25w32 sturdier, train x3 NOT, heat ill, COApm NOT,
more of ME — scroll down past eclectics
— eclectics ‘WE HEADLINES’ from this week’s media —
eclectic deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources
China’s economy grew by an average of 5.3 percent in the first half of the year, America’s by only 1.25 percent. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/04/trump-tariffs-china-trade/
Trump’s overt goal, meanwhile, has its precedent in Europe’s leading “electoral autocracy.” No matter the geopolitical puniness of his country, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a conspicuous darling of the American right, primarily because they see his story of triumph over a liberal establishment and entrenched domination thereafter as an example to follow. In the early years of his power, Orban implemented a gerrymander to his country’s election districts that has guaranteed him majoritarian power for more than a decade. Orban’s ruling party won 54 percent of the national vote but 83 percent of the country’s districts in the country’s 2022 parliamentary elections.
Skewed outcomes like that are among the main reasons many other democracies in the world, especially in Europe, fill their national assemblies with elections based on proportional representation — where seats in parliament are allocated by vote share, not single-member district contests.
Redistricting happens regularly in Britain, Canada, and Australia — countries that share the U.S.'s Anglo-Saxon political inheritance. But the lines are drawn by independent commissions or agencies that are not motivated by particular political agendas and do not involve elected lawmakers in their operations. https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?trackId=598b051fae7e8a68162a1429&s=6892d4760018952074947c1e&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=wp_todays_worldview&linknum=5&linktot=74
The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a statement Tuesday that 22 projects, totaling $500 million, to develop vaccines using mRNA technology will be halted.
Kennedy’s decision to terminate the projects is the latest in a string of decisions that have put the longtime vaccine critic’s doubts about shots into full effect at the nation’s health department. Kennedy has pulled back recommendations around the COVID-19 shots, fired the panel that makes vaccine recommendations, and refused to offer a vigorous endorsement of vaccinations as a measles outbreak worsened. https://apnews.com/article/kennedy-vaccines-mrna-pfizer-moderna-1fb5b9436f2957075064c18a6cbbe3c9?user_email=9a18118e64ac886183a1f61de74720d43b1343700b8a12e015ddf73957378e06&utm_medium=Morning_Wire&utm_source=Sailthru_AP&utm_campaign=Morning%20Wire%20Aug%206%2C%202025&utm_term=Morning%20Wire%20Subscribers
Think of purpose not as something that governs behavior but as a compass you can choose to follow, helping direct your energies toward a central life aim, says Todd Kashdan, a professor at George Mason University and founder of its Well-Being Laboratory. A sense of purpose can help “close that gap between who you are and what you ideally want to become,” he said.
People can lead content, meaningful lives without ever articulating a sense of purpose, he emphasized.
The term “purpose anxiety” appears to have been coined in 2014 by a University of Pennsylvania graduate student, Larissa Rainey, and caught on. Author Elizabeth Gilbert, for example, best known for her memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” has spoken frequently about an unhealthy obsession over a “purposeful life.” It is, she said in one interview, “the formula we’ve all been fed.”
There are many legitimate reasons for the advice given by parents, teachers, mentors and an array of online gurus that finding purpose is key to a good life. Research has shown that people who more strongly feel a sense of purpose tend to be physically and mentally healthier.
People have always searched for life’s meaning and purpose.
“Part of what it is to have a human consciousness is to think about our place in the universe,” said Jody Day, a psychotherapist and author of “Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future without Children.”
“But a lot of the places that we’ve naturally found meaning in our culture in, say, the last hundred years are falling away.”
Religion, for instance, often offered purpose and meaning to believers. But those who identify as religious has dropped significantly over the years (although that appears to be leveling off recently according to a 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center).
Other people traditionally found purpose in ensuring that their children had a better life than they did. Many don’t have confidence that will be the case anymore, Day said
As Steger said, “now we’re stuck trying to do the harder thing, which is, one by one, figure out everything in the universe and how we fit.” https://apnews.com/article/purpose-anxiety-wellness-84da5b896fedd7ef5932d63b05a5a7d5
In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want—husband, country home, successful career—but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and set out to explore three different aspects of her nature, against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Pray-Love-10th-Anniversary-Everything-ebook/dp/B000PDYVVG/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.0TyQxlxk3sIFAmPvME6B_P7sMvjDMajWjlSlNkxuWTGqEbXFwToJ7CzO--pF8W-ExVZgcgZYVep0mVs_bseePLqCmeY2fRdSsjfBKLDHHnao-vLegCOd05sfFloAgAutuqz6cPop4mBSqv7PwZOmDvIlYyMEAjF6P67M96p8EP8Pa68QtA6KJlxMRCtd-ERNsOQO1rp7utu5k6qqol0gxGYvc_nyf6LrbCi4VpvygY4.Gnw5HUJzw6KXWVHlHXcNDJUofms0mjIpm_juKBGTC6I&qid=1754747284&sr=8-1
Carney said in a series of recent agreements with other countries that America is, in effect, charging for access to its economy.
Manley said the investment thesis for Canada is pretty straightforward as Canada is rich in natural resources, has a skilled labor force, is open to immigration and has unfettered access to the U.S. market, the largest economy in the world.
“If that latter point is no longer the case, we’ve still got all the others, but we’ve got to really redevelop the investment thesis for attracting investment to Canada,” Manley said. https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-exemption-969a4cfb03638ce9d6c0ffad2b98b4b1
President Donald Trump’s sweeping, country-specific tariffs took effect today, levying taxes of varying rates on imports from most US trading partners. Per the Yale Budget Lab, imports into the US now face aggregate tariffs of 18.6% (which will fall to 17.7% after price-based consumption shifts), the highest rate since the 1930s.
The Financial Times’ Aime Williams underscores the severity of the moment, hearing from Washington-based trade lawyer Ted Murphy of the firm Sidley Austin: “This is the dawn of a new trade order, and the end of an old order.” Chad Brown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics offers: “We are now in a new world. Even to trade nerds, the complexity of this is just bonkers.” https://view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/175460482807062395adf3bef/raw?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cnn_Fareed%27s+Global+Briefing%2C+Aug.+7%2C+2025&bt_ee=ZGJd9Rg7nrR8hVdH0E9yv1iRQhEw1D4YLvd6Hg9atWOxYIricUOXMNDTJUWf9nIL&bt_ts=1754604828077
Expectations are high for the newest version of OpenAI’s flagship model because the San Francisco company has long positioned its technical advancements as a path toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a technology that is supposed to surpass humans at economically valuable work.
It is also trying to raise huge amounts of money to get there, in part to pay for the costly computer chips and data centers needed to build and run the technology.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the new model as a “significant step along our path to AGI” but mostly focused on its usability to the 700 million people he says use ChatGPT each week.
“It’s like talking to an expert — a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything, any area you need, on demand,” Altman said at a launch event livestreamed Thursday.
It may take some time to see how people use the new model — now available, with usage limits, to anyone with a free ChatGPT account. The Thursday event focused heavily on ChatGPT’s use in coding, an area where Anthropic is seen as a leader, and featured a guest appearance by the CEO of coding software maker Cursor, an important Anthropic customer. https://apnews.com/article/gpt5-openai-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-d12cd2d6310a2515042067b5d3965aa1
“As a horrified world watches the upending of an economic order that has brought it stability and prosperity for decades,” Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column, “the question I hear in country after country is the same: Why is the United States, the nation that has flourished so mightily under this system, tearing it down?”
Indeed, President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs—which took effect this week, bringing the aggregate US tariff rate to its highest level since the 1930s—mark a new economic order, experts have observed: one in which protectionism has replaced free trade. Fareed continues: “When I explain that many Americans—including the president—believe America has been the victim of this free trade system, the response is bewilderment. ‘How can you not see what is blindingly obvious: that you are the big winner,’ one senior foreign official said to me.”
The decline of US manufacturing jobs has produced much economic and political discontent, but Fareed points out that Americans’ real median income (adjusted for inflation) is up—50% since the 1970s, as the economics commentator Noah Smith notes. As of 2021, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a Paris-based consortium of the world’s leading economies, showed that by its measure, US median disposable income was higher than all but one member: tiny, wealthy Luxembourg.
Fareed concludes: “Change and disruption—caused by capitalism, globalization, technology or, crucially, a changing culture—have produced enormous anxiety among many. There are those who find these anxieties unbearable and want the world to return to what it once was. But—with or without tariffs—it won’t.” https://view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/175469566765940090bb02ae8/raw?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cnn_Fareed%27s+Global+Briefing%2C+Aug.+8%2C+2025&bt_ee=ZW954xqWUAL5REQ7x4oJsSi7sfJ9X%2BBBSEzoabSOd7H4KErp19bdEzyUqaWjwNg0&bt_ts=1754695667661
— ME in THIS WEEK life.flow.productivity of 168 hours available —
— into Sunday
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