Hasta La Gadget!

The lazy, hazy days of summer are good for your heart — but not because we tend to be lazier or hazier. Quite the opposite. Seasonal changes bring changes to our lifestyles, and summer just happens to be the season where we live a bit healthier. Here are 5 reasons why summer is especially good for aging hearts.

The Vitamin D we get from the sun improves our cholesterol.
A study from Brazil found last year that our “bad” cholesterol levels, known as LDL, trend about 8 percent higher in the winter than the summer and our “good” cholesterol, called HDL, tends to increase by about 5 percent. Seasonal cholesterol changes vary in parts of the United States and Europe where there are more dramatic seasonal weather changes (read: Californians may be on to something here.)

Here’s why: When it’s cold out, we hibernate inside and get less sun. Plus daylight hours in the winter are shorter. The result is that we get less Vitamin D from the sun, something that is known to improve the ratio of HDL to LDL.

This may also explain why the coldest months are the witching hour for heart attacks. Cardiovascular deaths were as much as 36 percent higher in December and January, according to a study done at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.

We eat more fresh produce.
For one thing, there is more of it in summer. For another, it’s stuff like blueberries. Blueberries are consistently ranked among the top fruits and vegetables tested for antioxidant activity. Come summer, they have the best flavor and are the least expensive.

A diet that’s rich in fruits and vegetables is generally lower in calories and higher in nutrients, and that translates into better care of your heart.

We reduce our stress.
Most of us take some time off from work over the summer. Granted, not as much as the French, but we do take some breaks. By law, every country in the European Union has at least four work weeks of paid vacation. Color us green. On average, workers with one year of service received 10 days of paid vacation in the United States in 2012.

And yet we have plenty of evidence that time off from work is good for us and good for our employers once we come back recharged. When we disconnect from our jobs, we tend to relax more. Our high blood pressure drops a few notches, we sleep better and basically give our hearts a break. Stress increases the pumping action and heart rate that in turn causes our arteries to constrict. This restricts blood flow to the heart.

A nine-year study that surveyed 12,000 men about their vacationing habits found that those who took at least one vacation a year were almost 30 percent less likely to die from a heart-related cause compared to other men of the same age who did not take time off.

There are no big pig-out holidays in the summer.
Sure you might double-down on the burgers on July 4th, but nothing like the damage you do on some of those other non-summer holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Passover. There is no continual stream of holiday parties with tempting sweets. So basically, aware of it or not, we are giving our bodies a rest from the binge-eating of winter.

Consuming heavy meals that are rich in carbohydrates, sugar, or fat can bring on palpitations, says WebMD. Even those who set out to be mindful of their intake around the winter holidays can cave to the pressure of the ongoing onslaught of treats during this social season. Come summer, all you have to do is grab a slice of watermelon instead of the second burger.

We are more outside more doing physical activities.
Dare we say the “E” word? Yes, in summer we tend to exercise outside more, sometimes without even realizing it. We take a swim in the pool to cool off, take walks on the beach, throw a frisbee to the dog in the park, hike our favorite trails, and love being able to jump on our bikes for a ride across town. All of that counts as exercise, which gets our heart rates up and reduces stress.

Pope Francis made a poignant appeal on behalf of the world’s refugees during his Wednesday general audience, reminding all listening that Jesus, too, encountered times of hardship and danger.

“We believe that Jesus was a refugee, had to flee to save his life, with Saint Joseph and Mary, had to leave for Egypt,” Pope Francis said, according to Zenit. “He was a refugee. Let us pray to Our Lady who knows the pain of refugees.”

The pope made his petition to the Church, which he defined as “all of us,” not limited to “priests, bishops, or the Vatican,” reported Asia News.

World Refugee Day is on June 20. “The number of these brother refugees is growing and, in these past few days, thousands more have been forced to leave their homes in order to save their life. Millions of families, millions of them, refugees from many countries and different faiths, experience in their stories tragedies and wounds that will not likely be healed,” said Pope Francis. “Let us be their neighbors, share their fears and uncertainty about the future, and take concrete steps to reduce their suffering.”

Heralded as the world’s largest temple, Bangkok’s Wat Phra Dhammakaya can reportedly fit one million followers and has fostered a growing movement of Buddhist converts drawn by its size as well as its message.

“Once I’ve been here I think I learn much more than my academy education, master’s degree or PhD,” one convert told Religion & Ethics Newsweekly’s Lucky Severson. “I learned the truth in life, learned how to be with myself and happiness within.”

Dhammakaya’s website outlines the teachings, activities and history of the temple, as well as the movement at large. The website states:

Wat Phra Dhammakaya was built according to the four factors that contribute to the cultivation and development of virtues, that were taught by the Lord Buddha. These includes:

1. Pleasant location,
2. Pleasant food,
3. Pleasant people and
4. Pleasant Dhamma.

Some criticize the intensions of the temple whose massive size and scale, as well as the substantial donations collected for participation, seem to run counter to Buddhist values. “Critics question the intentions of the temple,” Dhammakaya expert Rachelle Scott told Severson. “They think that the primary intention is to raise money to be big, to be global.”

One article in the Manusya Journal of Humanities called the temple a “capitalistic” endeavor that preys on the “spiritually-thirsty” middle class.

Buddhist scholar Sulak Sivaraksa echoed these concerns in his interview with Severson.

The Buddha never wanted the people to become Buddhist. The Buddha would like people to become enlightened. The Buddha would like people to understand the danger of greed, hate, and delusion… What the Dhammakaya try to do, I feel, is a distortion of the message of the Buddha, because they want to be successful, and to be successful in this day and age you have to go along with capitalism and consumerism.

Critics aside, many adherents say they have profound experiences during meditations at the temple, Scott says.

There are stories of individuals being able to travel to the various realms of existence, to the heavens, to the hell realms while in a state of meditation. I have heard stories of individuals who are able to undergo operations while awake, and they feel no pain, individuals who are able to see things that are happening in different locations while they are in a state of meditation.

Religion & Ethics Newsweekly takes viewers on a tour of the temple, with commentary from experts, critics and converts. Take a look at the video above.

In the late 1980s, Hungary was widely considered to be the economic trendsetter in Eastern Europe. The “goulash Communism” of Janos Kadar, introduced at the end of the 1960s, had gradually morphed into a hybrid form of market socialism. I spent a month in Budapest in 1985 and was startled by the profusion of goods in the stores. It wasn’t exactly Vienna, but it was a far cry from Warsaw or Moscow.

Given its position at the head of the pack of countries in the region, Hungary was expected to be the first to make the successful transition to capitalism. And indeed, in the early years of the 1990s, foreign investment flowed into the country. But today, Hungary has fallen behind many of the other countries in the region in terms of growth, employment, debt, and other economic indicators. Many Hungarians are left scratching their heads and trying to figure out what went wrong.

When I first interviewed Laszlo Urban, he was a young economist affiliated with Fidesz, at that time a liberal political party. If Fidesz had formed a government in the early 1990s, Urban would have likely occupied a top position overseeing the economic transition. Instead, he went into the private sector, spending more than a dozen years in banking. Fidesz, meanwhile, shifted away from its early liberalism and took over power in 1998 as an avowedly conservative party.

We met again last May in Budapest, and I asked Urban what he thought went wrong with the economic transition. Among other things, he thought that the government mishandled the response to the collapse of the market that had existed in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

“In order to make the Hungarian economy truly competitive, they had to privatize the majority of the economy,” he told me. “As a consequence, at least 30% of the labor force turned out to be unemployable at the inherited wage rate in the new system. What do you do in a situation when 30% of your labor force all of a sudden loses all their jobs or their ability to be employed productively? The way we handled that had a lasting negative impact on the transition. Roughly 30% is just too huge of a blow. In the way the government dealt with the issue, at least one-third of that number just left the labor force completely and was probably not employable productively anyway. But we’re talking about another two-thirds that we should have found some way to keep in the labor force. Instead, those people were let go into early retirement or given disability pensions, or in some other way they also left the labor force. This was just too large a percentage of tax-paying, employed workers who disappeared from the labor force.”

Practically speaking, the government should have approached privatization differently. “I would have separated the companies that needed to be privatized urgently from those that could have been privatized in a more gradual fashion,” he continued. “The more export-oriented enterprises, which needed to be competitive, had to be privatized. The state-owned sector was not competitive, that was clear. I still believe that state-owned companies cannot operate productively and competitively. They could not have survived competition. Nor did they have enough capital for their modernization. So in order to have a chance to stay competitive, those companies had to be privatized. But it is true that those companies that serve mostly the domestic market, particularly service sector firms, their privatization should have been done in such a way that a middle class would have emerged to run these businesses.”

The closure of huge numbers of factories and the creation of a large group of people dependent on government programs, Urban believes, are a legacy of the early 1990s that continues to shape Hungarian politics and economics today. This group “became the primary target constituency of any political force that wanted to win elections,” Urban concluded. “Budget deficits and increased public debt resulted from the measures to please that particular constituency. It is still a dominant part of politics in Hungary and is even driving what Viktor Orban is doing now. It’s not because of his personality, but because he understands the dynamic and has the numbers to prove it. If he maintains his popularity with this welfare recipient constituency, then he will be reelected in 2014.”

The Interview

One of the things I asked you in 1990 was about your expectations about Fidesz. It was a rather unusual collection of people with a radical, liberal, and alternative agenda. You imagined that it might hold together for about 10 years. But it began to split earlier than that.

It wasn’t really a split. Some people departed for SzDSz. Some of the alternative people who were never an influential part of the leadership also left. But the core of Fidesz stayed together. Actually I would not have thought that Viktor Orban could build such a strong party as he finally managed to do. Of the original group of 50 top people who closely worked together, probably more than 30 are still there. They are in different positions. Some of them are still at a high level, others are more marginal, but they are still Fidesz politicians. This was already the case in the early 1990s but increasingly Viktor didn’t care what the others in the party were thinking. He managed to achieve full control over the party and then later the government and then the whole country. That was quite an achievement. I wouldn’t have thought that it was possible. I thought that Fidesz needed to align itself with other political forces and form maybe a conglomerate leadership, more like what happened after the 1998 elections.

Orban’s economic program was different when he was in opposition than when he was in government, especially in his most recent incarnation. How you would evaluate his economic program today?

There was this episode in 1998 when Fidesz first got into government. I left in 1995, so we were not in contact during these next three years. And yet the economic program of the party was rigged up by Gyorgy Matolcsy already in 1996 and 1997. In the campaign he was the economic spokesperson. And yet when Viktor won the elections, he asked me first to be the finance minister. And I could have become finance minister. I’m not sure how long I would have stayed finance minister, because we probably would have disagreed on some policy issues pretty early on. But the interesting thing was that when he asked me, I said that I’d be happy to work with him, but we needed to agree to certain things and one of them was about reducing the budget deficit. That time it wasn’t even that high: about 4-4.5% of GDP. During the next three years, even without me, he followed that policy. He reduced the fiscal deficit every year, and even the debt started to decline. So his economic policy during the first term was pretty close to what I would have agreed to, but it doesn’t mean that we would have gotten along easily. The way he governed, even then, was that he could only work with people that didn’t set conditions, who didn’t even object, and who just executed whatever he said.

But his view about what needed to be done in the economy then was pretty close to mine, although the international environment was also more favorable. So he paid attention to macro balances. Then he tried to stimulate the economy through the housing sector, which was a little bit overdone, and it led him into some difficulty in the last year of his term. But I’m sure that he would have controlled that. Interestingly enough, even now that fiscal discipline still seems to be one of his priorities, partly because Brussels is pushing it. But that’s a continuity, in the sense that beyond the pressure from Brussels, Viktor understands that macro-fiscal discipline is important to maintain.

But the major disagreement between what he’s doing now and what I think should be done is that he does not seem to accept that the economy is a non-zero-sum game where the major incentive for a lot of people to participate is to gain more than they are putting in: this is what competition and the market economy are all about. For Viktor, the economy is predominantly, like politics, a zero-sum game where a person can win only if he takes away from others, and if others are winning then it is something that is taken away from him. It’s a power game for Viktor, and if someone looks at the economy that way, even only a certain segment, then it has much larger repercussions. He just doesn’t seem to have an understanding of what this lack of respect for this very delicate institutional and behavioral environment does to the incentives of people. If you want people to behave creatively in order to gain more and if they’re all doing the right things to contribute to an overall economic goal – he just doesn’t believe that this is what the market economy is about. For him the economy is just an extension of the political sphere where positions can be redistributed. This is what he is doing now, starting with the bigger public procurements all the way down to tobacco shops, which are now being redistributed. It’s a redistributive game for him. If someone looks at an economy as a redistributive game and has all the power that he has to rearrange the institutional structure along those lines, then he might get what he wishes for and end up with an economy where there is no growth.

That zero-sum attitude seems to apply to his approach to the EU and his talk of closer cooperation with Russia.

The bureaucracy in Brussels is basically trying to put a straitjacket on all the members. Sometimes this over-regulation is very irrational. But we have to implement the whole acquis communautaire. The fact that all members are contributing to the community project and then funds are redistributed and heavily administered makes everything very slow. Much of the money spent on investment in this economy is coming from Brussels and not much else. So paradoxically, whatever Brussels is doing very often helps his approach, which is that the government drives the economy. It’s not intentional. This is just the nature of how the EU is structured. It’s a bunch of common regulations and a bunch of money that is being redistributed, following rules and regulation, and with a lot of administration.

When Viktor is talking about the East, Russia and China and some other countries, there are two motivations behind it. One, he recognizes that some of these countries, for different reasons, have foreign reserves which they need to invest in foreign assets. Viktor thinks, “We are not a big country, so if they just put a little bit of their money into Hungarian government securities maybe it will help us to manage our public debt. Or if they don’t want to buy our government paper, then maybe they could help finance some infrastructure projects and invest their money in a way that would even open up some of their market.” So, in a sense, it is like a technocratic approach.

On top of that, Viktor has made it clear that anyone who wants to do business in Hungary must be humble with him because he can always use a wide array of available means to make their life miserable. It’s not necessarily an autocratic regime here, although we have a parliamentary regime where whatever happens basically depends on the leader’s own will and he can implement anything that he wants. In that sense, although the fundamental rules of the game are democratic here, the way he operates within that is closer to a Far Eastern non-democratic regime. He likes to be the alpha-male in every respect, not only in politics but also in business. Everyone recognizes that he is the ruler, at least in this small part of the world. These two motivations are skillfully mixed in his messages. It’s not so easy to pinpoint whether it’s just a pure problem of his personal style because he can wrap it up in rhetoric like “we want to be an export-driven market” and “we want to improve the macro finances.”

You said earlier that even before getting involved in the policy world you thought it would be a good idea to have some practical experience in the financial world. How did the opportunity arise, and did the experience meet your expectation?

To read the rest of the interview, click here.

There are certain foods we love so much that we unashamedly eat them straight from the container with a spoon. Sweetened condensed milk is one of those foods.

We know what you’re thinking — it’s sugar overload, it’s thick and sticky, it’s syrupy and it is definitely not to be consumed on its own by the spoonful. We’re not advocating that you eat a whole can or even more than one teaspoon; we’re merely confessing our guilty pleasure to explain how strongly we feel about sweetened condensed milk. A little goes a long way with this super sweet substance, and it’s all you need to understand how dreamy it is. Whether it’s on its own, in a coffee or in a pie, sweetened condensed milk can completely transform a dish, and might even transform you.

Sweetened condensed milk is milk from which the water has been removed and to which sugar has been added. Some people find it off-putting, but those people probably haven’t tried it the right way. People all over the world eat it. It’s common in coffee in parts of Asia, in pies like Key Lime in the United States, and in cakes and pudding in Latin America. Whether you make your own, or buy it in a can, you should give sweetened condensed milk a try if you aren’t a fan already. It’s definitely decadent, but there’s always a time and place for that. Whether you choose to indulge every day or less frequently is up to you — but whenever you’re ready, sweetened condensed milk will be there for you.

Here are 29 recipes that will convince you sweetened condensed milk is some of the best stuff on earth. It might be the unsung hero of the dessert world. We’re here to sing its praises.

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