The Middle East and North Africa are going through some growing pains. Their populations are getting fed up with the state of things and are demanding change. In the grand scheme of things this is kind of scary.

For the last twenty years we have lived in a world that was run by a big brother. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the US became the one and only power broker. Whether you liked it or not, the world only had one Super Power trying to keep its spheres of influence. There was no too and fro between Russia and the US in the Middle East, Africa or Indo-China. The threat from Cuba fell off the table. The little proxy wars disappeared. Remember Korea, Viet Nam, Israel vs Everyone and Afghanistan 1? It was a suprising period of stability. Sure there are always nut jobs causing problems, but none were a result of the two oldest brothers pushing to see who is best.

Now we have countries that are in the midst of change and most likely will shun the US’s advances. That opens it up to everyone else. In the case of North Africa, you know that the Chinese are going to be in there doing whatever they can to expand their sphere of influence. The European Union will want to explore its options, and the “New” Russia will be eyeing the situation as an oppportunity. The most repulsive contender is Russia, but it will probably win. It has a growing market and the one thing that everybody wants – weapons. The Chinese are behind the eight ball when it comes to throwing top rate weapons at a government in exchange for alliances. Russia still produces some good planes, missles and tanks.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Before you start complaining about the poor job the US did over the last couple decades, think about how great the world will be if Vladimir Putin is galavanting through the pyramids with his shirt off.

Until then, I remain,

A Sour Kraut

The other day I was driving along with one of my children. There was a news story on the radio covering a hospital’s strategy of closing beds and cancelling surgeries to deal with the upcoming spring breaks. Apparently it is a time where enough doctors and patients take a vacation that they can reduce the number of elective procedures that are performed.

Interesting. I find it hard to believe that there are patients out there that decide to take a vacation and prolong their knee replacement. Could it bet that too many surgeons head south? Whatever. One health authority was commenting that these closures and cutbacks were saving the health authority over one million dollars. SAVING! Yup that is what was in the comminique – SAVING!

Suprisingly, my son was paying attention. His question was right on the money – “Don’t they still have to do all those operations?”

“Yup,” I said.

“So, they are not really saving any money.”

“Nope.”

“So, why did they do it?”

He was probably regretting starting this. “Well…, you have to understand that the health care system does not care about health care. Departments and hospitals care about staying within their budget and hopefully placing the burden of care on someone else or some other department. If they were worried about health care they would realize that quick treatment is the best way to “save” money. If you prolong the time from injury to surgery you are actually incurring more costs not less.”

He was intrigued by that. “What do you mean?”

“Its simple. Remember the time you sliced open your leg and we sat in the ER for six hours and finally left? You went to another ER the next morning and were treated there in forty-five minutes.”

“Yeah and they said that if it had gone any longer I could have gotten an infection and they couldn’t stitch it.”

“Right. So because you weren’t treated right away the first time, you ran the risk of it getting worse and we had to buy all of that stuff at the drug store to close it and keep it clean overnight. Quick treatment would have saved money. Now if you look at something like a knee replacement, those take many months to get a date for a surgery. In the meantime the person has to live with constant pain. That means pain killers. Since most people are elderly that need this procedure, that means they are probably on the provincial pharmacare program and those pain killers are being cost shared by the health care system. Lets take a drug cost of twenty dollars a week for 35 weeks. How much is that?”

“Seven hundred dollars.”

“Yes, seven hundred dollars. Now if you are on pain killers because it hurts when you walk, how much activity are you going to do? Not much. So your fitness goes down. Lower fitness means longer and more expensive recovery and physio times.”

“So, they are not saving anything.”

“Just their hides.”

I remain,

A Sour Kraut

I was listening to Mikhail Lennikov on the radio the other day. He said something that sent a chill through me.

In case you are not up on the life of this former Captain in the former Soviet Union’s KGB, he is holed up in the First Lutheran Church in Mission, B.C. He is there, having been granted sanctuary by the church, to avoid his deportation. He has been in Canada since 1997 and was ordered deported back to Russia a few years ago. It is a sad story of a family disrupted and a lack of political will to do the right thing.

What scared me was his comment on Canada. After he left the KGB, he moved from Russia to Japan. He lived and worked there before moving to Canada. He likes Canada because “it reminds him of Russia” and he feels comfortable here.

Reminds him of Russia huh. Wonderful. I hope it is the scenery. It couldn’t possibly be our over-bloated bureaucracies and their hold on power. I hope it is not the similarities between Canada and that world famous Russian work ethic. What if the similarity is the Russian penchant for producing top quality goods like the Lada? Having a good time as a result of the bottle? Low health care wait times? Whatever, it is not a comparison that I ever wanted to hear.

Maybe this should be a wake up call. I don’t hear a lot of countries stating that they want to be like Russia. I am going to assume we are not. If I am wrong – shoot me!

Until then, I remain,

A Sour Kraut

For the first time in years, someone in government is making sense. Canadian provincial governments have been going down the path of “spend more, spend more” when it comes to education. The problem is that in most parts of the country the student population is declining. The money has not gone into the classroom, but rather into salaries and school board administration.

The province of Nova Scotia was the first to float the “sky is falling” balloon and challenged its numerous school boards to find ways to save 22% from their budgets. Since this was analogous to putting the foxes in charge of finding ways to promote the health of chickens, the school boards expectantly produced a media campaign of scary scenarios.

On Friday, the Minister of Education for Nova Scotia, Ramona Jennex, basically called the school boards bluff. She said that the Government would not allow any cuts to teachers or the classroom, before cuts were made at the administration and school board level. Praise Jesus.

She went on to back up her threat with some startling figures:

Administrators and principals that pull in more than $100,000 – ten years ago 16, now 132
Increases in education funding over the last ten years – 40%
Increases in administration costs – 30%
Decreases in enrollment – 30,000 students

Finally, someone putting the blame exactly where it lies – at the feet of the people who are supposed to have your and my childrens best interest at heart.

This is not just a problem in education. This is the same problem with health care. The bureaucracies get bigger, bloated and resistant to anything that may be close to efficiency. All the while they claim that they need more money or else little Janie or Johnny will not be able to read or write or get a simple antibiotic if they poke a rusty nail in their foot.

I can die happy now. Ramona is on the case.

Until then, I remain,

A Sour Kraut.

I heard an interesting thing the other day. A medical professional was saying that obesity was a disease and that people needed to be treated for it not ostracized because of it. He was sure about this. A disease.

Now, it only takes a breif walk through a Walmart to figure out that we are all a lot fatte than we need to be. The reasons are simple. A generation ago a large number of us had physically active jobs. Even office jobs were more active. Remember having to walk to the file cabinet or the Gestetner? Well, no more. The most exercise most people get at the work place these days is the walk from their car to their computer screen.

Couple that with the two car, drive everywhere society and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine that we don’t get enough activity. The other big difference is the proliferation of the food industry. We have more choices of easy, prepared foods than ever before. Be they at the grocery store or the plethora of fast food restaurants that are easily accessible on your way home. A quick perusal of the nutrition information on this stuff shows that you could eat maybe one meal of this stuff and it would do you the whole day. Maybe two.

So, we have people who are eating to much and moving too little. Yet, this is now a disease. Great. That means whenever I put a few pounds, I can get treatment. Yup, I don’t have to take any responsibility at all. It is not my repsonsibilty to take care of myself, I am diseased. What a great thing. I am eagerly awaiting the day that they can tell me that my other shortfalls, short, stupid and ugly, will also be considered a disease and I can get treated for it. Soon I will be tall, handsome and CEO of some multinational.

I always thought a disease was something that invaded the body and cause harm. How can being overweight be a disease? Even if you have a genetic predisposition to weight gain, that is not a disease, that is just something that you have to manage and control. Just like being short, stupid and ugly, you learn how to manage it and fool people.

But, we are a society that doesn’t like to be told that something is our fault. We don’t wnat to take responsibility for out actions, we want it to be someone elses fault, or somethings fault. We like to be the victim, not the responsible person who takes responsibility for their choices.

Compare that attitude to the ones expressed in book on parenting, by Amy Chua. A noted Yale law professor, who was raised by Chinese immigrant parents, she decided to write a book showing the differences between the way that immigrant families raise their children and the way Westerners parent. Needless to say that some of her techniques raise the eyebrows of the typical Canadian or US parent. The Chinese philosophy tends toward “Boot Camp” while the Western way is to coodle and nuture. You can tell that Ms. Chua never really thought that she should be her daughter’s best friend. She was there to push them to be their best, take responsibility for their actions and be the disciplinarian when they failed. She believes that the biggest difference in parenting styles is shown through the development of self esteem. Western parents like to tell their children how great they are. Immigrant families push their children to be their best in school and music, and see the childs self esteem grow through accomplishment. Did the Tiger Mom make mistakes? Sure. We all do. But I kinda like what she is saying. A strict regiment of respect for parents, elders, teachers and self combined with a strong work ethic seems like a better way than children determing what they want to do and when they want to do it. Is it easy. No. According to Ms. Chua it is a constant battle. It is not the easy way to parenting, but it is worth it in the end.

I wonder if immigrant families look at obesity as a disease?

Until then I remain

A Sour Kraut

How would you like to see a fast food commercial where everyone eating the food is grossly obese and has an oxygen tank hooked up to their nose? Better yet it could show a surgeon cutting through layers of fat as they perform a gastric bypass procedure on a person munching some fried chicken. How about a beer commercial that shows a slim blond passed out in the gutter with her teeth rotted out of her mouth? Sounds kind of far fetched for products that are perfectly legal and companies that are allowed to be in business. Doesn’t it? Tell that to the tobacco companies.

Before I go further, let me be clear. I DO NOT THINK SMOKING IS A GOOD IDEA. I BELIEVE THAT PEOPLE WHO DO SMOKE ARE HARMING THEIR HEALTH.

However, cigarettes and tobacco products are perfectly legal in Canada and other countries. Why then do we insist that we ban their promotion and slather their products with explicit pictures of dead people and disgusting health problems? Tobacco isn’t the only thing that is bad for us, yet we seem to think that it is fair to try and pressure tobacco companies to make their product unpalatable. Maybe not their product, but definitely the package.

Here’s a better idea. Ban them all together. Sure. If they are bad then make them illegal. Makes sense. Sure, it does, until you remember how well that worked during prohibition. We don’t have the guts to do it. The governments understand that they do not have a replacement for the tax dollars that tobacco brings in. So, cigarettes stay and we try to feel like the just, by infringing on their ability to operate a legal business freely. Sure, we need to have age limits on the products and all that, but like any business they should be able to promote their product in the best way available.

I know that there are those who talk about the great medical expense that arises from caring for sick smokers, but I have not seen any study or results that say that expense is more than the tax revenue that cigarettes bring in. I have said it before and here we go again, “If there are people stupid enough to smoke and pay taxes into the system that will help pay for my family’s health care or education, than I am more than happy for them to smoke.”

If that is not bad enough, we now have the politically correct movement to penalize people who are following the rule and spirit of the law. In Scandanavia and now some jurisdictions in Canada people are being penalized for coming close to breaking the law. I am talking about the loss of your car for a week if you are pulled over by the police and you blow a reading of .05 on the breathalyzer. The legal limit is .08. Blow .08 or over and you are driving under the influence according to the law. You have broken the law and you should be punished. Seems straightforward enough. If I am driving down the highway, where the safe-design speed is posted as 110kmh and I am doing 120kmh than I should be charged with speeding. If I am doing 105kmh I should not lose my car for a week to teach me a lesson!

Really. The politically correct speak for this when it was introduced, consisted of people saying that they wanted to reinforce responsible drinking. What! You are punishing responsible drinkers. The people who go out to dinner, or a party or have a beer after hockey, that say, “hey, I could drink more, but I need to drive home so I will only have one drink.” Now you can lose your car for DOING THE RIGHT THING! What gives? You either make the law state that any alcohol in your blood is not allowed if you are driving or you leave the punishment at the .08 level. You can’t punish responsible people for being responsible and following the law. Sorry, I stand corrected. You can if you are stupid and want to do the politically correct thing.

Why don’t we have the guts to put in a law that works? One that really attacks the problem of people habitually driving under the influence. The ones with the .016 levels that kill people. The ones that have lost their license and still continue to drive and cause accidents. Those are the people that need to be stopped. Those are the ones that need to be told, that if you get caught, you are going to lose your car, your license and go to jail. No get out of jail free card, no second chance. If people knew that the hammer was going to come down on them at the .08 level, then they would think twice about going over the one or two drink limit. Or they would take a cab.

The tough part is looking in the mirror. Sure, that would be the best law, but we probably all can remember a time when we got behind the wheel when we weren’t supposed to. How can we say something is wrong that we have done ourselves? Easy. You take responsibility for your actions and do the right thing. Not the politically correct and easy thing – THE RIGHT THING.

Until then, I remain,

A Sour Kraut

As I look forward to another year in Canada I get a pit in my stomach. Here we are with one of the best countries in the world and all we can do is keep screwing it up.

The problem is that we always want to take the easiest route. Our companies like to dig it up, catch it, grow it or cut it down. They like to ship it off to somewhere else. They do not like to process it into anything of more value. That is too hard. They just want the quick buck. Our population is the same. We don’t want to work hard, or even excercise. We are not big on saying no to our children or people who have an issue with anything and everything. We are happy trying to be like the Europeans and not like the US. As a result we have a country that is just not quite working anymore.

We like out entitlements. Taking a page out of the FAILING European socialist experiment we have set the bureaucrat as our ideal. Honest. A couple of generations ago the ideal was to be in business for yourself. That was where you could get rewarded for your hard work and intelligence. Then it moved to the banks. I can still hear my grandfather telling be to “…get into the banks. That is where all the big money is made.” Now we hear that you want a “government” job. How wrong is that? How can a country prosper when its citizens are striving to work in the public bureaucracy? I hate to tell you people, the civil service does not do ANYTHING to grow the economy. As its title states, it is a service that is there to manage the funds that the private working stiff keeps having to give it at alarming rates.

A little course in basic economics. A country has to produce stuff. Stuff people want. Remember the barter system. Hundreds of years ago people traded stuff of value. You produced grain and needed meat for your growing family. Fine. Produce enough grain to have some extra after you fed yourself and you could trade that grain for a side of beef. Maybe. You had to have a good quality product and someone else with the beef needed grain, but it usually worked out. Villages and communities specialized production. One family would be known as the wheat people and another would be know as the milk people. Or whatever. Blacksmith, leather worker or mason. To survive you had to be able to produce a good or service of value that you could trade. AND you had to produce it at a level great enough to provide for yourself and trade for enough stuff to survive. This is important. If you didn’t make enough of your stuff to get what you needed you had a trade imbalance. When currencies came into being, this trading became simpler. People no longer had to trade for horseshoes with a balcksmith that wanted wheat ( or whatever it was you had to trade with ) you could now just sell your product to anyone, get the money and go buy what you wanted from the best supplier, or best deal. If you didn’t have enough money from your sales to buy what you needed you either borrowed or died. Neat huh. The borrowing was the trade imbalance. If you had money in the bank after you did all your production and buying and you were still living, that money was a trade surplus. If you were having to borrow to survive you had a trade deficit.

Canada works the same way. We need producers to make stuff that people in the country and worldwide want. These producers are the farmers, small business people, fisherman, lumberjacks, mill workrers, factory workers, miners, computer programers etc. You get the picture. Ever here of anyone striving to be a farmer these days? Or a factory worker? No, how about a miner? Hmmmm… so no one wants to do any of the things that we need to have a prosperous economy. Great.

If you plug a civil servant into the picture you can soon see that they really don’t do much to grow the economy. They suck money in and little comes out. At least not enough to balance. Remember the trade deficit. Voila. In ancient times it is hard to imagine a hard working village farmer walking up to the king’s tax collector and saying “Here, take these chickens and this grain, my family may go hungry, but I REALLY, REALLY need you to take my hard work and give it to the bureaucracy. Really. I’m not kidding. take them.” As ridiculous as that is, that is the state of Canada now.

Sure there are services that the country needs. Defense is a good one. Hard to say you are going to create a unique and prosperous society and then show the world you value it so little that you are not even going to try to defend it. Policing is another one, so is sanitation. We need these services and others. It is not correct to say that they need to produce a value equal to what goes in. They will come at a cost. Where we have gone wrong is giving these operations and positions more power than they deserve. An economy cannot have the positions that do nothing to contribute to its strength setting the benchmark in terms of prestige, wages and benefits. How can a private business suceed when they have to compete with the government bureaucracy in attracting quality employees? They can’t. It drives up their costs, deprives them of quality employees and as a result makes them less productive and competitive.

Many years ago I was doing a study in a mill town. Having lunch with the mayor one day, I mentioned how lucky he was to have such a large stable employer in his rural town. His reply shocked me. He wished the mill had never existed. It was going to be the death of the town and he didn’t know how to stop it. He was much smarter than I and he saw what was happening. The mill provided high paying union jobs. All the children in high school knew that if they played their cards right, they could get a job at the mill. So they didn’t bother to do anything else. Most didn’t even finish high school. Those that did, went off to university and never came back. There was nothing to come back to. Just the mill. Other businesses wouldn’t set up shop, since they didn’t want to have to compete with the limited labour pool coupled with the high wages paid by the mill. Being a lot younger, I didn’t take my lack of understanding personally. I just appreciated the wisdom of someone more experienced. It took twenty years, but that mayor’s predictions came true the day the mill shut down.

Canada is going in the same direction. We have a civil service bureaucracy that is growing larger, sucking more money out of the economy and through growing union contracts, making it harder for private companies to compete in the wage market. What happens when we finally reach the point where this Canadian “mill” has to shut down? Where are all the jobs going to come from? What will our children strive for then? A job hopefully. Any job. By the way, has anyone heard that China’s burgeoning economy is being driven in large part by its bureaucracy? Me neither.

Right now we have a civil service, and I am talking education and medical services here too, that wants more and more. They think they are “entitled” to it. Remember Mr. Dingwall, that paragon of public service greed that stated that he was “entitled to hi entitlements”? Those entitlements were hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance due to him as a result of his being let go early for doing a questionable job. Well people, it is wrong to expect any entitlements when it is the other members of society that are providing them to you. You may like to think that it is money from some magical government vault, but it is money that is coming out of the pocket of every person in this country who is producing something of value. Don’t go into your next union negotiation and tell us that we need to tax “big business” their fair share so that you can be fairly paid. “Big business” is not the enemy. They and their workers are the ones that are getting the short end of the stick. Ask any worker if their standard of living has kept pace with the standard of living experience by bureaucrats in the civil service. When they say it has gotten worse due to increased tax burden, ask them for more so you can get more entitlements. I dare you.

The enemy is not “big business”. The enemy is the bureaucracy. Canada needs to wake up and understand that it is a mill town on the brink of colapse.

Until then, I remain

A Sour Kraut

A very heartfelt goodbye to 2010. Not my favourite year,

January 2010 – shut down a business and started negotiations with creditors.
February – sudden death of a very close friend. I still think of him.
March – having not learned my leasson years ago I decided to once again import products from Asia. With the advent of email and the internet, this venture at least did not require 3:40am calls to “Lucille” in Taipei. Somethings stay the same. While before, shipments were held in customs in Hong Kong, now containers disappear in the ether of ports and ships.
April – the constant pressure from investors to account for their money or products starts to wear thin. Joy of joys, I start to get chest pains and pressure after playing two periods of hockey. Same with runnning.
May – due to natural evolution, I separate from my business partner. My container appears and customs starts to work its magic. I embark on a search for a new employee to help fill my partners vacancy.
June – stats show that through the first two quarters, countrywide, my business’ industry is down a whopping 14%. Locally the numbers are between 35% and 50%. I lose money hand over fist. My container is held indefinitely for a random drug search.
July – the doctors imform me that my body no longer likes the medications that have been working their magic. I am pulled off them to see if things return to an even keel.
August – nothing bad. I finally get in for a heart test. I am allowed to return to my medications. I get worried.
September – it becomes quite apparent that someone is stealing from the business. My father’s health starts to deteriorate.
October – my father passes away. I realize that I have disappointed people who care about me.
November – I lose my belief that I can make things better. Somethings just happen. I can’t change everything. Maybe anything. My decisions, however bad, are ones that I have to live with.
December – some parents conspire against me to have me removed as a coach. The allegations are of verbal abuse and totally false. Nevertheless, I am banned from participating at any level. The appeal is still being heard by the provincial association. Wheels turn slowly. I painfully realize who my real friends are.

The best thing is that 2010 is over. Look out 2011, here I come. Not really. Like I said, I have given up on making the best out of a bad situation. I still belief that Bill Cosby was right. “Things can always get worse!” Just when I thought things could not get worse, they always do.

What am I saying, I am an eternal optomist.

Until then, I remain,

A Sour Kraut.