Jack Manassas and Company

July 28-31, 2017 - Mini Vacation in Revelstoke Anne noticed that I had 4 days off in a row over the weekend, culminating in her birthday (she is 29, of course!). She has completed the six-month ordeal of the CP3, that was the final hurdle to getting her pharmacist license here in BC. She will soon be heading down to Maryland to visit with family and help take care of her mother. Our Honored Son (HS) will soon be heading to California to seek his fortune in Silicon Valley. Really, it is our last likely time for a family vacation. So naturally we headed for Revelstoke. We stopped at the Dutchmen Dairy for ice cream. The camel and llama are both gone now, but many farm animals are still on display.  I was working in Sicamous a couple of weeks ago, and got two one-liter tubs of their ice cream after work. It was actually a bit disappointing. We remember how rich it tasted in previous years, but these two tubs were not much better ...

A lot of people are very upset about global financial conditions these days.   Almost everyone I know is struggling to make ends meet, and failing at it.  Debt levels are high, wages are not keeping up with inflation, our standards of living are going down year by year.  The most likely endpoint of this process, for most of us, seems to be bankruptcy--But bankruptcy is increasingly being prohibited by law.  The only people who seem to be prospering in the current environment are the Very Rich, Government Employees, and Organized Criminals. In the banking crisis in 2008, we bailed out the banks.  It has gotten us nowhere.  The banking industry has continued the same bad practices that got it into trouble in the first place.  We are heading for another crisis of the same kind, but orders of magnitude larger.   The usual endpoint for all this is a giant financial crisis, mass bankruptcy, hyperinflation, chaos, war, bankers and politicians ha...

July 2017-- British Columbia is on fire. Well a lot of it is, anyway. We went driving around to see what we could see-- and what we couldn’t see. Smoke from the wildfires hundreds of kilometres away have obscured the sun for days on end. Here are some pictures:  This is Blind Bay Road, heading towards the lake.  The trees are not really covered with ashes-- That's an artifact of the dirty windshield, which IS covered with ashes...  Here's one of the giant mini-mansions near the waterfront.  The reddish ball in the sky is the Sun.  It looked a lot redder in real life...  Here's the Marina, mountains in the background barely visible through the smoke.  The sign in the middle says "Thank you." By contrast, only a couple of days later, the wind shifted and we had blue skies again.  This is what watering the flower baskets is SUPPOSED to be like!