Robyn O¹Brien lives in the Boulder area. She is a fresh, inspiring and credible voice for the information/patterns she has assembled/synthesized about how our food ³industry² makes us sick (allergies, cancer, etc., etc.), raises our health care costs, weakens our global competitiveness, also etc. etc. and what we can do about it. And, she brings a deep level of compassion and wisdom to the task of transformation at hand. Kudos to Robyn….JS
Robyn O¹Brien shares her personal story and how it inspired her current path as a “Real Food” evangelist. Grounded in a successful Wall Street career that was more interested in food as good business than good-for-you, this mother of four was shaken awake by the dangerous allergic reaction of one of her children to a “typical” breakfast. Her mission to unearth the cause revealed more about the food industry than she could stomach, and impelled her to share her findings with others. Informative and inspiring.
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Robyn authored The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It. A former Wall Street food industry analyst, Robyn brings insight, compassion and detailed analysis to her research into the impact that the global food system is having on the health of our children. She founded allergykidsfoundation.org and was named by Forbes as one of “20 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter.” The New York Times has passionately described her as “Food's Erin Brockovich.”
Phi Beta Iota: The industrialization of agriculture, and the corruption of government, have led to a complete ignorance of the “true cost” of bad food, not only in making children ill, but in consuming fuel, water, sweatshop labor, and enabling tax avoidance and the externalization of pollution costs to the public present and future. It bears mention that US Government regulation has totally trashed the emergent organic food movement in the USA, and there are only two sustainable agricultural models on the planet: the Amish in the USA, and the Cubans. The truth at any cost now lowers all other costs forever.
At the International Monetary Fund, there is one set of ethics guidelines for the rank-and-file staff and another for the 24 elite executive directors who oversee the powerful organization.
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“There are a lot of controls in place when it comes to the staff, but not for the leadership,” said Katrina Campbell, a compliance and ethics expert at Global Compliance.
The Economist was founded in 1843 by James Wilson, a hat manufacturer temporarily brought low by one of global capitalism’s first identifiable business cycles. By a series of courageous re-inventions over 168 years, it has managed to become, and then remain, one of the most influential editorial voices in the world.
It is time for another of those periodic reinventions.
Wilson’s original prospectus announced his determination to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
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The shift required – one that already has begun under editor John Micklethwait, but one which still has far to go – involves the recognition that the social sciences have begun to integrate concepts of governance, organization and cooperation into the center of their conception of the world, rather than confining them (as they were in The Wealth of Nations) as something of an afterthought to the last section of Smith’s great book.
Phi Beta Iota: Brother Penguin has brought forth a very articulate statement on the role of humanity in changing–the the point of catastrophic implosion–the Earth. While lamenting the lack of responsibility of governments and corporations, the article stops short of recognizing that the challenge is not about governance, which is a process, but rather about information, which is a foundation. Multinational information-sharing and sense-making among the eight tribes of intelligence is the non-negotiable first step toward illuminating and then eradicating the corruption and waste that is now characteristic of all organizations and individuals that lack integrity. Everyone has intelligence. Virtually no one has integrity. That is where we start. Integrity in information-sharing and sense-making.
EDIT of 18 Oct 2012: The second nuclear catastrophe in Japan is IMMINENT. The flooding is, like the magnetic field flip, a 100-150 year evolution (see second reference below). Not yet being discussed is the fact that when sea water rises, it will flood and contaminate aquifers that have gone shallow. Naturally one anticipates that renewable power and water desalination and purification will be freely available in the future.
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The Japanese tsunami-nuclear crisis has put public thinking about climate change, 2012, and nuclear risk into high gear.
These maps are going mainstream. There are very weak signals that the US government and Wall Street are quietly freaking out at the highest levels and stealing what they can while they can, on the assumption that the “debt” will become irrelevant in the aftermath of a combination of catastrophes in the 2012 time-frame.
Our confidence that 2012 is a year is awakening rather than catastrophe is now revised. It may be both.
The core second point that is emerging in public intelligence is the implication of flooded nuclear plants that go critical underwater and make the seas radioactive. It is clearly both unlikely and perhaps impossible to shut down all these nuclear reactors and evacuate their waste. When combined with tens of millions of rotting corpses in the oceans, the problem of clean safe water becomes interesting.
The third point, much much submerged (pun intended) beneath the catastrophic sea level change and the nuclearization of water, is the possible “first disclosure” of extra-terrestials, whom we believe to be both benign and mixed–greens and grays, at a minimum. The lead thinkers we know are closing down their traditional businesses and heading for high ground with clean aquifer water. The future will be interesting.
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It pains our collective to observe that the US Intelligence Community is completely useless in service to the public. A national intelligence community that had integrity and could produce intelligence (decision-support) would be all over this, and would refuse orders from unethical self-serving politicians to keep their findings secret.
It's time America got its house in order. Public intelligence in the public interest is a good starting point.