Daniel Lubetzky

Interesting:

A new study from the RAND Corporation examined how 648 terror groups around the world ended between 1968 and 2006. It found that by far the most common way for them to disappear was to be absorbed by the political process. The second most common way was to be defeated by police work. In contrast, in only 7 percent of cases did military force destroy the terrorist group.

“There is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” the report declares. “Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended.”

From Nicholas Kristof’s NY Times column, Make Diplomacy, Not War.

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Thomas Friedman contrasts US energy policy and US behavior to the way Danes live and have structured their lives to be energy-efficient, and almost energy-independent.

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Russia’s authoritarian dictator-in-building Vladimir Putin has been getting high on the fumes of oil revenues that Russia is reaping from the West (US consumers are propping him and others like Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez up). The oil boom has helped Russia’s economy thrive for the last few years. This, plus weak leadership from the US and Western Europe, has combined with Putin’s ruthless KGB past to make him into a formidably arrogant threat to democracy and freedom.

His so-far unchecked invasion of Georgia is a threat to the world, with consequences potentially as grave as any development our globe has witnessed since the walls of the Soviet empire crumbled down.

Is the West going to rise to the challenge? Are leadership and principle going to stand? Is civil society going to mobilize? Is media going to do a better job at awakening the world to these dangerous developments?

At a minimum if Russia does not reverse its aggression, it needs to be ousted from the Group of 8.  No nation that behaves the way Russia has over the last few years – like a bully – deserves such newly anointed role.

Georgia’s President Saakashvili is not blameless. But nothing Georgia has done merits Russia’s aggression. And if the world does not react forcefully, Russia’s imperialist instincts will only grow stronger and eventually catch up with those who stand by today.

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And the corollary to the earlier post is that obesity in children has reached epidemic proportions, causing Type 2 diabetes and many other health complications that stay with them beyond childhood for the rest of their lives.

There are other key health challenges to children, that the food industry needs to tackle…

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A report last week from the Federal Trade Commission found that the makers of soda, fast food, cereals and other products spent $1.6 billion in 2006 on marketing aimed at children and teenagers.

…While almost $500 million a year is spent on soda advertising, only $11 million is spent on ads for fruit and vegetables.

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Thanks to Stacy Perman for a profile about PeaceWorks, KIND, and OneVoice in BusinessWeek yesterday.

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Consumers are increasingly demanding that manufacturers replace high fructose corn syrup with natural alternatives, such as cane sugar, agave syrup, or as in the case with KIND, honey and glucose.  Research has confirmed that High Fructose Corn Syrup is more fattening than other sugars like sucrose and glucose.  And high fructose corn syrup is cheap and concentrated, but hits the blood stream faster and is at least a partial culprit for the obesity and diabetes epidemics taking over.

In spite of the Corn Industry Lobby and their efforts to confuse consumers, after decades of manipulating Americans into higher consumption, including by lobbying to impose tariffs on imports (such as healthier alternatives like raw cane sugar) that compete with HFCS, people are wising up.

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Interesting cultural observation: in the US, people take one cent or one dollar off to create a perception of value: an iTunes song costs $0.99, not $1.00; a KIND Bar retails for $1.99, not $2; a jacket is on sale for $199 instead of $200.  In Great Britain, that "discounted" valuation is a sign of poor quality and is not used.  A product costs 1 pound.  If it is going to be less, it goes down to 0.79 – 79 pence.  Almost nothing is ever sold for 0.99 or 1.99 in the UK, and certainly also not for 99 or 199 pounds.  It’s rounded numbers.  Telling of the entire business personality of these countries.

Pom Wonderful did something, err, wonderful for the food industry by fighting to uphold the standards of the category in which it leads, pomegranate juice, to the point of successfully suing unscrupulous new entrants who tried to ride on its coattails by marketing lower grade products as if they were the real thing:

"Consumers buy the products to gain the health benefit – if that is not present then there are problems for the category. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be more active in this area but we all know how under resourced they are. We are trying to protect the integrity of the category." Rob Six, spokesperson for Pom Wonderful

"Purely Juice", a company that claimed to sell purely pomegranate juice that was in fact primarily cane sugar and corn sweetener was ordered to pay $1.5mm to Pom.

The category for healthful snacks where KIND leads gets similarly hurt when consumers are duped into buying "natural" "nutritional" and "energy" bars whose ingredients contain refined sugars like high fructose corn syrup and refined flowers and hydrogenated oils, contributing to the diabetes and obesity epidemics overtaking America.  Similar enforcement action should follow for companies – big or small – that manipulate what it means to be "all natural" and "healthful."

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Jerusalem Post Editor David Horovitz’s interview with Barack Obama is one of the most to-the-point expositions of Senator Barack Obama’s stances on Mideast issues.  Horovitz asked strong and straightforward questions, and Obama replied with earnest answers.  Anyone who truly cares about understanding the "real" Obama on these issues should read this interview.

One example:

Horovitz: You’ve said on this trip that you want to work for an Israeli-Palestinian accommodation from the minute you’re sworn in, so let me ask you about the thesis that there is no prospect of Palestinian moderation prevailing and enabling a peace process to really move forward until Iran’s nuclear drive has been thwarted – that so long as the Teheran-backed extremists of Hamas and so on feel that they are in the ascendant, the moderates can’t prevail and that the whole region is now in this kind of holding mode.

Obama: I think there is no doubt that there is a connection between Iran’s strengthening over the last couple of years, partly because some strategic errors have been made on the part of the West. And [the same goes for] the increasing boldness of Hizbullah and Hamas. But I don’t think that’s the only factor and criterion in the lack of progress.

Hamas’s victory in the [Palestinian Authority] election can partly be traced to a sense of frustration among the Palestinian people over how Fatah, over a relatively lengthy period of time, had failed to deliver basic services. I get a strong impression that [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas and [Prime Minister Salaam] Fayad are doing everything they can to address some of those systemic failures by the Palestinian Authority. The failures of Hamas in Gaza to deliver an improved quality of life for their people give pause to the Palestinians to think that pursuing that approach automatically assures greater benefits.

You know, look, I arrive at this with no illusions as to the difficulty in terms of what is required. But I think it’s important for us to keep working at it, frankly, because Israel’s security and peace in the region depend on it.

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