Buffet Fortune Will Go to Gates Foundation

Investment guru Warren Buffet certainly understands flow. His stake in Berkshire Hathaway, built over many years of studying companies and choosing investments, is worth about $44 billion. Buffet announced recently that he plans to transfer this wealth to five foundations, with the bulk of it – about 83 percent – going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds many projects that benefit society at large.

“We agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society,” said Buffet in a recent interview with Fortune magazine.

Buffet, age 75 and a widower, says even with this gift, he has “quite a bit of cash” to leave to his three children. Three foundations run by the children will also receive some of his fortune and leaving all of his wealth to his children didn’t seem right to him. He admires his children, he told Fortune, “But I would argue that when your kids have all the advantages anyway, in terms of how they grow up and the opportunities they have for education, including what they learn at home – I would say it’s neither right nor rational to be flooding them with money.”

The Gates Foundation, started in 1994, funds many projects aimed at improving global health, including development and testing of vaccines for diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and diarrhea that kill millions of children in developing countries every year. Its other major projects are in education and educational technology.

In a statement regarding the gift from his longtime friend, Bill Gates said, “The impact of Warren’s generosity will not be fully understood for decades. As we move forward with the work, we do so with a profound sense of responsibility. Working with Warren and with our partners around the world, we have a tremendous opportunity to make a positive difference in people’s lives.”

Short Book Makes Big Wave

A very short, simple story, told in 23 pages, is creating a ripple for peace.

The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering: A Story for Anyone Who Thinks She Can’t Save the World, is making the rounds of many churches and spiritual groups, as well as peace groups across the country.

The story is about two women who don’t know each other, but one day decide to stand together for peace. They don’t block anything. They don’t challenge anyone. They just get noticed.

As the story progresses, it’s a little girl who first answers the question that the confused townspeople are asking about the grandmothers.

“What are they doing?” everyone asks.

“They’re saving the world,” says the girl.

The story was published in book form by Viking in 2005.

“All I wrote was a little story for a newborn babe about grandmothers standing in the park,” says author Sharon Medhi, a writer and grandmother who has lived in nine countries. “A story that by all rights should have gone utterly unnoticed. And at any other time, in any other place, when the news wasn’t bad and the world wasn’t askew, that might have been true. But not this time.”

It seems easy to focus on bad news these days. This book reminds us that there are simple things we can do and that a small stone can still make a big ripple.

“Tao of Willie” Spreads Lifetime of Wisdom

When people think of Willie Nelson, they usually think of long hair, country music and a skirmish or two with the law.

Unless they’re Nelson fans, they might not know that at 73, he’s still doing headstands and smoking joints in the back of his tour bus, has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and is nowhere close to slowing down.

Add author to the list. Actually, he’s the author of three books, including the most recent, The Tao of Willie, in which Nelson reveals 50 years of Texas wisdom, distilled through a life on the road.

There are many books which in title and topic are loosely based on the Tao Te Ching, an ancient book of philosophy from China. Like many of them, this book touches on the importance of meditation and a belief that all things are interconnected.

But Nelson’s book – written with longtime friend, novelist and golf writer Turk Pipkin – goes on to include humor and a wry wit. “There are more jokes than heavy philosophy in this book,” said Reuters, “which is part memoir, part musing on lessons he has learned – from picking cotton as a child in Texas, to failed marriages and falling foul of the tax man.”

Anyone who can maintain his balance and sense of humor after 10 years of dealing with the IRS – to the tune of $17 million – knows something the rest of us can use.

Shatner Powers Therapeutic Riding for Israel

William Shatner has had many roles in his long TV and movie career, including Captain Kirk on Star Trek and Denny Crane on Boston Public.

Now he’s putting his star power behind a therapy program for children in the Middle East. He has recently been named the celebrity spokesperson for the William Shatner/Jewish National Fund Therapeutic Riding Consortium Endowment for Israel and will help raise $10 million so that all children who can benefit from riding therapy will receive it.

“I want to go and make a difference internationally,” Shatner told JNF, “I see it as a way to foster peace between the nations…Good will is in short supply and we have to build it…” In May, Shatner and his wife visited programs across Israel as a prelude to his fundraising efforts.

The endowment will provide scholarships for children of all religious and ethnic backgrounds, including Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians.

Since the 1950s, therapeutic riding has been used to help people with physical disabilities. Because horseback riding moves the rider’s body gently and rhythmically – similar to walking – riders with physical disabilities often show improvement in speaking, flexibility, balance, muscle tone, strength, motor coordination and emotional well-being.

Study Shows That Time Heals Wounds

As time goes by, people tend to release their negative experiences and feelings and focus on the positive, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Personality.

The researchers – Drs. Michael Conway and Wendy-Jo Wood from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada – looked at memories of 279 university students. They asked male and female students about events that helped them learn who they are and what life is all about.

“Mental health is maintained or improved by people’s attempts to make sense of their life experiences,” said Dr. Conway in an interview with Reuters Health. “People try to see the positive in even very difficult life experiences and come to downplay, as much as they can, how negative some events were in the past.”

The kinds of events remembered by the students ranged from death, assault or conflict on the negative side, to love, marriage or attaining of cherished personal goals on the positive. The results were similar regardless of gender.

“Everyone can experience strong emotional reactions in extreme situations and everyone needs to come to terms with such events in order to maintain a positive sense of self and a positive sense of the world at large,” said Conway.

“Tiger Temple” Offers Oasis

On the grounds of the Wat Luangta Bua Yannassampanno monastery in Thailand, you’re as likely to encounter a tiger as a monk.

The monastery, also called the “Tiger Temple,” has become home to 16 endangered Indo-Chinese tigers, according to a recent report in The Christian Science Monitor.

The tigers have been brought in by the locals, as cubs. As 400-pound adults, they roam an abandoned quarry on the grounds for several hours each day. They have caged quarters as well, where they are fed and cared for by the monks.

Buddhist pilgrims from around the region bring their amulets to the temple, to have their protective properties enhanced by closeness to wild beasts tamed by a holy man. The temple also teaches meditation classes for those who wish to control their own wild qualities.

“The aim is to eliminate arrogance and anger through contemplating aspects of the majestic animal, which from Cambodia to Tibet retains an exalted role in Buddhist spirituality,” said the Monitor.

Poachers also live near the monastery – in a mountainous, rural area of Kanchanaburi province, west of Bangkok, along the border with Myanmar (Burma). With the black market price of an adult tiger running into thousands of dollars, cubs continue to be brought to the monastery.

“I didn’t know what to do with them, but I couldn’t just let them die,” says Phusit Khantitharo, abbot of the monastery. “Poachers think the bad karma of killing a tigress is cancelled out by saving her cubs.”

“I love them all equally. They’re my children,” says the abbot. The monks believe that some of the tigers are reincarnations of people they have known and if the tigers lead peaceful lives, they’ll be reborn as humans again.

Compiled by Sally Kimbel