There are plenty of things at the moment that irritate me. Before I make my comments, if you are super critical of this post then you are one of my problems. 

I’m tired of everything being black and white. No, not racism, opinions. You are either for or against Biden, for or against vaxxing, for or against Critical Race Theory. There is no middle ground anymore and no one wants to listen to arguments from the other side. It’s perplexing how to move ahead on anything. Facts are ignored, the truth is whatever the media tells us and people can’t seem to think for themselves any longer.

I’m done with the pandemic and everything about it. I’m asthmatic so have a hard time with the mask protocol and I constantly question whether it is effective.

I’m aghast at how ‘wokeness’ has changed the history of this new world specifically the US and Canada. It’s like taking a time machine to go back and erase events. By removing statues, place names, and people those acts diminish us by not passing on lessons learned to future generations. Someone once said history is written by the victors in a war – exactly! People in control make history.

I’m tired of the ‘news’ media. Are they journalists or pundits? Are they genuine or following corporate policy? I am tired of news that is politicized to move a viewpoint ahead. Walter Cronkite would be appalled with how the media portrays the news, or most often, creates the news. NEWS is not an opinion, those that give an opinion are pundits with a specific angle they are promoting.

I’m upset about the lack of freedom we enjoy or rather enjoyed. Australia is a police state, most countries are following suit. The many freedoms we used to have including freedoms of speech, choice, assembly, religion are being taken from us – I’m done!

Education is something I am part of, being an Adjunct Professor at a local university. Socrates would flip if he saw how educators teach opinion rather than espouse debate. My teachers taught from a recognized history text but today’s educators teach opinion based on the ‘fake news’. If I had school-age children they would be home-schooled – period!

All I will say about the gender issues is that I get confused with news articles about a person and it keeps referring to the person as ‘them’. I understand the pronouns use, it just makes the news story confusing to me. I don’t care whether a ‘person’ is male, female, or confused. The other thing is transgender males in competitive female sports – it’s wrong!

Choice! From now on I am not going to tell anyone my vax status. A friend told me recently he respected me but not my choice – really? There are millions of us who sit on the sidelines and see the way our nations are mismanaging our lives wishing we could do something. Well, guess what, that day is coming when the multitudes will say enough already.

The last thing I want to rant about is the products we use every day, the bare essentials. The usual goods you buy that you use every day like dish soap, deodorant, toothpaste are manufactured by vast multinationals. They control our daily lives by owning multiple brands all in the same niche.

I set out on a quest to look at products I use and see which ones were made domestically and ethically. My wife and I, for some time, have ordered our organic-based non-GMO food from local producers we know that are within 100 miles of our home. A cool distribution company called Spuds does all the work for us and even delivers it to our home. The truth is they are largely less expensive than the ones we used to buy at Costco.

Can you name all of the different brands you use every day? Most of them are owned by mega-corporations. Johnson-Johnson owns more than 30 brands; everything from Tylenol to Benedryl and Nicorette. Proctor & Gamble (what Soap Operas are named after) owns 65 brands in 10 product categories; everything from Ivory Soap to Cheer, Huggy’s, Joy & Crest Toothpaste. 

Have you ever wondered how many of their products are made in the USA? The truth is very little, most is made overseas!

Why is that important? Some years ago it was found that Chinese-produced baby food had traces of melamine in it which is a wood sealer. Milk had contaminants as well. Closer to home, Becel owned by conglomerate Unilever (soaps, etc) commissioned their own trials decades ago that found Becel benefited the heart by lowering cholesterol. I was one who believed the hype and switched to Becel unaware the clinical trials were not independent. I’m back on butter, thank you very much!

It also seems to me that if one company like Proctor & Gamble owns a large market share of a particular niche by owning multiple brand competitors then they must control the pricing and supply chain. Isn’t that price-fixing? 

Don’t get me wrong, the global marketplace gives us products that we wouldn’t have access to if we were forced to only buy domestically. My concern is mainly the consumables we use every day. What care does a contract manufacturer for Crest in China provide to make sure I have the best product in my mouth when they have cost constraints put on them from Crest? Sure, everything in the product is ‘listed’ on the label but no one knows what they mean, do or what quality they are.

You can count the number of retailers, on one hand, that source every product based on the ethical manufacturer, quality, and price. Companies need to compete so all three of those suffer. Why is the pricing so critical? Marketing!

In 2021, Procter & Gamble’s advertising spending in the United States reached 4.7 billion U.S dollars giving it a #1 overall worldwide ranking for promotional activities spending with 8 BILLION on marketing. Nothing from that comes back to you, the end consumer. It adds to the cost of the toothpaste, the soap, the headache remedy, and everything else that the company sells. The answer to their shareholders and need to show a massive profit. 

Wouldn’t you rather shop at US companies that put more of that money back into product development, with safer, quality ingredients and a company that recognizes how important our freedoms are to us?

Yes, I said the ‘F’ word again, freedom. Freedom to have non-genetically modified, healthy, priced appropriately and ethically produced consumables seems like a simple quest.

Let’s see where this all goes!