My Sustainability Mantra

A Vegetarian Diet is good for your and good for the Planet.

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. - Albert Einstein

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. - Howard Zinn

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

WHEN SPIDERS UNITE, THEY CAN TIE DOWN A LION.
-Ethiopian proverb

Episode Nine: Perverse Incentives | The Invisible Hand with Matthew Lazin-Ryde | CBC Radio

This radio program came to my attention because it features some ideas put forth by Dan Ariely,Professor, Duke University, he explains some of his theories.

Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, is someone who has been featured in this blog when we posted  his T.E.D.  Lectures.  

 Best-selling Author, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, The Upside of Irrationality and Predictably Irrational. 

"An expert on how people actually act—and why they act—in business and economic environments, professor and best-selling author Dan Ariely shows what human behavior means for business innovation, strategy, marketing and pricing." 

source: ( http://www.washingtonspeakers.com/speakers/speaker.cfm?SpeakerID=6657   )

The Invisible Hand: Perverse Incentives

by Matthew Lazin - Ryder

CBC RADIO Podcast

photo credit: eschipul

Homo Economicus 2.0 Podcast   Economists often use models to explain economic theory at work. In the simplest models, we humans are depicted as coldly rational beings who compute all our options, and act in our own self interest. This prototype of a person is called Homo Economicus. New thinking, however, is giving us a much more well-rounded view of human behaviour within economics.

In this episode we reveal a new model of a man, Homo Economicus 2.0. [MP3 file: runs 27 minutes]

 

Incentives are the rewards you get for engaging in certain behaviours. They are often created by governments or other organizations to encourage people to act in a certain way, without mandating the behaviour. For example, you may get a tax break if you donate to a charity. But incentives can also be created unintentionally, and they can have unexpected and negative consequences. In this case, they can create the opposite effect to the one they are intended to have. Economists call these perverse incentives. In this episode, Carleton University economist Frances Woolley guides us through some examples of perverse incentives, and how politicians and policy makers can use these anomalies to create better outcomes in the future. We'll explore how the fields of crime prevention, pest control, and even the dog show circuit, have all provided valuable lessons from incentives that have gone rogue.

http://www.cbc.ca/theinvisiblehand/index.xml

 Source: http://www.cbc.ca/theinvisiblehand/episodes/2012/08/22/episode-nine-perverse-incentives/ Men and Markets Observed Episode Nine: Perverse Incentives |  The Invisible Hand with Matthew Lazin-Ryde | CBC Radio Episode Nine: Perverse Incentives | The Invisible Hand with Matthew Lazin-Ryde | CBC Radio

The Lonely Redemption of Sandy Lewis, Wall Street Provocateur - NYTimes.com

This is a fascinating story about a guy who grew up on Wall Street....

   Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

 ANGRY Sandy Lewis, an ex-broker who once manipulated a stock price to make a point, at his Essex, N.Y., farm. “There’s no rational structure” on Wall Street, he says.

September 15, 2012

A Lonely Redemption 

By MICHAEL POWELL and DANNY HAKIM


ESSEX, N.Y. — Striding barefoot through the fields of his farm in the Adirondacks, S. B. Lewis, known as Sandy, is talking without pause, gesturing this way and that in a soft summer rain.

That Mr. Lewis is in a rage is not unusual. A few days earlier, he had watched as the computerized stock trading of Knight Capital ran amok.

“If Knight blows, six firms follow, and the whole corrupt thing goes up,” he said. “Predator banks and hedge funds run the market for their pleasure — there’s no rational structure, nothing!”

He is just warming up. News reports have revealed a world he knows intimately. Goldman Sachs pays vast fines to avoid prosecution for mortgage securities fraud. Barclays manipulates interest rates. The Senate exposes HSBC as a racketeering enterprise, laundering money for drug cartels. Banks are laden with bad assets.

And Wall Street, Washington, the press corps, everyone sits and stares like so many dumb cows.

“The complicity on Wall Street is sickness!” Mr. Lewis says. He fixes you with his laser stare. “If you think the big firms are being honest” — his tone slides streetwise — “well, sweetheart, go think something else!”

The temptation is to dismiss Mr. Lewis, 73, as a crank, except he once ruled as an eccentric genius of arbitrage, with a preternatural feel for the tectonic movements of the markets. He has railed for decades about venalities now on daily display. Rude truth is his currency.

He knows Wall Street’s heights. He helped hire Michael R. Bloomberg, and he invested the money of two former Securities and Exchange Commission chairmen, making a fortune in the 1980s. And he knows its depths, since he pleaded guilty to stock manipulation in 1989, and was barred from the Street.

President Bill Clinton pardoned him, and a federal court judge later said Mr. Lewis acted out of pure reforming impulse.

But he remains in self-imposed exile.

Mr. Lewis wants to flip over Wall Street’s paving stones and search for worms. 

He relies on his singular strength: he discerns patterns where most see random data. He forecast the financial meltdown of 2008 that vaporized Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. In 2006, he warned a Bear Stearns executive: “Bear is toast. Get out now!”

Lehman Brothers, he notes, certified it was in good health in June 2008 and issued stock, attracting investment, including from the New Jersey Teachers’ Pension and Annuity Fund. Secretly, Lehman was on an intravenous drip, poisoned by bad debt.

“My respect for their brains is too great to think Lehman’s top guys didn’t know they were conveying the cynical impression of health,” Mr. Lewis said.

He is no less suspicious of Goldman Sachs, which has alumni sprinkled across the upper reaches of government. 

In a tough spot, Goldman obtained extraordinary permission to make an overnight metamorphosis from investment bank to traditional bank holding company.

“Can I prove this was a wired deal? Absolutely not,” Mr. Lewis said. “Am I certain of it? Only 100 percent.”

As for the whirling, three-million-shares-per-second casino of Wall Street? He sees it as rigged. “I would not risk stocks under any circumstances,” he said, “because we don’t know when this thing is going to blow.”

Nothing about Mr. Lewis is easy. He delights in sending scabrous, insulting, free-associative mass e-mails to journalists, financiers and members of Congress. Show annoyance, and he doubles down. “You know what I do with tension?” he said. “I ratchet it up!”

Not surprisingly, some dismiss him as a nut. As striking are those who pay careful heed.

“Sandy’s right; government created a banking oligopoly with no accountability,” said Peter Solomon, a friend of Mr. Lewis’s who runs an investment banking firm.

Arthur Aeder, a retired accounting executive, was twice fired by Mr. Lewis. “Not many antagonize Goldman just for the hell of it,” Mr. Aeder said. “Most people think, ‘I have a family to feed.’ ”

Mr. Lewis is no less harsh on himself. After a visit, he handed us laptops containing every furious e-mail he had sent and received over 10 years.

“The Wall Street ethic broke decades ago,” he said by way of goodbye. “The stink is terrible.”

MR. LEWIS was born to Wall Street royalty — his father, Cy, was managing partner at Bear Stearns from 1949 to 1978. His parents were characters out of a Fitzgerald novel: his father was Jewish, debonair and domineering; he desired power, wealth and a beautiful woman — wife or mistress, that mattered little. His mother, Diana Bonnor, a member of the Protestant establishment, was beautiful, brilliant and no less formidable. She cared about social justice and status and was profoundly uninterested in mothering.

“I never remember her at breakfast,” recalled Roger Lewis, Mr. Lewis’s younger brother. “High tea? Oh, yes. Cocktails? Yes! But breakfast? Never.”

Cy doted on Sandy while Diana screamed at the boy, striking him with a hair brush when he refused to read, he said. A willful child, the boy stopped speaking for days and sometimes retreated onto a window ledge, sitting high above Park Avenue.

Another brother, John, renounced wealth, bought clothes in thrift shops and became a well-known legal-aid lawyer. Roger got off to a fine start on Wall Street until the Grateful Dead moved into his town house before Woodstock. He ingested gobs of LSD, was arrested on charges of selling drugs and served time. “I broke all the bonds of polite behavior,” Roger said. “Prison was pretty fascinating.”

When Sandy Lewis was 10, his parents shipped him off to Chicago and Bruno Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School, an institution for emotionally disturbed children. The first day, he held his breath until he nearly passed out. But he credits the school with saving his life; Bettelheim became a second father.

“He had Bruno’s traits: he was arrogant, controlling, all powerful — and generous,” recalled George Kaiser, a former teacher at the school.

Mr. Lewis saw in Wall Street a three-dimensional chess game played at great velocity. “Brain not brawn, and the smartest wins, yes!” he said.

He came to conceive of the Street as a drainage system, every pipe connected to another. Inside information sluiced from brokerages to white-shoe law firms to investment houses.

He glimpsed this world when he returned to New York in 1964. He said he sat in the front of his father’s Cadillac limousine, listening as Cy and friends talked angrily about a partner who had impersonated a reporter for The New York Times and got a half-hour drop on a Supreme Court decision. The firm profited by trading ahead of the news.

Mr. Lewis said he confronted his father that night. Dad, you must fire that man. Cy shook his head: He is too valuable, Son.

“That,” Mr. Lewis said recently, “was when I realized that the trouble on Wall Street was systemic.”

He refused to sit at the Four Seasons trolling for inside tips and paying for call girls for clients.

He was fired by all the best firms: Salomon Brothers, White Weld, Dean Witter and Merrill Lynch. At Merrill, the chief executive officer at the time, Donald Regan, pursued a system to buy and sell stocks without using the exchange floor. Mr. Lewis came to see this creation as unfair to the public.

So Mr. Lewis, in speeches and work with the S.E.C., fought to make all sales transparent on the floor of the exchange. “In one of my periodic periods of unemployment, I walked down the street thinking, ‘O.K., now I’m going to sabotage Don Regan,’ ” he said. “I have six kids and I’m going to be eating worms.”

He worked briefly for Ivan F. Boesky, until he realized the arbitrage specialist was trolling for inside information. Mr. Lewis quit and Mr. Boesky was later imprisoned.

To find a place that would not fire him, in 1980 Mr. Lewis established S. B. Lewis and Company. The company’s returns were meteoric — over 50 percent annual returns after expenses. Former employees recall a brilliant arbitrageur who could, without warning, go to “Sandy World,” a mental planetoid with a population of one.

Mr. Lewis brokered the merger between Sandy Weill’s Shearson and James Robinson’s American Express.

“I told Robinson: ‘Weill’s got the brains; you’ve got great class. It’s perfect,’ ” Mr. Lewis recalled.

He had found success, a lovely wife and five boys and a girl, with a home in Short Hills, N.J. Except his volcanic pit never stopped rumbling.

IN November 1988, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the United States attorney, indicted Mr. Lewis on 22 charges, accusing him of manipulating the stock of a large insurer. Mr. Giuliani was a Savonarola in the canyons of mammon, and Mr. Lewis would fall beneath his sword.

Rivals shared laughs at Sandy the Moralist laid low. The trouble, however, took root not in venality but in his mania to police his industry. He had watched as insiders reaped profits by driving down prices before shares went public.

He laid a trap. He asked another securities firm to buy stock in the insurer to shore up the price. I’ll cover your losses and describe the payments as “investment banking services,” he told them.

Mr. Lewis hoped to deliver a delicious kick to the teeth of the insiders. He made not a dime; his firm was not involved in the offering.

Years later, a federal judge, William C. Conner, described Mr. Lewis’s action as “an act of market vigilantism in which Lewis in no way personally profited.” He was infuriated, the judge wrote, “by what he viewed as the unethical actions of arbitrageurs.”

“He was the Lone Ranger,” Mr. Solomon recalled, “and Giuliani treated him like a member of the corrupt club.”

Prosecutors threatened Mr. Lewis with 15 years if he went to trial. His wife, Barbara, urged him to cut a deal. He argued prison would be interesting. His bravado reinforced her fears.

Silver haired and trim, she looks at Mr. Lewis, still consumed: “I thought he would die. That was weak of me.”

He pleaded guilty to three charges, and the judge handed him three years’ probation and a $250,000 fine.

TELL us about Bill Clinton. Mr. Lewis cannot resist a smile; even by his standards, this is a weird tale.

In the summer of 1994, Mr. Lewis — in exile — got a phone call at his Maine home from his friend, Douglas S. Eakeley. Mr. Eakeley was also an old friend of Mr. Clinton’s.

I want you to go to a fund-raiser in Portland, Mr. Eakeley said, and talk with the president about his womanizing.

Is this, Mr. Lewis asked, an intervention?

As it happens, Mr. Lewis possesses a sixth sense for psychic pain. He can pick the addicted, the sick and the depressed out of a crowd. His fractured childhood and pathological candor give him an expert hand with the singed.

He rounded up Barbara and a friend, Dr. Stanley Evans, and drove to see Mr. Clinton at the Holiday Inn by the Bay.

Mr. Lewis introduced himself. “You’re Doug’s friend?” the president said, according to Mr. Lewis and Dr. Evans. “Wait, we’ll talk.”

The Secret Service escorted Mr. Lewis, his wife and the doctor into the kitchen, and the president followed.

“Sir,” Mr. Lewis recalled saying as he stared at Mr. Clinton. “Doug thought maybe I should spend a weekend with you. It would be the two of us only.”

Mr. Lewis said the president was taken aback. “What is this about?”

“Sir,” Mr. Lewis said, “this is about your most personal business. You probably won’t be too happy with me by Monday morning, but I think we can avoid a train wreck.”

The president’s face flushed. Dr. Evans realized his friend was confronting the president about his extramarital affairs. “I thought Sandy had lost his mind,” he said.

The weekend session never took place. Revelations of the president’s sexual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky came years later.

Mr. Eakeley is circumspect. “Sandy has incredible intuition and intellect, and I knew he could help if the president could stand it,” he said. “Sandy may have alarmed the president, but I don’t think he repelled him.”

Mr. Clinton’s office declined to comment.

So it goes for Mr. Lewis on his walk, decades long, through the wilderness. One night, he said, he yanked a truck driver out of a fiery wreck on the New Jersey Turnpike, only to discover that the driver had Mafia connections. He said a mob representative told him he could call in his i.o.u. anytime; Mr. Lewis declined, politely.

He became the de facto impresario of the Clinton Correctional Facility, a prison near his farm in the Adirondacks, arranging frequent performances. The prison has housed a who’s who of the criminal and homicidal, from Lucky Luciano to the serial killer Joel Rifkin.

Recently, Mr. Lewis brought in Helena Baillie, 30, an accomplished violinist who is akin to his surrogate daughter, to perform Bach’s “Chaconne” in the Church of St. Dismas, the Good Thief. Many prisoners were in tears.

Mr. Eakeley said Mr. Lewis might be better for his exile. One of Mr. Lewis’s sons, John, is not convinced. He sees a father become “walking id.”

“Giuliani,” he said, “obliterated some part of him.”

In 2000, Mr. Eakeley and former Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach worked pro bono and submitted a pardon application to Mr. Clinton. In January 2001, just before leaving office, the president signed it.

Six years later, Judge Conner overturned the S.E.C. order that barred Mr. Lewis from Wall Street. “Federal regulations now outlaw the very practice his actions were meant to thwart,” the judge noted.

No cloud of mellow descended. Mr. Lewis trailed the S.E.C. counsel out of the courthouse. “I will rip your guts out,” he bellowed. “Letter to follow!”

A few days later, he looked at the mountains and experienced an epiphany: “I’ve gotten my redemption, and no one cares.”

THE phone rings and Mr. Lewis, in midsentence of a long disquisition, picks up the receiver. A North Country car dealer asks about the economy.

“Yes? Yes!” he listens for 30 seconds. “It’s going to get a lot worse. We’ll be burning scrap wood in our fireplaces before it’s over. Goodbye!”

Among residents of this rural land, Mr. Lewis has a reputation as a savant. He warned that the housing market was overheating years ago and sold several properties. He converted to cash before the 1987 stock crash.

Still, he could not complete the last act in his redemptive play. Financiers with White House connections solicited his advice during the 2008 crisis. But he was not invited into the circle of advisers who, to his mind, poorly served this young president.

As a Wall Street friend warned in an e-mail: “Sandy, you constantly kill yourself. You exhaust folks.”

Mr. Lewis considers his plight over a dinner with Barbara. His eyes are red, his voice a rasp. “I’m bright as hell, but I’m impossible to live with.” Barbara nods. “I am in a state of outrage all the time.” Barbara nods. “I bring this Orthogenic morality to everything on Wall Street, and it’s unsustainable.” Barbara, dry as gin, says, “No kidding.”

Mr. Lewis sees a banking system in unstable remission. Goldman answers to no one. China and Europe are wobbling, deflation is at the door, another crash is coming.

“The criminality is astounding,” he says. “You have a complete confusion between principal and principle.”

He is pacing again. “You don’t understand what it is to find someone on Wall Street who tells it like it is. You want to get real? Baby, let’s do the full root canal!”









This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 23, 2012

An article last Sunday about S. B. Lewis, known as Sandy, a former Wall Street broker who turned into a critic, misstated, in some editions, the given name of one of his former teachers at Bruno Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School in Chicago. He is George Kaiser, not Charles.





The Lonely Redemption of Sandy Lewis, Wall Street Provocateur - NYTimes.com

 Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/nyregion/the-lonely-redemption-of-sandy-lewis-wall-street-provocateur.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=print






The Lonely Redemption of Sandy Lewis, Wall Street Provocateur - NYTimes.com

Define Success to properly set your compass on your single definite purpose

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair. In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
- Bertrand Russell

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. ”
― Mark Twain

 
"In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins
- not by strength but by perseverance."
- H. Jackson Brown 

 “Don't mistake activity with achievement.”
― John Wooden

 “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

 

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”
― Amelia Earhart

“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”

― Henri J.M. Nouwen

To a Mouse

To A Mouse.
On turning her up in her nest with the plough, November 1785.

Robert Burns was a poet, but that was not what earned him his living. As with most artists of his time he had to have some means of earning his keep. In Burns' case he earned most of his money, sparse though this was, from farming. This is why he is also known as the "Ploughman Bard".  

 

It was while he was ploughing one of his fields that he disturbed a mouse's nest. It was his thoughts on what he had done that led to his poem, "To A Mouse", which contains one of his most often quoted lines from the poem. I am sure that you will recognize it, probably not from the Scottish words, but from the translation, lines 4 and 5 from verse 7.

To a Mouse



 Standard English

Small, sleek, cowering, timorous beast,
O, what a panic is in your breast!
You need not start away so hasty
With hurrying scamper!
I would be loath to run and chase you,
With murdering plough-staff.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
And fellow mortal!

I doubt not, sometimes, but you may steal;
What then? Poor beast, you must live!
An odd ear in twenty-four sheaves
Is a small request;
I will get a blessing with what is left,
And never miss it.

Your small house, too, in ruin!
It's feeble walls the winds are scattering!
And nothing now, to build a new one,
Of coarse grass green!
And bleak December's winds coming,
Both bitter and keen!

You saw the fields laid bare and wasted,
And weary winter coming fast,
And cozy here, beneath the blast,
You thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel plough past
Out through your cell.

That small bit heap of leaves and stubble,
Has cost you many a weary nibble!
Now you are turned out, for all your trouble,
Without house or holding,
To endure the winter's sleety dribble,
And hoar-frost cold.

But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leaves us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

Still you are blest, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!





Burn's Original 


Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!













 
SOURCE:
http://www.worldburnsclub.com/poems/translations/554.htm

Robbie Burns: To A Mouse

 

 

TO A MOUSE

ON TURNING HER UP IN HER NEST WITH THE PLOUGH, NOVEMBER, 1785

by: Robert Burns (1759-1796)

I

 

EE, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,

Oh, what a panic's in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi' bickering brattle!

I was be laith to rin an' chase thee,

Wi' murd'ring pattle!

 

II

 

I'm truly sorry man's dominion

Has broken Nature's social union,

An' justifies that ill opinion

Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion

An' fellow-mortal!

 

III

 

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen-icker in a thrave

'S a sma' request;

I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,

And never miss't!

 

IV

 

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!

Its silly wa's the win's are strewin!

An' naething, now, to big a new ane,

O' foggage green!

An' bleak December's winds ensuin,

Baith snell an' keen!

 

V

 

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,

An' weary winter comin fast,

An' cozie here, beneath the blast,

Thou thought to dwell,

Till crash! the cruel coulter past

Out thro' thy cell.

 

VI

 

That wee bit heap o' leaves an stibble,

Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!

Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,

But house or hald,

To thole the winter's sleety dribble,

An' cranreuch cauld!

 

VII

 

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft a-gley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,

For promis'd joy!

 

VIII

 

Still thou art blest, compared wi' me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But och! I backward cast my e'e,

On prospects drear!

An' forward, tho' I cannot see,

I guess an' fear!

"To a Mouse" is reprinted from English Poems. Ed. Edward Chauncey Baldwin & Harry G. Paul. New York: American Book Company, 1908.

 Source:
 http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/to_a_mouse.html

  

 Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth
(By permission of the National Galleries of Scotland) 

Albert Schweitzer envisioned a life of compassion and reverence for all living things.

EMBRACE CHANGE:

"If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars."

- R. Tagore 

Build a better life according to your ideal Vision.

Do not wait for perfect timing, get started now.

What you do today, is all that matters.

Do your best with what you have and start from where you are.

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working." - Picasso

There is power in action so make plans and execute them.

Circumstance is a result of your past and does not indicate where you are heading.

The greatest journey begins with the first step and so does your building of a new business or whatever you are setting out to create.

We all need to start where we are and in the moment, find the strength to overcome obstacles we encounter, persevere and endure until we achieve a few goals and gain momentum in a positive direction.

Live according to your Vision of the well-lived life.

"One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity."
~Albert Schweitzer

Reverence for Life:

Lost in thought I sat on deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal concept of the ethical that I had not discovered in any philosophy. I covered sheet after sheet with disconnected sentences merely to concentrate on the problem. Two days passed. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase : “Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben” (“reverence for life”). The iron door had yielded. The path in the thicket had become visible.”

— Albert Schweitzer

China's Philosophers

Chungliang “Al” Huang is a notable philosopher, dancer, performing artist, and internationally acclaimed Tai Ji master and educator, having received the Republic of China’s most prestigious award in the field of education, the Gold Medal Award, from its Ministry of Education.

As the Keynote speaker at the Major World Gatherings in India, Switzerland, Germany, and Bali, Chungliang "Al" Huang appeared with many notable world leader's of religion and spiritual philosophy including the Dalai Lama.

Huang is the founder-president of the Living Tao Foundation based on the Oregon Coast of the United States, and the International Lan Ting Institute, located in the sacred mountains of China.

Huang was featured in the inaugural segment of Bill Moyers’ renowned PBS "Bill Moyers World of Ideas” series.

Throughout his career, Huang established many close alliances with highly regarded philosophers and scholars of our time. Notably, his colleague and collaborator, the late philosopher scholar Alan Watts, mythologist Joseph Campbell, and his mentor John Blofeld.

Huang was born in Shanghai in the 1930s.[1] His family moved to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese civil war.

Huang grew up in China with a rich background in the classics, fine and martial arts, and the Beijing Opera techniques.

Huang moved to the United States in the 1960s to study Architecture, Cultural Anthropology, and Choreography.

Huang became a Tai Ji teacher at the encouragement of Alan Watts, and became involved with the human potential movement. His 1973 book Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain greatly helped to popularize taijiquan in the West. It went on to be published in 14 languages.

[edit]Teaching and Collaborations

He has taught at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA since the late 60's. Huang was a close colleague and collaborator with the late scholar Alan Watts, mythologist Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Laura Archera Huxley, John Blofeld, and Huston Smith.

[edit]Philosopher

Huang is well-known for his collaborations with philosopher Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell and others for his involvement with Esalen Institute and the Omega Institute. He also appeared on the "Bill Moyers World of Ideas" series on PBS. He now is the creator and president of the Living Tao Foundation and the Lan Ting Institute, which helps promote Chinese arts.

[edit]Concerts, Performing Arts and Dance Collaborations

Huang entered the performance arena through the entertainment business and gained recognition as a dancer with the original Rat Pack with Sammy Davis Jr., performing with Bruce Lee, and as a featured dancer in the film, Flower Drum Song.

Huang was soloist with his own theater/dance company performing at Jacob's Pillow, in New York City and at the American Dance Festival.

In the early '80s, Huang co-created with Paul Winter Consort “The Tao of Bach: A Tai Ji Musical Offering” concert series at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City and at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

Collaborators in the past have included entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., pianists Lorin Hollander and Robert Levin, flutists Alexander Murray, Michael Faust, Lorna McGhee; trumpeter Guy Few; Jazz musician, Paul Horn, Charles Lloyd; cellists David Darling and Michael Fitzpatrick; singers John Denver, Joan Baez; and harpist Andreas Vollenweider.

[edit]Educator

Huang is a respected speaker in the field of human potentiality, on cultural diversity and creative dynamism in global business and education. Huang’s unique style of teaching individuals to fulfill their human potential has garnered accolades and nurtured students of life around the world. This enlivened body of knowledge/wisdom, accumulated and crystallized into gems of structured guiding forces for nearly four decades, are transmitted to those who truly wish to gain this knowledge, wisdom, and expertise in order to become Living Tao Practitioners – perpetual students of lifelong learning who have been, and will become mentors to others.

[edit]Scholarship and Notable Recognitions

Albert Schweitzer Envisions Compassionate Living

EMBRACE CHANGE:

"If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars."

- R. Tagore 

Build a better life according to your ideal Vision.

Do not wait for perfect timing, get started now.

What you do today, is all that matters.

Do your best with what you have and start from where you are.

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working." - Picasso

There is power in action so make plans and execute them.

Circumstance is a result of your past and does not indicate where you are heading.

The greatest journey begins with the first step and so does your building of a new business or whatever you are setting out to create.

We all need to start where we are and in the moment, find the strength to overcome obstacles we encounter, persevere and endure until we achieve a few goals and gain momentum in a positive direction.

Live according to your Vision of the well-lived life.

"One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity."
~Albert Schweitzer

Reverence for Life:

Lost in thought I sat on deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal concept of the ethical that I had not discovered in any philosophy. I covered sheet after sheet with disconnected sentences merely to concentrate on the problem. Two days passed. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase : “Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben” (“reverence for life”). The iron door had yielded. The path in the thicket had become visible.”

— Albert Schweitzer

Catch of the Day: Whale Shark

A fisherman transports a dead whale shark after it was caught in fishermen's net, in Yangzhi county, Fujian province, August 1, 2014. 
REUTERS/Stringer

Source: http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?articleId=USRTR41Q48#a=1

Woes for Women | Top 5 Worst U.S. States for Women | NewsFeed | TIME.com

Woes for Women | Top 5 Worst U.S. States for Women | NewsFeed | TIME.com

Which states have been ranked the worst places to live for women? iVillage takes a look at the places where it’s hard to be female.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/23/top-5-worst-u-s-states-for-women/?xid=newsletter-newsfeed#women-woes#ixzz1qBgzRH9q

Napoleon Hill

A goal is a dream with a deadline.
Napoleon Hill

Action is the real measure of intelligence.
Napoleon Hill

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.
Napoleon Hill

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.
Napoleon Hill

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.
Napoleon Hill

Before success comes in any man's life, he's sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to quit. That's exactly what the majority of men do.
Napoleon Hill

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.
Napoleon Hill

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
Napoleon Hill

Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you ready or not, to put this plan into action.
Napoleon Hill

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.
Napoleon Hill







Don't wait. The time will never be just right.
Napoleon Hill

Edison failed 10, 000 times before he made the electric light. Do not be discouraged if you fail a few times.
Napoleon Hill

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.
Napoleon Hill

Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
Napoleon Hill

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed on an equal or greater benefit.
Napoleon Hill

Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to cut all sources of retreat. Only by doing so can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win - essential to success.
Napoleon Hill

Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.
Napoleon Hill

Fears are nothing more than a state of mind.
Napoleon Hill

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.



Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.
Napoleon Hill


Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/napoleon_hill.html#ixzz1jZJpZUKl

Again: Red Meat Hurts!!!

This article is presented to contrast the fact that a large portion of the world's population goes to bed hungry.  Yet certain rich societies enjoy so much of the most expensive protein source - red meat that it can become a hazard to good health.

People dealing with M.S. and other  health conditions know to watch their diet and their health in general because they are fighting a great battle with a progressive disease and need to maintain their strength.

All red meat is bad for you, new study says - latimes.com

All red meat is bad for you, new study says

A long-term study finds that eating any amount and any type increases the risk of premature death.

• 
  

Eating any amount and any type of red meat increases the risk of premature death, a new study says. (William Thomas Cain / Getty Images / March 12, 2012)

• Also
• Graphic: Effect of red meat on mortality risk
• Chew on this! Critics sink their teeth into red meat study
•  Test-tube meat burger is in the works
• 'Pink slime': Revolting beef additive or absolutely edible?
•   PETA goes nearly nude in Vernon meat protest
• Opinion: Singing the blues about red meat
• 
  

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times March 12, 2012, 4:28 p.m.

Eating red meat — any amount and any type — appears to significantly increase the risk of premature death, according to a long-range study that examined the eating habits and health of more than 110,000 adults for more than 20 years.

For instance, adding just one 3-ounce serving of unprocessed red meat — picture a piece of steak no bigger than a deck of cards — to one's daily diet was associated with a 13% greater chance of dying during the course of the study.

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FOR THE RECORD:
Red meat: An article in the March 13 LATExtra section about a study linking red meat consumption to an increased risk of premature death said that preservatives like nitrates probably contributed to the danger. It should have included nitrites as well. —

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Even worse, adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20% higher risk of death during the study.

"Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk," said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published online Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Crunching data from thousands of questionnaires that asked people how frequently they ate a variety of foods, the researchers also discovered that replacing red meat with other foods seemed to reduce mortality risk for study participants.

Eating a serving of nuts instead of beef or pork was associated with a 19% lower risk of dying during the study. The team said choosing poultry or whole grains as a substitute was linked with a 14% reduction in mortality risk; low-fat dairy or legumes, 10%; and fish, 7%.

Previous studies had associated red meat consumption with diabetes, heart disease and cancer, all of which can be fatal. Scientists aren't sure exactly what makes red meat so dangerous, but the suspects include the iron and saturated fat in beef, pork and lamb, the nitrates used to preserve them, and the chemicals created by high-temperature cooking.

The Harvard researchers hypothesized that eating red meat would also be linked to an overall risk of death from any cause, Pan said. And the results suggest they were right: Among the 37,698 men and 83,644 women who were tracked, as meat consumption increased, so did mortality risk.

In separate analyses of processed and unprocessed meats, the group found that both types appear to hasten death. Pan said that at the outset, he and his colleagues had thought it likely that only processed meat posed a health danger.

Carol Koprowski, a professor of preventive medicine at USC's Keck School of Medicine who wasn't involved in the research, cautioned that it can be hard to draw specific conclusions from a study like this because there can be a lot of error in the way diet information is recorded in food frequency questionnaires, which ask subjects to remember past meals in sometimes grueling detail.

But Pan said the bottom line was that there was no amount of red meat that's good for you.

"If you want to eat red meat, eat the unprocessed products, and reduce it to two or three servings a week," he said. "That would have a huge impact on public health."

A majority of people in the study reported that they ate an average of at least one serving of meat per day.

Pan said that he eats one or two servings of red meat per week, and that he doesn't eat bacon or other processed meats.

Cancer researcher Lawrence H. Kushi of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland said that groups putting together dietary guidelines were likely to pay attention to the findings in the study.

"There's a pretty strong supposition that eating red meat is important — that it should be part of a healthful diet," said Kushi, who was not involved in the study. "These data basically demonstrate that the less you eat, the better."

UC San Francisco researcher and vegetarian diet advocate Dr. Dean Ornish said he gleaned a hopeful message from the study.

"Something as simple as a meatless Monday can help," he said. "Even small changes can make a difference."

Additionally, Ornish said, "What's good for you is also good for the planet."

In an editorial that accompanied the study, Ornish wrote that a plant-based diet could help cut annual healthcare costs from chronic diseases in the U.S., which exceed $1 trillion. Shrinking the livestock industry could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions and halt the destruction of forests to create pastures, he wrote.

eryn.brown@latimes.com

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Walking is man's best medicine. - Hippocrates

Toronto doctor's 'magic pill' goes viral - Toronto - CBC News:

CBC News
Posted: Jan 11, 2012

An illustrated video with a simple message about health has received more than a million hits on YouTube, much to the delight of the Toronto doctor who created it.

"My bankability with teenagers has increased significantly," Dr. Mike Evans told CBC News on Wednesday.

Evans is a doctor at St. Michael's Hospital and professor at the University of Toronto. People all over the world are linking to his month-old video from Facebook and Twitter.

Evans says his message — to complete a half-hour of exercise every day — is like a magic pill to cure aches and pains.

"I've got a pill that's going to help with your arthritis, help with your depression, help with your anxiety, help with your obesity, help prevent cancer," he said.

The video cites studies from the world, including research that shows even overweight people have fewer health problems when active.

Humor is a state of mind.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.
- Bertrand Russell


A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke -- and that the joke is oneself.
- Clifton Paul Fadiman


A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
- Ernest Hemingway


The creative person is both; more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.
- Frank Barron


I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.
-  Edward Albee


Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
-  William James


The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.
-  Peter De Vries


Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
-  Peter Ustinov


If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

- Mohandas Gandhi

Keep a Sense of Humour

Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh.
- Katharine Hepburn


Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.
- Samuel Butler


Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
- Aristotle


Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.
- Samuel Butler


Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
- Voltaire


Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
- Karl Marx