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Disseminators of online disinformation had taken advantage of such pre-existing communities – such as church groups – and used them as a powerful mechanism through which to spread their lies.

“Videos that promote this kind of ‘cure’ get thousands of views and the people who make them earn a lot of money,” said Córdova who said such producers could easily earn up to 7,000 reais (£1,050) per month. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not – what matters is the number of views.”

Others used falsehoods for political purposes. Córdova said that some far-right politicians in Brazil were engaged in a permanent “race to remain relevant” using bombastic and bizarre “news” to stay in the public consciousness.

The misguided belief that 5G telecom towers spread the coronavirus via radio waves prompted villagers in Huancavelica in the Peruvian Andes to detain eight telecoms engineers for more than a day. Ginger consumption in Peru has rocketed and exports nearly tripled because of the belief it can treat or cure Covid-19. At least 10 cases of chlorine dioxide poisoning have been reported in Bolivia in recent days.

The justice system needs to find a way to hold people responsible for the content they share – so they feel less comfortable distributing and sharing this kind of news,” she said.

“This will only stop when there is a counter-attack, when the justice system understands they must hold these people to account” by forcing those who alleged, for example, that Covid-19 was a Chinese experiment to prove such claims in court.

The global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in population bears one-third of the responsibility for increased consumption

But population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth.

Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental breakdown.

Panic about population growth enables the people most responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to blame those who are least responsible.

At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological footprints thousands of times greater than the global average: “All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”

If we had the global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.

he proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who don’t want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.

how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.

Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little land”, and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.

Malthusianism slides easily into racism.

Most of the world’s population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “barbaric”, “degenerate” people “outbreeding” the “superior races”

These claims have been revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about “white replacement” and “white genocide”. When affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.

The far right now uses the population argument to contest immigration into the US and the UK

Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor.

So a good way of deciding whether someone’s population concerns are genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural poverty.

Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving almost nothing behind

Or have they simply sat and watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?

Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the demographic transition leaves their ageing populations with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers.

49 percent of Americans referred explicitly to family relationships in their definition of happiness, while Southern Europeans and Latin Americans generally conceived of it in terms of oneself: Just 22 percent of Portuguese, 18 percent of Mexicans, and 10 percent of Argentines talked about their families in their happiness definitions.

Writing in the International Journal of Wellbeing in 2012, two Japanese scholars surfaced an important cultural difference in the definition of happiness between Western and Asian cultures. In the West, they found happiness to be defined as “a high arousal state such as excitement and a sense of personal achievement.” Meanwhile, in Asia, “happiness is defined in terms of experiencing a low arousal state such as calmness.”

In large countries, even comparing people within the same borders can be difficult to accomplish accurately. Happiness is defined very differently in northern versus southern India,

research shows that the United States is home to significant regional differences in personality characteristics. For example, people in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions tend to display more attachment anxiety (“When will you call?”), while the western states breed more attachment avoidance (“See you when I see you”).

in Latin-based languages, the term comes from felicitas, which referred in ancient Rome not just to good luck, but also to growth, fertility, and prosperity.

Even the words we use to talk about happiness have different connotations in different tongues. In Germanic languages, happiness is rooted in words related to fortune or positive fate. In fact, happiness comes from the Middle English hap, which means “luck.”

cultures vary widely in their definitions of happiness. Therefore, it is impossible to say that one country is happier than another in some absolute sense, and a single index of “the happiest countries in the world” is not instructive.

Maybe Finland is the happiest country by one definition; it is almost certainly not by another. Countries should be classified more than compared.

handy way to get started on that task is to distinguish between two ways of focusing on happiness. The first is an “inner” or “outer” focus on happiness—that is, on introspection versus interaction with others. The second is a “relation” or “task” focus—people-oriented versus doing-oriented. This gives us four major models for well-being, based on survey research from around the world.

1. Happiness comes from good relationships with the people you love.This is a combination of the “outer” and “relation” foci. In this model, friends and family are who deliver the most happiness. A good example of a country that fits this model based on how the population tends to define happiness is the United States.

2. Happiness comes from a higher consciousness.This is a combination of the “inner” and “relation” foci, and is the model for highly spiritual, philosophical, or religious people, especially those who place a special importance on coming together in community. Southern India has been found to be home to a lot of people who follow this model.

3. Happiness comes from doing what you love, usually with others.This is a combination of the “outer” and “task” foci—that is, a dedication to work or leisure activities that are deeply fulfilling. This is your model if you tend to say “My work is my life” or “I love golfing with my friends.” Look for it in the Nordic countries and Central Europe.

4. Happiness comes from simply feeling good.This is a combination of the “inner” and “task” foci. It is the model for people who prioritize experiences that give them positive feelings, whether alone or with others. It’s a good way to assess your well-being if, when you imagine being happy, you think of watching Netflix or drinking wine. This model is most common in Latin America, the Mediterranean, and South Africa.

Just as different places have different definitions of happiness, so do different people. Understanding that diversity can help you understand yourself—to see whether and why you are a misfit in your home, and what you might do about it, whether that’s moving, joining a new community, or simply making peace with your surroundings.

“Misinformation is the new playbook,” Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls, said. “You don’t like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality.”

“We’ve run into the uneducable,” Ellen Sievert, a retired historic preservation officer for Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County, said. “I don’t know how we get through that.”

Steve Taylor, a former mayor of Neihart (pop. 43) whose family owns a car dealership in Great Falls, is a conservative who voted for Donald J. Trump twice, though he said he has regretted those votes since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Fellow Republicans, he said, have painted the heritage area as a liberal plot

“They make it a political thing because if you have a Democrat involved, then they are all against it,” he said. “It’s so hard to build something and so easy to tear it down. It’s maddening. It’s so easy to destroy something with untruths.”

And she came across a vein of conspiratorial accusations that national heritage areas were a kind of Trojan horse that could open the door to future federal land grabs.

Beginning in 2013, Ms. Weber teamed up with local preservationists, formed a nonprofit, enlisted local businesses and raised $50,000 for a required feasibility study. In 2014, the Great Falls City Commission included the heritage area as part of its official growth policy.

The proposal would take in four National Historic Landmarks: Lewis and Clark’s portage route around Great Falls; Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River that was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s; the First Peoples Buffalo Jump, a steep cliff over which Blackfoot hunters herded buffalo to their deaths; and the home and studio of C.M. Russell, the turn-of-the-century “cowboy artist” whose paintings of the American West shaped the popular image of frontier life.

The park service requires demonstrations of public support, which Ms. Weber and her allies solicited. For six years, the process went on largely undisturbed. Ms. Weber hosted dozens of public meetings and was a regular on local radio stations. Opponents made scarcely a peep.

The proposal for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area, encompassing most of two central Montana counties that are together roughly the size of Connecticut, was the brainchild of Jane Weber, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who spent a decade on the Cascade County Commission.

Ms. Grulkowski’s interest was piqued.At the time, she was becoming engrossed in the online world of far-right media. From her home on 34 acres in Stockett, a farming community of 157 people south of Great Falls, she watched videos from outlets like His Glory TV, where hosts refer to President Biden as “the so-called president.” She subscribed to the Telegram messaging channel of Seth Keshel, a prolific disinformation spreader.

Then the 2020 political season arrived.

By May, their campaign had reached the state capital, where Mr. Gianforte signed the bill barring any national heritage area in Montana after it passed on a near-party-line vote. A heritage area, the bill’s text asserted, would “interfere with state and private property rights.”

In two hours of talking at his farm, Mr. Bandel could offer no evidence to back up that claim. He said he distrusted assurances that there were no such designs. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to do it right. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn’t he?” Mr. Bandel said. “The fear of the unknown is a huge fear.”

Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski with the details.

But when pressed, Ms. Grulkowski, too, was unable to identify a single instance of a property owner’s being adversely affected by a heritage area. “It’s not that there are a lot of specific instances,” she said. “There’s a lot of very wide open things that could happen.”

That somewhat amorphous fear was more the point.

“We didn’t believe in any of that stuff until last July,” Ms. Grulkowski said. “Then we stumbled on something on the internet, and we watched it, and it took us two days to get over that. And it had to do with the child trafficking that leads to everything. It just didn’t seem right, and that was just over the top. And then we started seeing things that are lining up with that everywhere.”

One thing Ms. Grulkowski does not do — because she refuses to pay — is read The Great Falls Tribune, the local daily. It’s not what it once was, with just eight journalists, down from 45 in 2000, said Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the paper before the owner, Gannett, laid him off as opinion editor in 2016. He is vice chairman of the proposed heritage area’s board.

In the paper’s place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski. Last winter, a glossy magazine distributed to Montana farmers put the subject on its cover, headlined “Intrusive Raid on Private Property Rights.”

Ms. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist.Buoyed by the trust her neighbors have placed in her, she has begun campaigning for Ms. Weber’s old seat on the county commission, in part to avenge the way she feels: mistreated by those in power.She doesn’t feel she’s been told the whole truth.

And waste produced by a nearby electricity plan and oil refinery has damaged the giant Berre lagoon in southern France.

When five tons of dead fish washed up in August near her house on the lagoon, she decided that she was ready to move.

Madrid says the responsibility lies at the local level.

“I unfortunately do think that political colors matter,” she said.

ut in September, the Spanish Institute of Oceanography published a report that rejected the idea that excessive summer heat helped kill the fish.

the contamination comes from water seeping into the lagoon from an aquifer in which toxic substances have accumulated over decades.

Laggards should get government incentives to invest in green technology rather than “stones thrown by people who have no knowledge of our modern irrigation systems,” he added.

She said at least 75 percent of the lagoon’s water contamination came from runoffs.

The lagoon was proof that “one of the major problems of Europe is the contamination of its waters by nitrates,” he said.

Mr. Morán said that his central government planned to use 300 million euros, or about $350 million, from the European Union’s pandemic recovery fund to protect the Mar Menor’s natural habitat and waters.

They all face the same challenge of needing to hedge their sales of gas and electricity to cover price differences across different markets.

In a statement explaining the decision to provide Uniper with extra financing, Fortum said that European gas prices reached “unprecedented levels” in December.

In Britain, the sudden price rise has led to the collapse of several smaller energy suppliers.

In Germany, the price for energy to heat and power homes in November rose more than 101 percent from a year earlier, the country’s official statistics office, Destatis, said.

Global demand for energy jumped last year, after the world economy reawakened from widespread shutdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. When many economies started up again last spring, the need for natural gas shot up. Natural gas is crucial for generating electricity, running factories and heating homes across the continent.

European countries normally stock up on gas in the summer, when prices are relatively cheap, but the pandemic and a cold winter last year drew down levels of stored gas, leading to the wild swings in prices.

Prices for natural gas have risen about sixfold, to record levels. The surge means the wholesale price of electricity has reached stratospheric levels, making headlines across Europe as consumers, battered by the pandemic, are now hit by big increases in their home energy bills. Many European countries have tried to buffer the shock to consumers with price caps, subsidies and direct payments.

These high costs are also undermining the economics of companies that make fertilizer, steel, glass and other materials that require a lot of electricity.

Satellite images and field tests show that 13 percent of the land has already lost its fertility, while nearly the rest of the region is at risk.

Brazil’s northeast, the world’s most densely populated drylands, with roughly 53 million people, is among the most at risk.

Instead, higher temperatures and less rain combine with deforestation and overfarming to leave the soil parched, lifeless and nearly devoid of nutrients, unable to support crops or even grass to feed livestock.

Increasing deforestation in Brazil has alarmed officials around the world because it threatens the Amazon rain forest’s ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere.

Those entrepreneurs began paying landowners for their mud, and in a few years, dozens of ceramics plants employed hundreds of people.

At his small plant recently, a few dozen laborers laid out thousands of tiles to dry in the midday sun.

Factories make the tiles by mixing water with clay, and then firing the result in a wood-burning oven. All those ingredients — water, wood and clay — are in short supply here.

The operation consumes 60 to 75 cubic meters of wood a week, or enough to fill five large dump trucks.

That can have a devastating effect. The soil and clay they extract is crucial for retaining a proper balance of nutrients and moisture in the surrounding land.

In 2010, during another difficult dry season, Mr. Dantas said his family almost ran out of money. To feed themselves and their cattle, they decided to cash in on their mud.

But in 2010, instead of planting, the family watched four men with shovels excavate and haul away the soil. It took them three months. They paid about $3,500 for the clay.

London never really caught a break after the Black Death. The plague resurfaced roughly every 10 years from 1348 to 1665—40 outbreaks in just over 300 years. And with each new plague epidemic, 20 percent of the men, women and children living in the British capital were killed.

By the early 1500s, England imposed the first laws to separate and isolate the sick. Homes stricken by plague were marked with a bale of hay strung to a pole outside. If you had infected family members, you had to carry a white pole when you went out in public. Cats and dogs were believed to carry the disease, so there was a wholesale massacre of hundreds of thousands of animals.

Smallpox—A European Disease Ravages the New World

The indigenous peoples of modern-day Mexico and the United States had zero natural immunity to smallpox and the virus cut them down by the tens of millions.

“[T]he annihilation of the smallpox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice,” wrote Jenner in 1801. And he was right. It took nearly two more centuries, but in 1980 the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been completely eradicated from the face of the Earth.

In the early- to mid-19th century, cholera tore through England, killing tens of thousands. The prevailing scientific theory of the day said that the disease was spread by foul air known as a “miasma.” But a British doctor named John Snow suspected that the mysterious disease, which killed its victims within days of the first symptoms, lurked in London’s drinking water. Snow acted like a scientific Sherlock Holmes, investigating hospital records and morgue reports to track the precise locations of deadly outbreaks. He created a geographic chart of cholera deaths over a 10-day period and found a cluster of 500 fatal infections surrounding the Broad Street pump, a popular city well for drinking water.

While cholera has largely been eradicated in developed countries, it’s still a persistent killer in third-world countries lacking adequate sewage treatment and access to clean drinking water. 

Here’s the story you may have heard: In the late 1980s Japan experienced a monstrous stock and real estate bubble, which eventually burst. Even now, the Nikkei stock average is significantly below the peak it reached in 1989. When the bubble burst, it left behind troubled banks and an overhang of corporate debt, which led to a generation of economic stagnation.

There’s some truth to aspects of this story, but it misses the most important factor in Japan’s relative decline: demography. Thanks to low fertility and unwillingness to accept immigrants, Japan’s working-age population has been declining quite rapidly since the mid-1990s.

The only way Japan could have avoided a relative decline in the size of its economy would have been to achieve much faster growth in output per worker than other major economies, which it didn’t.

Adjusted for demography, Japan has achieved significant growth: It has seen a 45 percent rise in real income per relevant capita. The United States has done even better, but this hardly fits the narrative of Japanese stagnation.

there’s more. Managing an economy with a declining working-age population is difficult, because low population growth tends to lead to weak investment. This observation is at the heart of the secular stagnation hypothesis, which says that nations with weak population growth tend to have persistent difficulty in maintaining full employment.

Yet Japan has, in fact, managed to avoid mass unemployment, or indeed mass suffering of any kind. Here’s one indicator, the employed percentage of men in their prime working years:

This percentage has remained high in Japan; indeed, consistently higher than that of the United States.

What about young people? Japan did see a rise in youth unemployment (ages 15-24) in the 1990s, but that rise has since been reversed. Here, via the World Bank, are International Labor Organization estimates of youth unemployment in Japan and, since the subject is attracting attention, China:

So Japan’s economic performance since the days when everyone thought it would rule the world has actually been pretty good. It’s true that employment has been sustained in part through large deficit spending, and Japanese debt has shot up:

But people have been predicting a Japanese debt crisis for decades, and it hasn’t materialized. In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model — an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.

while this is hard to quantify, lots of people I’ve talked to say that Japanese society is far more dynamic and culturally creative than many outsiders realize. The economist and blogger Noah Smith, who knows the country well, says that Tokyo is the new Paris

having been taken around Tokyo by locals, I can confirm that the city has a lot of vitality.

True, that same language barrier means that Tokyo likely can’t play the same role in global culture that Paris once did. But the Japanese are clearly having great success with sophisticated urbanism; if you think of Japan as a tired, stagnant society, you’re getting it wrong.

Will China be the next Japan?

There are some obvious similarities between China now and Japan in 1990. China has a wildly unbalanced economy, with too little consumer demand, kept afloat only by a hypertrophied real estate sector, and its working-age population is declining

there are growing concerns that China may have fallen into the “middle-income trap” that seems to afflict many emerging economies, which grow rapidly but only up to a point, then stall out.

if China is headed for an economic slowdown, the interesting question is whether it can replicate Japan’s social cohesion — its ability to manage slower growth without mass suffering or social instability

is there any indication that China, especially under an erratic authoritarian regime, is capable of pulling this off? Note that China already has much higher youth unemployment than Japan ever did.

This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” He later added: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill’s victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history. Churchill believed the highlands, the most fertile land in Kenya, should be the sole preserve of the white settlers, and approved of the clearing out of the local “kaffirs.” When the Kikuyu rebelled under Churchill’s postwar premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps, later called “Britain’s gulag” by the historian Caroline Elkins. Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proven, by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died.

This is the great, enduring paradox of Churchill’s life. In leading the charge against Nazism, he produced some of the richest prose poetry in defense of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a check he didn’t want black or Asian people to cash, but as the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote, “all the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.”

It is the conflation of virtue with commerce.

Where did this ideology come from? An exceptional period of low interest rates and excess liquidity provided the fertile soil for fantastical dreams to flourish.

Cryptocurrency is the most ideal vessel of these impulses. A speculative asset with a tenuous underlying predetermined value provides a blank slate that meaning can be imposed onto

Anger after the 2008 global financial crisis created a receptivity to radical economic solutions, and disappointment with traditional politics displaced social ambitions onto the world of commerce.

The hothouse of Covid’s peaks turbocharged all these impulses as we sat bored in front of screens, fueled by seemingly free money.

The unwinding of magical thinking will dominate this decade in painful but ultimately restorative ways — and that unwinding will be most painful to the generation conditioned to believe these fantasies.

Pervasive consumer-facing technology allowed individuals to believe that the latest platform company or arrogant tech entrepreneur could change everything.

illusory and ridiculous promises share a common anti-establishment sentiment fueled by a technology that most of us never understood. Who needs governments, banks, the traditional internet or homespun wisdom when we can operate above and beyond?

Mainstream financial markets came to manifest these same tendencies, as magical thinking pervaded the wider investor class. During a period of declining and zero interest rates, mistakes and mediocrities were obscured or forgiven, while speculative assets with low probabilities of far-off success inflated in value enormously.

For an extended period, many investors bought the equivalent of lottery tickets. And many won.

The real economy could not escape infection. Companies flourished by inflating their scope and ambition to feed the desire for magical thinking.

Most broadly, many corporations have come to embrace broader social missions in response to the desire of younger investors and employees to use their capital and employment as instruments for social change.

Another manifestation of magical thinking is believing that the best hope for progress on our greatest challenges — climate change, racial injustice and economic inequality — are corporations and individual investment and consumption choices, rather than political mobilization and our communities.

Every business problem, I am told, can be solved in radically new and effective ways by applying artificial intelligence to ever-increasing amounts of data with a dash of design thinking. Many graduates coming of age in this period of financial giddiness and widening corporate ambition have been taught to chase these glittery objects with their human and financial capital instead of investing in sustainable paths — a habit that will be harder to instill at later ages.

The fundamentals of business have not changed merely because of new technologies or low interest rates. The way to prosper is still by solving problems in new ways that sustainably deliver value to employees, capital providers and customers.

What comes next? Hopefully, a revitalization of that great American tradition of pragmatism will follow. Speculative assets without any economic function should be worth nothing. Existing institutions, flawed as they are, should be improved upon rather than being displaced

Corporations are valuable socially because they solve problems and generate wealth. But they should not be trusted as arbiters of progress and should be balanced by a state that mediates political questions

Trade-offs are everywhere and inescapable. Navigating these trade-offs, rather than ignoring them, is the recipe for a good life.

Another Berlusconi-Trump lesson is that vulgarity can be an asset, not a liability, because as soon as it’s derided as such — the minute detractors tsk-tsk and curl their lips — it positions a politician in opposition to “the elites.

Trump, too, has benefited from a congenital affinity for television. But he also took to more recent inventions, to changes in the information ecosystem that suited him as well as “The Apprentice” did. He spotted the internet’s fertility for lies. He saw that the greatest currency on social media is spite

One of those is that ultimate power and ultimate persuasion depend on an intuitive, visceral understanding of the age’s media

Another: Voters will put up with narcissism because many of them will interpret it at least in part as a perk of success and as confidence’s sufferable sidekick.

And there’s an authenticity to artifice. Trump embodies that oxymoron the same way Berlusconi did.

Few among us have gone to the amoral lengths of a Trump or a Berlusconi to preserve ourselves (and I don’t mean cosmetically) at any cost. That’s the real secret binding these braggarts.

If you don’t care about how thoroughly you’re degrading your country, if you’re willing to sacrifice its future on the altar of your own greedy here and now, you can scheme with abandon, lie with conviction and vilify anyone and everyone who gets in your way. Shamelessness is its own reward.

The Trumps after Trump are taking notes.

In a country where famines have destabilized dynasties throughout history, the ruling Communist Party is also aware that fulfilling basic needs is a prerequisite for political stability.

Already, farmland in China is shrinking, as rapid urbanization has polluted large swaths of the country’s soil and governments have sold rural land to developers. The distribution of water between northern and southern China is uneven, leaving some crop-growing regions vulnerable to droughts and others to flooding.

The war in Ukraine has threatened China’s access to wheat and fertilizers. And a trade war with the United States that began in 2018 made it more expensive for China to buy soybeans and other foods from America.

The Chinese government frequently points out that it has to feed one-fifth of the world’s population with less than 10 percent of the world’s arable land.

To create a more stable food supply, China has stockpiled crops and purchased more farmland overseas. It has been developing heat-resistant rice strains, genetically modified soybeans and new seed technologies, an effort that has triggered accusations of intellectual property theft from the United States.

The rains hit just as farmers were preparing to begin this year’s harvest, causing some of the wheat to sprout. This lower-quality wheat is unsuitable to process into flour and is typically sold at a lower price as animal feed.

the most recent fears about food security stemmed from the flooding in Henan Province and the surrounding regions in central China, which produce more than three-quarters of the country’s wheat.

“But when extreme weather conditions happen, it not only creates damage, but it’s also very expensive to fix.”

The extent of the damage to this year’s crop is still unclear. A lower wheat yield could force China to import more wheat this year and raise global grain prices

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of wheat. Demand has risen along with incomes as people in cities buy more Western-style breads and desserts. Soaring meat consumption in China has also necessitated more wheat, which is used for animal feed.

China’s fixation on food security has global implications, in large part because it maintains huge stockpiles of food, including what the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates is about half of the world’s wheat reserves.

Gauging the stability of China’s food supply is difficult because information about the exact quantity and quality of its crop stockpiles is treated like a state secret. Although the country’s official data regularly shows record high wheat output, for instance, analysts have questioned the reliability of the data.

In response to the accusations by Western countries that China was hoarding food, a commentary published in The Economic Daily, a state-controlled newspaper, revealed that China had enough wheat and rice reserves to feed its people for at least 18 months, which the article suggested was a reasonable amount of stockpiling.

The economist Thomas Malthus, now dismissed by mainstream economics as an interesting crank, is resurrected by Galor as the man who correctly saw that for millennia humanity had been trapped by its own fertility into subsistence, starvation and famine. As soon as material matters improved, the birthrate went up, so did the population, and the pressure on food resources exploded – returning humanity to starvation

great sections of Galor’s book are to be applauded

What broke the Malthusian armlock on humanity’s destiny, argues Galor, is the gradual quickening in the introduction of technologies that required mass education for their successful implementation. This triggered a virtuous circle of more innovation, more investment in education, more need to invest in the quality of children rather than quantity, so that birthrates declined sufficiently to allow living standards and life expectancy to rise. Because it was now rational to invest in children’s education rather than get them working, child labour and exploitation fell away

Above all he shows how cultural attitudes persist long after whatever concatenation of events brought them into being, so that countries and cultures that get ahead tend to stay ahead

He is scathing about the shock programmes of market liberalisation that accompanied the “Washington consensus”, ignorant of these persistent traits. Effective market economies can’t be built spontaneously in cultures that are hostile to the very conception.

his optimism about humanity shines through – prize its diversity, commit to educate its children and they will find their way to innovate and create a culture of growth

It’s a great way to look at the world, but a healthy recognition that power, capitalism, finance, the existence and structure of states and public philosophies – some right, some wrong – are all part of the brew would have made his account more realistic

But using them would mean cutting a deal with a brutal leader closely allied with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, underscoring the painful moral and political decisions that now confront Western leaders as they scramble to avert a global food crisis.

The Lithuania route appears to be the most promising for getting food quickly to areas like the Middle East and Africa that need it the most, even if it is also a long shot.

“This is a decision that politicians need to take not me,” Mr. Latakas, the Klaipeda port director, said. “It is up to them to decide what is most important.”

Western nations like the United States, as well as Ukraine, oppose lifting sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion but have not ruled out a deal with Belarus.

The war has halted those shipments, leaving around 25 million tons of grain, according to U.N. estimates, from last year’s harvest stranded in silos and at risk of rotting if it is not moved soon. A further 50 million tons is expected to be harvested in coming months. The grain elevators in Ukraine that have not been damaged or destroyed by shelling are quickly filling up. Soon, there will be no room left to store the incoming harvest.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, said severe bottlenecks meant that the existing routes through Poland and Romania “can provide only limited alleviation of the food crisis” given the volumes that need to be moved.

Warning of an approaching “hurricane of hunger,” the head of the United Nations, António Guterres, has sought to negotiate a deal under which Ukrainian grain would be transported out of the country by ship or train, and in exchange Russia and Belarus would sell fertilizer products to the global market without the threat of sanctions.

That means that Western governments and Ukraine are left to try out a range of possible solutions fraught with problems. Test runs of trains carrying grain from Ukraine through Poland to Lithuania, for example, have taken three weeks because of different track gauges in neighboring countries, requiring cargos to be loaded and unloaded multiples times.

Turkey has proposed using its ships to transport grain from Odesa, which, in addition to getting Ukraine to demine the port, would require an agreement from Russia not to hinder vessels.

But faced with the considerable challenges of executing such a plan, the best option for getting large quantities of Ukrainian grain to hungry people is probably by rail through Belarus to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports in Latvia and Estonia.That “won’t solve everything, but it would significantly alleviate the situation,”

Ukraine is opposed to any easing of sanctions against Russia but, increasingly desperate to move grain trapped by the war, is more open to the idea of a temporary easing of sanctions against Belarusian potash.

Roman Slaston, the head of Ukraine’s main agricultural lobby, said one challenge was that many rail connections through Belarus had been blown up by Belarusian railway employees sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause.

“Given that the Russian Army is still in Belarus, who is going to pay to repair that now?” Mr. Slaston asked. “This is like some kind of madness.”

We don’t grow food to store it,” he said. “People in Africa won’t be fed by our grain sitting in bags in our fields.”

The scale of the overall development is considerable. “Once fully implemented, Catalina will produce enough green hydrogen to supply 30% of Spain’s current hydrogen demand,” CIP said.

And in July 2021, a briefing from the World Energy Council said low-carbon hydrogen was not currently “cost-competitive with other energy supplies in most applications and locations.” It added that the situation was unlikely to change unless there was “significant support to bridge the price gap.”

For its part, the European Commission has laid out plans to install 40 GW of renewable hydrogen electrolyzer capacity in the European Union by the year 2030.

The effects of rising food prices have been felt unevenly around the world. Asia has been largely spared because of a plentiful rice crop. But parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America that are more dependent on imported food are struggling.

But economists and agricultural experts say that while these efforts help at the margin, there may be little the government can do to combat a phenomenon that is both complex and global.

In the United States, food prices rose 6.3 percent in December compared with a year ago, while the price of restaurant meals rose 6.0 percent and the price of meat, poultry, fish and eggs jumped 12.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Joseph Siegle, the director of research at National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, estimated that 106 million people on the continent are facing food insecurity, double the number since 2018.

Overloaded shipping companies have been refusing to send their steel boxes to the Midwest to pick up agricultural products, instead preferring to ship them back to Asia to carry more lucrative cargo.

With both their costs and their sales prices increasing, many farmers are making similar margins to what they earned before, Mr. Edgington said. But “huge swings” in the price of corn, soybeans and fertilizer were still putting their finances at risk.

because Arendt feared for the future, much of The Origins of Totalitarianism was in fact focused on an excavation of the past.

the principle that led her down this path remains important: To grapple with a broad social trend, look at its history, try to find its origins, try to understand what happened when it last appeared, in another country or another century

To explain Nazi anti-Semitism, Arendt reached back not only to the history of the Jews in Germany but also to the history of European racism and imperialism, and to the evolution of the notion of the “rights of man”—which we now more commonly speak of as “human rights.” To have such rights, she observed, you must not only live in a state that can guarantee them; you must also qualify as one of that state’s citizens.

the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda

it offers us a kind of dual methodology, two different ways of thinking about the phenomenon of autocracy.

To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects.

when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other … Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.”

it is impossible not to wonder whether the nature of modern work and information, the shift from “real life” to virtual life and the domination of public debate by algorithms that increase emotion, anger, and division, hasn’t created some of the same results

In a world where everyone is supposedly “connected,” loneliness and isolation once again are smothering activism, optimism, and the desire to participate in public life.

he 20th-century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.

The Origins of Totalitarianism does not contain a set of policy prescriptions, or directions on how to fix things. Instead it offers proposals, experiments, different ways to think about the lure of autocracy and the seductive appeal of its proponents as we grapple with them in our own time

“The entire world is suffering from this conflict, but we in Africa are already facing the collateral damages,” said Ousmane Sène

For months, African leaders also shunned President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who asked at least twice to address the African Union. Mr. Sall said Thursday that Mr. Zelensky could soon address the organization in a videoconference, although no date has been announced.

More than 14 million people are on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa, according to relief groups, and nearly 40 million people are at imminent risk of famine in West Africa this year, according to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency.

The Kremlin said in a statement that the two leaders would discuss “the expansion of political dialogue and economic and humanitarian cooperation with the countries of the continent.”

In West Africa, one of the most visible effects of the war so far has been on bread prices that were already on the rise. In Burkina Faso, bakers went on strike last month after the government shuttered bakeries that had raised the price of a baguette. In the Ivory Coast, bakers have decreased the size of the baguette in the face of soaring wheat costs.

They coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, apparently trading tools and sharing cultures. Some groups survived the Ice Age, while others vanished,

when farmers arrived in Europe about 8,000 years ago, they encountered the descendants of this long history, with light-skinned, dark-eyed people to the east, and possibly dark-skinned and blue-eyed people to the west.

“We lack still an understanding of why these movements were triggered. What happened here, why it happened — it’s strange.”

Modern humans arose in Africa and expanded to other continents about 60,000 years ago

These early Europeans have almost no genetic link to younger remains of hunter-gatherers. It appears that the first modern humans in Europe may have disappeared along with the Neanderthals

he oldest DNA of modern humans in Europe, dating back 45,000 years, undermines such a simple story. It comes from people who belonged to a lost branch of the human family tree. Their ancestors were part of the expansion out of Africa, but they split off on their own before the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians split apart.

About 33,000 years ago, as the climate turned cold, a new culture called the Gravettian arose across Europe. Gravettian hunters made spears to kill woolly mammoths and other big game. They also made so-called Venus figurines that might have represented fertility.

When the glaciers retreated, some descendants of the Fournol continued living in Iberia. But others expanded north as a new population, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called GoyetQ2. “It really seems like a peopling of Europe after the last glacial maximum,

Dr. Posth and his colleagues found DNA in Gravettian remains scattered across Europe. The scientists had expected all of the individuals to have come from the same genetic population, but instead found two distinct groups: one in France and Spain, and another in Italy, the Czech Republic and Germany.

“They were very distinct, and this was a very big surprise to us because they practiced the same archaeological culture,”

Dr. Posth and his colleagues named the western population the Fournol people, and found a genetic link between this group and 35,000-year-old Aurignacian remains in Belgium.

They called the eastern group Vestonice, and discovered that they share an ancestry with 34,000-year-old hunter-gatherers who lived in Russia.

That genetic gulf led Dr. Posth and his colleagues to argue that the Fournol and Vestonice belonged to two waves that migrated into Europe separately. After they arrived, they lived for several thousand years sharing the Gravettian culture but remaining genetically distinct.

It’s clear from the new study that they were not isolated entirely from each other. In Belgium, the scientists found 30,000-year-old remains with a mix of Fournol and Vestonice ancestry.

About 26,000 years ago, the two groups faced a new threat to their survival: an advancing wall of glaciers. During the Ice Age, from 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, European hunter-gatherers were shut out of much of the continent, surviving only in southern refuges.

the refuge of the Iberian Peninsula, the region now occupied by Spain and Portugal, by studying DNA in the teeth of a 23,000-year-old man found in a cave in southern Spain. His DNA revealed that he belonged to the Fournol people who lived in Iberia before the Ice Age. The researchers also found genetic markers linking him to a 45,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Bulgaria.

When these groups arrived in Europe, Neanderthals had already been living across the continent for more than 100,000 years. The Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago, perhaps because modern humans outcompeted them with superior tools.

The Vestonice, by contrast, did not survive the Ice Age. When the glaciers were at their most expansive, the Vestonice may have endured for a time in Italy. But Dr. Posth and his colleagues found no Vestonice ancestry in Europeans after the Ice Age. Instead, they discovered a population of hunter-gatherers that appeared to have expanded from the Balkans, known as the Villabruna. They moved into Italy and replaced the Vestonice.

For several thousand years, the Villabruna were limited to southern Europe. Then, 14,000 years ago, they crossed the Alps and encountered the GoyetQ2 people to the north. A new population emerged, its ancestry three parts Villabruna to one part GoyetQ2.

This new people, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called Oberkassel, expanded across much of Europe, replacing the old GoyetQ2 population.

another climate shift could explain this new wave. About 14,000 years ago, a pulse of strong warming produced forests across much of Europe. The Oberkassel people may have been better at hunting in forests, whereas the GoyetQ2 retreated with the shrinking steppes.

To the east, the Oberkassel ran into a new group of hunter-gatherers, who probably arrived from Russia. The scientists named this group’s descendants, who lived in Ukraine and surrounding regions, the Sidelkino.

in Iberia, there were no great sweeps of newcomers replacing older peoples. The Iberians after the Ice Age still carried a great deal of ancestry from the Fournol people who had arrived there thousands of years before the glaciers advanced. The Villabruna people moved into northern Spain, but added their DNA to the mix rather than replacing those who were there before.

When the first farmers arrived in Europe from Turkey about 8,000 years ago, three large groups of hunter-gatherers thrived across Europe: the Iberians, the Oberkassel and the Sidelkino. Living Europeans carry some of their gene

The Sidelkino people in the east had genes associated with dark eyes and light skin. The Oberkassel in the west, in contrast, probably had blue eyes and may have had dark skin

These three groups of hunter-gatherers remained isolated from each other for about 6,000 years, until the farmers from Turkey arrived. After this advent of agriculture, the three groups began mixing, the scientists found. It’s possible that the spread of farmland forced them to move to the margins of Europe to survive. But over time, they were absorbed into the agricultural communities that surrounded them.

every continent will likely have its own history of hunter-gatherer migrations.

it is now possible to extract human DNA from cave sediments rather than searching for bones and teeth.