Fugazi Fees and Furniture

 I am having another hate the world day today. As I type this I think I am being scammed. The world isn't as bad as it seems... is it?

First of all an update on a previous post - one you and I HAD to be expecting - I didn't get the job as a teacher assistant in the local school system here. While I was sitting in the office of the school where the interview took place I got some interesting looks from the principal, vice principal, and all the OTHER gals working there. One dude walked in. He was a guy with Down Syndrome who had a full plastic garbage can of trash he'd picked up around the school. The ladies were all congratulating him on his good work. Their reactions to me on the other hand, I think I explained that in my previous post, like Manson applying for parole. Some seemed amused at my token appearance to keep up the facade that equity promotes equality. The two females who interviewed me actually showed fascination at some points at the experiences and the experience I had and most likely at my massive overqualification for the position. Sympathy? Did I see some, "Awww... you poor, poor, shelter dog."? Possibly, but it wasn't enough for them to break down and hire me. 

This comes close to how I felt after absolutely NAILING the interview:

But that's not what has me hating the world today. I got the Korean university job offered to me and I'm filling out the contract and other immigration paperwork and sending it to them now. They have postponed the start date from the original March 17th to May 1st because they want me. It's nice to feel wanted! Especially at my age and with the legislation that currently governs racial and gender limitations on hiring in Canada, I feel happy to be relevant in the job market of SOME country. 

No, aside from THOSE fugazi practices that are a well entrenched part of my home and native land, there is something happening as I type this that has incurred my daily rage at the disingenuous behavior with which we conduct business that even extends beyond our professional personae. I started advertising my Mom's furniture today. Online. If you read the blog you know how the online hockey card market has been contaminated. I told my Mom that I was expecting much the same once I started advertising her stuff online. She doesn't get the whole magic of the internet yet so I figured I'd give her an example of the scamming that goes on. I was pretty confident there would be some of it eventually but I hadn't even finished posting my second piece of furniture when the first scammer tried his luck. I am still not convinced he was a scammer but I think so. He asked if the furniture was still available and I posted yes. IMMEDIATELY I got the long message that "I won't be able to go there myself to pick it up but I will send you a check you can deposit with your online banking app." All this guys' messages were instantaneous like it was a bot! I said okay and he said he'd sent the check. Sure enough there it was. I tried to deposit the check in my account but couldn't. Luckily I do my online banking on my computer, not on the app. The app doesn't even work on my phone. Never has. I think HIS scam was for me to deposit the check and it would show on my bank balance even though the check would not clear for 5 business days. By then they would have picked up the furniture. OR maybe he just wanted my email or was phishing for other personal info. Isn't it sad we actually have the word "phishing" for that? 

Anyway, I soon got some other responses. One said he was buying it for his mother. I told him I was selling it for my mother. He didn't get back to me. Scruples? I doubt it. He got my name and email too and said his mom would contact me later. 

The best one was from the old and frail "Ella Rose." Doesn't that just sound like a sweet old lady? It's supposed to. "She" said she was unable to pick it up too because she is currently in the US. Yeah I'm guessing a large U.S. city like Mumbai, Beijing, Manila, or Delhi. She told me her "cousin" will come to pick it up and she'd need my name and email. Then this sweet old lady said she'd like to add something as a gift since her cousin is so dear to her. She asked me to help her purchase a $500 Apple gift card for her dear cousin and wish her a happy birthday when she came to pick up the furniture and the card. For this favor she was willing to add a bonus of $100 to the deal that I could keep for myself. I agreed and said absolutely! Just deposit 1600 bux into my account and I'll even help with the lifting when her dear cousin comes to collect. I told my Mom at lunchtime that it was probably just an elaborate way to sell Apple gift cards. Probably some slave laborer in China who couldn't get on at the Apple iPhone assembly plant for a dollar an hour. 

After lunch I got the message that the payment was made. I checked my account. Surprise, surprise - no payment. She said there would be an official verification of payment in my email inbox. Surprise, surprise, no verification. Then she said to check my spam. Well surprise, surprise part III, there it was! 

Well I'll be! So I went out and bought a $500 Apple card and sent the card details but Ella Rose hasn't gotten back to me. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Just kidding. I texted "No thanks." I received a reply of "I don't get." So I responded, "Right. You don't get your sale." And I haven't heard back from Ella Rose. Poor Ella. I hope she finds a nice gift for her dear cousin's birthday. 

I was thinking about posting the check that was sent to me by a guy named Jeffery Martins that was signed by someone NOT named Jeffery Martins, but I'll check it out when I go to the bank on Monday. If it's bogus, I'll post it Monday. The reason I'm going to the bank Monday is - you guessed it - yet another scam.

THIS one has been going on for a while and I haven't noticed. It's only because of the reduced activity in my bank account that I noticed this month a withdrawal of about 30 bucks. I checked a few months back and there it was again. Same entity, same amount. I stopped after 4 months because I don't want to even think of how much I've pissed away to whatever this entity is but I hope it's not more than $120.00! I looked up the entity, I found their webpage, I even found a contact online who I could chat with in real time who told me they represent thousands of companies so there is no way of knowing which one it was. But the person said that if it isn't something I have purchased then my account has been compromised. I think of my many friends who buy things online ALL THE TIME and never have this happen. It happens to me so often I've lost count. It happened with Christmas presents, books, and I think this time it might be the resume website. 

You may know THIS scam. You search for a free resume builder site and get one. You plug in all your information which takes an hour then they tell you that if you want to download your beautiful new resume that will SURELY get you a job, you need to provide them with a card they can keep on file. Not to worry, there will only be a one-time-charge of 2 bucks or some shit like that for "processing" or some shit like THAT. We only do this in case you want to take advantage of our various services in the future. Right. If your resume works, I won't be needing your services in the future. But you say, What the hell," and you pay. You don't notice that somewhere hidden deep in the fine print is the TOTALLY LEGAL hidden fee of the 30-dollar a month membership to the site you didn't order and they told you you wouldn't be paying. There are no legal restrictions on this kind of crap believe it or not. Convict # 47 even famously added hidden monthly charges to his supporters' campaign contributions that some paid for years! This is one of few things His Orangeness calls "business" that he is NOT on trial for!

According to this article, basically everybody gets dinged by these and we all hate them. For all I know it could be something from the site where I bought my recent air ticket. Maybe my bank account or debit card. Maybe a hotel or telecommunication provider. That wouldn't surprise me. The nightmares I've had with Telus, Kudos, Bell... it could be one of THEM who keeps finding me. Evidently these types of scumbag businesses regularly add hidden charges. 

The upshot of it all is that I am going to have to change my bank account and tell everybody that deducts monthly charges the new card number. Come to think of it I only have TWO monthly charges, Chatr - my phone I'll be abandoning when I go to Korea. They're fine cuz I only pay month to month. I will DEFINITELY be looking for Chatr when I get to Korea because they don't lock you into lengthy contracts, another practice that shouldn't be allowed. I also pay storage fees every month for my locker in Victoria where I have my worldly belongings 90% of which I'll probably throw in the trash if I ever empty it out and take it somewhere. Yeah, it's possible that they are attaching extra fees but I doubt it. 

The shittiest thing about this is whoever is scamming me out of I don't know how much money is completely untouchable because of this anonymous online payment middleman. That's exactly WHY thousands of companies use them! Even if these practices WERE illegal, how could you catch them? The article above says that a lot of people who fight these charges are successful but they're the ones who know who they're fighting. I always run up against these agencies in Holland or New Zealand or some countries that have no regulations on shit like this and I have to cancel my card. It has happened half a dozen times probably. Not going to disappear under Trump, he uses them himself to flog his worthless crap. Canada? It's under the purview of the Competition Act and some other consumer protection law enforcers and we've seen how they are disappearing and being de-funded. 

Junk fees, drip pricing, hidden charges, and other deceptive sales tactics are another way our countries keep things fake for us. 

I'm probably STILL not finished with this folks.

Tipflation

 Like the person who posted this on Facebook, I have seen it a few times and maybe you have too. It's that story about a server who got a bill with "do better" filled into the area where the tip was supposed to go. So the person decided to take the advice to heart and started working harder and, lo and behold, tips started getting better. 

This smacks to me of the rich, one-percenter bullshit mantra they are constantly trying to push on the workers of the world (who they own) and get them to believe that if they just work hard, say their prayers, and take their vitamins, blah blah blah, lie lie lie. The old joke comes to mind. Rich guy drives up to one of his workers and says good morning. The worker comments on the beautiful Bentley his owner is driving. The boss says, "Well maybe someday if you work really hard... I can buy ANOTHER one." 

We're chattel, folks. Tipping is one of the best bits of evidence we have of this. We all know it's just greedy employers who are taking advantage of the Satanic "tipped minimum wage" in America of $2.13/hr. They do this simply by passing most of their workers' wages onto the customer on top of the price of the product. We may not know of the evil origins of tipping, but we all know it's scumbags who take advantage of it. Make no mistake about it, if you run a business in which your employees depend on tips, you are a scumbag whether you know it or not. Canada does not have a tipped minimum wage and in this way it can be considered more Christian than the US but scumbaggy sometheless. 

But even still, minimum wage is not a living wage and workers in both countries depend on tips to live and we have been domesticated, like the obedient livestock we are, to think not only is tipping okay, maybe we oughta work EVEN HARDER to make our owners even richer. Well the guy who posted the above, Bryan Hutson, or maybe just one of his friends, went ever further and insinuated that this is what Jesus would have us do. Christians, who pray over their meals and then leave paltry tips, are giving Jesus a bad name I think was the point. Even worse are the ones who leave tracts (which I think is what is meant by "tracks") in lieu of tips. That would be almost identical to "do better" wouldn't it? 

I wish we could see the TOP of that receipt. What did the customer pay $54.08 for? Probably a burger, fries and a Coke. Inflation is just another form of greed we've been domesticated to tolerate by the flesh farmers who bought us at auction, or hired us. Would Jesus even eat at this place? I've read the Bible and I think I got a pretty good impression of what Jesus might do at a restaurant. We're talking about a dude who fed 5,000 people with 5 loaves and 2 fish... es. He also made the wedding planners and guests at a certain reception much jollier by changing the water into wine. Jesus was all about getting MORE food and drink for his money, not paying more money for less food. He would also know that tipping in America coincided with the Emancipation Proclamation and was just a way of extending slavery among the 3.5 million people it turned into unemployed vagrants. What to do with all these slaves started the racist prison and police systems in the US and, no doubt, our lord and savior would know about THAT too. I think if you jump to the end where this Facebook poster wrote "If you don't plan on tipping, don't eat somewhere that employs people who work on tips," THAT is how you should be thinking if you're a WWJD type of person.

The US is a Christian nation. Reportedly even more so under his good and loyal disciple Donald Jedediah Trump. So tipping must be something on its way out, no? No. In fact it is so NOT the case we have a new word: tipflation. More and more places, not fewer and fewer, are asking, expecting, even demanding tips. Even at places where YOU have now become a non-salaried worker. Self-serve kiosks, self-check-outs, even Subway. SUBWAY where they went from 5-dollar footlongs to 11-dollar six-inchers in less than a decade! Now they want tips? As the internet meme says, "Come on, Subway, we made this sandwich together!" It's like tipping a co-worker isn't it? 

Canadians are at their tipping points when it comes to tipping according to this article. We tip more often and more than we used to. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that things are even worse in the States but here's a Forbes Magazine article that says the tipping culture is out of control there too. The Canadian article says that even here "abolishing tipping is hopelessly idealistic." It's part of our culture and, like a surprising number of things (income tax and banking come to mind) most of us don't like it or even know why we do it. So why are we "idealists" if we want to get rid of it?

In the late 1890's many Americans believed tipping was against the very principles upon which they had built their country. In an 1897 NY Times article tipping was the vilest of imported vices because it resurrected the aristocratic class they had left Europe to be done with. Many states tried to make it illegal but they too were idealistic trying to move against their owners, the rich and powerful that they certainly were not done with. In his book "The Itching Palm" a guy named William Scott described tipping as "democracy's mortal foe" and "a servile attitude for a fee." There really WAS quite a groundswell against tipping for a while in the US. Probably Canada too. But they were all just a bunch of idealists. We know this because there hasn't been a serious endeavor to abolish it in 100 years even though tipping has increased, tipping amount has increased, and hatred of tipping has increased exponentially the whole time.  

If you think that's the whole iceberg, it's just the tip. Unfortunately, tipping ignorance has also increased. When the hell, where the hell, and how bloody smegging much are we supposed to tip? Who makes the rules? Is there a governing body? I remember when 10% was expected. Now you get your pizza spit on next time you order from the same Dominos where you only tipped 10%. Some people don't even tip for pizza! I had to use Uber once when I was living in Calgary. I was out too late and there were no more buses home. I could have walked in an hour or so but I called an Uber instead. It was HORRIBLY expensive! I mean way more than even a taxi. And the asshole driver says to me in his frostiest Calgary winter voice, "So for a 33-dollar ride you are giving me only a 7-dollar tip?" I seriously thought for half a second he was complaining because that was too much. If not for the look and the tone I might have puffed out my chest like an aristocrat and said, "Don't worry about it young fella," or something to that effect. Instead I was feeling like I had over tipped (17.5%) AND like I had ripped this greedy bastard off. Add to that the pressure of the rest of Canada expecting Canadians to behave like Canadians and follow our culture. Yeah, tipping for me, a guy who has been away from it for years over in gloriously tip-free Asia, has become a lose-lose-lose proposition. 

But even if you've been here in Canada during the greedular evolution of tipping, statistics show you don't have much more of an idea than I do. According to the study in this article 60% of Canadians don't even think Uber drivers should get tips! But I bet more than 40% of us ARE tipping them. And what do we get for our extra money? We're not satisfied that tipping gets us better service. 

Here's an idea: get rid of it. Mandatory tipping that is. Tip when and how much you want. If we had a minimum wage that people could survive on, tipping guilt would be a thing of the past. Nobody knows how to do it right or how to find out. It's just another added stress to our already stressful lives. 

And, since there is no good reason for it to even exist, it is yet another in our seemingly inexhaustible laundry list of fakeness. 

I understand J.D. Salinger more all the time. My KINGDOM for something REAL!

PSA: Phantom Superman Area

 Well, to continue in the vein of real life becoming make-believe in which I have been writing for the past several posts... let's talk about the only thing I can really call a hobby I've had my whole life - collecting hockey cards. Just another thing that has been utterly destroyed by money, greed, and deceit so heavy it has parted ways with reality. This is a sad story close to my heart so please don't make fun of me. My name is Dave and I STILL collect hockey cards despite the rabbit hole of filth the hobby has cast itself into.

I remember being a young boy in Hamilton and having something to look forward to in the winter. I was not a huge fan of hockey but I remember the Buffalo Sabre's broadcasts on CHCH TV11. That stood for Canada Hamilton, Canada Hamilton I think. Hamilton was the city that REALLY should have been given the franchise in the 1970-71 season but probably since the other expansion team, the Canucks, were from Canada and the NHL was already interested in expanding into the US to get more of that sweet, sweet American franchise cash, Hamilton got screwed. 

I remember watching Sabres broadcasts after a day of school and possibly street hockey in the cold, snowy winter. After supper I'd hope to hear the Sabre Dance which was (of course) the theme music of the Buffalo Sabres back then. They had a lot of legendary players but I wouldn't even know their names if it weren't for hockey cards. I actually liked collecting the cards better than watching the games. My first ever favourite player was Rick Martin. He was #7 and a goal scorer. I used magic marker to put a 7 on a white T-shirt and used it to play street hockey in the summer. What? Didn't YOU play street hockey in the summer? 

Rick Martin with the best player on the team, Gil Pearreault and Rene Robert, all French Canadians, made up "The French Connection" line. I remember going to see a game and even though they played the Bruins with the greatest player of all time (Sorry Gretzky) Bobby Orr, and a goal scorer better than Rick Martin, I was cheering for the Sabres. Yup, I saw Bobby Orr play and didn't even care at the time. 

I think my favourite thing about winter was going to the corner store with 15 cents and buying a wax pack of cards hoping to get Rick Martin or Gil Perreault or ANY Sabre. Sometimes (but not often) I'd have MORE than 15 cents and buy more than one pack. My friends and I would have mouths watering from the chalky gum and we'd gather in a cloud of steam from our breath in the cold Canadian winter saying, "Got him, got him, got him, need him, got him, need him..." as we flipped through our new cards with our numb, rosy hands. 

I TOTALLY remember this wrapper! You know what this is goin' for nowadays? Twenty bucks! I'm not kidding! So many of these things were torn off and thrown away that they are a very rare source of fond, old memories that folks will pay to relive.

But that's what makes hockey cards, or any sports cards for that matter, worth money. We've all heard stories of people putting valuable cards in the spokes of their bikes to make them sound like motorbikes. I remember my cousin giving me a Wayne Gretzky rookie card. One of those that was graded a PSA 10 (I'll get to PSA in a minute) sold for 3.75 million dollars! What was the card I got worth? Nothing. It was thrashed. But that's what most kids did with their cards. I just liked them so much I took care of them. Very good care. I looked at them a lot but never damaged them. Well maybe early in my collecting career I played a little ledgy with them. That's when you lean cards against the wall and fling other cards at them. Whatever you knock down you keep. See? NOBODY took care of their cards. That made them more and more valuable over the years. Look at these:

These cards are from the 1974-75 season. I pulled every one of these out of a wax pack like the one pictured. That's 50 years ago when I was 7 years old! There's the French Connection. The Sabres made it to the finals that year. I remember that! One game was a foggy one. One thing I don't remember but it will give you an idea of the times and how they have a-changed, every player but one - Lee Fogolin, the Sabre pictured in the Finals card checking Bobby Clarke was Canadian. Yup only Lee Fogolin, an American, was not from Canada. 

These cards mean too much to me to sell but they're not worth much anyway even being 50 years old. The Perreault and the Finals card both have gum residue on them. Just my luck to have the best cards in the pack stuck to the gum! The corners are rounded and there are some wrinkles. I doubt I could even get 10 bucks for any of them. 

I also liked reading stuff on the backs of the cards. Some had funny cartoons on them. Boy those days are LONG gone! Now it's out of the pack and straight into a protective sleeve, a toploader, and maybe even into a magnetic protector. 

I STILL love reading the stats! The Hart Trophy in the pic is for the league MVP. He never won that but look at my boy Gil's rookie season! 38 goals! That was unbelievable back then! He was a shoe-in for the Calder which is the trophy for the rookie of the year. And, just read the card, he DID win the rookie of the year. That year Bobby or got 37 goals and 102 assists. Astounding for a defenseman! So he got the Hart. It was close though! His teammate Espo got 76 goals and 76 assists that year by letting Orr do all the work and standing in front of the net popping in Orr's passes or missed shots. The 76 goals was a record until Gretzky broke it 12 years later. Orr also won the Norris for best defenseman. The voting wasn't even close for THAT one. 

My friends and I would bounce stats like this off each other during recess at school, or during lunch at school, or during school at school. There was a time when I knew a lot more about hockey than I do even now. Mostly due to hockey cards and the love of the game.

So I've been collecting hockey cards for about 50 years. I still buy some once in a while when I want to waste a few bucks. At one point in my life when values were calculated by Beckett magazine I looked through and priced out a bunch of my best cards. Not all of my cards, just the cards with the highest prices. I had well over 20,000 dollars worth of cards. I figured they'd get more valuable as they got older. I kept them in climate controlled storage and paid over 100 bucks a month for it. They were my rainy day savings. I have never trusted banks and why would anyone? Also, I knew that it would be very unlikely to sell all of them and get their value. I would have to spend a lot of money traveling from card show to card show. Maybe go to card shops or meet some folks online who might be interested in buying them. The hope was that I would never have to sell them because I love them too much, but just in case, I felt I had a little nest egg. At one point their value was probably in the 50,000 dollar range.

Not any more. The hobby has been destroyed by greed, corruption, and price fixing. Now you can't get anything for a card that is not sent to the lawyers of the hobby - PSA. I don't know who the hell PSA are but they have an almost total monopoly on hockey card value setting. They can look at a card in perfect condition and say it is "off center" or has "surface wear," "discoloration" or "micro flaws." Maybe the autograph has "ink bleeding" or "inconsistent pressure" or all kinds of fake shit like that. I have actually seen several videos of people opening packs of cards. I reckon I save money vicariously "opening" cards instead of buying real packs. See how it's becoming fake? Anyway, a lot of the regular pack openers I watch have started wearing latex gloves while doing it so as not to cause any microscopic surface damage or leave a fingerprint that the CSI unit of PSA can detect thus decreasing the card rating from a 10 to a 9.5. It's complete hogwash and if I were a billionaire collector I would never buy a card that was "slabbed." That's what you call a card that has been sent to PSA because they put it into a slab of plastic so you can never get it out without breaking it. Here's what a slabbed card looks like:

That card has been sent away to PSA and graded highly. The price (hmmm... this sounds a bit shady doesn't it?) is more expensive for a higher grade. A Coffey rookie card rated a PSA 10 is worth almost $5000. I remember not long ago when the value of a Paul Coffey rookie card in what Beckett called "mint" condition was worth more than that. Thing is, we depended on our own judgment as to what was and what was not "mint." 

Any Joe Blow who didn't want to get ripped off was going to check on things like centering, sharp corners, wrinkles and imperfections, etc. There are some imperfections that I WANT in my cards because counterfeiters, and when hockey cards reached their height in value the counterfeiters brought their greasy asses out from under their rocks you can be sure, can't fake little hairs or threads in the cardboard. They can't make fake cards with gum residue on them either. Or the furry edges that are the result of a dull cutting blade or being at the bottom of a stack of cards being cut. They are imperfections that allow you to know you have the real thing. 

Like a friend, mate, or good pair of shoes, these imperfections ADD to the value and love in a person who is not a soulless money-grubber and who has genuine love for the real article. Where do I find people like this in my hobby? They seem to have all drunk the Kool Aid and/or disappeared. 

Here is what PSA has done to the hobby and to the dumb schmucks who have bought into it: 1. They have set themselves up as the one and only authority on card condition... and they are a BUSINESS! You PAY them and they are not cheap. Not long ago we trusted each other to exchange genuine cards and we trusted ourselves to judge their condition. PSA has convinced us that none of us are honest and none of us have enough talent to judge our own cards. 2. They have reinforced their indispensability online by employing trolls to comment on cards for sale on websites or ebay or any place cards are sold. You can guess the comments. First of all they call any card that has not been incarcerated in PSA plastic "raw." A raw card is almost never looked at closely by commentors no matter where you try to sell it. They pan it shamelessly if you are asking for what it's worth. 3. They even occasionally DO look at the condition and THEN slag your card with their fabricated vocabulary of ersatz flaws that are not really there. They do this so nobody gets good value (or what a card is really worth) unless they first give PSA their pound of flesh and get it graded. It's very simple! You will get people making jokes about your pie-in-the-sky price (even if it's low) and even flamers saying you should be banned from the room. "You really need to do some research before you post." But 4. PSA has removed an awful lot of pictures of cards rated a 10 by their agency. Why? They don't want you to be able to do what they do. Even if there WERE PSA 10's to look at online, they're encased in plastic so any criticism of THEIR criticism can be written off as image distortion due to the plastic casing. You know what? The above is NOT a Coffey rookie card.

THIS is a Coffey rookie card. 

If you look REALLY closely you might notice that the right margin is marginally (ar ar) thinner than the left. It is very slightly off center. There is zero corner wear, it is in remarkably good condition for a 44-year-old card. And I have taken good care of it since I pulled it from a pack 44 years ago. Coffey is one of the best defensemen ever and there are precious few of his rookie cards in the world in such good condition. When you consider that this is O-Pee-Chee, not Topps, it's even MORE valuable. 

I put this card on a few websites and almost instantly people started with the comments. And they can because they have internet impunity and they have the support of other trolls who are trying to buy cards as cheaply as possible. Why else would they do that? Well for one reason, maybe they are trying to increase the reputation of PSA thereby making THEIR slabbed cards more valuable. For another thing they want me to lower the price so they can buy this card for nothing, get it slabbed and sell it for hundreds more than they paid. 

The last comment I read on the site where I posted this card and a few others was, "Ban this guy, please!" They won't have to. I unsubscribed from the group. I'll never even try to sell my cards online again. That ship has sailed. The market has been poisoned and bullshit reigns. This card is worth hundreds, maybe thousands but I will never be able to sell it online for even tens. 

But I love my cards too much to sell them anyway. So it's not all bad news. I know what I've got in my hockey card collection and most of my cards are too valuable to me to get even half of what I know they are worth. Values don't just go through the basement in such a short time. The fact is, there is really no reason for the value of hockey cards to have dropped. The sport saw a double digit increase in ESPN viewership in 2024. Probably due to Bedard. Hockey's popularity spiked with Gretzky and the value of hockey cards did too. The NHL's popularity spiked with McDavid and the value of hockey cards did too. The popularity of the NHL is spiking again and the value of cards has artificially plummeted due to the PSA snobbery. It's another in a long list of fake things that just keep replacing the real pleasures life used to have. 

The only person I'd be willing to sell to or trade with is a fellow collector who is not in it for the money. Ironically that person stands to make a lot of money buying cards from me because I will not sell them for outrageous prices. Only PSA can allow people to do that. Unfortunately I suspect that anybody I sell my "raw" cards to will just permanently confine them to their Superman Phantom Zone slabs so they can get more money for them. Hey, maybe PSA stands for Phantom Superman Area. Remember this?

Anyway, you only get top value if PSA gives the cards a high enough grade and THAT might depend on how much you pay them. 

Does everything have to be a scam? 

Equity Part II

 Y'all didn't think I was finished with this didja? I reckoned that since last post was like a three-posts-in-one I'd divide this therapeutic tirade into two posts. This post has a lot of homework in it too but there is some delicious irony that some of you may have picked up on already but maybe not. I love irony! It's so... (fake well) ironic!

When I was 8 or 9 years old my family moved from Hamilton Ontario, steel city Canada, to a beautiful part of the most beautiful province in Canada - BC. The community was almost completely comprised of a group of Russian immigrants to Canada called the Doukhobors. You can read about them here. My Mom hooked up with one in Hamilton named Phil and moved us all west. The little history tells us that they were persecuted in Russia for extreme pacifism. Segregation is no stranger to the Doukhobors. Yup, peace, equality, and pacifism. Irony part I: Phil may be the single LEAST pacifist human being I have ever met. If ever there was a... I think I'm gonna need to invent another word here... a violentist, Phil was it. He was violent to family, friends, pets, I have even heard tell of Phil in his younger days protesting with other Doukhobors for peace... by blowing shit up! He may have done jail time for it too. 

While in this small, rural community amidst the mountains and the junction of the Kootenay and Slocan rivers I, and my three brothers, became country boys. We OD'd on fishing, hiking, mountain climbing, all the things the city of Hamilton didn't provide. My older brothers were bussed to Castlegar for school but I had to go to the tiny, 4-room schoolhouse right next to Phil's father's property on which we lived. I think my younger brother Jeff was not yet of schooling age. Lucky him! I was the only non-Doukhobor in the school until in my second year (grade 4 I think) a boy named Jesse came to the school. He lived at the trailer park and I think his parents drove him to school each day. So I'd say there were about 25 students per class making (for convenience's sake) 100 students at the school. 98 of 100 were Doukhobors. That's a higher number of Doukhobors than remain in Russia today. So they went from a persecuted minority to the vast majority in the little village of Shoreacres, BC. Of course, having experienced exclusion because of their beliefs they were welcoming to outsiders. Of COURSE they were! Individually. I even got a Doukhobor girlfriend when I first arrived and we hung out all summer together. But when school started and groupthink took over the exclusion began.

One day one of the girls named Selena who was about the most popular girl in the school said that I smelled like bacon and from then on I was shunned. Point of note: Doukhobors are commonly vegetarian as well although Phil ate as much meat as anyone and I saw an awful lot of lunchmeat in the sandwiches the other kids brought to Shoreacres School. The fact that they were Doukhobor could be incidental. I mean, if I could find bacon cologne I'd wear it! Smelling like bacon is a GOOD thing to me. The vegetarianism and the bacon smell whether either were real or imaginary, may have been significant but I don't think it was their professed vegetarianism or any other Doukhobor-ness that was the major factor that caused the exclusion of Jesse and me. I think it was the majority status and the tribalism that is so often the biproduct of it. With the exception of a few, those kids were HORRIBLE to us! Even my summer girlfriend fully jumped on board and ignored me as if we had never had a minute of fun together. That hurt, but when she started saying I smelled and avoiding contact, even wiping off any body part that had accidentally come in contact with me - yeah I'm not kidding. There was one non-Doukhobor teacher, Mr. Ottowell, who did his best to be nice to me and chasten the kids for exclusionary practices but he was ineffective. Irony Part II: Doukhobors who were shunned as a minority in Russia came to Canada, became a majority and proceeded to exclude non-Doukhobor minority kids. 

I'm talking about kids here because my main topic revolves around exclusion in school. I have heard my mother talk about HER experiences as an adult in the community and she felt the same feelings of not belonging although I doubt anyone was calling her "Stinky Judy" or washing themselves after touching her. 

Back to school. In the ensuing years I went to schools that were progressively less Doukhobor in enrollment and I had more friends and more inclusion in almost direct proportion. I was too young to keep stats so you'll have to trust me on that. Even a lot of the Doukhobors who had shunned me became my friends. By high school even Selena was my friend. I harbour no ill feelings to any individual Doukhobor to this day, but they can be assholes as a group. I think that can be said about almost any group so it's not really fair to single out the Doukhobors.

So... suffice to say there was exclusion long ago in BC schools. This is not a new thing. Its roots appear to have more to do with groups than individuals so, as my inclusion plan specifies, the appropriate strategy to diffuse exclusionary behavior is targeting the individual. It is just as important, and this falls to the government or the province and the country, to maintain an environment of equality (not equity). I'm talking about avoiding situations in which schools have overwhelming majorities of students with a commonality that could lead to divisive behavior. In the example I gave it was a shared upbringing, values, beliefs. It could be skin colour, it could be religion, it could be heritage or language. The government of Canada and the various provincial governments have created situations (documented in previous post) in which these opportunities for divisive behavior have increased. For years Asian immigration was increased at record rates and nowadays immigrants from India are noticeably increasing. When it comes to "racial" or cultural exclusion in Canadian schools, in true Canadian fashion the articles about this problem fail to specify the exact nature of the exclusion but I have lived in China and I have worked with a lot of Indians. When I worked at Tech in Trail there were two Indian employees who exhibited exclusionary behavior based on caste. Back in India the one was a member of a higher caste but while in Canada the lower caste member was in a position of leadership and the higher caste member had great difficulty obeying orders or even accepting suggestions from a person he considered to be his social inferior. I have no doubt this is surfacing in Canadian schools. 

Check out this vid. I know it's in Houston, Texas but the girl being bullied and considering suicide was mistreated for not speaking Spanish, not English. 

While living in Vancouver I tutored a Korean kid and he told me of gangs in his school. The Koreans were the KD's. I found that hilarious because KD to me means Kraft Dinner. The Chinese too had a gang. I forget the other gangs but he made it clear that there was severe tribalism and segregation in Vancouver back then. This was in the early 2000's. Irony of ironies? The efforts of Canada to multiculturalize have created large groups that self-segregate based on heritage. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! 

So what is the solution? They need people who can encourage inclusion through sharing stories of experience. Experiences both with positive effects of inclusion and negative effects of exclusion. People like, for instance... ME! Now HERE is the irony of ironies of the post: It appears that I am being denied a chance to be an agent of change, an inclusion officer, a person the public schools of Canada are "CRYING FOR" because I am being excluded due to skin colour and gender.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not just saying white males are the only victims. In a country that stupidly recognizes only three "races" in its legislation we're being shot in our collective feet by our own lawmakers and government. My brother had two guys from Saudi renting his basement suite in Victoria while attending college there. The Saudi Prince gave them VERY substantial assistance but, because they were members of the "other" race in Canada, i.e. "brown," they were also able to take advantage of a lot of benefits offered by the BC government to foreign students. What about Ukrainians? What trumps what, their colour or their country? I know of many Ukrainian adults getting refugee benefits from the government but at school maybe they're just "white" kids. 

This reminds me of what I have heard about prison. Are schools like prison? Even here in the friendly, multicultural Mecca we call Canada? The short answer is yes. Our prisons are perpetuating racism rooted in our colonialist Canadian history. 

Well, maybe the schools are too. Most people have no idea about how "white" a country Canada was not so long ago. The Komagatu Maru was only a little more than 100 years ago. Yeah! A boatload of Punjabis fired on by BC military and told to go back to India. Nowadays there are loads of Indians coming to Canada the majority of whom are STILL from Punjab but now they are being mistreated by other Indians. See another of my previous posts entitled "Canada's NEW Indian exploitation."

And in the video the residential schools from Canada's past are mentioned as well in which Natives were taken from their families and mistreated at school. So what does this all amount to? It's nationally sponsored segregation and exclusion practiced by the Canadian government in the past and still very much in the present. Now we're having trouble with exclusionary behavior in public schools. Gee, I wonder why...

I'd be remiss if I didn't circle back to the Doukhobors which was where I began the post. I left out an important thing. When the Doukhobors arrived in Canada many parents, especially those of the "Son's of Freedom" or "Freedomite" sect, did not permit their children to go to Canadian schools. The government did what we've been socially misled to believe Canada would never do: they took the kids out of the Doukhobor homes and forced them into residential schools just like the Natives. Take a look at this lawsuit launched by some Doukhobors for exactly that. Look at the very first name on the list. I recognize some of the other names on that list too. 

So, maaaaybeeee being segregated by the Canadian government might have had more to do with the exclusionary behavior of the children of the children in this lawsuit than their heritage. Maaaaybbbeeee if Canada stopped its knee-jerk discrimination and became TRULY multicultural instead of the largely political multiculturalism we have developed in our country there wouldn't be this problem in our public schools. MMMAAAAAYYYYYYBBBEEEEEE if they got somebody teaching in the schools who KNOWS all this, we could start down the right road to equality. 

I am positive the people of Canada want this but that is irrelevant in a Country where the people don't get what they want. It comes down to whether the powers that be in Canada want it and I see a lot of signs that point to an answer of no on that question. I think our owners in Canada fear true inclusion because with it comes in-fighting between the tribes into which citizens have a habit of self-segregating. When that happens Canadian citizens are distracted from those we really SHOULD be fighting with: our government, lawmakers, and people who truly run this country. 

What do you reckon?

The day after I read this I was looking through our local paper and saw this:

Like a school diversity officer applying student-centered methodology to encourage the inclusion of kids with anxiety and other mental issues, kids from various cultures, and disruptive kids, the KBRH campaign uses patient-centered methodology to encourage inclusion for their patients in society. The job I applied for with the school board isn't that different from what they do in the "Mental Health Matters" campaign. I briefly considered applying since they have received lots of government (taxpayer) funding and might be looking to spend it on new employees... then I looked more closely at the picture. 

Do you think for half a second that somebody wouldn't write the newspaper and the organization and maybe even start a letter-writing campaign to the provincial and federal governments if the picture had all MALES in it? Do you think for half a second that anybody (except for possibly stupid old me) will write anything anywhere protesting the fact that this picture contains not a single dude? Do you think the paper would have ever come close to publishing a pic with all men in it? If you said yes to any of these questions you don't know Canada. And you don't know what the effects are of almost 40 years of Employment "Equity." 

"Look what we've done to white men." "Shelter dogs, bro." Apologizing for laughing at a comedian. Akaash Singh knows what he's talking about. 

I still might write a letter that won't be put in the paper and will ensure I'm even MORE unemployable but that's just because I am not quite full shelter dog yet. I'm bottling shit up. Have been for 40 years but I'm not licked yet cuz I'm too stupid to give up. It IS getting more and more discouraging with every unemployed day I spend in my country though. And there is no guarantee I won't just completely give up and say, "Fuck it, I'll support the Tariffic Trumpster or some equivalent entity here in Canada like Doug For-Our-Republican-Douchebags Ford. I may just get a forehead tattoo saying, "I apologize for my penis." I may just jump on the raise-the-price-of-everything tariff war bandwagon, but not yet my dear readers. Not quite yet...

Equity beyond Equality is no longer either

 A week ago I met a gal in the drug store. I was stocking up on diabetes supplies and chatting with the pharmacist who has a son thinking about teaching overseas. I was telling him about all the good stuff because, despite all the bitching, whinging, and bellyaching I've done on this blog to the contrary, overall I loved teaching overseas and I am hoping to return to it in the spring in Taiwan, UAE, Korea some lucky country. While the pharmacist was talking with me a lady waiting in line behind me asked, "Are you a teacher?" I turned around and replied, "Yeah." She says, "You sound like you'd be perfect for the job I'm doing. It's with the school board. They're hiring teacher assistants." I had actually applied for that very job about a month prior to our conversation. I saw it when I was living in Calgary and applied for it a few days ahead of my Jan. 10th arrival in Trail where I am now. So I said, "Is that the job for T/A's who are supposed to be like inclusion officers?" She said that was exactly what she did. Then she told me they were "crying for people to fill MANY positions!" I can't tell you how many times I've heard this. "CRYING for teachers." Crying for teachers... if I had a nickel for every time someone has said that to me in a place where I couldn't even get work as a teacher assistant... 

When I was in the States they were "crying for teachers" so loudly that they hired 20,000 of them without certification but FOR SOME REASON I couldn't get in on that action. I'm always told they're "crying for teachers" here too but every time I answer ads, send resumes, apply, I get ghosted. And now here I am in Canada again where prior to my 25-year teaching career I actually WAS a T/A in Smithers, BC. This is while working as a guard at the RCMP jail, working at the recycling depot, and doing seasonal work diamond drilling and working at a welding shop. I couldn't find anything full time all year round despite being young, right out of university, in peak physical condition, and still full of youthful positivity. Check out THIS relic from the archives:

So, I was working as a T/A 30 years ago folks. And I don't mind telling you when this gal (her name was Wanda) started telling me that all the girls she works with were getting lots of hours; they've even hired some girls right outta high school; you're younger than me with way more experience than I have - they'd be crazy not to hire you, and so on, I was getting excited. This is a 30-dollar-an-hour job. It would be the best job I EVER had in Canada and I was perfect for it! It's about DEI and the problems with exclusion that have recently been in the news. I told Wanda I actually wrote a capstone project proposal for my master's on EXACTLY that! Why, here is the intro to it: 

Part 1: Establish a need.

The Education Access Society in British Columbia, Canada has made exclusion data in British Columbia schools available online. They say about their report on data collected between 2018 and 2022 that BC children and youth with disabilities missed thousands of days of school, were left without support or instruction, were left out of field trips, clubs, and events, were secluded and restrained, and these number have not improved over 4 years of collecting data (BCEd Access Society, 2018). As recently as January of 2025 an investigation by BC ombudsperson Jay Chalke has been launched into allegations that children who are deemed disruptive or who have disabilities are being excluded and even sent home from school multiple times a week(Judd & Lazatin, 2025).

According to the BC School Act, students with disabilities or diverse abilities must be provided with an education within a classroom in which that student is integrated with students who do not have disabilities or diverse abilities unless the educational needs of the student with disabilities or diverse abilities indicate that education should be provided otherwise (School Act, 1996, 75 & 168 section). Should Jay Chalke’s investigation reveal that there is no better alternative to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the educations of BC students who have disabilities, diverse abilities, or are disruptive in some way, this would indicate a need for agents of change to intervene and establish more effective acceptance and practice of DEI in the public schools of BC.

It goes on to describe what skills such "agents of change" would require and something called "Empathetic Design" that leverages social belonging, human connection, project-based learning and team building skills to satisfy the typical "identity vs. role confusion" needs that most adolescents, including those with disorders that can cause learning impairment and anxiety, ELL's from different cultures, and an other self-segregators are experiencing. This is all stuff I've studied and experienced throughout my career and it's probably a lot MORE than School District #20 (Kootenay/Columbia) was expecting from any person who answered the ad. And yet I'd been ghosted again.

So I chatted with Wanda who turned out to be the older sister of a guy I went to high school with. Evidently he and his wife had been shot by their neighbour recently so I had stuck my foot in my mouth asking how he was. But in a small town I figured it couldn't hurt having a personal connection like that. I then asked Wanda for a name. She gave me the name Marcy VanKoughnett who I looked up online, got the correct email and sent ANOTHER application directly to her. She's the HR manager who does the hiring for the position. A week later (actually FIVE weeks after my first application) I'm still being ghosted. 

A good buddy posted on his website today a cartoon and comment about DEI. Here's the cartoon:

I know, I know... there's a grammar mistake. Shame on you Calvin! THEY were put in place... But aside from that this is a bit difficult for me to agree with and I've blogged about why. My recent situation described above gives me little doubt about the situation in Canada that started in my high school graduation year (1986 Grade 13) the year I first joined the job market and the cause of the 4 decades of futility I have experienced in it. Let's be brutally honest about this even though there are those whose sensitivities have been trained to shy away from such honesty, Equity carried past the point of Equality is no longer either. 

I believe in some cases including the Canadian Employment Equity Act the word "equity" is chosen due to its relation to the word equality and the positivity that it evokes. The word equity usurps a lot of those warm, fuzzy feelings when it really should NOT. The Act was brought about with the purposes of creating equality in the workplace and putting an end to hiring based on gender, race, culture or other things like that. THAT would be equality. Equity is trying to bring about equality by hiring based on gender, race, culture or other things... for a while until things even out. So even though there will be people who try to mount arguments against this absolute fact, employment equity in Canada created unfair hiring practices based on criteria the legislation and its supporters were trying to do away with. And I am not saying that in a bad way. It sound like I disagree with that but I don't. Back in 1986 if there was a need to hire people even if they WERE less qualified based on these horrible criteria, HEY, white dudes would have accepted it a helluva lot more readily if you hadn't tried to piss on us and tell us it was raining beer. For almost 4 decades we've been lied to. We've been told things like "They're crying for workers" in many areas including teaching but that crying was not meant for the ears of "white" Canadian males. Okay. I actually have done okay and I don't mind being the generation that was used to even things out in Canada. But are you now lying to me even more and telling me that things still haven't evened out after 40 years of this? I think that's exactly what Canada is doing.

I blogged on this before and there are statistics. The ones I used in the blog were from 2019 I think and since then there have been immigration records broken so the numbers will have white males as an even MORE significant "visible minority" in Canada now than then. So why am I still being dogged by the Employment Equity Act? Things have swung WAAAAY past equality here in Canada and yet the habit of looking at a white man applying for a job like Charles Manson applying for parole lives on with HR workers all over the country.

Here is one of the posts from the past. I have posts that have a thousand hits. Many over 100. This one only got 16. Please read it if you think I am the only person who has noticed this reality in Canada.

Here is part two. It only got 17 hits. That's because the white males of Canada are like shelter dogs. They reckon if anyone sees them reading shit like this they'll lose the shitty jobs they have or worse, their wives, female friends, even MALE friends. Don't be a shelter dog. Read it. See if you can find any mistakes.

I know it's difficult to hear stuff like this about Canada but let me repeat the point of the post: Equity carried beyond Equality is no longer either.

So, what I will be proposing to the students I work with if I ever become an officer of inclusion will be equality NOT equity. Equity probably was a decent idea in Canada to a point but we're past that point. As I say in one of the above articles I was never for it because I expected exactly what we got. I was for instituting equality. At the time I thought that with just equality in practice it would take a decade or two to even out the workforce. I guess there's no way of knowing. But we've had almost 4 decades of UNequal equity and we are STILL unequal. It gives me little to no consolation that the INequality we now have is in favour of the people who got the shitty end of the stick back in the 80's. I dislike inequality no matter who the winners and losers are and I don't think there is an ethical argument against that principle. What we have is 4 decades of socialization and opinion providing to overcome in the collective consciousness of Canada to recognize our failure to grasp this principle. 

Meanwhile... I'm still getting ghosted by employers offering jobs that I'd be AWESOME at. The hiring practices employment equity has promulgated over the years are not the cause of all of my employment woes, but I submitted some applications using false female and native Canadian names and THEY were not ignored so I am positive I've taken some hits here. I'm okay with that for the cause of equality but it's time to abolish the discriminatory hiring policies that are the employment equity laws in Canada.

The Responsibility That Comes With Watching the Superbowl

 The Superbowl is over. We can now get on with life. Well, everywhere but Canada that is. We have the Four Nations hockey tournament starting Superbowl Wednesday? How many days of the week are named for the Superbowl? Is "Superbowl Wednesday" accurate? Who knows? There are many unknowns about Sunday's superfest that just make me go, "Hmmmm...."

First, pity the poor football fan that has had their love of the game of football nurtured at every turn by corporate sponsors, political propaganda, religious dogma, and, oh yeah, sport appreciation because there is an undue amount of pressure thrust upon them to go to the game and even while they are AT the game. There is no tellin' what the average price of a Superbowl ticket was. I dare you to find anything close to non-conflicting reports on it. Suffice to say that it was somewhere between a month's pay and a year's pay for Joe Football Fan. For the "average" fan at the game, that is to say the WAY above average earner in the Disunited States, Trump, Taylor Swift, Bradley Cooper, Anne Hathaway, Kevin Costner, Jay-Z, Adam Sandler, Paul Rudd, Pete Davidson, Lady Gaga... well the price of admission for them is reasonable. A drop in the bucket. They probably don't know how much a dozen eggs cost anyway, do they? My point is the average fan at the Superbowl was anything but average. And this microcosm of America is its greatest yearly celebration. A celebration participated in directly by only the financially elite. That says something right there. 

The TRULY average American has to either go to a pub or Superbowl party to "participate" or just sit at home alone and watch it on TV. But they're satisfied with the hope that someday, against all odds, if they live right and work hard, they might get to go to one. And if you doubt it just ponder the myth, legend or fact known as the "Super Flush." There have been reports of city manhole covers being blasted off streets and sidewalks in cities during halftime when Joe Football Fans who watch on TV like REGULAR folk all need to get rid of all the Superbowl refreshments they've been stuffing themselves with during the first half. Of course municipal sewage reps deny this but it makes sense. About 120 million people tuned in so when over a third of the US, most of whom live in the cities, are on the same bathroom schedules things can get a little messy. When large groups of people are single-minded of purpose, if that purpose is shit, there will be some explosively shitty situations. Keep that in mind as we project American Superbowl ethics onto the screen and see what rating you'd give it if you were a member of the Motion Picture Association of America. 

Let's stay with the pressure on the fans that I mentioned. If you were lucky (or just rich) enough to have attended the greatest cultural event of the American calendar year you could not just watch the game. Oh no, you were roped into responsibilities far beyond. Responsibilities that forced you to make choices, or at the very least to look around, read the room and go with the flow. We'll start with the most obvious and we won't get to them all but if you think critically about what you witnessed (if you watched) they'll come to you. Again, hard to get a consensus but what was the reception for Football Felon in Chief when he walked into the game. The first sitting POTUS to do so maybe because others were not just sitting, they were governing but I would never give the other presidents THAT much cred. It was more likely that they wanted to give that appearance and Trump just can't be fucked. He's done hiding his democracy-dismantling misdeeds. They are probably not ALL out in the open but enough of them are to get him the reception he so justly deserves:

Look at Taylor Swift's reaction to Trump being booed. Ha ha ha. Priceless! He got exactly what he deser --- WHAT? What's that you say? Those boos were for HER? Taylor Swift who pays her workers well - unlike Trump? Who has donated millions to disaster relief - unlike Trump? Who has donated millions to racial equality - unlike Trump? Who has donated millions to education - unlike Trump? Taylor Swift? A girl who has earned the title of philanthropist - unlike Trump? SHE's being booed? She has donated more money ANONYMOUSLY than Trump ever has. There is no way of knowing but I would bet that at least some of the money Taylor Swift has given to the many good causes she supports has actually been misappropriated by Derangement Orange trying to enrich himself by scamming those charities. Wait! I must be exaggerating. Trump would ne - oooooh yeah. Just one of a thousand horrible things he's done that the public seems to forget.

So the fans at the game probably reacted the same way to Trump, no? I mean if they're gonna boo a nice gal like Taylor... 

Okay, I'm not saying that Trump wasn't cheered but spare me the hyperbole please. "Raucous?" Standing ovation? "Crowd went wild?" People were already standing and cheering for the flag. It was strategic product placement. Zooming in on President Bone Spurs doing a salute to the flag he has absolutely forfeited the right to give should have gotten him boos worse than Taylor Swift's. This is what I mean by the responsibility that was thrust upon the crowd. They had to choose to boo or cheer. The whole nation would see the choices they made and many who don't have the time, intellect, or inclination to educate themselves would follow like lemmings. This was an opportunity for MAGA that could not be missed! THIS is why Trump was there and just to add a conspiracy theory of my own, how do we know the cameramen, sound engineers, TV production workers were not all MAGA flunkies personally placed by Trump himself like he's done with the cabinet, the supreme court, and who knows how many agencies in the DS? Did they crank the volume on the Swift boos or the Trump cheers or both? Is there a Zapruder film of the Superbowl that will go viral in the coming weeks that shows what REALLY happened? Who knows? Again, all the world's a stage. This may be why actors, singers and other entertainers are the representatives who are chosen to deliver messages of ethics to the country. Hell, Trump and Reagan - movie star and TV star. 

But there is something going on in the Disunited States that has happened before in history. Before I wax too philosophical (and that's coming, fair warning) look at the Superbowl program. It could be taken as a dirty tactic to hijack the emotions of Louisiana and the country to somehow blend the resilience shown after the Bourbon Street truck killings at the beginning of this year and the unconditional patriotism that Americans are expected to have even at the worst of times (which is right now) and spin them into support for the cult of stupid that is Donald Trump's government. What the hell was that Brad Pitt "spirit of the huddle" bullshit if not a call to mindless patriotism for a country that has long since stopped being what is described therein? I'll answer that question. You know what it is? What it ALSO is? It's the gameplan for defeating that mindless patriotism that has stopped that country from being what is described therein. So, again, it is left up to the fan to choose - do you cheer this or do you boo it? Maybe that's not the right question. Is this a call to support your current leadership or to rebel against it? Here, listen again:

THEN what was there? Lady Gaga, Harry Connick, Jean Baptiste, the Big Easy band, and OH MY GOD, even the Black National Anthem! "We have come over a way that with tears has been watered. We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered." "Keep us forever in the path we pray. Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee." 

THIS is the message America needs right now! Where was it? At the Superbowl where everyone was drunk with the wine of the world. 

Okay, one last video. There is a comparison made more and more often from history that is becoming a bit worn out but only because of its increasing relevance to the American situation. Unfortunately things do not bode well if you give some thought to the comparison. The two ways of reacting to the message that was broadcast over the airwaves during the Superbowl come down to being smart or stupid. That's as simple as it gets. To complicate it a bit:

The scariest point in the video might be the statement that stupidity is worse than malice. I often wondered which side Trump is carrying the flag for but he's erased all doubt - he's for stupid. As Bonhoeffer theorized, we can oppose the wicked, evil or malicious by the use of force, but against stupidity we are defenseless. 

So, America, you thought you were just watching a football game eh? Hopefully your Superbowl hangovers aren't too bad. Hopefully you can evaluate with reason and intelligence that challenge that was craftily proposed to you during the game. Hopefully you can get a little help from this post and others like it. I don't want to see your country go down in flames but it's in the cards. 

I'll leave you with a quote from Howard Zinn, the author of A People's History of the United States and an irrepressible optimist: 

Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population . . . whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.

Reminds me of an MLK quote, "Society's punishments are small in comparison to those we inflict upon ourselves when we look the other way.

Capstone Course Part I: Crash And Burn

 Well... (the word I have started more posts with than any other)... it seems I have a little more time on my hands so I think I'll write a post about why without sounding too much like Tommy Shaw or whoever wrote the Styx song. To all of you who don't know, REALLY? You don't know this song???:

The song is not quite accurate for my situation, but I have taken a stab at my capstone course and it went about as badly as it could have. There are many reasons for this and since I have the time on my hands, I'll tell you about them. So, unlike a regular university master's program, the one I'm taking doesn't allow you to choose some of the things that resonated while you were studying and write a thesis one of them or a combination of them. I had a thesis topic chosen but the 11th and 12th courses are, unbeknownst to the students, designed (in my opinion) to generate tangible studies and use them for the purposes of convincing whatever boards need to be convinced of granting regional accreditation to the school. I guess I thought the international and national accreditation the school advertised when I was considering committing to study there was going to be good enough. I had no idea what regional accreditation was or that it was the highest accreditation of the three. 

Nevertheless, I did 10 courses and then we got into the most boring area of education in my opinion - educational research. The 11th course was going to be a study done in an actual school with actual students that you thought up and did yourself. When course 11 originally came around I was moving from Canada to the Disunited States and it was summer so I had no idea where I could find a school at which to do the study. I had to take a semester off because of this and all throughout the semester I was doing all I could to ascertain what the hell I was supposed to do to finish my master's. I was getting the runaround from everyone until finally the school made the wise decision to change the course. Now it did not require any actual school with actual students. So while in the DS I took the 11th course on the theory of educational studies and aced it. It was super easy! The whole time I was checking on what would be in store for me when I took the final course. Unfortunately the website just had the old description of writing up the data you had gathered during your real study in a real school with real students as a real educational research study. But I signed up anyway.

I have just completed the first week and received the grades for what I submitted. I'll tell you one thing: I worked at least twice as hard in this one week than any other week of any other course. I was supposed to submit a study proposal using secondary research only. That is, not a real school, no real students, and using data and information from writings and studies of OTHER people to support my study proposal. This was easy enough to understand. We were actually instructed to create a fake school. I chose "Terry Fox High School" but was told by the prof that I shouldn't use any real names. Even for a fake school? But, as it turns out, there actually IS a Terry Fox High School in Coquitlam, BC. So I changed the school name to "Larry Fox High School." Sound silly enough yet? But wait, there's more! I had to compose fake letters asking permission from Larry Fox High to study their students, and being granted permission by the fake principal of the fake school (I made up the name of Derek Sweeney for him) to do my study. Fake addresses, phone numbers and emails included :-) ha ha ha. STILL not Mickey Mouse enough for you? In this letter to a fake school asking for fake permission to conduct research on fake students at this fake school the stipulation was included that the research we were asking permission for - the fake PRIMARY research - would only be SECONDARY research. Somebody who wrote the permission letter templates just couldn't seem to keep reality and fantasy straight. THEN... (still not finished) when I included in my research proposal to the fake school and the fake principal a fake description of conducting fake interviews with the fake students, the professor told me to delete that part because it's primary research and we are supposed to only use secondary. It's FAKE primary research FFS!

Then... (can you believe I'm still not finished?) I was given a list of considerations for the proposal that included (verbatim) specific evidence of an educational need, the goals and objectives of the (fake) school, stakeholder (students, parents, admin, community) interests, cost, visibility, ethical considerations, and possible barriers to the study. This was the first description of the project I read. There were several others that were similar but different. I tried to come to a compromise but couldn't do it. So I wrote to the prof midway through the week telling her I had started and stopped the project proposal several times and just can't come to a clear understanding. I also mentioned that the templates were in pdf form and I was unable to edit them so I had changed them to Word form to make it easier. She gave me some advice about my concerns. She told me I had to use pdf so that she could sign the fake proposal to the fake school etc etc etc... SURELY she could sign the damn thing in Word! And a helluva lot easier! Why ANYBODY needs to sign fake shit was never explained but... At LEAST I didn't have to come up with a fake Principal Sweeney autograph. Cuz that woulda been silly wouldn't it???

She gave a few other bits of simplistic advice like just follow the directions (that I had told her I couldn't follow and frankly NOBODY could) and don't overthink it. This proposal is "amazing." That's the exact word she used. Then she said, "Don't worry, we'll get through this."

So I figured maybe I WAS overthinking. I put together a project that I felt very unsure of still unclear on the majority of the spaces in the templates - what they meant and exactly what I was supposed to fill them in with. But I did my best and thought the substance of my project (which she called "amazing") would be considered, as it should be, more important than the style. The style we could work on in the coming 7 weeks. NOPE! Even though the prof accepted the fake letters of permission and consent IN WORD, the other stuff I had submitted was given a total of - are you ready for this? - ZERO.

That's right, zero. My "amazing" proposal got a zero and I was told to fix it by Sunday (2.5 days) or it wouldn't be accepted. The reasons were itemized. The stakeholder interest was to be edited because it contained primary sources. (RIGHT! FAKE primary sources.) Cost was to be eliminated for the same reason. I had just said that cost would be covered by the province since they had paid for a similar program (I gave the name and reference for the real program which is secondary research) but I said it would be low due to the universal nature of the program's implementation which made it unnecessary to screen individual students for special needs and/or learning disabilities. She found this too "primary" too. Again this was fake screening of fake kids I was talking about. Visibility was never explained to me even though I asked her to clarify its meaning. I think it was just one of many words used to impress rather than instruct. Ethical considerations was to be rewritten using source A and source B which are ethical considerations for secondary research in general rather than the ethical considerations for MY specific research proposal, which, (is it me?) I would think are the ones to be considered here. And finally the research I had done and I had sourced directly from books, articles, videos and such was to be removed because it contained verbiage about interviewing real people and it was not "secondary" research as defined by the regulations on human research protections. Then she had the NERVE to tell me that when I do research to cite it specifically and put it under the heading of "references," which I HAD.

One other hilarious addition was the 7-sentence summary of my project. Seven sentences. No more, no less. What am I writing poetry here? Should I make them rhyme? How about Spenserian Stanza? What in the name of Paulo Freire could the point of THIS be I ask you? 

And the cherry on top of all of this? Every time I sign into the website of my school I get an email saying a new sign-in has been detected even though I have signed in from this computer from this location before. 

So the upshot of all of this is this course is by no means ready for study. The prof needs to come to grips with the difference between reality and fantasy, primary and secondary, instructing and impressing. I'll wait till the various kinks are ironed out just like I had to do for course 11. All this does is postpone my master's another semester... or more. 

I've had two experiences with "teachers" who run this plan of instruction whereby the beginning of the course is designed to make students fail and feel like they will never be able to succeed. It's primarily (not to say ALWAYS) done by "teachers" who are crappy at teaching. Often they are what I call eggheads who are so fascinated with jargon, technicalities, money, and authority that they lose sight of the human side of their jobs. These "teachers" do their best to complicate, obfuscate, and make things as HARD to navigate as they can. Then as the course proceeds the change is not in the students but the "teachers." They explain things more thoroughly, they are nicer, and they accept students' work more readily. The students perceive this as learning while they may not be improving at all. All that is happening is the information that was hidden from them is now being revealed. Things that were made ambiguous are clarified. The confuser is now a teacher. And this is done in many cases by teachers who are after high evaluations, high praise, or undeserved reverence. The students are so relieved to understand that which they thought they could never understand they give the credit to the "teacher" who really was the reason they couldn't understand in the first place. 

This happened to me at one job I was trained for in Korea and one certification course I took for a job I had in Canada. SPEP in Korea and PBLA certification in Canada. So maybe just look out for abbreviated company names. More specifically company names that are actually initialisms in which the teachers call the initialisms acronyms. A lot of people at both places annoyingly did that.

Burning bridges... doo doo dee dee doo. I am not saying for sure that the prof in this new course of mine was doing that but it has all of the earmarks of - hmmm... what shall we call this type of teaching? It's done mostly for unearned evaluations, respect, and self-congratulatory ego stroking. How about we call it Narcissistic Pedagogy? Does that have a ring to it? If I had the choice to write an actual thesis instead of put together some bogus fake study on fake students at a fake school overseen by a fake teacher (oops, now I've SURELY gone too far!) I just might do it on Narcissistic Pedagogy. Maybe I should write a book. I've got enough experience. It's an idear...

Anyhoo, the internet here was iffy at best. There were times while I was writing my "amazing" project proposal when my Perrla couldn't be used. In fact all the sources that Heather and I have saved over our shared Perrla paper writing studies have now been erased. I had to RE-enter the 20 or so sources I used while writing my project proposal.

Wanna know what it was for? Recently in the news in BC there have been stories on exclusion from public schools. Kids with disorders that could cause learning impairment, students with diverse needs, and students with anxiety symptoms that make them "disruptive" have been excluded, missing classes, even sent home from schools a LOT and parents are concerned. There's even a study being done on it by the BC ombudsperson Jay Chalke. There was a very successful program designed in BC for kids that has shown success internationally called FRIENDS that I had read about in my studies. There wasn't one for secondary school, however, so I thought I'd do one. It would not just be for anxiety but it would include the growing needs of diversity, multiculturalism, and learning disability knowledge. It would take an empathetic design approach combined with project-based learning, team-building exercises, and collaborative dialogic methodology to create human connection and understanding the lack of which is commonly the root cause of exclusionary behavior and the disastrous effects it can have at school and in the future lives of the students. I don't want to get too deep into the plan but suffice to say it was "amazing." 

If it weren't for the style over substance approach that was chosen by the professor, I'd continue writing my fake project proposal and I'm sure I would have a master's degree by springtime. The question I can't help asking myself is, given all that I know about the source of it, how much more legit would this master's degree have been than my project? When it comes down to it, how legit is ANY school?

And so we arrive at the inescapable point of the year again. Everything is fake.

Please, somebody prove me wrong.