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Retirement covers a full one third of life after a career in today's better health and life expectancy. Yet people thinking of life in retirement have either trite or vague ideas of life in retirement a study at MIT Agelab shows. Men use responses such a "hobbies,"travel," and "relax." Women in contrast after child rearing efforts as primary caregivers for children and elderly parents use terms as "peace" calm" and "time." The advantages of staying active, working part time that are shown to aid cognitive function during today's longer lives are not fully grasped.

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Evangelical Christianity in Brazil and the efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies. Ms. Alves, minister for women and family issues, is popular among the poorer communities in Brazil for her efforts in this direction. WSJ reports that her popularity is close to that of the corruption fighting Justice Minister Sergio Moro. She recently launched the Adolescence First campaign. Evangelical Christianity has grown quickly in the poorer urban areas and the northern region of Brazil and now makes up a third of the population. About 54% of Brazilians now think of the conservative Christian message as positive following years of corruption scandals and neglect of basic services such as sanitation and transport, says this report in the WSJ.

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Recovery of New York office space as vacancy drops to 15% in Manhattan office buildings from the 8% before the pandemic in 2019's final quarter. The Park Avenue $60 story tower that has head offices of Chase Bank is one of the recovery spots. The return ot office attendance is back up to levels before the pandemic in 2019, slightly higher by 1.3%. A younger workforce is attracted to work in Manhattan with short commutes from the suburbs around it.  The Park Avenue Corridor near the Grand Central Terminal Building is  another one of the areas with easy commute into New York City from suburbs.

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Humor and jokes from Trump and a video skit from Harris that was played at the Al Smith dinner in New York City in October 2024. The annual event is organized to help Catholic charities and requires speakers to engage in light humor.

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Mexican president Sheinbaum in a conversation with Trump says all caravans have already been stopped inside Mexico. The two presidents discussed the flow of drugs, migration and closing the border. DJT called the conversation "wonderful" and "very productive."

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Secretary of State Rubio says US will move on to other priorities if Ukraine and Russia don't take up US proposals for a ceasefire in Ukraine. Witcoff and Rubio are in Paris for talks. Witcoff met with Putin in Moscow.

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India is a major farm exporter with over $50 billion in exports of farm products. New trade agreements with US and EU will shrink the current $14 billion surplus over imports as imports increase to meet US and EU negotiation requests.

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DJT says EU is dragging its feet in coming  up with a trade agreement with the US. DJT says he will put 50% tariff on the EU, changes deadline from June 1 to July 9 to give the EU more time.

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Katherina Reiche as Economy Minister and Karsten Wildberger as Minister of Digital Affairs are two new appointments from the private sector of new German chancellor Merz. Reiche is faced with coming up with a solution to the high energy cost facing German industry.

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Ford utilization of EU plants is less than one of 2 plants 2025. It is renting out the unused plant capacity to Nissan which needs this capacity to make cars in the US to overcome DJT tariffs on imported autos from Japan.

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Getting all the flavors of eggplant parmigiana without the trouble of layering and baking- takes 35 minutes.  It means cooking the fusilli or mezze rigatoni separately, and the cubed eggplant + garlic separately in a skillet with crushed tomatoes, and bringing it all together with parmesan and basil plus oregano, and fresh slivered mozzarella.

Recipes are motivated by the idea of using experimentation, fun and ease of making, for getting less cane sugar, and more fruit, nuts and ancient grains into the diet for better health.

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This commentary in the WSJ says it is essential that the U.S. get back manufacturing of all technological goods back to the U.S. or its allies. The dangers of depending on China or other countries not clearly allied with the U.S. is quite clear especially after the pandemic. The U.S. and European supply chains need to be completely remade, restructured, to avoid dependence on China or countries that are not allies. This is what supply chain renewal is about. Yet initiatives alone with hundreds of billions of dollars price tag re not the answer to the problem. What is needed are specific targeted actions such government direct assistance to key sectors to ensure U.S. technological advantages in worldwide competition. Giving a hole range of incentives and direct financial support to industries making everything from electronic and computer components to high tech parts that go to defense and civilian production.   The U.S educational component in this puzzle is university students in all high tech courses which should be kept for U.S. citizens or from key allied nations at American universities. The manufacturing base would mean securing incentives and aid to manufacturing industries, component by component, part by part, to secure American leadership and distinct advantage.  Job losses have to be reversed and industries relocated back to the U.S. And only in cases where it is advantageous to manufacture overseas to relocate in allied countries India, Japan or South Korea. U.S. labor has to be brought into the picture as a key participant in the national interest and given an important role. R& D efforts have to be developed component by component, technological part by part, and technology by technology, so that a systematic plan can be followed to secure American leadership for the rest of this century, is what experts including this one say is required today. ...

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Closer scrutiny shows that tech companies that have gradually bought into or expanded into new technologies have market power that works to the detriment of democracy in the US. It also fuels a race of other companies with opposing views such as News Corp to use its market power resulting in rival groups not the people of the US able to form their own judgements about the best policies for the American people and the world. NY Times says of Google's Class B voting shares that have 10 votes per share giving founders Larry page and Sergey Brin control of the company that it is OK given their motto "don't be evil." Yet this advertisement of benevolence may just be a way of preventing close scrutiny of the company. Google through You Tube and Podcasts controls huge parts of the media space in 2024 in streaming services that are replacing cable television in 2024. What effect it is it having on public discourse in the US and is a separate class of voting shares a detriment to democracy? This report says NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange oppose this and this type of Class B is because it was set up before Google went public. NYTimes takes a casual approach to all this by saying it is Google followers, people who come after Brin and Page, or someone who buys the company,  who might be sloppy or greedy.  Closer scrutiny shows that tech companies that have gradually bought into or expanded into new technologies have market power that works to the detriment of democracy in the US. It also fuels a race of other companies with opposing views such as News Corp to use its market power resulting in rival groups not the people of the US able to form their own judgements about the best policies for the American people and the world. ...

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It is important to remember that Republicans Wendell Wilkie who ran in 1940 and Dewey in 1944 and 1948, Eisenhower in 1952, 1956, all adopted the worker protections for safety, hours and wages, and the employment stabilization programs set up by Perkins for the two Roosevelts- Republican Teddy Roosevelt who gave her her start 1911 and Democrat Franklin Roosevelt 1924-1944. Basically it setup what we call the Modern World where America was the model of modern industrialization for the whole World. Important to remember as Labor and Capital go through a reaffirmation of the principles guiding same issues that dogged America before. The Frances Perkins Exhibit at Columbia University in 2010 showed the most influential woman for the lives of ordinary American citizens and workers, workers families and children, for three decades 1920's to the 1950's. The first woman to serve as a key member of the cabinet. One who guided the legislation that set up the structure in which labor and capital each participated equally in the economic structure of modern America. Perkins was educated at Mount Holyoke College which had Corinthians 1 15  as motto "Be ye steadfast." She got her Masters degree in Economics and Sociology from Columbia University. She studied economics at University of Pennsylvania before going to Columbia University.  She is the only member of the cabinet who served not just all 12 years from1932 to 1944 under Franklin Roosevelt, but also before that from 1924 to 1932 for NY Governors Al Smith and Roosevelt, and before that for Teddy Roosevelt as head of the Committee on Public Safety in 1911. When Harry Truman followed FDR Perkins asked to run the Social Security administration, was made Civil Service Commissioner in 1944. She lectured at Cornell University during the Eisenhower administration.  ...

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In the past market forces pushed the US out of the chip business to highly subsidized chip companies TMC and SMIC in Taiwan and China. US cannot have it both ways. It cannot compete with China in chips and allow temporary market forces do the job of decimating its chip industry.    Market forces are rags to riches and mostly short term ignoring long term. Nvidia now valued at $1 trillion under market forces would not exist today. WSJ showed recently that only with the help of a loan from a Japanese Sega videogame executive Iramijiri to Nvidia founder Jensen Huang was Nvidia able to survive market forces in 1998. Qualcomm a maker of phone chips has made a takeover offer of Intel in 2024. Intel shares dropped 60% this year and is valued on share basis at $90 billion- yet was recently at $290 billion closer to its true value as America's chip pioneer and leader. Qualcomm is at $185 billion. Yet share values can be rags to riches as Nvidia story of going up to $1 trillion in 2021 and $3 trillion in 2024 shows. Such a deal draws anti trust concerns with too much control under one company. A deal for takeover of British owned ARM by Nvidia was stopped by regulatory authorites in UK and the EU in 2022. The US government is giving $8.5 billion to Intel to build up its chip making technology in competition with China. The Gelsinger plan is for manufacturing to be boosted up, so is the effort of the Biden administration. It may take time yet it is the right approach for the US. Pat Gelsinger is leading this effort at Intel. In the past market forces pushed the US out of the chip business to highly subsidized chip companies TMC and SMIC in Taiwan and China.    ...

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  As policies moderate, and policy action delivers results such as stopping the war on Ukraine, rebuilding the US Navy, and trade that brings back jobs, fentanyl deaths near zero with CMC (Canada, Mexico and China) forced to stop fentanyl flows, the small slippage in DJT support from federal workers in Republican districts and losses to business from wide deportation could reverse. DJT's first 100 days with strong action from the start, given the 2 year window before a possible Democrat takeover of the House and letting out the frustration on border policies of the Biden administration, are taking the Nation by surprise. Immigration policy on illegal migration is supported generally in the US except where it reduces customers to small businesses for fear of deportation such as occupational therapy.  Government employees who voted for DJT are uncertain about their jobs and are a group that is taken aback by the speed and action on cutting the government federal bureaucracy of 2 million workers. Many federal workers are spread out in the 51 states and many are in Republican or Republican leaning districts. With some slippage DJT approval is now at 47%, and slightly higher disapproval at 51%. As a result these two groups are moving away from supporting DJT in the first 100 days. Some who still support him outside these two groups are expressing disapproval of action coming this early and forcefully, yet support the overall policy agenda on immigration and cutting spending. There is also a small yet vocal group that supported RFK Jr. and this group remains energized by his promise to take action on health. Others who wanted strong action on immigration to reverse errors of Biden policies for illegal migrant entry and dispersal across America remain committed to DJT policy.  ...

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Lee Hockstader, writes the European Affairs column in The Washington Post. He visits the city of Wolfsburg, a town founded by the Nazis for their "strength through Joy," program. VW is cutting a fourth of its German jobs over 5 years, about 35,000 employees. Half of the 120,000 people in Wolfsburg work for VW. Germany faces deindustrialization as a result of its dependence on heavy industry, on automobiles, chemicals, metallurgical engineering. Its failure to digitize and to move ahead in AI and software presents a problem. While countries such as China surged ahead with bold investments in EV vehicles VW was slow to respond. Japan pushed forward in hybrids. India in digitizing fast. Cost of labor have caught up to inflation and rising, electricity costs are up, and profits from Chinese production are vanishing with China's BYD and Geely, and other Chinese auto companies taking away VW and GM market share. VW's US Tennessee EV plant faces an uncertain future with loss of EV subsidies by DJT executive orders. In the US the effects of deindustrialization underway were covered up for decades by Compliant Media and Economists with the idea that it brought consumers lower prices, a facade for not saying that labor was more compliant in Asia after a period of job banks in Detroit and other hindrances put up by labor in the US in the 1970's souring management. That generation and period is gone and America badly needs to get its act together. Here in Wolfsburg the schools supported by VW like the Wolfsburg New School will lose VW funding as well as the public services in the city from lower tax revenues. This is what happened in the US catching up to the last of the industrial players of the twentieth century now facing a competitive China and a future competitive India.   ...

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This may be the most important work of the DJT administration by 2027 into 2028 elections.  WSJ calls it the soda wars, when it is the slow destruction of America. As JFK and RFK well knew when they made fitness a goal for America in 1960- health is not built on sodas. Today with such high obesity, sodas and its likes, it is about the slow destruction of America.  MALA make America Live Again starts here. “When a taxpayer is putting money into SNAP, are they OK with us using their tax dollars to feed really bad food and sugary drinks to children, who perhaps need something more nutritious?” Right now it is the biggest item for schools in most states for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan. Passed by Congress in 1964 the original bill for SNAP excluded sodas and luxury drinks, but had Sodas added back in by the Senate. By lobbyists even in 1964? SNAP schools program falls under the Agriculture Department. Democrats as well as Republicans appointed Agriculture Secretaries and not one took the action to get sodas excluded, to let states request sodas be excluded and approve it, not the Democrat a Carter, a Clinton, or an Obama, or a Republican a Reagan, a Bush, or a Trump (first term) took the necessary action. In 2025 Brooke Rollins is Agriculture Department Secretary. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee has seen the damage sodas can cause in her family. Rollins on her first day in office has finally acted- after 61 years when the original intentions of the SNAP bill's creators were confounded in the Senate.  On her first full day in office, urging them to propose pilot programs testing changes to food aid. Rollins sent governors a letter to ask for the removal of sodas from schools food aid program.   ...

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Intel's new CEO was the CEO of Cadence Design Systems 2008-2021 which makes software for integrated circuits and systems on chips.   Coming from Malaysia and Singapore Tan got his Masters in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and founded Walden International in 1987. Making early investments in China's chip industry when China's chip industry was just starting in the 1990's, Tan's company participated in  40% of the chip industry investments in China made from the US between 2017-2021. Some of this is covered in a WSJ report from 2021 shown alongside. He served on the boards of China's Semiconductor Manufacturing and Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment.  A parallel to this is Morris Chang who after degrees at MIT started the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. A period back then in which the US chip industry dependent on market forces and without hidden government subsidies was eclipsed by new ventures in first Taiwan, then South Korea and China. During a period in which technologies were freely transferred with no long term grasp of the consequences to American technological leadership, and chip industry in the US. It was allowed to decline by administrations of Bush and Obama since 2000, ceding dominance through lack of investment in manufacturing technologies. In chips and science capitalism and market forces leave American companies to the mercy of markets when government support overseas is not matched by government support in the US to create an absolutely essential level playing field.  The US then feels the lack of synergyistic energies that go from chips to other advanced industries and technologies. Textbook economics from Dartmouth or Ivy Leagues is with totally theoretical stuff about comparitive advantage no help, and created the current situation for America in chips and science where a whole industry was ceded.  ...

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US Trade Representative Lighthizer in the Report on China's Entry into WTO sees this as a mistake in the policy of president Clinton. Clinton has said that was a mistake. David Sacks raised this issue in a podcast with Larry Summers, an economist who was deputy to Robert Rubin and Deputy Treasury Secretary, then Treasury Secretary succeeding Rubin in 1999. Clinton on the advice of Rubin and Summers set up the framework for China to join the World Trade Organization without the safeguards and the setup that would prevent it using state capitalism and subisidies to build its own economy with exports, to ally with American corporations to support the outshoring of almost the entire industrial base of the US. Shocking as it sounds this has happened, had happened by 2016, when Donald Trump with the advice of USTR Lighthizer took the first steps to reverse this with Tariff policy, which was supported by president Biden, and continues in its new phase under DJT in 2025. Rubin and Summers had supported deregulation of financial markets and removal of the Glass Steagall Act by 1999. This was to led to the financial crisis of 2009 that was to be one of three body blows to the American working and middle class. The others China entering WTO without safeguards that led to deindustrializing US and loss of its manufacturing base, loss of 5 million jobs, tens of thousands of factories. And the third was the pandemic. “ . . .it seems clear that the United States erred in supporting China’s entry into the WTO on terms that have proven to be ineffective in securing China’s embrace of an open, market-oriented trade regime” 2017 USTR Report to Congress on China’s WTO ...

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After all the media talk about tariffs inflation- inflation is at 2.4% in May 2025. Tariffs was part of the toolbox of strategies under Lighthizer and Jamieson on getting fair world trade, and not like Congressman Hawley in the 1920's who understood little about the workings of the US economy. This fact the official media such as the WSJ and NYT, Wash Post, BBC need to get it right about the Hawley Tariffs. Hawley was born in rural Oregon in 1864 went to country schools, and was president of Willamette University in Salem, when it's population was 4258. As House Ways and Means Committee chairman he wrote the failed tariffs bill Hoover signed in 1930. DJT's US Trade Representative Lighthizer in 2016 led the successful negotiations with Japan under Reagan, Scott Bessent who leads negotiations on tariffs with China with USTR Jamieson, has a deep understanding and grasp of today's financial markets. Tariffs is one of the tools in the US toolbox to get Japan, China, South Korea to even the playing field for US companies and bring back manufacturing to the US. Without it China would not budge from its unfair advantage and would not negotiate in fairness. This is proven in the way Japan in the 1980s and China today are responding to the US position preparing their economies for not relying on sudden surges in exports putting whole industries and workers in America and Europe out of work and out of jobs. DJT says- "No we are not going to accept that," the EU is catching on and adopting a similar position, China knows that.  The media is irresponsible in presenting tariffs in a negative way, irresponsible to American workers the 10 million put out of work since 2000, and to American families and the Nation.   ...

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China's changing trade strategy- closing up or opening some sectors such as pharmaceuticals in a change of mind.

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Early opinion polls show Macron the more convincing candidate in the first television debate held in March with 29 percent in an Elabe poll, with Le Pen at 19 percent. An OpinionWay poll shows Macron more convincing at 24 percent and Le Pen at 19 percent. Polls show Le Pen winning 27 percent of the vote in the first round with candidate Fillon on the right and Melenchon, Hamon on the left splitting the vote. In the second round with two candidates the vote shift of other right and left candidates determines the outcome. The second round then hinges on whether French middle and working class voters see risks to their economic future in leaving the EU, and whether appeals to nationalism and anti-immigrant rhetoric works enough to draw support from a centrist candidate.

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There are similarities in the Republican and Democratic party platforms in 2016. One area of agreement is in the reinstatement of Glass Steagall Act. That legislation made in the Depression period to separate commercial banking from investment banking was changed  when president Clinton made changes in a deal with Senators Phil Gramm and Jim Leach in 1999. The too big to fail problems of banks and the problems of investment banks during the 2008 financial crisis are attributed to the lack of Glass Steagall protections for financial stability and safety. The result is that in the post 2016 environment banks can expect a tougher regulatory environment. Another are is in trade where both parties are expected to take tougher positions to protect U.S. interests. The Republican platform calls for "better negotiated trade agreemets that put America first."

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Alexander Kudascheff of the DW.com says in this editorial opinion that the secular republic of Kemal Ataturk is about to become an Islamic autocracy. Kudascheff cites a number of reasons why the failed coup seems partly improbable such as it being led by the Air Force and Erdogan being able to fly back to Istanbul, not cutting communications,  and the intelligence agencies not having earlier knowledge about it. The overreaction to what is seen as a coup that was put down so quickly raises questions about the coup itself, says DW.com. It points out that Turkey now being admitted to the European Union now seems less probable than ever. The 3 month emergency is also seen with much skepticism. The coup and Erdogan's overeaction are a big negative event for Turkey-Eu relations.