Give Me A Little Credit Won't You?

 I can't say I'm surprised at being refused an apartment due to my bad credit score. As established in the previous post, that's just the way things are done 90% of the time now in Canada even though it don't make no kind of sense. But then a whole helluva lotta things we do in Canada, banking is high in the running for best example, don't make no kind of sense. 

During my research for my last post I learned that there are two places - two private, for profit businesses (not government agencies, boards, or commissions) that compile debtor data and establish credit scores. These scores have somehow become cherished and protected bits of bogus information that we all protect like they are pets or children. Anybody remember teachers back in the day who, faced with the realization that the student was not being intimidated by them any more and would continue to misbehave would say, "That will go on your permanent record!"? The gasps and exclamations of terror from anyone within earshot represented the sum total of the power of the mystical permanent record in that it existed only in the minds of the dumb schmucks who fell for the con and the grifters and scammers who were perpetuating the myth. Our permanent records were nothing but carefully manufactured records used by people in authority to scare us into behaving like obedient students. 

Folks, I am starting to believe that credit scores are not a whole lot different. They're just carefully manufactured scores compiled by entities who want to scare us into behaving like obedient consumers. We're trained to believe that they reward honesty and punish delinquency and cheating but in my experience I have found evidence that they are exactly the opposite. Because the institutions that compile and calculate the scores are private businesses they operate under the same auspices as other companies that not only don't punish unethical behaviour from their workers and customers (creditors) but can actually reward it. 

I explained my situation in the last post in which Telus made it impossible for me to cancel. Recently there have been efforts by the CRTC to force the big three telecom providers to allow people to cancel more easily but those efforts are no damn good to me now are they? They're about three or four years too late, as it were. I have a bad credit score and a $550 debt because Telus took advantage of impotent laws that were not being enforced that WERE on the books saying a company has to make cancellation as easy as signing up. We've always had these laws across Canada but this is the kind of law you can get away with breaking if you are a monopoly. Telus broke the law, made it impossible for me to cancel, actually sent me fraudulent bills even after my account with them was zeroed out, sent those fraudulent charges into collection, and caused my bad credit score and $550 debt. Those are the facts and they are not disputed. 

But in my last post I speculated that calling the credit dispute lines that Equifax and TransUnion have would most likely be an exercise in futility. Since I'm off today and just doing laundry I figured I'd put my theory to the test. I called 1 800 871 3250 and after the requisite phone gymnastics I was shocked to receive an option to press 2 and speak to a representative. It wasn't more than 5 minutes on hold either until I got my phone call answered by a human being. He didn't even have an Indian or Filipino accent! Was I wrong? Was I underestimating Equifax? This was intriguing...

So I got the usual introduction: My name is flabbetyfuckfuck and I will be assisting you. Nobody enunciates their names when their job is working for a helpline the purpose of which is to offer anything but help. So right there I lost a bit of the flash of hope I received when a human answered. I said, "What did you say your name is, Raoul?" He paused for a long time and said, "Yes." So it WASN'T Raoul but the name he was working under today was something that sounded like Raoul. Although, he had a French accent so maybe it was. It doesn't matter. You see, I don't care that much about the identity of the person on the other end of the phone when I am trying to do something about a fraudulently acquired debt and credit score. Unfortunately, Raoul took a familiar tack, one I've experienced with a few Canadian government organizations and consumer help lines I managed to reach humans on: the old we cannot help you if we can't verify who you are ploy. 

I gave Ben a few pieces of information and he was able to get my credit score and tell me how much I am on record as owing. I gave Raoul so many different pieces of information about myself over the next 25 minutes that there is nobody else on the planet it could have been, but without a utility bill or a piece of ID with my current address on it, Raoul was not satisfied that he knew who he was talking to. 

He told me I needed to write to National Consumer Relation Box. That was confusing. What the hell is a consumer relation box? I said, "Do you mean organization or agency or something like that?" "No, box." "Okay whatever. Continue the address." "190 Montreal, Quebec.H1S 2Z2. So it was National Consumer Relations Box 190... you greasy Frenchman. I wish I'd said that but didn't. 

He said I need to send them the front and back of my health card and passport (which don't have my address), a bank statement with an address on it and a letter stating that I want to update my address. Include Social Insurance Number, date of birth, phone number, and address. And here I said, "And then tell them what I just told you about Telus and how they cheated me and that's how I have bad credit?" He says no, just ask them to update your address so they can verify who you are. 

I said at almost the 30-minute mark, "Okay stop right there Raoul. IF you were able to verify who I am, or IF the people at the Consumer Relation Box were able to verify who I am, would I get any help? For instance would anyone be able to contact Telus and ask them to verify my account there and see if what I am saying is true?" "No, we were unable to verify your identity so I would suggest you contact the collection agency or contact Telus and make the payment or get a statement from them stating that you do not owe them. We have received this information that you owe from creditors." I said, "Yeah, who lied. And you believe them. So there's nothing you CAN do is there? Except get me to pay Telus who I don't owe anything. What I want to know is can you make this right, not can you make me pay. It's not right for me to pay. I don't owe Telus anything. Can you believe me instead of believing Telus?" Raoul says, "We would require letters, okay?" I respond with, "Well as I've been telling you I can't contact Telus. The only time I was successful they told me I don't owe them anything, yet here we are." "In that case sir I'm very sorry to inform you that this is the best that I can do for you at this point in time." 

So then I gave up trying to be nice. I said, "Well that's about what I expected. You're not really legitimate, are you? You believe the corporations and not the people they're screwing." He then says, "You can get in touch with the legal department..." Right! I can't even get in touch with the BILLING department who fucked up my bill! The person I got in touch with and told me I owe Telus zero asked me for the email of the assholes who kept sending me bills and even SHE was throwing around the word "fraud" when referring to them. She said she'd report them to the Telus fraud department and get things straightened out, but I guess she never did. I continued, "This is fraud, I hope you know this. Your organization is supporting fraud." He then says to me, "You can contact the legal authorities for this, okay?" I said, "I guess that's all I can do isn't it?" He then asked if there was anything else he could do at this point and I said, "No. There's nothing you can do. You did your job." And I hung up.

So it's pretty much exactly what I expected. At "Equifax" there is no equality and they don't deal with facts. The Creditors are never doubted and the debtors are guilty until proven innocent. In order to clear my credit I need to get a letter from Telus saying "Yeah, we sure did break the law and block you from discontinuing your service. Hell, we also fraudulently charged you for two extra months after your internet was switched off. And that ain't all, we charged you a shit ton of interest on the charges we fabricated! We screwed you good boy!" 

These collection agencies are just corporate shills helping businesses keep Joe consumer in line and their help does NOT confine itself to the legal limits of Canada. Which begs the question, why the fucking fuck are people falling all over themselves to take these things seriously? Why have we allowed them to become so invasive? I need to find a place to live. Do I have to go out and get a fucking credit card so I can do that? How is this system any different from this shit:

I'm almost proud to have a bad credit score. Maybe I'm a bad Canadian citizen. The way this country is going, maybe I should be proud of THAT too.

Give Me a Little Credit Will You?

 I'm going to start off this post the way I have started some others because some of the things I blog about come up from time to time, not to say rear their ugly heads, so I sometimes refer to previous posts. If you are a frequent reader you will know to whom (or what) I am referring when I say the Unholy Triumvirate. We have lots of telecom providers in Canada, but Canadians prefer either Bell, Rogers, or Telus. Roughly 86-90% of telecom revenue is sucked in by these three totally corrupt corporations. There ARE dozens of other providers, but they lease lines from the big three so, yes Virginia, that IS a monopoly. They cheat, lie, and steal like a monopoly and we allow them to. They are massive contributors to what I call "the cult of inconvenience" and in the post bearing that title I mention Korean telecom providers who are horrible, but MUCH better than the Unholy Triumvirate. 

Here's a blogpost from Feb. of 2024 called "How is Telus Like The Hotel California?." Please read it. It won't take long. One of my shorter ones. The answer is that you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Note in this post that I wrote, "I really do not have a credit rating." To give you some context I was living in Calgary back then working part time at the Centre for Newcomers, living with Rob and Terri, and doing my 10th course in my master's degree (still believing it was legit). I had been told by a landlord in Trail where I lived the summer before, that I had no credit rating. He was a banker and did credit checks all the time and in 2023 when I got hooked up with Telus and moved into my own place in Trail, I had no credit rating. I signed up for Telus internet so that I could do my 8th or 9th course of my master's' degree. I forget which one. This was while working as a security guard for Teck. 

When I moved out and tried to cancel my Telus and was blocked from doing so, I started getting emails that I could not answer and bills that I could not pay from Telus for the ensuing months after I had moved out of my apartment AND given back the internet box. Here's a blogpost from that time explaining this experience in more detail. Some time after that I guess Telus wanted to appear like they had done their due diligence in getting me to pay what I did not owe them for service they did not give me and they gave my account to a collector who threatened to mess up my credit rating.

So today I got a text from a guy who is taking care of renting an apartment for a Chinese lady here in Sarnia. It's a cheap basement apartment that's right between the two sites where I work security and right beside the school where I volunteer. It would be perfect for me! But Ben, the guy representing the landlady, said he had done a credit check on me. I told him I didn't think I had a credit score but I also mentioned there had been some trouble with Telus so that might give me one. He said I have a very low credit score. He also said that I owe something like $550.

Now... The 550 dollars has to be mostly interest on the one or two months of cable I didn't get and didn't pay for. I can't remember what I paid back then but I don't think it was even 100 bucks a month. I had nothing but internet, no TV and no phone. That amount happens to be the exact monthly rent on the apartment I'm trying to get. So, after 59 years of life I owe 550 bucks. That shouldn't result in a bad credit score really. And I don't really owe that much. 

The landlady will be getting first and last month's rent - if I don't pay and take off, she's lost nothing. Unless I trash the place and I dunno, there might be a damage deposit too. Also, during my interview with Ben I told him that I have over 20 years of teaching experience and 10 years of security work. People trust me with their kids. I have to get regular criminal record and vulnerable sector checks for the teaching. I also had heightened security clearance for some of my security work. Shouldn't that have more weight than a bad credit score or a 550 buck debt? He told me that they've had a lot of people contact them about the room and I have two things going for me that the others didn't: I'm employed and I'm not a whackjob. I also explained that I had tried to pay Telus but couldn't. If they don't give me the apartment because of this, that would be insane.

But let's look at this closer because it falls into the category I've been pursuing in these pages lately. We just follow stupid rules without thinking. Let's examine a Canadian credit check and see if it's a good indicator of honesty and/or something that would indicate whether a person would be a good tenant or not. First of all who does it? You might think they're done by some government agency but they are not. In Canada either Equifax or TransUnion does your credit check and they are private, for profit businesses. These two credit reporting agencies gather data reported by lenders like banks, credit card companies, auto loan providers, and utility companies. All are paragons of virtue and stellar examples of institutions that would NEVER report anything fraudulent EVER! And if they DID provide what's known in the business world as IKYABWAI credit reports (I know you are but what am I) in which THEY cheat the customer but claim the customer has cheated them, SURELY Equifax and TransUnion would check it out, no? Absolutely not! The citizen has to do that through their online dispute portal or mail-in or call-in services. But we can't/won't do that until we know our credit has been fucked up and by then it might be too late. And let's face it, those dispute services are probably designed with the very same dedication to the cult of inconvenience as the Telus cancellation services that don't fucking exist.

Equifax and TransUnion do not verify the data they receive from lenders or creditors, they just rely on these notoriously unreliable entities to report everything honestly. Errors and mismatched scores occur frequently as you might expect. But having said all of this, it's still a valuable source of information for landlords because they receive information about delinquent renters, right? Wrong. They only lower renters' credit scores if they are reported as delinquent by third-party rent reporting services such as FrontLobby, Zenbase, or TenantPay. For most of us, Equifax and TransUnion have none of our rent history data at all. Yet 82-90% of landlords nowadays do credit checks on prospective tenants. Why? Cuz it's just a rule. It's what we do.

I'm not going to get too deep into the Blue Jay game the other night in which the STUPIDEST thing I have seen in sport happened. Here's a pretty factual (but not even close to GOOD) explanation of it. The game was delayed for what seemed longer than 15 minutes. Fans and players were upset. We STILL don't have a valid rule or explanation. The fact that he ran home on a fly ball without tagging up is a rule that supersedes this fake rule that everybody is trying to claim exists. I dunno if the umpire Guccioni is the son and heir of the Penthouse Bob Guccioni fortune, or maybe has ties to the mob but you can't go home on a fly ball without tagging up. Most people in the ball park know that rule. It seems that even when we know we've done something stupid the go-to move is to double down on the stupidity and everybody is just far too inclined to go with it. Change the rule. Or eliminate it. If the ball had been caught, both runners tagged, and the guy on first got tagged out, not forced out, trying to advance to second AFTER the guy on third had made it home, THEN it would be a timing play and the run would count. 

Anyway, what do you think the odds would be of getting my credit rating restored if I managed to find someone at Equifax or TransUnion who gave half a hunk of shit and explained my whole story? They would KNOW FOR A FACT that I was right and they are wrong but what do you want to bet they'd be mealy mouthing and making themselves look stupid defending the established but stupid rule of believing the company and not the customer? 

Before I go, I want to add to this that I had been on the phone, after trying so many different ways to reach someone to help me cancel my Telus internet, I got a girl on the phone who said she was at a Telus office and said she could help me. I told her that I was trying to cancel and I couldn't and I kept getting email saying I owed for internet I wasn't getting. She said she'd open up my account on her computer. So I gave my name and account number and she assured me that I had a zero balance. That is, my internet was cancelled and I owed Telus no more money. But I kept receiving emails and messages that I couldn't respond to even after that! Do you suppose Equifax or TransUnion would even believe that? And what do you want to bet I end up having to pay that $550 someday when it has ballooned even more. And can somebody please tell me why they are allowed to charge interest? If I really DID get a month of service without paying then I owe them that much forever. Maybe indexed for inflation but interest? This is just something we allow because they are a monopoly and we can't stop them!

So anyway, I want to move into this apartment but I might lose it for having a bad credit score that was generated by dishonesty that was in no part my own. It may be believed by Ben or the landlady because we believe for-profit businesses before honest people nowadays and for some reason we evaluate prospective tenants based in part on a credit score that in all likelihood bears exactly no connection to past tenant performance on the part of the renter. But that is the world in which we live. Those are the rules. It is what it is. Right?

Addendum: Today I got a text message from Ben. I have been refused as a tenant. Even though he said I'd be a dream renter I guess the landlady got nervous about my outstanding debt with Telus. What does Telus (and Bell and Rogers) do anyway? Their infrastructure is predominantly to BLOCK Canadian airspace and stop people from broadcasting or receiving broadcasts for free. What we pay for from them is for them to UNblock what they've blocked for us. How many times have you heard people say that soon there'll be a company hoarding the air of the world and selling it to us. We already have these companies. Telus is one. And even though I had told my story to Ben and even though I HAD done everything I could to pay Telus, and even though I actually HAD connected with them and been told my account was zeroed out with them before it continued to increase and was eventually sent to a collection agency and interest accrued and resulted in the bad credit score and debt I'm in now... the landlady STILL trusted Telus over me. 

Today I applied to rent a place above a Chinese restaurant in town here. The rent is similar and the place looks even better but there WILL be a credit check. It's being handled by one of those middlemen companies called Mutual Property. We'll see if my story has any effect on them. Not holding my breath.

Stay Poor Anne!

 I've never done this before but if you want to watch the video to which I will immediately refer, go to almost the end of this post. 

If the guy who seems to have trouble looking at Anna Bocca can be believed... Mate, look at her! She's young but not airhead, non-contributing, dependent-type young, she's hot but not Chekhovian cheat-on-your-husband-but-don't-divorce-him, predatory hot, she's brainy, and oh yeah, by the way, English accent? No? I'd be looking at her. Anyhoo, if the guy who has been researching wealth inequality for 15 years knows what he's talking about... and good for Anna! This is why her vids are so informative I guess and why I have learned a lot from them, trust her, and have put her on this blog before: she is brilliant at finding answers. Not data, not biased opinion, but the unvarnished truth. It's hard to get from people with political, social, or professional associations that would cause them to "varnish" the truth, so find a broke-ass intellectual who has the money to survive (maybe student loans or parental support?) and the non-affiliation to be objective. That's how this dude strikes me: he's a starving student. Maybe he's not looking at Anna cuz he doesn't have the dough to take her round to the pub. Maybe he's got a mid-term exam tomorrow and even this interview is going to necessitate an all-night cram session. But I could be wrong. What do I know? Maybe he works for GE, but I think he'd look more in his element wearing his little toque aboard the Rainbow Warrior saving whales than in a business suit and that's why Anna rode her bike over to visit him. Rode her bike. Man I love this girl!

At any rate, if this guy knows his stuff, things were unequal, then there was a short period of what seemed to be experimentation during which the royalty, robber barons, elite, less-than-one-percent, puppet masters, call them what you will, allowed a middle class to form and the gap between the few Haves and the unwashed masses of Have-nots to close a little bit. In my previous post I speculated that gratitude might have played a part in this experimentation since it happened on the heels of two world wars in which those unwashed masses saved their owners' businesses and countries in which and with which to do their businesses, but that's just me humanizing their patrician indifference to help myself try to relate to the money sickness a little better. In reality it might have just been coincidence. 

They pinpoint the start of these "golden years of capitalism" to the Bretton Woods Conference from July 1st (hey, Canada Day) to July 22nd in 1944. Much like golf rules and Bill 66 (see previous post) a LOT of things were decided for (not by) the people of the world and they, or I suppose WE were blissfully ignorant of how (disastrously) we would be affected by these new RULES. To the victor go the spoils and you can bet the American influence on victory in WWII played no small role in all these new rules heavily favouring the U.S. In fact it'd be a safe bet that a lot of this stuff was negotiated BEFORE the US entered WWII. Just look at the economic conditions that allowed the US to fight. World war is expensive. War bonds were issued, prices were controlled, and things were rationed. Regular folks made sacrifices. The Fed set interest rates low, like 3/8 of a percent, and, as mentioned by our expert, top rates of tax on the rich were up to 90 or 95%. Then after winning the war the US brought the gold standard to the world linking all money to the dollar, they thrust the IMF and the World Bank upon the world (and, if I'm not mistaken, this is what coaxed the rest of the allied countries into the central banking systems they all currently have), and true Keynesian economics were employed. What do you know? The Golden Years! 1945-1973.

People could buy a house with 2 years' salary! Labour unions were strong (and less corrupt). The economic system, banks, investments, the stock market, corporations, these were all tightly regulated by government (which was less corrupt) and the IMF/World Bank (which was less corrupt). So what happened in 1973? In a word, corruption. In two words, Reagan and Thatcher. 

It didn't JUST happen like that of course. Greed didn't just disappear for 25 years. Things were happening in the US like the Vietnam War, less competitive prices, and the soap opera saga of world oil supplies that disrupted the US gold standard and blew up the Bretton Woods economic bliss. Interest rates went up, taxes on the rich went down, unions were demonized, and along with oil, absolutely everything got much more expensive. Yeah... just like today, they had (carefully manufactured in my opinion) massive inflation. Since unemployment went up and wages stagnated, it wasn't just inflation, it was STAGflation.

Now, here's where we want to start asking about the RULES again. Where do they come from, who makes them, and, as they ask in the vid, why do we even play this game? Why do we put up with unpaid overtime (again see last post), rising costs, shittier jobs featuring more work for less pay? How did we get sucked into playing this game and who sucked us in? Meanwhile, businesses have had sustained record profits since the early 70's while us regular folks have been losing at this game. In short, there's more money out there and we're getting less of it. Are we just not working hard enough? Are we just not smart enough? Are we getting outwitted, outlasted, outplayed? Nope, we're getting fucked. 

If you're now thinking, "There he is again, conspiracy theorist Dave," it's because you've been carefully and expensively socialized into thinking that. The "game" to which I'm referring is Capitalism if you haven't worked that out yet. We have known that this game or system does not work for quite some time. The utter failure of the system exhibited itself in the Great Depression that gripped most of the world in the 1930's and partially led to WWII. We have known of a way to win this game for quite some time too: socialism. But, as its name might suggest, that is only good for society, which is not good enough for the rich, and since they are the ones making the rules, we have to play by them if we want to play their game. Why oh why we would want to I just don't know but here we are. 

Lest we forget, FDR implemented programs like unemployment insurance, social security, labour protections, market and bank regulation (or RE-regulation), and other such socialist policies to save America from capitalism just before WWII. I.e., the government, not the "free market" or the private sector, had pulled America's asses out of the Depression. As America goes, so go most other allied countries, so really THAT'S when we all started playing the people's game, and it was a fun 40-year long game for the people until the early 70's when the rich flipped the table and said, "We're not playing this game any more. Even though we're having fun and we like the game, we have a better game." Better only for them as it turned out.

So... how did the rich convince us to go back to playing their game? They flat out lied to us. We just covered how it was government that saved the people from the Great Depression. Then government regulation carried the people through the best years of their lives. People trusted, even LOVED the government! FDR got elected 4 times! But the Reagan and Thatcher administrations had the job of painting government as "the problem, not the solution." That, as you might expect, took some doing. 

This is when a bloody well organized propaganda campaign to bring back capitalism and funnel the money that had leaked into the public back to the top where it belonged began and the wealth gap re-widened with it. Not surprisingly, Big Oil were leading the campaign with J. Howard Pew characterizing the New Deal as a Trojan Horse for socialism, which it totally was, and that would be a BAD thing once "socialism" became a scare word. Newspapers became unsourced propaganda filled rags poisoning the minds of the electorate against the government that had given them the best years of their lives and in favour of the corporations that had led them into the Depression. How did they do it?

Rugged individualism, competition, anti-communist thought, scapegoating, blacklisting, oh yeah, it got UGLY! It wasn't just the newspapers, it got into the movies too. The message that regulating the "free market" was absolutely unconstitutional and unamerican was at the heart of most of the rhetoric. The result was socialism and/or communism and both were evil. The very American prosperity gospel replaced the Biblical idea that chasing money is NOT a virtue. It is fascinating how THAT scam was perpetrated on the American people! Anna does a great video on that too called The Big Church Grift. "If you want to be perfect sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor." Matthew 20:21. Jesus said that. Christ. I guess the verse the prosperity gospel considers to trump that is, "Nobody's perfect." Fakeziah 6:66. (The use of the word "trump" is no coincidence there. heh heh)

Corrupting religion to make Jesus into an entrepreneurial spirit rather than a loving one was bad. You might even say it was evil. But I think what was done to corrupt education was probably worse. Maybe it's my natural progression in life through religion to education that makes me feel this way, maybe it's faith vs. fact, I dunno, but it just seems diabolical to me. You see, much like pastors were paid to link money to virtue and God, academics were paid to write false studies and coerced into fudging textbooks and corrupting general education along those same lines. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the US contains the Haymarket Affair and the heroic efforts of Americans in America to oppose industry and demand human rights. There's even a song! This is why it isn't used much in American classrooms. They have been controlled for over a century by the powerful corporate lobby that fondly reflects on the days when kids could work in factories for long hours with no overtime pay, no benefits, no minimum wage, and no safety regulations as soon as they were tall enough to reach the machine controls. Educating the public on the heroism of citizens who opposed such conditions and fought for human dignity just didn't fit into the aspirations of the ruling class. So they changed education. Just changed it.

You may wonder, "Well, how the hell could they just do that? Knowledge is knowledge, no?" Unbelievably, the corporate lobbyists and think tanks of the day just took people who had spent lifetimes proving that capitalism has inherent problems - like it doesn't fucking work! The "golden years of capitalism" were 4 decades of socialism. Markets don't correct themselves and businessmen just connive to take as much money from the poor as they can. The Owners can't have us knowing this so they took guys like John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith and just lied about them! I'm not making this up! Anna Bocca is an economics student and I know several more who rant and rave about how Keynes and Smith are purposely misrepresented. People sympathetic to the cause of corporate (bullshit) economics were hired to teach and fund major university economics programs despite their academic WRONGNESS. This happened only because the lobby had the money to make it happen. Like religion, education had been messed up by money. Anna's video about this is very long but very informative. Check it out. 

One of the major bought and paid for quasi-economists was a name that might be more well known: Milton Friedman. Capitalism and Freedom was his highly biased pulp fiction on economics. 

So by buying people, schools, media, churches, and (Reagan/Thatcher) government, the rich ended their experiment with surrendering a little bit of money to the other 99 point whatever percent of the world and decided to take it back. If you want to learn about the aggressive expansion of the American Chamber of Commerce and the loads of cash they poured into buying politics in the early 70's, here's the link to the video I referenced at the very beginning. 

Sorry about the ads within but I think they're worth it. Not the ones from YouTube but Anne's sponsors. 

So there you have it. This is how we got sucked into playing the game of the (less than) 1%. In the end it boils down to money. Money made it happen and to truly understand how bad it is, you need to not have very much of it. To understand how those with money always end up being the ones in control boggles many a great mind. 

"The most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity." J.R.R. Tolkien

It seems to me that a guy could do worse than adopting the philosophy that the amount of trust you should put into a person is directly disproportionate to the amount of money that person has. So going back to the beginning, I truly hope that the guy Anne consulted was as poor as he looked and I hope Anne does well enough with her sponsors to keep producing such informative videos... but just barely well enough. Stay strong and stay poor Anne!

It Is NOT What It Is

 "It is what it is." I've mentioned this defeatist mantra and how much I hate it in these blathering bloggages before. I've had conversations about it too trying unsuccessfully to clearly convey exactly why I despise this philosophy and the battered and bullied generations that have been forced to adopt it. "Hate" might be too strong a word for how I feel about the pathetic downtrodden population that has been securely yoked and whipped by the ruling class into trading their lives to keep the wealthy in haute couture and bon-bons. But I don't like them and I'm one of them. What exactly is it that keeps us from doing what we all want to do?

"It is what it is." It's much like "A rule is a rule." It is no coincidence that after Bryson Dechambeau was penalized two strokes for accidentally improving his lie yesterday in The Open he said, "It is what it is." I don't want to get too deep into this but listen, as long as you don't move your ball, you are not improving your lie. Dechambeau walked into tall grass, stood behind his ball to see where he needed to hit it, then hit it. Well, MUCH later it was ruled by the stuffed shirts that comprise whatever governing body is in charge at The Open that stomping down the high grass behind his ball made his backswing easier and therefore "improved his lie." No. Just no. It improved his backswing and did nothing to affect his lie. You cannot argue that logically so you need to revert to, "A rule is a rule." "It is what it is." I can't tell you how many times I have rearranged foliage on golf courses to improve my backswing and watched my fellow golf partners do the same. It never occurred to any of us that we were cheating because we weren't. Improving your backswing doesn't amount to cheating in the minds of golfers worldwide. But evidently it's a rule.

Here's another: You are not allowed to ground a club in a bunker. Why not? It's about preserving the sand in the bunker and maintaining the hazard. It's much like raking the trap after you mess it up. They don't want folks practicing swings 3 or 4 times blasting sand out of the bunker and onto the grass. Understandable. So when someone grazes the sand accidentally while preparing to hit their shot, it shouldn't be a penalty, right? Logically that's right. But logic and justice so often take back seats to The Rule! Probably the worst injustice ever was Dustin Johnson in the 2010 PGA Championship who took a practice swing beside his ball that had come to rest in a strip of bare dirt with no grass growing in it. Well here come those stuffed shirts again with their crotches bulging at the prospect of being OBEYED by a celebrity golf professional. "That was a bunker!" they screamed.

This, my friends, this little patch of dirt in the picture above is not a bunker, it's groundskeeper neglect. Almost everyone, golfer or not, can agree on that but, well, a rule is a rule. It is what it is. 

You might be thinking, "Oh Dave you conspiracy theorist, they're just trying to stop golfers from cheating." Nope. I'll give you another rule that proves the rule-makers are not just punishing cheaters, they're also just punishing for the fun of it. If you make a mistake on your scorecard there are two things that can happen: 1. You can be disqualified if you write a score lower than the one you got. 2. You will be forced to keep the higher score if you (or your golfing partner keeping your score) writes down a larger score than the one you got. In the 1968 Master's Roberto De Vicenzo's playing partner Tommy Aaron gave him a 4 when he actually got a 3. This cost him a chance at a playoff to win the tournament. Obviously there was no attempt to cheat. So why the punishment? Nothing justifies it. So we have to try to mitigate the injustice with a brainless non-justification, "Well, them's the rules." "It is what it is." De Vicenzo had his own way of phrasing it, "What a stupid I am!" 

Why does nobody have the balls to change the fucking rules? Whether you think Dechambeau was breaking the rule or not, it's a fucking stupid rule. How can you avoid stomping down grass near your ball? You have to get close to your ball to shoot it! The rule should be that as long as you don't touch or move your ball, doing ANYthing to improve your backswing is NOT improving your lie. Kudos to Dechambeau for being one of the VERY few with the courage to fight stupid rules in our world. It can be done but few of us stand up to The Man.

Since returning to Canada I've noticed an outrageously gross societal wave toward this blind acceptance and obedience, almost worship of rules, no matter how stupid. If Canada were a sport, it might be golf. Here's a rule that has already cost me two jobs: If somebody is outside of Canada for 5 years, driving or not, his/her license expires and he/she completely forgets (inexplicably exactly at the 5 year point) how to drive necessitating more than just driver's license renewal, they must make their ways through the graduated driving programs of the provinces in which they reside as if they had never held a license or driven before. I settled in Sarnia hoping to get work with a friend who has a vending machine business. This requires driving around town and stocking vending machines with snacks and drinks. Pretty simple. Unfortunately, even with my clean driver's abstract and proof of 25 years with no accidents or insurance claims against me in hand, when I went to the appropriate keepers of the rules to plead for an exception all I got was, "A rule is a rule. No exceptions. It is what it is."

Here's another one: Despite our culture that is consciously forcing Canadians to own vehicles and drive, did you know there is excise tax on fuel? Excise taxes are for luxuries and dirty pleasures and they are designed to limit consumption of such products and services as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, marijuana, certain luxury vehicles, etc. You find me a Canadian who thinks gas isn't essential to their lives and I'll show you... me. I don't drive so I don't use gas. This tax does not affect me, right? WRONG. I take the bus and taxis and Ubers. I eat food that is delivered by truck. I buy all kinds of things that have gone up in price (and with Trump's bullshit war with Iran will go up in price much more) that involve oil in manufacturing, delivery, or somewhere along the supply chain. ALL Canadians are dependent upon oil and since the early days of recognizing its potential when a super rich asshole like William Knox D'Arcy could go to a poor country like Persia (Iran) and buy 30 years of land and oil drilling rights for some paltry sum like 20,000 pounds, Big Oil has been manufacturing oil addiction into cultures like Canada. If you've ever wondered why Canada sells its oil cheaply to the US then buys back the refined product more expensively, it ain't because we don't have the ability to refine it here. It's the same assholery that made William Knox D'Arcy pretend he was helping the Persians, not fleecing them. Here we add to "It is what it is," and "A rule is a rule," another euphemism that has proven quite functional in the creation of our oligarchic world, "It's just business." I could spend a long time on this but will instead refer you to this well-researched video:

The rich control our lives and how we live them. There was a short period of time after the poor fought a couple of world wars and saved the businesses (and arses) of every last one of what George Carlin calls "our owners" and they allowed the peasants to enjoy a little bit more of the wealth. Taxes on the rich were in the 70 percent area. Ordinary folks could live very well on one salary. People could send their kids to college, buy their homes outright, AND retire! We had those wonder years not just because of the greatest generation fighting in the wars, but also because they fought for workers' rights. 

Anybody know what holiday is celebrated on May 1st? If you're Canadian or American you probably don't, yet it's a big deal in over 160 countries around the world. It commemorates the Haymarket Affair during which people were wounded and killed after a peaceful protest erupted into violence. It eventually led to the adoption of the 8-hour day worldwide and where did it happen? Chicago! Ask anybody in the US - hell ask anybody in CHICAGO what the Haymarket Affair was or even what is celebrated on May 1st or the first Sunday in may in most countries and they won't know. The rich don't want them to know and, yes, after 25 years in the industry you can take it from me, the rich are even trying to control what we know. Why wouldn't they want us to know about the heroes who fought for labour rights to which we are now entitled? 

The obvious projected logic is that maybe the captains of industry and those who make the rules (which ARE the rules) might not want us to know about those rules and our rights enshrined within them because they are trying to slowly erode them, and this includes the 8-hour day. Let me give you one example from my new life in Canada. I just signed contracts to work security again and I will probably start training by the end of this week or if not, most likely this upcoming weekend. Amongst the various papers and documents I was hastily given to sign was the expected averaging agreement. I had one of these in the last security job I worked in Trail. THERE I was asked if I would sign it and agreed simply because I wasn't getting any weeks when I worked enough hours to get overtime. I don't think I ever did there. But if I HAD, I wouldn't have agreed to the averaging agreement. Here in Ontario these things were not legal until just 7 years ago when Doug Ford signed the (need I even say "euphemistic" when it comes to politics?) Restoring Ontario's Competitiveness Act or Bill 66 which allowed employers to bypass government regulation in this respect. 

You see, if a person works more than 44 hours in a week, that person is entitled to overtime pay which is paid at 1.5 times the worker's wage. People fought and DIED for this right ffs! With the Labour Standards Act it was expected that employers consult the Ministry of Labour and get approval for these "agreements." The approval required a bona fide reason for the averaging agreement. Here's what they are: If a worker works, say, 4 12-hour shifts in a week, that's 48 hours and that worker is entitled to 4 hours at the rate of 1.5 times their usual pay. However, if they have an averaging agreement the scheduler can give them only 3 shifts in the next week (36 hours) making the average weekly number of hours 42 for that pay period, and since a 42-hour week doesn't qualify for overtime pay, the company pretends like you didn't work overtime and asks you to play along with their gag and pretend they don't have to pay it... which they DO but be a good bitch and quiet down now. 

Now, you might be saying, "What an evil thing to do! Especially to a security guard who's only making minimum wage!" You're right! But the Ministry of Labour said, "Now hang on here, if the business has a good reason for it, we'll allow it." I can't imagine any legitimate reason for one of these averaging agreements and the employers usually couldn't think anything up, so they generally were assumed to be doing it to save money by denying workers' overtime pay to which they were entitled. This did not qualify as a legitimate reason, it qualified as greedy employers trying to squeeze the last drop of dignity and servitude out of their cattle - uh I mean chattel - uh I mean employees. Well now that Ontario has the new legislation called the Make Ontario Competitive Again Act, that now IS a legitimate reason and it sets a HORRIFIC precedent for more assholery to come. A rule is a rule. A law is a law. It is what it is. It's just business. 

You see how these things happen? This is not legitimate, honest, natural, evolutionary, or anything like that. These things happen when greedy rich people arrange things so that they can steal more from the poor.

We have to stop acquiescing to Draconian, Machiavellian, Gordon Gecko, Greed is Good rules, laws, and customs. We're already reverting and if we don't watch ourselves we'll be back to the era when kids could work 18-hour days in the fucking coal mines! 

It ISN'T just business; A rule is NOT a rule; and it is NOT what it is! Thank God for people who question these 1984isms like Bryson Dechambeau and others like him. If we were all like that we'd have a far better world. Leastaways, that's what I reckon.

Have You Seen This Man?

 All but one of the courses in my abandoned master's studies featured group projects. There were good things about them, but they were generally more bad than good for the simple reason that probably should/could have been anticipated: people are far less accountable while they are wearing their online personas. The progressive ed ideas of collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, are often encouraged in group projects. Sometimes they actually happen - even in online group projects. But, while it was interesting to interact with fellow students from all over the world, the projects more often than not took the form of aggressively dominant students bullying others into control of the projects to assure that no dummies negatively affected their GPA's. And without a doubt the project bullies only got away with that because they didn't have to be the type A dickheads face-to-face and field the push-back of the other group members in person. Kudos to the university for trying, but I think they're pulling back on this educational strategy and I think an online conversation thread I had with a member of the university administration describing what I just typed may have even played a part in my final class (11 of 12) NOT having a group project. 

Nevertheless, while doing these projects I was in contact with many of my fellow students and occasionally we got off topic in our communication. The topics unrelated to our projects were what you might expect - where we were located; what inspired us to get MEds; what age and subjects we taught; what time it was; and the like. But another popular topic was the school. More specifically its legitimacy. They advertise as tuition-free but we all paid money for our courses. That was surprising to a lot of students. One of the other surprising things was the accreditation. Most of us read all the claims of accreditation in the school and course descriptions not knowing that REGIONAL accreditation was the big one and they didn't have it, although they DO now. They got regionally accredited somewhere around my 9th or 10th course. By the same accrediting body as Berkeley and Stanford don't you know! So I guess that would be good... if you finish the degree.

On THAT note, there was a hugely popular topic that we discussed and I was not aware of until late in my studies, like about 10 courses in. I had mentioned the thesis course, or what the school calls the "capstone" course to several people and we discussed what we were planning to write our theses on. I had all but settled on Paulo Freire early in the course (like probably before I was done my second course) when I first heard of this guy who should be a household name all over the world, but isn't. He was a popular choice but since his educational niche was adult linguistics - and so was mine - the choice seemed an especially suitable one for me. None of the students I talked with ever mentioned the fact that this course was NOT a thesis course. Absolutely nothing in what any of us had read about the course prepared us for the final two courses, which was when we all found out, and which consisted of preparing and writing one of those boring, statistical, almost mathematical, scientific educational studies in which we try to quantify something unquantifiable. In the upcoming video, Bruno della Chiesa provides us with the word "quantophrenia," which is the obsession in social sciences with treating numerical data as the only valid form of knowledge. I have needed that word countless times in this blog and probably in about 50% of my research papers during my M.Ed. studies! Thank you Bruno! 

Anyway, believe it or not, the school actually provides a list of the topics they want us to study. On that list are things that have been researched to death and anyone who has taught for 5 minutes, hell, even non-educators already knows. They NEED to be things that are well researched already because NOW it has to be SECONDARY research meaning that we have to somehow (and as explained in a previous blog post, the university and its professors haven't quite figured out the details of HOW) read lots of previous papers on our topic and relate them to our research???, personal opinion???, fake research??? or whatever, on the same topic. 

I even knew a guy in Gongju, where I did the first few courses in the degree, who was on his 11th course and he didn't tell me this very important, game changing information. I think he might have caught things early on when the project was still PRIMARY research and was able to use HIS class as research subjects. I didn't keep in touch and don't know if he ever finished. In fact the only time I talked to him was at a noisy pub in Gongju and neither of us was interested in talking shop at the time. I think it would have made a difference. Shoulda, coulda, woulda...

What I believe happened, (and this is based on communication with the administrator) was the university was running into problems with students not having classes to use for their research, (My 11th class fell during the summer semester during which students were on summer vacation and if I remember correctly, this was why I initiated the dialog with the administrator) as well as liability issues in which master's students had to get permission from parents, teachers, students, and it became too difficult. So I was assured that I wouldn't need to worry about it, the course was changing from PRIMARY to SECONDARY research. And, thankfully, the 11th course was without a group project. I say thankfully but I am now thinking that if we HAD a group project, maybe we could have ironed out exactly how the hell we were supposed to DO this primary study using secondary research. It is literally impossible and I tried until I was unable to try anymore. I explain the details better here.

I have since been contacted by the university and asked why I abandoned my course right at the finish line and told them that they need to fix it before I can finish it. And if they had allowed me to write a "No, you're wrong and here's why" thesis, the very kind Noam Chomsky describes as the type they expect MIT students to write, thereby qualifying that institution as progressive, why, I would have my M.Ed. today. However, my institution, while training me in all kinds of educational progressivism, was like most and refused to practice what they preached. 

Aye, there's the rub! Why can't universities practice the kind of education their education departments educate about? This brings up the topic to which Freire devoted his singularly out-fucking-standing life and career, and the topic on which I would have written my thesis if I hadn't mistakenly assumed my uni was going to be forthcoming about the course format from the beginning. Schools, and maybe most particularly American schools need to choose between education and industry and despite what Howard Gardner calls at least 300 years internationally and at least 100 years in America of articulate critique of this view, the choice of industrial education remains dominant. 

I have watched, re-watched, and re-re-watched this video in which Gardner says they'll come back to that, but they don't come back to that! However, some fascinating points are brought up about the elite protectionism and its not-so-well-known but enduring presence in the constitution, government, and culture of America since it was established. I love the point about Ralph Waldo Emerson saying that if the poor are educated too much, they'll come for our (ruling class) throats. One of the framers of the Constitution, James Madison, said virtually the same thing at the Constitutional Convention when he argued for the protection of the minority of the opulent against the majority (of the peasants). But, unlike Freire, they don't really state unequivocally that the solution, as I think every educator knows from all the critique Gardner mentioned, is the pedagogy of the oppressed. We must educate the poor, not oppress them. But the ruling class considers this a threat to their positions of power so they call it radical and revolutionary. It's still valid, probably more relevant than ever, and people are still being oppressed as much as ever. We just need educators with the balls to challenge the oppressors and implement proper education.

I think here we need a little background on THE MAN. When you talk about education, you might think Dewey or even Chomsky is the main man, but I have no doubt they'd both defer to Freire. In fact Chomsky talks of attending a Deweyan school when he was young that had the very Freirean dialogical, formative - not summative assessment style. He says he skipped a grade but had no idea he was a good student cuz the school was not obsessively comparing him with other students. Bruno mentions the PISA standardized tests that are probably the best example of this educational evil that is LITERALLY (and I don't use that word in its modern watered down form) killing 14 and 15 year old students and the careers of teachers the world over because we MUST have these evaluations. Why? Higher evaluations = more money. It's as simple as that. It's nothing like this:

Trust me! GOOD teachers have been teaching to the tests and prioritizing the comparative, competitive curriculum at the expense of real education because they could lose their jobs if they don't. Students have been climbing to school rooftops, holding hands, and jumping to their deaths because of failing their families, schools, and countries through mediocre PISA scores. We all know the horrors of the industrial education methods, every Ed. degree course including even Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaches of their evils, we are consistently taught that each student's personal progression is what is most important, and then the prof says, "This will be on Tuesday's test which is worth 30% of your final grade. Those who fail will stand a good chance of having to repeat the class. Check the rubric in the group chat for what will be covered on the test." Victor Weisskopf's "It doesn't matter what we will cover, it matters what YOU will DIScover," is just a wonderfully pithy quote, but it happens only in educational La La Land, am I right? Well not entirely. It happened in Brazil in the early 1960's because one man had the cajones to do what so many teachers are scared to do. He got put in jail, kicked out of his country, and effectively cancelled from a lot of educational cultures because of it, but boy did he get results!

That man was this man, Paulo Freire. 

Don't recognize him, do you? He took his native Brazil from having a literate population that, as near as makes little to no difference, excluded the poor (and oppressed) to almost total literacy by teaching peasants to read. He did this by getting to know his students intimately, teaching them words that were particularly relevant to their daily lives, (generative vocabulary) studying syllables and forming new words with them, analyzing pictures of everyday scenes and discussing them, and prioritizing (almost weaponizing) dialogic, interactive, highly political, and emotionally bonding conversation. He was teaching illiterate adults who were highly affected by their political surroundings but, because of their illiteracy, were not allowed to vote. So, if we allow the students' trust in political power, or at least some form of increased personal agency being attached to the Brazilian vote, these were highly motivated students and statistics illustrated their success. It is said that many were taught to read (Portuguese) in as little as 30 hours! 

Things were going swimmingly and by 1963 Paulo Freire was appointed to director of the Brazilian National Literacy Program due to his phenomenal successes in regional programs in his area. The government wanted all of Brazil to be literate I guess. THAT government needed to go it was determined, perhaps BECAUSE of that, by the heads of the military coup (incidentally they were backed by the US in case you believe their war on education was strictly domestic) who overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964. They blatantly declared Freire's empowering education a form of subversive, revolutionary, and radical action and imprisoned him for 70 days after which he was exiled for 15 years. Well, if you watch the video, at least he wasn't murdered like the Jesuit teachers and their daughters and housekeepers in El Salvador. So he had THAT goin' for him...

Freire developed his educational and consciousness raising philosophies while in exile in Bolivia, Switzerland and primarily Chile. He even taught at Harvard for a while in '69/'70. It was during his exile from Brazil that he wrote the sadly inaccurately titled Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It should have been called the Andragogy of the Oppressed since he wasn't teaching little kids, but never mind.

When I first learned about Freire, read his book and learned his educational philosophies I immediately found in him more than just agreement but, although I will never suffer like he did for education, a kind of brother... a FRERE if you will. That means "brother" in French. 

Before I ever heard of him I formulated my own opinions and philosophies on the marginalization/oppression of the poor in almost every country and the duty of those of us who have experienced this injustice, and are in positions to educate young minds and old about it, to do so. I always preferred active, participatory learning to the passive vessel "banking" model Freire criticized in so much of our "traditional" education. Teamwork, problem-solving, and, indeed, group projects were always integral parts of my curricula. Though I experienced failure with them online during the Covid 19 epidemic. Becoming critically conscious, thinking deeply about it (praxis), and dialoging about it were strongly encouraged in my classroom. 

I was much like Bruno who hadn't heard of Freire but who found that he had been exposed indirectly to a lot of his ideas and educational philosophy. Learning about Freire for me was like learning that word quantophrenia from the video. "WHERE have you been all my life?" I immediately asked and thought of all the times I could have used that knowledge.

I suppose the reason I wanted to write my thesis on Freire, and maybe even one of the reasons why I am writing this today, is so that I can give one or two other people that overwhelming feeling of support. Freire and many of the other educational giants who I read about in my master's studies, gave me a kind of attaboy from the grave and made me more confident that I wasn't the only one clinging to the hopeless hope of proper education in this world.

A hope I have almost given up on. I'm still volunteering a couple hours a week educating for free but I think my final job on this earth is destined to be in security. A great waste of a good teacher to be sure, but at least I'm not as likely to be assassinated by American anti-intellectual militants working as an industrial security guard in Sarnia.

So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice...

Old Too Soon, Smart Too Late

 I guess it's true what they say: You learn something new every day. This morning I received a call from a local medical study that I had signed up for. They're studying diabetics and I figured any way I can help... So they say to me, "Are you taking any meds for your diabetes?" I say, "Insulin and some other pills..." Immediately I get removed from the study. She says, "We're not studying diabetics who use insulin." Suddenly my mind goes back to a time in Calgary when I tried to give blood. I called in advance and asked if diabetics could give blood and they said it would be fine. As I got to the clinic my phone rang and the person on the line asked me, "Are you taking insulin?" I thought that the majority of us diabetics ARE taking insulin so rather than assume we're just recreational diabetics, or beginners, the assumption should be that we've committed to this disease and are taking advantage of Banting and Best's fine work. But it seemed the opposite. Here again it seemed like they were assuming they'd get volunteers who have lazy pancreii, not, like me, pancreases that have attained superfluous organ statii/statuses. So I look it up. Evidently only 30-35% of us take insulin. ALL type 1 diabetics do, but they're only about 5-10% of diabetics. The majority are, like me, type 2ers. However, UNlike me, many rely on lifestyle changes or oral medication and only eventually (I guess when they get old) transition to insulin usage. 

I visited my new diabetes doc just a couple days ago. All my Doukhobor friends who read this would get a charge outta his name - Dr. Pandu Shetty. He's quite a character actually. 77 years old and looks like he could still pull the plough. He asked me how long I've had diabetes and I couldn't even give him a guess. I only found out by accident really and the first time I measured my blood sugar (after sum gyup sal with the Fam about 5 years ago in Korea) it was off the charts! I called up a hospital and asked if I could see a doc about it and they said they only admit patients with private medical insurance, predominantly foreign professionals and US military. The person I had reached asked if I knew my blood sugar level and I said, "Yeah, it's 545." She said, "Come in immediately!" The doctor I ended up seeing started me on insulin and some other drugs immediately so I didn't get to experience the "transition" to insulin that type 2ers are supposed to. 

I often think about situations I was in before I found out I had diabetes like having to take a leak so bad I went in Seoul traffic or a Beijing subway garbage can; any of the times a friend told me something I had done (while drinking) the night before of which I had no recollection;  or even times when I was thirstier than an Irish roofer in Kuwait. I have never passed out or had a seizure - to my knowledge, but I bet the diabetes "augmented" my life long before I knew I had it. I wonder how many stupid life choices, or how much of my erratic behaviour could be partially or even fully blamed on it. How many Facebook friends have unfriended me while I was so high on sugar I didn't know what I was typing? How many have I unfriended under those conditions? I have to admit, I wasn't eating jujubes or swigging fruit juice to get my sugar up. In almost every case it was booze that caused me to sugar-ramble in talk or text so I can't claim absolute innocence, but I wonder what the levels are here. I mean at what point do I start blacking out. Maybe I oughta do my own diabetic study and carefully keep track of what sugar levels are when diabetics start saying stupid stuff and doing things they'll be embarrassed the next day about. I will allow patients who ARE taking insulin, I won't snub them. 

So I guess we can all agree here to one thing: anything stupid/insulting/awkward/nasty I have said or done to any of you, that was the diabetes talking/typing/acting. Okay?

Okay, now that THAT'S settled, back to this study. While punishing the study-conductors by eating a big bowl of sugary Honey-nut Cheerios I checked online and found that (forget the 545 - that was the Korean scale. It's about 30 on the scale I'm using now) typical target range for diabetics is between 4 and 7. I liken that to a dentist telling you to brush 3 times a day. They know twice is enough but they ask for 3 hoping you will end up on 2. I try to keep my blood sugar between 7 and 10. Like brushing twice a day, it's enough. I find that I can still have most of the foods (and drinks) I like best that way. I have to control diet and exercise somewhat, but I manage to do it. ***Don't tell Dr. Shetty on me.

If only we knew earlier in life the things we find out later! Who knows how much better my life could have been if I'd known about my diabetes and controlled my blood sugar levels better? I am finding the same about other things of which my younger self was ignorant as well. For instance, politics. I remember wanting to be a lawyer and actually giving thought to participating in Canadian government in some form. It's a good thing I didn't get the chance! I worked closely with an MP from the Rainy River riding while living in Ignace as a high school student. He saw in me the intelligence and work ethic needed for political success... for a short time. Then he DIDN'T see in me an all too important aspect of politics, or, I hope, several. I didn't have the sleazy, self-important, opportunistic, ambition or the ethic-sapping lust for money and power so integral in the field. Again, not knowing then what I know now, it was probably the same deficiencies that sabotaged any law career I could have had. 

Story 15 of The Rose Garden includes a "vezier" which is a high-ranking political advisor, who took up with a circle of dervishes (which are members of a branch of Islam who take vows of poverty and austerity seeking divine truth through ascetic practices. Yes they sometimes whirl too.) after he was removed from his political post. The king asked the vezier to resume his post when he was back in political favour but the vezier had become so much like the dervishes he refused saying, "Retirement is better than occupation." The king pleaded saying, "We are in need of a man with sufficient intelligence to carry on the administration of government." His reply was classic! "It is a sign of sufficient intelligence not to engage in such matters." 

A recurring theme in the stories of Saadi is the fickle and paranoid nature of the ruling class that is caused by riches and power, and how often they can turn on those loyal to them. The vezier preferred the freedom that allowed the dervishes to be honest and just: the freedom that comes from poverty and powerlessness. 

Now I'm not a politician in the court of Stalin or Trump, but lately I have abandoned my profession in all but its voluntary form for (in large part) precisely the same reason. I have spent too much time with the dervishes to trust education administrators, or political administrators. It's all just a ruse. We've all seen this right?:

If there existed a politician in any country that legitimately offered this as his/her platform and actually DID something about it, that person would win every election in his/her assassination-shortened lifetime. Not just rent but the cost of living. This is the gist of what the majority of the world wants and it is the jobs of politicians of the world to deflect from this and pretend to busy themselves debating minor issues while delivering what their bosses (the rich) tell them to deliver: high rent and low wages. 

I love Henry David Thoreau's take on government! He says "The government that governs best governs least" is not far enough. How about "The government that governs best governs not at all?" But, says HDT, the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its DIN to satisfy the idea of government they have been given. Yet the government of itself never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.

Maybe he's right. I used to think we WERE ready to govern ourselves without the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals government provides. But then I see stories like this: Marilyn Gladu says she "crossed the floor" and joined the Liberal party to get more funding for the local riding here in Sarnia. I would think that no matter what party you support, this might be something that locals liked. It means more money for our area. More road construction, maybe a mall, some more jobs, ploughing service to your neighbourhood in winter, who knows? But it's pretty easy to take a walk around Sarnia and see a dozen "Marilyn Resign" signs on people's lawns. Indeed the head of the family with which I live commented just recently that she is a traitor and has to go. 

I'm not going to sit here and type that Marilyn Gladu was a GOOD politician right after basically saying none of them can be trusted. Look at that picture of her and PM Carney and tell me if YOU think butter would melt in either of those mouths. You can bet there were ulterior motives. But the two party system, which is designed specifically to perpetuate the tribalistic, we're-right-they're-wrong, black-or-white thinking that makes multi-faceted issues like cost of living and wages sound so complicated is just one of many political self-preservation efforts that intelligent voters should be able to see through. But it appears that either we can't, or we're not that intelligent. Until one or both of those things changes, on the con will stumble and bumble until ONE person has ALL the fucking money and power and the rest of us have nothing. 

Watch this: 

Can you tell me wtf the "genius" reason was for putting the hamburger in the glove? I can tell you what it was. So you'd watch the video. That's it. The more people that watch, the more money this video makes. Hell I'M even helping them by posting it here! This is not genius and it certainly doesn't "deliver exactly what it promises!" It's a trick to get you to watch the video. 

This is politics. Thousands of phonies promising something, looking like they might be trying to deliver it, but really all they want is for you to watch them with some hope in your heart that they're legitimate. Maybe even hope enough to vote for one of them.

Tell me something... After watching that video did you try to justify the hand-shaped burger? Did you say or think something like, "Well, I COULD make this on Halloween," or something like that? If you did, you might watch another video like this. Maybe not right away, but in 4 years you'll be ready to give one another chance. 

I heard one of my favourite comedians Mark Normand say that if politics were handled like the World Cup of soccer maybe we could all get along. He also said that maybe we could get the whole world to stop calling it "football" and call it soccer instead. See how soon the cracks form in political logic? You could instantly form the Grand Old Football party and the Progressive Soccer party and have them disagree on exactly everything so that soccer fans believe they are necessary. Then he went so far as to compliment the Japanese on cleaning the stands after games and say that they are definitely the master race! Yeesh! Mark Normand had better stay out of politics or he'll form a fascist party or a "reich" if you will that would be so successful it almost takes over the world. He'd call it the Japanese Soccer Party It's only downfall would be that Normand got too paranoid about protecting his riches and power as the J.S.P. grew. Members of the GOF would infiltrate his party headquarters and assassinate him. It would be easy after he culled several of his most trusted officers and left the JSP without effective sub-leadership. The new world power, the Grand Old Football party would promise international rules that are equitable to all countries that participated in the allied resistance against the JSP. This would alienate Canada and the US who secretly still call football soccer and they would eventually rise to rival the GOF party. This North American Soccer party would rise so fast and become so strong that they would almost take over the world. But its leader Megan Rapinoe would get paranoid due to all her power and money and she'd need to be assassinated. And so on and so forth...

We should force a dervish to run the world. What do you reckon... 

... should we give it a whirl?

My Mission is Fishin'

 So what can a guy do when he's broke and bored here in Ontariariario? Well, it rained here the other day and I found a few worms trying to escape their flooding holes. I had 4 of them. I figured that would be enough for a fish or two. I knew a place where a couple of kids were fishing and using just bare can hooks and worms with floats they were pulling in catfish like nothing. I'm not a cat fisher and they rank way down my list of most delish fish, but it's been a while since I had the joy of not getting skunked at the fishing hole. Thanks to the Peet/Spiwaks I had the chance to get tight line rush just two summers ago. But that's too long between fish dog gone it! So me and my worms went to Twin Lakes here to try our luck.

Twin Lakes is where one of my all time heroes Dick Proeneke built his cabin and lived off the land in Alaska. So I imagined myself doing the same and in the back of my brain (I hope) I was even narrating my trip like old Dick might have done. "The mosquitos were extra affectionate today. But I was working too hard hiking with my full pack to Twin Lakes to notice. I set out at first light so's I could fish for my supper. It was gonna be a full day and I'd packed myself a lunch of peanuts n' fish jerky." (really it was peanuts and pepperoni) Also it was only a couple of hours. I heard it was supposed to rain around 3 o'clock so I got there about 2:30 to get the feeding frenzy just before the rain. I've found in my fishing experience that before or after (sometime during too) rain is often lucky for fishing.

I had bought a few cheapo lures at the Dollar Store and I gave them a try at first. They weren't attracting the fish at all. Some weren't even spinning the way they should have. I guess you get what you pay for sometimes. But I really hadn't had any luck with the spinners yet this year. A couple bites and followers was all I got last visit to Twin Lakes. Yes, I got skunked on my first attempt. So I wasn't interested in another day of cast and retrieve practice. It wasn't long before I switched to float, can hook and worm bait. And it wasn't long before I caught this beauty!

It just might have been 6 inches but that's not a bad size for a bluegill. Just look at those colours! All the bluegills I was catching were like that! But that wasn't all I caught.

I also caught me a bass! And it was the best fight of the day even though those bluegills are scrappy fish! If it were 9 days later I could have kept this fish, but it's not bass season yet here so, like all my fish on the day, I chucked it back. I told it to get bigger so I could catch it again during bass season.

I also caught

I think this is a rock bass but it has a small bluegill mouth. It's not as colourful as a bluegill so I thought it might be a crappie. Anyway, it was pretty small. Fun fight though. A couple of nice jumps even! If you know for sure what this is, please comment.

Then I got this one:

I KNOW what this is! It's a perch. And at the very TOP of my most delish fish is the Walleye, which is a perch. Perch are also delicious but usually so small they're not worth the effort filleting. This guy was puny! Miniscule! But where there are perch there are sometimes walleye so that'll keep me coming back to fish this lake. 

You can see how tiny this perch was by the size of the swivel in comparison. Just a little nug. 

Here's another of the bluegills 

Look at the colours! 

Anyhoo, I got nine fish and not one of them was a catfish. I didn't even get to the lake where I saw those kids pulling catfish out left and right. By the time the rain started I was getting fish almost every cast and hits every single cast! It was so much fun I wanted to stay. My spot was well covered with trees so the rain didn't bother me a bit and there were absolutely no mosquitos. I had bug dope even if there had been. 

But, at about 5 I ran outta worms and packed 'er in. I didn't realize how hard the rain was coming down until I left the fishing hole and got out into the open. I had to wait for the 20 bus about 20 minutes and I got pretty wet while doing so. Did I care? Not even a bit!

The other night I had one of my 4:30 AM wake-ups so I wrote a country song. Well? What do YOU do when you can't sleep? lol "What the hell's a fella to do when it does no good to daydream, hope, or wish? If you got a pole and a honey hole it makes a life worth livin' if you fish. I'm too old to love, too young to die, but I ain't too busy to tie a fly and go fishin'. I used to be a helluva guy, now I'm just an ornery coot with a vision. Life is hard and times are tough, I'd call the Police but they're jammin' my transmission. (HEY don't stand so close to me!) I don't have much hope for the Lord and the Pope so now my mission is fishin'."

As I always say, I write my best stuff at 4 in the morning. It's a great time to go fishin' too! I think I'll fish as much as I can until I get working more here.

On THAT note, I did a full day of work today but hours are coming seldom. Even the volunteer work has yet to start. I finally got my Ontario security guard license (to go with the dozen other licenses and/or qualifications I've gotten since landing here in the province of my birth so I don't think it'll be long till I am a guard again). In fact I got news today that I've reached the second cut of hopefuls for a position as an Ontario prison/jail guard. This week sometime I'll be doing yet another test for that. Then it'll be a month before they determine whether I pass or not. Who knows how many more stages there'll be or how long it'll take to actually get work? That's how I constantly feel here. But in the mean time... my mission is fishin'!