see, this was high end pop. i could dig this. why doesn't this exist anymore?

i'm just thinking about tinfoil, because i've got my headphones wrapped in it. and this song started randomly playing in the ol' noggin.

although the song's not actually about tinfoil :P

there's a very simple two-step solution to this problem.

1) F. and don't give in on it. hold to it. as long as it takes. let his parents deal with it from there.
2) students that fail - even once - need to be put in separate classes. they should be able to get out of those classes by passing a full year, too. but, it's the way to get out of this pushing-them-through mentality. nobody wants 20-somethings in high school. that does have real consequences; i broke some asshole's arm in the ninth grade by pushing him down the stairs because he kept slamming me into the locker, and he should have been in 12th grade (and he was white, of german descent). so, put them in their own classes. at their own schools, even.

we need to bring back the idea of failing.

NO NO NO NO NO

KILL IT WITH FIRE!

KILL IT!

DIE! DIE! DIE!

this is actually a useful short because it explores the situation from russia's defensive priorities, which has been their dominant concern since before stalin. so much western media focuses on this bluntly comical idea of russia as an offensive power, trying to conquer the world.

it's also useful in the sense that it really draws the connection between modern russia and historical rome. this foreign policy is quintessentially byzantine, and so are the consequences - perpetual suspicion of imperial treachery.

i think that, in the broader historical perspective, "western civilization" has yet to truly break it's way out of the division of the roman empire. i know this is very abstract, but it's something i've drawn attention to before and i really think there's a lot of truth to it.

it's tied into the american historical psyche, and to the foundations of the nation itself - this idea of america as the new rome. but, it's sort of typically american in it's lack of scope. london was the actual new rome. washington is in many ways the new constantinople.

but, it's recursive. as much as the american revolution was a civil war within the british empire rather than a revolution, one that ended with washington as the new center of the british empire, the new roman empire, this is only the western half of the story.

the eastern half of the story sees moscow as the new constantinople, the continuation of the eastern sphere of roman civilization. and, it sees the russian empire as the continuation of the byzantine sphere.

so, then what was the cold war, really?

as history unfolds, conflicts localized in space and time open themselves up to these broader interpretations. the details fade. what's left is the broader narrative.

when this story is told to children on distant planets, it seems unlikely to me that any meaningful separation will occur over what we call the modern era. the whole thing will coalesce. moscow vs. washington, constantinople vs. rome, pope vs patriarch - this will all become intertwined into a single, epic struggle for control over roman civilization.

i really think we need some fact-based analysis here.

1) most people don't buy pot from cartels. they buy it from local growers.

this is useful reading:
http://www.theweedblog.com/how-can-you-tell-if-your-marijuana-comes-from-a-cartel/

2) your kids' hook-up ultimately probably comes from somebody's dad, or somebody's older sibling, and not from organized crime.

3) marijuana is not addictive.

4) because marijuana is not addictive, pushers don't push it. they push speed. meth. it's big business, and run by smart business people. if you can create a speed addict, you're going to get steady revenue streams from that person - regularly, multiple times a week. if you get a marijuana customer, you'll get sporadic sales every once in a while. so, they don't focus on pot because it's not in their self-interest to.

i've had these discussions with street-level dealers, and a lot of the time they don't even know where to find pot - despite having a knapsack full of speed that they're selling on the corner. you ask them for pot, and they try and push you speed and then tell you to get lost.

i'm not opposed to putting some of the money towards treatment centres. but, it would be better spent on treatment for actually damaging and actually addictive substances. the most damaging, addictive substance in our society is alcohol.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/legal-marijuana-taxes-1.3370358

(removed reply)

as i mentioned, marijuana is not addictive. acid isn't either, and i wouldn't be opposed to legalizing it, although i'm not about to strenuously argue the point, either. the thing about hallucinogenics is that you'd have to set a higher legal age, but the truth is that people mostly grow out of them by the age of 21.

the gangs push speed and meth, mostly. they don't start with pot. they jump right to the stuff that hooks them; pot is useless in hooking them. it's all about pills. and, it's actually a very different subculture, too. you would be targeting very different kinds of kids that would go for popping a pill to get an upper than kids that want to smoke a joint and chill out.

also: kids don't do heroin. it's an adult drug

i remember watching kids pop speed pills on the school bus when i was 13. nobody in that group had ever tried or knew how to get pot. i don't even think any of them had smoked a cigarette. and, i think that observation is pretty normal.

they weren't the outcast kids, either. they were the popular kids - the in crowd.

--

anglophile
No one will buy pot from a Gov't outlet. It will be expensive, much like cigars, or more. Once the substance is legal, pot smokers will simply grow it in their backyards, even if it is less potent. There will be no legal means to prevent this from happening. Also, remember that pot can't be used without abusing it. only a few "tokes" will have you completely inebriated. Unlike alcohol, it can't be used responsibly. A "casual" pot user, would be equivalent to an excessive drinker. One can enjoy a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, and still be legal to drive home, or supervise their children. Parents who smoke at home might find that they are putting their children at risk, if they smoke a joint only to find they have to rush the kid to the hospital for some reason. Their judgment would be so impaired that they might not even recognize a serious situation. Also, pot will be the chosen drug for kids at school. A few tokes between classes will get you stoned, while the same high might requires 7 or 8 beer, which would be hard to carry around, or consume inconspicuously.

jessica murray
i'm not going to comment on your conclusions regarding how marijuana users behave, but i want to point that you're half right about effects.

marijuana tolerance increases as you smoke. i'm a light, sporadic and social smoker - i only need a three toke pass to get stoned for the night, and into the morning. that wouldn't be true if i smoked regularly, but it is true because i don't smoke regularly. so, you're right that you don't need a lot, if you don't use a lot.

the flip side of that is that marijuana does a fraction to you of what alcohol does, and plateaus at a fairly low point. you will never blackout and forget what you did last night due to marijuana use. you won't spontaneously pass out. "as stoned as you can get" is roughly equivalent to the immediate buzz you get after talking 2-3 shots at the same time and it lasts for several hours - but then you can't get more stoned than that, and you don't deal with the effects of drunkenness.

so, it's faster, yes. and you need less. but it's also impossible to overdo it.

it's common sense that one should not drive stoned. but, the reality is that you're never going to see any stoned person stumbling all over the place, slurring words, cursing, unable to walk straight. marijuana just doesn't have the ability to create that effect, or at least not on it's own.


--


AlanWilliams
This will only drive the drug dealers to push harder more dangerous substances into the market. They will plan to adapt in order to maintain their market share and profits. This will result in even more people in addictive states unable to function in a sustainable lifestyle. The liberals are only doing this to protect the rich kids of Toronto (Rosedale) from getting a criminal record! They don't care about the devastating results although they say the money will go into addiction programs. Why not just criminalize pot as a deterrent and save lives???

jessica murray
actual drug dealers - bikers and whatnot - already mostly ignore pot, because you can't build dependence on it. they don't bother selling it as a gateway or whatever. they just jump right to selling speed in candy wrappers. and that's something that people should actually be concerned about.

--

captain canada
I can just see the fun at the border when Canada legalizes pot . Get ready to wait while US customs searches for that one joint your kid left in the back seat of the car and you end up in jail for smuggling pot to the USA .

jessica murray
bernie is claiming he'll drop the federal restriction. if he doesn't win, i can't see it being more than 4-8 years away.

start at 33:00.

it is more trade. he was right.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?80216-1/uscanada-relations

finalizing i still don't fully understand this

this track is also closed. not altered.

even with the tinfoil, i'm picking up a little bit of signal right now. i'm going to tentatively suggest it's because it's friday night and the magnetic field is stronger due to the lines being at peak electrical use, do something else for a few hours and reapproach a little after midnight.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/i-still-dont-fully-understand-this

finalizing in some neighbourhoods, the boogeyman is slightly more than an imaginary monster

this track is closed. not altered.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/in-some-neighbourhoods-the-boogeyman-is-slightly-more-than-an-imaginary-monster

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

takers

i've decided to upload a drum machine mix of this after all. this is a brand new mix, dated to today.

initially written in 1997. recreated in jan, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 1, 2015. deconstructed dec 18, 2015.

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

finalizing thug culture is enforced by the media from the top down

this track is also closed.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/thug-culture-is-enforced-by-the-media-from-the-top-down

finalizing use value is somewhat difficult to define in the human propensity towards artistic expression

i'm closing this track, as well. no change from the initial upload.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/use-value-is-somewhat-difficult-to-define-in-the-human-propensity-towards-artistic-expression

fisk's comments here are very unfortunate, and no doubt driven by feelings of bitterness by ndp supporters, who were positioned to win the election for months leading up to the vote. strangely, this is no doubt second hand bitterness. this kind of reporting is useful in the line of work fisk usually does, but doesn't lend itself well to an analysis of an election in another country.

it seems like the reporting for the article consisted of fisk calling up a couple of friends in canada.

however, i think that it must also be acknowledged that quebec has developed a nasty nationalist streak in it's politics, but in the context of two important points: first that it is a pragmatic tactic to achieve independence, and second that this tactic keeps getting rejected by voters.

lucien bouchard blamed the loss in the second sovereigntist referendum on "money and the ethnic vote". that's the beginning of this strain of thought, as far as i know, but some others may want to trace it back further. he seemed aware that his vision of a sovereign quebec nation was being thwarted by people that did not have deep roots in the region. while it may be over-exaggerating a single factor at the expense of the importance of others, it is not a spurious observation and there is no doubt some level of truth to it, too.

in fact, there is also some truth to the idea that the federal government - under the guidance of quebec prime ministers - has purposefully targeted quebec for immigration with the purposes of changing the nature of quebec society, to prevent separation.

after the second referendum, quebec clearly started to get a little tired with this one party rule that didn't campaign on spectrum issues. they wanted a debate driven by normal election issues: budgets, services, changes in the laws, etc. so, the separatist forces started breaking up into different political factions. this was very much driven by the body politic, who just wanted a better debate on issues that actually affected them.

when you open things up like this, you have to expect that some bottled up issues are going to get out. there were bent up energies in the quebec nationalist regions that saw people without these multigenerational roots in the region as being responsible for the failure of the referendum. within this, a conservative separatist group - called the adq - started building a kind of collection of ideas about religious immigrants that would eventually be picked up by both the pq (the biggest separatist party) and the liberals (the federalist party).

you have to understand that the legal changes they want to make are purely about assimilation. there's not a racial bias to it, nor is there an exclusionary nature to them. it's about turning immigrants into cultural quebeckers, so they vote in favour of independence. they don't want to restrict immigration to any specific group, they just want to ensure that whomever comes to quebec becomes a quebecker and aligns with what they see as quebec values. should any of these ideas be adopted, i would not expect them to survive independence by very long.

but, canada is a pluralistic society, and so the federal law sometimes gets in the way of these ideas - there have been constitutional challenges. in canada, you can't arbitrarily tell somebody not to wear a scarf and try to enforce it under threat of something.

when the laws are explored over a public debate, the ramifications of them begin to make people uncomfortable - even if they are rational to get to the end point of separation - and they are invariably rejected, even when people admit to agreeing with them - confusing pollsters and policy makers.  a few years ago, the pq lost an election over a "values charter" that would have acted as an assimilating force regarding things like head coverings and jewelry. polls claimed strong support for the values charter - yet the party lost, because of it. to support an idea of something is not necessarily to support the actualization of it. "i'd like to tell you to take that off your head" does not necessarily translate into "the law should be able to force you to take that off your head".

we saw the same thing in the last federal election. harper's rhetoric about muslims was pretty gross. public opinion polls seemed to suggest people both approved and realized that they can't actually vote for it.

the nativist streak is there. it has historical reasons. but, it's not xenophobic; rather, it's very strongly assimilating.

it may be a little bit real right now, so it may be easy to lose perspective, but we need to analyze trump correctly, as well. and, le pen, for that matter - although i think le pen is something very different, and destabilizing the region quite intentionally.

my very first comments about trump, before i got lost myself, were that you have to put him in context and understand *why* this is happening. when all the nonsense is debunked, your left with the reality that white people have done poorly in america since the 70s. with the collapse of the unions, the offshoring of jobs, mechanization and the rest, there are really declining living standards. it may not be informed to blame it on mexicans and muslims. but, we can't just leave it at that. the economics underlying this spasm need to be seriously addressed - and a fair bit of it needs to be attributed to nafta. there's other causes, of course. but, you can't do that in print, it seems.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-joy-of-canada-delivered-from-stephen-harper-s-darkness-to-justin-trudeau-s-light-a6779106.html
 
Emdx
> however, i think that it must also be acknowledged that quebec has developed a nasty nationalist streak in it's politics

Ah, yet another outsider that only relies on other outsiders for his information. You just fell exactly into the same trap you deplore with Mr Fisk.

> lucien bouchard blamed the loss in the second sovereigntist referendum on "money and the ethnic vote".

It was not Lucien Bouchard who made that famous remark, but Premier Jacques Parizeau. The next day, Parizeau resigned and Bouchard became premier.

But yes, Parizeau was right. Of course, money would be against us, as in any colonial situation. And the amount of money illegally spent to buttress the “NO” side during the referendum campaign was staggering. For example, whole planeloads were flown to Montréal, courtesy of airlines, at no cost to passengers. This kind of expense squarely fell into the purview of our election financing laws, and it was clearly illegal.

But nobody howled at the “money” part of the comment, because it was a given that money would be against us.

Let’s tackle instead the “ethnic vote”. Historically, immigrants have been used as a tool to minorize us. The expectation was that any immigrant who would come to Canada would become anglicized, and thus would not become part of our community. This was completely true until 45 years ago when the assimilation machine was stopped dead on it’s tracks by Law 101, which simply shut down access to english schools for immigrants.

This is the main reason why Canada hates Law 101, because it almost killed outright the assimilation machine.

What Jacques Parizeau was referring to with the “ethnic vote” is those immigrant communities who blindly vote for what their leaders tell them to, without asking themselves any questions.

Anyone with a brain would acknowledge that such behaviour in a Democracy is pretty deplorable.

Well, we lost by some 50,000 votes, and no doubt a lot more than 50,000 “NOs” were clearly “ethnic votes”.

There is nothing racist in denouncing this, in fact, Parizeau’s remark was clearly a denunciation of the racism that brings about those “ethnic votes”, racism fomented by Canada against Québec’s aspiration for independence.

But again, any minority seeking freedom from a larger country, like the Scots or the Basques are readily labelled as “intolerant”, “xenophobes” and all the unsavoury stuff you hear from Canadian media whenever the subject skirts Québec.

> you have to understand that the legal changes they want to make are purely about assimilation.

As I said before, immigration has been largely been used as a tool to minorize the french and the indians in Canada.

> but, canada is a pluralistic society,

Bollo*ks. It's only “pluralistic” when it suits Canada. And you see it bursting at the seams whenever there are high concentration of immigrants. Why do you think Rob Ford got elected as mayor in Toronto?

We get tagged as “racist” because our interculturalism policies are at odds with the canadian multiculturalism. We have good reasons to reject multiculturalism, because it’s mostly a tool to divide and rule; with immigrants isolated in little cultural ghettoes, it is far easier to manipulate them to keep them subservient than if they were full members of their adoptive society.

Which is what interculturalism does: we only take what we like from what immigrants take here; what we don’t like, we soundly reject and tell immigrants that they better forget about it.

Yes we are assimilationists. Although having immigrants keeping their culture is nice and all that, we don’t really care; what we want is them to take our language first and foremost. Culture will only naturally follow. We do this because we are strictly opposed to segregation and ghettoes; we want immigrants to be full-fledged members of Society, quite unlike the English who are very happy keeping their class system to keep the rabble at it’s place, which is pretty normal for a colonial society.

> In canada, you can't arbitrarily tell somebody not to wear a scarf and try to enforce it under threat of something.

Sure we can. And yet again, you cet carried away with the canadian media misrepresentation about Québec. We don’t bitch against the scarves (fu*k, we wear them ourselves six months a year — during winter, that is), it’s against the face veils we have against. And we’re not the only ones, almost all Europe is up in arms regarding this.

It’s just that the liberal crowd is so taken up in it’s multiculturalism that it stubbornly keeps going into the multiculturalist dead-end, despite the fact that this very subject made the NDP lose the chances at getting in power.

> the nativist streak is there. it has historical reasons. but, it's not xenophobic; rather, it's very strongly assimilating.

Well, yes. But it seems that in Canada, while it's okay to assimilate to the english, it's a no-no to assimilate to the french.

Which is a damn fine reason to get out of Canada.

deathtokoalas
i just want to point out that i'm a french canadian that grew up in the ottawa area. i do appreciate your correction about parizeau - i did misspeak on that point. but, i think you're otherwise demonstrating my points rather than rebutting them.

emdx
As a "french canadian from Ottawa", you have learned early on that your place is subservient to the english, and you clearly show it by your thoroughly colonized positions.

If you want to be french, you're welcome to come to Québec, but if you backstab us, you will be treated as you deserve.

deathtokoalas
i would rather leave ethnic nationalism in the 20th - if not the 19th - century. again: you're demonstrating my points.

to reiterate: the nativist streak is a problem in quebec, but they're not xenophobic. they're assimilationist. it's a very big difference in understanding them from a distance

perhaps the better way to understand quebec nationalism from britain - or the middle east - is to compare it to merkel's recent statements, rather than le pen's. the door is open. but they demand that migrants accept their value systems, should they choose to come in.

--

something else that you'll see floated around by the canadian pseudo-left is this idea of quebec as a victim of settler-colonialism. this is an outrageous narrative; france was of course a participant in settler-colonialism, and the french settlers were fundamentally no different than the english settlers. i'm glossing over a complicated history, but to put the french settlers on the side of the colonized is fundamentally wrong. regardless, i've seen it cited in international sources over the last few years, indicating that the narrative has some traction because it fits into the theories people like.

the actual reason this argument has popped up is due to the supreme court reference case on succession, which claimed that a unilateral declaration would only be valid in the context of a colonial relationship. as no such colonial relationship exists, such a unilateral declaration would be considered illegal and unconstitutional in canada.

you have to understand that context to make sense of the debate, but that's not what gets out of the country.

Emdx
Of course you are (again) wrong.
When the french settlers came, they certainly did not see themselves as superior to the natives; in fact, we actually “went native” and we formed a hybrid european-indian society.
To this day, we carry on several native way of doing things that are rather different from France (like seeking consensus rather than outright imposing one's views).
In all Canada, only the Québec government deals with natives as equals, on a nation-to-nation basis, rather than the “stupid, juvenile savage” way the federal government does. And the results show: in Québec, 80% of natives still speak their language (that’s because law 101 ALSO protects native languages) as opposed to less than 20% in Canada. We also deal with their traditional social structures, rather than the sham democracy that is imposed by Ottawa, and who elects corrupt, unaccountable band councils.
We also let natives administer Justice as they see fit, so, unlike Canada, we do not have a high native jail population.

But you don’t have to take my word for it; go to Moonsonee (or Attawapiskat), Ontario, and ask the Crees who live there if they would rather live in Québec…

deathtokoalas
see, this is skewed so many ways that i don't see any point in bothering. it's political whitewashing. but, as i pointed out, there's a reason for it.

at the start of the colonial period, the various native american groups were broadly more interested in using western technology to defeat their ancestral enemies than they were in defeating the invaders. european powers took advantage of this. but, a big part of understanding how colonialism in north america was possible lies in understanding that they have a very different cultural concept of property rights - the truth is that they didn't really see westerners as invaders because they didn't conceive of themselves as owners of the land. rather, they conceived of themselves as users of the land; it would not have made sense to them to try and stop others from using the land. there were treaties of friendship and land use signed with both early english settlers and early french settlers; neither the french nor the english held to these treaties particularly strongly. today, they're both under the interpretation of the same court system.

despite the complexity of the history, the broad truth is that the various native groups often found themselves aligned with imperial interests against the interests of the colonies. that is broadly true across the continent, and the broadest way to understand the nature of conflict in the period, and continuing to today.

so, for example, you saw the major native groups align with the french imperial interests against british settlers in the seven years war, but then you saw those same groups align with the british crown against american settlers during the revolutionary war. one of the reasons for the revolutionary war was a ban by the british crown on expansion westwards, in recognition of the sovereignty of the existing tribes. and, one of the reasons for the signing of the treaties in western canada was protection from american expansion.

what you're saying about treaty rights is simple nonsense - both in legal terms and historical terms. the single most violent colonial body in the history of canada was the francophone catholic church. there are some french-canadian metis (mixed) groups, but there are also english, scottish and ukrainian metis groups, amongst others.

quebec really needs to come to terms with it's participation in settler colonialism, rather than continue to deny the reality of it.

god, my brain hurts.

you know what? i know where the baltics are. i can identify each of them on a map. i know their capital cities. i know which language groups their dominant ethnicities fall into. and, i even know a fair bit of their history.

but, i don't have a favourite one. because that's really NOT a thing.

well, maybe prussia. it's them hats. but that would be a confusing answer.

i don't have a favourite balkan, favourite korea or favourite caribbean island, either.

i really hope the stupidity stops, soon. the canadian media is making fox news look insightful, right now.

this isn't tabloid quality journalism. it's closer to onion quality journalism.

...and it's sinking the conservatives to an ontario pc party level of amateurism. suddenly, they're more humorous than scary.

do they really think people can't work this out? really?

globalnews.ca/news/2409408/baltics-a-thing-because-its-2015/

Jane tow
Good for you Jessica, you sound like a very intelligent young lady. I hope one day you are PM!!

jessica amber murray
that's a good laugh.

maybe i should address this point. i've been rambling enough places that i think i have a passive audience. just a feeling. maybe paranoia, maybe solipsism - but maybe accurate. it's at least as likely, really, isn't it?

the idea of me running for office right now is really something that ought to be explained in the terms of a comic strip, with hilarious hijinks leading to total failure along the way. but, even if it weren't such an outrageously ludicrous proposition, the reality is that i wish my focus was 100% on music production at the moment. hear me out on this.

so, i've been dealing with radio interference in my head phones since july. since then, canada has been through an election and i've been kind of vocal about it. but, it was totally by the accident that my system was malfunctioning, and i had absolutely no idea why.

it took me forever to figure it out. first, i had to check things like drivers and system files, as it's the most likely option. that took months to rule out entirely, and i wasn't helped by the fact that i had two sets of headphones, both, it turns out, with shorts. so, every time i checked for issues with the phones, it was always "either the equipment is faulty, or both my phones are faulty.". and, you always take the odds on that gamble - you always say the equipment is faulty.

but, then i finally realized it had to be electrical. so, you have to check everything that could be creating interference. in a room full of gear, that's a nightmare. eventually, i realized that i was getting the same noise out of an mp3 player as i was getting out of the grid - indicating that the interference had to be in the air, as the mp3 player is not connected to the grid.

so, then i had to check to see how far i could go with this interference, realizing it has boundaries that are blocks away - meaning the interference is broadly environmental, and not coming from inside the unit. but, in the process i found the short in one pair of the phones. then, maybe both pairs had shorts, after all.

so, i think the shorts in my phones are interacting with the environmental field to turn my phones into radio antennas, and i'm picking up the local am radio signals. this isn't creating the sound of a radio station, it's just making the audio sound like am radio - kind of jagged and rough at the edges.

it turns out i can block the radio signals relatively well using tinfoil.

but, it took me six long months of experiments to get me this far. and, i'd never had taken the time to ramble on the internet, if it weren't to vent frustration about not knowing why i can't be done mixing this project by now.

that said, i might think about it. one day. in the exceedingly distant future. under certain unlikely conditions. so, it's not likely. but note that i have thought about how unlikely it is on more than one occasion.

17-12-2015: tweaking the solution & finalizing tracks

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriclaimed