Category Archives: Lifes Lessons

Economics, Lifes Lessons

Ever Been Blind Sided?

One reduces the risk of being blind-sided with awareness. The problem with awareness is that we are lacking it due to the imposition and acquiescence to life’s complexities. Even when one deploys discipline in erecting barriers to special interests, variables outside our control compel us to accommodate for the sake of functional conformity.

So, here we are in the information age where values are being blunted at the edges. Liberties are taken in the name of new culturally perceived norms when in actual fact subconscious minds are at work processing the impact of changing goal posts and impingements upon freedom.

Could there be a “reckoning day” when there’s a return to values in their pure form due to the consequences of such a negative change in behaviour? If so, what would that “reckoning day” look like?  Would it be tripping the circuit breaker of the New York Stock Exchange? Perhaps, it would be the removal of ATMs from banking kiosks? Then there’s the unthinkable but that which is showing up in the news. How about a tax revolt? As we speak, things are so dire in Venzuela that mothers are turning to prostitution in order to feed their kids. A report out today sponsored by Canadian firm MNP espouses that “48% of Canadians are on the brink of insolvency”. That’ right. Supposedly, first world country Canada has financially impaired citizens almost as its majority.

Perhaps it’s time to take the blinders off and examine what is actually happening behind the scenes in the offices of your elected officials, board rooms of banking executives, and line ups in corridors of corporate, environmental, and indigenous lobby groups. Perhaps, it’s time to reflect on the line item detail of government Balance Sheets and the injustice of untried tax evasion of elite cheats with offshore accounts. How about regulatory measures of our fractional reserve banking system in the context of spiralling public debt out of control with no apparent plan to pay back? Did you know that our tax system is over 3,000 pages of fine print?

John Titus has exclaimed that when the money supply retracted thirty per cent from 1929 to 1933, there were hundreds of U.S. financial institutions in play regurgitating financial paper. Right now in the U.S. Citigroup, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America basically represent those hundreds from the early thirties. These four banks are interconnected with derivative positions and they really are too big to fail in the context of what the effect would mean. When there’s deceit inherent within levers of power, there are strong winds ahead.          

Lifes Lessons

Complexity Theory And Airplane Automation

Does the human mind have limitations when confronted with multiple variables presented during short time windows requiring a life and death decision? I took a course in third year university called “Human Performance” and in the course we pondered the question of “reaction time”. It was postulated by our professor that when a football team was confronted with a “third and one” (American rules) scenario that the offensive team should be guaranteed a first down because of their advantage of snap count cognition. However; any fan of the game has witnessed the defence putting on the stop. After all, a quarter back sneak requires execution after the snap.

Airplanes now have all this automation which is predicated on electronic data flow. In fact, some of the data flow is initiated from conditions exterior to the fuselage. Ice pellets, rain, snow, wind, lightning and thunder are all conditions which airplanes may encounter and hence require the pilot whether automated or not to interpolate. But wait…shouldn’t these automated systems adjust for the conditions? Hasn’t every imaginable metric been created to account for weather events which have now been deployed within electrical circuit boards and decision switches?  Has it not been established that auto pilots can now drive the plane from just after take-off to just before landing? Does a pilot dare interfere with the scientific deployment of automation when his / her instinct has been aroused? Has the human mind been compromised through excessive deployment of automation in an environment which carries living souls through the air in a cargo machine?

Lifes Lessons, Politics

The Feeling of Corruption in Canada

Your Attorney General of Canada claims that your Prime Minister placed undue influence on her with respect to a prosecutorial decision in lieu of criminal evidence. In my mind this amounts to “obstruction of justice” subject to the penal code. It’s apparent that Justin Trudeau was motivated politically to save an engineering firm, namely SNC Lavalin, from consequences arising from their apparent conduct. The firm is based in Quebec. Trudeau is a Quebecer. It’s postulated that pensions would be saved by interfering with the prosecution of the firm and somehow that would philanthropically justify such immunity. I suppose Canadians are now expected by our Prime Minister to rationalize the penal code depending on circumstances of a person, or a company? This in my opinion makes our country’s leader unfit to lead. Now that he has cast away Jody Wilson-Raybould from her post as Attorney General in lieu of her steadfast integrity, the next incumbent will be faced with an office stained of its independence. Canadians are asking whether our justice system is now not only pitiful in its timely and cost effective execution but also lacking in credibility. If our Prime Minister is not ousted from office in the short term, I will be asking whether Canada is any better than corrupt Venezuela. 

Politics, Lifes Lessons, Personal Development

All This Hatred

I woke up this morning to a USA Today headline “The man is pathetic”: Giuliani attacks Cohen. My gut tells me that those spewing such vitriolic comments likely have ethical dilemmas themselves which brew underneath a bravado like facade.  This seems to be the new normal in politics. In an era past when differences of opinion could be debated with intelligence and unwritten rules of conduct, it’s now all out unfiltered attack based on emotionally planted self centred ego driven applause seeking irrationality.

It’s quite obvious to the bystander that Trump’s ex lawyer Cohen succumbed to heat applied by Trump during tenuous transactions arising from Trump’s business and personal conduct. In the remote chance you haven’t been witnessing Trump’s bully like conduct and visceral need to react intensely to any slight against him through his twitter account, never mind his propensity to litigate contractors in business, you can easily formulate through a “paint by numbers” like puzzle that this seems to be a man who takes every occasion to wield financial power regardless of ethical implications. Now, he is facing the music as he deserves. I had actually seen enough simply through his conduct in the election campaign that this was a man unfit for office. In spite of nepotism rules, Trump somehow determined that his daughter and son in law despite their youth and inexperience in governmental affairs would be apt “Advisers to the President”. I actually believe the man has some merit and humanity behind his veil which has unfortunately been voided by aberration.  

I suggest that Mr. Giuliani’s propensity to defend thePresident has more to do with his own need to have his ego stroked than anymisplaced loyalty. There are men who reach their twilight years and still donot discover the means to bypass this ego laden short circuitingmechanism. 

Upon posting, I thought this might go in my blog categorization of “personal development”.  Wink.

Economics, Lifes Lessons

Twenty-Five Per Cent of Canadians Say They Face Economic Hardship

This is what an Angus Reid poll has concluded from a sampling of 2,542 Canadian adults. I’m not surprised and below I make some attributions for the troubling statistic:

1.       Trade school not seriously introduced to 16 and 17 year olds in our           system of education

2.       Liberal culture unsupportive of propelling the individual toward                 entrepreneurship

3.       Propensity to defer responsibility

4.       Proliferation of employment agencies and head hunters buffering             effect of take home pay

5.       Opportunity cost associated with young adults pampered at home             by their parents

6.       Inconvenient and costly legal system incapable of expeditiously                 handling contract disputes

7.       Poor partnering of industry and education system

8.       Absent household budgeting / undisciplined allocation of after tax             dollars

9.       Psychological compulsion to showcase lifestyle undeserving of                   income

10.   Employer payroll costs effect on tempering wages