My vitamins

ByDoug Anderson Health

I take a lot of vitamins because I don’t believe that humans consume anywhere near the quantities that they would have had during their evolution on the savannas of Africa.

In most of the listings below I have included the recommended daily requirement from one source or another

These supplement are of course in addition to what I get from my food.

Vitamin A – WebMD Recommended – Men: 900 mcg/day, Women: 700 mcg/day
Vitamin A aids in the development and maintenance of night vision and aids in maintaining the health of the skin and membranes.
I take 10,000 IU every other day (Halibut Liver Oil capsule -10,000 vtt A/ 1,000 vitD)
Both Vitamin A and D are fat soluble so they are stored in fat and in the liver.
Skim, 1% and 2% milk is fortified with 1,200 international units of vitamin A per litre, as required … More

We need a Canadian Social Media platform

ByDoug Anderson Uncategorized

Our Digital Sovereignty is at stake

I got an email Friday from OpenMedia.org, a Canadian advocacy group that specializes in media and privacy issues. The 1st two paragraphs read:

Think about your digital life for a second. The social media apps we scroll through: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. The cloud services our businesses and even our governments depend on: Microsoft, Amazon, Google. The AI systems shaping what news we see and what content gets promoted. Not one of these is Canadian!

Every single one is controlled by foreign powers and corporations that profit off our data, manipulate our choices, and increasingly undermine our democracy. That’s what’s at stake: Canada’s digital sovereignty.

I agree. Preceding this email, a 14+ page open letter was sent to the Prime Minister signed by dozens of public organizations and 70-odd individuals including the likes of Margaret Atwood and former governor general, Adrienne … More

Deal or No Deal

ByDoug Anderson Uncategorized
Cusma is dead! Long live the new world order!

Doug Anderson

Aug 16, 2025

The gyrations of Trump’s trade war remind me of the popular Howie Mandel TV show from the early 2000s (it has been reprised a few times and reruns were still running on closed circuit at my doctor’s office a few months back). Contestants had to blindly choose suitcases with various amounts of cash up to a million dollars, gradually whittling down the number of cases in the hopes of hitting the jackpot. Trump is playing a similar huckster deal maker role as the US’s trading ‘partners’ scramble for their ‘deal’.

But that’s where the similarity ends. Reality takes over.

Canada’s failure to make a deal by August 1 is not the end of the world – it heralds a new era which will probably be better in the long run. Canada is unique among contestants. No … More

·

Investments, Blind Trusts and Mark Carney

ByDoug Anderson Canada, Politics

Why Potential Conflicts of Interests are a Red Herring

Doug Anderson

Jul 29, 2025

Mark Carney is apparently a fairly wealthy man. Wealthy people have to put their money somewhere and most of them are smart enough to realize that the bank is neither the best place nor the safest.

The disclosure of the assets that Carney put into a blind trust shows that he had investments in more than 560 companies through a third-party managed account, That 3rd party will be an investment company that is likely managing the wealth of numerous people and they have the expertise and the technology to pick stocks with good growth potential and below average volatility. They would have been operating under general guidelines set out by the portfolio owner. (e.g. no coal, no napalm, yes to clean energy, yes to innovation, etc.)

Beyond that, the owner would have little involvement and would … More

·

The intersection of politics and personality

ByDoug Anderson Personality, Politics
Why Hilary Clinton lost the 2016 election … and what about Mark Carney?

Doug Anderson

Jul 14, 2025

By any rational criteria, Hilary Clinton was far better qualified for the presidency than Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, but objective qualifications did not decide the race – it was their personalities.

If you’ve ever been accused of being secretive, you’re likely an introvert and Hilary had lots of secrets – her emails, Benghazi, etc. A lot of those secrets were part of her job as Secretary of State (and it’s good that a person in that position can keep their mouth shut) but it left her vulnerable.

In contrast, Donald Trump was an extrovert at the more extreme end. Extroverts get elected because they have a relaxed self assurance that draws people in. They sound like they know what they’re talking about and so people (the MAGA ones anyway) … More

The UN and Bully Politics

ByDoug Anderson International Relations

Stumbling towards a World Federation in which NO country can veto Peace

Doug Anderson

Jun 30, 2025

When I was in high school in the early 60s, The United Nations Association of Canada was running a model UN for High School students. There were 70 or 80 high schools in Toronto at the time including public, separate and private, and each school sent a delegation representing a member country of the UN. Each school studied their country and its foreign policy and debated the issues accordingly.

It was a big deal involving several hundred students. We met on Sunday mornings through the school year and developed policies to solve the world’s problem. We tackled the world’s thorniest issues like Nuclear Disarmament, Refugees (there were already 100s of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in camps throughout the Middle East), Human Rights (apartheid in S. Africa was an emerging issue – Nelson … More

·

Behold! The Naked Ape

ByDoug Anderson Evolution, Health

Survival of the Fittest: A Primer on Evolutionary Medicine

Doug Anderson

Jun 16, 2025

Evolutionary medicine is a legitimate but rather obscure branch of medicine. It studies humans and their ailments from the perspective of where we came from originally.

Homo sapiens evolved on the savannas of Africa about 300,000 years ago. Just to put the timeline in perspective, Christ lived 2,000 years ago so our species came into existence 150 times that ago. And moreover our species was preceded by several less developed Homo species over a period of several million years.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The first humans probably did not wear any clothes and lived in the open unless they could find a convenient cave for shelter. We were hunter gatherers. The food we ate was mostly eaten raw (in spite of the fact that earlier Homo … More

· ·

Reforming the Canadian Federation

ByDoug Anderson Canada, Lateral Thinking, Paradigm Shift
Francophone and Indigenous Canadians and Cultural Sovereignty

Doug Anderson

Jun 02, 2025

When I wrote my submission to the Spicer Commission on Canada’s Future back in 1991, the main issue at the time was Quebec separatism. Indigenous issues were peaking over the horizon but were still a relatively low priority in spite of the Oka crisis having occurred only a year earlier. Oka was the first time that indigenous rights had become the focus of national attention and was well before the Truth and Reconciliation, Commission in 2008. The more recent tensions between the Wetʼsuwetʼen people in BC and the Coastal Gas Link pipeline shows that we really didn’t learn much from Oka which was over a small parcel of land that a private developer wanted for expansion of a golf course.

In researching this article, I was somewhat surprised to find references to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples … More

Remember Meech Lake?

ByDoug Anderson Canada
Let’s get on with the constitutional crisis so we (the people) can build a new constitution that serves citizens rather than politicians

Doug Anderson

May 22, 2025

So a bunch of Alberta right-wingers want to have a referendum to make Alberta a sovereign country. The core group likely wants it to become part of the USA but that’s clearly a non-starter so they’ll start with suggesting a sovereign country and if it runs into trouble they will beg the US to take them over. Maybe. They like Trump, but politics goes in cycles and Trumpism is very unlikely to survive beyond his current 4-year term. Then what would they want?

This is a new-old scenario as we’ve been through this a couple of times with Quebec. The last time was in the late 80s and early 90’s when Mulroney was still Prime Minister. He beat them in their sovereignty referendum … More

·

Cutting Government Waste

ByDoug Anderson Canada, Government Policy

Where Bloat Butts up Against The Peter Principle

Prime Minister Carney laid out an ambitious program in his press conference a few days after winning the election. A lot of heavy spending predicated significantly on saving money by cutting government waste. All parties have made this promise for decades but the bloat continues. Governments just tend to be inefficient.

There was a thin little best seller book in the early 1970s entitled The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter. Its main thesis was that in any large hierarchical employment structure (like the civil service) people get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. Incompetence is perhaps too blunt a term – it simply means that they can’t for whatever reason fulfill the responsibilities of their position to the degree expected. Be that as it may, we’ll stick to the term incompetent. People who have reached their “final placement” … More