I’ve been back at school for two days, and I already have two assignments!

Fine by me. Tonight, I am going to do one of them, plus program all the assignments I can find on Moodle into my student calendar program.

Of course, that comes with inane complications. In order to download stuff to my new-to-me smartphone, I need to connect the app Google Play to my main Google account. Which would not be a problem… if I hadn’t forgotten my Google password.

My web browser knows it… but I don’t. And apparently, I did not see fit to add said password to the file where I keep such things. SO i had to go in and change the password… which of course, requires you to verify your password.

Good thing the browser knows it!

Had this afternoon off (yay!), so I did some errands that needed doing. Did some banking, picked up more insulin from my pharmacy, had a nice lunch at the White Spot in Richmond Centre… and tried to get my smartphone activated so it could live up to the “phone” half of its name. ^[1]

But there’s a snag, and it’s a big one. Turns out Telus’ cheapest cell phone plan is $35/month. Thirty five bucks! No way can I afford that. I was thinking maybe twenty, maximum. So there is no way I am going to sign up for Telus cell phone service, and it is currently a Telus phone.

And that means I am going to have to get someone (probably William) to “jailbreak” the smartphone, or as the cool kids are saying these days, to “root” it. That’s a fancy way of saying that I need someone to revert the thing to its virginal state, i.e., not programmed for any particular cell phone provider.

Then I can shop around for someone who will give me what I need at a price I can afford. It’s called capitalism, baby!

I appreciate that the salesman sized me up and decided that he should talk about the minimum price before we went any further. I suppose I could be offended that he assumed I was poor, but seeing as he was right, I find it hard to take umbrage.

Besides, you can’t get a decent price for umbrage any more, anyway. Not in this economy.

I think I have mentioned this before in this space, but I think the economy, or rather The Economy, is today’s modern secular capitalist religion. Entire nations make massive changes to how they do things because The Economy’s official priest class, namely economists, say that it must be done in order to appease The Economy. People lose their jobs and have their entire lives uprooted because the priests say this is what The Economy commands. We are told daily to lower our expectations because we should just be glad we even have jobs when The Economy is so angry with us.

The fact that these lowered expectations serve the interests of the anti-capitalist plutocratic overlords who never liked freedom in the first place is, I am sure, just a happy coincidence.

Imagine what would happen if society simply stopped believing in The Economy, or rather, in economists. It wouldn’t be hard to do. Economics is 99 percent bullshit anyhow, and has a lot more to do with professors getting tenure and lending plausibility to the overlord’s rapacious usury than anything resembling real results. No matter what you believe, you can find an economist who agrees with you and who can provide excellent ideological cover for your poorly thought out beliefs.

“You think I am wrong? Well this economist says I am right, and has a lot of very impressive jargon and intimidating charts to back up my beliefs. So unless you are prepared to argue with my economist on his home ground, you can’t prove I’m not right!”

These are the people who really pull the strings. They show up on the doorstep of leaders and use their powers of obfuscation and dissembly to undermine the leader’s confidence and convince the leaders that only by doing what The Economy wants (as interpreted, of course, by economists) can prosperity be insured.

This is the real way democracy is subverted and bypassed in the modern era. The economist class counts on most people’s unwillingness or inability to try to understand complex math-based systems to twist the arm of governments, basically saying “You have to either do what I tell you to do, or learn to understand all this complicated stuff yourself!”.

What the world needs, then, are more politicians who are willing to treat these people like the snake-oil salesmen they are and show them the door. Or at the very least, pit them against each other. Pick the economist(s) who agree with what you were going to do anyway, and when these anti-democratic servants of the plutocracy show up, refer them to your pet economist, and leave them to argue it out.

“Well, this is clearly too complicated for me to understand, so I will just do what seems right to me until you two can reach an agreement, okay?”

Then you can go about doing what is actually right, and make the numbers serve your agenda instead of ceding sovereignty to charlatans with spreadsheets. I am someone who does understand complex systems, and I can tell you that you (or someone bright working for you) can work those numbers to make shit do what you want it to do.

Not by lying or stealing or committing fraud, either. Just by having the balls and brains to look at something like a budget and apply a more humanistic set of priorities to it. Look for money being wasted on bullshit that doesn’t serve the people (or worse, acts directly against their interests), and move it to the things people actually need in order to be happy, relaxed, and productive.

And whaddaya know, the economy suddenly booms!

Because liberalism actually fucking works.

Take that you fucking servants of Mammon!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.