But it's not a pretty picture for the first boomers who are crossing the senior line in 2011. Their prospects look grim and they feel betrayed. That should sound an alarm: "Hello Houston, we have a problem: Washington's payload is ready for launch but the boomers are coming and they're mad as hell."

The vibrant America they were instrumental in building over the last three decades is slipping away. The promised golden years are looking tarnished, and may turn out to be a mirage. Their home values have collapsed, they have scant savings, high debt, and diminishing 401K's as they draw on their retirement funds to pay for their children's education and other expenses. Others can only shudder over threats to their pensions as municipalities declare bankruptcy. And the boomers are right to worry about losing their jobs as the recession lingers and more and more jobs are shipped overseas. While economists tell them they may have to work till they drop they wonder how that will play out, even if they choose to continue to work, when over 9% percent of the population is unemployed and unemployed workers over age fifty are the least likely to find jobs.

Back in Washington, politicians and policy makers are proposing changes in Social Security and Medicare with cuts that include raising the age for Social Security eligibility, cutbacks in services, elimination of coverage for some medical procedures, higher deductibles and co-payments, means testing for Medicare eligibility, sharply lower reimbursements to doctors and hospitals that will surely force hospital closings and the withdrawal of many physicians from the system, which will severely reduce the availability of medical services, and a plan to privatize Medicare. Policy makers and pundits are also questioning the cost effectiveness of end of life care--starkly stated in the grisly title of an article in Newsweek: "The Case for Killing Granny."

So what will the boomers do? For sure, they will not play dead. It's not their history and it's not their style. More predictably they will invoke the Rostenkowski factor. In July 1989 after Congress passed a catastrophic medical coverage bill that was introduced by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Congressman Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois seniors cheered at first. But when they deciphered the small print and discovered a surcharge on Medicare beneficiaries for the coverage they went ballistic. On August 17, 1989, the scene of seniors yelling "coward," "recall," and "impeach" while chasing Rostenkowski as he left a meeting in Chicago and struggled to flee the scene was played across America on the evening news. The images of seniors rioting, making threatening gestures, and venting rage terrified legislators. The bill they had passed by a three to one majority was swiftly repealed.

Those feisty defiant seniors were from the generation of the boomers' parents and grandparents -- elderly who were assumed to be submissive and fearful of authority and government. But when pushed they literally came out swinging -- and the terrified politicians frantically ran for cover.

If that generation of seniors struck back, what can we expect from the aging boomers? Keep in mind that the boomers will be the most educated seniors in history, they have high expectations for comfortable living, are computer literate and are adept in social networking.They know how to "work the system" (they were the system), will vote in greater percentages than any other age group (as senior always have), and they carry an impressive resume of protest and noise making.

All this screams out: Politicians beware -- the boomers are coming. Like drill sergeants you may bark your marching orders and expect unchallenged compliance. But this army will march to its own drum beat.

So stay tuned. For in the words of old time comedian Jimmy Durante, "You ain't seen nuttin yet!"

The reality is that the "Promise" that underpins western democracies canot be kept. The few young cannot afford to pay for our healthcare or the pensions that we expect and promised to ourselves.

But we Boomers are many and we vote and we can get organized. So we are on a collision course with ourselves. Politicians that try and cut back will be attacked and then some.

But the facts remain. We cannot afford the promise.

So what to do? There can be no easy way out at the political level. We will fight our selves to keep the promise that canot be kept.

But the money cannot be there. So I fear that much that we might do collectively cannot be done. So the truth will come too late and the pain will be at the maximum.

So what to do? Set up your own life to depend as little as possible on the "Promise"

How can we prevent our kids from becoming a statistic?

Should we sugar coat the most profound travesty to human health and happiness and just hope that the intellectual training we’ve provided and the skill of cooking we’ve offered is enough to keep our kids away from junk food when they grow up?

Or should we  encourage strong feelings about the fast food industry, the people who push it, and the people who eat it?

I don’t teach my daughter to hate. God no. Hate hurts the person doing it just as much as the person receiving it. And most of the time there is something to love inside of everyone, no matter if they have disgusting habits or not.

From a mom - and now what is your view and what do you do to keep your kids safe?

Eight in 10 British workers are overweight or living with long-term illnesses that limit their productivity, according to early findings of a 25-year study of people's wellbeing.

Poor health and obesity is costing the economy at least £21.5bn a year and will prove a severe drag on any recovery from the recession, the study suggests.

Workers who are both overweight and have three or more health conditions – more than 10% of the total – are taking over three weeks' sick leave every year.

The findings come ahead of publication, due in October, of an independent review of sickness absence, commissioned by the government. That review is expected to warn that growing numbers of workers are living with long-term conditions and need greater support to do so.

According to the wellbeing study, based on initial telephone interviews with almost 4,000 full-time workers, only 20% are not overweight and have no health conditions, ranging from high blood pressure to cancer. Another 20% have a weight problem but no health conditions. But six in 10 have at least one condition and 16%, almost one in six, have three or more.

This is what is not being discussed in any Canadian election. We do talk about access to more healthcare - but we don't talk about why so many of us are ill and what so many of us being ill means.

It means that our illness and our inability to work will make an economic recovery impossible. As the trends look now, on PEI healthcare and disability costs will far exceed our tax base by the NEXT election. 3 years later it will be more than double that.

This is new. It is new that most of us will enter early middle age really sick and increasingly unable to work.

With a father who died aged 55 and a mother who has been disabled since she was in her 40's I decided last year to take charge of my own health. I did not want to be a burden to my family.

So what about you? What is your health like? Do you think that it is normal to have high blood pressure? To be overweight? To have type 2 diabetes? To have arthritis? Do you think you have no control over whether you will get cancer?

I thought that all of this was normal. But I don't now and nor should you.

Do you think that the system will be there to support you in 10 years time? How can it be? How can we have a health system that costs 2 times our taxes? How can we also pay your pension? Pave the roads? Educate our kids?

It just cannot happen if we think that it is normal that so many of us are ill.

Do you think that medicine will suddenly cure us? They have not so far. What they do is to treat us WHEN we are ill.

Do you have a choice? Of course you do. You can do nothing and you can so put your future and the future of your family in jeopardy. Or you can decide to take charge of your own health and make a contribution to your future and the future of your kids and all our kids.

You can be a kid or a grown up - what is it to be?

Ann Worth has a breadth of experience and knowledge that spans more than 2 decades and covers small business, not for profit organizations and large corporate entities. One area of expertise is export market potential and export readiness. Ann is going to take this expertise and apply it to assessing a small business for export readiness. Her  experience as a business owner in specialty food business brings a practical approach to examinng your own small business operations.

Today just because you are a small company does not mean you cannot be exporting. But what to do? Ann will help you get ready.

The Queen Street Commons is set up to help all the very small businesses on PEI become more successful. The QSC Academy is where you can get advice in all areas of your life business and personal and where you can get connected to others who also seek to know more and who share your interests. For we learn not only from the expert but from each other.

You will find more on the Commons Academy page on our website - check out if we have a topic for you - or if you have an expertise that you think may help others.

This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”

Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.

As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.

The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.

As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”

HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”

Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.

A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s.

To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.

Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.

What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.

This says it all for me

"Also called 'lot-fed' beef, this type of beef is akin to battery chicken and intensive pork farming; the animals don't do much moving around and are usually fed twice a day, so they

gorge themselves when the food is there," Perry writes.

"These cows are sort of athletes on steroids, with the aim to maximise growth so the return is better.

"This can't be good for them (or us)."

Perry, who uses grass-fed beef, wagyu and some specialist, slowly raised (not lot fed) grain-fed beef from Rangers Valley, said that while slow-raised beef was more expensive, there were ways to stay on budget.

"Everybody has a budget and I get that," he said. "But there are ways of dealing with that that can be more about balance. You don't have to eat meat every day."

He said quality meats, as well as fresh fruit and vegetables and quality milk, were becoming harder to find as farming skills were lost.

You can create the market for real meat here and change farming so that farmers can make a living and the land can heal

Hello, I am Origo. I am a 3D printer for ten year olds.

You can draw your very own things in 3Dtin and I’ll build them for you in plastic.

Right now, I am just an idea. I will be as easy to use as an Xbox or Wii. I’ll be as big as three Xbox 360s and as expensive as three Xbox 360s. I will sit on your desk and quietly build your ideas, drawings and dreams.

There are other 3D printers. But none will be as easy to use as I will. None will be as reliable or work as hard for you. I’m not a kit or an industrial machine. I’m not complicated. I’m an appliance, like a toaster or a microwave. Only I’m purple and make your stuff.

You don’t have to be ten to use me, but it helps.  Sure adults are older and can do lots of different things such as drive a car and use a drill. But, adults aren’t really good at imagining things. They’re afraid. Afraid of failing, afraid of not making the perfect thing. They see the world as it is, not as it could be. They see what can’t be done, not what could become. Kids are not afraid. They’ll draw anything and everything. They’ll make whatever it is they feel like. They’ll imagine, dream and create. And that’s what I’ll help you do. You could share me with your brothers, sisters and parents and make together. You could teach them how to make the world as they want it to be. Most of all though, I’m a tool for you.

You can like me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter to follow my path from idea to reality.  The video below shows you what I am all about. This page goes into more detail of how I am being made.

Yes!

Once upon a time… Artur spent a lot of time making 3D printed things. Artur made wind chimes, sample kits, ways how to  get your sketched made steel, titanium tidbits and a new kind of paperclip. 3D printers were complex and expensive machines with low reliability. They were hard to operate. You had to be a  designer to make things, you had to spend a lot of time learning how to 3D print and you had to spend months learning how to 3D model. It was 2010.

It was clear that one day… one day… 3D printing was going to be the technology that would let people make whatever they want to make, on their own terms. But it would take years of gradual improvement for existing 3D printers to become good enough to function in the home. Artur thought, “what would a 3D printer that would work in the home look like? What if we could make it easy enough so that kids could use it? What if it could recycle its own material? What if it was affordable and easy to use? What if it would just work, all the time. What if we could start from scratch and create a true home 3D printer, a 3D printer for kids. If someone wanted to make the “first on the desktop” for every kid in the world, what would that 3D printer look like and how would it work?

Artur began to work on the Origo, the 3D printer that will hopefully answer all those questions eventually.

I loved making model aircraft as a boy. Good old Airfix! My son loves and still loves aged 31 Lego.

Soon kids will be able to think of a toy or a thing and make it themselves.

I'm excited - are you? Hey there is still a boy inside me too.

In Europe, the banks and mining companies bore the brunt of the selloff. Every bank and miner of any size opening lower on Thursday. French banking giant BNP Paribas lost more than 5 per cent, taking the one-week loss to 24 per cent and the 6-month loss to 56 per cent. Italy’s UniCredit shed 3 per cent, for a six-month loss of 64 per cent.

Some people are scared that their banks are bust - what does that mean for their savings and cash on deposit? I think the issue of safety will soon be on all our minds. So what to do? That is what this short post will introduce today.

Look at what is happening to the big European Banks - everyone knows that they are stuffed with assets that have no value. For many of the states in Europe are broke too. We are reaching the point at which the can can no longer be kicked down the field. For all the risk has been focused in the few mega banks. And having mega banks is what we have now.

Ah but we are OK in Canada. Yes we are in much better shape. But the US mega banks are not and we live in an interconnected world. Our banks may not have much exposure to European sovereign debt but we are exposed to the European banks. We have less exposure to the credit woes of the US but we are exposed to US banks.

We cannot isolate ourselves for we are part of a system.

Many are starting to talk about 2 ways out of this. From a policy point of view - to sever again the link between investment banking and banking. I think that this is inevitable but that it will take a long time and will demand a deepening of the crisis to get past all the vested interest that has done so well by leveraging off the banks balance sheets.

The more immediate way out is for us to think about what kind of financial institution is NOT linked to the global markets. The answer is right in front of us - the Credit Unions. They are wonderfully boring. Retail banking should be boring. It should be about mobilizing the community's cash and using it to grow the community.

Now many who run the credit unions want to be like the big boy bankers but the ones who see the truth of how this works could do well for us and for themselves.

70% of business on PEI has fewer than 5 employees. The big banks with all their use of technology no longer have the capacity to either look at the risk of this small but highly personal type of business and nor can they help to make this kind of business do better.

But the Credit Unions have this potential - and it is to conduct banking as it always was done for thousands of years. It is all about gaining a deep personal knowledge of who you are dealing with AND also helping that person to be more successful. It is a very active relationship of mentorship and mutual support.

We would have seen this on a micro level with the old General Store on PEI which to a large extent operated like a mini bank in the community. It was not just about extending credit until the harvest but of acting as the social glue in the community.

I intend to dig in deep into this topic. And and why me? I was a senior investment banker when I left my day job - I was one who then thought that combining investment banking and banking was a good thing! I was responsible for the strategic planning for CIBC and Wood Gundy. So I may be a villain but I do know a bit about how things work - enough to know that they don't and why now. Mea culpa!

•Chicago will vote in September on an ordinance that could make growing and selling produce within city limits much easier, potentially giving new purpose to the city's estimated 14,000 empty lots.

These advances come in the midst of a struggling economy, a changing climate, a global food system in peril, rising food prices, concern over lax food safety, and dwindling resources. For homesteaders, cultivating a corner of the yard or the back deck into a tangle of edible things has become one small way to regain purpose and control in an unpredictable time.

While self-sufficiency was once a necessity on the American frontier, transforming an entire yard into an urban minifarm takes considerable time and effort. Harriet Fasenfest in Portland, Ore., who calls herself a "householder," says the key lies in small, incremental steps.

"People want to live this life as a householder but they don't really know what that involves," says Ms. Fasenfest, author of "A Householder's Guide to the Universe," which offers tips and instructions on everything from creating a garden plan and budget to the alchemy of jammaking.

Beyond endless weeding and battles with slugs and nibbling wildlife, urban farming isn't as easy as deciding to dig up your lawn. Zoning laws can restrict ambitions by ruling against the appearance of "messy" lawns and running farm stands out of the front yards. In Oak Park, Mich., Julie Bass made national headlines in July when she faced jail time for breaking city codes by constructing raised vegetable beds in front of her suburban house. Among the charges: The beds were "not common to a front yard." (The charge was later dropped.) Probably most challenging, however, is the fact that long hours of work can sometimes yield very little in results.

Andrée Collier Zaleska of Jamaica Plain, Mass., is homesteading on 1,000 square feet behind her energy-efficient house. It took her two years to rid the backyard of an invasive, creeping vine. But the effort was worth it. Her garden supports two families during the summer months. Terraced beds in late August were plump with kale, parsnips, cabbage, carrots, pumpkins, and broccoli. A chicken coop at the corner of the yard stood empty – the arrival of its would-be feathered residents halted by Boston zoning laws.

The largest barrier - Zoning laws