We're All Getting Poorer - But Corporations Are Doing Just Fine

In a recent The Atlantic Magazine, they show two graphs about how well Corporate America has fared over the last several years. This would be in stark contrast to how "Average Joe" would have fared during the same period. Take a look:

This one shows Corporate Profits as a whole. Highest it's ever been.

Even as a percentage of GDP, Corporate Profits are higher than since Eisenhower. I wonder why this is???

Gabby Giffords, Aurora, and The Human Condition

I think maybe the USA is just an ongoing, democratic (sort of) version of the human experience. We do nothing until there is no other choice.


I'm thinking about: 

• running out of oil
• alternative energy
• global weather
• the worldwide debt crisis
• the worldwide banking scandal
• realistic gun control

Regardless of where you live, it appears as though we're wired to try and find the "easy way out" of any situation. Nobody wants to admit the difficult truth, confront it, and do something about it.

In our personal lives, when was the last time you saw a person do "the right thing" unless that was their only choice?

Probably after every easier (wrong) choice had been made.

As a species, we're really not very evolved...

Schadenfreude

There's a German word, "schadenfreude" about taking pleasure at the misfortune of others. To help you understand it better, I'll use it in a sentence:

"I take particular schadenfruede watching Enbridge twist in the wind....."

OTTAWA — Enbridge officials made a mounting public relations disaster worse this week by not immediately accepting blame in their official statement issued after an outspoken American regulator compared one of Canada’s energy giants to the “Keystone Kops,” public relations consultants say. 

U.S. National Transportation Safety Board chairman Debbie Hersman’s scathing assessment of Enbridge’s 2010 oil spill in Michigan has also raised questions over whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper needs to distance his government from Enbridge’s proposed $5.5-billion oilsands pipeline project to the B.C. coast from Alberta.
In his initial formal response, Enbridge’s Pat Daniel said that company personnel “were trying to do the right thing” during the leak from a cracked pipeline but encountered “a series of unfortunate events and circumstances [that] resulted in an outcome no one wanted.” 

There was no apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing in the news release, though a company official said Daniel apologized when speaking to reporters in Washington, D.C., after the safety board’s report was released.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/business/Enbridge+brand+repaired+analysts/6931281/story.html#ixzz20iDZhgdu

Big Oil and EnviroNazis

Vineet Radhakrishnan via Compfight

 I have to admit that this post is aimed squarely at my uncle in Calgary (you know who you are) and his general disagreement with my "EnviroNazi" stance on oil shipping through BC enroute to anywhere else (China?).

Although members of my not-so-immediate family (OK - cousin) are employed by Enbridge, I took particular pleasure in the recent sport of Big-Oil-Bashing that's been going on in BC. Despite the best efforts of our Federal Goverment to push through the Northern Gateway project, I think it just might be political dynamite for whoever touches it Provincially.

This week, two influential pieces in the BC media (actually, one has hit the international media) target the potential damage that could be done by an oil spill (tanker or pipeline) here in BC:

1. A Wilderness Committee (that ought to be unbiased, says the EnviroNazi) report on the affects of an oil spill on Stanley Park
2. The comments of our normally "sit on the fence and scared for her political life" premiere about Enbridge specifically.

So the net-net is, despite my earlier assurances that BetaMax would triumph over VHS, I believe that maybe this time the environment will trump big business. And our kids and grandkids will thank us for behaving like grown-ups for a change....

The News - Or Lack Thereof

This will be another rant. It's been building for a while, so with the Libor news, it's reached a boiling point.

The reason the recent Libor scandal was the tipping point for me is that, unless you actually went looking, you would barely hear a mention of this on our TV news. Who reading this knows what Libor is? If you don't - go find out.

It's likely larger than the financial meltdown of 2008, but it's a little bit difficult to understand. We would rather watch "Trending Now" on the local station and see what Joe Butthole says about Katie Perry on Twitter.

This isn't news!

Why is it that "news" programs pander to us and we reward them by watching? Every network is the same - from Global to CBC to MSNBC to CNN. And god forbid we talk about Fox.

I watched the first three episodes of Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" over the weekend, where he ponders a network news program that, for an hour each day, actually delivers the news. Facts, not innuendo or a left/right angle, and no social media nonsense. Quite the indictment of what we're spoon fed today. If we would actually reward real news programs by watching them, networks might just do it. But they're too afraid to try, so we'll never know.

The closest I've found for real news today is Al Jazeera. It's staggering to go back and forth from CNN to them and see the difference. One is talking about Mitt Romney's Jet Ski, and the other is talking about the possible poisoning/assassination of Yassar Arafat. Guess which one.

I suspect that the BBC News could also be a good choice, but they've shut down their web feed here in Canada, so the only way to get it is via your local cable TV company. If anyone has it, and finds that it's a whole lot better than the trash we get now, send me a note.

So here's a suggestion - reward your local news (and national/international news) by not watching it. Get your information on-line from a trusted, non-biased source (there are some of them out there). This way, you can consume it when you want, and read interesting things to the depth you're comfortable.

It won't be like the baby food you're getting now, but I bet it'll be a lot more satisfying.

PS: Cap yourself at a half-hour a day on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Your brain is a valuable thing to destroy.

An Average Day - And More Anecdotal Evidence

Ina Todoran via Compfight

I had a conversation with a good friend yesterday about diet.

She has had to adopt a very-high-fat diet over the last twelve weeks because of an intense medical treatment she is on.

A big part of her treatment is a drug that must be consumed with 20g of fat. She had to take this particular medication three times a day (7:00AM, 3:00PM and 11:00PM). Finding 20g of fat in one place that she could tolerate was hard. About the only thing she could keep down was a smoothie she had every day (sometimes three times a day), or a cracker loaded down with butter.

She also had to take other medication with food at various different times during the day (Noon and 7:00PM).  The medication taken at this time also needed food intake but did not require high fat servings.  She consumed these pills with such items as salad or meat. During this treatment she could ot tolerate any type of bread at all.

Anecdotally, In the past 4 months since she's been on this calorie rich, fat rich, carbohydrate poor diet she's lost about 20lbs from her pre-treatment weight, and 30lbs from her highest weight at the beginning of the course of drug therapy - when she could stomach a greater variety of food.

This led me to yet another high-fat/low-carb story I've heard (first hand) about losing weight - without ever intending to lose weight. It is an incidental side effect of this whole high-fat process.

I'm now doubly convinced that everything we've been told about how to lose weight is wrong. Neither my friend nor I can exercise at this point, so burning all those excess calories isn't an option (as all the weight loss people would have you believe).

I'm now down to my high school weight of 148lbs. I seem to be quite steady.

Just for kicks, I wrote down everything I would eat in a typical day:

The surprising thing is the total number of calories consumed is about right for a man my size (almost 2000), and the amount of fat that  used  to make me cringe (133g - are you kidding!!). I'd like to get the sugar/carbs down even lower, but most sources are consumed with lots of fat as well, so the insulin load (the whole reason I'm doing this) is blunted - so I'm not too worried about it.

So take this to your dietician and ask him/her to explain. Either you don't exercise enough, eat too many calories,  or their whole idea of what makes you fat is wrong.