Insanity and Greed Rule

Whether it's the uber-volatile Vancouver and Toronto housing markets--where 90 year old sawdust insulated falldown-in-the-next-windstorm shacks are being snapped up for $2 million, and Canadian banks are actually giving people mortgages when the family's data proves they'll need 145 per cent of their income to service the debt (for 35 years)--or the sheer ludicrosity of participants leading up to the United States' election, total nutcases appear to be in charge.

Toronto and Vancouver house of cards?

This time I'm not talking about local politics.

Stories epitomizing insanity and greed are no longer rare, they're news.
Or a facsimle thereof.
Sometimes breaking news, in a global industry that otherwise has nothing newsworthy to report, especially considering they're on the air daily for three hours to all day!


Examples permeate mainstream media daily, to the point where my family isn't alone in shunning TV or most print publications.

Just one more example from Gyula Kiss' excellent blog coldstreamernews:

But before the cut-n-paste from his blog...a story link that'll whet your whistle.
Or raise your ire, as it did mine.

Among other notable folks, read the excerpt about George W. Bush's daughter buying an aquifer:

"Jenna Bush (daughter of former President George W. Bush

 and granddaughter of former President George H.W. Bush)

 reportedly bought 98,840 acres of land in Chaco, Paraguay, near the

 Triple Frontier (Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay).

 This land is said to be near the 200,000 acres purchased by her

 grandfather, George H.W. Bush, in 2005.

The lands purchased by the Bush family sit over not only

 South America’s largest aquifer — but the

 world’s as well — Acuifero Guaraní, which runs beneath

 Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

 This aquifer is larger than Texas and California combined."

And I'll begin the (author referenced) story from Gyula's blog with his wonderfully-timely closing statement:

The idea is almost as good as

 dumping highly treated domestic water

 on hayfields and other agricultural crops!

Here it is:

Nestlé’s bright idea: a water bottling plant in the desert

By Kate Yoder on May 27, 2016 

The world’s biggest water bottler is entering new territory: bone-dry Phoenix, Ariz., in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. The Arizona Republic reports that Nestlé plans to open a $35 million water bottling plant in the city that would produce 264 million half-liter bottles of water per year.

This news comes around the same time that Lake Mead (which supplies water to 25 million people in Arizona, California, and Nevada) just hit its lowest levels ever. Phoenix officials insist that the city has more water than it needs at the moment thanks to its supply from the Colorado River. No matter that the river is slowly emptying due to climate change!

That’s just one part of Nestlé’s water problems in the West. Last week, Oregon voters approved the nation’s first ban on commercial water bottling in Hood River County, effectively shutting down the corporation’s proposal to open its first bottling facility in the Pacific Northwest. And in California, Nestlé is currently under investigation for bottling water from a national forest, despite claiming that its water rights there date back to the 1800s.

You wouldn’t know it from the company’s actions, but Nestlé’s execs are actually pretty freaked out about water shortages. A 2009 leaked cable revealed that Nestlé predicted one-third of people worldwide would be affected by water scarcity by 2025, noting that water problems would be particularly severe in the western United States.

In the face of drought and dwindling freshwater resources, the irony of bottling water in a desert is … almost too much to be believed. But crazier shit has definitely happened!   Kate Yoder

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"Nestle learned it from that French company who had a TV commercial about building a city in the middle of a desert," Kia reminds us.

Yup.

Insanity.
Greed.
Nutcases.
Barons.

I just may throw the bigscreen out the window.
Or into the garbage with the rest of the unrecyclables.