i'm feeling far more alert, today...and i didn't go through a messy phase last night, although i slept a lot...

if i'm going to catch meth or crack in the urine, it's going to need to be within a few hours of being poisoned by it, so there's no use in going today, because i didn't feel it last night.

we'll see what i feel like in the morning.

i mean, if they're done, they're done. i mentioned that it wasn't bad until a few days ago; some of  the vocal snippets i'm hearing from downstairs suggests that some parents or grandparents may have been away for the week.

that would explain everything....

we don't really have separate branches of government in canada, like they do in the united states. our system of government is still the same system that the british set up in the colonial period; we have the system of government that america revolted against, and replaced. so, what we have is a parliament and a judiciary, and it's actually really the judiciary that sits at the top of the hierarchy and gets final decision making authority, here.

the most powerful person in the country is the chief justice of the supreme court, not the prime minister.

so, because the legislative and executive branches are not separate, we end up with internal power struggles - and that's fine, it prevents gridlock. but, the legislative branch is supposed to be the dominant focus; the executive branch is supposed to operate as an arm of parliament, and ultimately be subservient to it's decisions.

the prime minister is not even directly elected.

rather, the prime minister is merely first amongst equals - just one voice at the table, of no greater importance than any other. it is the mps that elect somebody to this office, not voters. that makes the prime minister no more powerful than the speaker. in theory, the office is actually superfluous in our system - it's unnecessary, and our system should be able to operate perfectly fine without it. in my more bitter moments, i've advocated doing just that - abolishing it.

but, as a first step, we need mps to stand up and take back their constitutional roles and stop letting this plastic jesus tell them what to do.

if anybody's to be systemically ignored in our system, it ought to be the prime minister, not the committees.

the committees are the actual government. the executive branch is supposed to fall in line, not the other way around.

this is really a co-option of our system.

the idea that the prime minister can just pull the plug on a parliamentary committee, as though he's the king, is completely absurd in the context of a westminster system of government. but, we have a tradition of parliamentary spinelessness in this country that really needs to come to an end...

i think that the members of this parliament should have turfed trudeau months ago. and, i've been vocal about it. how long will they let him run roughshod over our democratic institutions for?

and how long will we keep electing mps that just do what they're told?

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/03/02/the-trudeau-government-says-its-listening-if-so-not-to-parliament.html

i think what donald trump meant to say is:

if you don't have stolen land then you don't have a colonial state.

right?


or


if you don't steal land, you don't have a country.

that could have been a daley-level typo. alas...


i think this article gets the right point:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/3/2/1745982/-Tariffs-aren-t-good-or-bad-but-the-way-Trump-is-imposing-them-could-be-a-disaster

look at this guy.

he even looks next level.

shit, i'd take laurier over any one of these poseurs, any day.

that was a man with some serious principles. you don't see that nowadays.

and, he was right, too. world war one was a pointless bloodbath. we should have launched a revolution over that shit....

....but, i just want to point out that the idea that trump may actually be trying to break some unions is not that remote.

if the actual intent is union-breaking? well, that might work....

but, is it not clear yet that the 'free trade' part of nafta is a joke?

if i was in this government, i'd be looking at a cost-benefit analyses on complete withdrawal.

we can talk bilateral reciprocity with the next administration...

i've made my views on tariffs clear...

they're neither good nor bad, but they're complicated. and, you need to be really, really, really smart if you're going to start throwing them around with any meaningful intent.

the trump administration is not smart enough to do this without it coming back to hurt them.

and, canada must immediately retaliate.

i could no doubt deconstruct this into a probable actual movement from liberal to undecided (i promise you that the conservatives are not up 5 points), but the polls at this stage in the cycle are realy just propaganda, anyways, and that's the better way to look at.

what i'm going to tell the liberals is this: the pandering to minorities was always a bad idea, and is going to blow up in their faces if they don't stop. nobody is going to vote for trudeau because he wears traditional indian clothing on a trip, but lots of people might vote against him because of that.

minority voters are generally more sophisticated than this and will at best ignore it.

but, low education white voters (many middle class) are broadly not more sophisticated than this at all.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4058984/justin-trudeau-india-trip-ipsos-poll/

...so, you let the 5-6% of addicts that will beat it come to you, and you stop wasting resources ordering the rest of them around...

and, let's be frank - keeping a couple of visibly hopeless addicts on the street is just about the best disincentive you can come up with.

“The therapeutic community claims a 30% success rate, but they only count people who complete the program.” Califano adds that 70-80 percent have dropped out by the 3-6 month marker.

so, you're looking at something more like around a 6-9% success rate.

are you willing to redirect billions of dollars in health care spending for a program with a 95% failure rate?

you'd have to be pretty religious not to see the folly of this.

...or perhaps get very large checks from the relevant industries.

so, i do support needle exchanges, and a few other harm reduction approaches, because studies have shown that it helps maximize resources.

put simply, it's cheaper to give them clean needles than it is to treat them for aids and hepatitis.

our scarce public health resources should be focused primarily or solely on people that don't create their own preventable problems.

and, i'm going to present similar arguments for smokers and fat people that i will for drug addicts.

and, i've been clear enough, but people kneejerk on this: i've never suggested punishing users, i'd rather advocate for non-intervention altogether, but i think that the dealers should be basically executed in public.

and, i mean, that doesn't mean that people should be denied services, either. if they want help, let them come to it. and, volunteer services should deal with this.

my concern is that the resources are limited, and i don't want to see money for addicts competing with money for other services. what bothers me are outreach services, and the amount of resources wasted by the system on a problem that shouldn't exist at all.

i'm sorry; i just don't consider this something that room should be made for in the public health budget.

but, i'm the densest flac you've ever heard: there's not a compression algorithm in the world that's going to let you take a byte out of me.

i don't even listen to hip-hop.

i can feel myself decompressing.

wow.

so, you could call me the black sheep of the family.

i'd rather call myself the white sheep in a black herd.

my mom is still alive.

i don't talk to her much, and haven't since i was a teenager and she got very heavy into heroin. i abandoned her more than she abandoned me, and i actually don't regret that; i could see as clear as day that she was hopeless, and that i had to make a choice about it: was i going to let this affect me for my whole life, or was i going to move on?

i was about 14 or 15 when i decided to move on.

there was never a talk or anything. i just showed up for a scheduled visit once to find her passed out, naked on the couch and washed my hands of her. we made no attempt to contact each other for years afterwards. i don't know if she had overdosed at the time or not.

to this day, she's a heavy methadone user that comes in and out of heroin relapses.

she got it through AA - drinking buddies looking for something stronger. she may have been blacked out when she first tried it; i don't know. maybe we can call that the "rob ford defense", moving forwards.

nobody and nothing gets 100% blame for this, and lots of entities get partial responsibility. but, knowing my mother, i don't think she would have sought it out. i think it was presented to her, and she went along to fit in. i'm consequently very much of the opinion that restricted access could have prevented her from walking down that path.

the best way to stop kids from doing drugs is to drug their parents.

you can just imagine the political discourse, fifteen years from now.

liberal prime minister justin bieber has just announced legislation that is designed to appeal primarily to the powerful children-of-dead-addicts lobby....