Although this is barely sarcasm, there is almost no difference between the “cheese” and the wrapper, except one has been made to be able to swallow and the other, not. With all the recent exposure due to the recall, I understand that food manufacturing and processing involves risks and human error, so that is the least of the problem, or so I think.

The elephant in the room is this: what is it going to take for folks to stop relying on the most convenience in terms of what they put into their bodies? People still buy this fake food, en masse. With so many easy, still-convenient choices for real cheese at bargain or decent prices, why do people reach for the worst of the bunch?

It is because Kraft sliced “cheese,” individually wrapped, is what they know and what they are used to buying. To purchase anything else, for much of the masses, would require some original thought, a new choice, a step out of the comfort zone. Food choice should never be confined within a comfort zone because we live in times where technology, ingenuity, and entrepreneurial freedom are rapidly evolving and allowing all of us – rich, poor, and the middle class – to have more and better choices.

Folks have asked me, “Karen, how is Kraft not cheese?” To them, the ingredients look “normal” for cheese. But really? Look at the photo of the Kraft package (I dare not call it cheese) in the article. It clearly says “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product.” It does not say “Cheese.” It is an industrial, processed cheese that does not “qualify” to be cheese because FDA regulations forbid this product to be called as such due to the too-low cheese content. Have you ever looked at the color of this product? Might that have been a hint?

As long as Big Food keeps selling convenience, individually wrapped and all, the medical-pharmaceutical complex is well-placed to keep people semi-comatose and alive until their 80s and beyond, with quality of life not ever being an issue.

The Obama economy has sent healthcare insurance prices skyrocketing, decimated our military preparedness through massive spending slashes, and with 50 million Americans now on the federal food stamp (SNAP) program we’re at a post-Depression era high. America now has record numbers of children living in poverty and Americans living at or beneath the poverty line. Obama has broadened the income inequality gap, and month-after-month the Obama economy breaks its OWN previous month’s record for workforce participation lows.

As is customary for this administration, news which may shine a less-than-positive light on the president’s performance is released on Fridays (which is to say that virtually all economic data is released by this administration on Fridays) so the news hits the headlines over the weekend while Americans are distracted, thus softening the lousy news’ impact. Friday August 7th, was no exception.

The BLS reported that 93,770,000 people (16 and older) were neither employed last month nor had made specific efforts to find work the prior four weeks. The number of people outside the workforce in July increased 144,000 over the previous record. That would beat June’s record of 93,626,000. June eclipsed the previous record. That would be May’s record when 93,194,000 were not in the workforce. Get the picture? Things are going in the wrong direction.

The number of Americans not in the workforce hit the high water mark of 90-million in July 2013 and has continued to rise ever since. With 50 million on food stamps, tens of millions more receiving other forms of means-tested welfare and record low numbers paying into the federal income tax system, the old adage of “more people riding in the cart than are pulling it” comes to mind.

I’m a little tired of pulling. But until we get more people paying attention to the substance than the flash, we have little chance of turning this nation around.

Rivlin welcomed the ambassador, who took up his post in July, and told him of his hopes in using Quarrey’s diplomatic experience for confidence-building measures in the region. “During your term here, we will celebrate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, which perhaps marks the beginning of the diplomatic relations between Israel and Britain,” Rivlin told Quarrey referring to the November 1917 document in which the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary at the time, Arthur James Balfour, stated his government’s support for establishing a national homeland for Jews in Palestine.

Rivlin issued an informal invite for the British monarch to come to Israel. “I want to also convey my warmest regards to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and extend to her an invitation to visit our region,” he said.

Together with Henriquez, Quarrey took time to visit the Jerusalem Open House and meet with gay Israeli youths.

The ambassador, who has worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for two decades, previously served as the prime minister’s private secretary and was director for foreign policy at the National Security Secretariat. He has also served overseas at the UK Mission to the United Nations in New York, in India and in Zimbabwe.

However, in a sign of continued dissent among the ranks of Europe's creditor nations, both Germany and Slovakia stood firm on the tough conditions Athens must accept as its price to stay in the eurozone. Mr Fico added that he "wholeheartedly" supported German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble's proposal for a "temporary" eurozone exit for Greece during eleventh hour summit talks in July.

"There are no rules in the EU over a euro exit... But that does not mean however, that you can not create the rules. The proposal with a fixed-term euro exit has advantages. I support the agreement reached for Greece, but we will be watching very closely what is happening now. We are nervous."

Ralph Brinkhaus, deputy parliamentary floor leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, said a deal continued to be met with scepticism from Germany. "There are a lot of questions that remain open," he told German radio on Monday, adding that Europe's largest economy would prefer to give Greece a second bridging loan if the parties failed to reach a deal before Athens is due to repay the ECB. “That’s better any day than forcing a bad agreement to get it done quickly,” he said.

His country speaks Greek, has at various times in its history actively sought enosis (political union with Greece) and each year pledges ersatz fealty to Athens by awarding a full douze points to Greece in the Eurovision Song Contest (regardless of how dire the dirge). But the Mediterranean island also has fresh memories of the damage a far-Left government can wreak on an economy, is in the middle of its own bail-out programme and is straining to implement the Troika’s memorandum of understanding to the letter.

This tension was regularly apparent: Cyprus was the only eurozone member state that openly supported debt relief for Greece but Georgiades was also publicly critical of the Greek government’s belief that tax rises should take most of the strain in any austerity plan. And, as Greece makes its slow transition from belligerence to reluctant acquiescence, there is much it can learn from Cyprus – even if the lesson is, like Lawrence Durrell’s description of the island’s lemons, bitter.

Michael Sarris, who was Georgiades’ predecessor as Cypriot finance minister during the 2013 banking crisis, was recently asked what lessons Greece could learn from the Cypriot experience. He said: “You implement as faithfully as you can your agreements, move on, and go easy on the blame game.” To some that will sound like good common sense – the current Cypriot government has taken a pragmatic approach that Athens might do well to adopt. But, to more cynical ears it might sound like the lesson for bailed out countries is to shut up and do what they are told.

Mrs Jackson willed that her estate of around £500,000 should go to several animal charities, and expressly left nothing to her estranged daughter. Indeed, she wrote to her lawyers to say: "I have made it clear to my daughter that she can expect nothing from me when I die." Mrs Jackson's daughter, Mrs Ilott, has five children and does not work. Her husband works only part time and the family relies mainly on state benefits.

She claimed that she had a right to "reasonable provision" under the 1975 Inheritance Act and was awarded £50,000. To my mind, and I think that of some other judges, that was stretching a provision which I understood was to ensure the welfare of young children of the will maker, quite far enough. She wanted more, however, and although the High Court turned her down, the Court of Appeal re-wrote the will and awarded her £164,000.

Over recent years I have become more and more concerned at the rise of what I have called "judicial imperialism", as some judges seem to me to want to enlarge their powers beyond the boundaries set by legislators. It must fall to the Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, to explain to the judiciary that they have embarked on a dangerous path by exceeding their lawful authority. Perhaps he might even encourage a public authority to challenge such a decision as having been taken without the appropriate authority.

Louis Farrakhan made terror threats against white Americans in his recent speech at a Baptist church in Miami, and the silence from Barack Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the media and most conspicuously – black Americans – is deafening. Farrakhan did not make this speech in a mosque. He made it in a Christian church. And the congregation cheered his chilling threats of death against white Americans as if Jesus Christ had come down from heaven.

Farrakhan gave a congregation of angry blacks license to kill white cops and other white people. This is pure evil. And it could start a race war, which I have no doubt is his intention. Whites are not killing blacks in large numbers. In fact, the opposite is true. Blacks are robbing, raping and killing whites at alarming rates. And black-on-black crime is higher than ever in cities like Baltimore, New York City and Chicago.

Farrakhan knows who is really doing the killing. So does Obama and his racist attorney general. So do the media, who routinely magnify instances of white-on-black violence, while masking much more common black-on-white violence. In a sane, just world, Farrakhan would be arrested immediately for making terrorist threats. Yet if he were white – God help him! The “Justice” Department would arrest him so fast, his head would spin. The media would cheer his arrest, and so would the average black American.

In the past, Germany had repeatedly supported Catalan secession. Influential German think tanks are demanding that secession not be obstructed. However, there is opposition rising from within business circles. Catalonia is a central site for German companies in Spain. Engaged in trade throughout Spain, they do not want to see their business possibilities limited to one region and Barcelona's secession from Madrid could possibly prove an obstacle.

According to German government advisors, on the other hand, these problems could be solved. Some economists contend that the EU's currency, the Euro, can, in the long run, only be maintained within a uniform economic area. This would exclude Spain, but include a seceded Catalonia, the strongest economic zone on the Iberian Peninsular.

The central bank cut its daily reference rate by 1.9 percent, triggering the yuan’s biggest one-day drop since China unified official and market exchange rates in January 1994. The People’s Bank of China called the change a one-time adjustment and said it will strengthen the market’s ability to determine the daily fixing.

The devaluation jolted global markets, with the currencies of South Korea, Australia and Singapore falling more than 1 percent amid bets other countries may seek weaker exchange rates to keep exports competitive. China’s move has raised the risk of a “currency war” as export rivals seek a weaker exchange rate to stay competitive, according to Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University and former non-executive chairman for Morgan Stanley in Asia.

“It’s hard to believe this will be a one-off adjustment,” Roach said. “In a weak global economy, it will take a lot more than a 1.9 percent devaluation to jump-start sagging Chinese exports. That raises the distinct possibility of a new and increasingly destabilizing skirmish in the ever-widening global currency war. The race to the bottom just became a good deal more treacherous.”