More than a year ago, I wrote a column about two damaged brands. One damaged brand was the “Made in China” brand and the other was the well respected financial brand of Wall Street.  At that time China was dealing with the fact that pet food produced in China was killing pets all over the world and that toys produced in China had extremely unsafe levels of lead.  Also at that time Wall Street was beginning to deal with the meltdown of the mortgage backed securities market.

This column immediately came to mind last week.  In the same week that the $700 billion bail out was being discussed in Washington, China was basically shutting down its’ dairy business due to criminal negligence and bribery.  More than 50,000 Chinese infants have been stricken with life threatening kidney ailments due to the addition of melamine to most baby formula and milk products.  There are two things that are similar to both these crises.  First, the dairy industry in …

The current financial crisis is part of a larger realignment going on in the world.  There is a new Age that is beginning and with it comes a new restructuring of many facets of human life.  We are now entering the Shift Age, which is the global stage of human evolution.  This means that many aspects of humanity, certainly economics are being reorganized from the way they were during the Information Age and the earlier Industrial Age.

All year, in this column and in speeches given around the country, I have stated that the economic downturn we are going through must be looked at from a new perspective.  The ‘is it a recession or not’ and ‘is it a bear stock market or not’ is a far too narrow focus for insightful discussion.  There is something much larger that we are beginning to move through.

We are beginning to move into a new global reorganization of human society.  We have known for close to a decade that we are moving …

As a futurist, I view the financial crisis that exploded last week from a high level, long term perspective.  The macro forces that are reshaping our world must be considered when such a crisis occurs.  In addition this particular crisis will force us to reevaluate long held economic ideals that may no longer have validity in their purest forms.

It is important to state that there are many traceable causes to this crisis. It is these particulars that politicians and those that need to blame something or someone will focus on as a way to justify a point of view or to seek retribution.  There will be much argument about who is to blame and what needs to be done to protect the U.S. and global financial system from further meltdown.  This is an important discussion to have, as long as there is perspective and an honest desire to right the ship rather than to just be right.

There have been financial crises in the past that can be looked at for guidance and for reassurance.  Guidance in how to handle what now confronts us, and reassurance that we can and will weather this crisis.  The Great Depression has been mentioned a lot this past week, as it was the specter of such a calamity that provoked the actions made by the Fed and the Treasury Department .  This was due in part to the fact that Ben Bernanke is regarded as an authority on this historical economic event.  Perhaps a more …

One of Salvador Dali’s greatest paintings is called “The Persistence of Memory”.  Last week the results of a new study were published in Science magazine that conclusively prove the physical nature of that persistence.  In what other scientists have called a ‘foundational study’ a team of researchers from America and Israel have discovered and documented the physical nature of memory.

In the study, the researchers threaded tiny electrodes into the brains of 13 people with severe epilepsy.  Evidently this implanting of electrodes is standard procedure as it allows doctors to pinpoint the brain activity that cause epileptic seizures.  These patients watched 5 to 10 second film clips.  The researchers recorded the firing activity of about 100 neurons per person, all of which were concentrated in and around the hippocampus, a part of the brain know to be critical for memory.

The researchers identified single cells that became highly active during some videos and quiet during others.  More than half the recorded cells hummed with activity in response to at least …