while i think that trump is probably right in deducing that promoting peace will make him more popular than beating the drums of war, i don't imagine that an american pullout from south korea is at all imminent.

see, here's the thing: when it was about war it was smoke & mirrors. and, when it's about peace, it will be smoke & mirrors, too.

i could be wrong; maybe, i missed something. but, the situation in korea is really pretty intractable. and, it would require a major shift in thinking from one or both sides to break through it.

that said, you don't need a peace agreement to increase trade, and that's what everybody should really be concerning itself with.

wynne wants to avoid saying "i will balance the budget".

but, she just as clearly wants to say very loudly that "doug ford will not balance the budget".

one of the things the liberals should be doing right now is trying to point out that doug ford isn't much of a conservative at all, with the hopes of promoting voter apathy.

we know he's going to run huge deficits. they should make sure everybody realizes this quite clearly.

and, see, there's a difference between being a liberal and pushing fiscal restraint, and being a liberal and pointing out that your opponent doesn't care about fiscal restraint.

liberals don't win elections by being conservatives. but, conservatives don't want to vote for fiscally irresponsible neo-liberals like doug ford, either - despite the fact that they keep getting tricked into it.

i mean, normally when we talk about the feds downloading services to the provinces, the provinces aren't volunteering for it.

when are you numbskulls going to ask for something costed?

and, we forget that what happened to mike harris is that he turned into stephen harper.

i guess this will help trudeau balance his budget?

it won't help ford balance his, that's for sure.

but, nobody really expects neo-liberals to balance budgets, do they? the federal conservatives have never balanced a budget.

c'mon, you dummies. you're being played. and bought off with your own cash, so this guy can sell off what's left of the commons to his banking buddies.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-pcs-announce-child-care-tax-rebate-for-low-income-families/

i really never saw myself as a smoker. i mean, i acknowledged i was. but, i never intended to start smoking habitually, and i was basically in the process of quitting from the time i realized i was.

i started smoking to stay awake because i was working and going to school at the same time. it was either nicotine or cocaine. i think i picked the better option.

and, it really does keep you awake and alert. it's the best stimulant there is. really.

so, how do you quit smoking when you have exams next week? you can't; you need to study, so you need to stay awake, so you need to smoke.

and, then how do you quit when you're working two jobs? or...

i would routinely quit for three-four weeks at a time, over and over again. so, it's really more accurate for me to say something like that i was a smoker around 70% of the time, between 2002-2016 - and a non-smoker about 30% of the time.

i never tried to rationalize it; i knew it was unhealthy, but i'd always quit next week. and, i was never happy about it, but i had to find some way to stay awake, whether i liked it or not.

whenever i had a down period, i'd get most of the way there. but, as soon as i had anything substantive to do, the smoking would start up again.

so, nobody should be surprised by how militant i'm being about this: even when i smoked, i was very anti-smoking, as weird as that sounds.

it follows that if you ever see me with a cigarette in my hand, you can be sure i'm either already drunk or on the way there.

if i end up going to court with this, all parties should expect an affidavit from me, declaring the following:

1) i finally definitively quit smoking cigarettes as a habit at the beginning of 2016, after smoking habitually from 2002-2016, with many attempts to quit over the period.
2) i have never been a habitual marijuana smoker.
3) i have never had a medical marijuana card.
4) as a rule, i have never smoked inside of any dwelling that i've inhabited; i've always smoked outside. i have not smoked anything - at all - inside of the apartment in question.
5) while i may have relapsed a couple of times due to overwhelming stress, including at the end of 2017, because quitting smoking is hard, those relapses have been short-lived and are not evidence of hidden habits. all relapses have been carried out exclusively outside of the dwelling in question.
6) i acknowledge that i may continue to smoke casually when i'm drinking, meaning when i'm at the bar. this is infrequent and likewise does not suggest habitual use - it is behaviour relegated strictly to bar patios and other places of alcohol consumption.

those are the facts.

you don't have to like them.

but please stop disputing them.

clearly, i crashed.

i need to get some work done today.

it's clear that she's still smoking inside, but less clear whether she's leaving or not. i woke up to an overhang of tobacco smoke, and have noticed some minor plumes. but, i continue to hear a lot of banging downstairs.

i guess if she's leaving then she'll want to be out by the first.

and, i'll wait until the first before i start making daily complaints. it's just going to be something like:

"yeah. she's still smoking. *click*."

again: you can't just order an addict to stop.

well, i'll acknowledge that this is a better approach than modelling for this election, as there is a potential for a large swing. but, i'll point out again that when you take a lot of crap and average it out, you're left with an average amount of crap.

i don't think the evidence that the pcs are polling over 40 right now is very strong.

what i want to point out, instead, is that this is the kind of headline the liberals would love to see replicated and picked up on. because the truth is that a lot of people are still voting against harris, rather than in favour of any specific liberal idea. these people are aging, though, too.

is there some value in the idea? i'm going to suggest that there is. harris was a brash neo-liberal that didn't give a fuck. ford is very much in the same mold.

the difference is that harris was still a tory, and was still able to hold a large amount of the old tory base. it took time for that to disintegrate, in revulsion at the shift towards markets (and just as a consequence of dying off). ford may do well amongst newer canadians, and that is a game changer, but he's going to have a harder time holding that red tory swing, which is still key in ontario for at least a little while longer. and, this is a cultural thing rather than a political thing - old tories are going to simply dislike him.

in the end, the election may depend on whether ford can hold his own party's traditional base or not, even as he makes large advances into traditional liberal voter territory. trump managed to do this. we'll see if ford can or not.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-ford-harris-1.4636845

unfortunately, when your apartment constantly smells like drugs and smoke, it's hard to see the value in things like laundry and showering because everything smells bad again in minutes, anyways.

i'm going to have to redo the last load i did.

but i'm coming up against my own stench, right now.

and i actually think that's a good sign - if i can smell myself over the background radiation.

i've been sitting here for hours, unsure if i'm going to fall asleep or not.

either i'll get to work or i'll fall asleep.

i think that when i do crash, i'll be happy to get something a little less broken.

the air is better tonight, but we'll see how long that lasts. i'm even considering showering...

all i've ever posted on the internet, when it comes to modern hardcore, is overly snotty reviews.

i actually don't have the slightest idea why anybody would think i've ever been a modern hardcore fan.

i don't, and never did, have any patience for that kind of thing.

i met some friends near the end of high school that knew i had a large cd collection. i didn't realize it for several years, but they thought i had hundreds of metal cds; in fact, i had hundreds of techno cds. well, industrial & techno.

warp records stuff. nettwerk records stuff. wax trax stuff. nin. thirlwell. coil. electronic pop, like bowie or oldfield. electronic post-rock, like tortoise. kraut/kosmische, like tangerine dream. keyboard-driven prog. goth. new wave.

the balance was mostly psychedelic music, itself often fairly electronic.

and, yeah, there were a few dozen punk discs from the 80s and 90s, as well.

i bought a late megadeath album on cassette once, but sold it within a few months. and, i flirted a little with korn, because they were weird.

but i never listened to, like, refused or anything like that. no "emo" (until the 2010s, when there was that brief moment of arty screamo). never liked that van halen, protest the hero kind of thing. was never my thing. i was listening to instrumental music at the time.

sorry.