Most frightening and/or depressing story: Ralph Nader says the civilian carnage in Gaza is an order of magnitude worse than even the Gaza authorities say it is. Which is almost unthinkably horrible if true, and makes the Israeli public statements about collateral damage seem even less credible. However even handed you try to be in considering this war could be a proportionate response to the original gruesome attack, it is getting harder.
Most hopeful story: Yes, there are some fun native (North American) wildflowers you can grow from bulbs. Let’s give the environmental and geopolitical doom and gloom a rest for a moment and cultivate our gardens.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I looked into Belarus, and now I am just a little bit less ignorant, which is nice.
This might seem like a random topic, but Peter Turchin got me interested in Belarus. By his telling, sure, Lukashenko is a thug who has tortured and disappeared his political rivals, but he is a thug who has delivered some economic success and quality of life for his people. He has blocked potential oligarchs and maintained something along the lines of the original vision of Soviet state-owned means of production. In Russia (again by Turchin’s telling), the oligarchs got the upper hand in the 1990s and early 2000s, after which Putin crushed them and at least partially restored economic and political power to the bureaucratic government. In Ukraine, the oligarchs completely got the upper hand after the fall of the Soviet Union, took over the country and the political revolutions and counter-revolutions since then are oligarchs fighting amongst each other.
Numbers below are from the CIA World Fact Book and rounded by me. It’s a little unfair to look at the numbers for Ukraine right now, but we can compare Belarus to Poland, Russia, and Germany. Belarus is the poorest among these, but the distribution of wealth is significantly more equal (similar to a Scandinavian country in fact). Life expectancy is significantly higher than Russia and similar to Poland. So you might say yes, Belarus appears to be the closest thing to a Soviet workers paradise where nobody is rich but people have jobs, put food on the table, and get medical care. Russia is richer but strikingly unequal, and some combination of poor nutrition, poor mental and/or physical health, substance abuse, violence and/or poor health care holds down life expectancy. Germany is wealthy and healthy, although fairly unequal.