Month: December 2010

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Compassion Gone Wild

A Kosher Response To Poverty

They call it a modern-day “tent of Abraham,” a group of four cost-free restaurants—three in Brooklyn and one in Queens, New York—where indigent Jews in need of kosher meals can sit at small, cloth-covered tables and be served by waiters five nights a week.

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Tracking Another Bizarre, Inexplicable Phenomenon

Teens Are the Happiest People in Canada

According to new data from Statistics Canada, teens are the happiest people in Canada. And they’re getting happier.

In fact, 96 per cent of Canadians aged 12 to 19 reported they were highly satisfied with life in 2009. That’s compared to 94 per cent of teens who reported either being satisfied or very satisfied with their lives in 2008. Each year the Canadian Community Health Survey asks Canadians to rank their life satisfaction, and the data shows that teens are getting more satisfied every year.

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Outbreak of Irrational Generosity

40 of the richest US families pledge to donate at least half their money to charity.

Forty wealthy families and individuals have joined Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and billionaire investor Warren Buffett in a pledge to give at least half their wealth to charity.

Six weeks after launching a campaign to get other billionaires to donate most of their fortunes, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. released the first list Wednesday of people who have signed what he and Gates call the “giving pledge.”

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Explosion of Unexpected Sanity

Billionaire Warren Buffett: “I Should Be Paying A Lot More In Taxes”

“I think that people at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it,” he told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour in a clip played on “This Week” on Sunday.

When Amanpour pointed to critics’ claims that the very wealthy need tax cuts to spur business and capitalism, Buffett replied, “The rich are always going to say that, you know, ‘Just give us more money, and we’ll go out and spend more, and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you.’ But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.”

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Do You Know All the Ways That Laughter Can Improve You?

There may be a lot more for you to learn about the healthful art of laughing and smiling.

It is known that laughing produces rapid rhythmical contractions of the diaphragm. These rhythmical contractions have a healthful effect on the abdominal organs, stimulating their functions and activating the digestive secretions, especially those of the liver. They also modify the rhythm of breathing, stimulate the pulmonary function and the activity of the heart and thereby produce a better oxidization. The popular proverb which says that “laughing makes good blood” is therefore scientifically accurate.

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Pure Compassion in Action

Medical clinics offer free health care to needy

“I’ve always felt health care is a human right,” said Dr. Lars Osterberg, co-medical director of the Arbor Free Clinic, a Sunday-only center run entirely by Stanford medical students and faculty. “In this country, we don’t have that right, so when I was in med school, I vowed to do something to provide it – at least for a few patients.”