The Paradoxical Commandments

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs, but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.

The Paradoxical Commandments were written by Kent Keith in 1968, when he was 19, a sophomore at Harvard College. They were part of The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council, his first booklet for high school student leaders.

No excuse for tainted meat

Clark Behind The Headlines
From HLN's Money Expert Clark Howard

Have you heard about this E.coli outbreak that killed two people and made hundreds more sick? It’s because of a food processor in New York that had to issue a recall on a huge amount of ground beef. They weren’t testing for a strain of E.coli that was banned 15 years ago.

If you remember, in 1993 there was a deadly E.coli outbreak involving the fast food chain Jack in the Box. And as a result of that, the U.S. Department of Agriculture banned this strain of E.coli from meat and introduced new rules for companies to test their products. But they made it voluntary. Well, a lot of meat companies, including this big one in New York State, came under pressure from the slaughterhouses and suppliers and decided, “Yeah, well, we're just not going to test for that.” And as a result, you have people dead who wouldn't be, and people hurting who wouldn't have been. Inexcusable.

It is so third world that we have the ability to prevent these illnesses and deaths, and just because of financial interests of meat packers, we don't do it. But a few retailers are making an effort. Costco Wholesale processes its own meat, and it fully meets the advisory guidelines and tests everything they put on the shelves. It’s just something where you think, why would a business cut corners like that and why would the meat industry have people lose faith in the safety of the food supply just to shave a penny here or there?

You know, in capitalism, businesses that mess up get punished by the marketplace. And often they get destroyed like the people who sold tainted peanut products. But the fact is, the people that get sick or die are still sick or dead.

The answer is very, very simple. The Department of Agriculture needs to make mandatory the inspections for the E.coli strains that they know are deadly. Think about if it was your kid who died because some meat processor decided to cut a corner and not test its product to make sure it's safe. I find that very upsetting.