Share – Hãy ngừng thanh tẩy cuộc đời bạn bằng cách trút giận lên thế giới — Triết Học Đường Phố 2.0

(2208 chữ, 9 phút đọc) Cả khoa học lẫn các bậc thầy giác ngộ đều nhất trí rằng, việc xả cơn giận dữ lên đầu người khác là hành động không thông minh và thiếu nhận biết của con người, nhưng họ không hề phủ nhận trạng thái tiêu cực luôn hiện diện trong cuộc…

Hãy ngừng thanh tẩy cuộc đời bạn bằng cách trút giận lên thế giới — Triết Học Đường Phố 2.0

Hãy đặt một mình vào trong ví dụ sau đây. Bạn kẹt xe vào 8 giờ sáng trong tình trạng thiếu ngủ, chưa có gì bỏ vào bụng và liên tục bị tra tấn bởi tiếng còi xe giục giã phía sau. Tiếp theo một tay mặt hầm hầm sát khí áp sát trực diện và hỏi thăm bạn bằng mấy lời khó nghe:

“Sao mày lái xe như thằng đần vậy?”

Bạn sẽ có 2 phương án, một là “bơ đi mà sống” hai là “Này anh trai, ông không chỉ đần độn mà khuôn mặt còn hao hao con khỉ đột đấy.”

Tất nhiên khi đọc bài viết này, đa số chúng ta thiên về lựa chọn nhã nhặn đầu tiên, còn thực tế thì nhiều khả năng sẽ là phương án hai. Thế là bùng nổ một sự giận dữ đi kèm những lời lăng mạ nhau giữa đôi bên.

Dù phim ảnh và cuộc sống thực được ngăn cách bởi sự phi thực tế do kỹ xảo điện ảnh tạo nên, nhưng một điều mà chúng ta chứng kiến trong phim lẫn ngoài đời đều rất giống nhau đó là: Hãy xả hết mọi nỗi bực tức và ức chế trong lòng ra ngay lập tức.

Văn hoá, truyền thông, thậm chí cả sách vở và bây giờ là cách chúng ta tương tác trên internet cũng cổ vũ sự tiêu cực mà mình gọi là tra tấn tâm lý người khác bằng cách viết hay đăng tải các nội dung xúc phạm, công kích và phát tán những thông tin rác để trút xả cơn giận của cá nhân.

Có không ít người trong chúng ta coi đấy là cách hiệu quả để giảm stress, để cân bằng lại cảm xúc và để loan báo cho cả thế giới này biết mình là nạn nhân của bất cứ ai trong xã hội, trong các mối quan hệ gây ra cho mình. Tuy nhiên chúng ta đã quên mất rằng, khi phát tán những sự tiêu cực ấy vào thế giới thật hay thế giới mạng cũng không thể triệt tiêu được vấn đề, mà thực ra, nó có thể khiến mọi việc tồi tệ hơn thông qua hành vi ích kỷ ấy cả trong hiện tại lẫn tương lai của chúng ta. Qua thời gian, xả giận sẽ làm tăng những hành vi hung hăng. Điều này không được rút tỉa từ kinh sách, hay cuốn đạo đức công dân mà đã chứng minh bằng tâm lý học hành vi, nơi nhiều chuyên gia tin vào sự hoạt động và đưa ra quyết định của tâm trí và hành vi con người sau những thí nghiệm thực tiễn chứ không phải thông qua tôn giáo hay đạo đức học.

Ngồi yên 2 phút hiệu quả hơn là đấm bao cát khi tức giận

Vào những năm 90, nhà tâm lý học Bushman thực hiện một nghiên cứu kỹ lưỡng dựa trên 180 sinh viên để xem xem việc xả giận có thực sự hữu hiệu hay không.
Bushman đã theo đuổi nghiên cứu này trong một thời gian dài, và các thí nghiệm đều cho kết quả giống nhau. Nếu bạn nghĩ rằng việc thanh tẩy và xả giận là tốt, bạn sẽ có xu hướng làm những việc bạo lực khi giận dữ. Kể cả sau khi xả giận, bạn vẫn cảm thấy giận dữ và càng dễ tiếp tục thực hiện những hành vi hung hãn.

Nhóm thứ nhất đọc những bài viết trung tính. Nhóm thứ hai đọc những nghiên cứu giả chứng minh rằng xả giận là hiệu quả. Nhóm cuối cùng thì được đọc rằng xả giận chẳng có nghĩa lý gì. Sau đó Bushman yêu cầu các sinh viên phải viết bài luận về việc ủng hộ hay phản đối việc phá thai, một vấn đề nhạy cảm, có khả năng gây cảm xúc mạnh. Ông phổ biến rằng bài luận của họ sẽ được chấm chéo, nhưng thực chất thì không phải vậy. Một nửa số bài sẽ được chấm điểm rất cao, nửa còn lại sẽ có dòng viết: “Đây là bài luận tệ nhất mà tôi từng đọc!”

Sau đó Bushman cho phép các sinh viên tham gia lựa chọn một trong số các hoạt động như chơi điện tử, xem phim hài, đọc một mẩu chuyện, hoặc đấm bao cát.

Kết quả là những người bị chọc giận bởi cách chấm bài thuộc nhóm được phổ biến rằng xả giận là một hành động hiệu quả có xu hướng lựa chọn việc đấm bao cát cao hơn rất nhiều so với những người cũng bị chọc giận ở những nhóm khác.

Bushman tiếp tục một thí nghiệm khác để chứng minh việc xả giận rút cuộc chỉ đem tới sự tồi tệ thông qua một trò chơi giữa các sinh viên và người chấm điểm bài luận của họ.

Nhóm thứ nhất được cho xả giận bằng cách đấm bao cát, trong khi nhóm thứ hai thì chỉ ngồi yên một chỗ trong 2 phút. Trò chơi vô cùng đơn giản: bấm nút càng nhanh càng tốt. Nếu chậm tay hơn, bạn sẽ phải bị tiếng còi rất to dội thẳng vào mặt. còn nếu thắng thì đối thủ của bạn sẽ bị thổi còi. Ngoài ra bạn còn được phép chọn mức âm lượng cho tiếng còi sẽ dội vào mặt đối thủ trong khoảng từ 0 tới 10, mức 10 tương đương với 105 decibel.

Kết quả nhóm được đấm bao cát để xả giận đã chọn mức âm lượng 8,5 để trả thù những người chấm bài cho họ, trong khi nhóm ngồi chờ chỉ đặt ở mức trung bình là 2,47.

Trong một thí nghiệm tương tự được thực hiện sau này cho phép những người tham gia lựa chọn lượng tương ớt cho lên thức ăn dành cho người đã làm họ giận, nhóm đấm bao cát đã đổ một đống ớt trong khi những người ngồi chờ thì không làm vậy

“Nó như là thuốc phiện vậy, bởi vì nó là hệ quả của những chất dẫn truyền thần kinh cùng với những tác nhân củng cố hành vi. Nếu bạn đã quen với việc trút giận, bạn sẽ trở nên phụ thuộc vào nó. Bởi vậy cách tiếp cận hiệu quả hơn đơn giản là hãy dừng lại. Hãy nhấc bỏ cơn giận của bạn ra xa bếp lửa.” Bushman kết luận.

Nhưng khoa học và tâm lý học cũng thừa nhận việc xả giận ngay tức khắc bất chấp hậu quả thực sự mang tới cảm giác hưng phấn tuyệt vời. Và đó chính là vấn đề. Thanh tẩy cảm xúc bằng cách này sẽ làm bạn cảm thấy tốt, nhưng nó là một vòng tròn luẩn quẩn. Những cảm xúc khiến bạn tìm kiếm sự thanh tẩy qua xả giận vẫn sẽ lưu lại, và nếu sự thanh tẩy khiến bạn cảm thấy tuyệt vời, bạn sẽ tiếp tục tìm tới nó trong tương lai như một con nghiện.

Vậy tại sao việc chấp nhận cơn tức giận và chờ đợi nó đi qua lại có thể hiệu qua hơn là chửi bới hay sử dụng tay chân? Điều này có thể lý giải được, nhưng theo một cách rất trái ngược với bản năng vị kỷ, tối đa hoá lợi ích của chúng ta.

Lòng trắc ẩn sẽ xoá bỏ sự tức giận

Trong tập 7 loạt phim hướng dẫn thiền định có tên Headspace guide to Meditation đang chiếu trên Netflix. Khi ai đó làm chúng ta bực bội, cảm giác đó đem đến sự khó chịu và tức giận cũng như ngay lập tức khiến chúng ta nảy sinh sự kháng cự và công kích để bảo vệ bản thân – Nguyên nhân của sự xả giận thường xuyên suốt ngày.

Dù là cách nào thì cả lựa chọn này đều phá huỷ sự bình yên nội tại, đồng thời gây đau đớn cho thể xác của chúng ta, và cho các mối quan hệ xung quanh. Để chấm dứt các chuỗi hành động tiêu cực này thì các kỹ thuật thiền định được sử dụng nhằm mục đích giúp bạn nhận ra rằng : BẠN SẼ HẠNH PHÚC KHI TẬP TRUNG VÀO SỰ HẠNH PHÚC CỦA NGƯỜI KHÁC, bằng cách để những cảm xúc tức giận trôi qua một cách tự nhiên như nó đến.

Điều này dường như bất hợp lý, phản trực giác cũng chính chúng ta cũng cảm thấy không công bằng với bản thân. Nhưng khi chúng ta tập trung vào chính mình, vào hạnh phúc của bản thân thì tâm trí có xu hướng thu nhỏ lại đúng kích thước của sự vị kỷ mang tính cá nhân. Đồng thời thế giới quan cũng thu hẹp lại khi chúng ta chỉ nhìn vào chính mình. Và như chúng ta đã biết, mọi khổ đau và hệ quả trong cuộc sống này bắt nguồn từ ham muốn cá nhân mà ra.

Khi bạn đổi hướng tập trung, khi hướng ra ngoài, tâm trí sẽ mở rộng và như thế giới quan cũng đi khỏi giới hạn của chính bạn. Từ đây bạn sẽ mở lòng hơn, thấy được và nhìn nhận sự hạnh phúc của những người xung quanh mình hơn bất chấp những năng lượng tiêu cực đang bao trùm xung quanh.

Đây được gọi là lòng trắc ẩn. Khi lòng trắc ẩn được đánh thức và sử dụng trong việc hoá giải sự giận dữ, bạn sẽ không phải níu giữ những cảm giác mình thích và cố chống lại những gì mình không thích mà thế giới đem tới cho bạn, từ tiếng còi xe, tranh cãi với đồng nghiệp hay giận dỗi với vợ hoặc chồng trong những hiểu nhầm nhỏ nhặt. Lòng trắc ẩn là khái niệm làm chúng ta phải lưu ý đặt hạnh phúc của người khác tương đương với hạnh phúc của chính mình, hoặc trước cả niềm hạnh phúc chúng ta xứng đáng được nhận.

Chia sẻ sự khó chịu hay tức giận của tâm trí người khác bằng cách thấu hiểu rồi bỏ qua mà không phát sinh sự tức giận với người khác thực sự đem tới hạnh phúc trong tâm trí chúng ta, dù rằng điều nay nghe phản trực giác và bất hợp lý khi sống trong thời đại với nhịp điệu gấp rút và đầy tính cạnh tranh như bây giờ. Thông qua thiền định, chúng ta sẽ học được cách phát sinh lòng trắc ẩn mà không cần sự miễn cưỡng hay cố gắng nào hết.

Điều này cũng đã được kiểm chứng bởi các nhà khoa học ở Tây Ban Nha, khi họ quyết định tìm hiểu tác dụng của thiền định có ảnh hưởng thế nào tới hành vi hung hăng của một nhóm học sinh trung học. Đây là những học sinh có hơn 5 lần phải đến phòng tư vấn về nhân cách và đạo đức ở trường. Các nhà khoa học đã chia số học sinh này thành 2 nhóm, một nhóm sẽ tập thiền trong mười tuần, nhóm còn lại thì không.

Kết quả là nhóm tập thiền đã giảm đáng kể mức độ hung hăng so với nhóm còn lại. Chứng minh này cũng cho biết thêm, việc thiền định hàng ngày không chỉ tốt trong học tập mà còn cải thiện tâm tính của học sinh với thế giới xung quanh.

Cố gắng đừng bao giờ phát tán sự tức giận của mình ra bên ngoài

Bushman cùng những nhà tâm lý học khác khuyên rằng khi cảm thấy giận dữ, đừng phản ứng tức thời, hãy thả lỏng thư giãn, hoặc tự đánh lạc hướng bản thân bằng các hoạt động hoàn toàn không liên quan và không mang tính bạo lực.

Tất nhiên là việc hạ hỏa hoàn toàn khác với việc trốn tránh cơn giận, mà là biến khoảnh khắc khó chịu ấy thành sự trắc ẩn thông qua những kỹ thuật và thực hành thiền định như các thiền giả hướng dẫn từ hàng nghìn năm qua trước sự xung đột bên trong làm ảnh hưởng trạng thái bình yên nội tại của mỗi người.

Cả khoa học lẫn các bậc thầy giác ngộ đều nhất trí rằng, việc xả cơn giận dữ lên đầu người khác là hành động không thông minh và thiếu nhận biết của con người, nhưng họ không hề phủ nhận trạng thái tiêu cực luôn hiện diện trong cuộc sống này. Thực tế là bạn không thể kiểm soát được nó nhưng bạn có quyền lựa chọn để giải quyết vấn đề khi nó xảy ra.

Đứng trước một tình huống như vậy, chúng ta có sự tự do để lựa chọn cách giải quyết, và cách giải quyết nào cũng có thể đem tới những kết quả khác nhau ảnh hưởng đến tâm trí và cuộc sống của chính chúng ta. Xả giận hay sử dụng lòng trắc ẩn để thay đổi thực tại là tuỳ lựa chọn ở bạn.

*Bài viết có trích dẫn kết quả trong cuốn “Bạn không thông minh lắm đâu” và phim Headspace guide to Meditation.

Tác giả: Đức Nhân

Share – [THĐP Translation™] Kỹ thuật hành thiền dành cho mọi mức độ IQ — Triết Học Đường Phố 2.0

(615 chữ, 3 phút đọc) Kỹ thuật này có thể được áp dụng bởi người mới bắt đầu và chuyên gia bất cứ lúc nào và nó sẽ không thể bị thực hành “sai”.

[THĐP Translation™] Kỹ thuật hành thiền dành cho mọi mức độ IQ — Triết Học Đường Phố 2.0

Kỹ thuật này có thể được áp dụng bởi người mới bắt đầu và chuyên gia bất cứ lúc nào và nó sẽ không thể bị thực hành “sai”.

Bạn có một công việc, và đó là để cho bốn điều dưới đây xảy ra trong quá trình hành thiền của bạn:

1. Tập trung sự chú ý vào điều gì đó liên tục hoặc ổn định (khoảnh khắc, hơi thở, bộ mặt thật của thực tại, chính sự tập trung, bất cứ điều gì)
2. Sự chú ý bị phân tán khỏi đối tượng ban đầu
3. Nhận biết sự chú ý bị phân tán khỏi đối tượng
4. Đưa sự chú ý trở lại đối tượng

Bạn không cần phải ép buộc bất kỳ điểm nào trong 4 điểm trên, hoặc coi trọng bất kỳ điểm nào cao hơn những điểm khác. Bạn chỉ cần giữ một ý định chung cho điểm đầu tiên và phần còn lại sẽ thuận theo với tiến độ của riêng chúng.

Nếu bạn đã quen với các kiểu thiền thông thường, bạn sẽ nhận ra rằng điều này không có gì mới, và những người mới bắt đầu đôi khi được cho là có vấn đề với nó. Vậy làm sao có thể nói là nó không thể bị thực hành sai với bất kỳ ai?

Bí mật mà nhiều người dường như không nhận ra là sự phân tâm là một phần của thiền định. Không có sự phân tâm sẽ không có sự nhận biết của sự phân tâm và nếu không có sự nhận biết thì sẽ không có sự-quay-trở-lại-có-kiểm-soát về điểm tập trung. Và việc luyện tập sự tập trung trở lại chính là toàn bộ mục đích. Vào thời điểm bạn không bị phân tâm bởi bất cứ điều gì, thiền đã trở nên ăn sâu đến mức nó thậm chí không phải là một hành động có ý thức và những kỹ thuật như thế này trở nên vô nghĩa.

Những gì chúng ta đang phát triển ở đây là một cách để sự chú ý có được cảm giác về cách nó tập trung trở lại khi bị phân tâm. Đây là điều xảy ra khi chúng ta ngồi xuống với ý định chung là tập trung vào điều gì đó và được nhắc nhở về điều đó bất cứ khi nào chúng ta nhớ đến nó, đó là lý do tại sao chúng ta ngồi thiền.

Đây là điểm mọi người có thể hiểu sai và tại sao “kỹ thuật” này lại quan trọng: Họ nghĩ rằng vì họ bị phân tâm nên bằng cách nào đó họ đã thất bại trong việc ngồi thiền. Nhưng trước khi họ kịp nhận ra rằng mình đã “thất bại”, họ đã nhận ra sự phân tâm một cách thành công và quay trở lại với ý định ban đầu!

Vì vậy, điều duy nhất họ đang làm ‘sai’ là không nhận ra rằng cảm giác thất bại chỉ là một sự xao lãng khác khỏi sự tập trung thành công của họ. Và nếu một người gặp phải cảm giác thất bại, thì họ sẽ có cơ hội để vượt qua nó bằng cách nhận ra nó, chấp nhận sự tồn tại của nó và để nó quay trở lại trọng tâm.

Nói cách khác, hệ thống này có thể được coi là quá trình chuyển đổi những xao lãng và năng lượng tiêu cực thành nhiên liệu cho sự phát triển tích cực bên trong. Theo tôi thì điều này có thể hữu ích.

Tác giả: DongCha_Dao

Kungfu – Fighters and Flexibility

By Jason Kelly 

Full link: https://blackbeltmag.com/improve-flexibility-for-martial-arts?utm_campaign=BBM%20FY21&utm_medium=email&hsmi=108377662&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–uHv-XxafyoxcOoh3FzWL34d2PbieWoStcLzcb71-F5_BYtM4dpDOq8zhlyYPOxezV4imckdw1VkDYViLxvKXNLQKEw&utm_content=108377662&utm_source=hs_email

These three simple ways will make you more flexible instantly!

Fighters need to have an optimal amount of flexibility to kick, punch, takedown their opponent and even to escape submission holds. Your body has to be able to move through ranges of motion effectively, and that requires your muscles to stretch and contract functionally. In order to create flexibility, you have to wrap your mind around that it is more than just stretching a muscle.

Let me explain. Alignment and stability optimize flexibility. The joints must be in the correct position for muscles to stretch and contract properly. When joints are not aligned well, it compensates stability that limits and restricts mobility and flexibility; leading to dysfunctional movement. This also affects the contraction, range, and speed of your motion because your muscles lose pliability and resiliency.

For example, when the glute muscles are weak, the hip tilts forward. This causes the quads to tighten, resulting in a loss of flexibility to compensate for the weakness of the glutes. When the quads are tight, they will not stretch effectively because they are now stabilizing the hip instead of the glutes. So, the neuromuscular function for the quads must switch.

The solution is, to restore gluteal strength, in-turn, restoring stability to the hip. When stability is restored, the quads will be pliable and resilient and have the ability to stretch and contract effectively again. Stability is essential to maximize flexibility.https://www.youtube.com/embed/3vECP9GDaLI?rel=0

Do these three things to create instant and dramatic flexibility and range of motion.

Contract then Stretch

By contracting the muscle that opposes the stretching muscle, it sends a relaxation signal for the muscle being stretched. For example, your glute and quads, back and chest, or quads and hamstrings. It is called Reciprocal Inhibition.

• For example, when you lunge, contract the glute first before you stretch the quads.

Hold the Stretch

By simply holding a stretch for 5-10 seconds; the muscle will relax further into stretch. Your muscles know to the exact length how far and fast they can stretch. It is called Autogenic Inhibition.

• For example, when you stretch, and the stretch stops, hold for about 5-10 seconds. The muscles will relax further, increasing the stretch.

Breathe

The inhale supports the contraction and the exhale supports the relaxation, the stretch. When you inhale and exhale using the first 2, it increases flexibility more.

• For example, inhale as you stretch to the tension point of the stretch. Hold for 5-10 seconds then exhale into the stretch further. You will feel the stretch open immediately.

Use all three things to optimize the movement pathway for flexibility and mobility. Muscles need to adapt, to adjust flexibility and range of motion.

Isolated stretching vs. Resisted Stretching

Isolated Stretching

Just stretching a muscle will not produce flexibility. It pulls the muscle fibers apart.

Isolated stretching:

• Makes muscles lax losing ability to produce force and speed.

• Desensitizes muscles diminishing explosiveness.
• Loses resiliency.
• Produces inhibition- muscles cannot contract forcefully and fast.

Static stretching is not detrimental. The problem is the aforementioned when you do strength training or force production because your muscles don’t respond effectively.

Static stretching will not injure you. However, to gain flexibility statically, you sacrifice power and force production.

Muscles absorb force when you add resistance to the stretch. Static stretching, does not.

Resisted Stretching

Stretching with resistance allows muscles to maintain elasticity to create a more forceful rebound contraction. Without it, it like bouncing a basketball in the sand. Muscles need to be able to stiffen to be springy and explosive like bouncing a basketball on the ground. You want muscles to be resilient and springy, having the ability to stretch and recoil fast with power.

• Research says, regular heavy stretching with resistance for 10 minutes three days a week increases strength, speed, and power as well as enhances flexibility and mobility.

Other research says dynamic stretching through ranges of motion, where muscles contract and stretch, improves flexibility as well as promotes muscular stiffness.

Stretching before competition and training diminishes force production and relaxes muscles due to lengthening, diminishing springiness and explosiveness. I always prefer doing slow resited stretching with weights or resistance bands because it maintains and enhances, springiness, explosiveness, and flexibility, all at the same time.

To understand more about the process of stretching, stiffness, springiness, and speed my book, The Balanced Body and Instant Strength explains them more fully.

Kungfu – Wrestling With the Descendants of Genghis Khan: Bonus Content!

By Antonio Antonio Graceffo, Ph.D 

Full link: https://blackbeltmag.com/wrestling-with-the-descendants-of-genghis-khan-bonus-content?utm_campaign=BBM%20FY21&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=108377662&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–VpSgmgy2rrvn2MhZ8g_PsZMD4aWehNkYNd15HugLD-Qi9Fs-POUoLQlud7GH55ybQcIB0G-wMQVwLk7TjZknzL3axZA&utm_content=108377662&utm_source=hs_email

A Closer Look at Mongolia’s Naadam Festival

Mongolia’s “three sports of men” — archery, horse racing and wrestling — were the featured attractions at the first Naadam festival convened by Genghis Kahn himself in 1206.

Fast-forward to the 21^st century: The festivals, held nationwide in mid-July each year, still celebrate the formation of the Mongolian Empire and its achievement of independence from China’s Qing dynasty.

The highlight of modern incarnations of Naadam is the wrestling, and many boys who grow up on the steppes dream of one day being crowned a champion.

The wrestling competitions are single-elimination tournaments. Wrestlers wear trunks and an open-chest shirt with a rope tied around the abdomen, all of which opponents are allowed to grab. The most common colors seen are red, which symbolizes power, and blue, which represents the Mongolian sky.

The author (left) grapples with a Mongolian wrestler.

The grapplers also wear heavy traditional boots and a Mongolian hat. The four sides of the hat represent the four provinces of old Mongolia. The top knot is for the five regions of the Buddhist government. The silver badge attached to each hat bears the animal ranking of the wrestler.

In competition, the wrestlers have to win six matches to be crowned champion. There are no weight classes, which is perhaps why the top grapplers generally weigh 260 pounds or more. The goal is to make the opponent touch the ground with anything other than the soles of his feet.

Because of the coronavirus, the most recent Naadam competition in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar took place without an audience. Spectators had to watch on television or online.

At the competitions in the provinces, however, the action was live, and residents of nearby towns showed up to watch.

In a secondary subdivision called Temenzogt, located about seven hours’ drive from Ulaanbaatar, I was fortunate to have a chance to wrestle in a Naadam event.

Author Antonio Graceffo (right) and his opponent.

After quickly sizing up my huge opponent, a former champion, I braced myself for a pushing and pulling battle of upper-body strength. I was surprised when he chose to use his heavy boots and massive thighs to kick my legs out from under me.

And with that, my Naadam experience came to an abrupt end. I was grateful, however, for the efforts of all my Mongolian friends who made it possible for me to fulfill my dream of wrestling in Naadam.

I learned a lot about Mongolia, the culture and the ground, so much so that I’ve decided to stay here another year and really dedicate myself to learning Mongolian wrestling.

Maybe at next year’s Naadam, I’ll be able to last 20 seconds.

Antonio Graceffo writes Black Belt’s Destinations column. Read more of his work here. His book Warrior Odyssey is available here.

Ẩm thực – What Happens To Your Body If You Eat Peanut Butter Every Day

By CARLEIGH STIEHM

Full link: https://www.eatthis.com/what-happens-body-eat-peanut-butter-every-day/?utm_source=nsltr&utm_medium=email&utm_content=news-costco-covid-19-outbreak-washington-state&utm_campaign=etntNewsletter

We know it is true that peanut butter can be part of a healthy diet, but is there such a thing as too much?

There are many potential health benefits to incorporating peanut butter into your meals, but does that mean you should eat peanut butter every day?

Before we started second-guessing this childhood staple (and all-time favorite), we went straight to the source, talking to experts in nutrition about the nuts and bolts of peanut butter. What we found might have you looking at your daily PB&Js a little differently. Here’s what the experts had to say, and for even more healthy eating tips, be sure to stock up on The 7 Healthiest Foods to Eat Right Now.

1

You’ll ward off cancer.

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Nut consumption is associated with a decreased risk in several cancers including lung, pancreatic, endometrial, and colorectal, explained Hollie Zammit, RD, a registered dietitian with Orlando Health.

“In fact, per the American Institute for Cancer Research, a diet low in processed meat and rich in legumes, such as beans and nuts, can help lower your cancer risk,” says Zammit. “This is thanks to the great sources of various vitamins, minerals, fiber, and phytochemicals that nuts contain.”

So, if eating great meals like this Crunchy Thai Ginger Salad with Peanut Butter Dressing recipe can be delicious and cancer-fighting, you tell me, is there anything peanut butter can’t do?

2

It can result in weight gain.

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“Peanut butter is high in calories—two tablespoons have about 180 calories—so eating too much of it can lead to weight gain,” said New York City-based registered dietitian Natalie Rizzo, MS.

Don’t worry too much, though. You can combat potential weight gain by controlling your portion sizes. Stick to recipes and meal ideas that don’t go overboard on the creamy (or crunchy) stuff, and you will be just fine.

Keep reading to learn how, in moderation, peanut butter can actually help you lose weight instead.

3

You’ll see lower numbers on the scale.

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“If you stick to the recommended portions, eating peanut butter may increase certain hormones that promote satiety and feelings of fullness,” says Rizzo, citing research published by the National Institutes of Health.

Felling full and satisfied can lead to less snacking later in the day. Starting out the day with a healthy dose of peanut butter can get you started on the right track. Try an easy breakfast recipe like these Peanut Butter Overnight Oats to have something to look forward to as soon as you are out of bed.

Looking for more tips? Learn how to fire up your metabolism and lose weight the smart way.

4

You’ll get hours back in your day.

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One of the major struggles of eating healthy is the time it takes to prepare and cook full meals. Peanut butter takes the struggle out of meal prep without sacrificing any of the flavor or nutrition.

“Quick, easy, and convenient is the name of the game when it comes to a healthy, consistent diet,” says Laura Burak, MS, RD, CDN. “Peanut butter ranks right at the top as not only a nutritious and heart-healthy plant-based food, but in my opinion, one of the tastiest foods in existence!”

5

You’ll be happier.

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“If I was on a deserted island and I could only bring one food, it would be a jar of peanut butter,” says Burak. “That’s how much I love it and how versatile it is when it comes to a healthy diet.”

While Rizzo cautions that if you don’t like peanut butter, there are plenty of other options out there to make sure you are getting in all of your nutrition needs in a given day. But if you enjoy peanut butter, there is no reason you shouldn’t be eating it every day in moderation.

6

The type of peanut butter matters.

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Not all peanut butter is created equal. This might be less of an issue if you are eating it as an occasional treat, but if you are eating it every day, you need to make sure you know what you are putting into your body.

“No matter which brand you go for, always look at the ingredient list and choose one whose only ingredients are peanuts,” says Zammit. “Natural peanut butters are best. Avoid nut butters with additives such as added sugars and hydrogenated oils.”

For a little extra help choosing which variety is right for you, read through this ranking of peanut butter by nutrition.

7

You should eat in a variety of ways.

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“What is more classic and delicious than a PB&J sandwich?” Burak asked.

While the classic combo is one tried-and-true way to incorporate peanut butter into your diet, if you are going to be eating it every day, don’t be afraid to mix it up a little and try some new recipes.

Zammit shared these ideas for new ways to enjoy peanut butter:

• Add a serving to whole-wheat toast and pair with sliced bananas or raspberries.
• Pair with 1 serving of fruit or vegetables. Apple slices or celery sticks are popular choices.
• Throw some into your favorite smoothie as a protein source.
• Enjoy 1 serving with your favorite rice cakes.
• Mix a serving into 1 cup of steel-cut oatmeal or cream of wheat.
• Spread onto a pita or pancakes and top with your favorite fruit.
• Have a multi-grain bagel with 1 serving of peanut butter.

When in doubt, Burak said, you can always go back to basics: “There are endless ways to incorporate peanut butter into a healthy diet, but just remember, you can stick a spoon in the jar and just eat plain and that’s always good enough for me!”

Ẩm thực – The Extraordinary ‘Cookbooks’ Left Behind by Prisoners of War and Concentration Camp Victims

By ROHINI CHAKI

Full link: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cookbooks-made-by-prisoners?utm_source=Gastro+Obscura+Weekly+E-mail&utm_campaign=20113bb7be-GASTRO_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_01_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2418498528-20113bb7be-70327933&mc_cid=20113bb7be&mc_eid=df51e46713

Their culinary legacies, written on scraps of paper or fabric, tell stories of hope and resistance.

Writing recipes became a ritual during times of debilitating hunger. ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH GRILLO

IN 2005, THE LAUDED FRENCH-BELGIAN author and playwright Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt was attending a salon in Moscow when a woman he met asked whether he would like to see “the most beautiful book in the world.” “I was hoping to be the one to write it,” Schmitt joked. But Schmitt’s interlocutor began to tell him about her mother, Lily, and Lily’s friends. They were Trotskyist resistance fighters, captured and sent to a Soviet gulag for campaigning against Stalin. These incarcerated women wanted to leave a legacy for their daughters, whom they might never see again. They pretended to smoke, and used the papers from their meager allotment of cigarettes to make pages for a message. But, paralyzed by the weight of leaving a legacy on just a few sheets of assembled paper, and fearful of losing space or pencil lead to a mistake, the women could not write anything at all. Until, one day, the most unlikely person in the group, the homely, timid Lily, started writing.

During their encounter in Moscow, Lily’s daughter told Schmitt she had the collected pages, stitched together into a notebook. Her mother was the first one out of the gulag, and hid the notebook by sewing it into her skirt. Lily and her comrades had since died, but the daughters sometimes met for tea and pored over “the most beautiful book” together. And on every page, tattered and ravaged by time and trauma, was a recipe.

In an English translation of his short stories, published in 2009, Schmitt provides this account of the encounter in an epilogue to the title story, also called “The Most Beautiful Book in the World.” The epilogue is written as if it’s a real event, and it piqued the interest of French filmmaker Anne Georget. “When I read that story, it rang true to me. So I tried desperately to reach this famous author for confirmation,” she says.

With the help of a friend who worked at the Foreign Affairs office, she procured the guest list for the Moscow event. Another friend, influential in expat circles, located the woman Schmitt had spoken to. She was a French professor at a Moscow university. In the true origins of Schmitt’s fictionalized account, the recipes were written on fabric, and belonged to her ex-husband’s grandmother, Vera Nicolaieva Bekzadian. Bekzadian had been deported to the gulag in Potma, in 1938, where she spent a decade and compiled a series of recipes, with input from her fellow inmates.

Georget had previously made a documentary about Mina Pächter, a woman who died in a Nazi camp, and whose legacy for her daughter—also a cookbook—was memorialized in a 1996 book titled In Memory’s Kitchen. Georget’s made-for-cable French-language film, Mina’s Recipe Book, released in 2007. The filmmaker also published a book (in French) based on interviews and illustrations from the film. Soon after, she began receiving letters from private citizens saying they had relatives who’d maintained similar notebooks full of recipes in camps and prisons. “In all these testimonies, there were a lot of men involved in the writing of the recipes,” says Georget. “For me, the transmission from mother to daughter had been so important that I had missed this other part of the story.”

The story of “the most beautiful book in the world” is hard to imagine as anything other than a singular occurrence. However, across the world, in places that were once sites of torture, deprivation, and inflicted hardship—whether Nazi camps in Theresienstadt and Leipzig, or Chinese labor camps under Mao Zedong—men and women huddled together to find community by sharing and recreating favorite recipes from memory. They wrote in the dark, on scraps of fabric, on the margins of propaganda leaflets of the Third Reich, and in carefully concealed notebooks. Some of these places now house memorials; others have been destroyed, or their history covered up. But, in the coded language of food, these secret documents reveal their sordid history: diaries of ghostly recipes, from people haunted by tragedy.

In 2015, Georget premiered her film, Imaginary Feasts, a documentary that took over a decade to make and which explores this phenomenon. It profiles prisoners held in gulags, at Nazi concentration camps, and in Japanese prisons during World War II. Georget featured Bekzadian’s story in the documentary.

Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, Czech Republic. PHOTO BY WOLFGANG KAEHLER/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES

Her previous film, Mina’s Recipe Book, tells the searing story of one of these fantasy cookbooks, written by prisoners from memory. The film begins with a voiceover rendition of Mina Pächter’s daughter, Anny Stern, answering a shattering phone call 25 years after her mother had died in Theresienstadt, a Nazi camp in Czechoslovakia. Stern had managed to flee Theresienstadt for Palestine, and eventually moved to the United States with her husband and son. In 1969, she was living on the East Side of Manhattan.

“Are you Anny Stern?” a stranger on the line asked. “I have a package for you from your mother.”

The package, when Stern finally mustered the resolve to open it, contained a picture of her mother with Stern’s son, a few letters, and a notebook of tattered pages, held together by rough stitching. In this notebook were recipes—of linzer torte, goulash with noodles, chicken galantine––compiled by her mother and the other women of Theresienstadt.

Theresienstadt (whose Czech name was Terezín) has been variously referred to as a German concentration camp, a transit camp, and a Jewish ghetto. Located just outside of Prague, the colony was presented as a model ghetto (some Nazis referred to it as the “paradise ghetto”), a sham example of the Third Reich’s purportedly ethical treatment of Jewish people. In a foreword to In Memory’s Kitchen, the book that inspired the film, Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar, writes that elderly Austrian, Czech, and German Jews who were wealthy or otherwise prominent were told they were being brought there as part of a “privileged resettlement.” Some even paid the cost of transportation, deceived into thinking they were being sent to a retreat. Jewish scholars, artists, scientists, and World War I heroes ended up in Theresienstadt.

From Terezín, they would either be deported to a death camp, or sent to other transit camps. Of the 144,000 Jews sent to Theresienstadt, 33,000 died on site and 88,000 were deported to Auschwitz. By the end of the war, only 19,000 remained at the camp. Of these, only 100 were children. As emblems of a continuing Jewish line, children went first to the death camps. A memorial and a ghetto museum now stand in Terezín, exhibiting the personal collections of former inmates. There’s a park on the grounds, which commemorates the children of the camp.

In these circumstances, it was already a miracle that Anny Stern and her young son made it out of the camp in 1939. And the marvel didn’t cease when her mother’s last gift, entrusted to a friend as Mina Pächter lay dying of malnourishment in a Theresienstadt hospital, finally reached her, having made a circuitous route through Israel, Ohio, and finally New York City.

Sergeant Warren Stewart, an American POW, who kept a diary of recipes from memory while detained in a Japanese prison camp. COURTESY OF SUSAN & RODDIE STEWART

Michael Berenbaum, who served as the project director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, describes the cookbook compiled by the starving women of Terezín as “a spiritual revolt against the harshness of given conditions.” He cautions against treating this document as something other than a vital historical artifact. “As such, this work—unlike conventional cookbooks—is not to be savored for its culinary offerings,” he writes, “[B]ut for the insight it gives us in understanding the extraordinary capacity of the human spirit to transcend its surroundings, to defy dehumanization, and to dream of the past and of the future.” Pächter’s cookbook, and other holdings of the Stern and Pächter family, now reside in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

When survival depended on those who were strong enough to work despite abysmal conditions, the memory of food provided psychological succor. In Imaginary Feasts, Georget interviews a former inmate of Flöha, a concentration and slave-labor camp where prisoners built German Messerschmitt fighter planes. The food comprised mostly liquids, former detainee André Bessiere recalled: coffee in the morning, yellow gruel at night. There were 200 bowls for 700 men. This total annihilation of the body, of human dignity, was a calculated strategy of power. Because the detainees were dispensable labor, whose ultimate fate was the death camps, there was no need to nourish their bodies. “Starve them to death, you save the money for the food. They don’t have the capacity to resist,” said Berenbaum in an interview on Imaginary Feasts. “Whatever work you get out of them is a bonus.”

With trauma, language fails; there is never enough of it to give shape to the kinesthetic experience of horror. In the absence of language, these recipes offered a vocabulary of resistance, combating unspeakable deprivation with written narratives of nourishment. They also offered a vocabulary of safety, a comfortable memory of past meals, conveyed as hushed community ritual: a survival of the mind, when the body was on the brink of shutting down.

“It was a way to forget the conditions they were living in at the time,” says Roddie Stewart, whose father, the late Warren Stewart, wrote a similar diary of recipes while detained at a Japanese POW camp during World War II. “A way to go back to a better place and time, when they were with their families.”

Late Sgt. Stewart’s diary entries from his time as a prisoner in Camp 2B in Kawasaki, Japan, during the Second World War. COURTESY OF SUSAN AND RODDIE STEWART

Sergeant Warren Stewart was an athletic sophomore at the University of Alabama when he enlisted in 1941. Deployed at different bases in the Pacific, Stewart was captured and loaded, with 2,000 other prisoners, into the cargo holds of what American POWs called a “Japanese hellship,” bound for the island of Kawasaki. Most of his cohort died during the 36 days they spent in the lightless, damp underbelly of the ship. “Japanese soldiers would lower little buckets with balls of rice, and that’s all they got to eat,” says Roddie Stewart.

At the Kawasaki labor camp, where he was held for 40 months, Stewart kept a neatly written journal detailing his daily meals: almost always rice with cabbage and carrot soup or noodles in pork and onion broth. But a different culinary world unfolded in the sergeant’s diary, where prisoners pitched in recipes for cream puffs, honey-drop cakes, cherry-date loaf, and pork tamales. An entire page of Stewart’s diary was dedicated to a list of sandwiches. It was almost as though the ritual of recall offered an escape of the mind, even as the body remained confined to the squalor of Kawasaki Camp 2B.

The late sergeant’s diaries are preserved in a locked safe in the Stewart house in Florence, Alabama. “It’s probably one of the most precious possessions I’ve got,” says Roddie Stewart, his voice breaking. “It reminds me of my father, of the man he became because of what he went through. He was more patient that anybody I knew, and had a love of life like nobody else ever had.”

Perhaps the only multi-cuisine “cookbook” written by incarcerated soldiers was the journal maintained by another American POW, Chick Fowler, during his time in Bilibid prison in the Philippines (where Stewart had also been detained briefly). Fowler’s aunt published his diaries as Recipes out of Bilibid in 1945. It contained recipes contributed by Fowler’s fellow war prisoners from their countries of origin. There were British recipes and American, Chinese and Mexican dishes, Italian favorites along with French, Javanese, and Filipino foods. In the absence of a common language, or common cultural coordinates, these imprisoned men turned to food fantasies as a framework of communication.

Harry Wu, at the Laogai Museum in Washington, D.C., which he founded. PHOTO BY RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

It wasn’t only the myriad political upheavals of the Second World War that inspired this particular form of culinary resistance. Harry Wu, a political dissident in China who spent more than 19 years at Chinese laogai, or penal labor camps, recalls similar “food imagining” practices with fellow prisoners in China under Mao Zedong. In his memoir, Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag, Wu wrote, through his translator Carolyn Wakeman, that inmates took turns “presenting the others with elaborate descriptions of a favorite dish, sometimes a specialty of our native province, or a secret recipe from our family. We would explain in detail how to cut the ingredients, how to season them, mix them, and arrange them on the plate. We would describe the smell and then the taste.” Even though Wu had come from affluence and never cooked, he weaved evocative tales of how his cook made his favorite dish of pork spareribs. “Everyone would listen in silence,” he wrote.

Although most of the authors of these recipes are now dead, the horrific circumstances that produce these documents remain. In February, the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security published a report about a spot inspection at an immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey. The inspectors found the center had been feeding detainees rotten, moldy meat and bread, causing wide-scale food poisoning at the facility and leading to inmates filing complaints about food quality. “Hunger comes not only from the body but also from the spirit,” Wu wrote of his experience a half century ago. Across history, the distribution of food, its quality, and its withholding has been a calculated strategy of subjugation and a marker of whether those imprisoned are seen as worthy of respect.

Perhaps what we take away from these stories is not the recipes that saved some Jewish women, or American soldiers, or Chinese labor-camp detainees from physical and emotional annihilation. Instead, these stories come to us as testaments of the repetitive depredations of history. They show how, across different periods of time, and around the world, humanity has been negligent in its fundamental duty: to recognize the inalienable human rights of those deemed ‘other.’

Ẩm thực – Quality Control

By Nishant Batsha

Full link: https://www.eater.com/22221011/extra-virgin-olive-oil-artisan-labels-veronica-foods-labeling-lawsuit?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NATIONAL%20-%2011121&utm_content=NATIONAL%20-%2011121+Version+B+CID_d80876dd16233a1a1c9ab0959bedde56&utm_source=cm_email&utm_term=INSIDE%20THE%20DUBIOUS%20WORLD%20OF%20OLIVE%20OIL%20LABELS

Why Big Olive Oil erupted over a boutique distributor’s claims to a fresher, healthier oil

IIneeded a nice bottle of olive oil. We had moved across the country in January and were now in month three of the COVID-19 pandemic — my expectations were lowered enough that homemade pesto sounded like an extravagance. Helplessly bound to my own demographic profile (“buy local!” “spend a little more and buy quality!”), I found myself driving 25 minutes to the suburbs outside of Buffalo, all the way to a boutique olive oil store called Prima Oliva.

Inside, the store telegraphed its status in the same way a boutique cigar or wine store would: medium-roast wood shelves and plenty of negative space. The olive oils were stored in small stainless steel drums (fusti), each with a small tap. A small laminated sign hung from each drum featuring varietal information and tasting notes. The shop owner took an empty glass bottle from a wall of them and filled it up with arbequina olive oil. The quality of the olive oils were, in part, guaranteed by a robust standard called Ultra Premium.As I found out later,Ultra Premium extra-virgin olive oils had to satisfy 33 parameters, including production, taste, chemistry, and more.

The small shop in the western New York suburbs looked incredibly similar to one I had been to when I lived near Berkeley.In the shadow of the Claremont Hotel was a store with the same dark-wood shelves, polished stainless drums of olive oil in the center, a wall of bottles ready to be filled, as well as small drums of vinegar and flavored oils along the sides. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this wasn’t a coincidence: The Berkeley store was owned and operated by Veronica Foods, an olive oil distributor that supplies Prima Oliva (along with 700 other stores), and whose focus on quality has ruffled feathers in the olive oil industry.

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“We consider ourselves a small player,” says Leah Bradley, Veronica Foods’ CFO. “In the quality arena, we’re a giant, but in the olive oil industry, we’re small.” Veronica Foods’ focus on quality can often feel opaque to the regular consumer, with tables detailing information on polyphenols, free fatty acids, diacylglycerols, and more. But Bradley was right about their position in the industry: total U.S. olive oil consumption was around 362,000 metric tons in 2019; Veronica Foods supplied a little under a percent of that. Yet the company, and its Ultra Premium extra-virgin olive oil standard, has been able to corner a large portion of the boutique olive oil store market — and from this position, it was part of a much larger debate on what constitutes quality extra-virgin olive oil.

Veronica Foods was founded in 1924 by an Italian immigrant in New York City and moved to Oakland, California, in the 1930s. In the mid-1990s, the olive oil distributor set out to build an international supply of extra-virgin olive oil. According to Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oilby Tom Mueller, the company was swindled by a trader in the early ’90s who supplied it with adulterated olive oil (olive oil mixed with a neutral refined oil), prompting it to begin scouring olive-growing regions for quality product. Veronica Foods even bought its own olive oil mill in Tunisia where it could store oil in silos topped off with nitrogen. The company now imports over 1 million gallons of olive oil from suppliers around the Mediterranean, California, Argentina, and the Antipodes and supplies them to stores across the United States and a handful of other countries.

Those stores are the only part of the Veronica Foods chain that the consumer will see. The brand is effectively masked to the end consumer because it’s a distributor — Veronica Foods imports olive oil and also buys olives directly from producers to produce extra-virgin oil at the company’s Tunisia mill. It sells to the stores with which it’s affiliated. In exchange for being a Veronica Foods olive oil exclusive seller, stores get access to training, educational seminars on topics like olive oil chemistry and vocabulary, and marketing material. Veronica Foods’ website stresses that these stores “are not franchises,” stating that they do not charge fees or commissions.

Even though Veronica Foods deals directly with olive oil producers it identifies as meeting certain quality parameters, after its mid-1990s debacle it took additional precautions to ensure its olive oil wasn’t adulterated. In Extra Virginity, Mueller describes how Veronica Foods CEO Mike Bradley tried to go to the FDA and the California Department of Food and Agriculture to take action against those passing off fake olive oil, to no avail. The onus of finding and ensuring quality would have to fall upon Veronica Foods.Supermarket oil this was not.

The company created its 33 quality parameters as internal standards to make sure all the olive oil it purchased met its specifications. Around 2013, Veronica Foods began to market its internal metrics as a seal to highlight to the consumer the difference in quality found in single-cultivar imported olive oil. “We created the Ultra Premium standard for the consumer,” Bradley says, even while noting their internal standards predate the Ultra Premium standard. “It highlights what we’re selling as so different from everything else in olive oil. It exceeds all the world standards.”

Veronica Foods was aggressive in making its claim to quality. When it launched the standard, its website claimed that “the absurdly low standards created and fostered by numerous trade associations and government agencies responsible for policing them has only contributed to the confusion and misinformation [around olive oil]” and that “The UP standard is reserved for the finest extra virgin olive oils in the world.” It pointed out that it wanted to distinguish Veronica Foods olive oils from the “broader category sold in mass markets the world over under thousands of brands and private labels.” In short, supermarket oil this was not. However, the company didn’t clarify that Ultra Premium was invented by and applied only to Veronica Foods’ olive oils.

Others in the olive oil industry accused Veronica Foods of subterfuge for marketing its seal as a certified standard, claiming that a seal-based standard had to be available to other brands. If a standard only applies to your own products, it’s more akin to a marketing trademark. In 2016, a few years after the standard launched, the North American Olive Oil Association (NAOOA) sued not only Veronica Foods, but also seven New York State-based stores that stocked Veronica Foods olive oil.

In the lawsuit, the NAOOA argued that the Ultra Premium designation was the sole intellectual property of Veronica Foods. Even if another other olive oil producer met all the 33 quality parameters, it could not apply for or display an Ultra Premium seal.

The NAOOA further alleged that Veronica Foods’ Ultra Premium standard was a “self-created designation used exclusively by VFC and its retailers to sell VFC olive oil.” The organization also claimed that its members, which include large multinational companies such as Colavita, Cargill, and Goya, were being targeted by Veronica Foods’ marketing. This marketing included claims that supermarket oils weren’t as fresh and had no health benefits when compared to oils in the Veronica Foods supply chain.

“[It’s] remarkable what they have done. I love the shops, and they’re great at getting consumers excited about olive oil,” NAOOA executive director Joseph R. Profaci says of Veronica Foods. But, he adds, there was “no reason to denigrate other products.” As Profaci puts it, it doesn’t make sense to declare that “unless you buy handpicked olive oil, you’re not getting the benefits.”

But the belief that artisan products provide more benefits came out of an olive oil marketplace rife with adulteration, false claims to quality, and misleading labeling. In Extra Virginity, Mueller found that a “Made in Italy” label on a food product offers an opportunity for fraud: People are generally willing to pay more for Italian products. According to a study from the Italian farmers association Coldiretti, Made in Italy counterfeiting, in which counterfeit labels are applied to products, was a 60 billion euro a year industry. (Even though the Italian government has stringent regulations around the Made in Italy designation, the problem has gotten so pernicious that it implemented blockchain technology as a potential solution.)

Veronica Foods’ experience with adulteration wasn’t in a vacuum: part of the desire to claim quality comes from the myriad controversies relating to legitimacy. However, an equally important impetus comes from the connection between olive oil and health.

Prior to the 1980s, olive oil was a niche product, popular among Italian immigrants and those interested in authentic Mediterranean ingredients. (The American diet was increasingly antithetical to fats of any kind.) Then, in 1985, studies from the University of Texas Health Science Center and other organizations found that monounsaturated fats — like olive oil — could, in fact, lower cholesterol levels. An article announcing this study in the Personal Health section of the New York Times even included a small accompaniment for readers about how to choose the best olive oils. It showed a slight preference for extra-virgin olive oils — a category of olive oils extracted by mechanical methods (no heat or solvents) and qualitatively determined to be free of defects via a taste test — saying that they have “distinctive flavors” from “top-quality olives.”

The idea of healthy food is particularly prevalent in the United States — a nation that spends the most on health care yet has the lowest life expectancy and highest chronic disease burden when compared to other high-income countries. These lagging indicators are nestled in a culture of toxic individualism where small choices in diet (good fats! Bad fats! Keto!) have an undue burden of importance with health outcomes.

Starting in the 1990s, the idea of olive oil as a health food found a home in the Mediterranean diet trend, popularized by figures such as Dr. Walter Willett at the Harvard School of Public Health. Olive oil trade groups also began to take notice. In the early to mid-1990s, the International Olive Oil Council began to fund Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust (a nonprofit dedicated to improving public health by popularizing “old ways” of eating) conferences to the tune of $2 million a year. These conferences were often attended by food journalists, cookbook authors, and people from the restaurant community.

Simultaneously in the early ’90s, small producers such as McEvoy Ranch and the Olive Press in California began to produce boutique artisan olive oil, selling at prices that were comparable to bottles of fine wine. This effectively created a new market: expensive and healthy extra-virgin olive oil.

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In 2010 came a study that solidified the inferiority of supermarket olive oils in the eyes of the American consumer. The UC Davis Olive Center, a branch of the university that brings together scientists and agricultural specialists to, as stated in their mission, “address the research and education needs of California olive growers and processors,” released a study that sampled 14 imported supermarket brands and five California brands of olive oil. Researchers subjected them to tests of taste and chemical profile. The center had a bombshell of a conclusion in its executive summary: Nearly 70 percent of the imported supermarket brands failed the sensory tests, and their chemical tests found that these failures could be attributed to oxidation, poor quality from damaged or overripe olives, or adulteration with cheaper refined olive oils. The study was picked up immediately by the media. Outlets couldn’t resist a good pun: The LA Times headlined its article with “Lab tests cast doubt on olive oil’s virginity,” while CBS News wrote “Nothing Extra About Imported Extra-Virgin Oil.”

The NAOOA was livid. After the Olive Center published its story, the NAOOA sent out a press release stating that the UC Davis study was “causing confusion among consumers,” with then-president Bob Bauer saying that “imported olive oils are authentic, high-quality products.” Ten years on, the frustration over at the NAOOA lingers. “It was inappropriate,” says Profaci, who points out that the chemical tests found no adulteration. After the study was picked up by the news media, it was difficult to convince consumers that imported supermarket oils were not adulterated. Moreover, the NAOOA, with its portfolio of large imported supermarket brands, felt like it was being unfairly targeted by a study supported, in part, by the California olive oil industry. “The damage has been done. There are a gazillion stories about fake olive oil on the internet because of these studies.” In any case, as Profaci pointed out, “olive oil has a two-year shelf life and these studies are 10 years old. The quality of olive oil in the market today is far superior than what it was 10 years ago.”

Dan Flynn, executive director at the UC Davis Olive Center, agreed, telling me that “the lots vary with time” and that “for consumers to know what the quality is right now, there needs to be another study.” Nevertheless, he added that they’ve never been challenged by another study on the results of the 2010 report.

While Veronica Foods’ internal standards predate the UC Davis report, its Ultra Premium standard was published and launched just over five years ago (though the Ultra Premium website was registered in 2012). The marketing materials used by Veronica Foods — and even the Ultra Premium standard — can be seen as an outgrowth of the coverage that came out of the UC Davis study. But Veronica Foods was hardly alone in the creation of its quality seal. The NAOOA has its own seal to ensure freshness and quality that seal came out of the UC Davis report, Profaci told me. It was meant to provide proof that the olive oil is real — not in any way adulterated. The difference between the NAOOA seal and the Veronica Foods seal is that the former was developed by a trade group and not a single company. A trade group’s seal can be applied to multiple products from different companies, and as such, it doesn’t fall into the category of trademarked marketing materials.Like wine, cheese, and the organic-foods industry, extra-virgin olive oil resides in a vague and poorly defined world of claims about health and caliber.

Other trade organizations have their own quality seals. The Extra Virgin Alliance created one. The Australian Olive Oil Association has one, as does the California Olive Oil Council. That same libertarian streak that leads Americans to try to solve their health with food also means that regulation is fast and loose. Every organization of extra-virgin olive oil producers and distributors will make the same claim: Their olive oil is fresh and healthy, and of the highest quality.

The case between the NAOOA and Veronica Foods was eventually thrown out on a technicality, though it found new life and was reinstated in late 2018, the same year the FDA announced that it would allow olive oils to be labeled with a “qualified-health claim” that it was a heart-friendly food. By 2020, the litigation had been settled, leaving the terms of the settlement confidential. Profaci and Bradley were bound by silence — the terms meant that they are unable to discuss the case further. But the Ultra Premium standard still exists, albeit with a caveat. Veronica Foods’ marketing material now makes it clear that UP only applies to extra-virgin olive oils distributed by Veronica Foods. Meanwhile, the company continues to expand. It now supplies stores in Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, in addition to the United States.

The NAOOA is lobbying the FDA to create an established definition of virgin and extra virgin, and to state what tests should be done to establish purity and quality. Like wine, cheese, and the organic-foods industry, extra-virgin olive oil resides in a vague and poorly defined world of claims about health and caliber. The grocery store can’t be trusted. Quality claims on labels are often grounds for litigation. There seems to be little hope for someone who wants to have healthful and flavorful olive oil without having to conduct extensive research or enter a standalone boutique store.

There might be another way. I posed a question to Dan Flynn: If he could choose one label to put on a bottle of olive oil, what would it be? “Harvest date is important,” he told me. “You get more antioxidants the fresher the oil is. They will decline with time.” Leah Bradley agreed. “It’s a critical piece of information that is not normally available to the consumer,” she said. Seal or no seal, Veronica Foods argues its olive oil is of higher quality because of this: It’s able to source olive oils every six months by switching between northern and southern hemisphere sources.

But perhaps there is some hope for those who don’t want to pay boutique prices for a bottle of what is essentially the fatty juice of the olive fruit. I took a look at the back of my bottle of California Olive Ranch EVOO purchased from the supermarket and there it is, printed on the back: a harvest date. I count the months on my hand, and I can breathe a little bit easier. The quality just might be there. 

Nishant Batsha is a writer of fictions and histories. His writing has been published in the Offing, Narrative, and the Believer among others. He lives in Buffalo, New York. Vicente Martí is an illustrator and visual artist.

Stoic – Practice Makes You Prepared

In 2017, the New England Patriots were down 28-3 to the Atlanta Falcons in the third quarter of the Super Bowl. It had not been a good game. Fans had already begun to write the Patriots off. Announcers had serious doubts as to whether a comeback was possible. But somehow, against all odds, the Patriots would come back to win that game in one of the greatest victories in all of sports.

How was that possible? When we interviewed Martellus Bennett for the Daily Stoic podcast, he had one explanation for how his team had managed to pull off such an incredible upset. New England, he said, was never rattled. They had practiced for so many different scenarios that being down that much didn’t crack their self confidence. In fact, he said that the team was so prepared for the Super Bowl that they had, in the weeks before the game, even practiced for the longer halftime. They had literally rehearsed what they would do with something as basic as 15 additional minutes of waiting between halves. It was actually easy to go back out on the field and do what they needed to do to win. They just had to revert back to their training.

To the Stoic, this makes perfect sense. Remember: Seneca said that misfortune lands most heavily when it was not expected. The idea of practicing, envisioning, training for all the contingencies of life, of a game, of a trying situation? This is how we ensure we’re able to navigate it correctly. Winging it? That’s for amateurs. Pros? The Patriots? They prepare.

We need to follow this example. Premeditatio malorum is not about tempting fate. It’s about being ready for any fate. Positive visualization without negative visualization is just dreaming—it’s fantasy. Visualization without preparation, without work? It’s worthless.

You have to practice. You have to be ready. For any of it. For whatever it is that your life may bring. Or you’re going to get crushed.

Collection – If you want to take on big problems, try thinking like a bee

By Mary Halton

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Full link: https://ideas.ted.com/if-you-want-to-tackle-big-problems-try-thinking-like-a-bee/

Raúl Soria

New month. New day. New leaf. So you’ve woken up and decided you’re finally going to take on the big, big problem that’s been weighing on you — perhaps it’s shoring up your public libraries, helping homeless dogs and cats, or fighting climate change.

Yet as much as you’d like to act, you’re stopped by some persistent, piping doubts: “Where do I start? And even if I do something, will it really matter?”

When it comes to climate change, for instance, the greatest minds in the world are struggling to come up with solutions. Meanwhile, you’re someone who struggles to bring your reusable bags to the store.

But maybe it’s time to look elsewhere for inspiration — like the humble honey bee.

They can show us that thinking small may be the best way to think big, according to beekeeper Marianne Gee, who lives in Ottawa, Canada.

The lifespan of a worker bee ranges from six weeks (in the summer) to twenty weeks (in the winter). Most of her brief existence is spent gathering nectar to make honey.

According to Gee, “a bee in her lifetime makes only 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey” — a tiny fraction of the hundred pounds of honey that a typical colony needs to survive. “The most remarkable thing isn’t that she does the work; it’s that she doesn’t even do it for herself,” she adds. A bee won’t directly benefit from the honey she makes; instead, it will allow future generations to thrive after she is gone.

This too is how we can change the world — by not worrying about the size of our contributions and by letting our efforts join the actions of others.

Gee herself was distressed by the pesticides and diseases that were harming the world’s honey bees and ruminated about what she and her husband could possibly do to fix the ailing agricultural system.

One day as she was tending her hives, she realized, “I am insignificant, but my 1/12 of a teaspoon counts.” She found purpose in starting an urban farm, helping people plant garden plots on their rooftops and schoolyards, and teaching novice beekeepers.

Keep making honey. Your 1/12th of a teaspoon counts.

Collection – Smart quality: Reimagining the way quality works

By Álvaro Carpintero, Tacy Foster, Evgeniya Makarova, and Vanya Telpis

Full link: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/pharmaceuticals-and-medical-products/our-insights/smart-quality-reimagining-the-way-quality-works?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hdpid=9977a29d-4b88-49ea-a0e9-3e995dbfa49e&hctky=2618809&hlkid=2da948a965984d93ba0bacf56e2c2a05#

Pharma and medtech companies that adopt a proactive approach to managing the quality function can generate value far beyond improved regulatory compliance.

Technological advancements have enabled a fundamentally new way of delivering quality. Pharma and medtech companies now have the unique opportunity to implement an approach that goes well beyond execution and compliance.

Imagine a quality system that:

• tells companies when and how their customers’ needs evolve
• creates more capacity in the whole organization by automating data collection, analysis, trending, and reporting—so designers can design, engineers can build, and salespeople can sell
• embeds compliance within flexible, user-friendly, organically built business workflows
• naturally fulfills the spirit—not only the letter—of the regulations

Realizing such a vision would require a paradigm shift from treating quality compliance as part of the cost of doing business to establishing quality as an enabler of enterprise value creation. A “smart quality” framework, which combines advanced technologies, modern process design techniques, and flexible ways of working, can help companies reimagine the way quality works—and at a fraction of what it used to cost even five years ago.

In our experience, a smart quality system could have a tangible line-of-sight impact on profit, accelerate time to market by more than 30 percent, and increase the capacity and responsiveness of manufacturing and supply chain by 20 to 30 percent. Beyond these directly measurable benefits, a smart quality approach would cause the entire organization to take ownership of quality, empower employees, boost customer satisfaction, and reduce compliance risk.

The current quality landscape

For decades, pharma and medtech executives have viewed quality compliance as the cost of doing business because it usually works behind the scenes, staying mostly invisible to customers and the organization unless disaster strikes. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the function has traditionally operated as such—focused on compliance as the baseline with cost reductions as the variable objective, albeit with some efforts to give greater emphasis to a customer focus and prevention. In some cases, companies have approached quality with a policing mentality, shaping quality systems and processes with the primary goal of satisfying regulators and catching nonconformances.

As a result, quality compliance has been under nearly constant pressure to reduce costs, in line with most other overhead functions. When cost pressures increased during and after the Great Recession, year-over-year budget-reduction targets became, in many cases, the quality function’s sole success metric. The fulfillment of compliance requirements was often seen as a given. However, such approaches have further obfuscated the quality-compliance system’s true cost to the enterprise: for years, it has constrained innovation, amplified uncertainty and extended lead times in supply chains, distracted salespeople from focusing on customers, and driven overall frustration across the organization with perceived bureaucracy and low-value-added work.

Unsurprisingly, as new digital technologies offer boundless opportunities, most companies have applied them solely to further reduce directly identifiable costs. Solutions have emerged for paperless workflows, automated data pulls and visualization, and artificial intelligence to search unstructured data. Still, the focus has remained on addressing the overall budget of the quality-compliance organization function and achieving clearly measurable cost reductions, ideally within the same fiscal year.

This mindset has been standing in the way of taking full advantage of the real opportunity at hand—using speed, data, and connectivity to improve product quality, process reliability, and ultimately, efficacy and patient safety.

As a result of the one-sided view of quality compliance, the big picture has remained the same over the past two decades: overcomplicated requirements and reactive processes and systems that slow down the business and increase cost.

Charting a new course

Over the past five years, a new way of thinking about quality has emerged. Through our work with clients on several large-scale, global quality-transformation projects, as well as regular dialogue with many functional and enterprise leaders, we have defined an approach we call smart quality.

Smart quality builds on the existing objectives of unconditionally delivering on patient safety and regulatory requirements at the lowest-possible budget. However, it achieves these objectives in new ways and expands their scope by reframing the role of quality in the modern enterprise.

Quality is a value-added partner and coach that helps integrate compliance into regular operations while enabling speed and effectiveness.

Smart quality’s explicit objectives include the following:

• perceiving and delivering on multifaceted and ever-changing customer needs
• deploying user-friendly processes built organically into business workflows, reimagined with leading-edge technologies
• leapfrogging existing quality management systems (QMSs) with breakthrough innovation, naturally fulfilling the spirit—not just the letter—of the regulations

The new ways in which smart quality delivers on its objectives can be categorized in five building blocks (Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1

Exhibit 2 shows select examples of how new technologies could reshape what day-to-day quality work looks like across the entire value chain.

Exhibit 2

Creating value across the entire enterprise

Pharma and medtech companies that adopt smart quality and incorporate technology into each step of the process can free up business resources to focus on higher-value tasks.

• R&D engineers can gain more time for innovation and product improvement as smart quality streamlines and integrates compliance documentation and uses data to make decisions, thereby reducing the compliance burden.
• Optimized quality control plans, deviation and nonconformance prevention, and rapid issue resolution can all accelerate production and release cycle times.
• Sales teams, armed with new digital tools and real-time insights from complaints and vigilance, can shift their attention from troubleshooting to engaging with customers.
• All employees can become more engaged in supporting quality, as relevant data is easily accessible and quality-compliance requirements, systems, and processes are more intuitive and user friendly.

Furthermore, the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has caused many organizations to embrace the fundamentals of a more proactive approach to quality (see sidebar, “How the pandemic has accelerated the shift to smart quality”).

Companies that have adopted smart quality have demonstrated that its direct impact on quality improvement surpasses traditional business cases. For example, smart quality has enabled organizations to reduce their total cost of quality assurance by up to 50 percent. Each of the building blocks has its own application areas to generate value (Exhibit 3). As more of the building blocks get implemented, the impact compounds.

Exhibit 3

Here are representative case examples for each of the building blocks:

Smart quality controls: A pharma company with multiple labs used an advanced-analytics digital-twin solution to dynamically optimize scheduling in the labs. The scheduling model relies on a continuous feed of production and lab data to automatically generate an optimized allocation of resources such as equipment and employees. Historical data is used to analyze variability and update standard times. This solution helped the pharma company allocate the workload properly among its labs. The solution has improved productivity in already well-performing pharma manufacturing labs by 40 to 50 percent.

Smart quality assurance: A medtech company used digitization and automation to enhance customer experience, identify and address quality signals faster, and reduce the cost of complaint management by more than 25 percent. The redesigned intake process has allowed the company to link the known issues and their respective safety risks, structure and automate the intake process and customer response for all complaints, and eliminate manual processing for more than 50 percent of complaints. Customer experience has been enhanced through an online complaint-submission application, real-time feedback, and decreased need for follow-ups and return handling. The quick escalation of high-risk complaints and automated trending have reduced patient risk by allowing rapid response to address emerging issues, fulfilling the true spirit of the regulatory requirement for complaint trending.

Process and product mastery: A pharma company used custom advanced analytics to reduce deviations by more than 65 percent. This solution has since helped the company monitor trends, find and eliminate several root causes of recurring deviations that had been impossible to detect with traditional tools, and take preventive action before issues occur. It has also developed a feedback loop with product development teams to improve the robustness of products and processes. The company can now identify the underlying drivers of quality control-test variability and simulate their effect on product properties, enabling product and process mastery.Would you like to learn more about our Pharmaceuticals & Medical Products Practice?Visit our Research & Development page

Smart-quality ways of working: A healthcare company automated data collection, analysis, and visualization for its quality management review to improve depth of insight and accelerate cross-functional decision making. The company has redesigned the structure of its quality performance management and reporting to incorporate a modernized set of metrics for operational performance, quality systems, culture, cost, and compliance. This deep redesign of the metrics has allowed the company to perform comprehensive decision-oriented quality reviews at all levels across functional and geographical entities—such as R&D centers, suppliers, manufacturing sites, distribution centers, and country affiliates. Automation has significantly reduced the manual effort needed to compile and prepare quality dashboards and cut the time needed for report preparation and verification from six weeks to less than two. An efficient, easily accessible, and user-friendly interface has decreased the time required for leadership review by half and enabled high-impact, cross-functional decision making along the entire product value chain.

Smart compliance foundation: The Medical Device Innovation Consortium partnered with the FDA and the medical device industry to fundamentally recast the corrective and preventive action (CAPA) to support continuous improvement initiatives.¹ Previously, both major problems and simpler issues had to go through the intense CAPA management process. By changing CAPA management from an intense process required for all levels of compliance to a framework focused on continuous improvement, major problems receive more attention and resources while simpler ones follow an expedited path. The new framework has cut regulatory complexity and the effort associated with CAPA management by more than 50 percent, while enabling more focus on continuous improvement initiatives. By viewing compliance through the lens of patient risk, this framework helps organizations deploy the most appropriate tools and quality systems, address quality events and emerging trends faster, and minimize bureaucracy and duplication of work. A live pilot with several manufacturing sites across multiple companies has demonstrated the mindset shift toward continual improvement, as engineers and quality professionals have been able to shift their focus from formal compliance to prevention.

Making it happen

A full transition to smart quality is a significant shift for an enterprise. It affects most functional areas and all product- and geography-based business groups. Such a comprehensive transition requires leadership to establish a vision that is shared across the enterprise. The way to shape a shared vision would depend on the specifics of a company, but it is often best achieved using a series of structured visioning workshops. To open up people’s minds to new possibilities while getting them jointly excited about charting a new course, these workshops can deploy modern design techniques along with compelling external examples.

A full transition to smart quality is a significant shift for an enterprise. It affects most functional areas and all product- and geography-based business groups.

An implementation plan for the vision would then need to be formalized in a smart quality road map. It is best to design the road map in stages; each stage may include at least one of the smart quality building blocks and address at least one quality process and system. This staged approach enables companies to set up a self-funding engine, where benefits from prior stages get reinvested into subsequent stages.

It is critical that smart quality transformations are appropriately resourced. The required investment commitments for two areas—modern IT tools and capabilities, and in-house analytics capabilities and skills upgrades—appear to be the most common and among the most challenging. Defining the business cases for these two areas requires the most rigorous and involved efforts, best led by one or more strong cross-functional teams.

Last, smart quality transformation would benefit from engaging regulators in a collaborative dialogue, where possible, and incorporating their input and perspective. Such efforts would help alleviate concerns related to perceived compliance risks resulting from “doing things differently than before.”

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Companies that embark on the path to smart quality must make a sustained commitment to change. Implementing all five building blocks will enable the quality function and the organization as a whole to achieve higher levels of agility, speed, and performance.

Note: The insights and concepts presented here have not been validated or independently verified, and future results may differ materially from any statements of expectation, forecasts, or projections. Recipients are solely responsible for all of their decisions, use of these materials, and compliance with applicable laws, rules, and regulations. Consider seeking advice of legal and other relevant certified/licensed experts prior to taking any specific steps.

Landscape – Economy and COVID-19 Top the Public’s Policy Agenda for 2021

Full link: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/01/28/economy-and-covid-19-top-the-publics-policy-agenda-for-2021/?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=d3d8646507-Weekly_2021_01_30&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-d3d8646507-400737085

Sharp partisan gaps on addressing race, global climate change

As the United States faces twin crises of high unemployment and a global pandemic, large majorities of Americans want Joe Biden and Congress to prioritize strengthening the economy and addressing the coronavirus outbreak in the coming year.

Yet there are wide partisan gaps over most of the 19 items asked about in a new Pew Research Center survey – particularly addressing racial issues and dealing with global climate change, but also dealing with COVID-19 and reducing the budget deficit.

The survey, conducted Jan. 8-12 among 5,360 U.S. adults who are members of the nationally representative American Trends Panel, finds that economic concerns once again top the public’s agenda after declining in relative importance in recent years.¹

Currently, about eight-in-ten Americans say strengthening the nation’s economy (80%) and dealing with the coronavirus outbreak (78%) should be top priorities for the president and Congress to address this year. Two-thirds (67%) rate improving the job situation as a top priority.

Majorities also prioritize a number of other policy goals, including defending the country from future terrorist attacks (63%), improving the way the political system works (62%) and reducing health care costs (58%). 

About half of the public says the president and Congress should make it a top priority this year to take steps to make Social Security financially sound (54%), improve education (53%), deal with the problems poor people face in their lives (53%), address issues around race in this country (49%) and reduce crime (47%). 

Among the priorities that rank lower on the 19-item priorities list are dealing with global trade (32%), improving the country’s roads, bridges and public transportation systems (32%) and dealing with drug addiction (28%). Notably, majorities rate all of these policy goals either as a “top priority” for the president and Congress or as “an important but lower priority”; for each, relatively small shares say they are “not too important” or “should not be done.”

Partisan differences over many policy goals, but not on ‘improving the political system’

As in past surveys of the public’s priorities, Democrats and Republicans differ on the importance of many policy goals.

Still, while Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to rate improving the job situation as a top policy priority, majorities in both parties (71% of Democrats, 63% of Republicans) say this is a top goal. 

Similarly, large shares in both parties rate strengthening the economy as a top goal, though more Republicans (85%) than Democrats (75%) say this. The economy and jobs rank among the top five policy goals for both Republicans and Democrats. 

Yet there are stark differences over the importance of other policy objectives – especially those relating to race and climate change. 

About seven-in-ten Democrats (72%) say addressing issues around race in this country should be a top policy priority, placing it among the top five goals for Democrats among 19 policy areas. The issue is among the bottom five priorities for Republicans; just 24% cite this as a top priority. 

Similarly, 59% of Democrats compared with 14% of Republicans say dealing with global climate change should be a top priority. There also is a 33 percentage point gap between the shares of Democrats (68%) and Republicans (35%) who say addressing the problems of poor people should be a top priority. 

The partisan gap over addressing the coronavirus is as large – 93% of Democrats rate this as a top policy priority, compared with 60% of Republicans – though it ranks among the leading goals for members of both parties. 

Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to say reducing health care costs (by 21 percentage points), addressing issues within the criminal justice system (also by 21 points) and improving education (by 18 points) should be top priorities this year. 

By contrast, larger shares of Republicans than Democrats rate reducing the budget deficit, strengthening the military, reducing crime and defending against terrorism as top policy priorities. More than half of Republicans (54%) say reducing the deficit should be a top policy objective, compared with 29% of Democrats. Reducing the budget deficit ranks as a middle-tier priority for Republicans and is among Democrats’ lowest priorities. 

Republicans also rated deficit reduction more highly than Democrats last year, at the start of Donald Trump’s final year in office. Among members of both parties, the shares rating the deficit as a top priority declined sharply between 2013 (at the start of Barack Obama’s second term) and 2020. The nation’s debt and its yearly budget deficit have been rising in recent years. 

After a contentious presidential election and a deadly riot inside the U.S. Capitol, comparable shares in both parties identify “improving the political system” as a top priority for the president and Congress (64% of Democrats, 60% of Republicans). Yet in the past, partisans have differed sharply over proposals related to voting and elections. 

Policy priorities of White, Hispanic and Black Americans

Economic concerns rank near the top of the policy agenda for Black, White and Hispanic adults. However, there are major differences in their views on the importance of other issues, especially race, poverty, education and criminal justice.

Black adults (83%) are about twice as likely as White adults (40%) to say addressing issues around race in this country should be a top priority; 68% of Hispanic adults view this as a top priority. 

Black Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (85%) are more likely than White Democrats and Democratic leaners (68%) to say that addressing issues around race should be a top priority. Still, far more White Democrats than White Republicans (21%) rate this as a top priority. (see detailed tables for more).

While 77% of Black adults say dealing with the problems of poor people should be a top goal, smaller shares of Hispanic (64%) and White adults (46%) say the same. 

There are also wide divisions between White and Black adults – with Hispanics generally falling in between – over how much the government should prioritize improving education, addressing issues within the criminal justice system, dealing with the coronavirus outbreak and a number of other issues. 

Across all 19 items, there is none that significantly more White adults than Black or Hispanic adults view as a top policy priority. However, there are no meaningful differences in the shares across racial and ethnic groups who want to prioritize dealing with immigration, dealing with global trade, strengthening the economy or reducing the budget deficit.

Gender and policy priorities

Women prioritize a number of policy goals more highly than men do, especially addressing issues around race, the criminal justice system, health care and education.

A majority of women (56%) say addressing issues around race in this country should be a top priority, compared with fewer than half of men (41%). 

More women than men also say addressing issues within the criminal justice system (52% vs. 40%), reducing health care costs (63% vs. 52%) and improving education (59% vs. 48%) should be top priorities. 

Overall, a greater share of women than men say improving the job situation, dealing with poverty, dealing with immigration and several other issues also should be top priorities in the year ahead.

Age and policy priorities

Older adults are more likely to view several goals as top priorities compared with younger adults.

By contrast, there are only three items – improving education, addressing the criminal justice system and dealing with climate change – that larger shares of younger than older adults rate as top priorities.

The biggest gaps between older and younger adults occur on national defense policy priorities. About three-quarters of those 50 and older (77%), compared with only about four-in-ten of those ages 18 to 29 (39%), say defending against terrorism should be a top priority. Within both parties, older Americans are more likely to want the policy agenda to focus more on defense issues (see detailed tables for more).

Similarly, more than three times as many adults 50 and older (51%) say strengthening the military should be a top issue on the nation’s agenda compared with those under 30 (14%). Older adults are also more likely than younger adults to prioritize Social Security, the economy, the job situation and reducing crime.

Education and policy priorities

There are notable differences in views of policy priorities by education. Those with less formal education rate more goals as important priorities than do those with more education.

Nearly seven-in-ten adults with a high school diploma or less (68%) say taking steps to make the Social Security system financially sound should be a top priority, compared with 54% of those with some college, 36% of college graduates and 40% of those with a postgraduate degree.

Views are similar regarding the priority Biden and Congress should give to reducing crime: 57% of those with no more than a high school diploma say it should be a top priority, but this share falls across the other educational groups, reaching a low of 31% among those with a postgraduate degree.

Americans without college experience say a number of additional issues should be top priorities as well, including such policy areas as strengthening the military, defending against terrorism, reducing the budget deficit, reducing health care costs and dealing with drug addiction.

Those with more education beyond a college degree, on the other hand, are more likely to say that the president and Congress should give top priority to dealing with global climate change: About half of Americans with a postgraduate degree (49%) say it should be a top priority, compared with 37% of those with a college degree or some college experience and 35% of those with a high school degree or less. And adults with a postgraduate degree are modestly more likely than others to say addressing issues around race in this country and dealing with the coronavirus should be top priorities this year.

Note – Investopedia: The Market Sum: Slippery Slope

By Caleb Silver, Editor in Chief

Image courtesy GettyImages/Fuse

1/ 

Stocks Slide Into the Weekend With Steep Losses

A choppy and unforgettable week for the U.S. equity markets ended with steep losses for the day, which drove the Dow Industrials and the S&P 500 into negative territory for the year. It was the first monthly loss for the indexes since October as souring sentiment and wild volatility brought on by a highly mobilized day trading contingent disrupted the markets. 

All major sectors traded lower today, and nearly all major global indexes did as well — all except for Norway because the cold never bothered them anyway. Intense day trading of stocks that stole the spotlight this week, including GameStop and AMC Entertainment, has brought regulatory scrutiny and a lot of anger toward the online brokers that restricted trading in those securities. We haven’t heard the end of this outcry.

Was this week’s madness the beginning of a major revolution in the markets and the start of a big downturn brought on by the rise of risky day traders? Probably not, but they are a big and important part of the stock market ecosystem. The stock market may actually just be behaving like the tired old bull that is, and it is looking more like old bulls from the past.

Chart courtesy LPL Financial

2/

Regulators Mount Up

As expected, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it is monitoring and evaluating the “extreme price volatility” of certain securities, as day traders and retail investors pushed the prices of micro-cap companies like GameStop and AMC Entertainment to record highs. The move came after trading platforms Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and TD Ameritrade restricted trading and raised margin requirements for these stocks and others, including Blackberry, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Koss Corp.

Specifically, the SEC said it will review the brokers’ decisions to inhibit trading as well as warned investors to avoid “abusive or manipulative trading activity that is prohibited by the federal securities laws.”

You can believe they may also be looking to see if there was any collusion on the part of a group of investors who may have conspired to drive prices in these securities higher using false information. Who might stand to benefit if these shorted stocks shot higher? We were wondering why so many people were looking up SEC Schedule 13D on our website this week. Schedule 13D is a form that must be filed with the SEC when a person or group acquires more than 5% of any class of a company’s equity shares.

Chart courtesy YCharts

3/

Less Spending for the Holidays

Americans continued to spend less in December, a sign that the economic effects of COVID-19 could not be ignored during the holiday season. U.S. households cut spending in December for the second consecutive month, during a season that is typically characterized by its robust holiday shopping and mega sales. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) decreased by $27.9 billion, or 0.2%, last month, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 

Americans spent less on dining, travel, and healthcare in December. They also purchased less food and beverages from supermarkets and liquor stores. Sales at retailers declined for three straight months. However, consumers purchased more motor vehicles and parts, specifically new light trucks, and increased spending on household utilities like electricity, offsetting the decline.

While spending was down, personal income rose slightly due to the extension of government assistance programs.

Fidelity Is Hiring Amid Rapid Growth

The company plans to hire an additional 4,000 positions. If you’re passionate about helping others, a career with Fidelity could be a great fit. Learn More

4/

What to Expect Next Week

After a rough week for the major U.S. indexes that brought the DJIA and the S&P 500 into negative territory for 2021, investors will be anxious to see if next week will bring a relief rally or more intense trading volatility spurred on by day traders.

Corporate earnings have been better than expected, but the market has been focused elsewhere, and even strong results and positive outlooks have been met with selling. We’ll see a lot more earnings next week, in addition to the January nonfarm payrolls report due out Friday.

Here are the returns on some major asset classes year-to-date:

Earnings Season Continues

Earnings season continues next week with another slate of big names reporting earnings. On Tuesday, the remaining tech titans weigh in with Alibaba, Amazon, and Alphabet all reporting earnings. Notably, all three have been increasingly trying to push into the cloud-computing space.

How Are UK Businesses Feeling Post-Brexit?

This Monday the purchasing managers’ index (PMI) for U.K. manufacturers is released and on Wednesday the PMI for businesses in the services sector is released. PMIs survey how people across the business world are feeling and this will be the first PMI since the U.K. exited the EU single market at the end of 2020. While the U.K.’s exit from the EU technically happened at the end of Jan. 2020, the U.K. stayed under EU rules within the EU single market until the end of 2020. During that transition period a new trade deal was reached. While the deal, named the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), ensures tariff and quota free trade in goods, it does comparably little to address trade in services. In addition, new customs barriers for goods are still making trade in goods more difficult. 

US Unemployment Rate

The U.S. economy is still clearly ailing with unemployment at elevated levels. However, with the $900 billion stimulus package passed in December and talk of another one soon, it’s worth seeing if the stimulus and expectation of more has improved the employment situation or if the increasing spread of COVID-19 over the winter has outweighed its effect. Look out for employment numbers released this upcoming Friday.

Note – Blooloop’s Weekend News Roundup

In the news

Major expansion for the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool

Largest ever climate survey says urgent change is needed

Gateway Ticketing Systems announces return of Webinar Wednesdays

Christie GS Series powers immersive visuals at dome theatre in Xiong’an New Area

Photogenic & Cherry Hill Programs successfully adapt to challenges of COVID

The London Resort passes first test of Planning Inspectorate, now with Secretary of State

Up Pompeii!  Historic Antiquarium museum re-opens

Theme Park Fan –The Musical brings together UK attractions community

Valo Motion to showcase mixed reality digital attractions and special offer at ShowUp

Roto presents interactive Spark exhibit at newly renovated Bakken Museum

Disney theme park attendance predicted to recover by 2023

CoDe design museum for Costa Smeralda cruise ship

Ballast VR brings DIVR underwater VR experience to Yas Waterworld

Gateway Ticketing Systems provides Blueshift online store to Curious Minds

Parc Astérix dolphin show to close

JRA partners with Holocaust & Humanity Center to present new AI exhibit

Live-action Harry Potter TV series rumoured to be in development

Disney’s Jungle Cruise attraction to be ‘enhanced’

AUS$16 million upgrade for Taronga Zoo Sydney

Cosm powers immersive experiences across the globe

SPREE Interactive uses Pico Interactive VR headsets for international installations

ShowUp FEC conference schedule announced

Vivaticket announces new partnership with MyTicketAsia

Cetacean design for $AU30m Australian Underwater Discovery Centre

£300m Blackpool Central themed entertainment park moves forward

China Leisure launches first FEC with Nickelodeon Playtime in Shenzhen

RWS Entertainment Group launches seasonal product catalogue

In depth

Jerre Kirk: 27 years at Walt Disney Imagineering MORE
Glytch and the formula for esports LBE dominance MORE
Disney’s Wild Africa Trek brought with ListenTALK MORE

Note – McKinsey: The end of the beginning: Business trends for this year and beyond

This week, how businesses move from perpetual crisis to perpetual motion. Plus, harnessing the power of purpose, and Dickon Pinner, the global head of McKinsey’s Sustainability Practice, on the stirrings of a green postpandemic recovery.

A year of transition. Despite a resilience-testing 2020 rolling into a still-unsettling 2021, the good news is that barring any (more) unexpected catastrophes, businesses can start to shape their futures rather than just grinding through the present. We’ve seen that the strongest companies are reinventing themselves by embracing pandemic-driven change. That will surely continue this year.

In a recent article, we enumerated key business trends to watch, including rising consumer confidence, a wave of innovation, a green recovery, supply-chain fortifications, and a rapid move to the future of work. Let’s go through just a few of them:

Unleashing pent-up demand. As consumer confidence returns, so will spending. That has been the experience of all previous economic downturns. China, the first country to be hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, is also the first to be emerging from it, and its relieved consumers have begun to act and spend largely as they did in precrisis times. The rebound will likely emphasize hard-hit services, particularly those that have a communal element, such as restaurants and entertainment venues. Globally, leisure travel will bounce back, driven by the very human desire to explore. Business travel, by contrast, is expected to take longer to recover.

Innovation and entrepreneurship. Everything is going digital, from online customer service to remote working to supply-chain reinvention to the use of AI and machine learning to improve operations. Healthcare, too, has changed substantially, with telehealth and biopharma coming into their own. The COVID-19 crisis has created an imperative for companies to reconfigure or transform their operations. Did the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0) help those companies in their efforts? A new McKinsey survey suggests three outcomes: a win for companies that had already scaled digital technologies, a reality check for those that were still scaling, and a wake-up call for those that hadn’t started on their Industry 4.0 journeys.

The future of work is already here. Postpandemic, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that more than 20 percent of the global workforce (mostly in high-skilled jobs in sectors such as finance, insurance, and IT) could work away from the office most of the time—and be just as effective. Automation, digitization, and other technologies are weighing more heavily on workforces, too, with more than half of employees needing significant reskilling or upskilling by 2022, according to the World Economic Forum. Automation will leave few roles untouched—and not everyone will be reskilled or redeployed successfully. Here are a few tips for leaders to give their talent and their organizations the best opportunity to thrive in an uncertain future.

Hitting the dismount. Whether their companies are thriving amid COVID-19’s chaos or still in survival mode, CEOs across industries tell us they face tough choices, including figuring out how to adopt faster and more agile approaches. Here’s what those changes will actually look like.

So are you a future-ready company? Some companies are doing better than others grappling with trends that will unwind the old views of management. While no one organization has cracked the code, we found nine imperatives that define the most future-ready companies.

Finding where the ‘we’ overlaps with the ‘me’

When a company’s purpose is aligned with its employees’ purpose, good things happen. To harness the power of purpose, CEOs and other senior executives must pressure-test that purpose with their teams, their employees, and themselves. Our research found that nonmanagement employees were just as likely as top leaders to say that purpose should be more of a priority, even as they differed with leaders on what that purpose should focus on.

High-risk Americans could all be vaccinated by mid-2021

the Shortlist

Note – Fisher: Where the Street Sees Value

By Fisher Investments Editorial Staff

Full link: https://www.fisherinvestments.com/en-us/marketminder/where-the-street-sees-value?fiut=p

When everyone expects one category to lead, something different usually happens instead.

On paper, we are 10 months into a new bull market—a time when value stocks traditionally outperform. But, a few short bursts aside, that hasn’t been the case this time around. Since the low on March 23, 2020, growth stocks—those that plow profits back into the business and strive for long-term expansion—have beaten value, which tends to rely on the economic cycle to boost earnings and returns more profits to shareholders. This is a well-known discrepancy, and many pundits have identified a potential reason: Value-heavy sectors were most affected by lockdowns, while the Tech and Tech-like companies that were most resilient (and benefited from the big switch to working from home and shopping online) are growth-heavy. Once the world is vaccinated and businesses reopen, the popular narrative holds that it will be value’s time to shine.

We see a glaring problem here. Yes, value usually does best early in a bull market. But that is generally because after it gets pounded during a long, brutal bear market, no one wants to own it—that is where the, well, value comes from. It is also the great irony surrounding value investing: Value’s nice long-term returns (prior to the last decade or so) cluster in big bursts that happen when value is also least loved.

Today value is hardly unloved. With precious few exceptions, it is getting heaps of attention and affection today. You can see it in press coverage salivating over the prospect of outsized returns in Financials, Energy and other value-heavy sectors as normalcy returns later this year. You can also see it in Wall Street forecasts, which heavily favor value stocks and non-US markets (which are generally more value-heavy). Following are several snippets we rounded up—not to cast aspersions or quibble, but to illustrate just how common expectations of value leadership are this year in the investment community.

• “… we see the impact of a successful vaccine roll-out as decisive for the economy. This will likely support ‘value’ stocks, especially small caps, which have been worst hit by the Covid-19 lockdowns. Moreover, we think European equities, which have lagged US equities significantly, will continue to bounce back as the impact of the vaccine is felt across Europe.”^[i]
• “A return to normal by the second half of the year should help extend the rotation that began in early November away from technology/growth leadership toward cyclical/value stocks.”^[ii]
• “The largest beneficiaries will be stocks at the epicenter of the pandemic, such as Consumer Discretionary, Financials and Energy.”^[iii]
• “Looking ahead, we believe that investors will seek out opportunities in areas that are less richly priced and have yet to fully recover. These areas will likely include assets that are most sensitive to the U.S. business cycle (known as cyclical stocks) and to COVID-19 dynamics.”^[iv]
• “… while there will be bouts of volatility along the way, the switch into value/cyclicals and out of growth is likely to have several more chapters.”^[v]
• “In style terms, a more normal cyclical recovery could continue to boost value stocks relative to growth, a reversal of the powerful trend toward growth dominance—and unprecedented dispersion of stock returns—seen since the 2008–2009 global financial crisis.”^[vi]
• “Currency and local market valuations favoring [Developed Markets] ex-US over US equities, also supported by cyclical outperformance in 2021, and a rotation away from growth into value sectors and regions.”^[vii]
• “Investors have begun to look at the potential for revenue and earnings growth in many ‘out-of-favour’ areas that suffered during the pandemic. The most obvious of these are those that were effectively shut-down, such as hotels, restaurants, leisure enterprises and travel companies. It seems highly plausible that when the recovery, takes hold many of these businesses will experience a sharp rebound.”^[viii]
• “A robust recovery could trigger a rally that expands to include some of the most unloved value stocks. Investors may also start to take notice of value companies’ recent efficiency improvements, which in turn could drive a more durable value rally.”^[ix]
• “[We expect] the economic recovery to broaden out in 2021 on the heels of vaccine deployment. This will benefit more cyclical areas of the market.”^[x]
• “ … we expect equity markets outside of the U.S. to outperform, largely because of lower valuations and a higher dividend yield. Likewise, we are expecting value stocks to outperform growth over the next decade based on our fundamental assessment.”^[xi]

There are others besides those 11, but you get the drift. The vast majority of forecasters expect value to lead, propelling European, Financials, Energy, Industrials and other hard-hit categories to outperform this year. These forecasts are all backed by data and seemingly sound logic. But markets often defy all of that, because they are forward-looking and efficient. They price in all widely known information, which includes professional forecasts, and they usually end up upending those expectations.

The reasoning allegedly supporting value today is also widely known. That includes its long history of early-cycle outperformance and expectations for a big vaccine boost. To argue these aren’t already reflected in stock prices is to argue markets aren’t efficient. We wouldn’t recommend taking that position, as it is usually a losing proposition.

We don’t make long-term forecasts, but if you put us in the chair of a dunk tank full of ice water and threatened to hit the bullseye if we didn’t make an educated guess, we would say we doubt value leads materially until most pundits give up on it. If history is any indication, that probably won’t be until after another bear market—one that is longer-lasting and features the panicky late stretch that leads investors to capitulate on economically sensitive stocks. Then we will probably see a raft of this time is different-type articles arguing value won’t lead. Maybe they’ll cite its underperformance during this recovery as a sign of a new normal. Again, just an educated guess. But in the meantime, we think stocks are likeliest to prove the pro-value crowd wrong with continued growth leadership.

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[i] “Small Caps and Emerging Markets Tipped for Outperformance in 2021,” Tim Human, IR Magazine, 12/8/2020.

[ii] “Global Market Outlook 2021 – The Old Normal,” Russell Investments.

[iii] “2021 Global Market Outlook: What Lies Ahead in the Post-COVID-19 World?” JPMorgan, 1/14/2010.

[iv] “Market Outlook 2021 A New Beginning: Investing in a Post-COVID World,” Citi Personal Wealth Management, December 2020.

[v] “Markets in a Minute,” New York Life Investments, 1/20/2021.

[vi] “Global Markets Quarterly Update: Fourth Quarter 2020,” T.Rowe Price, 12/31/2020.

[vii] “2021 Investment Outlook,” Invesco, November 2020.

[viii] “Outlook 2021: Global and Thematic Equities,” Schroders, 12/7/2020.

[ix] “Global Tech, Emerging Markets and Pandemic Uncertainties: Opportunities and Risks in 2021,” Chris Flood, Financial Times, 1/9/2021.

[x] “2021 Outlook: The Runway Looks Clear,” UBS, 12/11/2020.

[xi] “Vanguard Economic and Market Outlook for 2021: Approaching the Dawn,” Vanguard Research, December 2020.

Note – AngelList: Reddit vs. Robinhood

Robinhood halts GameStop trading

Fintech behemoth Robinhood drew the ire of Reddit this week when it restricted trades of GameStop amid an epic short squeeze that’s causing havoc from Wall Street to the White House.

Members of the 4M strong #wallstreetbets subreddit were apoplectic to learn Robinhood and other trading platforms restricted trading after they successfully drove GameStop to astronomical heights. 

Investors invoked Braveheart, Michelle Obama, and comic book villain Bane to encourage others to keep the squeeze on hedge funds that bet against GameStop with short positions. VC Chamath Palihapitiya got in on the fun, buying $115k of the stock, turning a quick profit, and then donating $500k to the Barstool Fund for small businesses. 

The “meme stock” frenzy dealt serious damage to two of the targeted hedge funds, Melvin Capital and Citron Research, and led other well-known shorters to pump the brakes. The biggest loser so far: $20B fund D1 Capital Partners reported a 20% loss.

Ripple effects were felt elsewhere. The White House said it was monitoring the situation, and Senator Elizabeth Warren called on regulators “wake up and do their jobs.”

Meanwhile, Bank of America Corp. analysts, responding to GameStop’s roller-coaster ride, raised their price target to $10 from $1.60 — and reiterated their underperform recommendation.

Funding and acquisitions

Booksy, a Polish-founded appointment booking and payments management platform, raised a $70M Series C led by Cat Rock Capital. Founded in Poland and now headquartered in San Francisco, Booksy claims 13M active users. The company started with a focus on the beauty and wellness industries and has expanded to include gyms.

New York-based Rhino, which offers an alternative to home rental security deposits, raised $95M in a round led by Tiger Global Management. Rhino provides an insurance product to real estate companies, allowing them to forgo traditional rental deposits from tenants. The company charges renters a monthly fee to cover the insurance policy for the landlord.

San Francisco-based fintech startup Fast raised a $102M Series B led by Stripe and Addition. Fast lets shoppers log into websites and check out, without having to enter information more than once. It also allows users to purchase items without going into a shopping cart. Stripe also led the company’s $20M Series A.

Note – DealStreetAsia: The Week That Was

It has the hallmarks of a riveting movie: Wall Street. Billions of dollars at stake. A group of amateurs joining forces to take down titans via the most unlikely of targets.  GameStop, a video game retailer in the US, is the antithesis of what counts as a hot investment today and is the most shorted name in the US market. Yet, a band of Redditors and Robinhooders have taken on multi-billion dollar hedge funds that, at the time of writing, are sitting on some $20 billion in losses.  The biggest short squeeze in a decade has also spread to other counters, including cinema chain operator AMC Entertainment Holdings. In this case, not all was lost.  Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners converted its holdings of debt in the company to equity and subsequently sold the lot for $713 million as shares in AMC shot up tenfold. Silver Lake had in 2018 participated in a $600 million convertible bond round that gave it a roughly 21.3% stake in AMC. Nevertheless, the ongoing drama illustrates the changing face of investing. Perhaps GameStop would take AMC’s lead and capitalise on its new, super-charged market value to raise funds for a business transformation.

Unicorns take flight

That is, after all, a major perk of being a publicly-listed company. In Southeast Asia, one need only look at how Sea Ltd has built up its war chest.  And, the unicorns in the region are preparing to follow suit. Southeast Asia’s most valuable startup, Grab, is believed to have picked the bankers to work on an IPO in the US that could raise some $2 billion.  We argue in this piece that it could be Traveloka, among its peers in Indonesia, that is best-positioned for a public float, even as its core business – travel – continues to languish amid the pandemic. To be sure, tech startups in Indonesia are in a position of strength, as our story on their role in the banking consolidation in the archipelago indicates. Well-funded startups have been acquiring stakes in the country’s smaller banks to boost their financial services, as the banks themselves seek to shore up their core capital ahead of new regulations coming into force. In the most recent deal, in December, Gojek increased its stake in Bank Jago to 22%. Bank Jago will provide digital banking services through the Gojek platform, while Gojek’s users will be able to open a bank account with Jago via its platform. Separately, an analysis of ShopeePay, a unit of Sea Group, in Indonesia shows how its ties with one of the most influential families in the country is an important element to it achieving its fintech ambitions in the mega-market. Still in Indonesia, wholesale e-commerce marketplace Ula has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by existing investor Quona Capital, and B Capital Group. Akulaku, a consumer finance platform, is said to be in talks with strategic partners to sell a 15% stake in its peer-to-peer lending platform Asetku. In Malaysia, peer-to-peer lending platform CapBay has raised $20 million in its Series A round from Singapore-based KK Fund, a return investor.  Indeed, as DealStreetAsia’s report shows, e-payments and P2P lending were the two fintech categories that attracted the most venture funding in 2020.

Funding news

After a muted 2020, fundraising is in earnest, as both GPs and startups secure capital for growth and put a troubled year behind. This week, we reported that Singapore-headquartered Tanglin Venture Partners is looking to raise $45 million from US investors for its second fund that could be as big as $150 million. The fund targets Series C and above niche tech businesses in Southeast Asia and India. Also in Singapore, Altara Ventures, formerly known as Credence Partners, is said to be nearing a close for its $100 million+ debut fund. The firm has filed with the SEC with a placeholder amount of $200 million. Meanwhile, B Capital is targeting to raise $150 million for a global seed-to-Series A fund, even as the firm continues to focus on Series B and later companies with its main fund. In India, venture debt firm Stride Ventures is set to close its first fund at $48 million.  Separately, institutional investors continue to allocate to the region.  Canadian pension fund giant OMERS is investing in Singapore’s Orion Capital Asia, as it seeks to expand its mid-market credit portfolio in Asia.  German development finance institution DEG has allocated $22 million to Openspace Ventures’s $200 million third Southeast Asia fund. The institution, a subsidiary of German state-owned development bank KfW, has also committed $30 million to Asia-focused PE firm PAG’s second growth fund.  DEG has also extended a $10 million senior loan to Vietnamese animal feed producer Anova Feed JSC as well as smaller financing to Pakistani insurer TPL Insurance, and the Cambodia-Laos-Myanmar Development Fund II. Private equity fund General Atlantic is investing $55 million in acquiring a minority stake in Indonesia’s Kalbe Genexine Biologics, the life sciences arm of pharmaceutical company PT Kalbe Farma Tbk.

SPAC fever builds

At least three new SPACs in Southeast Asia were reported this week.L Catterton, the consumer-focused private equity firm co-founded by luxury house LVMH, has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a special purpose acquisition company. The SPAC will raise $250 million for targets in Asia, Bloomberg reported. The SPAC will be sponsored by L Catterton Asia’s $1.45 billion third fund and is expected to focus on consumer tech firms in the region.Meanwhile internet investment company Catcha Group also announced a $250 million SPAC for targets in what it calls the “new economy” sector. Finally, Aspirational Consumer Lifestyle Corp, the SPAC launched by former L Catterton Asia executive Ravi Thakran, is reported to be acquiring private jet charterer Wheels Up. The company is now the second-largest charterer behind Berkshire Hathaway’s NetJets, following a spate of acquisitions over the last 18 months.The year is just beginning, and the team at DealStreetAsia is looking forward to more deals ahead.

Michelle Teo  Managing Editor, DealStreetAsia editor@dealstreetasia.com

Note – Bloomberg: The Weekly Fix: Powell dodges the redditors, ESG’s big year

The Fed has better things to do…

…Than break up a stock-market party. It’s busy trying to nurture a fragile recovery, resolve inequality and keep the financial system on its feet.

That’s the message this week from Jerome Powell, who also stepped around reporters’ questions about the rebel forces attacking Wall Street’s short-selling bases. Instead he focused on what the Fed is NOT doing, specifically, not making any changes to its ultra-easy policy stance and definitely not tapering asset purchases. 

(It’s almost protesting too much. When the fateful time comes to taper, the Fed might want to come up with another word for it — perhaps there’s a mysterious string of German, though Kaufprogrammverjüngung might be a bit of a mouthful, and doesn’t sound terribly benign.)

Powell’s spit-take-worthy statement was that Fed policy was less a driver of asset prices than widely assumed: “The connection between low interest rates and asset values is probably something that’s not as tight as people think.”

Pepperstone’s Chris Weston couldn’t agree less:

“Let’s make no bones about this — the Fed created this evolving juggernaut. Cheap money/liquidity is not supposed to be directed to places that are inefficient and that has played out. The Fed has created a craze in equities, as they are directly targeting financial conditions, and installed a belief that equities only go one way. Government policy has given this a tailwind but the emotion of watching your neighbour get rich through stocks has impacted hard.”

It seems unfair to castigate the Fed for what is so far at least a joyride at the expense of a handful hedge funds, particularly when the central bank’s actions may well have averted a Great Depression. But it’s a long shot to say that ultra-easy policies globally haven’t had a profound effect on asset prices, having driven yields on more than $17 trillion of bonds globally below zero. 

Still, since there can be no dispute that the recovery is still fragile, better to leave the buzz-killing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which said it is “actively monitoring” volatility in options and equities markets. A game of whack-a-mole looks very much underway, with Robinhood suddenly imposing and then lifting trading restrictions, and various unloved stocks still springing to dizzying heights. To add to the confusion, politicians seem hardly to know which side to champion, as the renegades taking on Wall Street may also be shaking its foundations, and their donors.

It’s too soon to tell whether the rebellion against short-sellers turns out to be “some nonsense,” as BlackRock Vice Chairman Philipp Hildebrand put it, or a teachable moment for leveraged investors, or a multi-layered activist movement. By Friday, the movement had crossed the world to Malaysia, where the discussions of an online community, Bursabets, have so far included calls to rally against institutional investors who have kept the share prices of glove makers low amid the pandemic.

At this stage, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which such communities have a bigger impact than a couple of scorched hedge funds and a confused Australian mining company. 

While the redditors cast around for their next likely targets, hedge fund losses are still relatively contained. But the more they come under stress, the more potential for widespread degrossing and shedding of other assets to cover losses and reduce their market exposure. That could lead to weakness across sectors and possibly other asset classes. Volatility jumped this week, bringing the VIX close to levels that can see spillover to credit, said T Rowe Price multi-asset portfolio manager Rick de los Reyes.

(Rates reporter Edward Bolingbroke noted this week that the closing spread between the Cboe Volatility Index and the S&P 500 Index’s 30-day realized volatility jumped to the widest in Bloomberg data back to 1990. “Expectations for future volatility against a period of prior days’ price changes in the equity benchmark have never been greater, so investors may want to buckle up.”)

De los Reyes isn’t anticipating a broader shake-out now. But the short squeeze combines with recent dollar strengthening, and moves in Fed funds, to reflect increased risks of policy tightening. This combination signals mounting concerns that the Fed may not be firm in its resolve to stick its new strategy of keeping policy loose as growth improves and inflation climbs, the portfolio manager said. 

“The issue is, because it’s a new framework, the market is going to test that. It wouldn’t surprise me at all in the coming months — and it’s happening now — if we get a selloff in risk assets because people are concerned the Fed doesn’t mean what they say.”

So good luck to the Fed explaining to the market when it wants to trim bond buying that its stance with rates at zero is still loose. 

“We’re kind of addicted to stimulus, so even just maintaining the same level of stimulus may not be enough,” de los Reyes said. “The market definitely views tapering as tightening.”

The ECB isn’t done

A little ambiguity is a useful thing for a central bank, a point made often and indirectly by the master of obfuscation, Alan Greenspan. The ECB’s policy makers were busy building a little more of it into their outlook this week, agreeing to stress that rate cuts are still on the table. 

Even the negative-rates skeptics followed the script, with Governing Council member Klaas Knot, the Dutch central bank president, telling Bloomberg Television:

“I always quip that we’ve explored the effective lower bound, but we haven’t found it yet,” he said. “There is still room to cut rates.”

That seems a pretty clear dovish pivot from the prior message, which carried into last week’s meeting, that the asset purchase program is the primary policy tool, and policy makers might not even use all of that.  

Traders acted accordingly. Having all but wiped out the odds of a further cut until September, their positioning in interest-rate markets now puts in play a July move to drop the deposit rate below its current record low of -0.50%. 

The European yield curve also moved lower, and the gap between German and Italian benchmarks narrowed. And the ECB’s pivot prompted Barclays to reboot a long Italy versus Spain 10-year trade, avoiding Germany in case of any sharper risk-off moves. 

“If speculation around rate cuts grows and outright Bund yields rally, this would likely provide a spur to yield-grab buying” in European government bond spreads, wrote strategists including Cagdas Aksu. 

D’Accord

As the ECB scoops bonds out of the market, the European Union is issuing more than ever — kicking off 2021 with a two-part sale of seven- and 30-year bonds to raise money for the region’s new jobs program, SURE. The order book for the 14 billion euro ($17 billion) deal was almost 10 times size of the deal, at 132 billion euros.

That’s impressive, but a way short of last year’s 223-billion-euro record.

As John Ainger reported this week, these deals highlight the immense appetite for assets that are AAA-rated and whose proceeds fund either green or social projects. And the pace of issuance accelerates in the second half of the year, when the EU embarks on its 800-billion-euro recovery fund plan, a third of which will be covered by the proceeds of green debt.

So we finally have better news for the planet, in the week that President Biden re-entered the U.S. in the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Bloomberg Intelligence says sustainable bond issuance could reach $1 trillion this year. That’s after the supply of global sustainable debt surged by almost a third to $732 billion last year, primarily to fund social projects to ease the ravages of the pandemic.

The EU is a relative latecomer among the ranks of major sovereign issuers of ESG bonds. Chile raised a total of about $4.25 billion in euro and U.S. dollar markets this week, Caleb Mutua reports, including the biggest sustainability bond issued by a Latin American country in foreign debt markets.

And Hong Kong sold its second U.S. dollar-denominated green bond this week, raising $2.5 billion in a three-part deal to finance projects under the city’s Green Bond Framework. That helped propel issuance of ESG debt across Asia to $13 billion in January, the highest in more than two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Bonus Points

New Yorkers could be Andrew Yang’s UBI guinea pigs 

The pandemic has added $19.5 trillion to global debt

Renewables are now the dominant power source in Europe’s electric grid

Info – 5 Undeniable Long-Term Trends Shaping Society’s Future

Full link: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/5-undeniable-long-term-trends-shaping-societys-future/

We’re living in a world of rapid change, where disruption is the norm and innovation is the only way to stay relevant.

The dynamic nature of society makes it difficult to decipher. However, despite the world’s complexity, there are some long-term trends that have emerged among the chaos. These help us make sense of the world today, and can give us an idea of what to expect in years ahead.

Here’s a look at five long-term trends that are set to transform society as we know it.The following article uses charts and data from our new book Signals (hardcover, ebook) which covers the 27 macro trends transforming the global economy and markets. In some cases, where appropriate, we’ve added in the most recent projections and data.

#1: Aging World

With every successive year, our global population is skewing older.

Since 1970, our worldwide median age has grown by almost a decade. By 2100, it’s projected to increase by another 10 years.

Of course, not all countries are aging at the same rate.

Using data from the UN, the graph below covers the old-age dependency ratios (OADR) of different regions, showing the proportion of working-age citizens versus the percentage of older people, who are less likely to remain in the workforce.

What’s the economic impact of an aging population? Some potential risks include rising healthcare costs, a shrinking workforce, and even economic slowdowns.

To mitigate some of these risks, it’s crucial that countries build solid pension systems to support their aging citizens. Other potential solutions include increasing the age of retirement, enforcing mandatory retirement plans, and limiting early access to benefits.

Aging populations are also influencing the make-up of households in many countries. In the U.S., the share of multigenerational family households has been rising steadily since the 1970s.

At a societal level, people in the oldest age groups often play a different role in society than working age people. Many seniors engage in volunteerism and play a pivotal role in childcare for their families–activities that fall outside traditional measures of economic activity.

#2: Urban Evolution

Another macro trend that’s set to transform many regions of the world is rapid urbanization.

Currently, more than half of the global population lives in urban areas, and this influx of city-dwellers is expected to grow even more in the years ahead.

While urbanization may seem like an long-established phenomenon, it’s actually a relatively new trend, historically speaking.

Throughout human history, populations have typically lived in small villages. All the way up to the early 1800s, close to 90% of the global population still lived in rural areas. Urbanization didn’t take off on a widespread scale until the 20th century.

But once urban migration started, it snowballed, and since then it’s shown no signs of slowing down. By 2050, over two-thirds of the global population is expected to live in urban settings.

The Rise of Megacities

Even in developing countries, urban life is becoming the norm – a shift that is causing a boom in megacity growth.

The median population size of the world’s top 100 cities has been growing steadily too – from eight million in 2000 to a projected 12 million in 2035.

Why is this happening? People tend to migrate to urban areas for socioeconomic reasons, and these economic pull-factors are particular strong in the developing world. Over time, this migration and increase in the standard of living is lifting millions of people out of poverty. This brings us to our third trend.

#3: Rising Middle Class

While poverty is far from eradicated, the global middle class is growing, and fewer people are living in extreme poverty than ever before.

As the above graph shows, there was an overall increase in daily income from 1971 to 1995. By 2019, income levels had increased even further.

According to Brookings, an average of five people are entering the global middle class per second, and by 2030, the worldwide middle class population is expected to reach 5.3 billion.

As the global middle class grows, so does the market for products and services around the world. And as the middle class has more disposable income to spend, these developing markets can create new opportunities for companies and investors alike.

In fact, according to MSCI, although global equity markets are dominated by North American companies (61.5%) in terms of market capitalization, the vast majority of revenues (70.1%) come from outside North America. As the rest of the developing world gets richer, this trend is likely to accelerate.

#4: Rising Wealth inequality

People in lower-income economies aren’t the only people generating more wealth—the richer are also increasing their net worth. By a lot.

Over the last few decades, the wealth of America’s top 10% has increased by billions of dollars, while the middle and bottom wealth groups have stayed relatively stagnant.

What’s driving this wealth inequality? One key factor is the different types of assets each wealth group owns. While the top 10% invest heavily in the stock market, other wealth groups rely on real estate as their main form of investment.

Historically, equities have had higher returns than real estate—making the rich richer and leaving the bottom 90% behind.

#5: Environmental Pressures

So far, we’ve touched on four demographic shifts that are transforming society as we know it. But these changes in our global population size, wealth, and consumption habits have had far-reaching consequences. This last trend touches on one of those consequences—increased environmental pressure.

Since the year 1850, the global average temperature of land areas has risen twice as fast as the global average.

Various factors have contributed to increasing temperatures, but one major source stems from human-produced greenhouse gas emissions.

What human activities contribute to global emissions the most? The biggest culprit is industrial activity—32% of total emissions, while energy use in buildings comes in second at 17%.

Our Warmer World

Why is this significant? Rising temperatures pose a risk to our ecosystems and livelihood by changing weather patterns and putting the global food supply at risk.

The past half-decade is likely to become the warmest five-year stretch in recorded history, underscoring the rapid pace of climate change. On a global scale, even a small increase in temperature can have a big impact on climate and our ecosystems.

For example, air can hold approximately 7% more moisture for every 1ºC increase, leading to an uptick in extreme rainfall events. These events can trigger landslides, increase the rate of soil erosion, and damage crops – just one example of how climate change can cause a chain reaction.

For the billions of people who live in “drylands”, climate change is serving up a completely different scenario of increased intensity and duration of drought. This is particularly worrisome as 90% of people in these arid or semiarid regions live in developing economies that are still very reliant on agriculture.

As a society, we will need to take a hard look at the way we consume in order to begin mitigating these risks. Will we rise to the challenge?

Văn – 25/52: Hà Nội

Tính tới nó cũng đã cả gần chục đời dòng họ nó ở cái xứ Hà thành này… cái mảnh đất này gắn liền với nó như một phần cơ thể sống, có khi chính bởi vậy mà nó chẳng có cảm xúc gì nhiều…

Hà Nội chỉ chợt ùa về khi nó đã ra đi… cái bâng khuâng nhớ về Hà Nội chỉ còn là cái bóng ký ức của kẻ xa xứ…

Những buổi sáng nắm tay bà nội theo bà đi ra chợ, niềm vui bé bỏng còn được nhân lên vì thể nào cũng được bà mua riêng cho một thức quà, tùy theo mùa…

Những chiều đông đạp xe rong ruổi hồ Tây vô thức dưới hàng cây trụi lá, từng nhánh cây rụng lá gầy guộc chĩa ra chống đỡ từng cơn gió lạnh, che bớt cho tấm thân sần sùi năm tháng bươn chải… Lác đác bên con đường vắng, những gánh hàng rong liêu xiêu đổ bóng dưới ánh chiều đông nhàn nhạt… không gian phủ một bóng ảm đạm…

Hà Nội chỉ là như vậy… trong những ký ức thời thơ ấu – bình lặng mà ảm đạm, Hà Nội chỉ ánh lên với nó qua những áng văn hoài cổ mộng mơ của Vũ Bằng…

Cùng năm tháng, Hà Nội cũng thay đổi, âu cũng là lẽ tự nhiên như người ta thay một tấm áo mới vậy, áo thêm hoa, thêm gấm; và, Hà Nội phát triển cũng náo nhiệt hơn, ồn ào hơn… Cái tĩnh lặng của phố cổ, cái thâm trầm tinh tế của đất cố đô kinh kỳ dần được thay bằng cái gấp gáp của cuộc sống thời hiện đại… nhưng, Hà Nội chỉ là khép mình lại để bắt kịp trào lưu mà thôi,

Hà Nội vẫn giữ trong mình hương vị thuần khiết riêng của Hà Nội, một phong vị chỉ có thể cảm được vào buổi sớm mai khi trời đất còn chưa kịp thức giấc, ví như một đóa quỳnh vậy, tinh tế kiêu sa mà e ấp… giấu mình đợi người tri kỷ…

Dạo một vòng quanh hồ Gươm lúc tờ mờ, làn sương mờ xanh xanh lan tỏa như một tấm khăn lụa mỏng được dệt công phu bởi bàn tay người thợ khéo hờ hững vắt qua bờ vai người thiếu nữ xuân thì… thơm ngát, trong vắt, thuần khiết, không gian như lắng đọng như thể dành riêng cho đôi tình nhân trẻ trong giây phút cảm xúc trào dâng… 

Góc phố cổ bên cạnh hồ Gươm, hương café trứng những buổi trời chuyền mùa, tiết sang thu, vào sớm đông, nóng hổi, béo ngậy thơm lừng át đi cái gió se se lạnh… Lớp kem trứng được đánh bông cầu kỳ từ trứng và đường bởi lòng kiên nhẫn của người chủ quán; mà phải đánh bằng tay nhé, đánh bằng máy là không được, máy chạy điện mạnh quá, nhanh quá, kem không kịp chín… Một cây đũa tre được chẻ làm tư, gắn hai đoạn tre ngắn thành hình chữ thập – người chủ sẽ dùng hai tay se cây đũa tựa như người nguyên thủy đánh lửa vậy; người hiện đại thì đánh ra món đồ uống làm xiêu lòng những vị thực khách khó tính nhất… Có kem rồi, còn café nữa… mà café thuần đen phải thật nóng bỏng nhé, nóng bỏng như một chàng công tử hào hoa phong nhã tràn đầy nhiệt huyết lướt qua mà vừa đủ làm ấm lòng người thiếu nữ đang độ xuân… nhẹ nhàng thôi, thật nhẹ nhàng thôi, chàng công tử hào sảng nồng nhiệt tôn thêm lên vẻ tinh tế thanh tao bồng bềnh ngây ngất của người thiếu nữ… và tình yêu của họ đã tuôn trào như thể gửi gắm bao tâm huyết…

Xa xa, bên lò than nhỏ, từng nhóm cậu ấm cô chiêu xuýt xoa, giấu vào lòng củ khoai hay bắp ngô mới lùi than nóng hổi… miệng xinh cười khúc khích… Không như khẩu vị xứ Đằng Trong, người Hà Nội không dùng chung thức quà với nước mỡ chưng với hành lá, ấy cũng là để thưởng thức trọn vẹn cái hương sữa nguyên chất qua từng hạt ngô nếp mây mẩy được khéo nướng vừa chin tới, không cháy đen, cũng không còn trắng; từng hạt, từng hạt được ươm lửa, vàng đều… sữa ngô ứa ra len lỏi ấm áp thấm lan qua từng tế bào, thần khẩu kích thích rộng mở đón lấy từng hơi ấm lan tỏa…

Có một Hà Nội cũ như thế…

Một quá khứ tôi yêu, tôi mang theo…

___

NPL

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