Plausible Deniability

 So we have spent another half-billion taxpayers' dollars on another in a long series of public performances we euphemistically call elections here in Canada and what did we get? A banker. Number 5 on a Yahoo list of least respected occupations in Canada: banker. But I don't need Yahoo to tell me, I KNOW we don't trust bankers. Why would ANYBODY after what we learned in 2008? There are movies about it! Bankers are scum! They CHEAT people. Every one of them should be approached with the lack of eye contact and primal fear with which you'd slink up to THIS guy:

What is this guy? He's a carney. What is THIS guy?

He too my friends is a Carney. Of course you know I'm not talking about the OTHER figure in the picture who should never under any circumstances be sidled up to EVER... I'm talking about the person receiving the gift from the Orange Menace to the south. What IS that gift? Why, it's the Canadian federal election, that's what it is. I've explained it in the blog before but for those of you who don't trust my predictions even though they have proven to be right, here's another article you can read about how fighting the tariffs and takeover threats to the south has transformed another election loser into PM in a very short time. See the third guy thinking, "Did I leave the iron on?" That's Pierre Poilievre. He's the Conservative candidate who had this election in the bag before the "Canada Strong" defense against Trump narrative was manufactured. He (and of course Canada) is the loser in yesterday's election. 

Are Canadians so easily fooled? Well, if, like the household in which I currently am staying, you have any misplaced faith in Canadian elections, then even YOU have to admit they are no indication at all of what the country thinks. First of all about 73% of the seats are in two provinces: Ontario and Quebec. So election results tend to reflect how THEY voted - nothing more. But to even believe election results reflect how the people of our two dominant provinces THINK is wishful thinking at best, brainwashing at worst. Elections aren't real folks and as with most things (because there is a magnifying glass on everything they do) Americans give us the best examples of this. Watch the documentary called 537 Votes about the 2000 "vote" in America. Gore won, Bush lost but for 4 years the whole country acted like their democracy wasn't completely eviscerated. 

We already have an election vote collector from an important Ontario riding called Durham reporting that he saw CTV televising a Liberal victory in that riding before he or any of the other official election workers had even submitted their votes for counting. Is this dude lying? Probably not. Should we be surprised? Probably not. But like those who believed in Gore 25 years ago, people who believe this dude more than the election results will eventually be spun into lunatics and conspiracy theorists. 

Add to the inexplicably unrepresentative set-up and the ease with which our voting system can be manipulated, the most consistent result of Canadian elections - the fact that what voters want is never what the candidates offer and even if it appears as a small part of their platform, it is almost always what they do NOT get accomplished after being elected... you really should be able to see this ritual for what it is. Yet over 67% of registered voters voted according to this report. Mind boggling! 

If I believed everything I read in the media I'd consider the people of my country a bunch of Pavlovian suckers. But I don't. I know a lot of people who, like me, don't vote and someday we may even be able to feel proud that we are not contributing to the downfall of our own country like the reported 67% of us are. For years I have maintained plausible deniability and peace of mind that I have contributed in no way to the fraud that is our election ritual here. Maybe someday a majority will see it my way (if we already don't). Maybe someday we'll have democratic elections in Canada or even (GASP) candidates worth voting for. And as me and old Plato believe, only those who do not seek power are worthy to wield it. It was one of the many cool themes in the movie "Conclave." <<< which didn't win the Oscar by the way even though it was psychically topical. 

I remain unconvinced that the person we have elected is not one of the insanely dangerous men who wanted the papacy... er I mean position of PM. I guess time will tell...

Scamada

 As you may be able to surmise from the title, this is going to be a post about something that has filled me with sadness since returning to my once beloved home and native land, the veritable plague of corruption, cheating, and outright scamming that has replaced a business culture that I remember being more honest. Oh sure, there has always been all of the above but, correct me if you disagree, they are now the norm and they weren't before. There was a time in Canada when business could be done on a handshake. Now you are a fool to leave yourself so exposed. Trusting people is just opening yourself to a thorough butt pounding. Employers take full advantage of such "weakness" with no governmental or legal reprisals, giving them the conscience-saving feeling of teaching the employee a lesson by just doing what someone else would have done if they had not. I used to attribute this more to Asia but now here in Canada employers are legally screwing employees with no regulation and no loss of sleep. Canada has transformed into Scamada.

I won't rehash my stories about Canada's cable companies. The most expensive and the worst internet in the world I think, not to mention the scammy phone plans and service. My most recent is Chatr which has been very good. Month-to-month so the long term contracts that are easy to get but impossible to cancel don't exist. That's good. But for two months the internet speed I get on my hotspot when I have no wifi like here at Mom's place has gone from the promised 4G to 1980's pixel-by-pixel page building speeds. We're talking NEGATIVE 4G. That's bad. But that's not the scam of the hour.

I'm not going to talk about every phone call I get from telemarketers in either Manila or somewhere in India that Chatr gave me as part of my phone package either. I'm also not going to talk about every Canadian government agency and the website/phone labyrinths they have set up to take you VERY slowly but surely to dead ends. I have talked with representatives from every sector of the CRA, (Canada Revenue Agency) some of them not even Indian or Philipino, who have all either referred me to another department or told me they don't know why over three thousand dollars of my income tax returns for the last 9 years I was overseas has been and is still being withheld. The government of Scamada effectively STOLE over three grand from me! Not the first time either. But that's not what I want to talk about either. 

Just bear in mind the line from the first paragraph as you read today: Trusting people (in Scamada) is just opening yourself to a thorough butt pounding.

Okay, bearing that in mind, the scam I want to outline today is ongoing. We may (or may not) hear about it sometime in May I reckon. To be honest I don't know exactly how it will go yet either. What I know is I fell for it for about a week. I thought I had finally found a good job here in Canada that would pay for my transition to Korea. I still need to pay for an apostilled criminal record check, ($300) a plane ticket, ($600-$1200) and expenses during my first month in Korea (June, about $1000). I was contacted by the PISA test administrators in Canada. That stands for Program for International Student Assessment. It's something that I have blogged and written papers about and I hate. They are standardized tests which I believe I have mentioned in this blog as the worst thing to happen to education in the past 100 years or something to that effect. So right off the hop let's establish that I don't like these things. They put massive undue pressure on 14 and 15-year-olds around the world to basically prove their countries' intelligence. Schools are closed, people lose jobs, children are shamed, a LOT of suicides have been attributed to these cursed things! 

However... I am in a financial pinch here and I got a call Thursday April 10th from a 1 800 number so I can't call back (red flag number 1) and talked to an Indian gal (sorry but red flag number 2) named Rupaul. She told me that she had found my resume on Indeed (red flag number 3???) and was impressed. She felt I'd be a good candidate to not only be a PISA test administrator but a PRIMARY T/A. She told me that for every test I administered I would receive $250 plus a $40 per diem plus 50 cents per kilometer if it was at a school more than a certain distance away. But as a primary T/A I would also do pre-assessment interviews with the contacts of the schools, usually the principals, and for those I would receive $125 plus the $40 per diem plus kilometers. I would have to do some training which included online study of the T/A manual and participation in a couple of webinars. But that should only take a couple of days and I would be paid $250 per day so $500. She even mentioned that rides and hotels would be covered upon request when necessary.

Needless to say I was interested! I kept saying I didn't want to count my chickens or get my hopes up, but I did. I always do. I'm SO stupid! This sounded too good to be true so for the next few days I kept my eyes open for the catch. There HAD to be one, right?

Over the next few days I completed the onboarding, sent some reference contact information (and they DID call one of them), did an online criminal record check, sent them the one I had recently done myself, and made it to stage 4 successfully. This is the stage where they give you all the training manuals and tests and scripts and papers you will need for the job. This was also the stage where you receive a contract. I got the email yesterday (my birthday, April 14th) and started studying. They said that even if you haven't received the contract to go ahead and start reading the T/A manual and do the testing and the live webinars. Unfortunately there was a webinar today at 9 AM but I couldn't attend it because you are required to use as your ID the name with which you signed your contract plus your PISA T/A I.D. number. Mine is 5746. (Red flag number 4? I see this as a childish attempt to make something unofficial seem official. Like a treehouse password to keep icky girls out)

So I started studying. The first thing that needed to be done was the initial contact with the schools. This needed to be done on or after the first day of PISA procedures April 22nd. During the call you were to set up pre-assessment meetings. Let's say I was able to set up appointments and go to the schools for the pre-assessment visits when we make appointments and arrangements for the actual assessments in about 5 business days. Schools aren't open on weekends and I don't know how many schools I would be assigned, but I'm guessing about half a dozen. It'll take some quick organizing and some double booking but I think it could be done in 5 days which is 5 business days which is really a little over a week. Allowing a day or two for scheduling eventualities, we're finished with April. 

*** Actual assessments need to be scheduled a minimum of two weeks AFTER the pre-assessment visits. I am not sure whether this means two BUSINESS weeks for just two weeks but now we're doing assessments in the latter part of week two and week three of May. 

I read on. There will be some occasions in which the school requires regular assessments AND "UH" assessments. These are "une heure" assessments for SPED kids which are shorter than the regular 2-hour exams, one hour or une heure. So a good scheduler is going to need to space these tests at least two days apart. Further apart allowing for eventualities like flat tires, sickness, who knows what? Suffice to say there's gonna be a crunch. 

I read on. I found the whole process description to be almost unreadable due to its pedantic, detail-oriented nature, I can only imagine how harsh the actual procedure would be. Filling out STF's Student Tracking Forms with all the detailed codes in all the correct boxes. For example O for absent. Oa for temporary remote learner. 1 present. 1a computer problem. 1b hardware problem (I don't see how this is different from 1a so it could easily cause discrepancy... red flag 5). 1c internet issue. 1d absent >10 min. 1e might have skipped several questions. 2 parental refusal. 3. lack of accommodation for SEN (special educational needs. 4. changed school. 5. enrollment unknown. 6. permanently online studies. 

We need to go over all of these we can verify with the principal or contact in the pre-assessment visit and compare with any other T/A to be sure they are all identical. THEN we need to take attendance before the first part of the test, the second part, and before the questionnaire part. This is excluding the pure unadulterated tedium of inputting all this info on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and submitting them to CMEC the Council of Ministers of Education Canada. There they are scrupulously pored over and who knows how long this could take? I'm only boring you with part of the procedure so that you will know that with the time crunch, with the superfluity of data that needs to be recorded by multiple people, there are bound to be discrepancies. Only an idiot would expect all of this (plus the stuff I haven't told you about) to go off without a hitch. That's why red flag number 6 is important. "If there are any discrepancies, CMEC will not be able to remunerate the test administrators." 

However, I am used to exacting expectations from uploading grades in Korea to crappy university portals using antiquated hardware and software. I still figured I'd be able to pull this off. Then I read red flag number 7. No pay will be received by the T/A until the completion of his/her first assessment, the submission of all the forms, and the receipt, verification, and approval of said forms by CMEC. How long that will take... well there's no tellin'. 

I need the money for my job in Korea that starts June 1 but with all the submission, re-submission, editing, double, triple, quadruple-checking that is GOING to be necessary, it could be July before I see a dollar from these scamsters! To make things even more stressful (red flag #8) there will be make-up assessments if there is deemed to have been less than 85% participation during the original assessment. I think there can actually be TWO make-up assessments (I'm assuming with different test questions) but there will not be a third. This means, again I'm assuming, there will be no payment for the T/A. It's possible that THREE assessments could be done FOR FREE!

Think back to the phrase I told you to bear in mind. Trusting people in Scamada is just opening yourself up to a butt pounding. We've now established that I wouldn't be receiving any money for all the work I'd be doing until at least the third week of May. Allowing for discrepancies, make-up assessments, eventualities, scheduling mix-ups, (and you'd be an idiot NOT to allow for these things) AND assuming CMEC will take the requisite governmental time, whatever that is up to now, AND considering the sheer volume of PISA documents they'll have to process from every province in the country AND taking into account the time it takes to get bank account numbers, set up direct deposit, submit tax forms and other information to the employer, NObody's getting paid till June by these scammers. BUT how much money will the T/A's spend traveling all over the country staying in hotels, HOPING, or maybe I should say TRUSTING that CMEC will pay them what they say they're going to be paid?

This was enough to change my excitement to the familiar depths of Scamada job market despair, but wait, there's more! There always seems to be, doesn't there?

I got the contract. WHILE typing this! Oh it's a beauty! The very first thing it says is that my contract is NOT with the council of ministers of education of Canada but the CORPORATION of the council of ministers of education of Canada. CMEC is not a government ministry as the title obviously wants people to assume, it's a corporation. Not only is it a corporation, it's a fucking LOBBY! Their job is to get money from the government. That's it. And I've said it before many times, the government has no money. This is taxpayer money. They work in cahoots with Stats Canada who have lost all credibility with me. Just check their laughable statistics on immigration and you'll know what I mean. Red flag number... what are we at now 9? 10?

I read on. As a private contractor you are not an employee of the corporation and are therefore not covered by the Employment Standards Act, Workplace Safety Act, Canada Labour Code or other such laws. So I guess if I have a car accident while driving to an assessment I'm on my own. There are minimum standards that employers are NOT allowed to contract out of in Canada but maybe for private contractors it's different? I dunno. Too scummy for me at any rate. Red flag number 11.

I have to agree to indemnify the corporation against any claims by CRA or any other agency or entity with respect to withholdings they make of any kind. So if they can't find a discrepancy, they can make one up and not pay me for an assessment or WITHHOLD my pay and I have agreed to that by signing the contract. Red flag number 12.

30 days notice required to quit a 40-day contract. They are required to give only 14 days notice to fire you. They have 100% assignment rights, I have 0%. Intellectual property waiver so I can't write anything like this after signing the contract. And there is the expected secrecy promise. This requires a new paragraph at least.

As calculated, if I or any other T/A make a visit to a school on the second day of work, April 23rd and set up an assessment exactly 2 weeks from then, which would be the earliest possible date, May 7th could be an assessment date. This is unlikely, but during the second week of May I expect some kid to bring a phone into the test, take some pics of the questions and upload them for all of Canada to see. We are instructed to take precautions against this but nowadays... good luck. I would suggest metal detectors or even just stickers over the camera lenses of students' phones. But some clever kid will find or MAKE a combo calculator/cam, body cam, pen cam, whatever. What are we gonna do then? Will these tests all be disqualified? Certainly then nobody will get paid!

I'd have to be absolutely hurtin' for a butt pounding to accept this job, wouldn't I? Especially since I'll need a driver and no WAY will I find one who will wait till June to get paid! So I'll be going hundreds of dollars into the hole AND extending an idiotic amount of trust to a frigging corporation of lobbyists if I accept this job. 

But they almost hooked me! Fucking Scamada! It's hard NOT to get hooked. This is a pattern I've seen that has transformed Canada into Scamada: You get lobbyists to schmooze money out of the government however they do it. Probably I don't WANT to know how they do it. But that's their job. They don't teach English or administer PISA tests. They need to subcontract. Who gets the contract? The lowest bidder. Who is the lowest bidder? The entity that can figure out how to set something up to fracture a few Canadian laws, sidestep a few of our business ethics, and cleverly cheat desperate workers into accepting jobs that will never be full time (and have benefits) or jobs that have built-in pitfalls like this one where you KNOW you will be doing some work for free. These are the ethics that never used to be part of Canadian business and I think if we're honest with ourselves, we know where they come from. We've adopted business practices that overpopulated countries with insane levels of dog-eat-dog, do-or-die competition have developed. We're not big enough to need these practices and we need to smarten up and stop using them. Turn Scamada back into Canada.

Anyway, watch the news for stories of T/A's who weren't so lucky. Mid to late May this year I'd expect. 

So now it's off to Calgary to cut lawns or walk the streets for money till June. You want big bear? I love you long time!

Wish me luck...

History Repeating

 By way of reinforcement and update of my previous post called, "What Does A Carney Do?", check out this article of how invested Trump, and by extension the USA, now are in the digital currency scam. The article tells us that economist Paul Krugman says that the digital currency market value rests on "nothing but technobabble and libertarian derp." Does that make you feel secure? Not me. 

Now, if you haven't exceeded your free article limit at Forbes this month, go ahead and read our current PM's views on digital currency and if he gets elected (which it looks like he will) how invested CANADA will soon be in it. 

Cryptocurrency, which Trump likes, and CBDC, which Carney likes, are the same but slightly different. I doubt it would take much convincing to get Trump on board with a central bank backed digital currency once Carney explains that it could make him infinitely richer and more powerful than the crypto currency backed by technobabble and derp that he is investing in now. And as I said in my former post, this is what I'd expect from 4 years of these two crooks in charge of our countries. Carney will likely get elected based largely on his fake anti-Trump stance but we are already seeing signs of THAT facade breaking down. Maybe this was part of their "constructive, productive" conversation and part of their future "comprehensive negotiations." I doubt it will be long before they're smoking cigars, drinking snifters of port, and screwing our taxpayers together.

*** I have to sneak this in here before posting: This I am writing about a week after writing the above and imagining that Carney and Trump now ARE smoking those cigars and sipping that port. All the while people like the Blundell twerp I referenced before are PRAISING Carney for pulling off some ingenious money moving that actually hurt Trump. The explanation you will probably have seen posted by some anti-Conservative friends on Facebook by now is straight out of the past. The past when money was backed by concrete items like gold or government bonds. Nowadays, as explained in previous posts, banks just print money or pull it out of the air or some other fundamental orifice. Essentially the explanation is that Carney bought up US Treasury bonds while Trump was crashing the economy. He also told the leaders (central bankers) of other cuntries to do the same. I doubt it was only bonds they bought, they could have been investing in almost anything since everything was diving in price as the stock markets plummeted. The idea that Blundell and others are trying to push (and they know is bullshit) is that selling them off en masse would hurt Trump and the US so he'd better smarten up and by golly he did! What a bunch of heroes! 

Here's what probably REALLY happened: That little meeting between Trump and Carney was an agreement that included Trump blustering about Tariffs all over the place and causing the stock market crash (which even I had predicted). What I hadn't predicted was that it would be just a taste of things to come. It was an illustration of how easily they could make piles and piles of dough for the rich people in their countries and others. It was probably arranged that Trump would postpone or cancel the tariffs causing a stock market recovery and allowing the governments to sell what they had bought cheaply for tremendous gain. He would announce the time to buy the cheap stocks somehow... maybe a social media post like "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!" This is just classic stock market manipulation and it's yet another crime the convict in chief has committed and will get away with. Do I even need to type that exactly NONE of these massive gains would be distributed to any citizens but the already filthy rich? 

Trump and Carney both probably made themselves tidy little sums - something Trump's not good at doing. This undoubtedly cemented the love between the central banks of these countries and Trump rather than hurting him. The tariffs are still only on hold and this pattern could repeat itself to a much greater extent when the tariffs are back on the table. It also will be related to Trump that this is peanuts compared to what they could do with CBDC. But they needed his trust before making that jump. They probably have it now cuz what does Trump trust more than piles of money? And the most delicious part of it all is that Carney will get elected by accusing Trump of market manipulation among other things in his posturing against him. Like Trump conjured this up on his own!

And in case you are now saying, "Yeah but Dave, it DID hurt Trump. How's he going to recover the losses?" Easy. Same way any financial crash is "recovered from" nowadays. Print more money that is backed by nothing causing the NON - filthy rich to pay for it all. This is just recent history repeating itself. 

The current political shenanigans bring a song to my head. I hear Shirley Bassey saying it's all just a little bit of history repeating. 

There are a lot of people dancing right now, but do we know who's singing? Let's go back... waaay back to 1890. This is when Trump's hero President William McKinley was doing something remarkably similar to what is happening now. How similar you ask? I'll tell you a few things that will undoubtedly ring bells for everybody and I'll tell you some results of these things that really ought to ring warning bells, alarms, emergency sirens, and danger Will Robinsons. 

Canada was a young nation with our first PM John A. Macdonald who had been elected in 1867, was getting old, and probably wasn't going to win the upcoming election. He resigned in 1873 after getting busted for taking bribes but got re-elected in 1878 cuz - what do you expect from a PM? Honestly! The US was a bit older and well-established and thought their northern neighbors were a good source of raw materials. One example of our "trade" then is the fishing ships that stole wood and water from us while pretending to fish. But Canada was doing the exact same thing in Minnesota. "Reciprocal tariffs" of the 1890's trade war actually included colourful entrepreneurs like "timber pirates." I dunno, to me it seems somehow more honest than the entrepreneurs of today who just move money around in such an impersonal way scamming billions from the working stiffs of the middle and lower classes. 

What I'm getting at is our current situation with that tariffying menace to the south is shockingly similar to what we had in 1890. Here's a summary of just a few of the similarities.  Back then the tariffs backfired but part of the reason for that is they didn't have the stability of the central bank behind them. That would only come a couple presidents later along with the beloved income tax. Basically charging your own people directly instead of making it look like you are charging other countries but are charging your own people directly. And how did Woodrow Wilson get away with the temporary/permanent income tax? A huge crisis. WWI. Anyway, let's not get too far ahead. What McKinley DID have was the backing of the richest man in the world. 

Andrew Carnegie was not in cars or tech like Elon Musk because they were not the huge industries of the time, steel was. Steel was important to railway, building, and military construction. Carnegie was a "robber baron" abusing the workers, extending their hours and cutting their pay, and notably busting unions in the 1880's and 1890's. In his "The Gospel of Wealth" he wrote about his version of trickle-down economics which clashed with his earlier belief that "amassing wealth was one of the worst species of idolatry." He clearly caught what I call in this blog the "money disease," but toward the end of his life he found some sort of cure and gave a LOT to charity which is the ONLY significant way in the history of economics that wealth trickles down from the ultra rich to the poor. Carnegie can be partially forgiven for his late life philanthropy, but I can't see Trump or Musk ever doing that. Back to our history lesson...

Carnegie used strategies of vertical and horizontal integration, basically buying all the raw materials and shipping and absorbing competing companies respectively, along with some market manipulation in concert with other robber barons in oil (Rockefeller), and banking (J.P. Morgan), to make his vast fortune. He supported McKinley's tariffs as part of his protectionist efforts to eliminate foreign steel companies as competitors. He also liked the idea of Canada becoming a friendlier (US state) source of raw materials. 

The McKinley-Carnegie partnership was pretty similar to the Trump-Musk axis of evil we see today and so was their market manipulation. It also involved the central bank (personified by JP "Jupiter" Morgan) and a financial crisis - the worst to that point in American history. The stock market crash of 1893 was largely triggered by Canada's failure to become a state going so far as to re-elect the aging and unpopular Macdonald who won on the platform of "Canada Strong" and the counteractions of business diversion away from the US to Europe. Lower trade with Canada, and lower trade with Europe, which was now being supplied largely by Canada, and the bankers' scrupulous maintenance of the gold standard in favour of just pulling money out of their asses, caused a bank run. This triggered a proposal by Morgan and some other banks to purchase gold in exchange for - you guessed it, government bonds. This stabilized the US money supply and virtually instituted JP Morgan as the central bank of the time. Not the first, mind you, Andrew Jackson dismantled the 2nd Bank of the US in 1832 for being subversive and dangerous to the rights and liberties of the people. He was so right!

In fact, in 1901 McKinley made a speech on the virtues of dropping the tariffs and protectionism in favour of diversifying international trade once again (with Canada and Europe). It might as well have been entitled "This Tariff Shit Don't Work." He was assassinated the day after the speech by a dude who was one of MANY people who had been adversely affected by the tariffs and economic policies of the times and resorted to anarchy. Leon F. Czolgosz worked at a wire mill (steel) in Cleveland where the wages had been cut resulting in a strike. He eventually was fired and blacklisted but got his job back as Fred Nieman (nobody). He was so affected by the inequality between workers and the wealthy that he quit work and got more involved in the anarchist movement. 

Are you noticing any parallels yet? More to come...

Morgan, now the central bank, merged some railroads into a huge hideous conglomeration and did the same with steel by, with Carnegie, forming US Steel the first billion-dollar corporation ever. Unfortunately for them, McKinley's replacement, Teddy Roosevelt, was a strong believer in antitrust and limiting monopolies. This, and some more unscrupulous banking, led to the 1907 financial crisis which was averted by the "central bank" (JP Morgan) bailing out the banks that were failing to meet the demands of the panicked public demanding their savings back. How did he do it? You're starting to get this aren't you? More bonds. ... and a further monopolization of the steel industry by US Steel. Some even accused JP Morgan and others of manufacturing the panic to increase their profits, which they humongously did. But, now I'm just GIVING you parallels, it was never proven. 

This created a "need" for a central bank to be the lender of last resort so that scheisters like Morgan couldn't do such things in the future. What Morgan did and what central banks do now is vulture capitalism and it's been repeated over and over again. It's going on now if you ask me. If you have the time, read about it here: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://teachdemocracy.org/images/pdf/jpmorgan.pdf

It's all just a little bit of history repeating. 

Sel-fish-ness

 In 2007 while teaching at the leading language school in the country of Korea, Hangook University of Foreign Studies, I made a blog for my students and on that HUFS blog I posted the results of the test I am going to write about today. Here's the whole thing, make-up classes, syllabus, class pics, and the Kiss experiment. 

"Hmmm... make-up and kisses in English class? This sounds like it could be good! Ngo ooooooon...."

It's nothing so scandalous I assure you. It was just a social experiment I stumbled upon at the time and even in 2007 it was hard to find it again online after I'd heard and read about it. If I had posted the link on my blog it would most certainly be dead now. These are the things we're not allowed to know about and THAT concept is a very big part of the illustration of the experiment. 

Okay I'll get to it. I cannot post a link to the original experiment and I dare you to find it. It is zealously wiped off the internet as fast as it can be uploaded and has been since before 2007 so good luck. It was a lady who taught in the USA. She put something like 100 (for the sake of easy explanation) Hershey's Kisses in a jar. She lined up her students in no specific order. When replicating the study in Korea I chose to line my students up in the order they volunteered so as to encourage future class participation. It's not a strong suit of the average Korean student although at HUFS, as you can see, the students tended to be above average. Anyway, she told the kids the rules were as follows: Grab as many chocolates as you want and they're yours. Then pass the jar to the next person and they do the same. When the jar reaches the last person (again for convenience we'll say there were 10 students) the chocolates in the jar will be doubled and the process will be repeated. 

I'm sure you can guess what her results were and why this social experiment on the damage American culture does to the mentality of its children has been whitewashed from the internet. It's almost unnecessary to type but I'll do it anyway. She did this with several classes and the jar never made it to the end of the line with any Kisses left in it. In EVERY stinking class there was a Johnny Capitalist who selfishly and ignorantly emptied the jar. I only call the student Johnny because of the Little Johnny jokes. You've heard at least one of them. If not: An elementary school math teacher asked her class one day, "If there are three birds on a wire, and a farmer shot one, how many are left?" One little boy said two, but little Sally, realizing it was a trick question, said, "None, 'cause everyone knows that if you shoot at birds they all fly away." The teacher congratulates her on her correct answer.

Little Johnny, however, disagreed. He said, "No, there would be one --the one that the farmer shot."

The teacher replied, "No, Johnny, you're wrong, but I like the way you think."

"OK, teacher, I have a riddle for you," boasted Johnny. "Let's say three women are at a bar and they each order a single scoop ice cream cone. The first one eats it by gently licking it around the edges, the second slowly sucks the ice cream off the cone from the top, and the third gobbles the top and then sucks the rest out of the cone. Which one is married?"

After a few seconds of contemplation, the teacher replied, "Well, I think it must be the third, the one that gobbles the top and sucks out the inside."

Johnny responded, "No, teacher, you're wrong --it's the one with the wedding ring. But I like the way you think."

I first heard it with popsicles and the descriptions of how the popsicles were eaten was far more graphic but you get the idea. I particularly like this Johnny joke cuz it leads to good comments from married people afterwards like, "No, it's the one who has a headache and refuses the ice cream cone but I like the way you think." Or "No, it's the one who orders the cone by phone cuz her husband won't let her go to the bar, but I like the way you think." or "What is the married lady doing at the bar anyway? She should be home making dinner for her husband! I DON'T like the way ya'all think!" 

At any rate, I'm sure it wasn't always a boy who hoarded all the chocolate and I'm sure he wasn't always named Johnny but I AM sure that one of the problems WAS capitalism, or more specifically American capitalism. Don't get me wrong, there IS capitalism in the Korean culture as well and if I had done this experiment in any other place I had worked I KNOW there would have been a Johnny Capitalist and I have a very good idea the specific students it would have been. However, I doubt there is any classroom in the US or Canada that could replicate or even come close to the results I got at HUFS. Take a close look at those class pictures. NONE of those kids will be the CEO of Samsung, a partner in a large Korean law firm, a central banker, or president of Korea. They're too smart and too nice.

But hold the phone. I want to analyze the experiment a little more closely because I don't think it's just about capitalism, greed, selfishness, parenting, socialization and such. There is a major factor that I think I missed at the time and I think it would skew the results in Korea more closely to or even beyond the results the original teacher obtained. What I'm saying is I doubt teachers would be able to get such positive results even at HUFS in Korea today. It may not be so much about the capitalism entrenched in the culture, however. 

There is a worldwide shortage of what have become known as "soft skills" and every employer is looking for the kids who best exhibit them. You all know what they are. It's actually a military term. If you don't know, the skills they call soft are things like critical thinking, emotional intelligence, teamwork, cooperation, collaboration, the ability to describe the same thing in three different words, communication, adaptability, time-management, stress management, and my favourite - creativity. Basically they are not "hard" skills because hardware like machines, computers, or robots can't do them very well. There are those who believe they can now but I do not include myself among them. Machines, in my opinion, are not now as good at soft skills as people can be, nor will they ever be. 

"MMMmmmmm... Strong with irony this blog post is!"

Think about the choice every student of mine and that long since anonymous teacher had. And let's use the convenient numbers I suggested. These were not the numbers in either of our experiments but... there were 10 students and 100 Kisses in the jar. It wouldn't take much cooperation, collaboration, teamwork, the ability to express the same thing in three different words, problem solving, critical thinking, communication, etc., etc., to figure out that the possibility of endless candy for all exists. All it would take is basic math skills and some common sense to figure out that if each kid took 5 kisses the jar would have 50 left, that would be doubled, and the process could be repeated until they all died from diabetic shock. So what stops every single class from doing this? Perhaps a couple of better questions might be "Did they even realize this?" and "If so, THEN what the hell kept them from doing it?" I think in a LOT of cases the students DID realize the possibility of endless candy for all. Let's analyze together what caused them to suppress this knowledge and allow the group not to do it. During our analysis you will undoubtedly begin to realize that this is a microcosm of the countries of Canada and the US and you will also understand why this is something the owners of those countries DESPERATELY do not want their assets (or citizens) to know.

1. The Johnny Capitalist argument. This is Johnny and we already know that he wants all the candy for himself, fuck everybody else! This rare psychotic, anti-social tendency will take him far in our countries. Be honest, do you know a Johnny? Do you have a Johnny in your family? Is one of your kids a Johnny? Have you ever contemplated harming or even killing Johnny? It might even be a genetic tendency. If might even be possible to remove this putrid gene from the world pool but you just KNOW there would be that one country, North Korea, Russia, the US, Canada, that ONE evil country that would nurture the gene due to its power and its world-domination possibilities. There are those who believe this is inevitable, that this gene just occurs naturally in kids. I LOVE this cartoon:

On this I think it DOES occur naturally but it can be culturally nurtured to be dominant or recessive to the point of stigmatization. In US and Canada it is now the former but all of our original peoples proudly maintained the latter for many glorious generations until some people from Lord of the Flies countries invaded and rubbed it out. William Golding, fittingly, is from the UK and it was largely the British who I am talking about. (He's the author of Lord of the Flies) It may be even MORE fitting that the boys on the island in LOF were evacuated from a war that was raging in Britain, in order to keep them protected from it. 

A little literary break might be needed here. In the LOF story the evacuated kids initially choose a good boy, Ralph, as their leader but eventually a Johnny named Jack, who had been appointed by Ralph to be the food hunter and gatherer for the boys, becomes overwhelmed by his lust for power and the violence with which he can increase it. I think Bill Golding leaves us to surmise that the very same thing is what had led to the war from which the boys were evacuated. Eventually Jack and his followers end up hunting Ralph and burning down the island - the very source of the resources and power they think they are killing him for. The fire is seen by a British naval officer who meets the boys on the beach just before they can kill Ralph and asks what the hell is going on... and they all end up crying in shame. I remember reading that book in school and wondering if the soldier chastened the boys and they cried because their consciences exposed their shame... or did he have a fucking machine gun? Were they stopped from killing Ralph AND the officer because of morality or superior fire power? They probably saw the officer's ship too. I guess we'll never know...

Even as a youngster I had some soft skills. Analysis is one we haven't mentioned yet. OVER-analysis? Well I think it's still a soft skill but maybe a lesser one. In fact I think I'll go lesser and lesser by bringing up another of my favourite literary examples of this very same microcosm of some countries and possibly the planet: Catch 22. I definitely believe a great deal of the major problems nationally and internationally killing us all qualify as catch 22's and so does Yoda. (Yoda believes, he doesn't qualify, although maybe he does... okay that's over-OVER-analysis) The main catch 22 in Joseph Heller's novel was Yosarian, a bombardier during WWII, wanting to be grounded due to insanity the evidence of which is flying more missions, which you'd HAVE to be insane to do. Knowing this, however, proves his sanity and disqualifies him from being grounded thereby mandating the flight of further missions, which is insane. There are many more like when he's sweet-talking one of Nately's whore's co-workers and they agree that marriage is insane (with which I heartily agree!). Nevertheless he proposes to the ho proving his devotion to the match through the insanity that elicited the proposal. She refuses him on the grounds that he is too crazy to marry because he is crazy enough to propose something as insane as marriage.

Maybe the best catch 22 in the book was when American soldier and entrepreneur Milo Minderbinder, possibly the best Johnny Capitalist in the entire literary canon, comes to an agreement with the German military to take some product off his hands - I think it was cotton - in exchange for agreeing to bomb his own bomber base all the while announcing on the base PA that what is good for M & M Enterprises, his syndicate, is good for us all because we are all share-holding member of this syndicate. 

Bombing the base, burning the forest, taking all the Kisses, do I need to belabour the obvious associations here? Perhaps the mentality, the catch 22 mentality of Johnny Capitalist, Jack, and Milo Minderbinder goes something like this: Exhausting your own profit base is something only an insane person would do, but only an insane person would pass up the opportunity for so much instant power/chocolate that could be taken by another if I don't take it right now, and I, Jack/Milo/Johnny, am not insane, which proves I am insane. This is the Johnny Capitalist argument which is one I recognized at the time of my experiment and post. I'm sure you can see why the government and our owners would not want us to know this. 

There is another cartoon I'd like to show here that I just can't find. Perhaps like the study it has been diligently taken down by the internet censors. It's a man talking to some kids in dystopian times with nuclear bombs exploding in the distant background saying, "Yeah but for a while we sure had some great return on investment!" 

I don't know if it's ethical or even possible to eliminate all of these kids from existence. My suggestion would be to find them and mark them. Maybe force them to wear wristbands with a clear demarcation of their insular thinking, WWJCD, on them. "What Would Johnny Capitalist Do?" No? That wouldn't work? Why not? 

2. The fish-kids argument. Okay here's the other one and it's one I have recognized since the original 2007 post because it has increased a great deal since then. We need to start with the goldfish analogy. You've seen this I'm sure. 

Attention span has been decreasing. By now it's probably less than 8 seconds and I've heard the attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds. I don't know for sure but I think they measure this by the length between incidence of the goldfish sucking up a piece of its own shit, realizing it's not food but shit, and spitting it out, then 9 seconds later doing the same thing. As far as the attention span of a kid, I can tell you it's getting shorter just from my teaching experience. I see more kids than the average person and I do things with them that are good indicators of attention span. Here's an article that explains it more thoroughly and even though this article misleads you by calling it a myth, it basically says it's NOT a myth. 

I have a theory, and I think back and I probably should have recognized it at the time, that some of the kids who took more or ALL the Kisses from the jar may have done so out of FOMO or the instant gratification to which our current tech-driven age has allowed them to become accustomed. If we think about the mechanics of the studies, giving the first student the jar, waiting for his/her decision, waiting for the student to count/take the chocolate then pass the jar and wait for the next student to perform the same sequence, it's time consuming. Is it possible that a student could become so bored with the exercise that he/she would just empty the jar and say, "Okay, move on teacher, this has become tiresome."? You might not think so but I've witnessed more of just such behavior as we have fallen deeper and deeper under the spell of our devices. Like the Eagles said, "We are all just prisoners here of our own devices." Or something like that. 

The massive irony in all of this is that almost every one of the people skills or soft skills that are so prized by employers and what separate us from computers and machines require patience and sticktoitiveness that are the very things being systematically drained from us BY the machines. It's almost as if machines are making machines of our kids so that they won't steal their jobs in the future. I'm sure there's a catch 22 in THERE somewhere too. You can't get a job without computer skills and soft skills. The computer contributes to destroying the skills you need to get a job. You can't afford a computer without a job. But you can't get a job without a computer or the skills you learn from it.

I tell ya, I wouldn't want to be participating in a job market so rife with moral relativism and catch 22's... oh wait, I AM! Maybe this is one, or two, of the reasons why I'm currently contributing to that job market as a job hunter rather than a gainful employee. 

Pyramid Teaching

 In keeping with the theme of fakeness, a bent I've been on now for my last handful of posts, let me share with you something that I don't think has a name yet but you may have come across it like I have a few times. I'm going to call it pyramid teaching. The first reason why I call it pyramid teaching is because, like many of the cons I've been inundated with in my current confines of Scamada as well as abroad, this one starts with desperation, panic, some sort of crisis and let's be honest - it's usually a crisis of money.

Twice in my experiences with pyramid teaching I was in a money/job crisis, broke, depending on the kindness of friends or family to live and in need of work and I stumbled upon teaching "jobs" that wanted me to teach English in the most counter-intuitive, anti-educational, mathematical, corporate manner and had absolutely no chance of my falling for or buying into this pyramid scheme if I hadn't been. Once in Korea at a corporate training company called SPEP, once in Canada at a business designed to take advantage of taxpayer money (or, in the spirit of fakeness, government funding) from RAP (resettlement assistance program), mostly the IRCC (Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada), and other programs. The business used LINC, PBLA, and CLB (language instruction for newcomers to Canada, portfolio based language assessment, and Canadian language benchmarks) to attain their goals of creating a used car lot of GOOD teachers not working together but in competition with others paranoid of losing their part-time jobs with no benefits or being outperformed on monthly and yearly "performance evaluations," teaching in manners against their instincts and best practices always with the carrot of full-time hours and legal benefits like medical coverage just out of reach. I came across pyramid teaching in one or two courses during my master's too but dropped them both. You see without the desperation and the NEED for money it is easier to just recognize what's going on and get the fuck out. Unfortunately, the lure of money and basic survival forced me to endure the evils of pyramid teaching for much longer than I would have liked. But now I am able to illustrate it for you.

I remember being at my wits' end in Seoul  drinking a corner store beer and talking on the motel room phone with Heather in Pyeongtaek who, despite her considerable gifts in this area, almost didn't manage to talk me off the ledge a succubus nicknamed Diane has forced me out onto with highly skilled pyramid teaching. This was after the first day of "training" for SPEP which is the hook day. The hook is accomplished simply by giving the student the most impotent, helpless, useless feeling of failure he/she has ever encountered in the realm of education. You set them up to fail and utterly humiliate them. For me the experience was made infinitely worse due to the fact that I had apprenticed for over 20 years and learned how to teach well, recognized the shit show I was being forced to legitimize by my participation, but was trapped into continued participation on account of my desperate need for money. It was without any exaggeration torture. Let me explain...

Diane was a fairly attractive middle-aged Korean woman and also a hell-spawned demon. She had called me, congratulated me on being chosen for the job, and introduced herself as my trainer. She told me to arrive at the SPEP offices for my first day of training. They had some fake name for the procedure with undoubtedly an official sounding abbreviation. I remember there being a TON of abbreviations childishly thought to sound professional but that made the whole experience even more mickey-mouse amateurish because they stood for something else. I actually think the video lessons I was doing on the first day were abbreviated as ESP. I don't know what that stood for but even WITH ESP I wouldn't have been able to ascertain what it was that Diane wanted from me. With 20/20 hindsight I now know that what she wanted from me was utter failure and humiliation... and she got it... bitch.

Yes, I was going to be videotaped teaching lessons. I was told by Diane that I needed to stand for the entire lesson, (so I couldn't sit with individual students to help, which is a teaching skill I have developed over time), there would be a few students and she wanted me to pretend I knew them already and pretend I was setting them up with conversation partners, not to actually do it. "Don't make me talk to myself," I think she told me. So I was not teaching I was ACTING like I was teaching ON CAMERA. I don't know about you but these are two surefire ways to make me sweat. I would be a crappy actor. I remember filming a lesson for the webpage of a college where I taught in Korea. It was outdoors and the students were my actual students who I had developed good relationships with. As soon as the camera went on I launched into this nervous performance that was nothing like my actual teaching. My students were asking me, "David, what's wrong?" That increased my anxiety. It was outside in the hot sun, which made it worse. And I remember having worn the absolute WORST shirt for the occasion, a powder blue shirt that made any moisture blatantly obvious. I was sweating, the stains were increasing which in turn increased my sweating which made me more nervous and awkward and the cherry on top was the "director" saying, "More character! More emotion!" Basically, dance like a monkey for me. 

Not only was Diane making me dance like a monkey for her, she was playing a prog rock Kansas, Yes, or Rush song that was impossible to dance to. She had left the room to allow me to see the lesson in a book and plan my teaching strategies. I rarely do this without employing some sort of secondary exercise or game that relates to the topic or grammar or skill the lesson is teaching. Couldn't do THAT. I also arrange the class to best suit group conversation arrangements. Couldn't do THAT. I bring props, show videos, tell stories from my experience, could only do ONE of those. So I planned a lesson with the resources I had. She told me she was bringing several people, she showed up alone. Then on went the camera and she said, "Go ahead and TRY to teach me bitch!" 

Immediately I started saying something like welcome to class and I had planned to call on individuals to quiz them on the previous class. Another skill I had developed over the years. It's called formative assessment and it works. Let me call on someone, hmmmm... Diane blah blah blah. I asked her a question. She answers in this falsetto highly Korean accented, broken English, airhead teenaged girl voice, "I no Diane. I Minnie." I broke the fourth wall or whatever they call is in the biz. "See what I was trying to do there..." She interrupted me, "No no no... continue." I guess she didn't want me to break her method actor transformation into "Minnie." So I continued, "Okay let me ask another question from last lesson to a different student... uh Minnie?" She gives this stunned look like how am I supposed to know and gives a purposely grammatically incorrect answer. At least that's what I thought. So I quickly correct the grammar mistakes and tell her the answer. Well then SHE breaks the fourth wall. "What are you doing?" she asks. So I explain the concept of review to her. She says something dismissive like we don't need that then launches into a defense of Minnie's grammar mistake. I'm wondering if this is a test or if she really believes this. Turns out she really had this bad grammar habit (because I heard her making the mistake again when she wasn't in the character of Minnie) and she was pretty sure she was right. I can't remember what it was but it was something like "I were bowling yesterday," which might be okay shootin the shit with friends at a pub in certain areas of the UK but it's not okay in most places English is spoken. But I need the job - she wins the argument. Off to a flying start!

I decide to go into the preface for the lesson and tell a story from my life and ask if she can relate. Again with the stunned thousand-mile stare. She briefly breaks character after stonewalling my attempts to ask if she has ever had this HIGHLY relatable experience or something similar that has OBVIOUS connection to the upcoming lesson and says, "They don't care about you, just teach the lesson, there isn't much time." Or something like that. She might as well have slapped me in the face. This is the very root of my teaching philosophy. I get to know my students in order to attain about a dozen tried, tested, and true educational principles such as relevance, meaning, context, motivation, participation, engagement, learning preference, learning style, etc. She shot them all down in one fell swoop. And on and on she swooped! She was by no means finished!

You can imagine I was sweating as much as the mock lesson for the college website. And worse than that I was enraged at her repeated attacks on my well-established and valid pedagogy/andragogy (two words she DEFINITELY didn't know). When I get really, really mad my mouth dries out and I sound like an Asian man slurping noodles when I talk. Now I got THAT going for me. Each new thing compounded the anger and the sweating and the nervousness until finally I was the one who broke the fourth wall and came a hair's breadth from saying, "FUCK THIS!" and storming out. Instead I presented a long, well-researched and practiced explanation of how I was trying to teach the lesson and why. Diane sat there writing in her book note after note about how poorly I did. She eventually said something that just made things worse like, "Well I wanted you to SHOW me not TELL me." 

What she had now was a video that made me appear to be a shitty teacher. This was what she wanted. The very next day I was forced to (red-faced and sweaty again) sit through the the video recording of the whole fucking ordeal with Diane stopping periodically and giving vacuous feedback. Throughout the "training" she referred back to it to illustrate how far SHE had brought me with her brilliant training. She was teaching me the error of my ways you see and I would be a changed man, with gainful employment, all because of her. This would also do no harm to her reputation in the company. But it's all a scam! Pyramid teaching.

As time went on and I learned how to deal with Diane, understand what she wanted even though it was all wrong, and adapt to her messed up style of training, she actually became nice and frequently reminded me of how "improved" I was over where I started. Soon I started referring to that class and the video joking with her about how embarrassing it was. heh heh heh heh. So funny. 

I performed one lesson in front of two experienced SPEP instructors and it was what kept me there. I almost chose being jobless in a foreign country over teaching in such a ludicrous manner. But they both told me something that got me through the training and it was basically just dance the dance for a while and do the stupid shit they tell you to do and when you get to your REAL classes you can go back to teaching properly. Which is what I did until the company trapped me PHYSICALLY in living and travel situations I needed to get out of and I really DID say fuck this and quit mid-contract without agreement from my employer for the first time ever. That's how bad this place was.

I enjoy the study of both science and religion and subscribe to neither. Through my personal research I have boiled one of the most universal debates down to an admittedly simplistic but highly serviceable explanation. Wanna read it? It's very short. I have come to the conclusion that science is comprised largely of people who have a tendency to accept theory as fact and religion is comprised largely of people who tend to accept faith as fact. I believe, and to be clear I CHOOSE to believe in Tesla's theory of Aether more than Einstein or Darwin's theory of the permanence of matter or Kant or Augustine's faith in an eternal sentient being. Don't argue details please, I may not have described any of the four people's beliefs exactly, they were only chosen as well-known names associated with the schools of thought to which I associated them. Details may differ. I DID admit to a certain simplification. The bottom line is it is all just chosen belief that we cherish although it is impossible to prove. Although both would argue to the death, science has no more proven the existence of the Higgs Boson than the Catholic church has proven the existence of God. So I really don't know how we all can't just get along... but people have fought wars!!!

Anyway, when I worked in Calgary at the Centre for Newcomers it was very similar in many ways to SPEP. They differed much like the difference between religion and science. Neither went so far as to convince me to subscribe to their teaching methodologies, I had already made my choice, but whereas SPEP depended on their trainees accepting their teaching practices through faith, I found my time at CFN (the centre for newcomers) chock-o-block full of workshops and certificate acquisition designed to convince me of the scientific nature of their educational theory. Neither proved valid, in fact I have solid evidence they were both fraudulent, which I suppose destroys my analogy, but let me describe to you a bit of the pyramid teaching to which I was subjected during the acquisition of my PBLA certificate:

Oh I got it, but it was no less torture than the SPEP pyramid training. It's hard for me to remember the exact details of the frustrating baloney I was forced to accept as fact (or lose my job) but I'll give a few forinstances. We were meant to write a lesson plan and an assessment on three types of questions that was characteristically WAY overanalytical and mathematical for something as abstract as language. The statement that John had written on a postcard was, "Europe is great! I am having a blast! Wish you were here." Q: Is Tom enjoying himself? Our assignment was to characterize the question as either interpretive, analytical, narrative, or some other category I have since blocked out of my mind. We were all told that there was only one answer. We were ALWAYS told that there is only one answer. That's why I refer to this type of training as "mathematical." This, we were informed, is 100% an interpretive question meaning you need to interpret the statement to answer the question. Now, imagine Tom wrote, "Europe is great! The weather keeps me guessing, the food keeps me thin, and the drivers keep me on foot. I've lost 10 pounds! Wish you were here." THAT makes the question interpretive. Translating "I'm having a blast" to "I'm having a good time" is not interpretive, it's translative if that's a word. I discussed this with a few of the other teachers studying with me and we all shared the opinion that the answer was wrong but we also shared the familiar advice, "Just dance the dance, give them what they want, get the certificate and do the RIGHT thing in your classroom.

So I went through 5 weeks I think it was of the teacher giving me and other students these mind-bogglingly obtuse opinions that were offered up as unassailable factoids. I really don't want to relive too many of them so I'll just stop at the one example. I hope you can understand.

This was the type of pyramid teaching that I had to suffer through and try my best to act like I was employing in the classroom while surreptitiously doing the exact opposite. I thought my days were numbered and when they realized I was teaching properly that would be the end of me but THAT job ended because they constantly promised more hours and had no intention of giving them to me. The final semester they hired about 10 new people and gave me NO extra hours. This is simply because they don't want to pay the benefits that come with full-time employment. Pyramid teaching tends to come at businesses rather than schools and I have been surprised how many of the former there are around the world posing as the latter!

I worry that "dancing the dance," maintaining the fake while I pick and choose a very few moments to be genuine is a pattern that could spread beyond my professional life. Do you ever wonder that yourself? Are we ALL doing this a little bit?

What do ya reckon? Are our lives becoming more fake than real? Have we surpassed the halfway mark? Exceeded it? Are those moments of veracity on the decline? What is an acceptable percentage? Has THAT changed too? 

It's Royal Rumble... I Mean Election Time in Canada

 I have received this link from three of my friends on Facebook recently.

It begins with the purposely ambiguous "Canadian law enforcement has issued a stark warning!!!" I wanna know who "Canadian law enforcement" is first of all. Are you talking about the RCMP, provincial police, the courts, the legislative branch of government... I should read on to see this stark warning...

No warning stark or otherwise in connection to any law enforcement agency in Canada. Maggie Dwyer is an author. A good one. But not an agent of Canadian law enforcement. Alexandra Lavoie is a journalist for the Rebel News Network. For that matter, who is Dean Blundell, the original post creator? He's a shock jock who has pissed off "Canada Proud," a right wing organization with direct connections to the CP Conservative Party of Canada, that Blundell accused of organizing anti-Trudeau protests. They sued him for a couple hundred grand. Is that enough to compromise the unbiasedness of a shock jock? I'd think so. 

Remember the Brooks Brothers riot? The fake protest against the Florida vote recount of the 2000 Bush Jr. vs. Gore election... that actually WORKED and stole the election from the rightful winner - Gore. Remember that? You really should. It was an absolute, once-and-for-all condemnation of the democratic process of the US. If you think I am exaggerating, watch this:

The protestors were suspiciously non-Cuban and well dressed. They were just people the Republican party keeps around for strategic protesting. I bet you'd find a lot of the same people participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack only, having learned their lessons, this time they sported face paint, flags, and Viking helmets...

Well, as can be said about a lot of things, we have our equivalent here in Canada and it IS the Canada Proud bunch. Here they are distracting attention from a Trudeau speech by dressing as bananas:

So they DID what Blundell is being sued for saying they did. Speaking of fruit, the lawsuit is currently being handled in the Canadian public court of M-LIME (My Lawyer Is More Expensive) so we'll see who has more money, the Canada Strong Bananas or Dean Blundell. Actually I think he lost to the tune of 200 grand and he's started a GoFundMe page to pay for it.

I think you'll find, having learned HIS lesson, Blundell kept the phrase "Canadian law enforcement" intentionally vague so that he won't be sued again. There was no "stark" warning and when has Canadian law enforcement ever issued stark warnings? I've seen the RCMP issue public warnings about fraud and scams - the end to which is seemingly non-existent here in Scamada - Public Safety Canada, or Canadian Civil Liberties or even the CRTC issue warnings on TV or radio, but they tell you exactly where the warning is coming from. So someone receiving this Facebook message should already have their healthy skepticism on high alert.

The fake "stark warning" that has NOT been issued by any law enforcement agency is ostensibly against a misinformation campaign targeting Mark Carney. As you read it asserts the diabolical co-conspirator participation of "Russian-affiliated efforts," "Trump-aligned forces," "radical right-wing operatives," and even the "fake news." This is fake news condemning fake news FFS! By this point I would think the post would have been written off as such by any but our most special citizens, but evidently not. Some smart people are circulating this dreck. 

Guilt by association to Jeffrey Epstein conjured up by - guess who? - Canada Proud is also brought up.And while we're at it let's do a pre-emptive strike against the mudslinging we think Carney will surely be the victim of, and even though they haven't, we'll act like the Conservatives were definitely going to do it: HEY he's got a trans-gender son! 

Even if you didn't know, are not Canadian, or just don't give a shit about the WWE competitions we call politics here in Canada, there is a federal election on April 28th. That's only a little over a month from now. This post is nothing more than next level political mud-slinging and when has any law enforcement agency issued "stark warnings" against that? Why, it's as Canadian as maple syrup on poutine! It happens every election. It beats the hell out of talking about the issues that ACTUALLY concern 99.9% of Canadians! Those issues are always ignored, lied about, or both.

I can't even post a lot of things on Facebook here in Canada due to the national dumbing down of Canadian Facebookers that HAS been done by some government, or maybe even law enforcement agency or another. Have you ever received a message like this after Facebook blocks an attempted post? "This content isn't available in Canada In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can't be viewed on Facebook." I have. And frankly, I am surprised this particular post hasn't been blocked. I've received it from a couple of Canadians who are currently living in Canada.

Maybe this is the final warning flag: It isn't even considered news here in Canada. And it's not. Just political drama that is no more news than John Cena or The Rock turning heel in the WWE. At least the people who take that sort of news seriously, fake well, bless their little hearts and brains! But the people who take posts like the one in question here seriously, somehow THEY are still taken seriously by a lot of people. To me that's the biggest shock of this shock jock's story.

She

Maybe read this: a post of mine from the past (2018) before reading the following poem. And maybe think about this statement made by Margaret Atwood, probably the foremost and best known Canadian feminist after being accused of misogyny: "In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated."

She 

The stoutest of stock before she became she,

the champion of millions through uncompromisingly

fierce female lifeforce.

The apotheosis of innumerable generations, she emerged.

She grew mighty guided by

the calloused hand of wisdom,

a hand that had shucked fieldfulls of corn;

had socially snapped beans into soup

for the souls of loved ones;

a hand that had held a first dollar and a last;

a hand that could be heavy

when hubris got out of hand;

a hand gently holding hers, wrinkling as she became she.

A hand that set hers free.

 

Then came he, the he of she.

How he hoarded her and she he!

Hormonal harmony obscured from shame by desire,

Cognitively coerced by bohemian euphemism:

“He fell for her innocent charm.”

“She was attracted to his ambition.”

For a while they indulged each other’s lusts

bound by this contractual guile.

Who would fall first and by what harm

the goddess Irony determined.

 

Innocence faded, ambition grew.

So ends the honeymoon for these two.

The attributes they spoke of smugly

had shrunk and grown and made them ugly.

And what do ugly people do? They fight each other tooth and nail.

Wage war, the height of ugliness, with which ugliness they assail.

A second he, a second she, the first he in sex therapy.

He cheated she. He could you see, while claiming “sick” and “weak” to be.

Fleeting are beauty and sex appeal, but she stays young and fit and healthy.

She thrusts and swipes her card with zeal, his ugliness has made them wealthy.

How long can this warfare go on while happiness is on the skids?

She can’t admit this union wrong! So strengthen it by having kids.

A second he, a second she, but this time it is literally.

Chips off the block, apples near the tree, she’ll groom them very carefully

With manicured hands and psychology she’ll raise a second he and she.

She’ll right the wrongs of parenthood – the abuse her generation withstood.

She’ll call the mediocre good, give what her parents never could.

She’ll raise no hand to discipline. Say no a few times then give in.

She’ll write it all down, legislate! Empower the certificate.

With love she’ll kill the he she hates. She’ll he-ify till power equates.

Or maybe just a little more to make things more she than before.

Because she is she he will agree. If not, what use is he to she?

Her independence he impedes! She knows exactly what he needs:

Just like her parents before he, her enemy needs to set her free.

 

She has the job, she has the home, she has the kids, he’s all alone.

She was entitled to this all. She had to rise, he had to fall.

So he fell first, she was victorious through manipulation laborious.

His past achievements – all vainglorious. Is there any doubt who is the sorriest?

 

The spoils of war a wide wasteland for she.

A pampered hand shucks no corn and snaps no beans.

Abandoned femininity leaves no loved ones

to consume the soulful soup of kindness. 

Only comrades in war who parrot propeganda

comfortable in their echo chambers.

The hands of hubris hold the assets of the war.

Her final thought before returning to the

fierce female lifeforce form:

Who has suffered more than she at the hands of she?

 

And if you read this poetry and think, “This sounds a lot like me,”

There is a chance you will agree, she is she’s own worst enemy.

What Does A Carney Do?

 I say this a lot but who am I kidding? "If you follow this blog..." I have 4 or 5 loyal followers I think. So if you are one of those people you will have probably guessed I'd eventually get to today's topic. If not, I've been on a phoniness heater for the last half dozen posts and if you ask a well-informed person to list the phoniest shit in our world they won't get too far down the list before they mention money or banks or economics. This post will include as little of their lingo as possible but that is ONE of the many ways the members of the money industry smooth talk their ways out of trouble, they have a language that can be used to confuse, obfuscate, and create ambiguity - indeed, that may be its main purpose. To give you just one example I will tell you in lay-lay-laymen's terms what "fiat currency" means. Almost all of the money you or I have used physically or electronically in our lifetimes was fiat currency. What that means is it's not backed by anything of value like gold or silver - it is pulled out of the ass of a banker or central banker and is in every way imaginable phony. They've done their best to smooth talk us into believing this "creating money from nothing" idea is fake, but it's recently been empirically proven. Richard Werner has not been debunked yet as far as I have seen.  So what that means is... ahem... One of the only things that isn't fake about banking is that a lot of what they do is fake. The percentage of fakeness is in almost direct proportion to the size of the bank and the "size" of the customers they deal with. 

Go to 7:30 in this video which is the man himself, Richard Werner explaining how he proved the theory of credit creation. First of all, don't feel bad if, like me and even John Maynard Keynes, you thought that when banks "lend" money they actually give out money they had gathered over time through customers making deposits. This is the "financial intermediation theory." Or maybe you thought they use our money to make investments and create a reserve governed by a central bank and it is out of this stock that they "lend" us money. That's called the "fractional reserve theory." Both or either of these is what banks and central banks wanted us to believe. But both are wrong. Unbelievably, or believably if you are as jaded as I, when Werner "borrowed" 200,000 Euros from this bank as part of his scientific experiment, the first thing that bank did was record a deposit of 200,000 Euros! A FAKE deposit from which they "lent" him his newly pulled-out-of-orafacial money. This is called the "credit creation theory," euphemistically speaking. It could more accurately be called the money creation theory or the arse-exit theory or even the defecation theory. But that terminology might cause alarm and people might revolt. After all, by extension this means the bank has zero responsibility to anyone to magic this money into existence. They have no onus to create any value to associate with this money. They are handing it over to YOU and saying, "This is entirely worthless, now go ahead and work, create something, or do something with this money to give it actual value - then give it back to us WITH INTEREST! If that is not revolution-causing practice, what the hell is? 

But wait, there's more! If the people DID revolt, or even just find out about this, lose confidence in banks altogether, and run to the (more likely drive to but...) bank to take out all their money - which has happened before and it's called a "bank run," 1. There would only be enough for a small number of people to get back their savings or investments and, hmmmm... who do ya reckon THOSE folks would be??? The banks would start right at the top of course repaying their top customers. 2. Even if you DID somehow manage to get your money back like if you saw the bank run before the rich (which never fucking happens cuz the rich don't bank on the same planet as the rest of us. I'll illustrate a bit later.) your money would now have lost a lot of its value anyway. And 3. To "solve" this problem, the "government" would step in. I put that word in quotation marks because no government has its own money, the government is the people. Not those rich assholes who got their money back people (who don't pay taxes), the REGULAR people. Yeah, that's who will be responsible through taxation for paying back the money the banks screwed them out of and then lost it all in the first place! And on THAT there would be interest too! Look at the "rewards" all the bankers took from the 700 billion dollar 2008 bailout. That debt to the taxpayers of just America has ballooned into the trillions - yet they're still dutifully banking. 29 trillion 15 years ago as THAT article calculated. But we've stopped calculating, or at least publishing the calculations, I guess to avoid embarrassment. 

And the very WORST part about this is the bankers know that this is what they're doing and the only way this all ends is if the public finds out. The info is out there and the banks of the world have been precariously running this scam on ordinary people for years and years in constant jeopardy, they get discovered every once in a while and the system "corrects itself" (by taxing the workers more) and for this massive crime nobody ever seems to go to jail. You can see why they get off on that! It's the wet dream of the greedy and envious: magicking money into existence with virtually no consequences.

I say they are constantly in very big trouble but they don't think so. Banks make sure they hire the most narcissistic people they can who believe they are too smart to be in trouble. Sure there is the titillation of knowing that it's possible. It helps when they are practicing auto-erotic asphyxiation in their money vaults coked up with their high-priced call girls. Maybe they add the thought of getting caught to heighten their sexual pleasure somewhat but pride assures these bankers that they are too smart for the rest of the world to realize that what they do is entirely fake. And they have been right for a surprisingly long time! 

How long, you may wonder. The US is not the only country that practices this crap and I don't even know if they invented it, but they are, and have been for some time, world leaders in it. *** A word of warning: this may be hard to take if you are American or participate in the hero worship of Alexander Hamilton or even George Washington. The power of money to corrupt is formidable and can sometimes weaken the best of us. 

PLEASE READ THIS.

This is admittedly full of bias, but this was the creation of America's very first central bank. And this happened back when there still were principled Americans like Jefferson and Adams to oppose it. Alex Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury at the time needed president Washington's approval to set up this central bank of the corrupt, by the corrupt and most decidedly for the corrupt. Ever wonder why Washington DC is called that? It's pretty far from Washington. It probably would have been in Philadelphia or somewhere in Pennsylvania if not for a little corruption on the part of even old "I cannot tell a lie" "Father of America" Washington. His land, Mount Vernon, certainly skyrocketed in value after the capitol was placed so close to it! It was called Washington DC and abutted his land in exchange for his partially reluctant support for the central bank. I guess in his old age the previously moral George Washington was more concerned with providing for his security than doing the right thing. 

But this was after the American Revolution! The nation was broke from selling out to the war effort. The money and war bonds were almost completely devalued. This was all the soldiers had and the rich contrived to fuck them out of those war bonds for pennies on the dollar. This was a "gift" or maybe it could be better described as an IPO (initial public offering) to get the confidence of the rich, who, let's face it, were ALREADY war profiteers, behind the new central bank. You could say Hamilton and what he called the "monied" class of the country threw the rest of the people of America under the BUS (Bank of the United States). The money that was used to buy up the war bonds at face value didn't exist. There was a little contributed by the rich backers of the bank and people are taught that there were other sources like the French and Dutch who just loved to see the British getting their asses kicked in a war, but the initial value of the Bank of the United States was just in confidence. They employed the credit creation theory only a few years after confederation! Where is THAT song in the popular Broadway musical "Hamilton?" I guess that doesn't make for good singin'. Lemme take a crack at this:

We fought the high class British gents who taxed our tea and raised our rents then Hamilton our paychecks fenced to give us what we'd fought against.

Through sycophance and sophistry to early aristocracy he puckered up and rose to be secretary of the treasury.

Young Hamilton is who to thank for our initial central bank which helped the bad and screwed the good like some opposite Robin Hood.

Six years we languished at the yoke of this unprincipled young bloke till one man rid us of this cur. God bless the aim of Aaron Burr! 

No? Not boppy enough? Well I gave it a 1700's ring. Maybe the retention of the British mercantile system and the oligarchy that plagued the early days of the fledgling nation made it something less than a musical place to be. 

Nowadays, more and more people are beginning to realize that banks and the central banking system really do this and there exists a recurring pattern to it that the above illustrates. Werner tells us that for the past 50 years macroeconomic policy in most "developed" (I'm using a LOT of words in quotes. That tends to happen more in direct proportion to the fakeness of what I am writing about) countries, in particular Europe, N. America, and Japan, has been dominated by the views of their central banks. These views or what Werner calls "narratives" have been consistent if not identical from central bank to central bank all over the world. 

Step 1 is the crisis. If there isn't one already like a war or a pandemic, just create one. For example, two countries could cooperate politically and economically to manufacture social rivalry and financial crash that would qualify as a crisis. Sound familiar? Anyone believing the WWE posing between Musketrump and the newly UN-elected leader of Canada, and I hasten to add former governor of the central banks of Canada and England, Mark Carney? A friend asked me recently what I thought of the new Canadian PM. A good friend. One who might be doing it to get a friendly rise out of me. It worked. My response was something like This banker who, for the most part, Canadians didn't even vote for the people who voted him in, is trying to ingratiate himself by appearing to oppose Trump and appearing to cut carbon taxes right after replacing Junior T who had to step down for doing things like enacting the Emergency Act to nose through and actually freeze people's bank accounts - a move that was legally declared unconstitutional and illegal search and seizure - but for which he'll never be imprisoned or anything like that. Think of his name: What does a carney do? They coerce you into playing their rigged games and smooth-talk you into thinking you have a chance of winning and even when it appears like you won you've really only spent 50 bucks on a 3-dollar stuffed animal. 

The crisis is just a game to these puppet masters. Carney's "game" is this trade war which is nothing more than inflation for both countries which will come with the requisite step 1 economy crash. Recession or depression is the desperate panic state or "crisis" that enables the central banks to dictate macroeconomic policies that NOOOObody wants. The soldiers didn't want to sell their war bonds at 3 or 4%, they HAD to. This is step 2: The implementation of draconian economic policy. "Belt-tightening," "Reform," "Austerity Measures," you've heard the euphemisms. With the ever-increasing success of banks and corporations, and now that we know money creation is as easy as it is, why are we constantly given these doom-and-gloom fairy tales? To put it simply, these are policies of power and control.

What, you may ask, is the policy both Trump and Carney are seeking? Well, I'm glad I asked that question. Both have spoken about it and it represents what Werner calls "dystopian, 1984-like power and control." And, in true banker fashion, they have an abbreviation for it: CBDC. Central Bank Digital Currency. Here is Werner again talking about it:

Werner and Carney went to school together at Oxford! Even THEN Werner describes himself as the rebel to Carney's obedient disciple. 

Fascinating stuff to me! I can't remember enjoying researching a blog post more than this one. Yet, I am certain none of my posts forecast more danger. As always I don't want to be the soothsayer, prognosticator, prophet, or sage. I don't want to look back on this post and say, "I told ya so." But when Werner describes the central banks realization that they are FINALLY busted for their money-creation BS, I can just see the bad acting. It's almost comical. 

Like they were waiting (a century or more) for us dimwits to finally catch them. There was only FAKE surprise. But Werner tells us there was no denial. They jumped straight to, "Yup we're guilty so we must stop this. Here's how..." and they rolled out the CBDC plan as an alternative. It's not an alternative and it won't fix what ails us. It's something they've been anxiously waiting to spring on us that will give them EVEN MORE control than their "credit creation theory" did. 

You can search the internet as well as I can and find Trump talking about it or Carney writing and talking about it. They both want it. WE don't. So what do you reckon this central banker and dick-tater will do to try and get it? It's already started. 

The irony is there are ways to stop this like in France where everybody loaded up carts with groceries in supermarkets that stopped accepting cash and just left the full carts and walked out when their cash was refused. We still have the power to stop this and even the central banking "narratives" can be used for good and HAVE been if the fake money is made real by consumers instead of given to the rich who just artificially inflate their wealth with it... But that may be best left for another post.