For those of you who have read either the first three novels In Her Name: Empire, Confederation and Final Battle or the Omnibus edition which told the story of the conclusion of mankind’s 100 year war with the first sentient alien species to be contacted, you will be thrilled to know that the authour has penned a prequel which tells the story of the first contact and the first battle fought between humans and a race who live only for the thrill of killing and dieing in battle by using their wits and only the most basic tools of knives, swords, whips, throwing stars, their bodies, etc.

It took a while for Earthlings to understand that the only acceptable response was to fight back with every once of strength and courage they could find within themselves. The only alternative was the slaughter of every man, woman and child anywhere in the Universe. The race which they came to call the Kreelans, although technologically millenia ahead of their opponent’s, always refused to use their superiority and fought and died equally as often as their opponents.

The Kreelans live to feel and hear the Bloodsong coursing through themselves which allows them to bring Honour and Glory to their Empress. This is how it has been for hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of years. From birth Kreelans are sent into the arenas of the worlds around their ten thousand suns to learn how to fight using every form of personal contact warfare possible. Over their history they have completely wiped out many races never finding one sufficiently able to challenge the supremacy of the Kreelan Way.

The Kreelans can do this because they can feel and hear the voices of every member of their race whether living or dead. They know beyond doubt that if they bring Honour and Glory to the Empress during their lifetime they will live on with all of their kind throughout eternity. Humanity does not have that comforting assurance and thus clings to life as their one and only existence.

These books are a thought provoking tale to make us wonder how we might react when faced with such a choice. Would you be a pacifist? Or a fighter for your right to live? Would you sacrifice so that others might carry on?

What explains the mystique of age 65?

There was no particular logic at work in 1966 when Canada settled on 65 as the normal age of retirement for the Canada Pension Plan (CPP). We were simply copying the “minimum retirement age” the United States chose for itself back in 1934. Since then, the notion of 65 as the proper age at which to stop working and start enjoying oneself has come to be seen as a sacred right. It’s not. And it needs to change.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper hinted at looming changes to Canada’s public retirement system. This has been widely interpreted to mean a shift in the age of eligibility for Old Age Security (OAS) from 65 to 67. It’s an entirely reasonable idea, and has been predictably met with outrage and protest.

Continuous increases in life expectancy are fundamentally altering the mathematics of retirement in Canada. When we settled on 65 as the social norm for retirement almost half a century ago, life expectancy was around 72 years. Today it is almost 81 years. And there’s no reason to believe these gains—driven by better health care technology, drugs and education—will stop. Over the past 100 years Canadians have added, on average, an extra three months to their lifespans year after year. But retirement at age 65 remains fixed.

More years of leisure and comparatively fewer for work, partly paid for by government, sounds like a great deal. Yet such a scenario is unsustainable over the long run. According to a recent article in Canadian Public Policy by McMaster University economists Frank Denton and Byron Spencer, the ratio of Canadian workers per retiree will drop from 4:1 to 2:1 over the next two decades. If retirement programs are kept at current levels, this will inevitably require a doubling of the public cost of retirement—a massive burden to place upon future generations. The obvious solution is to adjust the age of retirement.

Canada is unique among developed nations in ignoring the issue until now. Countries that have already raised or are raising their retirement age include: the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Denmark, Australia, Belgium, Japan, Finland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Turkey . . . and on and on. It’s worth noting that the U.S. began the process of hiking its retirement age to 67 as far back as 1983.

And yet opponents are now accusing Harper of unleashing a hidden agenda on retirees. “The government has taken off the sweater vest,” remarked NDP finance critic Peter Julian. Critics point out Canada is in much better financial shape than many European countries. That may be true. But whether or not we’ve avoided the excesses of other public pension systems has no bearing on the fact that our system faces a crisis of its own due to rising life expectancies and lengthening retirements.

If Harper deserves criticism for his recent trial balloon, it should be for excessive timidity. In his Davos remarks he sought to contain potential criticism by declaring the CPP off limits: “Fortunately, the Canada Pension Plan is fully funded, actuarially sound and does not need to be changed.” In truth, the plan is fully funded only for the next few years and will soon require a major re-evaluation. Relentless increases in longevity have just as big an impact on CPP as OAS. It makes little sense to adjust the retirement age upward for one program while protecting the notion of retirement at 65 elsewhere. The social norm needs to change.

Canada’s retirement system was never designed to cover several decades of freedom from work. While it may be politically expedient to argue that Canada’s retirement system should be protected from change of any kind, there are serious consequences to the status quo. If we allow retirement to grow longer and more lucrative, we rob the economy of productive workers, put a greater burden on the next generation and inevitably threaten the viability of every other social program in the country.

Of course, any changes to the retirement age must be gradual, transparent and fair. (Certainly nothing should disadvantage the elderly poor; the near elimination of seniors’ poverty is one of the great Canadian public policy success stories of the past few decades.) Denton and Spencer propose adding three months per year to the retirement age until it reaches 70. Alternatively, Sweden indexes its normal retirement age to life expectancy tables; as the Swedish lifespan lengthens, so too does time spent at work. Regardless of the process, however, something has to give. Retirement can’t last forever.

by Brian Bethune on Monday, January 23, 2012

Take statins if you’re over 50, and baby Aspirin, too. Drop the vitamin supplements like they were a lit cigarette. Junk the juicer. If the vegetables at the supermarket aren’t today-fresh, opt for fresh frozen. Wear sensible shoes. Eat lunch and go to bed at the same time every day. Get your flu shot. Move around a lot, even when you aren’t exercising. Digitize your medical records, family history and genetic profile, and store this information on a USB stick. Carry it with you always. Share it, anonymously, with the world.

Think of yourself as a system: cancer is not something the body gets and health is not something it has—both are states, dynamic processes really, that the body undergoes. And your system is not the same as anyone else’s: the daily glass of red wine that does wonders for your friend may be killing you. Take note of the specific, unchanging details of your system. Is your ring finger longer than your index finger? That ups the risk of prostate cancer for a man, and of osteoarthritis for a woman. (No one knows quite why, but the marker is well-established.) Keep an eye on your more changeable fine points. Check your nails: yellowish hue bad (go for a diabetes check); white crescent at the base good (iron levels are sufficient). Check your ankles: indentation marks from your socks or loss of hair could mean circulatory problems and increased risk of blood clot.

Do all these things, which essentially add up to two commandments—cut down on daily sources of life-threatening inflammation and take an active part in your own health care—and you stand a very good chance of living to see the end of illness.

So argues Dr. David Agus in The End of Illness, a passionate and provocative assault on the rut in which he believes modern medicine is stuck, especially his own speciality, oncology. It’s been almost a century since deadly infectious disease was pushed into the background of the West’s mortality tables. Yet while deaths from the leading chronic killer, heart disease, have declined by 60 per cent in the developed world since 1950, the cancer death rate has barely budged.

Agus, 46, has the credentials to demand a hearing. He’s a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California, the 2009 GQ “rock star of science,” founder of two personalized medicine companies and a man who “looks at death two or three times a week,” as he sombrely notes in an interview. “Every week I tell people, ‘I’m sorry, I have no more drugs to try on you.’ I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s killing them, and it’s killing me.”

We need to admit our mistakes and radically reorient ourselves, Agus says. In chorus with a growing number of chronic disease specialists, Agus thinks it’s time to forget the lessons erroneously drawn from the victorious war against infectious diseases, time to realize chronic illness is different. It is not discrete parts that can be targeted with drugs or surgery like a colony of alien bacteria, but the whole system. Cancer is a verb, he repeatedly and strikingly stresses: the body of a leukemia patient is “cancering.”

And with most types of cancer, we are scarcely likely to win a war, not if victory is defined as a complete cure. But if we look at the body as a system, with a few simple lifestyle changes, plus new technologies already in the pipeline, three inexpensive medicines, and a change in the way we store and share medical information, we can achieve a different sort of victory: prevention, delay, control. The end of cancer, the end of all illness, Agus says, is in sight.

For all his faith in technological fixes coming down the road, Agus’s present-day advice has a decidedly old-fashioned feel. And with good reason: “Because that’s where the data is.” Agus is a fierce critic of shoddy and misleading medical tests, ones that are too observational (not controlling for variables and allowing bias to creep in) or too short in the time span covered or involving too few subjects. But there’s no debating the studies, many involving thousands of participants, that demonstrate the deadly effects of simply sitting around.

For example, a 13-year study showed that sitting four hours in a row doubles your risk of dying from or being hospitalized for heart disease later in life, even if you regularly exercise, and almost surely elevates the risk of cancer as well. All told, sitting is almost as deadly as smoking. Agus, surprised to find after measuring his daily steps that he moved around his office far less than he thought, now conducts all telephone calls while walking.

Inflammation is the danger embedded in prolonged sitting, and the killer risk factor that lies behind Agus’s advice. As far as wearing sensible shoes, Agus would not be surprised to hear that wearing high heels lops years off a woman’s life since they are known stressors of leg joints and the lower back. Stress means inflammation, and chronic inflammation kills, probably by slowing or blocking the body’s DNA repair processes. It has been linked to cancer, heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and accelerated aging. The more of it you avoid, the better your long-term prospects.

Hence the comfortable shoes and the regular sleeping hours. The human body craves predictability, and stresses out when its daily rhythms are upset. Going to bed and rising at the same times every day is possibly more important than the amount of sleep you get. Avoid naps, unless, of course, you already have a well-established nap habit. And stick to your schedule every day: no sleeping in on weekends.

Likewise, eat at the same time as much as possible. If you have to work through lunch, try to have a snack at the accustomed hour. Something healthy, which means—in conscious echo of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food—“as unprocessed as possible; not too much; mostly plants.” Agus has a deep suspicion of the obvious targets (french fries, say), but also of foods and food processing that can plausibly claim to be healthy. Juicing, for instance: “Does your body really want 10 carrots at once?” he asks. Or of supposedly fresh produce that has travelled hundreds of kilometres, leaking its nutrients all the way; better to eat fresh-frozen produce. It’s vital to get your nutrients from the real thing, because for those who think they can make up any dietary deficiency by taking vitamins, Agus has some very bad news.

Vitamin supplements would be bad enough if they were merely useless, he says. The money Americans spend yearly on vitamins—some $25 billion—is sorely needed elsewhere in the medical system. They aren’t getting much for their money now. Consider claims that vitamin D significantly cuts cancer risks and that three-quarters of the U.S. population had insufficient levels of it. For Agus, these results are found in not very high-grade studies; for one thing, he’s at a loss to understand how anyone can claim to have established the correct dose for appropriate D levels. The bone disease rickets is long gone and age-related fractures are not on the rise, meaning that by the only indications we have, the population has quite enough vitamin D. Moreover, some of the miracle stories record what he considers absurdities, one even declaring that vitamin D cream rubbed on tumours can “make them vanish,” which ignores the general fact that the human body reacts differently than lab-grown tumours and that actual tumours in actual patients are difficult to reach with a salve.

Lost in the buzz created by such stories are the results of tests that far better reflect Agus’s gold standard—double-blind, placebo-controlled—one of which concluded elderly women taking D supplements had an increased risk of falls and consequent fractures, and another that found the vitamin had a potentially negative effect on prostate cancer. If our bones are doing well, Agus asks, why add more to a complex system when we don’t really know what it’s doing? Vitamin D feeds healthy cells, so it may also feed cancerous ones. Vitamin C certainly does. Tumours, Agus says, “eat it like candy.” And while vitamin C does indeed attack free radicals, a key villain in inflammation, that’s not always a good thing. The body makes free radicals for a reason (the immune system uses them for killing invading bacteria) and has its own ways of keeping them in check (a store of neutralizing enzymes). When we take supplements that excise an undue number of them, Agus says we are upsetting a delicate balancing act to ends we cannot predict.

Some of the new evidence on vitamin supplements pushes the conclusion from useless to very dangerous. A 2003 meta-analysis that looked at 82,000 patients in total found vitamin E use inconsequential and beta-carotene (a precursor of vitamin A and a common element in over-the-counter supplements) to be deadly enough in prompting heart attacks that the researchers suggested it no longer be studied because of the risks to participants. A major Finnish study found that for the five to eight years patients took the supplements and eight years afterwards, the vitamin A precursor upped lung cancer incidence by 18 per cent. The vitamin E had no effect on lung cancer, although it cut prostate cancer (by 32 per cent), albeit at the cost of a 50 per cent spike in hemorrhagic stroke (bleeding in the brain). “Death is a pretty serious side effect, don’t you think?” sums up an exasperated Agus.

Unless you are correcting a real deficiency or are pregnant, ditch the supplements: “I’ve had more push-back on what I have to say about vitamins than on anything else I argue, including heated conversations at dinner parties with people who have whole shelves of multivitamins. But there are no shortcuts to nutrition and health, except ones that might shortcut your life.”

Agus’s book, which published this week to massive U.S. media coverage, is likely to shake up not just vitamin champions (and manufacturers) but his own colleagues. When he stood before thousands of doctors at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in 2009, and uttered The End of Illness’s core theme—“We’ve made a mistake”—the “hisses that I heard leaking from the audience were disheartening.”

Once you have done what you can do in your lifestyle, and changed the five things that are reducing your lifespan, Agus thinks the battle to reduce chronic inflammation should move to your physician’s office and to the three medicines he believes all middle-aged people should consider. Like neurobiologist Paul Patterson, who has studied the links between children in utero and later diagnoses of autism, schizophrenia and depression, Agus says people take the flu too lightly. In his 2011 book Infectious Behavior, Patterson recorded the final health effects from the great flu pandemic of 1918, which killed more people than the Great War. Those who were in their mothers’ wombs during the pandemic went on to lifetimes of health problems disproportionately worse than those born before or after, including higher rates of diabetes and heart disease—the effects on fetal brains of the mother’s immune system ramping up to fight influenza. Agus too emphasizes the ferocity of the immune system’s response to influenza, reacting “like an irrational personality that blows everything out of proportion, and producing staggering amounts of inflammation.” Every bout of flu leaves “ghostly marks,” aging your blood vessels and leaving you vulnerable to all kinds of inflammation-induced diseases later in life.

So take the vaccine, and if you won’t do that, at least adopt common-sense hygiene: wash your hands and avoid airplane flights if at all possible. The stakes are higher than you thought.

More important than any vaccine, he says, is baby Aspirin, famous for helping to prevent blood clots and thereby staving off heart attacks and strokes, and now revealed to be far more of a panacea than previously thought. Last year British scientists, looking at eight long-term studies involving 25,000 participants, found that 75 mg a day reduces the risk of dying from common cancers by 10 to 60 per cent. And how does Aspirin do that? It’s a powerful anti-inflammatory. Until very recently, baby Aspirin offered a trade-off for physicians and patients—blood-thinning benefits (anti-clot action) versus blood-thinning disadvantages (bleeding). Agus thinks the balance has now tipped decidedly in favour of the benefits.

Then there are statins, which the skeptical oncologist hails as the major wonder drug of our time. Statins like Lipitor and Crestor have dramatically reduced the ravages of cardiovascular disease over the last two decades. They were designed to do so by inhibiting a liver enzyme that plays a key role in producing cholesterol, the bad kind that clogs arteries. But study after study has shown that cholesterol reduction is not the only beneficial result and perhaps not even the most important. They reduce heart attacks even in people without high cholesterol, because they too reduce inflammation. They also shrink your risk of death from respiratory illnesses and infections, even long after you’ve stopped statin therapy, in a multi-year “legacy effect.” Statins are one of the few drugs that will keep you off a ventilator if you ever come down with swine flu. If you are approaching 50 and not on statins, Agus advises, ask your doctor why.

The system-wide effects of statins is a key factor that led to one of Agus’s most arresting conclusions: we probably already have all the drugs we will ever need. “I know that’s a little provocative,” he allows. “But I firmly believe it. Look at the drugs we have now. We can hit every major system in the body. What we don’t know is the dose and the timing and the particulars of individual bodies.”

Agus’s frustration with this state of affairs, the single greatest roadblock to his illness-free world, is palpable: he’s clearly walking faster as he discusses it over the telephone. There are terabytes of medical knowledge out there, but it is not combined or organized. “A patient goes to a doctor who sends him to a specialist, with a side trip to a technician, and there’s hardly any communication between them. Sometimes we can’t communicate. We don’t even have standard nomenclature—what one doctor calls a “fractured” leg another calls a “broken” leg, and they don’t end up in the same data collection.”

There are magic bullets on the horizon, but without data they can’t fire. In 2009, Agus and Danny Hillis—a former Disney engineer who pioneered the development of so-called parallel supercomputers—set up a way to measure 100,000 different types of proteins from a single drop of blood. The goal is to evaluate and make sense of the body’s intricate inner workings in a way that’s much more dynamic and insightful than what’s offered by DNA, which can only tell us about risk rather than predict the actions of your proteins. Within a decade, Agus predicts, people will be able to upload their protein information onto a personal biochip for an individualized plan of action, including both preventive measures and therapies for identified ailments like imbalances in blood sugar (diabetes) or uncontrolled cell growth (cancer).

Their doctors won’t just examine them once a year; they will continually monitor them. But they will only be able to know what to do because patient data will be continuously added to a universal database and fed into new trials and experiments, speeding up our understanding of which drugs work best for which people. This database of millions upon millions of patients might show, for example, that people with a particular genetic profile respond to one type of cancer treatment but not to another. As more people anonymously add their health data, the database would become more and more effective as a tool for preventive medicine. The problem with health care today is that not enough is known about the body to practise preventive medicine, Agus argues. We’re stuck in the diagnostic model, waiting for an obvious symptom to emerge—and at that point, doctors are usually treating a disease that has had every opportunity to progress.

If we continue to “hoard” our health information, as Agus puts it, the future will never arrive. He’s impatient with privacy worries—“I’m talking about taking all identifiers off”—and is hopeful, in a Facebook-era that demonstrates little concern with privacy, that the justice of his cause will bring people around. “I’ll tell them that if we have this information, maybe their children will never have to suffer from the problems they have had. It’s their right to demand an end to illness, and this is how it will have to happen.”

   It first popped into my head when I lay down to sleep. I need to be well rested and agile tomorrow because I have a long drive and then a difficult speech to make to a group of people who don’t care and won’t likely believe anything I say understand my point of view.

And then it started. I had written the speech myself from the information which was sent down the pipe from the top brass. I knew all the facts down cold and had decided on the order of presentation. (Turn on my left side.) I had practised them over and over in the last few hours. I could picture the words as I typed them on my computer when I closed my eyes. This speech would make my reputation. Or maybe it would send my career right down the toilet. Speaking of the toilet I have the urge to go. Get up, do the necessary and come back to bed. Lie down again and get comfortable.

Picture myself standing at the podium looking comfortable. All neatly turned out in the clothes I had carefully picked before coming to bed. That’s what all the experts tell you. Of course, “they” are not the ones having to stand in front of their peers to make a point. Why hadn’t I made an appointment with the hairdresser? It’s hard to feel glamourous with a do-it-yourself do. (Turn over on my right side.)

Look at the clock and realize that’s it’s been an hour since I turned out the light. I’m not asleep yet. Don’t panic. Yet. I need to be calm, cool and rested after my drive to make a good impression. Try counting sheep. Half an hour later, I’m on my left side again and there have been more than one hundred of those fuzzy white things with dust in their wooly coats walk by – and I’m still awake.

Flip over again onto my stomach and then start relaxing my muscles one at a time. Start at the top of my head and work my way down. I get down to my throat which tightens up, but my mind keeps interrupting again with some rewordings of the key points. I need to concentrate. The harder I try the more I keep interrupting myself. Gahh!

Flip all the way over to my right side and try to calm down again. But the changes to the speech keep pushing their way up into my conscience again. Sit up and turn on the light. Spend some time finding that notepad which should be right on top of the things in the night table drawer. Then spend even more time digging down under the junk to find which far corner the pen has slipped it’s way into. By that time the brilliant rewordings have disappeared from the top of my consciousness.

After a few minutes of trying my best to bring those incredible insights back, I put down the pen and paper and turn out the light. (Left side this time.) I’m so tired. I just want to fade away to black. A little peaceful time and then suddenly, there come those wonderful improvements again. Sit up and get out the writing materials again and this time I capture all of my ideas quickly. I do them point form because they need to be captured before they rush off into the night again.

Finally all done I look at the clock and it’s 3:30 AM. Yikes! The alarm goes off at 6:00. Can’t make it any later or I won’t be there for my shining moment on stage. Mentally tell myself to relax and get with the program at hand of relaxing into sleep. Next thing I know the radio is playing some loud rock and roll song from the sixties and it’s time to get up and at it.

Did you ever wonder why speakers always seem to have bits of paper with scribbles on them which even they can’t read? Well, now you know the rest of the story. Particularly if they are the opening act at the symposium.

It first popped into my head when I lay down to sleep. I need to be well rested and agile tomorrow because I have a long drive and then a difficult speech to make to a group of people who don’t care and won’t likely believe anything I say understand my point of view.

And then it started. I had written the speech myself from the information which was sent down the pipe from the top brass. I knew all the facts down cold and had decided on the order of presentation. (Turn on my left side.) I had practised them over and over in the last few hours. I could picture the words as I typed them on my computer when I closed my eyes. This speech would make my reputation. Or maybe it would send my career right down the toilet. Speaking of the toilet I have the urge to go. Get up, do the necessary and come back to bed. Lie down again and get comfortable.

Picture myself standing at the podium looking comfortable. All neatly turned out in the clothes I had carefully picked before coming to bed. That’s what all the experts tell you. Of course, “they” are not the ones having to stand in front of their peers to make a point. Why hadn’t I made an appointment with the hairdresser? It’s hard to feel glamourous with a do-it-yourself do. (Turn over on my right side.)

Look at the clock and realize that’s it’s been an hour since I turned out the light. I’m not asleep yet. Don’t panic. Yet. I need to be calm, cool and rested after my drive to make a good impression. Try counting sheep. Half an hour later, I’m on my left side again and there have been more than one hundred of those fuzzy white things with dust in their wooly coats walk by – and I’m still awake.

Flip over again onto my stomach and then start relaxing my muscles one at a time. Start at the top of my head and work my way down. I get down to my throat which tightens up, but my mind keeps interrupting again with some rewordings of the key points. I need to concentrate. The harder I try the more I keep interrupting myself. Gahh!

Flip all the way over to my right side and try to calm down again. But the changes to the speech keep pushing their way up into my conscience again. Sit up and turn on the light. Spend some time finding that notepad which should be right on top of the things in the night table drawer. Then spend even more time digging down under the junk to find which far corner the pen has slipped it’s way into. By that time the brilliant rewordings have disappeared from the top of my consciousness.

After a few minutes of trying my best to bring those incredible insights back, I put down the pen and paper and turn out the light. (Left side this time.) I’m so tired. I just want to fade away to black. A little peaceful time and then suddenly, there come those wonderful improvements again. Sit up and get out the writing materials again and this time I capture all of my ideas quickly. I do them point form because they need to be captured before they rush off into the night again.

Finally all done I look at the clock and it’s 3:30 AM. Yikes! The alarm goes off at 6:00. Can’t make it any later or I won’t be there for my shining moment on stage. Mentally tell myself to relax and get with the program at hand of relaxing into sleep. Next thing I know the radio is playing some loud rock and roll song from the sixties and it’s time to get up and at it.

Did you ever wonder why speakers always seem to have bits of paper with scribbles on them which even they can’t read? Well, now you know the rest of the story. Particularly if they are the opening act at the symposium.

    There aren’t a lot of books which make you actually envision them as a movie while you are reading them but this one certainly does. Michael, of Mike as he prefers to be called, has a way of letting you really know and understand the characters he writes about. The detail of their thoughts add dimensions which make the story come alive.

The Omnibus edition is a compilation of three books which were written between 1991 and 1994. I found them really great to be printed together as they flow very well without a lot of repeating of the same information over and over as some series do.

What would happen if humans went out into space and found another sentient race? They might be technically light years ahead of us. But would they necessarily be friendly? Would they treat us like bugs or at best animals with little capacity for understanding? Could we possibly see their world and adapt and adopt or would we simply believe that they held magical powers which we couldn’t comprehend?

Add to this a penchant on their part for old fashioned pre-technology fighting with swords, knives, pikes and throwing stars and you have a real predicament for the human race. The aliens don’t just eradicate opponents with bombs and lasers from afar but prefer in-your-face combat where limbs are chopped off and blood and gore are ever present. When they leave a planet they usually finish, after killing every man, woman and child, by setting the planet on fire and leaving ashes and stone to mark the spot in space. To be fair, they don’t use weapons or technology which their human opponents don’t possess yet.

One of the planets which they attack after 80 years of such invasions contains a small boy of 5 named Reza Gard and his parents. Both his parents die fighting hard to protect their world from the invaders and Reza finds himself wandering alone when a huge fearsome warrior with blue skin, ruby red lips and very black hair and eyes towers over him. She grabs him by his hair and lifts him off the ground preparing to cut off his head with her extremely sharp knife when Reza surprises her by using his Father’s knife which he carried by instinct alone to slash her on the left side of her face from eyebrow to cheek. The amazed warrior is touched by this tiny animal’s courage and carefully marks him with a scar in exactly the same spot on his face and leaves him to survive if he can.

We meet Reza seven years later on a planet were orphans are housed and forced to work hard for their keep. Again, they are attacked by the Kreelan hordes who this time kill all the adults and take the small children with them for mysterious reasons of their own. By a stoke of luck, the warrior recognizes Reza’s scar after they have all been sedated and brings him along even though he is much older than the rest of those who are kidnapped.

The rest of the story tells how Reza is forced to survive in a completely alien and distinctly unfriendly environment and how he later returns to humanity when he refuses to fight against his own kind. This is a book full of action and daring deeds. Don’t put it down until the end.

The media and blogosphere is full of predictions that the housing market in Canada is going to crash. My hunch is that it won’t. It could level off or stagnate for a while, but Canadians aren’t going to wake up one morning a year or two from now and discover their houses are worth 15% to 25% less. Here are five reasons why:

No. 1: Housing doomsayers argue that when interest rates rise from their currently low levels, it’ll take away the credit punch bowl and cause house prices to tumble. However, the Bank of Canada will likely only allow its rates to climb as long as the economy is growing vigorously—which, in turn, means that employment and income levels are trending upward. Historically, job increases and wage gains have contributed to housing demand. These macroeconomic factors might not keep the mania in full flight, but they can serve as an offset to rising mortgage rates and help prevent the market from cratering.

No. 2: Real estate is a local market and differences exist between regions. Vancouver, with average house prices above $800,000, may be a bubble about to burst. But many other places, like New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island—where average house prices are under $200,000—don’t appear to be overly frothy.

No. 3: The doomsayers may be afflicted with “recency bias,” which says that people’s view of the future tends to be shaped by what recently occurred. The U.S. and some other countries experienced housing busts over the last several years, so that scenario tends to get a lot of weight in people’s minds when they reflect on the Canadian housing market. But, historically, such busts have been “fat tail” events that rarely occur.

No. 4: There are structural differences between the U.S. and Canadian housing markets. Lenders in Canada have greater recourse rights, meaning they can go after people who walk away from their mortgages (Alberta might be an exception). Also, the subprime mortgage market was less advanced in Canada.

No. 5: Price-to-rent and price-to-income ratios show over-valuation in the Canadian market, but valuation levels are not usually good indicators of turning points. Over- and under-valuation can persist for years in currency and financial markets. Indeed, the U.S stock market has been over-valued for more than a decade going by several yardsticks—yet it’s still holding up.

For those who don’t really understand what a mutual fund is here’s a simple view. If you and I wanted to invest in a big international company we might find that shares are selling at $100 each. And they are only sold in lots of 100. Individually neither of us might have enough money to buy those shares but if we pooled our money with others, we could purchase many company’s shares and earn some money while we hold them. We might hire someone to pick and choose which companies are the best ones to put our money in based on a number of different factors. Of course, that person we hire needs to be paid and s/he charges us some of our investment money for their time and expertise. That fee is called the Management Expense Ratio or MER.

Although Bill Miller has not kept a perfect record since this book was written in 2002 it is an interesting look at someone who manages those large mutual funds out of New York City. Written long before the 2008 market correction (yes, it was a correction, not the end of life as we knew it) and when interest earnings of 10% were a reasonable expectation, this book is a primer for those who want to understand how these people manage the enormous amounts of capital which are pooled together in mutual funds.

Written in a light style we first learn a bit about the man and how he learned to do what he does. In the process we find out about how economists think and what kind of art goes into deciding the value of something. Whether it’s a concrete item like a building or a truck or the ability to value the management style of a given company’s CEO, there actually are formulas and ways to come up with a value.

Once we understand all that, we learn how exactly those “smart people” we hire to make us money go about their business every day. How do they make decisions on what to buy and what to keep in our bundle of items called a mutual fund? There seem to be as many methods as there are managers at first. As we read on though we find that the formulas are quite rigid but the order in which they are applied change from person to person.

Lowe’s book documents the old economy before all the high tech changes came about and just how very much computers have changed how management makes decisions. Bill Miller is still out there today doing his best to earn the investors in his funds a good rate of return. Learning about him may change your mind about how you invest in the future.

Posted on January 16, 2012 by idimage

** I must confess that it never really registered that nowadays etiquette and manners of all kinds are not taught in schools. In a country like Canada I believe that there should be a place to go to learn the etiquette and manners of many nations. With the great mix of homelands and customs found here it would help considerably to know what applies with whom and when. Never the less, this is an interesting and informative article and one we should take to heart. – Sue Ricketts

Oscar Wilde said, “The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.”

Today, more than ever, deals are sealed at the dining table. If you are not comfortable doing business over a meal you may be losing that business. That is why so many companies around the country are investing in dining etiquette and protocol experiences for their front line employees.

Business dining is about just that – business.  Don’t get confused about why you are there.

First things first, when you are eating a business meal, please remember – you will eat again.  If you are hungry at the end of the meal, you can always go through a drive through. During the meal match your eating pace to match your client’s pace.  You do not want to be finished while your client is still eating, or vice versa. When your client is finished, you are finished.

The place setting, which is your napkin? Just think of a BMW car and when you sit down at a table. From left to right, “B” is your bread, “M” is your meal and “W” is your water or any drink. The bread plate is always to your left and drinks are always to your right.  With that in mind, when you look at a preset table and see the napkin in the coffee cup, yours is the one to the right of your setting.

Last week a client was telling me that someone invariably takes her bread plate at functions. Not wanting to embarrass anyone and not knowing what to do, she just does not eat any bread.  My suggestion is to wait until everyone has taken his or her bread plate and ask the person next to the unused plate to pass it to you, or ask the waiter for another.

Bread and butter, what do you do? Put a dab of butter onto your plate and break off a piece of bread small enough to put the entire piece into your mouth.  You butter that small piece of bread and eat.  Butter the bread on the plate not in your hand.  Please, no buttering the entire roll and taking a big bite.

Some tips to remember throughout the dining experience:

• Wait until everyone has been served to start eating.
• Silverware goes from out to in – corresponding with the courses, first to last.
• Your silverware never hangs off the plate onto the table, keep it resting on the plate.
• Your napkin does not go back onto the table until it is time to leave the table at the very end of the meal.  If you excuse yourself, place your napkin in the chair, not on the table.
• Cut one bite at a time, do not cut all your food up before you take a bite.
• Eat with your mouth closed.
• Do not turn your preset coffee cup over if you do not want any; just say “no thanks” when they are pouring.
• Put lipstick on in the restroom, not at the table (the same applies to toothpicks).
• Remember your BMW.

I don’t spend a whole lot of time watching TV. Most of it is just not very interesting to me. I watch the news and a things like the Fifth Estate and other educational programs. One of those that is consistently interesting is CBC.ca/ Marketplace. They always bring out important information on what is happening out there in Canada. They expose lies, educate consumers and try to find out the five W’s of journalism on whatever topic they have chosen for the week.

Each program they have a segment called Busted which is often an eye-opener into something which people have been doing or buying. Below is a segment on one of those things which are becoming more and more popular every year.

We all agonize over gift giving and it seems to make sense to purchase a gift card instead and let our family and friends choose for themselves what they would like to have.

This little gem shows us how we can be ripped-off at our own expense. All I can say is caveat emptor – buyer beware! If you paid money for a card, would you believe that the giftee might not get all or even any of the money you paid? Sadly, it seems that they may not. Shame on the crooks for using the familiar Visa name to perpetrate a fraud against us. Shame on the banks too for being involved. And thanks a whole lot provincial and federal governments for letting us citizens become prey to yet another bunch of conmen.

Please take the time to follow this link and be an informed buyer. You can leave comments on their website or write to you MP and MPP/MLA to make them aware that you don’t appreciate their inaction on this.

Are there special rules for gift cards sold by the banks?

Last year, Canadians spent about six billion dollars on gift cards. But we’ve heard many complaints from viewers about a certain kind of gift card that are issued by banks. In this week’s Busted segment, Erica Johnson puts the Visa Gift Card to the test.

http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2011/visagiftcard/

One place to start looking for more information is http://www.creditcardscanada.ca/answers/ask