in the sense that this is accurate, it's exceedingly depressing.

is the biologically assigned sex of the child really that big of a deal?

i suppose i should be happy that i'm healthy enough that my lungs are still able to go into overdrive whenever i quit smoking. i've been through this often enough to know that this is the last phase before normalcy: the white blood cells start coming out in a quantity that sometimes makes me feel like i'm choking. i can literally stand over the sink and watch a connected gob of slimy goop fall out of my throat for upwards of a minute at a time. it only lasts a day or two. rather than clear my lungs slowly, my body seems to want to go into hyperdrive and flush it all out as soon as it can...

i'm actually scarily healthy. i tell people i won't live to 50. the reality is that if i can cut the smoking out now, otherwise keep my lifestyle (healthy eating, but more importantly no car) similar and get a little luck on inheriting dna from my mom's side, i'll probably make it to 90.

and i can't help but feel that this exaggerated response i always get when i quit is a function of being as healthy as i am.

i made a point of not getting anything done today, because i was expecting to pass out. i've actually been awake for a normal 17 hour day at this point and i'm feeling very alert. but, i'm still not doing anything...

tomorrow, i think, will be time to start again.

i determined yesterday, briefly, that the primary problem was, in fact, the firewire driver. i'm expecting it to boot up to a clean signal. perhaps another reason i didn't do anything today is fear that it won't.

so, sneaky tom claims he has enough senators to pass legislation, but won't tell us who they are. he has also just put the champlain bridge up for sale, but won't tell us where he got the jurisdiction from; his good friend philip is on the record as responding with "i shakes me head".

the last time i looked at the senate, it had a bare minority of conservatives required to pass legislation, dozens of vacancies and a rump liberal minority that has been disowned by his party.

so, we're to believe that he's managed to convince the entirety of that rump liberal minority, along with over a dozen harper appointed senators?

don't worry. he'll tell us who they are after we elect him. and don't forget to look at his other offers, including the champlain bridge.

he has dozens of open seats. the first thing he'll do is fill them.

this is the kind of absurdly irrational lie that destroys careers, because it takes precisely no careful thought to realize he's lying through his teeth on it. he'd better hope that very few people are actually prioritizing this as a voting issue, or he's digging another shovel into his own grave every time he opens his mouth on it.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-senate-abolition-ndp-1.3235746

so, the way this works is that we have to buy it because we're being ordered to, but harper is dragging his feet (diefenbaker may be using some magnets from his grave) and the other two are being facetious in suggesting a market-based competition. in the end, they will of course buy the f-35s like they're told. this might be the only thing they all agree on: they don't want this.

but, why do we have to do this, again, barack? you know they're going to sit in a hangar. hell, i'd rather you just keep them down there to begin with - we'd save money on keeping vandals away from them. and on wd-40.

why can't we just pay you a protection tax, or something? that way, we can budget it properly. plan around it. tax your compan..err....the russians. tax the russians to pay for it.

no, really, there's gotta be some way out of this. two out of three are insisting on balanced budgets, and i don't want anybody dealing with funding cuts to buy planes. we've got pilots. they'll be happy to take part in your silly empire, if you'd like - you just need to give them planes. or, if you really want us to have them, maybe you could give us some of that "military aid" that you give to countries like israel.

we're just kind of not really interested in being taxed on this. we've got stuff like single payer health care that we'd rather use that for.

see, the american perspective sees it as a win-win. they get jobs for building the planes. they get their allies the planes. it's all win. and, this is the post-war reality and has been since the war: they get to order us to buy their stuff because they're the empire and we're the client and that's how this stuff works.

what they're not realizing is that we don't spend more on the military than everybody else in the world combined, like they do. rather, we spend a lot on services. for us, that's an obscene amount of money.

it's not as easy as just levelling with them. it's going to require some kind of delightfully aloof comedy routine, or something.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-trudeau-scrap-f35-halifax-1.3235791

PrimeMinster Gerald Butts!
Where do you guys get such utter nonsense?

Jessica Murray
it's how the world works, man. maybe drop chomsky an email and ask him to explain it to you....

i just can't see how the liberals could be polling in the high 20s in quebec without being competitive in outremont. show me the polls, dammit...

it's not a mulcair thing. and i'm sure there's an intangible. and blah blah blah. it's just that it has to be at or near the top of the list of ridings that the liberals can win back if they're running higher.

it's one of those things where it's like fighting against gravity. as an independent observer, i see the numbers i'm thinking, and i think that outremont is worse than vulnerable. the ndp could run maurice fucking richard, it doesn't change the math.

well, maybe the rocket would change the math a little. you get the point.

if the liberals are up, outremont is vulnerable. no caveats.

so, show me the polls.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-trudeau-papineau-mulcair-outremont-1.3230605

iamjustme
Liberals are at 32% in Outremont, 54.6% in Papineau!

Jessica Murray
do you have a source for that?

iamjustme
Threehundredeiight.com ....Eric Grenier amalgamates all of the respected polls and has numbers for every riding in Canada.(CBC)

While the election is on he also has a contract with CBC.

Saw CTVs pollster this am. He said the NDP were trending downward, but Eric hasnt said that...

Jessica Murray
i see. you're posting the numbers from his "riding projections".

those numbers are more or less pulled out of thin air. there's some vague attempt to construct them to be consistent with the provincial polling averages, but it's ultimately merely a lot of guesswork. they should not be taken seriously on a riding-by-riding basis.

what i'd like to see are some actual riding polls.

when i moved here, it didn't take me long to realize i'd walked into a space that is rather strange, politically speaking. in the ontario election, it was not that uncommon to walk by middle class houses with giant union signs next to giant conservative party signs. it sounds like a contradiction, but it rather seems to be the bedrock of the political culture. there seems to be a sort of underlying insularism in the region that i think you want to explain by a lack of education. so, you get all these people that want strong unions to improve their financial circumstances, but are in truth deeply socially conservative - like most uneducated people. the saying is that conservatives may not all be stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. this area seems to demonstrate the truth in this. what they really want is a right-wing socialist party.

i would consequently suspect that these ridings could easily swing conservative if they had a fiery populist candidate in the mould of a rob ford.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/canada-election-2015-harper-manufacturing-windsor-1.3235747

i am an actual, real-life leftist that is not afraid to stand up in a room of conservatives and declare myself a communist, and trust me – the media is not on my side.

i think this article is maybe circumlocuting a bit of an epiphany, in referring to the media as disconnected elites – although it is continuing to make an error in tying them to the existing spectrum. so long as we let the media do this, it can continue to divide and conquer in a weird way.

and it is a weird way. the media is it’s own party. i haven’t read the book, but “laurentian elites” is not a bad description. the truth is that they’re tories. not conservatives; tories. supporters of diefenbaker, clark and mulroney. bleeding hearts, as the elder trudeau would say. christian protectionists that enforce a noblesse oblige amongst themselves. that is at the heart of the refugee crisis: noblesse oblige. not liberalism. not socialism. toryism.

it’s a strange anachronism. there truly isn’t a party that represents the interests of the aging canadian elite. and, has there been a country in the history of capitalism where the elite is disenfranchised? hey, i’m the leftist here – i realize how little that makes sense. and, yet it is clear that this is what exists…

www.therebel.media/media_party_disconnected_from_public_they_serve?page=4

i think it's reasonable to be extremely wary of dynastic politics. and, frankly, i wouldn't vote for trudeau solely on his own merits. but, he happens to be walking into a situation where the other two party leaders are unelectable, which makes him the best option by default.

if he wins this thing, it's neither going to be a commentary on his own abilities, nor a commentary on the abilities of his father. it's going to be the country settling back in to it's comfort point in rejecting the politics of the other two parties. and, the truth is that most people realize he's a largely ceremonial figure head, anyways. the prime minister is not meant to be like the president; when he talks about decentralizing power from the pmo and allowing cabinet more independence, that's a direction i'm in favour of.

it's one thing to not know something. there's lots of things we don't know. all of us.

what's more important is whether we pretend we know things we don't or if we have the humility and maturity to defer to others that are more capable when we know we lack the required understanding.

it's that deference that marks a capable manager - and that pretension that marks an incapable one. the truth is that we've had far too much pretension in government for far too long and could benefit from somebody that doesn't see themselves as a philosopher king.

so long as he continues to understand what he understands and what he doesn't, and knows what to defer, i think we'll be ok - in fact, better off than if we are to elect yet another narcissist that thinks they can run the country from a single office.

www.huffingtonpost.ca/ranjani-iyer-mohanty/justin-trudeau-political-dynasty_b_8156318.html

Maryanne Weis
Jessica... take the time out of your busy schedule to read his policies and perhaps then and only then can you see the difference between voting for Trudeau or Harper and Mulcair.

Jessica Amber Murray
well, that's the thing - i don't think he's written any of these policies, or even had much input into the process. and i'm ok with that.