News: April 26

The Power of the Squat It’s the one exercise most of us should be doing. But we need to do it right. ........ What is the single best strength-building exercise many of us could be doing right this minute ....... and the answer would likely be a resounding: squats. ....... “For lower-body strength and flexibility, there is probably no better exercise” ........ “It is really a whole body exercise” ....... “It requires core stability and trains the back.” ....... Some people worry that squats can imperil the knees and hips, but the exercise can actually help protect and improve the workings of these and other joints .........

The movement “helps maintain the flexibility, stability and function” of hips, knees and ankles

......... squats are key to living and aging well. “When we clean the house or plant a vegetable garden, we need to squat,” Dr. Duric said. Ditto for easing into and out of chairs and lowering ourselves to toddler level for face-to-face playtime. ......... squats are “one of the most primal and critical fundamental movements necessary to improve sport performance, to reduce injury risk and to support lifelong physical activity.” .

18 Gaslighting Phrases That Experts Say Are Unfairly Belittling Your Emotions Recognizing this behavior early can save you from having to overcome emotional trauma later, psychologists explain. .



Thomas Piketty’s Radical Plan to Redistribute Wealth
I’ve dealt with Putin before: I know what it will take to defeat this brutal despot My own history with Putin goes back to 2000, when we were both prime ministers of our respective countries. It was only when I ran to be president of Ukraine in 2004 that he actively campaigned against me........ the Putin I dealt with then no longer exists. He has since become a completely isolated and brutal despot who cannot stand any opposition. ........ One of the greatest weapons we now have against Putin is international solidarity and support. This is something that really bothers him. ........ Fatigue towards the horrors of war is sadly common; we saw this with Syria, Yemen and our own Donbas. But those of us in Ukraine cannot afford to feel fatigued, or else we risk losing sight of victory. ........ This war is a defining moment, not just in Ukrainian history, but in defence of democracy. This is not just a regional conflict between Ukraine and Russia but a fight against tyranny and imperialism. ....... I strongly believe that victory for Ukraine is inevitable.

Russia warns United States against sending more arms to Ukraine President Vladimir Putin says the "special military operation" in Ukraine is necessary because the United States was using Ukraine to threaten Russia and Moscow had to defend against the persecution of Russian-speaking people.

Attacks Begin in New Country as Russia Warns Nuclear Threat Is ‘Real’ In a significant move, Germany, which has so far refused to supply heavy weaponry to Kyiv, is expected to confirm that it will send 50 anti-aircraft tanks. ........ Another element in the Russian war plans became clearer last week when a Russian general, Rustam Minnekaev, let slip that the proposed “land corridor” would stretch all the way to Moldova, entirely cutting Ukraine off from access to the sea. ....... Under those plans, Russia's military control would stretch all the way into the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria, where Russian-backed separatists declared independence 30 years ago and where Russia still has a military base.

Tensions surge after attacks in Moldova's Russia-backed breakaway region Russia’s foreign minister has warned Western powers not to underestimate the “real” risk of nuclear conflict if they continue to funnel weapons to Ukraine in what he says is an undeclared proxy war. ........ Within hours of his remarks, explosions were heard inside the sovereign borders of Moldova. Ukrainian officials believe Russia is launching “false flag” operations in the pro-Russian rebel-controlled enclave of Transnistria in order to justify widening their imperial assault into a second nation.

Russia’s Lavrov Says NATO Is Using Ukraine as a Proxy, Warns Against World War III Ukraine said comments suggest Moscow senses defeat Russia’s top diplomat said the West was engaged in a proxy war with his country that could escalate into a world war with nuclear weapons, as Western nations elevated their commitment to defending Ukraine. ........... “The risk is serious, real. It should not be underestimated,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a Russian state-television interview broadcast Monday night. “Under no circumstances should a third world war be allowed to happen,” he said, adding that “there can be no winners in a nuclear war.”



The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word In a creative play on three different languages, Ukrainians identify an enemy: ‘ruscism.’ ....... a bilingual society at war with a fascist empire ....... “Pашизм” sounds like “fascism,” but with an “r” sound instead of an “f” at the beginning; it means, roughly, “Russian fascism.” ...... The aggressor in this war keeps trying to push back toward a past as it never happened, toward nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history. Russia must conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin says, because of a baptism a thousand years ago, or because of bloodshed during World War II. But Russian myths of empire cannot contain the imagination of the Ukrainian victims of a new war. National identity is about living people, and the values and the futures they imagine and choose. A nation exists insofar as it makes new things, and a national language lives by making new words. ......

The new word “рашизм” is a useful conceptualization of Putin’s worldview.

Far more than Western analysts, Ukrainians have noticed the Russian tilt toward fascism in the last decade. ....... A bilingual nation like Ukraine is not just a collection of bilingual individuals; it is an unending set of encounters in which people habitually adjust the language they use to other people and new settings, manipulating language in ways that are foreign to monolingual nations. I have gone on Ukrainian television and radio, taken questions in Russian and answered them in Ukrainian, without anyone for a moment finding that switch worthy of mention. Once, while speaking Ukrainian on television, I stopped for a moment to quote a few words of poetry in Russian, a switch that was an effort for me. But Ukrainians change languages effortlessly — not just as situations change, but also to make situations change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word. ....... Putin’s ethnic imperialism insists that Ukrainians must be Russians because they speak Russian. They do — and they speak Ukrainian. But Ukrainian identity has as much to do with an ability to live between languages than it does with the use of any one of them. ......... Russian and Ukrainian are very similar. They are pretty close — much as, say, Spanish and Italian are. ....... Russian grammar is similar to Ukrainian — perhaps a tad closer than, say, Ukrainian and Polish ....... The Ukrainian word for “cat” sounds like the Russian for “whale,” while the Ukrainian for “female cats” sounds like Russian for “intestines.” ........ Russians do not understand Ukrainian, because they have not learned it. Ukrainians do understand Russian, because they have learned it. This fact has battlefield implications. ...... President Volodymyr Zelensky generally used Russian as a comedian and almost always uses Ukrainian as a politician — except for when he might switch, midspeech, to using Russian to address Russians, in the full knowledge that Ukrainians will follow along. ........ when Russians use it earnestly, Ukrainians might consider it a sign of “zombification,” зомбування, a word they use rather a lot. One Ukrainian explanation for the use of the letter Z by official Russia as the symbol of the invasion is that “the other half of the swastika was stolen in the warehouse,” a joke about the logistics of the Russian Army — but personally, the Z makes me think of “zombie.” ....... English vowel sounds are also different — broader, lazier and more numerous — than those in Ukrainian and Russian. English speakers have about as many ways of pronouncing “a” as there are vowels in those entire languages. ....... In English, if you believe in racism, you are a racist; if you believe in fascism, you are a fascist. This lexical progression is similar in Ukrainian. “Расизм,” racism, has the associated personal form “расист,” racist. “Фашизм,” fascism, yields “фашист,” fascist. Likewise, the new word “рашизм” has “рашист,” or ruscist. .......

Given the imperial character of the Russian state, a very high proportion of the Russian soldiers in Ukraine belong to national minorities.

This suggests a deeper problem, which is that even soldiers dying for a fascist cause need not be fascists themselves. ........ Russian fascism is certainly a phenomenon that requires a concept. The Russian Federation promotes the extreme right everywhere. Putin is the idol of white supremacists around the world. Prominent Russian fascists are given access to mass media during wars, including this one. Members of the Russian elite, above all Putin himself, rely increasingly on fascist concepts. Putin’s very justification of the war in Ukraine, as an act of cleansing violence that will return Russia to itself, represents a Christian form of fascism. The recent publication, in an official Russian news service, of what I consider an openly genocidal handbook, providing a plan for the elimination of the Ukrainian nation as such, confirms all this. Moscow is the center of fascism in our world. .......... Russia today is a country where it is illegal to call this war a “war,” and where reading a poem or showing a blank poster is deemed a slander of the army. ........ on the battlefield, where the Russian Army is conformist and cowering, and the outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian Army adaptable and creative. .

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Investors Mark Cuban, Marc Andreessen, and others react to Elon Musk buying Twitter for $44 billion: He's 'on the clock'
Another housing bubble? ‘We’re skating close to one,’ says Realtor.com economist This might be the hottest housing market ever recorded. Over the past 12 months, U.S. home prices are up a staggering 19.2%. For comparison, in the years leading into the 2008 housing bust, the biggest 12-month jump was 14.5%. ...... stubbornly hot housing market now has housing economists flirting with the real estate industry's most feared word: bubble....... "U.S. house prices are again becoming unhinged from fundamentals." ..... CoreLogic now considers 65% of U.S. regional housing markets to be "overvalued.

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France

Macron May Keep the Presidency, but Le Pen Has Already Won Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally, has worked hard during this election campaign to soften, even detoxify, her image. It seems to be working. “I think she’s full of good ideas,” Cyrielle Bernard, a 19-year-old who lives in this picturesque Burgundy town, told me one afternoon last week, chatting in the tobacconist shop where she works. Of all the candidates, she said, “I think she’s the most logical.” ......... Ms. Le Pen’s success comes from casting herself as the defender of the countryside and the working class, focusing on cost-of-living issues and defending social protections. She has also been helped by an image makeover in which she opened up about raising her children as a single mother and now combines tough talk on immigration with social media posts about her cats. ......... In the second round, polls predict she could easily win more than 40 percent, potentially 10 points more than in 2017. ........ The same winds that brought Brexit and helped elect President Donald Trump are also blowing through France. ....... Ms. Germain, who works as a house cleaner, dislikes Mr. Macron. “He always has that smirk,” she said. That smirk is a problem for Mr. Macron. He has a tendency to talk down to people — to say “let me explain to you,” rather than listen. ........ how deeply entrenched Ms. Le Pen’s hard-line views on immigrants have become and how she has successfully recast anti-immigrant rhetoric into practical policy recommendations. ........ Her father” — Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former presidential candidate and the longtime leader of the far-right National Front party — “was completely racist. She’s not. She wants everyone to respect our ways. If you go to Africa, you respect African law. Her father just wanted to kick them all out.” ........... Such views are not uncommon, especially in small towns in France with little to no immigration. ......... She wants asylum seekers to be processed abroad and has said her first act as president will be to propose a referendum on immigration. ......... “A lot of them take advantage of the system and aren’t integrated in France,” she told me. ....... Ms. Le Pen has managed to widen her consensus by combining far-right positions on immigration with a left-leaning defense of public spending and social welfare. ........ she has promised to eliminate income tax for people under 30 — and her once extreme positions appear less so now that the center right has also adopted much of the same rhetoric, especially on national-identity issues. Help came as well from Éric Zemmour, whose firebrand declarations made her seem more moderate. ........ “We’ve tried the right; that didn’t work. We’ve tried the left; that didn’t work. Maybe we need to try the far right, with a woman in power.” ........ The unemployment rate fell to its lowest in 13 years ........ it is hard to win saying, “Imagine how much worse things could have been.” ....... She proposes “reducing VAT tax, raising low salaries and pensions, spending more on health and education.” ....... Mr. Macron, by contrast, has become the embodiment of frightening economic trends, even if they predate him and extend far beyond France. ........ Ms. Le Pen has long expressed her respect for Vladimir Putin. .......... “Lots of voters are tired of voting against their own convictions in order to block the far right — ...... That anti-far-right alliance, he added, is “much weaker than 10 or 20 years ago.” .

The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism Democratic capitalism is showing signs of deep, systemic sickness in the United States, Europe and Australasia, even as varieties of state or authoritarian capitalism are slowly becoming entrenched around the world, particularly in China and Russia. ......... In the developing world, democratic capitalism has always had a mixed reputation. While the West preached its freedoms at home, it happily engaged in political and economic exploitation abroad. ........... as of 2017, 88 of 195 states were classified as “free,” compared with 65 of 165 in 1990. ........ After the end of the Cold War, however, four structural challenges emerged to endanger the future of democratic capitalism: financial instability, technological disruption, widening social and economic inequality and structural weaknesses in democratic politics. ....... The 2008 financial crisis, one sign of a systemic sickness, occurred because of poorly regulated financial elites. The costs to governments and peoples were bailouts, lost jobs and more public debt. Governments had to scramble to save capitalism from itself as financial markets failed to self-correct. As a result, the markets privatized their profits and socialized their losses. Only one top bank executive went to jail. The taxpayer, by and large, paid the bill. And democratically elected governments were routinely tossed out because they had either failed to prevent the crisis, or were unable to manage the resulting public debt — or both. Another crisis could push the system to its breaking point. Yet a weakened Dodd-Frank Act in the United States now makes a repeat of the 2008 crisis more likely. All at a time when governments have even less room to respond. ............ Democracies, like corporations, can now be hacked. Social media distorts the free flow of facts that has been the lifeblood of democratic capitalism. .......... The financial and technological challenges are compounded by a rising economic inequality. The extreme concentration of wealth in the United States in recent decades is well documented. The new barons of capital and technology thrive while the American middle class stagnates and the American dream fades. ......... In the United States, unrestricted campaign financing continues to undermine democracy. The spectacular corruption of the electoral redistricting system — gerrymandering — only compounds the problem. ....... As Western democracies look increasingly sick, other systems of governance are now on offer. Russian nationalism .......... China has become increasingly confident in its own model, described as authoritarian or state capitalism. And its “Beijing consensus” is held up to the non-Western world as an example of a more effective form of national, and even international, governance. ........ The American social contract needs to be rebuilt through a revised New Deal. The social impact of technological change must be politically managed, rather than left to the market. Finance should return to its historical role as the servant of the real economy, rather than its master. And the Supreme Court must set a new direction on campaign finance (by overturning the Citizens United decision), gerrymandering and some of the crazier interpretations of the Second Amendment used to justify a breakdown in basic law and order. ........... Both represent the enduring idea of freedom. Yet both rest on increasingly fragile political and economic institutions. History cautions us against any belief that democratic capitalism will somehow inevitably prevail. Unless, of course, we make it so by tending the garden while there is still time. .

Marine Le Pen Is as Dangerous as Ever When Ms. Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron, albeit with a worrying 34 percent share of the vote, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Many hoped Ms. Le Pen, after falling at the final hurdle, would fade into obscurity. ........ She now has more chance of winning it than ever: After taking 23 percent in the first round, she’s within eight points of Mr. Macron in the second, on April 24. ........ she’s also embarked on a comprehensive effort to soften her image, renaming her party, downplaying the harsher elements of her platform and presenting herself as a warm, even folksy woman who loves her cats. ....... Ms. Le Pen is an authoritarian whose deeply racist and Islamophobic politics threaten to turn France into an outright illiberal state. She may pretend to be a regular politician, but she remains as dangerous as ever. For the good of minorities and France itself, she must not prevail. ....... She especially targeted minorities, “to whom,” she said bitterly, “everything is due and to whom we give everything.” ........ There is now barely any space in French politics to advocate for French citizens who don’t look, behave, pray or eat the way “traditional” French people are supposed to — let alone to champion the rights of immigrants and refugees. ....... In this environment, Ms. Le Pen can turn her attention to more everyday issues, such as rising energy bills and the cost of living, safe in the knowledge that on immigration, citizenship and “national identity,” she’s already won the argument. ......... For more than 30 years now, French political debate has centered itself around issues of identity at the expense of more pressing topics such as health care, climate change, unemployment and poverty. ........ Exploiting feelings of decline at the end of the 1960s — as France shed its colonial empire, lost the war in Algeria and submitted to American domination of Western Europe — the far right became a potent political force. ......... to defend its conception of French identity, evoking a thousand-year-old European Christian civilization threatened by North African Muslim immigration. .......... As people from France’s former colonies migrated to the metropole, the party focused obsessively on the supposed dangers of immigration. ......... “Tomorrow,” he infamously said in 1984, “immigrants will stay with you, eat your soup and sleep with your wife, your daughter or your son.” Such rancorous resentment found some sympathy in certain quarters of French society, where the homogenizing effects of globalization and the increased visibility of Islam among French-born citizens were held to be stripping France of its essential character. ........... With the rise of Islamist terrorism, Muslims were seen to be practicing an inherently violent religion that required containment by public authorities. To be a Muslim was to be guilty until proved innocent. ......... The past decade has taken this equation to a new level. The widespread fear now is not that a handful of people among nearly six million Muslims might pose a danger to public safety, but that all French Muslims by their very existence threaten the cultural identity of “traditional France.” ........ and passing a bill that gives the state power to monitor Muslim religious observance and organizations. ......... underneath the sheen of normalcy, the brutally racist ideology her party pioneered over the past 30 years is very much intact. ........ the company she keeps — she has associated with Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Viktor Orban .......... Her administration would echo those in Brazil, India and other countries where a similar rightward slide has taken hold. For minorities, immigrants, dissidents and democracy itself, it would be a disaster. ......... As a French Muslim citizen born and raised here, I fear for my country. ...... it’s instructive that voters may elect a politician whose core ideology violates the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that France has long championed. In that irony lies the gap between what France could be and what it is. .

@RimSarah defends "liberty, fraternity, equality" in the face of Le Pen https://t.co/bnGoJbpZVT

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 22, 2022

A Biden Blood Bath? Biden’s approval rating had sunk to just 33 percent ......... only seven months out from the midterms. ....... a really sour environment for Democrats.” ..... a major part of the problem is messaging. “We’re scared of our own shadow on taxes,” he said in the interview, and it “makes no sense.” .............. They feel stuck and angry, they’re tired and overwhelmed, and that energy is being directed at Biden. ....... America has changed its mind and its mood. It wants a show and a showman to distract from its misery. Biden is not that. And he is being punished for not being a huckster. ........ Biden isn’t constantly tweeting and hamming it up for the cameras — in fact, too often, he has shied away from interviews — and his reticence has left a void of emotional connection to him. ........ Biden has moved from the macro to the micro, taking steps that will indeed benefit many Americans but are too narrowly focused to transform our society or fix the core problems that plague it ........ two major perennial issues are resurgent: crime and the economy. The fear of crime and the pinch of inflation aren’t abstractions or complicated foreign policy or perks for special interests. .......... oppression by conservatives in this country is like an amoeba: simple, primitive, pervasive and highly adaptable. It simply shifts its shape to fit the environment and argument. ........ Biden’s approval rating among people identified as Hispanics was even lower than it was among those identified as white. ........ Hispanics hew conservative on some social issues. .... we could well be looking forward to a Biden blood bath. .