Some of them are dieting, so they are depriving themselves.  Tsk!  So sad.

Some of them say that they simply don’t like chocolate. I believe that they mean what they say… I just don’t believe that they’re actually from this planet.  Never mind that I want to carefully edge away from them and call the immigration authorities… I usually manage to quell that reaction.

Time was, when I talked about chocolate, I had to specify “real chocolate”, not that adulterated stuff - like milk ‘chocolate’, white ‘chocolate’ and other unholy confections.  More recently, though, it’s become commonplace for people to assume that I mean THE REAL THING, namely smooth, dark chocolate, high in cocoa content.

There’s an explosion of connoisseur chocolate. All the brands that used to cater to the kiddy-kandy crowd (like Nestle (in the US… Nestle elsewhere always knew what real chocolate was), Hershey, and others) have added “premium” lines of dark, rich chocolate, and some of them are not half bad.

After sampling many kinds, I seem to have settled on Lindt Excellence 70% Cacao bars. They recently went up to $3.29 per 100g bar at my local Wal-Mart, then dropped back to $2.97 before Christmas (2008). My local supermarkets and drugstores have jacked it up to prices in the $3.79 range, and didn’t drop ‘em for the Christmas period.

You might have just decided that my tastes are hopelessly plebeian, but I’m unrepentant. If it means that I can be content with a fix that is still within my means, I regard it as a good thing.

On the other hand, I recently came to the conclusion that I should throw away chocolate.

Yes, yes, I heard some gasps of horror there.  Obviously, if I’ve sampled some that’s not to my liking, but haven’t handled the remainder too badly (which means my fingers never touched…) then I’ll give it away to any taker. Otherwise, into the garbage.

What!!??!!

Well no. It’s not quite what you think.

You see, being /i/n/s/a/n/e/l/y/ … er… insatiably curious, I keep trying different brands and … um… models(?) as they come to my attention.

Many of them are rather decent - unlike a lot that used to appear on the shelves, pretending to be strong dark chocolate, when in fact they were chocolate-colored crayons. Yes, I’m sure that many of those eastern-European and Middle-Eastern brands were more wax than chocolate. But things have definitely been picking up as chocolate fanatics have bribed food scientists to publish claims about chocolate being (not just good, but) good FOR you.  All the producers who want to stay in the game have now had to UP their game - in many cases, quite a lot.

It turns out that I like both the German-Swiss style and the particular blend of beans that Lindt has used to create my favorite chocolate. After many samples of their expanded Excellence offerings, where they feature the chocolate of Peru, of Madagascar, of Cuba(?), etc., it turns out that those others - while quite good - just don’t do it for me the way the original recipe does.

Branching out, it seems that I rather like some better examples of the Dutch process, but that I mostly just don’t appreciate the French process (which is also, apparently, embraced by Hershey on my side of the pond).   Nestle?  They’re Swiss, aren’t they? Not sure why I don’t like their effort as much as the Lindt classic Excellence 70% - perhaps it’s that they are Suisse (French-Swiss) and have been tainted by the French process?  Dunno.

It’s not _bad_ really, and I won’t turn up my nose at a sample. It’s just that there’s a certain underlying … er… ah… sourness to that style. That’s probably not accurate, but I can’t think of a better descriptive term just now, so there it is.

On the other hand, many people appear to like, and even prefer, the Hershey and French versions of good dark chocolate, and that’s not a bad thing. One benefit is that those other styles take some of the pressure off my favorite, and help keep its price from going through the roof.

On the down side, any increased demand for any style of chocolate puts more demand on cocoa producers (not to be confused with coca). So the prices are still being pushed up.

So, let’s say that I’ve opened a new chocolate-bar wrapper and found that the content is good-but-not-great. Why would I throw the rest away? Why not just enjoy the almost-greatness of it? Any chocolate is better than no chocolate, right?  Yes, but I’m also fat.

I’m fat, and I don’t want to give up my chocolate. Yet I want to prevent growing more fat and even, gawd help me, grow less fat.  So, I’ve decided to not waste the calorie intake on anything less than the best.  That simple.

The better it is, the more satisfying it is. The more satisfying it is, the less I can allow myself and still achieve some semblance of… well… satisfaction.  Yes?

Also, the dark stuff doesn’t disrupt my blood-sugar level the way other dessert-ish things do (and gawd knows I love my desserts - ref. the waistline for confirmation of that).  The cookies and pie can go and, as long as I can still have some dark chocolate, life is still worth living.    Ahem.  Don’t press too hard to find out how much (or little) I might be exaggerating there.

Back to the styles of chocolate, for a moment:  I wish that somebody would undertake to sample and classify all the widely available kinds of dark chocolate and sort them according to the major styles to which they seem to conform, as well as according to the major source of their cocoa.  You know, tabulated, ranked.  Sorta like the Tom’s Hardware or the Help Authoring Tool Matrix of chocolate sites.

Monee Kidd’s Chocolate FAQ is interesting as a summary, though a bit dated.

If you want to adulterate your chocolate, with fillings and such… don’t bother. Buy ‘em ready-made from Leonidas. If you can get them relatively fresh where you live, you can exchange a few dollars for a little bit of heaven. Unfortunately, they can’t be saved. As soon as they lose freshness, they become rather ordinary.  That’s the price of using the bestest (yeah, I know it’s not a real word), freshest ingredients.  Oh, but their site uses Flash. Oh well… can’t all be perfect. 

I tried Cowgirl Chocolates a few years ago, and quite enjoyed several of their spicy products. Time to place another order!

Y’know what I’d really like to find?  I’d really like to find a source for good-quality LIME-creams covered in good dark chocolate.

Apparently, I’m drastically in the minority on this one.   Many confectioners offer assortments of filled chocolate candies, often including fruit creams, fruit jellies, or even real-fruit (or fruit-rind) bits in chocolate. But how often have you ever encountered LIME in the mix?    I think I’ve hit a lime-centered chocolate perhaps twice in my entire life.

When I was a kid, I liked the _green_ LifeSavers (back when they were lime-ish). I was disappointed when most jelly-beans (back before the million flavors of Jelly Bellies) that were green turned out to be mint or that gawd-awful early attempt at (gag) green apple pseudo-flavor.  But as I left childhood behind, and dropped such sins as milk-chocolate candy bars, in favor of dark chocolate, chocolate truffles, and chocolate pralines, I’ve really, really missed any opportunity to enjoy a combination of two of my favorite flavors.

There was a rumor on the web about a lime-flavored ball of chocolate wedges, similar to the Terry’s Orange (which I sorta like), but I’ve been unable to track down the lime ones. They were a different brand, and only seasonal. Apparently not the Christmas season, because it’s the past month or so that I’ve been looking. Maybe they were too much like the Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Terry took ‘em to court.  Dunno. I just know that not finding the product (after seeing a couple of references - from previous years) was disappointing.

What I’d _really_ like though, is for some producer on the order of Leonidas or perhaps Ghirardelli to start selling high-quality lime creams in dark chocolate.

This’d be one of those times where it’s not as much fun to be against the flow. Contrarianism can have its drawbacks. 

Well, back to the hunt.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2009

PREAMBLE

Some of you don’t sweat, and you never smell bad. Go away.

The rest of us emit body odor to a lesser or greater degree. Actually, most of what we emit through our pores is odorless. Even the sweat in our armpits is odorless when it first appears. The odor is bacteria shit. Bacteria are everywhere, including in your pits.

They live there because it’s a warm, comfy, moist place with lotsa food. They dine on the constituents of your sweat, particularly pit-sweat, which is special. Then they excrete. It’s what they excrete that smells bad.

You can disturb them mightily with good ole soap-and-water. It ruins their day… or part of their day. Then they regroup, chow down, and stink. In other words, your morning shower removes the smell and gives the little smell-makers a hard time, by removing many of them and much of what they’d eat if they came back. But come back, they do.

With a few exceptions, some of whom are from other planets, we all perspire. Constantly. Much of the time, it’s “insensible” perspiration. That doesn’t mean it’s stupid; it means that it occurs so slowly and in such minute quantity that we can’t feel it. It’s gone before it can accumulate. However, anything that makes us warmer - either the ambient temperature is high, or we are exerting ourselves and generating body-heat - causes perspiration production to increase. Also, enclosed spaces like armpits tend to be warmer and to have little air circulation compared to more exposed surfaces of the body.

The increased perspiration hits the drier air and evaporates, meaning that it goes from the liquid phase of water to the gaseous phase of water. The phase change soaks up some heat, which helps to cool our bodies, which is why we sweat in the first place. Er, I mean, perspire. For you folks in Texas and many other places, that’s pretty much the way a common “swamp”-style air conditioner works - not as effective as compressor-and-refrigerant air conditioners, but better than nothing and doesn’t require much energy.

But, back to sweating … er… I mean, perspiring… It works, unless it doesn’t. Reasons why perspiration doesn’t make us cool might be:

- the local temp is just too darn warm, and the little bit of cooling we get from evaporation is just overwhelmed - or, after a while, we run out of water to exude [heat stroke] and stop perspiring (if that happens, you have problems far worse than a bit of body odor — what are you doing reading a blog?? drink! get help!!)

- we are working just too darn hard, and the internally-generated heat is coming faster than a bit of surface evaporation can manage

- the ambient air is already saturated (muggy, humid) and is unable to accept any water from your exudations, so the perspiration - oh hell, let’s just call it sweat at this point - stays on your skin and runs into your boots … and your eyes and your collar and your waistband and… ok we have the picture.

The point is, the more you sweat and the sooner you sweat, the more food you provide for the little pit-dwelling bacteria and the sooner you have bacteria-shit in your pits.

By the way, the sweat glands on most of your body don’t provide any real sustenance to the stink bacteria. The glands in your pits and groin exude some additional chemicals along with the salty water, and those additions are what the bacteria turn into … um…. stink.

DISCLAIMER
I don’t want to turn people into compulsive washing fanatics. Human sweat doesn’t really smell that bad… WHEN IT’S FRESH! Good old fashioned physical labor or exercise gets the juices flowing, and even pit-sweat is not foul initially. The other person’s recently-exercised smell can be part of a sexual/sensual turn-on.
The problem comes when it’s allowed to linger and grow stale. OR, if the source of the sweat is not exertion but fear, anxiety, nervous tension, that can make your pits smell unpleasant in an amazingly short time. More accurately, it gives the pit-dwelling microbes the kind of food that makes their poop smell worse, faster.

You can have some effect on the intensity and flavor of the stink by what you eat, but not that much. Basically, if you are able to reduce your B.O. to almost nothing by becoming a vegan (or some other restricted diet) then you were probably not very stinky in the first place, or you stank for some disease-related reason…. which happens. But we’re addressing most people, here, not you special cases… sorry.

What can add insult to injury is when your clothing causes you to stink faster than you otherwise would have. You might notice that some shirts/tops can go through the laundry, come out smelling fresh, then start to smell funky a couple of minutes after you put them on. Now that’s just cruel. But there’s a reason for it.

DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT

Well, you can control the personal pit-stink by washing, but as we’ve noted, that cleaning can be effective for greater or lesser amounts of time, depending on the weather/climate and on your level of physical activity. Also your health. If you have high blood pressure, you’ll likely sweat more easily and copiously than other people. Fuel for the microbes.

This observation can lead to some obsessive body-washing if you let yourself get carried away. Naturally, the chemical industries have come up with some solutions, for better or for worse.

Some of them start in the shower, with good old masking-stink built into your soap. I don’t know if they started the trend, but “Irish Spring” was certainly an early popularizer of having your suds stink louder than the residual body-stink in your pits. I never favored that approach. If you’ve been really stinky for an extended period, you might come out of a regular shower and still be able to smell your own pits as you towel off. Egad! That’s some persistent stink. It’s right in your skin, and didn’t get washed out by the soap and water. Next time you get back in the shower - which should be right now, if you are about to go on a date or a job interview - try a bit of dish-detergent in the pits. That will often help you to dig out the B.O. molecules that have embedded in the creases of your pit skin. Don’t do it all the time, or you’ll develop a rash.

MASK IT

The first thing that they came up with, centuries ago, before indoor plumbing made bathing so convenient, and one that’s probably still the majority choice is masking. You apply a stink that you believe smells better than your natural aroma (or better than the bacteria-shit that wafts from your sweaty pits). Naturally, such a smell needs to be concentrated.

That solution can work all day on the average not-too-physical workday, though some people who commute via public transit will tell you that such solutions often wear off sooner than their wearers might have hoped.

There’s also the problem that more and more people are getting onto the “I’m sensitive/allergic to scents!” bandwagon. Some of them actually are hypersensitive. The rest… well, I think Baron Münchhausen has many, many descendants, but let’s not go into that. Suffice to say that if you apply a sufficiently strong artificial aroma to yourself, you’ll guarantee that you’re going to offend some people and physically harm some. Apply a lesser, survivable counter-stench, and you’ll do less damage on the bus or elevator, but you might need to re-apply during the day.

CONFINED SPACES

Here’s some free advice on that score. If you are ever invited into a radio studio for an interview or guest spot, arrive clean but without any artificial scents or perfumes. Most DJs, hosts, and other on-air persons spend their working days in tiny cubicles. They really, really, really resent anybody who brings a strong smell into the confined space where they work all day. They might take revenge by asking you embarrassing questions or making you appear foolish and unprepared. Better to arrive stink-free and have the interviewer or host on your side, no?

PREVENT IT (1)

The popular chemical attack, other than the masking stink, is to prevent the sweating. That works for people who don’t sweat much, or people who are completely sedentary. I’m talking about antiperspirants - usually, but not always based on aluminum chlorhydrate or similar compounds - that basically spread alum on the sensitive skin of your pits, in an attempt to close off the pores or discourage the sweat glands in that area. How much aluminum do you want soaking through your skin? If it works for you, and you don’t mind smearing that stuff on your skin, day after day after day… then by all means continue.

PREVENT IT (2)

The smart chemical attack is one that doesn’t bother trying to prevent a natural function (sweating) that’s going to overwhelm a chemical barrier eventually - probably when you can least afford it - and doesn’t try to mask your natural pit-stink with an overpowering artificial odor. Instead, it attempts to neutralize the odor or to neutralize the pit-critters before they generate the odor. The first one that I’ve found that actually works is called MenScience Advanced Deodorant. I’m lucky enough to live in the same city as the bricks-and-mortar locale of the MenEssentials store that carries this stuff, so I can just drive over and pick up a stick. It’s pretty much odorless (at least to my nose), and it keeps my pits pretty much odorless a-a-a-allll day lo-o-o-o-o-o-ong. From a standing start after my morning shower (say 07:30 most mornings) until bed-time, it’s never failed me. Even into the next day, it seems to offer protection until it’s washed off. Wow.

AND, at 17-bucks per stick, it’s roughly half the price of the Armani Emporio (masking stink…. but pleasant and sophisticated masking stink….) that I’d been using for the past few years.

Obviously, if you are the kind of guy who likes to wear a scented aftershave, then either you should wear a matching deodorant, or wear something like the MenScience Advanced that won’t offer a competing scent.

PREVENT IT (3)

Here’s my favorite. Do you exercise? Do you wear any of the new-ish, “high-tech” fabrics that threaten to wick moisture away from your body, and expel it, keeping you dry and comfy? So far, that works for people who don’t sweat much. For either real athletes or copious-sweating semi-to-non-athletes (like me), those miracle Dry-Fit and other fabrics get overwhelmed during the warm-up; never mind the workout.

Am I about to reveal the magic fabric that does the job that those techno-fabrics pretend to do? Nope. As of November 2008, anyway, I’m not aware of any.

But those fabrics do have some value, and coupled with a suitable outer layer, they can channel a fair bit of sweat away from you. Sorta-kinda. They sure as hell beat cotton for that purpose. It’s not for nothing that mountaineers and hiking and other outdoor enthusiasts refer to cotton as “death fabric” - it gets soaked rapidly and then holds that clammy wetness against your skin, chilling you in any but the hottest of weather.

OK fine, but we were talking about stink. What’s the deal? You wear whatever’s /m/o/s/t/ /c/o/m/f/o/r/t/a/b/l/e … er… least uncomfortable for your workout, then you toss it in the laundry and have a shower. Stink is not a big issue. Well… maybe. If you use any of those plastic fabrics, especially any that are based on polypropylene, but some other popular ones as well, then you’ve noticed that they like to stink.

Manufacturers have responded to customers by pre-treating with various chemical compounds. Those wash off. Then your garment stinks. Others have tried embedding silver or copper micro-threads into the fabric, which either kills or discourages the growth of the stink-making microbes. That works to some extent, and it doesn’t irritate most people (though to get it non-irritating, they had to lower the copper or silver content to the point where it doesn’t work very impressively).

Eventually, however, your garment stinks.

Why?

You wash it don’t you? With some pretty harsh detergent stuff, don’t you?

So, why is it that your running shirt can come out of the laundry smelling fresh (by the way, for the sweat-wicking to work properly you should avoid using fabric-softeners on most such fabrics…) but then a few minutes after you put it on - about as long as it takes to get warm and a wee bit humid - it offers up a pungent memory of the way it stank before you threw it in the wash. Eeewwww!

The very hydrophobic nature of some of the fibers keeps the water off/out. If the wash-water can’t get into the fibers of the fabric, then the detergent (that’s dissolved or suspended in that water) doesn’t get in either. The bacteria-shit - or at least, the components that emit the stink - are oil soluble. They cling to every tiny nook and crevice and kink of the plastic fibers, laughing at the warm water and detergent that would otherwise wet the fabric and carry the offending material away. So it stays, embedded.

When next you warm and moisten it by wearing it, you give the current crop of underarm critters a head start toward stink.

So, once the manufacturer’s chemical repellent wears off, your plastic-fiber garments stink.

What to do?

Vinegar.

It’s that simple. When you go to launder your exercise clothes (or your polyester leisure suit), etc., just be sure to add a cup of ordinary white vinegar to the wash water. Works like a charm. It amazed me how effective it was. Cheap, too. Workout clothes that I was ready to toss in the garbage have achieved a new lease on life. Just plain old vinegar. Your Mom probably told you - well, maybe your grandmother - but you forgot, or you took it to be an old wives’ tale. It wasn’t. It works. There’s a good chemical-engineering reason for it (having to do with ion charges and such), but basically, the acid vinegar is just the thing to allow the laundry water and emulsifying agent (soap or detergent) to do a proper job on the oily stench molecules that try to cling to the plastic fibers.

PREVENT IT (4)

Wool.

Yes, wool.

Even for workout clothes.

They make lightweight knits of Merino wool, now, that are delightfully comfy, non-itchy, cool on a summer day, or warm on a winter day. And wool just doesn’t encourage human body odor. People who go on hikes for a week, ten days have been known to bring just one or two wool shirts and other wool garments, and not wash them the whole time….. and still magically not reek (much) when they come back to civilization.

Wool fibers have built-in anti-microbial properties. Even when a wool garment finally starts to stink, a good washing solves the problem.

Ordinary wool is… um… an acquired taste in terms of underwear and garments that touch your skin - even the finest weaves and knits can be a bit scratchy. Merino wool’s long fibers make it supple and gentle on the skin. Luxurious.

Heavier knits, for any weather cooler than a hot summer day, tend to regulate body temp. Even when wet, medium- and heavy-weight wool retains its insulating ability. You can be out in the bush and get dunked, and your wool garments will still keep you warm. Not as warm as they would if you’d had the sense to stay off that thin ice…. but far warmer than anything with cotton in it, and warmer than most artificial fiber garments. Certainly far warmer than wet goose-down. Ahem…

Merino wool. Use it. Love it. Too bad the price will skyrocket when we all start using it.

DID WE MENTION FEET?

Hoo-boy! Some people’s feet stink so badly that they can clear a room by removing a shoe. They can ruin a carpet by just walking barefoot or sockfoot on it.

Once again, that’s bacteria. And fungus. An enclosed shoe with a warm, sweaty foot is the perfect environment for both bacteria and fungi. Along with whatever chemicals are exuded in your foot-sweat, there’s all the epithelial cells that have been sloughed into your shoe and had nowhere else to go. Even open sandals will either trap or soak up stuff that feeds bacteria (and thus feeds stink).

If you must wear shoes, make sure they are leather (not treated for water-proofness) or are ventilated/mesh. Just don’t wear boots indoors if you don’t absolutely have to do so. Most of us work in offices and must wear enclosed footwear. The best thing that you can do for your feet and for your co-workers… and fellow inhabitants of earth, in general… is to wear wool socks.

Yes, for the same reasons mentioned earlier, wear wool. If you are in a physical job that requires workboots, wear workboot WOOL socks… not plastic… not cotton. Cotton socks are ok for athletic pursuits where you can change them every half hour or so. For any situation where you wear the same socks and shoes/boots for several hours, go with wool.

If you wear running shoes, there are some thick, soft, Merino wool “boot” socks intended for hiking boots and sold in outdoor/hunting’n'fishing stores that are off-white or cream colored and only mid-calf height, so they’re pretty-much ok to wear as athletic (or walkin’-around-the-office) socks. They are blissfully comfy. Unlike cotton terry, they retain their lofty, springy nature even after a day of wear. Being Merino wool, they don’t irritate - no pick, no itch.

If you wear leather dress or casual shoes, there are now plenty of thin, fine-knit Merino wool dress socks.

Why? We already went through this for shirts. Natural stink reduction and comfort.

If your feet aren’t bothered by ordinary wool, then you don’t need Merino, which might be more expensive. But you do need wool. Even if you don’t think so, your spouse, your co-workers (or cow-orkers, as the CopyEditors mailing list folks like to call ‘em) and many other people, would beg to differ.

Well, there’s probably lots more to say on the subject, but I can hear you snoring. I can also hear my supper calling me.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2009.

Literally.

We’re going to discuss intestinal function, plumbing (yours), diseases (like diverticulitis, crohn’s, irritable bowel, appendicitis, and even hemorrhoids, also constipation), and I have to mention all this in the first couple of sentences, or the search-engine bots don’t take me seriously.  This is a health-related post, so it should be taken seriously.  I’m smart and well-read and like to share, and I’m going to tell you things you might not know about your butt and what goes on behind/within it. Stuff you need to know, if you are a) human b) alive.

Anyway, about pooping:

There’s a good chance that you’ve been doing it all wrong, ever since you were potty-trained.

Me too.

Doing what wrong?

Pooping. Defecating. Shitting. Crapping. Unloading. Performing bowel movements. Practicing elimination.

And, hurting yourself in the process.

Me too.

There’s an obscure little website out there that I think deserves more attention. The guy behind it seems to be one of those earnest-but-practical sorts. He’s made some connections, figured out that there’s a problem, and figured out a stopgap solution.  You can keep reading this blog-post if you happen to like reading my posts - or if you’ve landed here exhausted, and inertia is keeping you from clicking away - but I think you should visit http://www.naturesplatform.com

The site and the presentation are a little rough around the edges, but I think the guy has a point.

Here’s my take. Human animals are built in such a fashion that we squat to eliminate waste and to give birth. The physical arrangements of our bodies, particularly the plumbing, is conducive to the squatting position.

If you don’t believe it, try crapping while standing erect. Yes, messy, too, but the main point is that your inner plumbing is not aligned when you are erect, so it’s physically difficult to evacuate your lower bowel from a standing position. There are quite practical reasons for this, if you give it only a few seconds of thought, so it’s not surprising that we evolved to dump while squatting. It’s also not surprising that we are well designed to squat when we’re not standing. Aeons passed between the time the first humans appeared, and the time the first chair appeared. So, our ancestors spent much of their working lives and most of their social lives in the squat position. Hunkered down. Huddled. Chatting, pounding maize, sewing hides, making arrows, passing the dope-pipe around the circle… er… did I say that out loud?

Everybody in the world, up until the 19th century, used either latrines or squat plumbing. The exceptions would have been royalty and other rich folk who could afford to have special facilities made for them.  It was only when the ceramic sit-down toilets became cheap and ubiquitous that the majority of people in the western world began to empty their bowels daily from an upright seated position… the “throne”. Naturally, since the British dominated half the world with their Empire, all the third-world people took it into their heads that throne-style/chair-style flush toilets had to be symbols of progress and superiority.

So, we’ve all been folding ourselves to only about 90-degrees, in order to sit-and-dump using our ceramic potties, for a bit over a century. And we’ve been paying for it. But, since the bad effects are slow to occur, we haven’t been making the connection. All this time, we should have been dropping a lot further, and folding ourselves more like 160(plus) degrees in the fully squatted position.

As noted on the www.naturesplatform.com website, the poor half of the world still uses squat toilets and, while they have a lot of health (and other) problems related to their poverty, they don’t have a variety of intestinal and other troubles that plague us “advanced” westerners with our throne-style water closets.

So, I’m saying you should call the nearest plumber or bathroom store and have a hole-in-the-floor squat toilet installed?  Yes, actually, I am.  But good luck with that. You won’t find anyone who carries them as a product, you won’t find a plumber with experience installing them, and you’d probably have an argument with your building-code people if you were silly enough to tell them about your plan.  Then, when you later wanted to sell your house . . . well, good luck again. 

So, if you are actually reading this far, and haven’t already gone away to the Nature’s Platform site, then I’ll let you know that the owner of that site has come up with a little folding platform that converts your regular porcelain throne into a squat toilet.

What he’s giving away is information and opinion, and what he’s selling is convenience… if you believe his information and opinion.  For the most part, I believed what he has to say (I summarized above), and I weighed the inconvenience of constructing my own platform against the convenience and small cost of buying one from Nature’s Platform… and went with convenience.

Yep. I’ve been using a Nature’s Platform for more than a year. It works.

What does it work FOR?  … you ask . . . and rightly so.

For me, it works to cure and prevent hemorrhoids.

Hey, don’t laugh!   That was worth more than the price of admission, right there. It cured that problem in a couple of weeks, and they’ve not been back.

As far as I’m concerned, if the Nature’s Platform claims needed any validation, they got a big boost in my mind, right there.   No, my mind is not in my butt, but when I was afflicted, my mind was certainly ON my butt more than I’d have wanted.

Sure, I felt a little silly setting up a platform around my toilet, and climbing up there. But since I’m unlikely to import a squat toilet fixture from Japan or India, this made all kinds of sense. And it works. So there!

If you’ve got hemorrhoids, diverticulitis, crohn’s disease, chronic appendicitis, or _any_ ailment that could remotely be attributed to - or aggravated by - unnecessary and excessive back-pressure in your internal plumbing, then I suggest that you invest. If you’re a guy or gal who’s handy with the tools, you could make yourself a platform. If you’re more ambitious, you could import and install an in-floor toilet. Or you could just buy a ready-made (some small assembly required — due to shipping — took a couple of minutes from the clear instructions) folding platform from Nature’s Platform.

Try it out.

If you don’t think it’s doing you any good, sell it or give it away.  It ain’t gonna break the bank.

If I had any kids, I’d be insisting that they use the one that I’ve got.

What’s my connection to this product and the site?  I’m a happy customer. If I eventually get my own website going, I’ll see if I can get some kind of click-through affiliate arrangement and maybe make a few bucks. It wouldn’t be much, though. I can’t see that the guy’s making a lot of profit from this product, and the volume is never going to be very high. If you’re even thinking of visiting, having read this far, that puts you in the minority.   For now anyway (January 2009) he’s getting a tiny bit of free advertising from me.

Once again, the only unquestionably true claim for the product is the one about hemorrhoids. I can vouch for that one.  But if you’ve got ‘em, you know that a product that painlessly gets rid of them AND gets rid of the cause (so they never come back) is worth the small cost (and a little bit of embarrassment) right there.

For the rest, well, the other disease/dysfunction associations are extremely plausible for the same functional and hydraulic reasons that the hemorrhoid connection makes sense.  Everything below my stomach works more smoothly than before, but I can’t make any claims about diverticulitis, because I wasn’t diagnosed - came close, at a doctor visit two years ago, but didn’t follow through since having the Nature’s Platform. Or, as I like to call it, my “Squat Rack”.

It spends most of its time, folded, leaning against a wall in my upstairs hall bathroom. It takes just over four seconds to set up, and about the same to take down and put aside, when I’m done.

DRAWBACKS!

The drawbacks that I’ve observed stem mainly from the fact that this is a stopgap measure, for those of us who cannot readily obtain and install a real squat toilet.

1) Splashing.  Because you are squatting on the platform over your open toilet, you are hanging out a bit higher than if your butt was nestled solidly on the regular toilet seat. So when anything falls in, it’s falling from a slightly greater height, and tends to make a slightly greater (higher) splash. It’s a little annoying sometimes. You do clean your toilets regularly and frequently, don’t you? Good. So it’s not that much of a problem.

2) Getting up and down. This thing IS a platform, with its standing-on surface just above the rim of your toilet. You need to be able to step up there, get your feet planted on either side of the opening, and squat down. I have no problem at all with this. But then, even for an overweight 50-something-year-old, I’m fairly agile. Even more important, I’m not wealthy.  :-)  So, my hall washroom is a narrow affair, with barely more than a foot (30cm) to my left, before there’s a wall, and not much more than that to my right, before there’s the edge of my bathtub. This means that I have the (wide) edge of my tub to use as a step-up, and all kinds of supporting surfaces to lean on, if I wobble. So, as I say, I never have any problem at all mounting the platform, using it, and dismounting.  Your situation might be different. If you have a palatial bathroom, your toilet might be quite far from the nearest support. You might need to employ a little step-up stool, to get safely on and off the Platform. If you are even considering this, you are probably an older person who is less impressed by what other people think (so not going to let a little embarrassment deter you), so that’s good, but your balance and agility might not be what they once were (back in your socially conforming and easily embarrassed days).  Yes, youth IS wasted on the young, isn’t it?

WARNING: Nature’s Platform is a sturdy, easy-to-handle affair, but the framework is narrower than the foot platform (where your feet go). This means, that you must be very careful to NEVER place your feet near the outside edges of the platform. It’s OK while you’ve got two feet firmly planted, but if you then _lift_ one foot, to move it, or to attempt to step down, the other foot is now carrying all your weight, outside the supporting framework. This will easily flip the platform and you!  I’ve not had this happen, but I have placed my feet a little wide and noticed the wobble as I shifted my weight preparatory to … um… dismount. So I’m always careful. You wouldn’t kill yourself (he said hopefully - if not helpfully), but you could turn an ankle badly. Just take reasonable care, ok?

So, here’s that URL again. He’ll provide you with more supporting info, as well as the pictures and arrows. My butt is practical and unpretentious, and my butt endorses Nature’s Platform.  It’s well engineered and well constructed. It’ll save you some pain and worse. Think of all the money you’ll save on laxatives. Now go.

http://www.naturesplatform.com

Come back soon. I’ll have more to say about something else.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2009.

Werty derd.

I’ll be talking to the guys, here, about something that’ll affect most, eventually.

Actually, I already talked about it in my other post on sleep and natural-source calming drugs. So, no need for more than a quick summary here, and then get to my observation/recommendation.

If you are really interested in details, then Wikipedia and umpty-twelve medical-stuff sites will be glad to help you. The short form is:

If you are over (say) 45, your prostate gland - a ring-shaped gland with muscles, that encircles your urethra just at the point where it (tries to) exit(s) your bladder - has been soaking up your spare testosterone or dihydrotestosterone and swelling for the past two or three decades. So, it’s been pushing up against your bladder, and it’s been tightening around your urethra (the only pipe by which urine can get from your bladder to the outside world).  Having worked up a good head of steam, so to speak, it’s getting to the point where it’s starting to restrict the old flow. It’s making you feel the need, the need to pee, more often, and more frequently than seems strictly necessary. Can’t make it through the night any more, can you?  Oh? Still can?   Just wait a bit (he said, looking at his watch).

If you are in your twenties, well all that hasn’t happened yet. You’re the young guy in the public washroom, pissing like a firehose, barely repressing a derisive smirk as the middle-aged fart next to you dribbles and spurts, pauses and grunts.  Take note. It’s coming. You can’t feel it yet. It doesn’t give you any warning… not that there’s much of anything you could do, if you knew. Well, you can jack off, or have sex, a lot. Yep, apparently science pokes the Catholic church in the eye, yet again, and masturbation and/or regular sex WHILE YOU ARE YOUNG are good for your prostate health when you get older. Who knew? Apparently, if you work the machinery five times a week when you are young, it doesn’t clog up and doesn’t go cancerous when you get older. Well, at least it becomes significantly less likely. Studies show… really. So, since (statistically) most of us don’t marry young any more, it appears that science is telling you to have pre-marital/extra-marital sex, for your health. But wait. Another study or ten points to an increased incidence of prostate cancer and other problems due to STDs from promiscuous sex. Why can’t these scientists make up their minds, dammit?  Looks like it’s monogamy or your hand, buddy.

Er, sorry about the digression, there. I just wanted the arrogant 22-year-olds to sweat a bit. Now, back to whatever it was we were talking about… uh… OH, right.  Prostate. Benign hypertrophy thereof.

It affects some of us sooner, some of us later, and most of us eventually. There are various medical approaches, all with nasty risks and side-effects, that can be invoked when BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia) gets to its not-very-benign advanced stages. What we’re interested in is dealing with the interim. 

Your medical practitioner will be more than pleased to either:

a) prescribe you all sorts of thoroughly-tested, “targeted” drugs, with lists of known/expected side-effects that threaten your liver, your kidneys, your eyesight, your heart, your balance, your ability to hold down your breakfast, your weight, your IQ… and give you suicidal thoughts.

b) tell you about all the above and suggest that you just not take anything, put up with the symptoms until they become totally unbearable, then get on a waiting list for some of those late-stage surgical interventions.

If it’s not obvious, I actually like that second doctor better, but I don’t like the symptoms. I especially don’t like being one of the poor slobs on the early slope of the ol’ bell curve.  So, I’m keeping my eye peeled for relatively benevolent things that I can take/do, to minimize those symptoms.

By the way, we’re not addressing cancer here. My Dad had that, got the injection of radioactive metal slivers, suffered for several months, and went into remission on his prostate cancer - right on schedule, about the 72-year mark.  Of course, he also was well into the secondary stages of emphysema, by then, and was only saved from a lingering, gasping death by having his lung cancer metastasize to his brain… but I’m digressing again, aren’t I?  The take-away point from this paragraph is that, while it might be connected with BPH - it affects the same machinery, and is driven by many of the same factors - prostate cancer is not just an inconvenience or a pain in the equipment. It kills.  Get your PSA levels tested, and get your doctor to perform the ol’ digital exam.

So, back to discussing the non-cancerous development of the prostate, and what to do about it.

The WWW is chock full of offerings to help alleviate BPH symptoms. I have not tried most of them. Frankly, I’m scared to try some of them.  

Or maybe… I’m just not there yet. 

What I did try was the same one that everybody tries, Saw Palmetto. It sorta worked. A little bit. But right from the start, it bugged me that the ubiquitous herbal treatment that’s touted all over the place was being only minimally effective at the early end of what might turn into 30 years (or more) with a steadily increasing problem.  Oi.

It happens that I was poking around with some other stuff, health-related, a few years previous. Maybe you’ve heard of Dr. Peter D’Adamo and the Eat Right 4 Your Type diet (a.k.a. the Blood-type diet). Now, I don’t for a minute think that he’s got “all the answers”, but it does appear that he’s onto something. The available evidence suggests that there is some foundation to some of his theories and to at least some of his practical advice. So, to make a long story longer, D’Adamo suggests that, for people with blood type O (hi there!) some different herbs might be more effective than Saw Palmetto. Topping the list was. Urtica Dioica, otherwise known as Stinging Nettle, specifically the root.

So, I tried it. It worked, after just a few days. The effect was significantly better than what I’d noticed from taking recommended dosage of Saw Palmetto.  Goody.

So… and you can see this coming… the next thing I did was to combine the two. The combination worked better than either one alone.

What’s even better, I didn’t have to get the Stinging Nettle root from D’Adamo’s company, at inflated prices. Of course, I couldn’t find it at Costco, Wal-Mart, any of my local chain drugstores or supermarkets. Not even the natural-food-and-supplements stores could sell it to me. Was I going to have to dig up my own nettle plants and process the roots? 

Fortunately, an old-fashioned independent pharmacy downtown was willing to find it for me. This is one of those places where they still concoct at least some prescriptions in-house. The nettle root that they found for me is commercial, from www.herbalselect.com in Guelph, Ontario, Canada (just down the highway a few hundred miles).  Woohoo.

There are tons of other sources out there. Probably just about any vendor of the powdered root of the urtica dioica plant is as good as another. Really the ONLY reason I’ve been sticking with this particular one is that it’s the one this local pharmacist chose. Yeah, it could be the producer is run by the pharmacist’s brother-in-law. It could be a lot of things. But these people have given a convincing performance of being both sincere and knowledgeable for the past several years, so I’ll go with what they’ve got. For now.

My theory, unsupported by anything stronger than logical supposition, is that D’Adamo has the right idea here. Saw Palmetto has some effect on BPH symptoms. It has enough that people have been recommending it for years’n'years. The reason it gets so many recommendations and yet didn’t do me as much good as I’d hoped is that it’s more effective for the other half of the male population, those with blood-type A or AB. We type-O types do better with Stinging Nettle root. The blood-type-A folks would likely find that the nettle didn’t do as much for them as it does for type O.  Again, nothing but supposition, there. Maybe, if you are an older guy with BPH and blood type A, you could try urtica dioica root for a while, then try Saw Palmetto for a while, then try a combination for a while, and report in here. 

I’m already here, so I’m not all that interested in participating in actual controlled, double-blind studies, or at least not for longer than six months or so. It would have a bad effect on my health (the constantly interrupted sleep) if I was in the wrong group and had to resume full symptoms for half a year. Selfish bastard, I am.  Seriously, if somebody is organizing a proper study, and it won’t take longer than six months, I’ll volunteer.  More than that, and we’re getting into a significant fraction of my entire remaining time (actuarilly speaking), and I value my comfort.

Ahem.

Well, this is as good a place as any to wrap for today, no?

Come back soon.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 200… nine.  Yeah.  Almost got me there. I started this in 2008, the wife couldn’t stay awake for midnight (and The Hour with George Strombolopoulos (sp?) wasn’t doing it for her), and she went to bed. So did the cats.  So here it is 2009. May it be a good one for you. G’night.   Copyright 2009.    Hah!

It was called Hi Qi Restful Sleep.

You’re sleepin’ OK?   Move along then. Nothin’ to see here.  

Again (if you’ve read my other posts), it’s not a miracle, but my experience is that it helps.

I generally sleep pretty well, for me. I did have to qualify that, though. Y’know that guy thing, when you reach a certain age, and you get up in the middle of the night to pee? Well, I’m that age… and a bit. As any half-decent medical site will be only too happy to tell you, with pictures and arrows, no less, the prostate is an organ that’s important to male sexual and reproductive function. And it’s badly designed. I mean, really.  It’s a donut shaped thingie that encircles the urethra at the very top, right up against the bladder.

Let’s say that again. It’s a thick, fibrous ring of glandular stuff that basically strangles your pee-pipe, right at the source, and that’s at the _best_ of times. It spends the first half of your life producing seminal fluid, so that your sperm have something liquid to ride in, as they head for the exit. (Um, I’m talking to guys here, right?  Setting up the sleep thing. Women can skip a few paragraphs ahead… or keep reading for laughs.)

So, what else does this thing do. Lemme think, here.

Right. It reacts to years of exposure to male hormones by swelling. 

It starts life like a Montreal bagel (a slim, smooth ring) and then turns into one of those fat, overstuffed bready things that some other cities mistakenly think of as ‘bagels’ - the kind that are so puffed that there’s basically no hole in the center.  Got that image firmly in mind?  In youth and early adulthood, your prostate is a ring, and your urethra runs from your bladder through the hole in the center of the ring. Then, you pass 40-something and the damn thing swells and makes the hole tighter. And tighter. And tighter.

And pretty soon, it’s throttling your urethra - the tube by which urine goes from your bladder to the outside world.  Oh, and since it’s really an outgrowth of the urethra and the neck of the bladder, it’s not like it can slide up and down outside the tube. It stays put. It swells. And as it swells, the inside diameter shrinks (see above) and the outside diameter expands.  Where does it expand to? Well up against your bladder, of course. So, it’s putting constant pressure on the bladder, right about the place where the bladder lets you know it’s being stretched by a full load of urine. 

Yes, it makes you feel the urge to pee, more frequently and more urgently than “back in the day”, and then it tries to prevent the passage of urine through the only tube to the outside world. Cruel. If there was a god, I’d blame her/him/it for a cruel joke on all us human males. What’s even more cruel is that a minority of men live a good long life without their prostates ever becoming problematic… but I digress from my digression…

All of that to say that, as guys get older, we generally start feeling the urge halfway through the night. There’s not a tremendous amount you can do about that, but THIS particular post is about what happens after you stumble back to bed. 

You lie there waiting to go back to sleep. 

Usually you do - sleep, I mean - and the next thing you know it’s morning.

Same with the women. Either they’ve got their own reason to wake up, or the hubby climbing out of bed and bumping into things on the way to the bathroom is enough to wake the wife too. Mostly it’s just a half-awake experience, then shut-eye until morning. No big deal for either of you.

But sometimes, the ceiling stays stubbornly in view. Or, you resolutely keep your eyes closed, but the images behind your eyelids are not dreams; rather they’re things you’ve been fretting about. Or worse, they’re meaning-of-life questions, but something about the 03:00 timeframe causes your answers to be bleak and pitiless. So you toss. You turn. You remember your most embarrassing moments, you fret and fume about how little you’ve made of your life, and how much it’s slipped by, already. You admit that your feeling of it being “half over already” is actually optimistic, and you’d have to count on living past 110 for this to be “half-way”.  Argh! And the radio-alarm comes on and you haven’t slept in hours… or worse, you finally fell asleep mere minutes before the alarm sounds, so you are at that point where waking is disorienting, unsatisfying and all-round not a happy experience. And the day is just officially beginning.

Hey! All that from getting up to pee.

It’s _those_ nights that you’d like to be able to simply pop a pill or something and let the fretting subside and let sleep come while you’ve still got hours before sunrise (I’m writing this in December, so four in the morning is still 3-1/2 hours before sun-up).  But pretty-much any pill (or liquid) that you can get from the pharmacy is going to have nasty side-effects. Or it’ll be addictive. Or it’ll work for a while, then need higher, ever-higher doses to keep working.

What you want is calmness. You want anxiety or racing thoughts to subside. You want tense muscles to unclench. You don’t want something to knock you out. If nothing else, you’d be useless in case of some nighttime emergency - like a fire, or the kids getting sick, or whatever. Calm is good. Doped-up, knocked-out is not.

This is where Hi Qi Restful Sleep comes in. 

It’s gentle, reasonably effective, and seemingly lacking in side-effects.

You don’t take it every night. You take it on those nights where you’ve had a rough day, maybe some extra anxiety about the job, or about not making a deadline, or maybe a big scary presentation coming up. Perhaps your house is now worth less than your mortgage. Ouch! Or a close relative (parent? sibling? child?) is due to undergo major surgery. 

Personally, I find that if I take a couple of the “Restful Sleep” capsules plus one of Valerian, I sleep like a baby. I can still awaken to empty my bladder in the middle of the night, but as soon as my head hits the pillow again, I’m back to sleep.  

No grogginess. No adverse effects on my health or mental state the next day. I awaken rested.

In fact, it doesn’t make me drowsy at all. Just calm and _able_ to sleep if/when I’m tired. 

In other words, I can take it during the day if I’m feeling, oh… perhaps… maybe… a little… E D G Y ! 

It doesn’t work as well, for that purpose as another herb I once used, but that other herb, kava-kava, got itself banned in Canada after a few idiots damaged their livers by taking way too much, and our idiot government overreacted. Now they’re too embarrassed to admit their error so they are stupidly and stubbornly clinging to the ban. Well maybe not so stupidly, if the rumors are true that certain government officials were paid by certain pharmaceutical companies to keep the un-patent-able kava-kava off the market. 

Where were we?  Well, if you can get kava-kava root extract (not stems or leaves), and your government doesn’t hassle you about it, then it’s great for occasional day-time anxiety relief (FAR better than a shot of alcohol before you give the best-man speech at your buddy’s wedding, or the deal-of-a-lifetime-clinching presentation in front of the big customer). It’s also just about as good as the product I’m describing (Hi Qi Restful Sleep capsules from PharmEast).  But if you have any problem _getting_ kava-kava, or if you have any undesirable reactions to it, then the Hi Qi caps are the way to go.

From my perspective, neither of these are for taking every day. They’re for occasional use when you need them. If you “need” them every darn day, then you have problems and should be investigating what’s really wrong with you. Almost everybody gets a bit strung out or flustered or stressed or anxious now-and-then. Those are the occasions when I’d take Hi Qi Restful Sleep or a good, reliable (known concentration of kavalactones) kava preparation.

By the way, while Hi Qi Restful Sleep contains some valerian, and valerian by itself is often recommended as a gentle herbal answer to non-specific agitation or tenseness, I find its affects, alone, to be just barely detectable at recommended dosage.  Everybody’s different. I’m reporting what’s worked for me. What’s worked for me is Hi Qi Restful Sleep plus a little extra valerian.

Again, the effect is not as spectacular as that of Holistrol (renamed as Hi Qi Healthy Blood Pressure) that I discuss in another post, but the herbal items that I discuss here are at least in the category of “seem to reliably do what they say they will, without fanfare or hype, and without any side-effects that I’ve noticed”.

Next time, I’ll get onto the third-and-last herbal thingie that I’ve found to be of any use or effectiveness, and it’s related to the story in this post. Stay tuned.

OH yeah.  I am aware that there are some stolid, unimaginative folks who never worry, never have trouble sleeping, are never nervous in tense work or social situations (like unpracticed public speaking). Yes, I know that you exist. I also tell myself that you pay for that stolidity, that placidity, with a lack of imagination and creativity.  I could be wrong, but it comforts me to think that creative people are often wound a little tighter, and that the two go hand-in-hand - a certain dynamic tension is necessary for creativity and imagination.  I don’t intend to be insulting here, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because those folks would not be reading this.

Carry on as though normal.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2008

I’m… um…. past the halfway point (how’s that for a euphemism) and showing some signs of wear and tear. A lot of them, I must simply put up with. Some are dangerous. Most are inconvenient. When I find a product or a service or a method that alleviates the dangerous or the merely inconvenient aspects of getting older, I like to pass them on.

Now, I am not a scientist and never have been (I’m also not a lawyer, but that’s another discussion), but the wanna-bee inside me does respect evidence-based, repeatable, statistically valid claims and assertions. From a scientific perspective, anecdotal “evidence” is not worth the electrons it is printed on (so to speak).

The problem is that not everything that shows signs of possibly being useful is likely to be rigorously investigated and brought to market before I kick the bucket. Or contrarily, if it’s not as good as claimed (or is actively harmful), it’s also not necessarily going to be debunked by good science before I’m past caring. I care right now. Therefore, like many other people, and perhaps foolishly, I pay attention to some of the anecdotal health-related stuff, when it seems to suggest it could do me some good. Besides, the scientific powers-that-be (PTB) are stretched thin enough that they can’t investigate everything, so they pay more attention when things become popular or are shown to have interesting possibilities. Thus, there’s at least some value in pursuing the anecdotally helpful herbal (and other alternative) approaches to this-and-that health concern - whether it turns out to be truly, verifiably, statistically significantly useful, or whether we foolish adopters turn out to be the horrible example that finally convinces other folks that a particular remedy or nostrum was a bad idea.  Ahem.

So, the title of today’s blog entry refers to blood pressure. My wife’s is low, and mine is high. Too bad we can’t just split the difference and both be healthy.  More accurately, mine used to be high.  I’m a tad chubbier than I should be, and that’s no help.

Doctors and others will be glad to inform you that elevated blood pressure - even a little elevated above “normal” - is a bad thing. In my lifetime, “normal” has been redefined a few times… always downward.

Anyway, probably the biggest day-to-day problem with elevated blood pressure is your kidneys. Your kidneys are filters. They filter out byproducts of your metabolism that need to be eliminated. They do it by running blood, under pressure through lots of tiny passages, against selectively permeable membranes. As the word membrane might suggest, these tiny passages and associated bits are delicate. The processes by which your blood is filtered and the unwanted bits end up on the bladder/ureter side requires a certain minimum pressure to work. If your blood pressure is too low, your kidneys can’t function and they shut down. That’s a bad thing.

At the other end of the spectrum, if your blood pressure is too high, the kidneys certainly work, but they are under constant stress. The delicate bits begin to literally fray and shred. When enough of your kidneys have shredded, they stop functioning. That’s a bad thing.

Of course there are other places where it’s not good to have constant over-pressure in the vessels. The eyes are not happy about it, for example, but the classic one is the brain. Too much pressure on the vessels in the brain can cause a blow-out or a leak. Either way, blood getting into brain-spaces where it shouldn’t be (and not getting where it’s expected) - stroke - is a bad thing. My Mom has been missing half her field of vision for at least ten years, from a stroke, and has recently lost a lot more function from several subsequent strokes - amusingly (not) some were from bleeding and some were from blockages (clots) as the various doctors tried to adjust her meds.

But you knew all that stuff. Where was I going with this?  I started by mentioning non-standard (non-pharmaceutical) or alternative approaches to health concerns, so you might imagine that I’m going to mention one that addresses elevated blood pressure. Well, OK, I will. Thanks for asking.

SKIP DOWN TO HERE FOR THE USEFUL STUFF 

When I came across it, it was called “Holistrol” and you can still find it using that search term. However, a couple of years ago they re-branded it to Hi-Qi Healthy Blood Pressure. That’s supposed to be pronounced “High-Chi” (hy-chee), but I like to annoy the purveyors by calling it “hickey” or “heechee”.  The marketing approach might not be the smartest, but the product seems to work.

Seriously.  I’ve tried a lot of different vitamin and herbal concoctions over the years, mostly for curiosity’s sake, and 99 percent didn’t seem to do much of anything. Or, if they did, you could just barely tell. The wind had to be at your back, the moon in the right phase, the stock market in… well, let’s not go there.  Only a very few herbal items have _ever_ made a real impression on me by actually working.  This is one of them.

I read the stories on the website and said “yeah, yeah, yawn”. I read the claims of actual studies and reproducible results with somewhat more attention. I ordered some. I tried it.

My blood pressure had been routinely in the range of 170/95 with occasional excursions higher - both systolic and diastolic. That’s not good in the short term, and it was positively scary as an ongoing condition. So, um, you can see that I might have been motivated.

When the (as it was then called) Holistrol arrived, I took a challenge dose and kept the dose higher than maintenance for the first few weeks. By the end of the first week my pressure had dropped significantly. By two weeks it was down more than twenty points, and it kept dropping. By about six weeks, it was down in the 140/80 range. It’s been in the 120s over 70s and gone up a bit when I’ve gotten stressed… or fat, but overall it’s been below 130 over 80 for the past three years.

There are no side effects.

Despite my doctor’s initial urging (OK… insistence), I never started diuretics and other pharmaceutical remedies. It’s all the Holistrol. I even tried discontinuing it for more than a month. My pressure basically remained stable. I’m on the bare maintenance dose, and often skip one or two, and it just keeps working. So, as they say, I think it’s working on the causes and not just the symptoms.

Marvelous.

So I recommend it.  If you have high blood pressure, I at least recommend that you try it. It’s not expensive, so you have little to lose - did I mention no side-effects!?!

I freely admit that it might not work as well, or at all, for everybody. But jeez!  If it does, it’s golden, isn’t it?

I also recommend …..  LOSE THE LARD!

It makes a difference in so many ways. But! The only way to lose fat and keep it off is slowly. While you’re doing that, Holistrol/Hi-Qi gets your BP to safe levels so you don’t croak or stroke-out while you’re still (as I am) half-way too fat.

After getting the startlingly good result that I did, I cautiously recommended the product to a few co-workers who had mentioned having elevated BP or having relatives/spouses with the problem. A couple tried it and had pretty-much the same results that I did. Some were already on pharmaceuticals and their doctors weren’t impressed by the notion of any herbal concoction, so those people declined to try. I’ll note that at least one of those people is on at least two additional “medications” (why can’t they just say “drugs” or “medicines”…?) only to control the side-effects of their BP-control drugs.  Oi!  I just don’t see it.

I have no connection to the company except as a very satisfied customer. Long may they prosper.

Well, if I set up a real website, I might see about some kind of click-through arrangement. As of November 2008, I don’t have any connection.  If and when I do… well, it’ll be obvious, but perhaps it’ll carry weight that it’s been more than three years that I’ve been recommending the product and not getting any compensation other than the knowledge that I’m doing a good deed.

Here’s the home-page link:   http://www.pharmeast.com/

I’ve tried one of their other products with some positive reaction (nothing as dramatic as the Holistrol… er, I mean Hi Qi Healthy Blood Pressure), and I’ll talk about it in another post. As for anything else that they sell, I can’t really say. Haven’t had reason to try them, yet.

Again, you are reading anecdotal evidence. The only experimental “control” in my personal “study” was me before I started taking the product, versus me afterward. So, make up your own mind. Grain of salt and all that. I hope I’ve helped - this is, after all, serious shit. It’s your health, you own it, you decide what to do about it.

Well, that’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright November 2008

What’s something good and positive and useful that you and your neighbors can do, naturally, almost without thinking, and that your government with all its resources cannot do (yet frequently claims to have done)?

Lies, Damned Lies, and Political Utterances

Politicians and their apologists keep using phrases like “job creation” and “the XYZ government created Xty-thousand new jobs last month.” I don’t like that they do it, and I don’t like that nobody calls them to task for it. Media just let them make assertions like those, and pass them along unquestioned. That’s wrong because there are impressionable people out there who:

a) lack the education and training to recognize the error/falsehood of the statement, or

b) lack the wit or intelligence - even if they have been taught better, but

c) yet nevertheless have the vote.

Let’s lay it out in a bald assertion of unpleasant fact and then go back and explain the reasoning, for the benefit of those who have the interest and the capacity to “get it” if it’s explained for them: -

Government can’t create jobs.

Whenever you hear a politician (or an apologist for some politician) assert that he-or-she-or-the-government “has created jobs”, “can create jobs”, or (usually just before election time) “will create jobs”, they are lying or mistaken. Government physically cannot create jobs. No government has ever created a single job. Governments can do exactly two things to jobs:

1. destroy them
2. displace them.

Immediately, the politician (or apologist) blusters “Don’t be silly. We create jobs all the time! What about big, expensive project XYZ that created thousands of direct jobs and tens of thousands of indirect supporting jobs in the service and supply sectors?”

If you are naive and uncritical, you might swallow that contention whole, without question… which makes us wonder what you are doing here… but let’s continue anyway.

The politician making the statement might conceivably believe it, but that’s rather unlikely. Normally a person needs to be fairly astute to become a successful politician, so it’s more likely that the politician knows the difference and cynically counts on your gullible nature to secure your vote. That is, chances are 100-percent that the statement is wrong and chances are better-than-even that the politician knows that and is simply lying to you.  Politicians pander. Lying is the cheapest form of pandering.

What’s a Job? What is Wealth?

Real jobs are created only when wealth is created. That’s a simple, accurate statement with profound implications. Think about it. Break it down.

First, what _is_ wealth, and how is it created? Then, how are jobs created?

So start with wealth. What is it? Look up some dictionary definitions - it’s OK, you can do it on-line right now in another browser tab - I’ll wait.

Are you back?

Good.

So what did you learn? All the definitions revolve around the concept of value.

You have wealth. You might have a lot, or you might have very little. However much you have, you can make more. And I mean, literally “make” it. But wealth is in your head. Sounds metaphysical, but it’s quite straightforward.

If you got lost in the back woods and ran out of food, but you had a 10-kg bar of gold in your pack, would you be wealthy? If nobody is around who wants to trade the gold for food, how wealthy are you? If somebody appeared who had no gold, but who had two sandwiches, and (when you’d been starving for several days) offered you one of their sandwiches in exchange for your bar of gold, how valuable is 10 kilograms of gold. Roughly one sandwich?  Wealth is value and value is imputed. Value that’s imputed to a given thing can change with changing circumstances. That is, it depends on what’s in your head at any given time, and what’s in the heads of people around you.

How do you make wealth? Easy. Only two ways: you find it or you create it.

There’s really no part of the world that is unclaimed “property” any more, so in almost all cases, wealth is created and not simply found. You do it every day.   What?  Getting antsy?  Wondering why I don’t just spit it out? Wait no more.

It’s All In Your Head

It takes two to make wealth. You and at least one other person. It also takes an exchange. And it requires a change inside both your heads.

You and another person could each have whatever goods and abilities you both have, and live near each other for years and years, and not create a penny of wealth between you. But, as soon as you make some kind of voluntary exchange, you create wealth.

Your exchange doesn’t need to include money, though it commonly does. What it needs to include is for you and that other person to exchange some goods or services. Each of you might have something, or be able to do something that the other person does not have and wants, or cannot do (or cannot do well) and wants it done.

Maybe it’s simple, like one of you is a good gardener and the other of you is good with computers. You come to an agreement that the computer-savvy person will set up something computer-ish for the other person (or explain how to do something), and the other person will repay by providing some gardening advice and help.   Each of you is willing to trade a bit of time doing the thing that they do well in order to receive some help with a thing that they don’t do so well.

When you make the trade, each of you gives up something that you have (your time and a little skilled effort) for something that you value even more. The total value in your combined little world has increased, just because something that each of you owned has changed ownership to where it is more valued than before, voluntarily.

Notice that the most important aspects of the creation of wealth have occurred inside the heads of the parties to the transaction:

a) it was voluntary

b) each person believes that they have come away with something of greater value to them than what they gave up in the transaction. Each of the participants is now in possession of more total value than they owned before the transaction. The total of wealth in the world has increased by your simple trade. Multiply by millions and billions of transactions, large and small, every day, and you have a lot of wealth being created.

All your life, anything that you ever gave away or traded away, you valued less than whatever you received in return. Only if you were cheated or robbed was that rule not true. Think about it. Every single time you did something for somebody, or gave them something, you got something in return that you valued more. Often it was visible, material value (like money or barter); sometimes it was just the satisfaction of doing a good deed or the pleasure of seeing a face light up with delight and gratitude… or… karma points. Either way, what you gave/traded away was of less value to you than what you got in return. If the other party valued what they received more than what they might have given up, then the transaction was a net positive sum. Thus is wealth created.

Now, look again. and see how wealth is not created…
Say, once again, that you and that other person have the same starting goods and/or skills, but you (the person reading this) don’t particularly need or want anything that the other person has (or can do) while that other person _does_ want something from you.  Now let’s say that you two make the trade described above, with one little difference. It’s done without your agreement, against your will. The other person has a gun and orders you to make the trade. You were not about to do it until they threatened and coerced you.

Is wealth created in this second version of the exchange? Some would say it has been, because a transfer of valued items or services has occurred. Others (the people with functional brains) would say that wealth has not been created; but rather theft has happened (more precisely robbery). Wealth has only been re-distributed from the legitimate owner to someone with no legitimate title to it - unless you believe “might makes right”, in which case, why are you bothering to read this? For the rest of us, theft/robbery/fraud do not make a legitimate transfer of wealth and so do not increase wealth.

But if the person with the gun gives you something in return, doesn’t that make it a wealth-creating transaction?

Nope. They came out ahead by coercing you, but you lost both the value of the good or service that you did not wish to give up _and_ the opportunity cost associated with it. Somewhere is a third party who _does_ have something that you want and who also wants what you have/can-do, and was willing to make a fair, voluntary trade for it. But the person with the gun has made that impossible.

Wealth is in your head… and the heads of everybody else. If you didn’t freely take part in the exchange, and if you don’t believe that your situation, your wealth, has improved, then it has not. No amount of assertion or gun-waving by somebody else can make it true.

OK, so what if the person with the gun gave the gun to some friend of theirs, and the friend was the one who instructed you (on pain of being shot) to make the trade of your good or service for what the second person was willing to give to you (which might be nothing or which might be something that you don’t particularly want). Or similarly, if the third fellow, now holding the gun for his friend, simply took from you and gave to his friend (whether he gave you anything in return or not) - does that make it OK?

Does it become OK to steal from other people if we don’t get our own hands dirty but have an agent do the dirty work on our behalf? Most people (and the common law) would say no. It’s not OK. It’s theft/robbery and fencing of stolen goods.

All of that (above) to illustrate that wealth is created by voluntary trade. Wealth is not created when the trade is coerced. When transactions are coerced, the result is redistribution and possibly destruction of wealth, but no net increase.

From there, we can move to jobs and their creation (or displacement/destruction).

If you are like most adults, you are employed by someone. That’s a fair assumption because there are far more employees than employers, mostly because it’s harder to be an employer. For convenience, we’ll lump contractors and freelancers in with “captive” employees (if you’d like to dispute this or any other point that I make, feel free - I’ll approve-for-viewing any comments that appear coherent and reasonably free of name-calling).

With few exceptions, the person who employs you expects to get more value from you than s/he is expending on your pay and overhead. Otherwise, why employ you?

Some people really dislike that notion and make random noises about fairness, as though it’s somehow unfair of a “boss” to pay you less than the full value of the work that you do. The people who hold that thought fall into three categories of limited mental capacity:

1. Naive - this one is fixable by life experience and even a modicum of attention
2. Inherently naturally stupid  - not fixable
3. Ideologically prevented from applying rational thought - rarely fixable without a life-altering traumatic event.

Remember how wealth exists only because of what exists inside your head (state of mind) and what exists inside other people’s heads? Well the transaction that we call employment is just a version of contracting for services, which in turn is just a trade of:

• something that an employer values less (money and the use of infrastructure), in return for
• something that the employer values more (skilled work from you),

while that same trade from your perspective is

• something that you value less (your skill and a certain amount of your time and effort) in exchange for
• something that you value more (a reliable, comfortable place to work, proper tools, and - most of all - money that you can use for your own purposes).

From the employing perspective, if you started a little business and made a modest success working from your basement, but found that you needed some help to grow that business, you might hire somebody to do a specific set of tasks. This would allow you to do other important work for your budding company. Perhaps you’d need somebody to do the grunt-work like order-fulfillment (stuffing boxes and labeling them), or specific specialty tasks like book-keeping/accounting, legal representation, etc.

In all cases, you would employ your hired help only to the extent that they were of more value to your business than the wage or fees that you paid for that help.

If you paid each person exactly the value that they brought to the business, there would be no profit, no net return on that investment, no reason for having them there other than for the most temporary stint. The tiniest imperfection in the operation of your business would put it into negative cash-flow and the business would die. Both you and your employees would be jobless because you couldn’t/wouldn’t control your costs to keep them lower than your revenue.

Instead you have to ensure that every outgo from your business brings a positive return or, in the exception case, that the cost of an employee (or hired service) to perform a “necessary evil” (something that must be done, but doesn’t generate return on its own merits) is compenstated by some other aspect of your business. Anybody with a functional head on their shoulders can understand that. Revenue must exceed costs, or you don’t have a business; you have a money pit.

What’s difficult for some to understand is that such a mechanically simple and straightforward principle must also apply to them, when they are the employee. If what you produce is not worth more than what your employer pays you, then you are too expensive to keep around. The only exception is where you develop skills in “necessary evil” areas, where employers must have the service whether it’s a net drain or not (think of tax accountants and lawyers and other compliance with government regulations).

Even in the case of “necessary evil” skills, if somebody else has the same skills and is willing to work for less, then the employer should rightfully hire that other person instead of you.

Ordinary (and extraordinary) people create jobs by spending and investing. Government doesn’t have any wealth of its own. It has your money and my money. We are the ones who created the wealth - all they did was take it from those who can and do create wealth.

All that government can do is take money away from people before they have a chance to spend it or invest it, and then give that money to other people whom the government prefers. By doing so, they displace jobs.

The taxpayers each had needs and wants, on which they would have spent their money according to their own choices. Each of those expenditures would have gone to somebody who made or sold the desired goods, or who provided the desired service. That is, people create jobs by spending their money, voluntarily, on things that they need or want (that includes investments and savings, not just retail purchases). They examine their own situations and decide what is most important or most desired at any given time. The people who are willing to answer those wants and needs are compensated by employment.

When government takes money away from people, those people no longer get to spend or invest that money as they wish. All that potential wealth which arises only from freely-entered transactions, is prevented from coming into existence. Now government confers that money onto other people who will do things (or sometimes not do anything) that the original taxpayers were not willing to pay for. At the very least, this is displacement of jobs from somebody the original wealth-holder was willing to employ, onto somebody the government decides is more deserving (more likely to generate votes?).

By doing so, government causes the actual jobs that are generated to be worth less than the jobs that would have been created if the money had gone where the original earners had been willing to spend or invest. “Creating” a job in another province/state, or in a failing industry, creates a job that is worth less than the jobs that would have been created by the original earners simply spending or investing where they wished to spend and invest.

A job fails to exist where I and my neighbors live and work (either it disappears or it is never allowed to come into existence), and a job is artificially generated or preserved somewhere that there’s not enough real (non-political) demand to make that job happen without intervention. That artificial job then carries the extra costs of maintaining it where it’s not economically viable. It carries the overhead of all the bureaucrats that had to “take a cut” (their salaries and their overhead costs) along the way. Instead of encouraging people to move where the real jobs are (meeting the real needs and demands of ordinary, wealth-creating people), government subsidizes people who want to stay where jobs aren’t, but who demand to be treated as though they have some “right” to a certain type of job in the place where they happen to desire to live. So government cannot “create” jobs. It can only take them away from where they would otherwise have existed.

Finally, go back to that point about the employer reasonably expecting to get more for what s/he pays to the employee than that employer values what s/he is paying out.  If the government gives our money to somebody else, then in a wealth-creation scenario, we should get a return (from that “employee”) that we value more highly than the value of our tax money that was transferred to that “employee”. Because we did not willingly pay that person, but were coerced into doing so, we do not get full value for our money (or for our time and effort that we expended to earn it before it was taken away). Therefore, compared to a transaction where we willingly pay somebody, we have lost value. Endless assertions by politicians, bureaucrats and their apologists do not change that fact. Thus again, government has not created a job, they have merely displaced (at least) one job with one of lesser value.

Or that’s how I see it anyway.

Copyright November 2008

Phew! That was a long one. Hope it didn’t hurt your eyeballs. Go look out a window for a few moments. 

Well, I can support it if it taxes not just the carbon-dioxide-producing aspects of a product or service, but also the production of other pollution.

If we must tax at all, then tax goods by how far they have come, and by how polluting and inefficient was the manner of their creation. Remember, just because carbon-dioxide spewing has become important in the past few years does not mean that other kinds of pollution are not still killing us and our surroundings.

If something was produced in inefficient or polluting production facilities (or by inefficient or polluting farming, fishing, harvesting methods), then tax it on a sliding scale. The most efficient production or harvesting of the same (or similar) product (or foodstuff) would be the standard, and would not be taxed. Anything less efficient or more polluting would be taxed to greater and greater extent depending on how flagrantly inefficient or polluting it was.

Similarly, regardless how cleanly and efficiently something was produced, it would also be taxed if it had to travel a long way to get to its consumer… unless it came by solar-powered dirigible.

This would ensure that cleanly-produced and locally-produced goods and services always had a cost advantage over inefficiently or filthily produced goods, or goods and services that came significant distances.

There are many advantages to this approach. The main one is that “you tax what you would discourage or destroy”. So, instead of taxing the creation of jobs or the creation of wealth, we should tax the consumption of polluting goods and services (whether the good-or-service pollutes, or simply involves pollution in its creation or delivery/transport).

Wait a minute!  Why did I say “tax the consumption” rather than “tax the production” or “tax the conveyance”?

Well, the producers and conveyors are all over the place - many goods and services do not originate in our country (where “our country” is whatever country you, dear reader, happen to live in). It gets much too complicated, in a hurry, to arrange some sort of taxation at the source (all sorts of treaties and trans-national organizations to do the oversight and enforcement, and then all kinds of additional infrastructure to make those organizations do their jobs properly, fairly, and without corruption…. and besides, that’s too much like taxing job creation.

The money is with the people who buy things. Consumption taxes affect both the rate of consumption of goods and services by consumers _and_ the rate of production or (if the taxation is worded correctly) the manner of production.  If you make it uncomfortably expensive to buy item X that is produced with too much of effluent Y, _because_ of the excess of undesired effluent Y, then you also make it less likely that people will continue producing item X in that way. Either they’ll stop producing it, because hardly anybody is buying it, or they’ll find a way to produce it that doesn’t invoke the tax when item X is bought, thus encouraging more customers to keep buying their version of item X. Same idea for services.

A key attribute of this sort of approach must be flexibility. If a new production method is adopted for item X (or service X) that minimizes or eliminates nasty effluent Y, then that good should immediately be exempt from pollution tax aimed at effluent Y. People should not be taxed for buying cleanly-produced X as they are for buying dirty-production X. That much is obvious, and it needs only a rational and transparent appeal process - with enough bureaucratic troops to keep it updated in real time.  But those same bureaucratic troops must also have the freedom (and mental capacity…) to remove the “effluent Y” tax on that good if the producer finds a buyer who actually makes use of effluent Y in a non-polluting way.

That is, what we want to discourage is the bad effects of the effluent from the creation of your good or service. If somebody finds a way to make that effluent harmless, we don’t want to continue taxing it for historical reasons. Taxation has to be rational, or people will have reason (and right) to cheat.

You can’t have the consumer tax on your product lifted just because you pay somebody to cart your effluent away and dump it, instead of you dumping it yourself. That doesn’t solve the problem. BUT, if somebody develops an industrial use for effluent Y that consumes it, or otherwise renders it harmless, then the producer of item X can apply to have his item-Xs excluded from the consumer tax, to the extent that his effluent Y is contained and neutralized by the producer of item Z who has found a profitable way to use Y in the production of Z.

A rational taxation system lets a producer sell his good (X) even though his production costs are higher, if the higher cost comes from a method that neutralizes the bad stuff - compared to somebody who has less cost-to-produce because he pollutes while he produces. The taxation makes the polluter’s X cost more when the consumer buys it, thus leveling the playing field, while encouraging the behavior we desire.

Eventually, everybody adopts the new, non-polluting method as economies of scale and greater practice make it mainstream and cheap.

From the government perspective, that might sound like killing the golden goose. The more producers who adopt clean methods, the less tax revenue comes in. However, since it usually ends up being government that cleans up after the polluters (by cleaning up abandoned sites or by carrying the increased health-care burden on the citizens), the decrease in polluters means a decrease in costs to government… so if they’re rational, they don’t need the revenue that disappears when pollution disappears. Yes, that’s a big IF. That’s for another post.

It might even be possible to implement an approximation of the carbon-offset, such that dreaming up (and implementing) a new way of dealing with a former pollutant gives you (or your product/service) relief from the pollution tax at the point of retail sale. And if you don’t have an immediate use for such “credit” (because your product or service doesn’t pollute), then you could trade such credit with other entities who did need some relief.  The people setting the tax rates on individual consumer goods and services would ultimately control the real value that such credits could have, by the simple expedient of deciding how much or how little an onerous tax rate could be relieved by the application of purchased pollution credits.

The biggest drawback to such a plan would be the natural, inherent tendency of bureaucrats to work on “Island Time”… to stall, to drag their feet, to make the task of achieving a deserved reduction/exemption too onerous or costly to be worth the trouble. Thus, you’d want to build-in incentives for the bureaucrats to process applications without delay. You’d also want to bring back public crucifixion for bureaucrats who accepted bribes - whether to give somebody’s product an undeserved relief or to keep somebody’s product overtaxed for the benefit of the competitor who was paying the bigger bribe.

A beneficial side-effect of taxing the purchase of goods or services that polluted by their production, or that polluted by their delivery, would be a defacto “Buy Canadian*/Buy North American, Buy Local” movement,
giving our own flagging industries a resurgent local market. (I’m writing from Canada. Y’all can substitute the name of your own local country, region, state/province.)

The free-market argument has always been that it’s good to buy items from the other side of the world if they are cheaper/more abundant there, and can be shipped cheaply to here (wherever “there” and “here” happen to be, respectively). And I agree with that. Where I disagree is that we have heretofore let petroleum-based transport of goods be cheaper than its real costs. We’ve allowed the people who produce petroleum, and the people who use it, to externalize a lot of their costs - such as the pollution created by the harvesting and converting of petroleum and the pollution created by the use (burning) of it.

A taxation scheme that placed some of those costs back where they belong would help balance the scales, such that Buy Local would no longer be a silly anachronism. It would be the economical thing to do. It would also support local self-sufficiency.  Moreover, if every village, town, and city was served by local farmers and artisans and industries for the bulk of what they needed (and wanted - there’s nothing wrong with luxury), then even if local conditions went bad - drought, the mine runs out, etc. - the local people could still buy goods and services from not-so-local suppliers whenever needed or desired. They’d just pay more because of the cost of transportation and because of the tax due to that transportation.

On top of that, if a region suffered a really nasty downturn, the governments could temporarily ease the taxation of goods and services purchased by that region’s consumers, even if those goods and services had to come from afar (and burn gas/diesel getting there). The taxes, of course, would climb back to their pre-bad-times level over a certain, defined span of years (a sunset clause on consumption-tax relief, if you will). The idea would not be to subsidize people to remain forever in a place that was no longer able to support them, but to cushion the blow and allow them time to either adjust or get out, in orderly fashion.

Again, in summary, tax what you want to reduce or destroy - pollution and the externalizing of costs.

Don’t tax what you want to encourage - creating wealth and creating jobs.

Am I making sense here?

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright November 2008

Unions have made no secret about their preference to force Wal-Mart to accept unionization of their workers, raise prices, lower service, become less profitable, etc.

A few years ago, in a small town in Quebec (was it Jonquiere? I’d hafta look it up) a union succeeded in getting itself certified at the town’s only Wal-Mart store. Wal-Mart decided that the store could no longer be run the way they run stores, so they closed it. This put everybody who had worked there - including both the union members and all the non-union employees - out of work.

Recently, in a Quebec town, not far (just across the river) from my home in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, a union tried to organize Wal-Mart again. This time, they were succeeding, not for the whole store, but for the Tire-and-Lube shop portion of the store. Among other things, it would have meant that the unskilled workers in the Tire-and-Lube would have received instant raises from the provincial minimum wage ($8.75 per hour, I think - which is pretty shitty wages, but which is what that level of labor is worth) to somewhere above $15/hour. That would obviously put a big dent in the profitability of the Tire-and-Lube portion of the store.

Wal-Mart responded by closing the Tire-and-Lube shop, but keeping the main part of the store open.

Naturally, the papers and talk-shows were full of vitriol, denouncing the evil, union-busting tactics of Wal-Mart. Naturally, I had a response, which I submitted as a Letter to the Editor. Once again, it was on the “being considered” short list, but didn’t make it into the paper. Through the joy of blogging, I get to publish my version anyway. It goes like this:

Here’s how to make everybody happy in the infamous closure of the
Wal-Mart tire’n'lube shop.

Wal-Mart regains an “in-house” profit center that provides a popular
service, and the unionists get to keep their jobs on their terms.
Here’s how it works:

a) Wal-Mart leases the shop space to the union, at favorable rates (a
public-relations coup - not much profit in that corner, but no loss, and
all that good will).
b) The union gets a purpose-built space, in an ideal location, at better
lease rates than they could find for themselves, so they have more money
left over to buy insurance and utilities and HR/payroll services.
c) Wal-Mart sells or leases the tools, lifts and other equipment to the
union - after all, Wal-Mart is not making any profit off that gear right
now, so why not.
d) The union gets to buy some second-hand equipment that’s in
good-as-new condition (after all, they took perfect care of it while
they were employees, didn’t they?).
e) The union runs the shop as they’ve said they can do, while paying
everybody at least $15/hour plus benefits. Wal-Mart might even let them
share in any existing group benefits packages if it makes those more
affordable to the unionists - another PR coup for Wal-Mart and no red ink.
f) Either the union does their own managing and scheduling, or they
contract with Wal-Mart to answer the phones and schedule the service
bays - whichever approach the union finds most congenial. (So Wal-Mart
either has a small profit center or has no involvement.)

Wal-Mart gains by getting rid of unionized employees but without the
stigma (’in-house” outsourcing).
The union gains because they get to prove that they can do what they
swear is possible; run a profitable shop while paying the negotiated
wages and benefits to their own members. All of their vociferous
supporters are, of course, guaranteed customers of this fair-trade shop.

All the people who sided with the union gain because they can invest a
few dollars each if the union needs some startup/seed money (possibly
some sort of co-op venture), and they get the satisfaction of putting
their money where their mouths are.  Naturally, they would also (all these
people who have been righteously slamming Wal-Mart and vociferously
siding with the union) exclusively buy their tire and lube product and services
from the union-run Tire-and-Lube shop that resides in the Wal-Mart store.

Win-win-win!

- end of letter -

Now, who could possibly disagree with a plan like that?

That’s the way I see it anyway.

Copyright October 2008

Sometimes, you just need to relax and be amused, like this:

http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs13/f/2007/077/2/e/Animator_vs__Animation_by_alanbecker.swf

I saw it. I liked it. I hope you will too.