yeah.

i'm groggy.

but i'm ok.

i feel a little bit better, but am still unlikely to be able to do anything besides copy & paste for the next 12-15 hours, if i don't fall asleep (like i did this morning).

definitely a virus....

i just woke up from about 21 hours of straight sleeping, which itself came after a short awake period of about two hours. i've basically been sleeping since about 5:00 monday afternoon. which means i need to eat.

deciding to sit down and clean this up over the next few days worked out fairly well, because i'm so sore right now that it's just about my only option regarding things to do.

i've been noticing a sort of stretching issue for a while, now. i guess i spend a lot of time with legs under a desk, or with legs curled up when i'm sleeping (i can't help it, i go full fetal over night no matter how i fall asleep), and i walk a lot on top of it, so slightly sore legs are not a strange thing for me. when you're sore, you should stretch....

what i've been noticing stretching for the last little bit (specifically the one where you push your legs out from your body while lying flat) is that there's a point where it almost seems like my limbs are pulling out of their sockets. it's only ever happened previously with one leg at a time, but it's this mix of pain and numbness that's sort of hard to describe in any other way than it feeling like the leg is about to pop right out...

i've ultimately concluded that, despite the displeasure, this is probably good for me - because it tends to work. however, i need to, once again, point out the ms-ness of such a circumstance. it's part of a number of things pushing that way, but, i mean, there's not much to do about it..

before i went to sleep yesterday evening, i got a little stretch in and it hit me in both legs for the first time, which actually collapsed me off the bed and down on to the floor (i'm ok, obviously). but did it ever hurt. if you were here, you would have seen me collapsed on my thighs and sort of gasping for air.

given that i woke up with a cough, i'm now not really sure if the reason i'm sore is due to sickness or due to falling the wrong way. but i *am* sure that i'm not likely to move far from this spot for two or three days.

which should be enough to get this cleaned up. unless i can't stay awake...

it's a kind of a complex point.

i think she's missing it. the idea is that all that hegemony stuff is more effective if people are willing participants. i know i'm putting some words in there, but it's really the whole point; this sort of "peace research" is not about reversing the hegemony, it's about institutionalizing it.

so, are the actors using ideas about history and religion and other things to create chaos in the region? yes. to an extent. i think the american military has demonstrated it's ignorance about things a few times. for the most part, though, i think these things are intentional or at least made intentional when they're pointed out; the bush administration may not have foreseen the sectarian fallout, but the military presence in the region has sure done everything it can to use it as a divide and conquer technique. so, it seems naive to suggest that they don't know any better when they're clearly going out of their way to cause all kinds of mayhem.

but i think that's missing the actual point that he's making - what they don't realize is how much more successfully integrated these regions would be if less violent tactics were used to subdue them. and, to a major extent i think he's basically right. there has to be significant wealth redistribution in this region.

regardless of the back door politics that may or may not have gone into enacting and dismantling glass-steagall, the reason it was effective has less to do with trying to reduce speculation and more to do with putting rules on what can be used to speculate with. glass-steagall doesn't abolish the kind of wild financial behaviour that leads to these brutal crashes, it just protects certain types of savings from being gambled on.

the reason this is important is that the bailout is then only possibly used the way it's meant to be. bailouts were a type of socialism when they were brought in. if a bank is going to go under, the state steps in as a "lender of last resort" and keeps the bank afloat. but, why would the state do that? it shouldn't be to protect investors. not even the most ridiculous state capitalist would argue this is justified. it's to protect citizens that have their savings in the bank. this is the entire ethical and legal basis of bailout legislation, and it's not functional when the banking isn't separate.

now, if you separate the two types of banking, you can just go ahead and let the gamblers ruin themselves. the size of the institution is no longer relevant; the state has no obligation or mandate to protect investors.

this is very poorly understood by the general public - both activists and non-activists. glass-steagal is not a way to fix the banking system, but it is a way to stop bankers from gambling your savings off. i don't feel the interview helped to clarify the point.

i think a big part of the confusion is that people can't contemplate the idea that if you have money in a bank, and the bank goes under, that money no longer exists. banks are just viewed as these magical machines that produce money from the ether, relative to the totals we have in them. our totals are absolute. they cannot be modified.

but this is total ignorance.

i think the necessary educational component here needs to be in what actually happens to your money when you put it in a bank and why this is not a safe practice if bailout legislation is successfully reversed. that naturally leads into an explanation of why the continuing existence of bailout legislation is so hugely important to working people, and an explanation of the things that the banks are doing to abuse that social safety net.

so, it seems like the production of hair is something your body does to help remove harmful cholesterol. and i'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with modifying that excretion system, such as via electrolysis. testosterone is produced from cholesterol...

it's pretty wacky, looking into this sebaceous gland. it's constantly producing clones that it then smashes in order to expel the cell contents, which get converted into hair. that's almost how a virus works. now, supposedly the cholesterol is good for your skin, and that's fine. but, your body seems to see the need to expel it. generally, when your body expels liquid it's to get rid of something it doesn't want.

if i go in there and smash up all the glands, i'm going to end up with a build up of that cholesterol somewhere else. and, if you want research money to do a salacious research report on, i think it would be interesting to try and measure a relationship between heart disease and hair removal.

untitled (vst mix)

this takes the midi file as it was created in 2002 and updates the playback to utilize modern vst synthesizers and guitar modellers. render finalized on dec 26, 2014. 

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-vst-mix

the reality is that canada benefits from warming in just about every way - longer growing seasons, better exploitation of resources and a more enjoyable climate. to any body governing canada, this is not a crisis but an opportunity. and i think that this fundamental calculus needs to be understood in approaching ways to deal with canada. canada will never respond to this as a crisis situation - because it is not a crisis situation to canada. it is just about the best environmental conditions that are even possible for canada. it is optimal.

but, see, that screws the rest of the planet over. so, as a canadian, i'm torn between recognizing what is good for my area of the planet and recognizing what is good for the planet in general. and, that's difficult because it means that this region is going to have to make sacrifices for the well being of other regions. which doesn't tend to happen. this region is actually notorious for that.

and, it's particularly problematic because we're actually even in control of the factors increasing the warming. it's not just us, it's russia as well. but we're a dominant factor due to our extraction techniques, and our permafrost.

the reality is that putting the frozen person in charge of the thermostat is going to lead to higher temperatures. that is a fundamental calculation that has to be recognized about how future canadian governments are going to react to this concern.

if we get a liberal government in, they may increase foreign aid to areas undergoing desertification out of a sense of legitimate guilt. canadian liberalism is really the last remaining branch of the original british liberal tradition, and by far it's most complete extrapolation of thought in the canadian constitution and charter of rights and freedoms. i think it's reasonable to project into the future this legitimate feeling for the necessity of reparation, and to have that feeling shared by a broad sense of the population. canadian liberalism can still produce this sense of legal fairness - i'd argue probably uniquely in the british tradition.

but none of that will stop canada from increasing emissions, it will just a set a self-imposed price on it's behaviour.

another strain that's going to develop is that canada is going to see itself increasingly isolated with russia. now, the current government is behaving rather stupidly in regards to this, so any kind of natural aligning is going to be stunted until they're removed from power. but, it's increasingly inevitable that we're going to see closer co-operation between canada and russia as their policies align internationally, if not domestically.

the reality is that the basis for canada as a non-aligned state is already well established from the trudeau and chretien years. the liberal party in the second half of the twentieth century didn't want nato to define it's international relations and often acted as a semi-neutral go between for american interests, while resisting nato operations in favour of united nations operations. it wanted an independent foreign policy, and had one up until the current prime minister took over. if a liberal government is able to re-establish an independent foreign policy, that kind of relationship might develop between canada, russia and the united states - the latter of two which are on the path to direct conflict. that kind of third power actually has a very important role to play right now and canada is kind of uniquely situated, between them in multiple ways, to play it.

given the american psyche, and we've seen this repeatedly in american history, it's more likely that americans will get up and leave the regions they've damaged than stay and try to fix it. and, the direction that californians and texans and others are going to move towards is north. the question is how far north.

the idea that canada has any real say in the matter is pretty tenuous. we're utterly dependent on the americans for security, and if they decide to move a few units into montreal or toronto we're not really going to have much to say about it. there have been concrete plans, even, to do this - some as a contingency plan for world war two in case the british fell and some as recently as the succession referendum in quebec, which would have ended with clinton declaring montreal the capital of the new state of quebec.

so, is the reality that canada has similar security issues to a country like poland? i think this discussion immediately requires an acknowledgement of the difference of scale. canada is lightly armed, but very large and there's a dramatically different (shorter) history there, despite much of it being unfriendly. yet, it's the same basic dynamic, where canada could conceivably be in need to seek protection from a force which has no future historical role but to dominate it. there's no need to work out the hypocrisy, because there's no need for consistency.

with russia, further, the situation is far less ominous - we really have nothing but commercial relations to look forward to, as russia couldn't possibly pose anything but a pyrrhic threat to canada, no matter how hard it tried to.

i think that sets up some historically strange dynamics that are going to need some foresight to navigate around.

one could even say that russia has met it's match with canada, in terms of natural defence barriers. i mean, they could maybe pull it off. for a week. then, they've doubled their size and are open to immediate dismantling. from all directions. it'd be a race with china for central asia.

which opens the country up as equals, which is my point. cross-polar trade could be the dominant economic relationship in canada within a few decades.

the thing about the kennedy assassination is that it remains unresolved. whether the resolution ultimately ends in filling in details to the official story or in a different story altogether remains an open question, but what is clear is that the story is incomplete. so, theories, in this context, are valid hypotheses to be checked - even if they seem ridiculous.

i tend to lean towards lbj as the most likely suspect. but there were of course a dozen other people with motives and ability. in the end, the story may never be told.

you have to wonder, though, if, at the root of it, it wasn't just some high tory reaction to the irishness of the whole situation. i mean, you have to imagine that these conversations happened in london.

"history has turned upside down, i tell you. there's an irishman in charge of the empire."

british heads of state have been killed for similar crimes of ethnicity in the past. and, really it's not clear that the mindset of the british lords is altogether much different today, when it comes to certain things, than it was a thousand years ago.

given the conspiratorial complexity of certain theories, i just sort of like the simplistic stupidity of this one.

this is a softer argument that i think i ought to try first and foremost, and continue moving back to...

the fact is that i went in to see the doctor in the first place because i wanted to discuss factors that were disabling me from finding employment. i went through a long process from that point, but the essential premise has remained in stasis. i remain in need of that discussion about factors that are disabling me from finding employment. that needs to be a basic step forwards, and it's unlikely to resolve itself in a period of three months. so, if you're not going to diagnose me on the spot then you need to put the things in motion to have me have that discussion relatively quickly, so i can get another year or two to either be diagnosed more rigorously or to try and carry out any recommendations.

it's funny how you meet these people that think they can conquer any odds. it defies the entire concept of odds to think you can conquer all odds. so, there's an implicit misunderstanding of the concept inherent in this perspective. so, to me, the more interesting question is how such absurdity can arise?

i think there's a simple psychological explanation that essentially renders the concept as relative - despite all arguments to the contrary. it's ultimately just not carefully thought through, of course. but, i think the way it works is basically this - if you've never put yourself up against serious odds, if all of your challenges in life are things that you're more likely to succeed at than fail at, then you might gather the perception that odds aren't important. if you've always been favoured, and you've always won, it's possible to delude yourself into thinking you'll always win. see, that's the odds working, though. kind of comically.

so, you get these situations where people are faced with 100:1 odds and they approach it with the attitude that the situation is inevitably going to unfold in their favour, like every other situation always has. which is the comfort of modern existence, i suppose.

but there are rationalistic explanations for morality, and focusing on supernatural explanations in the form of universals is missing out on an opportunity to study something in detail.

when you're dealing with questions of biology, and the key point to get across is that it is a question of biology, the kinds of laws you see in physics are usually not applicable - because we're experiencing things at the micro level. you zoom out enough, you'll see those laws start to work. but that doesn't mean that what we're observing is universally "true" in some sense. it just means that things begin to demonstrate an order when you view them from a far enough distance of abstraction. which is basically a tautology, and doesn't imply anything of any value.

so, when you're looking at the moral systems of individual cultures this universalizing approach is completely backwards. those universals are just aggregate data. rather, each culture is going to develop an entirely individualized set of moral codes and ethics that apply uniquely to their environments. in other words, it's a question of evolutionary biology.

so, a culture with more scarce or less developed resources might have a tendency towards competition, whereas a culture with more developed resources might have a tendency towards a more social distribution. these things can get crossed when cultural values change slower than the technology does, which is essentially the situation we're in right now. when you look at specific examples of the way that settled people constructed moral systems vs. the way that nomadic peoples did, you see these kinds of differences come out starkly.

i just remember getting into this debate with profs into law or philosophy, and feeling like i was talking to somebody stuck on the other side of an epiphany that should really be old news by now. our morals don't come from a higher being. there's nothing universal about the way they operate. they don't exist in some cloud somewhere; they can't be revealed through mathematics, logic or empirical discovery. rather, they're attempts to ensure our own survival (some failed) that can be understood relatively well when looked at in an evolutionary perspective. nor are they entirely unique to humans in anything but their reflective complexity.

if you really want to entertain the notion, breaking the cycle would necessarily mean erasing yourself entirely from history. there's interesting consequences of that (as history would take a different path without you, however miniscule), but it's not what i was thinking about at first.

what that means is we could never know of anybody that's actually succeeded, because all trace of them would cease to exist.

it follows that all claims of enlightenment through this process are necessarily false.

but, frustratingly, it doesn't eliminate the possibility. it even opens up explanations as to why the event seems so rare - we can only remember the fakes.

it's remarkable how these ideas can reinforce themselves through seeming absurdities.

do dogs understand that they're being used for nefarious purposes?

like a drug sniffing dog for example. do they have enough awareness and empathy to say "yeah, i smell it on this person, but they seem cool so i'm not going to draw attention to it.".

well, we know that dogs are very good at sensing personalities. they seem to react differently depending on your emotional state. so, it's not pure fantasy.

i don't think i'd want to be the one that tests that idea....

you have to wonder if wolves have similar capacities. i mean, they're pack animals. it makes sense that some kind of concept of emotion would develop out of that. but, i would think that contact with humans would be a driving force in evolving that trait. knowing which humans are cool and which humans are assholes is something a semi-wild dog needs to be able to do on a day-to-day basis in order to survive.

you can see something similar in elephants. apparently, they react negatively to people who speak certain languages, because they associate poaching behaviour with those languages. that's something of value to pass on to future generations, even if it's kind of racist.

but what i'm thinking of is pretty sneaky. i think dogs may need at least a few more centuries before they can do sneaky things like that...

i'd love to come across a file of mine deep in the state (i think i'm getting my psychiatric evaluation, just from a distance) somewhere that has this broad stamp of deduction on it, in startling blunt clarity. like, a file marked BONKERS in red stamp. presented as a medical diagnosis...

our evaluation of this suspect is that she is simply bonkers.

....signed off for by a doctor, illegibly, but with credentials typed in boldface. to scream it's legitimacy.

i'm also glad the days are getting longer, again.

i think i'm pretty much used to that hour difference, now. it's from moving from one end of the same time zone to the other end. i'm used to the sun being up by 6:30 pretty much the entire year - and becoming visible not longer after 4:00 during the summer. here, it's quite often not up until well after 7:00. even at the peak of the summer, you're pushing 6:00, which kind of makes it feel like spring the whole year. i made it home in the dark from a compost-drop at 7:45 the other day.

the flip of that is that the sun is still up at 5:30 for pretty much the whole year. which has got me feeling like fall never ended, because i never got the cue of night time at 4:00 on a cloudy day.

i've actually tried switching to central time to recapture the difference, but i just found myself constantly converting in my head. it was just reminding me of it, rather than helping me forget it.

so, i think i'm used to it. but i'd still be nice to get the sun up a bit earlier...

you know, i was going to say something about how people have to go to work in the dark here.

but i guess it's also true that people have to go home in the dark in ottawa. i can remember getting off work in the dark quite frequently.

i think it's kind of better to get off work in the dark, because it just plunges you directly into the night, which is where you want to be when you're working during the day, anyways. but that's just a perception.

i think the more valid reflection is that you're stuck with one way or the other up to a relatively high longitude.

you know, it's true - cats really are always plotting to eat us. like, that cat that's been following me around..

see, i always knew that the cat was really stalking me as a possible prey item, but i was trying to rationalize ways around that obvious deduction, because it's not something you really want to come to terms with. that cat is following me around because it would like to eat me. how pleasant.

i think if it was a really serious concern to me, i'd of course react differently. but it's a cute, black and white furry cat with a bit of a swagger in it's steps. it doesn't really strike me as ominous, even if i know what it's really thinking.

when it comes down to it, though, do i really want to get into a fight with a cat? they seem cute and harmless. but, they're very agile and absolutely capable of catching you by surprise. we have a weak spot - our necks. and, cats are entirely aware of that weak spot. it doesn't take much to take you out through your neck. a smart cat would be able to exploit this.

you think past it, though. it's just a cute cat.

a cute cat that sees you as a possible prey item, if it can just get the right opportunity.

i think these studies that suggest that people that listen to specific types of music are more intelligent because they listen to that music are getting the causality backwards.

first, if you're focusing on a specific genre, you're doing this wrong. if the idea is the abstraction in the music, no specific genre has a monopoly on that. you may get different correlations, depending on personality. debussy is going to appeal to a different type of person than mozart does. and skinny puppy is going to appeal to a different type of person than genesis does. but, it's all abstract music and it should all have basically the same effect, if the factor is the abstraction in the music.

focusing specifically on "classical" music is going to mostly simply produce class differences, which are well understood as having an effect on test scores. it's a situation where x is correlated with y, y is correlated with z and a fallacious conclusion is being drawn that z is therefore caused by y - when it could very well be that x and z are where the causal relationship is occurring.

but the point of this shouldn't be to isolate "intelligent people". "intelligent people" is a pretty broad category, that encompasses humans with a wide variety of tastes. rather, the useful conclusion is something like as follows:

"if you actually legitimately enjoy mainstream pop music, it is probably because you are not of above average intelligence."

but you don't need a study to understand that.

even that's maybe a little unfair, as it's not impossible that you could be into abstract music and still like pop.

maybe something like...

"if you *only* listen to pop music, then chances are high that you're not that bright."

i think the key thing that bugs me about the studies is that they tend to focus so much on mozart. mozart was not the most abstract, creative or interesting writer of his era from any perspective. even people that really like mozart will acknowledge how prodding he could be from time to time. if the studies were based on something a bit more difficult....

i'd expect that if they did a direct comparison between kids that listen to mozart specifically and kids that listen to a spectrum of other "classical" composers, mozart would actually rank near the bottom in terms of test results.

i entirely agree that things are constantly in flux, and the causal model has problems at the micro level. i think the intuitive understanding is that things are happening too quickly for causality to apply. i say intuitive, but that's a tricky thing to understand if you try to break it down, despite it being the intuitive way to kind of understand it.

i think you can try and put some kind of conceptual bounds around it, though. every causal reaction requires a finite amount of time. if there's so much energy in a system that it pushes the cause through faster than a reaction can occur in, then you'd see causality seem like it's not working. you could think of it like a censor failing, by missing a signal because it's too fast - or in some cases like a censor exploding by taking in a signal that zaps it like a laser.

depending on the scale of the subject, the micro might be very perceptible to us. so, the question of how music affects intelligence is micro on this scale - it's reinforcing each other, because it's happening at a time scale that is shorter than a reaction can develop in.

but i think you can still pull out patterns, and the patterns are still meaningful, even if they require some careful analysis.

it's a more complicated matter as to how the russians should deal with it, but, given recent and not so recent history of the cia using ngos as front groups to stir up dissent, it should be acknowledged that when they call these groups "foreign agents", the reality is that they're probably right.

this is my basic argument.

=====================

So, the problem isn’t really whether I’m capable or even willing to find employment, it’s more a question of whether anybody is willing to allow me to work for them. And, the answer is that nobody is, and nobody’s going to.

To be honest, I would prefer not to. I don’t think that’s all that unusual. But, I do recognize that I’m not supposed to have a real choice in this matter. So, if I were to choose, what kind of job would I pick? Well, let’s separate out two kind of jobs – high wage jobs with lots of responsibility, or low wage jobs with little responsibility.

I would actually prefer the low wage job with little responsibility. The reason is that my aspirations and goals in life are not within the workforce, they’re within art and academia. Unfortunately, my art is quite unusual (and hence unmarketable) and my academic opinions are equally unusual. If I were to work a high wage job with a lot of responsibility, I would not have the time or energy to devote to my goals and aspirations and would consequently be very unhappy. So, I believe I would be less unhappy working a low wage job with small amounts of responsibility, as it would give me more time to focus on my goals and aspirations. I can also say that I’ve determined this through experiment.

So, let’s focus on the low wage jobs with low responsibility. Unfortunately, this option is not available to me, for the precise reason that I have a lot of education. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried removing the degree from the resume, I’ve tried adopting colloquial language, and I’m just too transparent – the hiring manager can see quite clearly that I’m introverted and bookish, have an IQ around 150 and am simply not going to fit in to that kind of environment. I don’t have the right profile for this sort of labour. So, while I would prefer this, it’s not something I can actually get. They want young, personable people. I’m simply not that person.

What about the high wage jobs with more responsibility, then? Well, ignoring the fact that I would be unhappy that way, it’s not an option that’s available to me, either, because I don’t have the psychological profile that fits into it. You need to have drive, motivation and a desire to compete. I have none of these things as they apply to private or government sector employment – my aspirations and goals are in art and academia. Worse, I’m not particularly good at integrating into systems of vertical management. Probably the best example to use is what happened when I applied for cra…

They had me write two tests. The first was an iq test, and my grades were very high. 95th percentile. This is consistent with past iq tests I’ve written. The second was a behavioural test, which I’ve failed thrice. What that means is that I’m basically certified by the state as unable to exist properly in a management system. I’m too independent-minded, too willing to take things into my own hands, too unwilling to rely on the hierarchy to make decisions. So, I’m not going to fit in there, either. We can have discussions about this, but my perspective is that the test results are essentially accurate – I’m not good at being told what to do or following what I perceive of as illogical rules for the purposes of protocol or convention. Again, I can’t change this – it’s my nature. A different system would value this, but ours rejects it as anti-social.

So, I’m left without any kind of option. I can’t do the drone work because they don’t want people like me doing it, and I can’t do the higher wage work because I can’t fit in there, either. So, I’m not left with any other option (so long as we accept that starving on the street is not a real option) besides trying to explore the reasons I can’t fit into either environment and trying to construct a disability out of it.

There isn’t a disability underlying my bookish introversion, it’s just my nature. However, I believe that there may be a personality disorder underlying my inability to fit into structured environments. This is what I’m trying to get diagnosed.

So, some examples of past behaviour that fit this pattern….

it's starting to look like where i am is going to just duck under the jetstream most of the winter this year, and may actually see above average temperatures. there might be a lot of rain, but that's less annoying than periodic deep freezes.

the rest of eastern canada doesn't seem like it's going to be so lucky.

i think they may have slightly exaggerated the effect of the vortex, and slightly underexaggerated the effect of the el nino, which positioned the path of the jetstream about 100 km south of where it seems to be settling. which takes me from right on top of it to right underneath it, and makes the difference between a winter defined by north winds and a winter defined by moist rains.

as i mentioned before, i think this has to do with them not integrating solar effects into their models. it's a minor thing. but, being positioned where i am, it's a huge difference maker.

forecast temperatures this week are between 2 and 8. no snow on the ground. no snow in the forecast. they're claiming it will get cold in two weeks, but they've been saying that for a few weeks and keep bumping it up. it seems like they misforecasted...

i mean, it could still switch. and it will no doubt get cold once or twice. but i think i'm in a sweet little spot this year...

the bad news is that, if i'm right, the fact that we're at the peak of a very weak solar cycle means winter could get pretty nasty for a few years after this year...

this is a good graph, because it balances the things out at the end.

(the blue is "global warming", the yellow is the sun, the red is the temperature, which is flatlining as the blue and yellow move in opposite directions.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Temp-sunspot-co2.svg

but where we are, what's more important is how the sun affects the factors that affect the jetstream. there seems to be research that suggests that these dips in the jetstream are correlated with solar activity, which is something very localized (temperature wise) to eastern north america - and tends to create warmer temperatures in the western part of the continent. so, you're not looking at a decrease in global temperature caused by the sun's decrease in power so much as you're looking at the global spread of energy modified in a way that makes us, specifically, colder - and other places warmer.

so, what that means is that even if carbon dioxide keeps skyrocketing, if the sun doesn't come back hard we could very well be stuck with all kinds of wind blowing south from the arctic making us very cold - while africa and india fry.

i've blocked them all, but i don't think it's an exaggeration to state that the reddit army is killing youtube.

you can't get a word in past them. they upvote each other. and they're complete fucking idiots. it's very unfortunate.

i don't know why they're doing this, but it would be great if they'd just stop.

i don't want to really argue with any of the points in the video, i just want to kind of point out that being an academic in the neo-liberal era is going to result in picking up some biases, no matter how much one may align against them, and point out a few things that, by being omitted, presented the kind of status quo idea of markets being drivers of peace.

1) the us military (and i'm going to include intelligence agencies in that category, for the purposes of this comment) acts as an enforcement arm on the "liberalization" policies pushed by the imf and similar organizations. that is, those states that don't want to do what they're told are subject to intervention, destabilization and all manners of coups, who will impose violent policies on the population. it's consequently rather inaccurate to suggest or imply that this is a peaceful or stabilizing process. even canada has arguably seen some soft coups over the last several decades (trudeau, chretien).

2) these policies mostly apply to small states, and it's of course a process of extraction. large states, like russia, cannot be controlled quite like this. and, so you don't get this peaceful market order of capitalists colluding for profit; rather, you get the old nineteenth century model of empires competing for resources. and, we saw this all through the cold war and still see it with american policy against russia and china.

now, i understand it's hard to stand in front of a classroom and speak like this in 2014. but, that's a reflection of academia's willingness to tow the line, rather than of reality.

deathtokoalas
the title of john maus' new thesis has been leaked:

"On Projecting Pseudo-Intellectuality Through Performing Bad Retro for Stoned Teenagers."

RedPill Swallowed
Jealous.

deathtokoalas
naw. even in my late 90s synth-pop phase, i never had any aspirations towards this. and while my background is in math, and math is kind of like philosophy, my epistemology has always been empirically driven. i'm just dismissive.

RedPill Swallowed
I'm not even going to pretend that I don't need to google some of those words, lol....I'll just agree.  Have a nice day. :)

deathtokoalas
it's not that rough. if you ignore silly people like kant, like you should, and like maus doesn't, mathematics and philosophy share an approach to understanding knowledge, which is based in deducing things from assumptions with logic. this is somewhat - albeit not entirely - contradictory to a scientific worldview, which attempts to understand knowledge through experiment.

it gets confusing when you acknowledge that there are quasi-empirical branches of mathematics (like constructivism). but that can kind of be glossed over for the purposes of getting to my point.

....which is that i don't really have time for speculative branches of philosophy. well, i guess it's fun to read sometimes. and you have to define questions before you can test them. but there's not much room for jealousy, there, as a result of that.

accidentalprotégé
I don't agree with everything that comes out of John Maus' mouth but what makes his music "Bad Retro?" As someone who dislikes socialized medicine I still think Rights For Gays is a banger.

deathtokoalas
i'm a fan of the period he's drawing on, but i just don't hear anything except watered down emulation.

Me Ear
Do ya get out much? Me neither. I'm a fat, damaged idiot tho. And your aspirations to truth are fine if it gets you thru shit. Really. I'm not being sarcastic. Even your aspirations to a superiority over others are harmless here in youtube comment sections. Bluntly tho, you don't know shit. Humanity is a tribe of monkeys that fell out of a tree one unfortunate day. And there's good folks and cunts. That's it. But what do I know? lol. Best wishes.

deathtokoalas
yeah. i'm post-godel. i get that. that doesn't have much to do with what i was saying, though. if anything, it's an argument in favour of empiricism.

Me Ear
Well, thanks for replying. 1 or 2 folks were nasty to you on here. I can be nasty too, very. Godel? Not heard of him, if it's a dude. It's in humans to value truth, yes. But there isn't any. And what you believe? It's not important. I'm exaggerating somewhat, yes.

Religion, philosophy, science, can have a place, yes. But anyway, one guy, or girl, sees a cat with 3 legs, kicks it across the road. Another guy or girl feeds it. All the rest is theory, in my view. And, no, I wouldn't kick the cat, on my worst possible day.

deathtokoalas
godel was an early 20th century mathematician that produced a series of important proofs. he's been described as the most important logician since aristotle. and, in some sense he defined a type of thinking that is necessarily post-aristotlian.

i have to oversimplify dramatically. but, he demonstrated that we have a choice between completeness and consistency. what that means is that there are necessarily true statements that can never be proven true - and that we can in fact prove can never be proven, despite being true.

that has a lot of implications to the axiom-deduction approach to epistemology. it throws kant out the window, to begin with. his whole concept of synthetic a priori knowledge being superior is rendered ridiculous.

again: i don't really see any point where you're disagreeing with me. you're just displaying that you didn't really understand what i typed.

Me Ear
I drink, listen to music and type shit for something to do, which I don't usually remember because I'm mentally disordered, damaged and drunk.

A serious (not sarcastic) question - why post clever stuff on youtube? And, again seriously,  where can doing so lead to?

(There's clever folks on youtube, yes, but most of them seem to end up wanting to die fairly soon after they've posted on the toob amongst folk like me, don't they?) 

deathtokoalas
see, here's the thing: maybe people reading my ranting might click on my name and check out my channel, and then go to my bandcamp site. the more places i leave links, the higher the possibility.

it's a benevolent type of spam/marketing, in the sense that people get something out of it. and, i don't get deleted or marked as spam, either.

Me Ear
I'll look at your channel then. I used to rant til I got a troll. Who had a channel. lol. I looked at it eventually, worst music ever. lol again. You know what tho? Your enemy is your helper too. I imagine you're smart enough to have heard of the concept. Except young kids are killing themselves coz of trolls now.. There was a case of somebody in this country who trolled somebody on 6000 websites. Those 2 should've got married, they had very similar interests.lol. Peace. xxx

if you were a dog, you'd realize that pineapples have a very strong piney odour that could be easily mistaken for another dog. see, it's a weird dog though: spiky hair, stationary. and on the counter. da fuck?

dogs operate almost entirely on smell, and they can pick up things with their noses that you can only contemplate in the abstract. it's not reacting to the way it looks...

but, put your face up against a fresh, unpeeled pineapple the next time you get a chance. you'll only get a fraction of what a dog will get. but it's enough to demonstrate the point. it has a very territorial smell.

i mean, if you have a better idea i'd like to hear it, but just keep in mind that it's going to be smell-related rather than sight-related. i think we all know this, but i think we easily forget it - because we're so vision-centric, ourselves.

you'll notice that when she puts the pineapple down, the dog smells it from a distance and instantly reacts. that's what's going on...

now, it doesn't have to think it's a dog, exactly, to get that kind of confused reaction. i'm sure the chemical reaction happening in the dog's brain is fairly specific in it's "that's a dog" reaction. i don't know if the glandy smells coming off a pineapple are chemically close enough to trick the dog's brain in that respect (and if it's just a few bonds off, that confusion is entirely plausible - it's about the geometry of the molecules sticking together). but, given that pineapples have such a territorial almost urine-like smell, i'm fairly convinced that it's interpreting it as some kind of living thing, and is just unaware as to how it should react.

put another way, i think the idea that this is a territorial reaction is correct. that pineapple's territorial smell is invading it's turf.

stripping that provision out of the bill would not protect taxpayers. rather, they'd lose their savings when the banks collapse again. the problem is much deeper than opposing bailouts, which are unfortunately required to protect taxpayers against irresponsible banks.

fighting the symptom, not the problem. typical democrat...

deathtokoalas
simply breaking them up isn't much of an answer, either. it didn't work then, and it's not going to work now.

there needs to be stronger regulations on what banks are allowed to do, not an increase in the number of ceos in the cartel.

to put it another way, what warren is saying is that the solution to unregulated capitalism is the enforcement of liberal market theory. and this is somehow being understood as "left wing"?

from a class war perspective, this is rather intriguing.

so, years ago people started drawing connections between violent behaviour and violent messaging. so, studies were done and the conclusions come to were largely that the violence in these kinds of games act as an outlet for rage at a system that treats us as worthless commodities. that is, the evidence seems to suggest that video games do more to prevent violence than they do to create it, thereby creating a pliable and subservient population that takes out it's anguish on a screen rather than on the system that produced the anguish. it's kind of marxist, really. video games are a sort of opiate of the masses...

now, if you extrapolate that to something like this, you can construct a kind of sedative out of it.

so, are you done clinging to the one aspect of your humanity that you have left? good. get back to fucking work...

ok, here's the thing: elephants are remarkably intelligent. they've recently been classed with apes and dolphins, and it's becoming clearer and clearer that they really belong in a class of their own. they are the animal which surpasses all others in wit and mind. there's some evidence that they're able to understand syntax. that's extremely rare. really, we can only be sure that humans can do that.

what does that mean? well, you can teach a dog to fetch a stick, and you can teach a dog to fetch a beer. but the dog doesn't understand that fetch is a verb. it takes the two commands as independent things. so, you'll need to teach it to fetch a third object as a new task. it seems to be that elephants can be taught what the idea of fetch means, then apply it independently to different objects without being explicitly taught. that's a remarkable level of cognitive advancement.

so, all these comments that are like "look. even a dumb elephant can figure this out." are really missing the point. smart ass comments about bratty kids aside, the reality is that full grown elephants are as intelligent as toddlers.

so, entanglement....which i was thinking about as i was walking back from the store....

something's communicating. it's impossible to deny this. figuring this out means figuring out what's communicating and how. that's the problem. i think a big part of the confusion is not being able to define the problem properly.

...which is because our current theories state that communication is impossible. but, there's no way around this. despite the need to uphold existing dogma in the field, i have to think pretty much everybody into this understands this.

if that means reevaluating things we're pretty sure are accurate, that's a necessity. because the problem is figuring out what's communicating and how.

i think one of the things that needs to be reevaluated is the idea of light as a speed limit. there's not really any good reason for this. now, if things can move faster than light, it opens up the possibility that something is communicating at superluminal speeds. that doesn't solve the problem, but it puts some structure around it. meaning, you're looking for some kind of tachyon.

and, if you acknowledge that light has a mass, then all you really need to do is find something with less mass than light to find an object that could possibly qualify as a tachyon. there's not really any good reason to think that light doesn't have mass, either.

but, i think the key thing that i can contribute from where i am is properly defining the problem. something is communicating. the problem is figuring out what is communicating and how. in the end, a proper theory needs to explain this, not deny it.

one of the things i want to focus on when i shift is trying to find assumptions that are embedded in science, figure out their source and expose them for merely being assumptions. once they've been disarmed, they can be questioned. my understanding is that the idea of light as massless is essentially a religious statement. there's a wide range of stuff in biology i want to focus on as well - the relation between natural selection and economic liberalism, the relation between creationism and the rejection of hybridization as a driver of evolution, etc. i guess my main thesis is that the separation of science from religion (and they were historically both branches of philosophy so they share a lot in common) is incomplete and that some attention needs to be drawn to this incomplete separation in order to get to the core of some contradictions.

that is to say that religious ignorance remains at the heart of science, but it's not really widely understood that this is the case.

so, i got my extension pretty easily. i didn't even have to ask for it. suggesting somebody's reading this....

hey, it's alright. it's evidence in my favour, right?

so, i have until april, now. camh is on the 12th of january. that gives me plenty of time to work something out in a less dramatic fashion and pushes possible appeals forward until july. that's actually enough time that i might get the discography done, at which point plans begin to shift.

i'm hoping i can get at least two more years on odsp, which should hopefully give me enough time to (1) complete the discography and (2) get a good chunk of the reading i want to do before i go back to school done. if i can get five years, it should transition me just about perfectly into a master's program somewhere. possibly in kitchener or london. there's reasons i moved to windsor, but the local place of higher education is not one of them. i stayed at carleton for a really long time because i was tied to the city and it was really a better option than ottawa for the things i was studying (and also because i liked the campus). but i think that going to a lower ranked school actually stifled me a little in terms of dealing with less than brilliant profs and slightly tedious curricula. if i'm going back to school, i'm going to go to a good one.

the flip side of that is that i really, really like where i'm staying. i wouldn't move unless i was pretty serious about it. and i'm projecting that forwards, but it's hard to predict where my head is going to be in 5 years.

and, if i can get permanent, i can basically just work out my ideas without the necessity of having to deal with the education system at all. i think there's something to be said for being the eccentric oddball that escapes peer review by publishing papers to appspot.

but, one thing at a time: i got my extension. so i can relax for the holidays and start scheming in january.

for fuck's sake, lucas...

you've been pushing the point for a week that deserting should imply the guy shouldn't be "rescued". it's getting annoying. she's been diplomatic in her response, as is her job, but let me break it down for you...

an institution such as the us army cannot allow any deserters to go unpunished for any reason under any circumstance. it must push down the message - loud and clear - that what will happen if you get caught will be so severe that you don't want to even think about it.

the army is not a democratic institution, and it can't be in order to maintain an empire like america's. it must be a ruthless, top down structure that makes dramatic public examples of people that break ranks. and, it must jump through every hoop possible to punish those people in as violent a way as they possibly can be punished.

so, deserting is not a reason to leave him there. deserting is a reason to bring him back, so his peers can see what happens if they get the same ideas in their heads.

i think i got it. or at least i think i'm happy with it. but the undo function isn't really good enough. i want total rewind. maybe that's a use for those glasses google is trying to sell, and nobody seems to want. because, really, what the fuck are they besides a surveillance device?

i'm seriously considering installing a camera on my screen to keep track of what i'm doing, so i can rewind the thing in case i haphazardly change something and forget what i did.

i mean, telling myself doesn't seem to work. and it's not even feasible, when you really think about it.

i bet the cia'd love that, huh?

when you manage to make chris hedges seem like the grounded, rational, less alarmist person in the conversation, you know you're a complete fucking idiot...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7P9P5lke-o

untitled (pretentious mix)

this is the version that i modified from the cakewalk output, but i ended up rejecting it because i added some guitar and synth parts that don't really work well with the track. i do a lot of improvisational noise, and wanted to integrate that aesthetic, but, instead, it just comes off sounding a little pretentious.

it wasn't long before i realized my error, but i hadn't saved a version i could go back to so i was sort out of luck. what i ended up doing was cutting the middle part out of the track when i used it for the reflections ep, then just dropped it from the symphony altogether.

nor can this be effectively reconstructed from the source, due to it having multiple paste overs after the cakewalk mixdown that are impossible to locate in the file. the result is something like a little reverb/delay on the track. it's consequently a unique, discarded mix that must simply be left as is.

dated to sept 10, 2002. uploaded, unmodified, on dec 14, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-pretentious-mix

i don't entirely agree with the ideas in this article, but it makes a very good point - the tar sands are not economically viable when oil is cheap.

i disagree with the idea that they'll keep pumping. if it lasts a while, it very well might shut them down. they'd be losing money. and, that's not why they're doing this.

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/j-l-granatstein-low-saudi-oil-prices-are-just-part-of-a-long-game

uploading already completed mixes of untitled to inri061 & inri070

1) this track was initially written as a folk punk song, but i jumped to the scorewriter with it almost immediately. the expanded guitar demo was written in a scorewriter and then performed, rather than vice versa. it was initially less about explicitly creating a techno song and more about ordering the parts in a way that could be deconstructed more effectively.

the taiko drum part was initially just to keep time; it wasn't supposed to be a part of the song. but, as i built it up i began to realize how interesting it sounded as a techno tune and sort of ran with it.

written over the summer of 2002. this render is from dec 13, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled


2) i programmed this over late july and early august, 2002. render from december 13, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/soundblaster-mix-7


3) when i initially recorded the track in cakewalk (as an experiment with the program) on a windows 98 machine, i ran out of ram after eight tracks and had to go back to my normal wave editor collage-build mixing process to finish it. unfortunately, i didn't really like the edits i made and ended up defaulting to this version for many years. however, it was only saved in mp3...

on aug 11, 2010, i converted the track to 32-bit directly from the mp3 (which i verified in dec, 2014 via phase inversion) and uploaded it to bandcamp, as a part of the never really finished and with now unclear future tetris project ( jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/tetris ). while i don't feel that the sound quality of the track is sufficient to act as a base for a final version, the process of compressing, decompressing and then converting to 32-bit produced something special on the bottom end that i feel is worth keeping for it's own sake.

dated to sept 1, 2002.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-out-of-ram-mix

uploading guitar demos to inri061

1) this song was first demoed as a rabit is wolf song, but the changes i made to it were not well received. this is as far as the track got in that context. recorded july 14, 2002.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/penny-shoeman-initial-demo


2) this is a second guitar demo, expanded to be a little more elaborate in the guitar playing. notating this formed the basis of the electronic version. recorded july 21, 2002.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-expanded-guitar-demo

publishing atom’s / taught to twist the affected so low (inri060)

this is two conceptually linked outtakes from mid 2002 that document an event that i'm going to be vague and obscure about.

written in august, 2002. track one was mildly remixed on dec 12, 2014; two and three were uploaded unmodified. final completion date is dec 12, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitar, effects, bass, drum sampling, drum and other programming, digital wave editing, vocals

released august 31, 2002

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/atoms-taught-to-twist-the-affected-so-low



1) i've been very apprehensive about publishing this, but i want to be complete and it was a long time ago.

the summer of 2002 is pretty messy for me. i was very isolated, going through hormone therapy and on the brink of psychological collapse. so, my memory over those months is quite blurry.

for this reason - and others - i'm going to withhold the back story to this track. part of what i'm doing here is writing a biography, and the purpose of that is obviously for readers at some point in the future. that's inevitably going to lead to me framing certain things in a specific and subjective way. as far as this track and these months are concerned, something happened that i'd rather is just simply forgotten. i'd prefer to leave it at that, and for readers and listeners in the future to simply respect that.

to be blunt, it would be difficult to make much sense out of the situation by interpreting these lyrics, anyway. they in no way reflect anything close to an accurate analysis of the situation. it is better to interpret them as rambling lunacy triggered by a schizophrenic episode than to try and make any actual sense out of them as a reaction to something that happened in real life. i was simply not living in the condition of sanity at the time.

i do want to point out that i'm taking some poetic license in the lyrics - you can't really make literal scientific sense of it, so don't try. i was actually more reflecting on my feeling that this science/math education thing wasn't really getting me where i wanted to get to in life. there's a few layers in there, but it's the last line that's the key one.

this was completed in a messy state over a few days in august, 2002. i mildly remixed it to turn the rest of the track up relative to the vocals on dec 12, 2014.

spinning alone
through an empty shell
a sole electron
moves out of it's orbit

the number is zero
this is the covalence
a bond is impossible
while surrounded by neutrons

yet a sole positron floats
in and out of the sphere
the attraction is strong
but it never comes near

the laws now collapse
as the electron moves out
the positron senses
and runs in fear

electrostatics
multiplicity
inverse attraction
the smaller repelled by the larger

physical laws only mean so much
even an electron seeks a positron's touch
the purpose of living is to lose what you crave
bohr, bohr, bohr, BORE spins alone in his grave

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/atoms


2) the effected solo. i thought it was clever at the time.

this was recorded in one take while i was doing guitar parts for the untitled techno tune. my head was blurry and i needed to just stop and jam. i then took the part (which was isolated from a much longer improvisation) and ran it through a series of effects to create this soundscape. dated to august 25, 2002.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/taught-to-twist-the-affected-so-low


3) i was doing bass parts on the untitled techno tune when i received the wake-up call...

dated to aug 31, 2002.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/wake-up-call

i still don't understand why they don't use soy....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o6Hh6tQj2w

well, i'm not particularly convinced that collusion is not taking place, but i got the refill....

when i got there, he told me it wasn't in yet. so i yelled and screamed for a few minutes, providing the ultimatum to provide me a refund or get on the phone and call around to get it in right away. the owner just coincidentally happened to be in the back, and she took care of it - the refill was there in about twenty minutes. that's how you have to deal with shit like that...

the excuse they gave me was they thought they gave me seven days (but i take them twice daily, so they gave me 3.5). it's a bad excuse, either way, because they told me it would be in by monday....

so, i dunno. all the information to conclude incompetence is there, but it's not really sitting right with me. for the immediate moment, it's sort of irrelevant.

you know, i still think this whole argument is missing the major underlying factor, which is demographics.

put all this stuff about lending and bubbles aside for a moment, and you're left with a boomer generation that was told to invest in housing to fuel their retirement. now, contrast that with stagnant wages since the 1970s. if you have housing rising faster than inflation and wages rising slower than inflation it's eventually going to crash when the boomers go to cash in their investment, and there's nothing that can be really done to stop that. this is the consequence of building a society on spiralling debt: in the end, the investment turns out to be worthless. what's going to burst is the boomers' retirement plans.

it gets a little worse when you consider the fact that they're all going to sell at the same time. they're still a demographic bubble. so, if they all decide to retire at the same time and all put their houses up at the same time they're going to crash the price through over-supply.

now, the banks could react to this by reducing supply, but it creates a headache in itself.

at the end of it, what you're left with is the understanding that the bubble is the collective entitlement of the boomer generation, and that it will disappear along with them - likely in the benefit of their children and grandchildren, who will see prices adjust downwards to their earning potential.

http://business.financialpost.com/2014/04/17/canada-housing-correction-could-trigger-another-recession-bmo-report-says/

even if the banks go full asshole and leave the houses abandoned (and i can't see that happening here), in the end they're going to have to sell for a song - provided the buyers are willing to repair them.

this idea of infinitely building houses into never ending suburbia doesn't take into account the fact that people die and the population growth rate is pretty low here....

i mean, for the last 20-30 years, you had a pretty stable situation where boomers could sell houses to each other based on their mutual levels of inflated equity. the whole thing just kept spiralling out, and the banks just kept making money. it's all on paper, though. the younger generation simply doesn't have 20 years of inflated equity to cash in. they're not going to buy a bungalow for $600,000 on a $50,000/yr salary - which, to us, is a quarter of what it was to them. it's an impossibility. the price of that bungalow has to fall to half or a third of that - to where wages are, which is a tremendous disconnect. and, that leaves betty boomer with an empty hat.

there's no way around it. the kids aren't going to generate that kind of equity. they can't inherit it unless their parents sell - circular logic, an impossibility.  they're not going to see 500% pay increases. the market just simply has to fall.

i think that pretentious is probably the most overused and least understood word in the english language. the only other word that really comes close is liberal.

which is sort of comical....

help me fix this...

the next time somebody calls you pretentious, ask them if they know what it means - and don't be surprised when they sputter.

i'm actually rather convinced that matt lee's purpose in these daily briefings is to waste time in order to prevent legitimate questions.

the question deserved the response it got, as a consequence of it's utter naivete. how are the iranians supposed to know what the americans don't want them to do? yeesh. the subtle propaganda in the question isn't the idea that the iranians are malleable to american influence - for in truth they are, and anybody that knows the situation knows this (despite matt's enforcement of the axis of evil narrative). rather, the subtle propaganda is the idea that the iranians can somehow get out of the situation they're in by playing along - that the americans are reasonable actors in the conflict, driven by rational concerns and a desire for dialogue. ask ghadaffi or saddam or even assad how well that worked out.

it's not a question of whether the iranians care about or know what the americans want. it's a question of whether the americans care if the iranians are being co-operative. the answer is they don't.

and i'd have laughed at him, too, if i were her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azDkOcIvxHk

the "incentives" driving the sanctions are not to change the behaviour of the regime, they're to try and incite the population to revolt.

this ends one of two ways...

1) the regime is overthrown.
2) iran becomes a russian protectorate.

....and the "detente" driving talks is a reaction to the increasing likelihood of the second option, not something coming out of a desire to bring the iranian regime back into the international community. on that point you have to give the obama administration a little bit of credit. that's something successive american administrations have not really taken seriously.

"if you grab his tail, he might take off..."

yeah. take off, eh.

hosers...

deathtokoalas
we've seen a few videos of these "crystal clean" lakes, and...

clear water like this is generally not indicative of a healthy lake. a healthy lake has plant-like stuff floating around in it.

you know what actually creates that kind of a situation? acidification. the clarity is generally a response of the ph sinking to a point that it can't support any kind of life. these crystal clear lakes that have been destroyed by acidification to the point that they cannot support life are called "dead lakes".

that doesn't mean that every lake that looks like this is the result of acid rain. there are other factors that may create the same result. but a lake in a mountain in slovakia would likely not be this clear unless it's been destroyed by emissions floating south from germany.

Michal Špondr
Maybe there are just no plants in such height. :-P And maybe it's a melted snow which got frozen again, snow doesn't contain animals. If you were right, Europe should be full of such lakes because of the emissions.

deathtokoalas
europe is full of these lakes, and slovakia is the most affected area.

Nox Solitudo 
I mean, Slovakia usually gets a lot of emissions floating SOUTH from Germany, and probably north from France too.

deathtokoalas
yeah, it's not like this is something that hasn't been studied to death. there's a lot of industrialization in the east of france, but it's the tremendous industrial production in germany (and, to a lesser extent, production in russia) that are the culprits here. really, it's a little surprising how few people have an awareness of this. if you google something like "acid rain europe", you'll see a number of maps that designate the worst areas as existing in a swath through the center of europe that includes sweden, poland and the former czechoslavakia.

SuperMegaUltraPigeon
I thought it was clear because of the shear altitude meaning there is little dirt or plant/animal life, sort of like an isolated lake.

deathtokoalas
yeah, i know this is an idea out there, but i don't think it's really accurate.

so, why do some high altitude lakes lack fish? obviously, fish need a way to migrate to the lake - they can't fly in. they could maybe get dropped by a bird, but that's a fluke thing, and unless they're asexual or pregnant they can't breed alone anyways. so, a relatively new lake that has no way for fish to get in to it will not have fish in it. but, those factors don't apply as well to other types of life. the idea that high altitudes eliminate soil, plants, insects, mammals, etc is not accurate. these kinds of things exist at all altitudes...

nor is there any connection between the glacial origin of a lake and it's ability to sustain an ecosystem - except that sometimes these lakes have unique ecosystems. there are glacial lakes all over canada with elaborate ecosystems. some of the best fishing is in the rocky mountains.

similarly, high altitudes are not a buffer against the high acidity in the rain in the region - which is well established. looking at pictures of the lake doesn't tell me anything. but a google search for tatra mountains and acid rain pulls up several results.

i'm acknowledging that i'm putting two and two together, here. but acidification is really a far more likely explanation for the clarity of the water than the idea that there's no life or soil because it's an isolated glacial lake. glacial lakes are isolated from the waterways in the region. they're not isolated from all the other ways for life to find their way to them. and, they're generally not void of life - unless they've been acidified.

SuperMegaUltraPigeon
You are probably right, i was just doing my bit of speculation. However i imagine even at such altitudes if the lake wasn't acidified then even some form of algae might live, causing the lake to not be clear.

deathtokoalas
ok, i've deleted enough people regurgitating something they read at some pop science website to make a final point and close the thread. just because you've found a link to something on slashdot or reddit doesn't mean the information in the link is worth reading. and, it's certainly not a reason to swing it around the internet like a biblical quote.

my point is that the popular media perception of this is probably wrong.

yes, black ice is more transparent than snow. but what this describes is how well you can see through the ice. it doesn't describe how well you can see through the water. a healthy lake full of black ice would be...black. because the water would be full of stuff. that's why they call it "black ice".

to get that kind of clarity through the lake, you have to be dealing with extraordinarily clear water - water that really only exists as (1) water coming from treatment plants and (2) water in lakes killed off from acidification.

thread closed.

similarly, everybody in the entire world (including the state department) understands that the detainees at guantanomo are pow's, but the state department will never call them that, regardless of the logic, because to do so would invoke the geneva convention. you could stamp "pow" on their forehead and have them sing "we are prisoners of war!", perhaps in the key of c, accompanied by a kaz...no, i'm really not that guy, honest, but you could do that - and they wouldn't crack.

it's a nice try, granted. but it's a waste of time.

i'm starting to think there's a conspiracy amongst the medical establishment in this town.

i went on saturday to fill my last refill on the emergency estrace prescription. they had 7 pills they could give me, and told me to come back on monday. i gave them a few extra days to make sure it was in. they didn't order it at all and told me to come back tomorrow...

i have a high expectation for incompetence in general, and am more than willing to assign it to the pharmacy at shopper's drug mart. but, there's a general pattern, here. did i upset somebody by going out of town for a rx? awww.

now, i have a new prescription and i haven't brought it in yet. if it's not there tomorrow, i'm going to have to take that prescription to a different pharmacy.

but i'm left wondering about collusion occurring. it's a small town....

then again, i know i get schizophrenic under stress. which is why i need to avoid stress. you dumb system, you.

we'll find out tomorrow...

i mean, they owe me 53 pills. i paid for them. i need to get them, eventually. but i need the refill by friday morning, too.

again: i think i might be dealing with a religious issue, which is the same problem i had with the local clinic. the main guy back there refuses to refer to me as jessica...

it seems to be a specifically muslim thing. i mean, i don't think one religion is more intolerant than the other with this. but it seems to be that some muslims in the community are having a hard time reconciling their religious value system with our dominant secular value system, and may be a little confused about what our law prioritizes when there's a conflict in place.

i don't have a lot of opposition to diversity. i don't think increasing immigration in a contracting economy is smart, but that has nothing to do with where people are coming from, it just has to do with the gross number of people in. given that we have little reason to think we can expect anything other than near zero to negative growth for the foreseeable future, i think restricting our immigration policy, overall, would be the preferable economic choice at this point in time. but that's an economic calculation, rather than a perspective on diversity.

however, i don't like this idea of religious people enforcing their value systems - regardless of the religion they're enforcing. and, i feel that may be a developing problem.

it's something that needs to be dealt with by the courts, who need to strongly enforce access to health care as a priority over religious objections to providing it. that law needs to be laid down, with extreme force.

i'd argue that it should be an offense that should necessitate a loss of license.

but we'll see what happens tomorrow.

i see that this is actually a current issue...

http://rabble.ca/columnists/2014/08/doctors-do-not-have-right-to-discriminate-and-deny-basic-health-care

ok. it turns out that this is under review, and a set of stricter guidelines is likely to come into force in 2015.

so, that's good news. i'd expect some court cases out of it...

the court isn't going to think in terms of balancing one right against another - it's repeatedly rejected that kind of thinking. but there is a contradiction.

the way i see it is that people make a choice to be a doctor, and in doing so they waive their right to religious objections. doctors work in the service industry. they're required to provide the services they're requested. and if they can't carry out those requests, they should find a different job that doesn't conflict with their religious views.

what that means is that i think being licensed to practice medicine in canada should be attached to upholding a secular value system. you'd have to rephrase that in terms of upholding science to make it legal, but it's the essential idea.

another way you could look at it is that, in canada, doctors are quasi-employees of the government. they're not technically. they run private businesses and cash in insurance hours. but it's being paid for by tax money.

as such, they really *ought* to be under the same legal purview as any other government body (and i don't know if they legally are). but, if they are, as they should be, the argument turns around the other way: conscientious objection becomes something that infringes on the patient's freedom of religion. which is kind of what i'm *feeling* about it...

when a doctor refuses treatment based on a religious view, they're enforcing their views on the patient as much as they're upholding their own. which is really what the actual problem is and really what needs to be addressed.

i mean, consider the issue applied to any other government service. could you imagine welfare refusing to hand out checks to single mothers because it feels their behaviour is sinful? city hall refusing to hand out drivers licenses to women because it believes women should stay at home? that's not the analogy people want to use because we have all these wonky class ideas. but, in canada, it's closer to the right one - whether it conforms to the legal technicality or not.

it was too cold to stand at a pay phone for an hour this morning....

and will be tomorrow, too. and probably also friday. it'll be nice on monday.

i still have over a month. and once i set this in motion there's not going to be any option but to work it out quickly. i mean, i'm not going to wait between attempts. i'm going to go back to camh and do it again the immediate moment i'm released, and i'm going to do it until they fill out the forms. they can't let that happen more than a few times...

i don't have any problems ruining everybody else's christmas, either. i mean, if you're still celebrating the birth of fictional characters, who can be bothered with your opinion? burn the tree already. yeesh.

bonus: if we were to collectively stop celebrating christmas, our entire economic system would collapse.

it's the wind rather than the temperature. it's actually been pleasant, temperature wise, all fall. it's hovering around 0 this week, which is fine. but the winds are coming in from the north at gale gusts and dropping the temperature to around -10. it's not fun to stand in...

it'll be nice when this pattern shifts.

i'm thinking the longer i leave it, the more likely i am to get an extension, as well. because they can tell me i still have a month. if i get an extension, it pushes the whole process forwards in time...that's what i really want...as far as i can push it...

in situations where there's a civil war, the legitimacy of the government is called into question.

they want you to call the legitimacy of the syrian government into question. they do not want you to call the legitimacy of the ukrainian government into question.

it's not an inconsistency, it's carefully worded propaganda.

(deleted) 

bah. marie knows what she's talking about. i wouldn't believe much of what she actually says, but she has a strong grasp of the situation.

and, now we're about to zoom in on the mating rituals of the appropriating upper class american white woman. it may seem confusing, as there are no male suitors in sight, but the appropriating upper class american white woman is taught to perform and practice the mating ritual for many years before it is actually used. they must shape themselves into spectacular sex objects in order to compete with other appropriating upper class american white women and ensure access to a mate.

updating inrijected (inri022)

so, i've added four more silly minutes to this silly release of silly rejected outtakes from the late 90s...

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrijected

convoy

originally constructed in april, 1998 on some kind of forgotten dare. reconstructed from source on dec 10, 2014.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/convoy

rap news 30

as for the vid, it's a long debate that goes around in circles. i don't think anybody that can think clearly about it really denies our own role (although maybe a vid like this helps in holding that mirror up), but trying to address it becomes recursive very quickly, breaking down into the obvious statement that we have to change ourselves but without a clear approach on how to actually do it.

there's this whole gramscian view that we uphold the system because we're taught to. from this perspective, it's impossible to do this "the revolution starts inside" bit until we're able to abolish the institutions that put the bit of the oppressor inside of us. but, we'd need to transcend the condition in the first place. and around in circles we go, tracing out an infinite series....

the only way to break this is to acknowledge a vanguard or what could be called an anti-vanguard. i think vanguard politics are discredited, myself. the anti-vanguard takes us into post-leftist thinking. temporary autonomous zones. but this assumes real revolution is impossible. that sounds defeatist, but is it merely realism?

the expanded pyramid you put up is worth dwelling upon. i think that, existing in the middle of the pyramid, we lack the ability to really change anything - largely because we can't adjust to a system that we neither have the right to tear down nor the right to reconstruct. the best we can really do is stand in solidarity with the people at the bottom of the pyramid, in helping them reassert their autonomy, the meaning of which changes from situation to situation. it's only once we can start talking about labour rights in china or land-use rights in brazil that we can understand how we can adjust to a fairer globe.

in the mean time, it probably means that post-leftism is realism rather than defeatism. that's a level of humility that inhabitants of the heart of the empire are going to find difficult to adjust to. perhaps that humility is in truth the real necessary first step.

i mean, i think the expanded pyramid sort of obscures the controlling aspect. you see a pyramid like that and you think that each level is dominant over the next, but is it really so? there's little doubt that "debt slaves" in the advanced industrial world are heavily reliant on production outside of it, but it's worth pointing out that that's a situation that keeps them in place rather than one that empowers them. we're increasingly seeing a situation of structural high unemployment in the developed world that's a reaction to unionization and is directly caused by outsourcing the labour that would alleviate the unemployment; while the unemployed may end up consuming foreign products with what amounts to debt, that doesn't put them in a less dependent position, or in any kind of a position of control. the pyramid presentation is consequently somewhat inaccurate. but, it's inaccurate at the higher levels, as well - this absolutely ordered hierarchy is a gloss any way you look at it. we used to think of this the other way around - we used to think of colonial areas as places to dump goods, in order to enrich the colonizing powers. switching the relationship doesn't construct a power relationship so much as it exposes the underlying economic mechanism. that is, it's more accurate to think in terms of two ends of a market. in order to make money, you need to be able to produce goods cheaply and have a place to sell them. if you take either end point out, the whole thing collapses. it's not entirely fair to suggest that the consuming side of this is as well off as the producing side of it. but it is perhaps instructive to point out that the entire purpose of the new world order (if it's defined as advancing neo-liberalism in the post-soviet era) is to slowly place them on an equal footing. i'm going to agree that if you ask the factory worker in china what the nwo is, they'll tell you it's the consumer base in america. but, if you ask the mass of unemployed workers in spain, they'll tell you it's the absence of economic opportunity created by the globalization of labour. and, maybe they're both right. that takes away a lot of our own agency. and, again, i think that's even more frightening. but i think it's very true.