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It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to be kind to others..

-Anonymous

But a no less serious problem is that some of these firms are "too big to lose." They wield so much influence over the economy that they can manipulate the outcome of their trades.  It’s as if the President of the United States could short a particular market and then use his bully pulpit to scare the market to move in his direction.

A case in point is what Goldman did with mortgage securities.  Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times wrote an incisive article about the Goldman conflict with AIG.  In it, she details how Goldman bet against the mortgage market by buying insurance from AIG on certain products that would pay if the underlying mortgage securities went south.  There is nothing wrong with that - so far.  For years, many (including me) also feared that a bubble had formed in real estate.  Goldman’s Jonathan Egol and Ram Sundaram were smart and arguably even visionary to anticipate it and bet against mortgage securities. But the problem is what they did next.  They proceeded to bully A.I.G., other business partners, and even the Federal Government, to pay them at valuations THEY arbitrarily set.  The perception that Goldman bankers are the smartest bankers in the room helped them create the momentum that led to the devaluation from which they benefited. 

Wall Street sharks will go where they smell the blood, and you cannot change that.  It is a necessary feature of a market economy - which is the worst of all economic models, except for all other options, to paraphrase Winston Churchill.

But Paul Volcker’s call to structurally protect against these financial behemoths must be heeded.   In this opinion piece he walks through some of the prescriptions that are necessary, including regulating which risks the different financial institutions can take, separating commercial banks from investment banks by reversing the recent decision to allow them to perform the same function and gamble with their account-holders’ savings, and limiting the leverage these firms can have.

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The following article lists a lot of ideas for how to fight childhood obesity. But one of the most effective ways is for responsible food companies to craft and market truly healthful products that taste good and are good for you, and that are attractive to kids.  It is not easy. But it can be done.

I know that this is off-topic, but just thought I’d draw people’s attention to a not-entirely-unrelated news story: The ‘final piece in the jigsaw’ was put into place in Belfast, Ireland last night, with the finalising of twenty year long process of negotiations, for a seven hundred year long conflict. The DUP and Sinn Féin (the two most extremist political parties in modern Irish history) have agreed the last details of a power sharing agreement.

Strong, patriotic and at one time violent leaders of both communities sat down and thrashed out a deal that looks like putting to bed most of the grievances that resulted in decades of violence and thousands of deaths. Conflicts do end, the wishes of the moderate majority bear fruit, and extremists eventually come into the political mainstream.

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This article describes the FDA’s efforts to zero in on the problem. But it doesn’t mention what most of the world - except the US - does. They require every product to list nutritional impact per 100 grams. I used to think that is confusing because you don’t necessarily consume 100 grams of that product. But it creates a benchmark that is easy to compare. And it doesn’t have to exclude an additional column for nutritional facts per portion.

They just recently launched this campaign to reward new ideas and charities.

And they now unveiled a 100% compostable packaging for SunChips.

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But since the advent of computers and now of the Internet, so many new possibilities have emerged - and yet the printed world has barely changed.  The advent of the Kindle, the iPad and other portable reading devices has so far simply resulted in turning analog print into digital print, while keeping the same linear prose format. 

If you stop to think about it, we are stuck in one model that, while beautiful and applicable for much good, is certainly not the only model to serve all potential needs that books can serve. 

Over the coming years, the whole way we think of e-books and just "books" will probably change.  One day it will not be "surprising" to read, within a book, interactive pictures and images akin to the ones you see in Harry Potter movies - those quirky 3D moving photos within the wizards’ magical newspapers. 

And it is also quite conceivable, indeed likely, that multimedia forms will reinvent how we do storytelling and how we provide information.  Why stick to just prose, or just music, or just newspaper, or just video? Why not create new models for information that combine elements of them all?

Why assume that a linear story is best? Why think that a book is necessarily different from a video-game? Someone will come up with a book that merges some elements of a game with different endings.  Analog examples already exist.  And digital multiple-choice endings already exist.  But we have not even begun exploring all the new possibilities presented by electronic "readers."

And why assume that a book needs to first be written and published, then read, then auctioned off to a Hollywood producer who then helps create a movie version of the movie? Someone will surely create a way to inform or entertain that combines elements of both - and more.

The potential for reinvention of the "book" is so far totally untapped.

Offer applies to sample size products only. Limited time offer. While supplies last.

“The calm following certain decisive war victories is dangerous as it masks the factors that can fuel future violent conflict and civil war in the future.”

Scott M. Weber, Director-General, Interpeace

On the other side, I have also heard people argue, persuasively if not popularly, the following viewpoint:

There is some irony in recognizing that, while negotiations bring a just process that can be better defended and that people can buy into, in general, after a "decisive victory" of one side, peace is more sustainable than in a "negotiated peace", which may be harder to sustain…

Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

-Harriet Green
CEO, Premier Farnell (and member of the OneVoice/PeaceWorks Foundation Board of Directors)

“If the Prophet Mohammed had asked me to deem Christians or Jews heretics, I would have deemed Mohammed himself a heretic."

Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun also “said Islam was a religion of peace, adding: ‘If Mohammed had commanded us to kill people, I would have told him he was not a prophet.’”

If we as consumers and citizens don’t do something quickly to fight back against the food industrial complex, by voting with our dollars, by informing and educating others, and by advocating to the government for more transparency, freedom, and a level playing field for natural foods producers, then the epidemics of diabetes, obesity, environmental degradation, food contamination and inhumane treatment will threaten us further.

Some highlights:

• Chicken and meat processing is so inhumane, and scary, it makes you feel you can’t avoid but to become a vegetarian - unless you live near Joe Salatin
• The Food Industrial Complex is abusive, greedy, and scary;
• corn engineering has created high fructose corn syrup, and the corn lobby has resulted in subsidies for obesity-inducing products;
• Price distortion from government subsidies causes poor people to buy cheap unhealthy foods made up of corn-derived empty calories - contributing to diabetes and obesity;
• Otherwise herbivore cows that naturally should feed from grass are now primarily fed corn, causing e-coli contaminations and diseases;
• Chicken die from the fast weight they put on; and they are treated as tools in an industrial machine - no lives;
• Monstanto is evil. They hold a ruthless monopoly over soybeans.  They intimidate and sue farmers to use their genetically-modified seeds. Federal and state government agencies have been bought off and serve the interests of the food industrial complex.

Serious work ahead.