i want to expand on my "running for election in california" quip, because i've said this before but never really got into it.

trudeau is actually probably more popular in the united states than he is in canada right now. this is recent: his numbers have crashed over the last three months, to the point where he's running in the high 30s. now, canada has a multi-party system, so running in the 30s is not the catastrophe here that it is there. regardless, if you're looking at raw numbers? he's running at 36%, compared to trump's 37%.

so, i'd suspect trudeau is doing much better in california than he is in canada right now. there was really never the kind of coverage in canada that you saw on sites like vox. our press is overwhelmingly conservative, but, even in the small left press, it just didn't happen. there was just a lot of skepticism.

in fact, i might suspect that trudeau and his advisers pay more attention to vox or even daily kos than they do to canadian sites like rabble, partly for the reason that canada has a left and the left-press is more interested in that left than it is in the bourgeois liberal party and partly for the reason that being bourgeois in canada means you probably spend a lot of time in the united states.

the liberal party intelligentsia has a lot of these bourgeois canadians that have spent good portions of their lives in the united states, and are consequently more connected to american politics than they are to canadian politics. some of them went to school in the states. particularly awful is that some of them went to law school in the states, and learned about the wrong constitution and the wrong system of government. some of them sought careers in the states. they all came back different people than they were when they left. and, if you realize the nature of the problem, it's actually very easy to point it out.

there are a number of issues on the table right now where the liberals sound exactly like democrats, and are being applauded for it by democrats. but, as this is happening, they are being nailed in canada by liberals for exactly what they are being applauded for in america by democrats. and, it's not always clear that they even realize it, because they've spent most of their lives disinterested in domestic perspectives. they seem to get their validation from the democratic-leaning sources that they've always consulted, and then don't even realize that they're getting nailed at home.

the previous leader - michael ignatieff - was absolutely roasted by the previous government for basically this issue. he spent a lot of his life globetrotting. he was a talkshow host in britain and a professor at harvard. he came back with subtle arguments in favour of torture that would go over astoundingly well at the fucking brookings institute or something, and seemed unable to grapple with the premise of leading a party that voted against the war in iraq on the grounds that it was illegal under international law. he was in a culture shock. but, he put a lot of the party that trudeau inherited in place.

i'm not even trying to attack anybody the way that the conservatives did. i just think that it's imperative that the ruling party ground itself in it's country of origin, and take steps to ensure that it is being directed by people that understand the views of the people that live in the country.

so, when i say that trudeau and his team of advisers think they're running for re-election in california, this is more than poetic license. there is a starkly dangerous level of truth to it. the reality is that a lot of them would be more comfortable discussing american politics, and that a lot of them see canada from outside in rather than inside out, or ground their perspectives in absurdly misinformed premises like "canadians and americans are basically the same".

if this government wants to survive, it will need to change it's perspective on how it sees itself in the world by cleaning it's house of americans.

so, what have we learned here?

1) canadians don't like it when you use the state to persecute religious minorities.
2) canadians don't like it when you use the state to prevent the persecution of religious minorities.

it sounds like canadians want a separation of church and state.

i know: it's a bleeding edge concept. maybe we'll get there, one day.

Forum Research has found that only 14% of people support M-103, Liberal MP Iqra Khalid's anti-discrimination motion that singles out Islamophobia.

if you go back a few pages, you'll see me argue that supporting the motion without defining the term wasn't worth isolating voters over.

The federal Liberals are now the first choice of 36% of decided and leaning voters, down from 39% last month. Meanwhile, the Conservatives, who are in a leadership campaign, have the support of 38%, up from 35% at the end of February.

they're idiots.

they seem to think they're running for re-election in california, or something.

they should have thrown the bill and it's author under the bus.

even irwin fucking cotler said this was stupid and divisive.

also, what they're talking about is vitamin b3. all of those acronyms mask that.

if you have a healthy diet, you probably get quite a bit of it as it is. and, if you're old, you should probably be taking quite a bit of it, anyways.

the effects of gravity, alone, will kill you, eventually.

i came to somewhat of an epiphany in 2008: given the inevitability of death, the only task worth accomplishing is finding some way to achieve immortality. and, i could go through a history of this, from eating the hearts of your enemy to drinking the blood and eating the flesh of the god-man in the christian ritual (it's kind of the same thing) and beyond. we've always known this.

i did not merely come face-to-face with the futility of existence, i realized the only way past it was to conquer it. and, so i set myself upon a goal of finding a way to eliminate mortality.

the question of chemistry is something that arose, but in the end i rejected it in favour of a process of shape-shifting that i believe is beyond the computational limits of my life-time. it was around 2010 that i decided that this is a poor bet, and i'm better off enjoying the life i have than wasting it chasing something beyond it. but, it was always with the view that the cutoff is likely very close (somebody 5-10 years younger than me may live to see it...) and with the understanding that i could even be wrong.

but, i don't think that the chemical approach is likely to work. i understand that biological aging is a chemical process and that it follows that you just need to reverse the chemistry in order to reverse the aging. but, it places the issue in a kind of a vacuum. a treatment like this may keep people's organs alive indefinitely, but it wouldn't reverse skeletal damage and it probably won't reverse dementia. so, you can live to be a thousand years old in a wheelchair, and have no memory of the last 900 years.

so, you can talk about replacing skeletal tissue with metal and finding ways to stop your brain from decomposing. but, you're going to get to some point at the end where you just can't do it anymore.

if you're serious about this, you need to separate the mind from the body and allow it freedom to roam. and, we will not be able to do this with conventional computers due to the prevalence of np problems.

that doesn't mean i'm going to avoid the stuff. but, it's not the answer i sought - and it's not the answer you seek, either.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/03/harvard-scientists-pinpoint-critical-step-in-dna-repair-cellular-aging/

i'm not sure if i've been over this in this space...

why does putin keep winning elections? the western narrative is that he rigs them. but, this is a poor understanding of things, and only works if you're ignorant of what's happening there and has been happening there for the last several decades.

westerners are used to very narrow political spectrums. you can vote for the left bourgeois party or the right bourgeois party. there might be a fake socialist party, or maybe some puppets of capital pretending to be libertarians. but, it's all strictly in a tiny sphere of neo-liberalism.

russia has a massive political spectrum. the options are communists, capitalists and fascists. putin's party is neither liberal nor conservative in western terms, but a broad capitalist liberal-conservative front against the commies on their left and the fascists on their right.

the main opposition party in russia is still the communist party. no other party has overtaken it. there is a very small movement towards social democracy, but the force most likely to threaten putin at this moment is a right-wing nationalism led by the likes of navalny.

this is why putin and his party are unassailable: the other options are literally soviets and fascists. literally. and, if the vote ever split, the communists would almost certainly win.

alexi navalny is not a liberal, he's a hard-right white nationalist. whether you like putin or not, this man deserves to be under deep scrutiny, and any movements he's leading should be stamped out with force.

he's a nazi.

i actually don't doubt their honesty. they believe what they're saying.

but, you can't take them seriously, or entertain their delusions. and, in a few decades, this will be seen as a historical curiosity.

just end the prohibition already and get on with it.

there's an easy way to check if m-103 is a threat to your freedom of expression, or if you're being taken in by right-wing demagogues, and that is to test it out by insulting islam everywhere you can. i'll start:

mohammad was a hamster and smelt of elderberries.

let's try another one:

islam is mind control, and it's adherents are brainwashed idiots. 

and how about:

religion is at the core of all evil in the world, and islam is amongst the worst religions on the planet.

this is a good one:

fear of muslims is rational because their religion is completely batshit insane.

one more:

religion is the greatest active threat to freedom in the contemporary world and must somehow be abolished. islam must be abolished.

am i going to get a knock on the door? i doubt it.

try it. it's fun.