Pascal was fascinated by our capacity to distract ourselves from the bigger questions of life and death. Is there a God? Who am I? Which religion is true, if any of them? What happens after our brief lives are over? If we are a tiny speck of life on a tiny insignificant planet within the vast expanses of space that were beginning to be discovered at the time, what possible significance can we have? How do you explain the monstrous contradiction of human beings who have the capacity for compassion, understanding and greatness and yet also for cruelty, bestiality and shame?

These are all big questions on which our eternal destiny depends, and so should occupy our minds day and night, and yet we have a remarkable capacity to distract ourselves from thinking about them. Silence and inactivity are unbearable to us and so we fill our time with (in his day) hunting, cards, conversation, tennis. As he put it, “the sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” He would have marvelled at our age with Twitter, TikTok, 24-hour TV and the myriad ways we find to divert ourselves during the most fantastically distracted age there has ever been.

And so Pascal tries to unsettle his reader, trying to stir up the instinct to consider deeper questions. Yet he still knows that even when we do start thinking about these things, we get muddled. Is there a God? Religious people say Yes; Atheists say No. Pascal knows enough of science to know that it is not capable of adjudicating on such questions, that evidence of miracles or biblical prophecies are ambiguous, and certainty is impossible to find. So what do you do when you’re intrigued by religion but there isn’t enough evidence to push you across the line to be a Christian? When one moment you’re convinced God is real, but the next you doubt the whole thing?

Maybe you give up on it – get back to scrolling through TikTok videos, watching the football on TV, musing over Harry and Meghan? Yet Pascal says you can’t just do that.

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Today would have been the 400th birthday of the genius that was Blaise Pascal. Here is my take on why you need to read him and how he helps us locate happiness. https://t.co/HjcCMEBpbe

— Graham Tomlin (@gtomlin) June 19, 2023

The Church of England Pensions Board is today announcing its intention to disinvest from Shell plc and other oil and gas companies which are failing to show sufficient ambition to decarbonise in line with the aims of the Paris Agreement.

The new investment restriction announced today will apply to all oil and gas companies that do not have short, medium and long term emissions reduction targets aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, as assessed by the independent Transition Pathway Initiative. The exclusion will apply to equity and also debt investments.

“Today we announce our intention to disinvest from all remaining oil and gas holdings across our equity and debt portfolio,” said John Ball, Chief Executive Officer of the Church of England Pensions Board. “There is a significant misalignment between the long term interests of our pension fund and continued investment in companies seeking short term profit maximisation at the expense of the ambition needed to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. Recent reversals of previous commitments, most notably by BP and Shell, has undermined confidence in the sector’s ability to transition”.

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Church Commissioners for England to exclude oil & gas companies from investments portfolio over failure to align with climate goals. Pensions Board also to disinvest from oil & gas companies failing to show ambition to decarbonisehttps://t.co/nSHPLTZOEYhttps://t.co/BbntlGm7G6

— Church of England in Parliament (@churchstate) June 22, 2023

When the Chinese government abruptly abandoned its zero-covid policy at the end of 2022, all bets were on a rapid economic rebound. After nearly three years of restrictions, the world’s second-largest economy would, the thinking went, come roaring back.

In the event, China has reopened with a whimper, not a bang. A range of economic indicators, including retail sales and investment, have risen less rapidly than expected. Some analysts now think the economy might not have grown at all during the second quarter. At this rate, the government’s modest gdp target, for growth in 2023 of 5%, will only just be met.

There are several reasons to be gloomy about China’s economic prospects, from America’s export controls on advanced semiconductors and skittish foreign investors, to President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on big tech firms. But the main culprit for the recent weakness is property, which before the pandemic was a crucial source of growth across the economy. Activity slowed, first as the government sought to rein in heavily indebted developers, and then more recently as sales have stayed weak. Between January and May, for instance, real-estate investment fell by 7.2%, compared with the same period a year ago. The danger is that the property bust now becomes an enduring malaise.

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"Even if China wanted to foster more consumption-led growth, it would not easily be able to do so. Many of the government’s economic policies are still designed to promote exports and investment, and to suppress consumption."
https://t.co/CS1xXzSMZV

— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) June 22, 2023

The hopes and dreams of regenerative medicine and the use of stem cells to treat or cure diseases have been a beacon of promise for 25 years. But after a roller coaster ride of scientific breakthroughs, clinical setbacks, policy wrangles, and an explosion of suspiciously charlatan clinics pushing unproven treatments, we are mostly still waiting for those cures.

Now bit.bio, a synthetic biology company focused on human cells and headquartered in Cambridge, England, has presented new data at the 2023 annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) conference last week in Boston that showed they can engineer stem cells with what they are calling an unparalleled level of consistency. Company officials say their achievements in the last few months will set a new standard for the manufacture of human cells, calling their innovation so disruptive they claim it will do for stem cell biology what CRISPR has done for genetics.

Bit.bio’s achievement builds on the pioneering work of Shinya Yamanaka, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan and a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, who discovered how to transform ordinary mature adult skin cells into more primitive precursor cells, which look and act like the sort of embryonic stem cells found in the early states of embryonic development in the womb.

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Industrial-scale stem cells are here. @bitbio’s new approach for making pluripotent stem cells could standardize the reliable, large-scale manufacture of cells for research and therapy.#cellbasedmedicine #iPSCs #biotech #stemcells #sciencehttps://t.co/uBsbLmiFwP

— proto.life (@protolifemedia) June 22, 2023

Headline rates of inflation across most of the world’s economies have fallen back sharply since the autumn but core rates — which exclude volatile categories such as energy and food — remain at or close to multi-decade highs.

These rates, seen as a better gauge of underlying price pressures, have sparked concern that central banks will struggle to hit their targets without wiping out growth.

“The next leg of the improvement in the inflation numbers is going to be harder,” said Carl Riccadonna, chief US economist at BNP Paribas. “It requires more pain, and that pain likely involves a recession in the back half of the year.”

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, added: “The only way to get inflation down to 2 per cent is to crush demand and slow down the economy in a more substantial way.”

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“The next leg of the improvement in the inflation numbers is going to be harder. It requires more pain:” BNP's Riccadonna

Apollo's Torsten Slok: “The only way to get inflation down to 2% is to crush demand.”
https://t.co/8BVmtH9pdm

— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) June 23, 2023

My God, I love Thee Thyself above all else, and Thee I desire as my last end. Always and in all things, with my whole heart and strength, and with unceasing labour, I seek Thee. If Thou give not Thyself to me, Thou givest nothing: if I find not Thee, I find nothing. Grant to me, therefore, most loving God, that I may ever love Thee for Thyself above all things and seek Thee in all things in this life present, so that at last I may find Thee and keep Thee for ever in the world to come.

–Frederick B. Macnutt, The prayer manual for private devotions or public use on divers occasions: Compiled from all sources ancient, medieval, and modern (A.R. Mowbray, 1951)

Into the sun. pic.twitter.com/8mPC6WJCRd

— Tree-lined lanes (@LanesTree) June 23, 2023

The LORD called Samuel a third time, and Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” Then Eli realized that the LORD was calling the boy. So Eli told Samuel, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.’ ” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. The LORD came and stood there, calling as at the other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” Then Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” And the LORD said to Samuel: “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. At that time I will carry out against Eli everything I spoke against his family–from beginning to end. For I told him that I would judge his family forever because of the sin he knew about; his sons made themselves contemptible, and he failed to restrain them.

–1 Samuel 3:8-13

Sur sa colline Valère, Sion 😍🏰🇨🇭#switzerland #photography #paysage #landscape #photooftheday #nature #castle @MySwitzerland_e @Veronique_Kanel @valaiswallis pic.twitter.com/aomrWSdNF0

— Délèze Dominique (@DelezeD) June 23, 2023