Here's to the end of school supported credentialism

Anyone who knows me knows how little respect I hold for credentialism and for the belief that schooling equals anything really valuable out there in the real world.

I'm always astounded by those job postings that contain the phrase, "University Degree Required to apply," as that stipulation immediately eliminates the creative and probably most functional people from the running.

Add too the reality of cheating in Universities. MacLean's Magazine had it in their research that cheating runs to 80% of students! What that means is that of those who gain a bachelor's degree, 80% of them don't deserve it. Additionally, that degree is obtainable with a passing grade of 50%....

So what does that mean for an employer? Simply this: by limiting their search to only those who hold a bachelor's degree, they're not asking for or getting the cream of the crop by any means. They're getting drones who will commit to four years (or more) in a class and who are quite good at regurgitation. Neither zombieism or regurgitation are sought-after characteristics for employment.

I certainly believe there is every excuse for further education. Simply for access to new ideas, philosophies and means of thinking, higher education is critical. HOW we educate is at question here and what is considered correct and right and valuable in terms of learning and styles.

This speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, eloquently packages up all the stuff I feel about the current state of education. Please note his brief but pointed nod to "ADHD."

About this Talk

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it.

Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize -- much less cultivate -- the talents of many brilliant people."We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says.

"If you have not yet seen Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, please stop whatever you're doing and watch it now."

Read the transcript >>

Enjoying this? Then check out ...
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The Canadian Pot Law is no more

Calgary’s World Wide Marijuana March

On May 4^th, a well attended march for legalisation happened in Calgary. Considering there was a crowd about 500 strong, mostly stoned, there were hardly any disturbances.

There were three arrests for possession. Apparently the Calgary Police Service is unaware that the Canadian pot laws have fallen.

In July 2007 the Supreme Court struck down the laws pertaining to possession for personal use.

The dissolution of the archaic pot laws has been covered by numerous Canadian news outlets including an article by Brian Preston published February 27 2008 in The National Post.

The laws were previously challenged and struck down in 2003 and there is currently a class action suit underway to deal with people who were wrongfully charged with possession between the years 2001 and 2003.

The existing laws were challenged and again stricken from the books in July 2007. The Supreme Court ruled that because the law has not been rewritten to accommodate medical users, the prohibition on all use -- including recreational use -- collapses because the law is unconstitutional.

According to Peter Hogg, an expert in Canadian constitutional law, once the Supreme Court of Canada has held that a law is unconstitutional, there can be no doubt about the status of the law: it is invalid, and need not be obeyed.

Since July 2007, a growing number of people across Canada has been successful having charges of simple possession dropped. This is quite simply because the law no longer exists and therefore charges cannot legally be laid.

It seems either the police services nationally either do not know the possession laws are no longer valid or they choose to ignore that fact.

The reality is that Canadian courts and jails are crammed with people who pose absolutely no danger to anyone, including themselves but have been charged with simple possession.

The cost to Canadians of charging, processing, incarcerating and prosecuting these non-offenders is astronomical. As far back as 1996, the annual cost was over $400 Million and estimated to be more likely double that number, funds that should be put towards useful expenditures.

There is no question that for-profit grow operations should remain illegal – at least until there is appropriate legislation and management in place to regulate such businesses.

However, as it pertains to people possessing small quantities of marijuana for their own use, it is well past time Canadians got past their Reefer Madness silliness and our politicians stopped worrying about whether Canadian laws offend the architects of the failed US war on drugs.

For those who’ve been unlawfully charged, click HERE for a Canadian defence kit. This kit has been used in several recent trials where the defendants either were acquitted or had their possession charges stayed.

Yeah, Bottled Water is a Great Idea.... not...

I just happened on this great article on Environmental Graffiti. The bottled water industry is one of the other reasons that gas is so darn expensive… FACTS:

• Bottled water production in the US consumes roughly 17 million barrels of oil every year, not including transportation.

• 17 million barrels of oil (equivalent to just under the GDP of the Cayman Islands at today’s prices) used in production, bottled water consumes gallons and gallons of water.
  

• Three gallons of the wet stuff is required to produce one gallon of what you will happily pay a dollar for, largely because of the length and complexity of the various “purification” processes and the evaporation loss that takes place while the water is in the plant.
  

• One percent of the water on our planet is both accessible and potable.

• Besides the extravagant amount of oil used to make the bottles and large volumes of water used in the bottling process:

• Transport costs - by the time you transport every bottle by rail or truck and keep it cool, you may as well have filled it one-fourth of the way with oil.

• Operating costs of the factories themselves
  

• Profit the bottled water companies have to make for their shareholders.
  

• Environmental Impact of Production: Every ton of PET plastic for the bottles produces 3 tons of carbon–adding 2.5 Million tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the 17 million barrels of oil.

But Anyway, Global Warming is soooo Last Year! What about the Price of Rice and Wheat!??

This is an excerpt from an email I just got from my brilliant, well-read friend, Dr.H., who is waaaay smarter than I'll ever be and reads about a hundred books a week.

Last year, Dr. H sent me a great piece called Save the Planet, Drive an Edsel. This week, I sent him a little tidbit about last year's news, Global Warming, and he sent me back this delicious analysis.

"... At the end of the day the CO2 debate is pretty well over.... There was still a debate [back in 2006] but in 2007 the walls came crashing down on the CO2ers. Their champions like Gore and Suzuki headed for cover and have refused to talk to anyone since.

The globalists and the media still act as if the idea still has legs and the governments still throw a little money that way; but there are no CO2ers ready to come out and debate the real scientists and historians and Al Gore's electric bill is still higher than the national poverty line.


So, the crisis du jour this year seems to be rising food prices and people starving in Africa. There is probably some truth to this but I doubt that it has much to do with the price of wheat.


A bushel of wheat weighs 60 lbs so one bushel will make 60 loaves of bread. At $3.00 a bushel the wheat in a loaf of bread costs 5cents. If the cost of wheat doubles the cost of a loaf of bread goes up 5 cents. If the price quadruples; a loaf of bread goes up 15 cents. Big deal! However, the cost of shipping grain half way round the world is a different story.


Africa used to be self sufficient in food, so, what went wrong? It looks like the Globalists goofed again! The trouble is, when these elitist geniuses screw up; innocent people suffer and die.

It seems that since the cold war ended; the Globalist media always needs to have a "The sky is falling " type of crisis that the government can appear to be fixing.

But unlike Y2K, bird flu, and global warming; this problem probably could use some fixing.

There is actually a simple connection between the CO2 gang that conveniently disappeared about a year ago and the severe food shortages that we are seeing today. The food shortages are largely due to the use of a lot of corn and other grains for ethanol. This idea was concocted mainly to please the Global Warming lobby groups lead by Gore and Suzuki.

If either of these clowns can be cornered into a meaningful symposium with real scientists with the opposing point of view; then they will have two challenges.

• First they must prove that their theory has any merit at all; which it does not. This leads to the second problem which is :
• What are they going to do about the starving and dying people who are the innocent victims of their bad advice.

They have good reason to disappear. They are just getting in deeper and deeper. "

I know! Smart hey?

God Bless Rich People... Yes, average US citizen, this really does exclude you.

I really, really cannot stand this woman.

THIS is the representation the US population wants?

THIS is the person so many women want to vote for simply because her anatomy defines her as female (questionable at best)?

How Mrs. Clinton lies and Obscures Truth

I just want to make two brief comments here.

About a month ago, Steven Harper's Chief of Staff, Ian Brodie is alleged to have made an off record, off camera comment about a call the PMO had received from the CLINTON campaign office.

It seems, as a campaign plank, Clinton has been making comments about how she'd alter the existing NAFTA agreement between Canada and the US.

However, the call from HER campaign office related the comments amounted to nothing more than politiking and were essentially baseless in reality. This issue was covered in MacLean's Magazine in early March and has since grown to epic proportions.

What rankles the hell out of me is this:

• Firstly, the call originated from Clinton campaign office. That is an established fact. Period.
• Secondly, the Clinton campaign has lately blamed that call on the Obama campaign and has recently gone to great lengths to use their own duplicitous, liar politics against Obama. It is disgusting.
• Finally and critically, the media, in particular CBC is complicit in this lie.

I personally know Brodie. In my opinion, there's no way he'd make comments that frustrate politics in another country unless he has become a very different person since he left his teaching posts.

The other issue is Mrs. Clinton's constant haranguing of Obama over his long relationship with "Reverend" White. Obama has distanced himself from this man and is very likely about to do that again and with prejudice, due to the ridiculous press conference Rv. White gave yesterday at the National Press Gallery.

Mrs. Clinton has been exposed time and time again as a liar and this situation will give her yet more opportunities to make up a life she does not lead. Here's why: during her husband's Lewinsky phase, or when it was forcibly ended by his being caught, the CLINTON spiritual advisor was none other than the Rv. White. Yes. that's right. In the White house.

Why anyone in the US is considering casting anything other than a stone at this woman is beyond me.

I hate Telus TOO!

Man, I am not alone in my extensive dislike for this company's customer 'service' practices. Whilst on hold or trying to make myself understood to SEVEN agents today, I receieved three "I hate Telus" websites from someone I was on Messenger with...

Telus Sucks Info
Rant Vancouver
Follow Steph

I know there are more of those sites out there and I KNOW there are way more people who think Telus's 'service' is so poor that it should win an award.

So, as I'm not afeared of anything or anyone, I sent the following email to the president of Telus and to another guy who has something to do with human resources, which I'm sure he administrates from the golf course somewhere....
"...
I wanted to let you know directly about my experience with Telus customer service today and in the six preceding months. The short form is that there should be an award for such appallingness….

Since Telus merged its two services, I have been unable to log in and administrate my account on line. My internet works perfectly, as does my phone, and I’ve always had access to WebMail via Telus, so none of that was at issue. I could not, however, log in to my services at Telus.com and have not been able to since whenever Telus merged services. I made my first call to Telus some six months ago.

You will note that I said six MONTHS. Yes.

I have tried on several occasions to call Telus for help. The usual scenario is that I’m passed about from department to department only to be cut off somewhere during the transfers. Massively frustrating. It seems that an ability to transfer a call without disconnecting the caller should be a baseline ability for a job in customer service but apparently that is not the case with Telus. Strange that a telephone company does not have this requirement of it’s employees.

Being cut off after having been on hold for ages and not having got any resolution led me to essentially giving up and resorting to trying again another time. One ‘customer service agent’ gave me the helpful advice that I would have to go in to the Telus (mobility!) kiosk in the mall nearest me to have my problem resolved. Hilarious.

Today, I called the number listed on the Telus site. I reached a young man whose first language is not English, which is not a problem in itself as I have a very mixed family and am quite comfortable with various accents; however, he could not understand ME. In order to get to him, I had to navigate the levels of your ‘helpful’ electronic system, which asked me my phone number in order to get me to the right department. When I reached said “right” department, the young man in question asked me again for my phone number, which I gave to him – FOUR TIMES; he could not understand me! I’m sure if you check the recording of this call, you will ascertain that I was very clear in my delivery but I finally had to slow down to one digit per second speed.

I explained to the fellow that everything on my end was working just fine but that I could not log in to my account to administrate it and that I wanted to change a password and add an alias. His next question was “so your internet is not working?” I explained again – having to stop him each time he interrupted me – that everything was working except that I could not log in and I gave him the corresponding error code. I presumed, wrongly it turns out, he would be able to look up said code and find a solution. Nope. He didn’t know where to look so passed me on.

He transferred me to a second person, but did not advise that person of why I was calling. The second person asked me the same questions again and then transferred me to a third who asked again for the information. He passed me on to a fourth, who passed me to a fifth, who passed me on to a sixth. That person said that I had to call a SEVENTH and that they couldn’t put me through because they didn’t have the means to transfer my call. WHAT? Time elapsed? 50 minutes….

I told each person I spoke to NOT to put me on hold, because if they did and I were disconnected, I would in their offices in 20 minutes, which is how long it takes me to drive to Telus’s office in my city.

The seventh call I made was back to the original number! By that time, I had either been explaining my problem again and again and giving my phone number over and over or I had been on hold. Total time on hold today? 35+ minutes. UNacceptable.

I finally reached Greg ... who was able to fix my problem with little disruption – except that Telus’s own servers are so slow today that neither of us could advance from one Telus page to the next without at least a TWO minute wait between pages. As it turned out, and as I’d suspected, the fix was relatively simple: it required that my existing account be decoupled and re-established. Pretty simple. Additionally, Greg sent me five very useful websites. Well above the scope of his job, I’m sure.

Greg was able to resolve a problem that it has taken six months and probably 12 previous calls to have resolved. I told him how I’d finally got to him and he observed that not everyone in customer service is as diligent as they could be. Actually, he was more pointed in his comments but in order to protect him, because he actually cares about the job he does, I’ll leave off with that. Suffice to say that he is very right.

If only one in seven Telus employees actually cares to find a solution to customer problems, you have a serious issue at Telus. I might add that the myriad “I hate Telus sites” that can be found on the internet should be a huge wakeup call to your organisation. Those customer satisfaction surveys you spend money on can be done away with, as there is an answer to every “how are we doing?” question at those websites.

Greg, on the other hand, deserves serious recognition and a huge raise. He is a key player at Telus, simply for his attitude; he derives personal satisfaction and has some personal honour from making things right.

I bill out at $65 an hour in my business. I am a writer and have recently worked for two years as a corporate trainer. My area of speciality? Customer Service. Suffice to say that as much as I am very glad to have regained access to my account on line, I’m quite certain that Telus is not about to reimburse me for the time it took today to make that happen – which amounts to about $98 not including GST… two months, approximately, of Telus service fees… relating to today’s merry-go-round - nor, I’m sure, will Telus be interested in the time I’ve spend in the last six months trying to resolve this issue.

I take it there are many clients calling in and receiving very poor service, if those websites are any indication, but I also take it that the cost to Telus of this poor service is not enough to inspire a change.

So, Mr. President, how’re your Telus services working today?
..."

A Complicated Kindness

I've had a cold for two days - one bad enough to keep me mostly in bed and bored. As I've finished reading both The God Delusion and God is Not Great (how religion poisons everything), I picked up my copy of A Complicated Kindness.... in the end, I didn't put it down - it fell out of my hands a couple times because I fell asleep, but I didn't stop reading on purpose....

Anyone who's grown up in the creepy, shifty reality of a religious home or community and who's either come out the other side or is still struggling for breath now, will be instantly sucked into this book. It's about us. The kids (I think that's actually spelled "victims") of the fantasy they call a loving god....

The worst thing is those who never learn to breathe and who, as elderly people finally realise how stifling and crazy the whole thing was but know it's too late to do anything about it, so they cling to it like a rickety, waterlogged, falling apart raft because they know, either way, they've already drowned.

Burn scars are thick and hard and immovable and they never heal. One learns to cope and to move in ways that don't cause those scars to stretch and tear - or to suck up the pain when they do - but they're always there. That's what escaping a religious community leaves a person with. Burn scars.

They tell us we're going to burn for eternity but they don't tell us that, if we escape, the burning stops and we're left with deep scars that either severely restrict us and how we are in the real world or paralyse us.

So anyway, this is what I wrote... about a place where religion didn't intrude or at least not enough to touch me.

"Funny about that old house. I remember it spotless too. Austere in a way but still warm and somewhere I really wanted to be. Different after my gramp was gone though. I loved how it smelled - it still smells that way, underneath the other smells there now. Gram always had a cloth in her hand, never to let the smallest crumb escape.

When one sees that house from across the yard, the cracks and broken bits don't show. You know when you meet an old friend you haven't seen for a while? They look exactly the same from 15 feet away but up close you can see time stamped on them.

The parlour looks like someone left in the middle of moving. To get to it, one must step carefully over the dry, curled-up-around-the-edges, seaweed-coloured dining room floor, which is obviously not safe. I suppose one wouldn’t fall too far, if it gave in, given it's probably only a foot or so above the ground. It looks as though it might suck you down but it's just joking in that creepy-old-uncle kind of way.

Gram's bedroom looks like she made her bed and then went out for a bit. There are clothes on the counterpane and hanging on her door; there are creams and such and her handbag on a old white table beside, but then, at the foot of the bed there is a box of books on the floor - her guest books - faces up, daring the rotting ceiling to fall in on the whole scene.

Time stops in that house - or goes backward or something.

It completely terrifies me that things have changed as much as they have and that they will so much more in the years to come. Who are all these strangers moving up the mountain and why are they there?

I think often about moving down there, as if then things would cease to change and it would be 1968 again, and nothing adults do would make sense but it wouldn't matter and maybe I could accidentally step on a different butterfly this time - one with smaller wings and who's departure would not cause such chaos - and then it would always be summer that smells like hay and tastes like peas eaten sitting in the field and feels like frozen ocean on hot day and where dads never leave and moms never yell and there are always fresh doughnuts in the kitchen and apples in the cellar and crickets to sing us to delicious humid sleep.

This is Spring in Alberta?

his is what is currently passing for Spring in our city!

Nice hey?

It's warm, despite what it looks like.

Wow, nice makin' up the rules!

Just a quick link to one of my favourite writers, Mark Morford, who is simply brilliant.

Sin 2.0

If you like this column, stick a live bookmark into your Links bar. Mark posts weekly.