i mean....

i get that this guy was being a jerk. and, good riddance. fine.

but, detroit can be frustrating when it comes to this, too. i've never seen a city go so far out of it's way to try and stunt investment.

so, the concern is that people from out of town (many who are white) are coming into the area and spending money. most cities actually go out of their way to design economic stimulus plans because they want that, they don't argue that it's "pushing out the local residents" (many who are black). now, i grasp that the way this guy was doing this appears to actually have been literally pushing out local residents by underpaying or not paying them at all, and bringing in workers that lived elsewhere - and no city would want that either. what everybody ought to want is a scenario where you create economic projects that bring in people from out of town (sometimes called tourists), who then spend their money in the local economy, which is then distributed to the locals, who then have money to spend on what they want to spend it on. that's called stimulus, or investment and it's what you're supposed to want, if you're a vaguely leftist liberal keynesian type. what they seem to want is loans for small businesses, while acknowledging that there's no market for what they're selling, because the poverty rate is structural.

what i'm getting at is what everybody knows: if they set up a bar designed to appeal solely to the local residents, it's going to fail, because they don't have the disposable income. in order to get the disposable income, you need to do things that create jobs - and then you need to find ways to attract people to spend money to pay the workers doing those jobs. then, once they've made some money, they can buy a venue, and put on shows for a local population that has disposable income from the employment created by the outside investment. detroit refuses to get this - it wants the end product without building it. this is just another example.....

i wish they would have tried to unionize or something rather than walk out, because the best outcome for everybody in the short run would have been for el club to keep being el club, and have it's profits better distributed amongst the workers, who could then use them to build the economy they want.

if the bar fails in the end, the neighbourhood loses a substantial income source, and everybody is worse off.

fwiw, the artist that i saw there on saturday - actress - happens to be both british and black.

that doesn't have much to do with why i was there, but it does happen to be actually true.

most of what i saw there were white rock musicians, because that's where they played, because it's where the best sound system was. but, the thing is that detroit is like 80% black, and rock music has a 90% white audience. so, any rock bar anywhere in detroit is going to come up to the same basic contradiction, unless you put it in a suburb like ferndale, which is kind of a shitty deal. it's a lot easier to put the thing downtown.

i guess the answer is to listen better.

but, i mean, i don't have a lot of patience for wage theft, either. if i knew what was going on, i would have  brought the iww in.

i'm hoping they can save the sound system somehow....you don't want that going to waste....

that article actually makes me wonder about what happened to me that night at the bar in february, 2017 where i ended up with a concussion and assumed it was an accident.

hrmmn.

this is very similar to what i heard the other night, so i guess it checks out.

if he's gone, he's gone.

but, the venue is still too small. which, i mean....it's great in the right circumstance. it's just a question of booking the right acts for a small space, and acknowledging that it's not the right space for others.

https://www.metrotimes.com/table-and-bar/archives/2019/02/25/new-ownership-takes-over-el-club-after-founder-accused-of-wage-theft-and-racial-discrimination

i heard some gossip about the situation at el club last night.

what i heard was third hand and one perspective, and i'm not willing to act on it until i hear some more information. but, whatever is happening at the location, it is clearly either scaring people off or pushing them out.

while i don't want to support a bad venue, at the end of the day, i'm going to go to where the bands are playing. and, i want to point something out about el club: it's actually a very small venue.

there's a sign on the door that says capacity: 305.

everything else aside, the sound in the club is good, and it at least ought to be a solid venue for a smaller act to play, if the issues can work themselves out. but, if you're an out of town band, and you think you can fill up a 300 person venue easily, then, everything else aside, i'd suggest you look towards a larger venue, because you're going to sell out el club very fast, and then everybody loses - you sell less tickets, people can't get in and the people that do go end up squished together.

what the city of detroit needs is an el club that can fit 500-600 people in it. what it has are the majestic and st. andrew's. and, the fact is that the culture at el club is no longer that different than the ones at these larger venues.

so, everything else aside, i'd request you think about picking the larger venue, if you think you can sell out el club.

stop for a second.

what are the historical parallels to a character such as osama bin laden? i've compared castro to mithridates eupator, but the pontic rebel is only one in a long line of roman hostis publicus - many of whom modern historians claim never actually existed, or were otherwise so dramatically exaggerated by the roman propaganda that they might as well have never actually existed.

sorting through propaganda, and validating or invalidating it, is a major part of a historian's job description. it is a substantial part of what a historian actually does.

so, i want you to contemplate a very real possibility - that future historians may actually argue that there never was anybody named osama bin laden. and, given the evidence they have before them, it may be the most reasonable deduction.

i will reiterate: this discussion is not currently in the realm of discourse, because the dearth of evidence is so staggering. i would like to be able to have a discussion and/or debate about who was responsible, but i need the government to release it's evidence before i can do that. all any of us can do is speculate, one way or another. the difference between my position and the mainstream position is simply that i am pointing out that the entire accepted narrative is purely speculative, and deductively equivalent to any conspiracy theory. but, then i'm taking a step back and saying "we can't do this. we don't have the basic facts.".

so, i will at least stand with the conspiracy theorists in requesting that the government finally release it's dossier, if for historical documentation rather than anything else. i mean, you don't think that historians 300 years from now are going to think that oswald acted alone, do you? there's enough time now, from that event, to understand that what we are told, and what so many of us continue to believe, is not what history will record.

but, i will lay something down fairly assertively: it is hard for me to understand how this happened without the aid of some kind of state actor, whether it was inside the country or outside of it.

so, to be clear: what that means is that if i do end up supporting the update bill in the end then that doesn't mean that i all of a sudden support nafta.

there's no contradiction in supporting the update package, and continuing to work to rewrite or dismantle the deal. and, if bernie wins, i would hope he pushes to renegotiate.

so, i may decide that this is better and be pragmatic about it, but i am sure that i won't decide that it's good enough, or stop agitating for change.

and, i have been clear for a very long amount of time that i am categorically opposed to intellectual property rights.

do i support the new trade agreement?

of course not, or at least not in absolute terms; this is still nafta, and i've been opposed to nafta for 25 years. that hasn't changed, and the reasons for opposing nafta haven't changed. what's changed is that the liberals and ndp have both swung hard to the right, and are expressing support for something that they used to oppose. i'm still where i always was.

but, the issue before us is not whether we can rip up nafta or not, it's whether we're going to accept the precise provisions, and i haven't seen enough of a close analysis yet to determine whether i think the positives are going to outweigh the negatives.

i mean, i've seen some language about labour standards that i like, and some language about intellectual property rights that i don't like.

the final text of the bill is not yet clear, so i don't know. i may support the revisions to the deal, in the end, while still opposing nafta, overall - or i may decide that the strengthened enforcement of intellectual property rights is more dangerous than the increase in labour standards is worth.

we'll see what the american congress comes up with.

we need to put the process on hold.

you can't be signing deals with an unreliable partner, and the united states is currently an unreliable partner. that is the language we should be using: we cannot rely on you to keep your word, america. and, we need to send a clear message to the americans that if they don't clean up their act then we're not interested in signing further deals with them.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/05/31/no-warning-for-trudeau-of-trumps-latest-tariff-threat.html

actually, i think this is completely absurd and preposterously tyrannical; we can't have the government going in and snooping around in your social media sites and firing you because they don't like your friends. that's despotic.

i hope that he sues for wrongful dismissal, and the court lays down some proper restrictions on what the government is allowed to do and not do, here.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5334013/the-commissionaire-former-door-guard-fighting-rcmp-allegations/

i watched something on lady grey this morning when i came in, and had to take some time to recollect myself. my rationalism is pretty cold, and i understand that the state is power and needs to put down rebels in order to keep being the state, but i have a general soft spot for children in my third law reality. it was never her fault. really. so, is it really the low point of english culture, of british civilization? it might be. for all the depravity that happened under monarchy and feudalism, and under the reign of this particularly murderous monarch, there must be very few documented executions of children.

anyways.

i was late for pile, but they were also unfathomably early. piii-ile! i figured they'd come on at 23:00, earliest, but they were a quarter done when i get there a few minutes after ten. the opening bands must have been very short sets. alas.

they let me in for free again, at least. 

i was just late. no reasons. i think i caught most of it; it seemed to be exclusively selections from the new record, and was good for what it was. and, i got some good rants out in the smoking section before i left.

i need to fast for a blood test tomorrow, so i don't know how useful i'm going to be for the rest of the night/morning, but i could conceivably get some reviews in. or not. i'm not overly focused on it at the moment.

it seems like trudeau tends to agree most with the last person he spoke with.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pence-vp-trudeau-nafta-trade-ratification-1.5155777

i mean, if it's supposed to be a consolation prize, i don't want it.

if they win, can we trade the trophy to get the stanley cup back?

canada has an nba franchise?

whatever.

so, i don't know yet.

i think i have a good idea of where i'd want to go if i go, but i'm not sure if i'm going anywhere, yet. it's going to depend a lot on how the weather shapes up over the next few days.

right now, i'm going to take a nap and then i'll get up and eat and start planning the day.

i identify as gen x because i don't want to be thought of as a millennial, and that isn't an empty statement. if you think people in the 35-55 age demographic have much at all in common with people in the 15-35 age demographic, you're simply wrong. for example, i am not a digital native; my only access to a computer until i was about 15 or so was in the computer lab at school. not only did i not have a cell phone in high school, but almost nobody had one until *after* i'd graduated university. i did not grow up listening to electronic music or hip-hop, but rather grew up listening to rock music from the 70s-90s. all of my cultural references and perspectives exist from the period before the technological revolution took over, and i had to adjust to it just like everybody else that is older than me did. so, i am very, very, very different than a millennial, and you're just going to get bad data if you try and lump me in with them.

am i more like a boomer then? no. as a cultural stereotype, they're fucking awful, selfish people. i mean, they're not all assholes, but being gen x in a lot of ways is defined by a reaction against the nihilistic, hedonistic, corporatist commercialism that defined the boomer generation.

i'd actually make the opposite argument - i'd argue that millenials are more like boomers than gen xers are, and that if you want to do this right, you need to skip generations, because we're all reacting against each other. i actually feel a stronger level of affinity with the parents of the baby boomers than i do with either the baby boomers or the millennials; this is less about young v. old and more about being squeezed between the depravity of the past and the depravity of the future.

if you ask a boomer they'll tell you the same thing, about how they had to rebel against their parents, and then get outgrown by their teenaged kids, who were yelling at them to grow the fuck up by the time they turned 15. and, you will no doubt hear the same thing from millennials, who find themselves frustrated by their children's cynicism and realism - which is something i'm looking forward to.

so, don't walk down this path of trying to separate the culture, or the voters, into young v. old. that's always been wrong; you need to skip generations, because the kids will always reject their parents in favour of their grandparents.

i thought freedom gas was what happened when you have too mean freedom fries.

they'll need to do a lot more than this to ketchup to the russians.

it's a flatly stupid idea that makes no economic sense under any sort of trade theory and is defined solely by american hubris and arrogance, and that's all there is to it.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/department-of-energy-refers-to-natural-gas-as-freedom-gas.html

i will be posting reviews for the last two weeks shortly, but i need to figure out if i'm doing anything this weekend or not yet, first.

this is the right approach, although i will tell you what the right answer is: they need to accept a need for greater water management, one way or the other.

so, maybe you abandon a few areas to the river, but that's a first step and not a last one - you still need to accept that there is going to be more water in the river more often, and find a way to engineer an answer to it.

in windsor, we need to install a modern sewer system and the council is just dragging it's heels on the reality of it. ottawa is going to need better infrastructure to control the river, and it knows how to do it, it has a complex series of locks as it is, it just needs to do the proper surveying of the region in order to figure out where to build what.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/jim-watson-doug-ford-letter-2017-209-floods-1.5154457

i mean, take a look at some of this "fake news".

you don't think we can teach our kids to be able to spot this, to figure it out? then, you have a pretty low level of respect for human cognition, don't you? why not throw away the whole charade, then, and just install a technocracy? we're too stupid to make the right choices, anyways.

i point this out pretty regularly: it was jefferson that argued that you need an informed populace for democracy to make any sense. if you're going to condemn voters to ignorance as a bunch of hapless idiots that need to be conditioned to make the right ballot choice, then you're not really a believer in the principle of democracy, you're just a vulgar gramscian, trying to come up with a sneaky way to manipulate voters into doing what you want them to; you're a machiavellian tyrant, you're not a democrat. we need to be systemic about this, but the purpose has to be in ensuring that voters have the cognitive tools to make an informed, self-interested choice. that's democracy. these other ideas are not.

i am fully confident that a well-educated populace will make the right choice; in fact, so are the oligarchs, and that's why they won't educate us.

don't fall for that; fight for education, not censorship.

we do not have a crisis in social networking.

we have a crisis in critical reasoning.

no.

listen.

this is ideological...

i'm an anarchist, so i believe in collective ownership of property, which is the definition of actual anarchism, but being an anarchist also means that i'm not in support of nanny state policies that try and control people's access to information, how they think or how they act. if i wanted any of that, i'd just be a communist; it is mostly speech issues that are the reason i'm an anarchist and not a communist.

what we need is better media literacy, and better critical thinking skills. as a culture, on both sides of the north american border, we have been trying very hard for generations to eliminate our critical thinking skills. now, we've come up against a technology that is demanding us to be better thinkers, and we're failing to do it, and we're failing to do it because we're not being educated properly. we need to come to terms with the errors we've made in the neo-liberal period, and reverse the cultural decline in the promotion of individuality, of independent thought.

so, i do not support restrictions on social networking; i support a return of critical thinking in the education system. and, it is not a minor concern - it is a very strong ideological break point that you are on one side of and i am on the other side of.

i will stand with the free speech activists, as i always have.

https://fair.org/extra/lie-the-sandinistas-wont-submit-to-free-elections/

i will not be supporting charlie angus when jagmeet singh is forced to resign in the fall.

https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/9395856-charlie-angus-trudeau-government-pushing-for-action-on-tech-giants/

here's a pot calling a kettle black.

yikes.

you can't make up stuff like this; it's in the "too surreal for the onion" category.

and, if this is the approach the government wants to take, it will need to change it's spokesperson in order to generate any sort of credibility whatsoever.

hearing this from freeland cannot be interpreted any way other than as a bad joke; she has absolutely no credibility, whatsoever, at all - and it's 100% entirely her own fault, for excreting such an immensely large volume of completely irredeemable, absolute and total bullshit.

the chinese are right to ignore her.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/chrystia-freeland-canada-china-michael-kovrig-spavor-detained_ca_5ced7e8de4b009400937d74d?ncid=other_trending_qeesnbnu0l8&utm_campaign=trending

yeah.

literally run an actual international banker.

for fuck's sakes.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/05/28/liberal-insiders-looking-at-mark-carney-as-trudeaus-successor.html

because sri lanka is a bastion of free expression and democracy, a place that backwards countries like canada and the uk should strive to be more like in their approach towards civil liberties.

if we only we were more like sri lanka....we can dream, we can hope...one day...if we try really hard....

what an idiotic, absurd farce.

bravo to zuckerberg and sandberg for refusing to give these buffoons the time of day.

and, i will lead the street protests, myself, if i wake up to a facebook ban in this country - a premise that i am not actually taking seriously.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/facebook-grand-committee-tuesday-1.5152436

i hope they increase welfare rates and subsidized housing availability to compensate, because this is a formula to increase the poverty rate.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/alberta-youth-minimum-wage-kenney_ca_5ced628be4b0bbe6e334411b?ncid=other_trending_qeesnbnu0l8&utm_campaign=trending

tornadoes happen when hot air slams into cold air, which is why they happen in transitional periods of the year. so, will climate change produce more tornadoes? well, that depends on if it produces more extreme temperature gradients, and that's a very specific question that is more regional than global.

hurricanes, on the other hand, are caused by very hot surface temperatures over open bodies of water. it is a complicated and dangerous thing to do, as there are so many other factors, but the research that exists does suggest a substantive predictive correlation between rising open temperatures and the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. you can make a very crude but very real connection here: more hot water = more hurricanes. that's legit.

you can't do that with tornadoes, because it's not about the global increase in average temperatures but rather about how large the difference in temperature is between competing air masses.

so, let's say the average summer temperature in your region increases by five degrees celsius, but you still find yourself subject to extreme blasts of winter cold. then, you'd get more tornadoes where you live, as the difference between your hot and cold weather extremes is getting larger, which is what causes the tornadoes. on the other hand, if you live in a region where the winter temperatures increase by a large amount, but the summer temperatures remain moderated by the ocean or something else, then you'll see a decrease in the number of tornadoes.

if climate change works out the way the models suggest, and models have margins of error, then i would suspect that the american midwest would see a decrease in the number of tornadoes, which would get pushed further north into canada. the reasoning behind this is that the higher levels of latent heat in the south would act as a greater buffer for the polar winds. the tornadoes would not stop, they would just move further north. but, the south should not get excited, as that means more hurricanes, instead - and, subsequently, more flooding in the mississippi drainage system.

globally speaking, i wouldn't expect an increase in the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere to create larger temperature gradients overall, unless it is happening in conjunction with something else (like a solar minimum), so much as i would expect to see a difference in the overall distribution of tornadoes. some areas would see less tornadoes, others would see more; the sum total of tornadoes, globally, would remain roughly constant.

it's one thing to run your mouth off on social media where nobody really cares what you say and whether it's true or not, but you expect a congress person to actually take the time to do some proper research if she wants to actually be taken seriously by actual adults.

i remember getting asked to play "marco polo" when i was a kid, and thinking they were talking about exploring china. can't we play gulliver's travels, instead?

wait. why are you all running amok?

it actually took me years to figure out what the fuck they were even talking about.

(i just watched a silly documentary on marco polo who, of course, did not actually exist. at all.)

he should call up richard wolff, and make a big deal out of asking him for advice.

he is the expert, here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/05/28/bernie-sanders-backs-policies-dramatically-shift-corporate-power-us-workers/

this article is based on 35 year-old propaganda that is relevant to almost nobody alive today.

the premise is that sanders ought to be in trouble because he supported a communist government in central america in the 80s, but sanders' position is that this wasn't a communist government, and he's right: it wasn't. sanders is even letting the right define the term "communist", which is far too generous, but at least allows for the debate to exist around defined terms; he is conceding the definition of "communist" as "unelected dictatorship", then pointing out that the sandanistas were actually a democratically elected government.

now, here's the thing: if you're like 80 years old, maybe you remember the talking points from the reagan administration and the propaganda from whatever the government news network was in the 80s. i think it was actually abc at the time. something like this might reactivate memories of ancient propaganda, and set you off like a manchurian candidate. it's possible.

but, to 90% of the voting population, the war in nicaragua is something you read about in a history book. and, guess what the history books say? the truth of the matter: that the sandanistas were democratically elected, and in fact very popular amongst the voting populace. it was their popularity that necessitated us intervention, because this is what america has been doing overseas for years: overthrowing popularly elected governments and replacing them with repressive dictatorships, like the contras.

now, you're going to try and counter my statements with some government lies, but, listen, that doesn't work anymore, because we're talking about history, and the books have already been written. the whole world knows this lie.

i'd encourage republicans to push this point; it will only help him, because the fact is that bernie was right.

but, what i'm more curious about is what anybody has to say about biden's role in iran-contra. that is a serious political liability.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/bernie-sanders-pro-sandinista-past-problem.html

and, just for the record: i have never at any point in my life ever listened to anything labelled 'ebm'.

i liked the punk rock component of industrial music, but was interested largely in the politics, not in the sexuality of it. industrial music was initially an outgrowth of the radical leftism in the punk movement. what you call 'ebm' was largely the undoing of this. all of a sudden, industrial music was about leather and black makeup, instead of radical leftist organizing - and if you're more interested in black lipstick than noam chomsky, or you don't even know what the fuck i'm even talking about, then we're simply not coming at this from the same perspective. i have absolutely no interest in that subculture at all.

it is true that genesis p'orridge was an important person in the early rave scene, but he was an old situationist, and he was just looking for a bunch of kids to radicalize. but, nonetheless, i would consider the outgrowth of actual techno to be more "industrial" than ebm is. i'll repeat that: techno music is a better evolution of the ideals underlying industrial music than ebm is.

but, in the 90s, when people used the term ebm, it was contrasted against something else: idm. you had what was called "electronic body music" that existed for the purposes of exploring hedonism and bohemianism through sex, drugs and empty commercialism. this was a very american means of expression, but i hated it to it's core. on the other hand, you had what was called "intelligent dance music" that existed for the purposes of exploring electronic sound design as an art form. this was a more european form, and actually primarily british during this stage, rather than german. my tastes in electronic music were defined by what was called "idm", and included an interest in artists like autechre, aphex twin and squarepusher.

so, if you thought i'd show up at an ebm show, you don't know me very well; if you knew me at all, you'd have known i would have stated a pretty vehement disinterest in the form.

the kind of industrial music i like is essentially a combination of techno and punk rock, in the sense that it combines the anarchist social values of punk rock with the music of techno. it has not really existed since skinny puppy's first break up in 1994.

again: i understand that it's warm in much of the rest of the...well, the world....right now, but the fact is that it is cold in eastern canada right now, and that includes detroit and chicago. further, we can argue about why the jet stream is the way it is right now, but it's clear enough that the reason we're experiencing what we're experiencing is that the jet stream is running unusually far to the south for this time of year, which is allowing colder arctic air to stream down to the lower latitudes. this arctic air is usually bottled up by this time of year, a process that has yet to happen this year. so, we can debate why this is happening [i claim that we're at the bottom of a solar cycle, and this is both predictable and quite 'normal'; you might argue for something else], but we know the mechanics of what's happening well enough - the jet stream is running lower than normal, this year.

the longest day of the year is june 21st. if this yearly process of bottling up doesn't happen soon, it might not happen at all - and this winter is going to be brutal as a result.

so, i will state this as clearly as i can: if you live north or east of detroit or chicago, do not be surprised if it doesn't really warm up at all this year, even while the city 50 miles south of you has another record warm year. there's a hard boundary asserting itself up the st lawerence right now, and the weather this year could be starkly, even frighteningly, different depending on what side of it you're on.

but, things can happen to shift the jet stream that are not related to the sun. remember: this isn't about measuring how much light the earth is being bathed within, so much as it's about magnets operating on the outside of the earth, which is tilted slightly away from the sun. so, the sun is only one input variable, and the actual shape of the jet stream will be determined by a complicated interaction of many, many variables, not only by one.

an active hurricane system could set the jet stream off, and at least give us some reprieve, although the solar condition right now would likely mean that this cold air would shift rather than retreat. so, if you get hurricanes in the right position in the ocean, you'll end up with the cold moving from toronto to calgary, and that would be better for everybody that matters.

that is probably the best we can do, this year.

but, i'm not predicting a deep minimum, i'm just pointing out the reality of a local one. the sun will be back soon.

if i were mark zuckerberg, i would be proud to be found in contempt of a parliament that shows nothing but contempt for the citizens it pretends to represent.

mark zuckerberg is not a canadian citizen, and owes our parliament absolutely nothing. he should raise the issue with his ambassador, who should strongly rebuke us for bullying a foreign citizen to raise cheap political points.

the parliament, and the ruling liberals, should be ashamed of itself.

and, with each stupid, hare-brained attempt to save itself from it's own abysmal failure at ruling, this dying government digs itself further into the notoriety of quite plausibly being the worst government the country has ever seen.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/facebook-contempt-parliament-1.5145347

the fact is that i'm pretty exhausted, even now. i'll be fine in a few hours, but i probably made the right choice. i may have started getting messy if i tried to push it much longer.

to be clear: the choice i had on sunday afternoon at 13:30, after staub, was to wait around until the next raft of parties started, which was really not until 22:00, although i would have snuck the shoegaze show in in the evening as i was waiting. if i had biked down to the diner for 14:00, and finished eating at 15:00 or 16:00, i would have almost certainly passed out as i was waiting for the shoegaze show to start, at 18:00. i would have had to have kept myself occupied in order to avoid passing out.

this is why i was hoping staub would run until at least 16:00. that way, i could dance away the afternoon, eat and hit the rock concert. alas...

on the way home, i was toying with the idea of eating at home and going back but i didn't even get that far; i crashed within seconds of getting in the house. i was legitimately exhausted. and, while i could have maybe slept from 14:00-20:00 and made it back out for 00:00, i didn't really seriously contemplate it.

so, i would have needed a short, free party to crash for the afternoon, to patch in, from around 15:00-18:00. but i'm double checking the after-parties schedule and sunday afternoon looks like it was actually a dead point. there were early morning shows that ended at noon, over-priced brunches, and some over-priced day parties. but, the only thing really happening was the festival, itself.

so, i can see what would have happened - i would have ended up trying to hang out at mocad or something and falling asleep at the table. then, i would have struggled through the shoegaze show and gone home, anyways.

but, i'm still relatively new to this, and they do the same shows every year, more or less. i can revisit this next time.

if i had skipped staub and left early, i could have been back for the freaklimate show, meaning i would have been looking at starting late on sunday night, then looking for an early morning party on monday, before going to day parties on monday, the monday night party and then probably not the early morning tuesday party. while the prospect of wasting five hours early on monday morning is probably easier than the prospect of wasting three hours later on sunday afternoon, it's still the same problem - and i'd no doubt be exhausted by the monday night show.

no. i like the idea of having the rock show on sunday night, but i'm also not exactly a big fan of either of those bands. i rather want to hope that somebody books something solid up against movement on the sunday, next year, and i'm able to find the logic for the extra push. i think i planned the right path, it just didn't work out.

it's also cold in detroit right now, and i knew that was going to be the case, and i think it had an effect on my thought process. if it was sunny and hot, rather than cold and rainy, i might have decided i can weather it out with a coffee in the park. but, you get that chill in your bones and start craving a blanket.

i know i can't win this mental battle; i might feel a little regret for coming home "early", but i suspect i'd have regretted going, too, as i'm not able to get up to the monday night show. i would have probably needed to sleep all day today, and not likely to get out again until tuesday. the question is whether i ought to be at the sunday show or the monday show, i guess. so, it really is a choice between one or the other, isn't it?

so, this year, i think i did what made the most sense. but, i'm hoping to pull this off that little bit better next year, to get at least one absurdly long day in....

i hope the weather co-operates, too. people are no doubt frustrated by the cold, right now.

and, of course, i was staunchly opposed to the invasion of iraq, as were most canadians, on the basis that it was illegal under international law, and threatened to erode the international global order, which it has done.

further, i have no memory of engaging with any media that suggested that saddam hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. my memory was that the media and government assigned the attacks to al qaeda, and the reason the united states invaded iraq was to dismantle the "weapons of mass destruction", which the international inspection teams were adamant did not exist, and for which no evidence was ever found to demonstrate their existence.

if there was ever a debate about invading iraq as retaliation for 9/11, i completely missed that. sorry.

for the record.

my initial hypothesis of the world trade centre attack was that it was an inside job. what i mean when i say that is that my initial feeling when living through the attacks was not "the united states is under attack", but instead "the united states military is launching a coup". so, that was my starting point, my initial condition, my base assumption.

however, i have never been involved with, organized with or even really communicated with any kind of "truther" movement. further, the minimal amount of information i've sorted through from these groups has largely struck me as a series of red herrings. broadly speaking, even if they could make their arguments convincingly, it wouldn't actually prove anything.

what are the actual facts, here?

1) the united states government has never released any kind of evidence that bin laden or al qaeda were involved in the attacks. strictly factually and legally speaking, the official position of the united states government - the hypothesis, stated without any proof, that a shady terrorist group called al qaeda blew up several buildings in downtown new york - is actually the most fully developed conspiracy theory in the history of conspiracy theories. no conspiracy theory has produced more media, or generated more speculation. but, there is absolutely no proof at all, whatsoever, for this claim.

2) while there are some inconsistencies in the government's story, it's hardly enough to prove they're lying.

3) the "truther movement" appears to be more interested in distracting from meaningful questions than generating meaningful answers. to state that they have failed to present a compelling alternate hypothesis would be an understatement.

4) the failure of the "truther movement" to articulate their argument compellingly does not mean they're wrong.

i am not going to kneejerk against "conspiracy theorists", or tarnish the concept of alternative research. i do not have a religious epistemology but a scientific one, meaning that i am not looking for absolute truth anywhere in existence, but rather for a series of constantly changing, constantly shifting approximations to reality. as we study and learn more about things, our understanding of them changes. historians, too, are constantly reevaluating evidence to uphold or deny the historical record, to try and figure out what is propaganda and what is actually true. the historical constant is not in any concept of absolute truth, but in the fact that governments are constantly lying to advance their own interests, meaning that the role of the historian is to question what a government says, not to accept it on face value. there is consequently a proper role for conspiracy theory in academic discourse, so long as it is approached using the scientific method. and, i'm actually going to label you a mindless idiot and slam the door in your face if you disagree with me about that. einstein, darwin, gallileo, marx - these were all conspiracy theorists in their day. understand that before you sharpen your knives; we need to collectively be more proactive in our critical thinking skills, to learn how to weigh evidence on our own, and not to rely on the dictates of official media and government narratives. our existence as a free thinking, scientifically-inquiring culture relies upon it.

so, in my mind, you don't win the argument by yelling "conspiracy theory". you need to be more rigorous than that - you need to cite evidence, you need to cite proof.

but, my analysis of the situation right now is that neither side of the debate has done that. the government's official conspiracy theory is no more convincing to me than the one presented by the truthers. neither argument passes basic scientific scrutiny, and neither argument would hold up in a court of law. it follows that the correct position to take on the topic is agnosticism; an honest observer would have to state that it is not at all clear who was responsible for the attack, and either hypothesis is equally valid until such a time comes as more evidence is revealed by the government to properly scrutinize.

the truthers have made a rather dramatic error, though, in trying to gather positive evidence that the government was responsible. short of finding direct electronic communication documenting the attacks - and if it was done from inside the government then these documents would exist in the proper agency - there was never going to be any convincing way to prove the government did this. these documents would need to be declassified before you could even have a meaningful conversation about the topic, and they will be one day, and we will no doubt learn that the truthers had a few decent insights, even if the smoking gun remains redacted. there are periods of byzantine history where the best way we can describe the existing historical record is to state that we know that records were destroyed and rewritten for that period; we can know that the history is wrong, without knowing what the actual history was, and therefore know that we can't know what actually happened. this may end up being the correct academic perspective in the long run - we may have to accept we'll never actually know.

i would recommend waiting for the government to actually release an unredacted version of their dossier before commenting further.

until then, both unproven hypotheses are equally valid - if you believe in science and evidence, and uphold critical thinking, and won't be intimidated by the senseless bully pulpit that is the corporate media.

these marijuana condensates floating around nowadays can be quite potent. how you react to a "dab" is ultimately a question of tolerance, but there is a possibility that you might overwhelm yourself and need some time to recuperate. 

if you're in a scenario like that, you don't need water, because you're not dehydrated. don't get me wrong: i like water as much as the next person. if you want some water, have some water. but, it doesn't take the edge off of the high; it's not a meaningful solution to anything.

a better idea would actually be coffee. but, there's ultimately not another option besides waiting it out.

so, if you find yourself knocked over after a dab, the reality is that you simply ingested too much thc too fast and now you're just simply too stoned to move and flatly need to wait for your body to process it.

the good news is that you can be quite confident it will pass relatively quickly. you're not likely to lose consciousness, to black out, to lose your memory or to otherwise lose your individuality as a conscious person, to become somebody else. it's more of a frustration than a serious danger, even if your body is clearly putting the brakes on in telling you that it can't process that much thc that fast.

the delivery mechanism is engineered for habitual users that don't get much out of smoking pot anymore. it's meant to be intense, and if you don't have the tolerance, you're going to get knocked down.

so, if you were worried about my well being or otherwise curious about why i seemed in a daze at around 6:00 this just past sunday morning, that's your answer. i wasn't overdosing on anything, i wasn't suffering from exhaustion or dehydration, i didn't need water (although i appreciate the offer) and i wasn't even drunk. rather, i found myself way too stoned after hitting some intense condensate and had to let it pass. that was all.

i recovered fairly well, actually, and was able to keep dancing until they closed marble at 13:00. i was still feeling that dab five hours after it happened though, which is an unusually long period for a marijuana high. so, i got distance from it after the initial intense reaction.

i'm not trying to scare anybody; in fact, i'd do exactly what i did a second time. i'm just reminding everybody that that shit is powerful, and the reaction i experienced is not unexpected. it really was just pot.

i had a good night, actually. actress was phenomenal, and while i wish the night was staggered a bit better i did manage to at least get a bit of everything i wanted to dance to.

saturday/sunday
23:00-02:00: actress [el club]
02:30-05:00: texture [marble]  [rubinstein, parasole]
05:15-?07:00?: art park  [intense dab @ ~ 6:00]
?07:15?-13:00: staub [marble]

if staub had gone on a little longer, i would have ended the night at one of these two spots:
18:00-00:00: basement & nothing [majestic]
00:00-07:00: freaklimate [salon]

but, the five hour wait was too daunting for me and i opted to get home, instead.

i'll be back out tomorrow afternoonish.

bernie's stance on iran is a ballot question, not a gaffe.

if you're that angry about it, you'll need to vote against it - because i can assure you that there are plenty of people that will very explicitly and very consciously vote against another war in the middle east.

friday:
20:00-21:00: detroit techno militia pre-party [bookie's]
21:30-22:00: prelude [northern lights]
22:30-06:30: modern cathedrals [tangent]

i should have showed up earlier and stayed at bookie's until 22:00, but the afternoon got thrown off waiting for a party i didn't go to to release the address, which ended up being too far from tangent to bounce between, and i was hoping to catch a different vibe at northern lights, which was more of a patio party than a dance club. i wanted to dance last night, but it might may have been nice to stop and listen to some modular synth noise in between aerobics sessions; i was hoping they'd end up in midtown or newtown, but they ended up in southwest, and it wasn't feasible.

besides that tweak - i should have went to bookie's earlier and stayed there later - i had a good, clear night and actually felt pretty refreshed when i got home, although i had no option but to sleep.

round two is either going to be extreme or absurd, depending on how it flows.

this was the best one.

i don't mean to pick on the catholics. really.

that wasn't even ridiculous or offensive at all.

this is ridiculous and offensive. and sacreligious, too.

i'm hoping to have a fun, painless weekend. y'all know i'm there to dance. but, the world is full of assholes, so i'm going to lay down a pre-emptive strike.

let's hope it doesn't come to this, let's hope nobody decides i'm an easy target to strike and goes after me.

but, we'll let this guy do the talking, if you decide you want to pick on me.

again: i felt great this evening after getting some exercise in some warm weather, but this is being ruined by the second-hand smoke from upstairs. i can't understand how anybody could think it's a good idea to prescribe this for depression; all that smoking drugs all the time is ever going to do is make you feel like shit.

an actual doctor would tell you to get some exercise and some fresh air, not to do drugs and vegetate like a mushroom. the quackery is baffling. and, what's more baffling is how many stupid people out there are actually falling for it.

depressed? you don't need drugs. you need exercise. you don't need tar and smoke and carcinogens, you need clean, fresh air.

he went to work for a few days last week, then stopped going again. and, despite what he says, the source of the smoke is clearly his space, even if i can't prove it's actually him.

i'm going to wait a few more hours to turn the fan back on, but it's going to need to be on all day to clear the space out. i'm willing to utilize the fan as a kind of punishment for the time being: if he's going to stay up all night and smoke drugs in the house, i'll turn the fan on all day. if he stops or tones it down, i'll turn it off. and, i'll have to escalate as the situation worsens.

i have no sympathy for somebody that claims they have to do drugs because they're depressed - that is bullshit on every possible level.

the conservatives remain stagnant, but the liberal bleed in every direction - including, i will state again, to the people's party, as that is where those voters are moving from, not the conservatives - is getting to a crisis point.

the only thing that is preventing the liberals from completely collapsing at this point is the reality that the ndp is even less popular.

we're on the path to yet another accidental conservative minority, right now - or worse.

http://www.nanos.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Political-Package-2019-05-17-FR.pdf

so, this is apparently what happened to create a change in policy.

meanwhile, i had to purchase a bicycle in farmington hills and bike it back to town, then leave it locked at the blue cross building beside the renaissance centre, where it rusted up over two winters.

sanity prevailed in the end.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/steely-nerved-steely-dan-fan-bikes-the-tunnel-makes-concert

but, there's a walmart at the next exit, and no large retailer can compete with that.

the mall should consider splitting it up into smaller stores.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/lots-and-lots-of-interest-in-former-sears-store-at-devonshire-mall

it felt good to get some exercise in some warm weather today; it's been far too long. and, i am now hungry...

i looked at three bicycles today, and bought the third one. this is copied from the kijiji ad, and is the exact bike:

it's actually quite similar to the one i left in detroit, but it's maybe an upgrade all around: thicker tires, better gears, better brakes. i just need to get the seat up a tad, and it's going to ride like a dream.

$40. cad.

and, that's my new detroit bike.

i'll say this again: if there's something i've posted somewhere that you're confused by, please feel free to bring it up, and i'll try to make sure you understand why you're confused about it. i can only do so much to help you understand, but i can at least clarify any misconceptions you might have, if you're specific enough about the point that you've misunderstood.

test

i don't seem to receive text messages any more, either.

the mailto:deathtokoalas feature appears to have stopped working.

or been intercepted.

frustrating....

test

to state it tersely: what trudeau has done is brought back the house of lords. and, he's supposed to be a whig, too; it's quite shameful, really.

and, now we're going to have to abolish it.

this may seem like a strange debate outside of canada.

our bicameral legislature isn't modeled after the body in the united states, but is rather a direct evolution of the british system. so, we have a house of commons - a parliament - and something we call a "senate", which is really a house of lords. for decades, the house of lords came into disuse, reduced to patronage appointments for political expediency. and, it is true that it was a waste of money, but this was a minor concern in the larger scheme of things - reducing it to patronage appointments at least prevented it from being used to overturn the will of the house, which is the actual expression of democracy in the country.

the conservatives used to argue for an elected senate, but they haven't done that in a while. it is very quintessentially canadian of me to oppose this proposal, which is generally denigrated across the spectrum as an americanizing policy. our entire system of government was designed to try and prevent the gridlock that exists in the american system. i know that americans love their checks and balances in order to prevent tyranny, but, standing in canada, i'm willing to finger your broken system of government as the root cause of most of your social problems. i don't want to create a system where one house is fighting against the other all of the time. so, i am opposed to an elected senate for the reason that i don't want the gridlock and inefficiency inherent in the american system.

further, abolishing the senate would eliminate the only check that we have. we don't want the senate to actually do anything, except when it has to do something. again: this is very canadian of me.

but, a tanker ban is hardly the kind of pressing concern that needs to trigger an undemocratic seizure of the state, and an oil industry lobbyist is hardly the correct vehicle to overturn the democratic will of the country. the danger of maintaining the senate, always abstract and distant when it was kept in disuse, has now been made apparent and obvious, and freethinking peoples that uphold the primacy of the popular will must mobilize to prevent the country from falling further into tyranny.

the senate wasn't broken before, but it is now.

it must be abolished.

i used to argue that the senate wasn't broken, and there wasn't a need to fix it.

i have been starkly critical of trudeau's reforms, arguing that they were going to bring about a constitutional crisis, and lead to a need to make more dramatic changes. we've been slowing moving to this point....

as of this day forward, i am now officially aligning with the ndp on the senate: i am in favour of complete abolition.

this is not the kind of thing that happens in a democracy, it is the kind of thing that happens in a country like iran.

i am deeply embarrassed by what just happened.

what this is is a constitutional crisis.

nobody voted for this woman, and her undemocratic exercise of power flies in the face of everything that this country's democratic traditions stand for.

i would call on paula simmons to resign immediately, and for the trudeau government to immediately reverse all of the undemocratic reforms that have led to this disastrous outcome for canadian democracy.

she has not just broken the senate, she has broken her own dignity, and the country's own self-worth. congratulations canada: you're a backwards, despotic country with an unelected ruling class.

bravo.

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/no-i-havent-broken-the-senate/

if the rules are changing from global governance back to empire again, canada is going to need to shift from the role of arbiter to the role of agitator and provocateur - or lose it's sovereignty to a more dominant power, of which there is only one serious competitor.

i want to be clear: we can't accept this new new world order, whether it's being pushed down from the south or from the east. canada was a prime author of the rules-based system that came out of world war two, and as a part of the coalition that won the war, we helped write the rules in our favour. our sovereignty is a corollary of this; we will lose it if we return to an age of empires.

but, we have to understand it before we can react to it.

it does not appear as though the government has clued in yet, and it had better catch up pretty quick.

china does not interpret canada as a sovereign country, but rather as a client state of the american empire. they would expect us to conduct our relations through washington - just as they would expect washington to conduct relations with the chinese clients through beijing.

a regional governor does not meet with a foreign emperor; that would be inappropriate.

in fact, the chinese no doubt view the mere act of sending a delegation as insolent and worthy of punishment. if tibet or hong kong were to send a delegation directly to washington (that boat has already sailed in taiwan), the chinese would no doubt punish them for it.

china is an empire with imperial ambitions, and sees the world as empires with imperial ambitions do.

so, what does canada do? this is the old, hard problem in canadian politics: how do we balance our sovereignty with our geography? in the case of countries with different ruling philosophies, careful balancing acts are required and necessary. i think it should be clear to everybody that this isn't possible in the chinese case, as they are making a point to interpret us as a province.

canada tends to prefer discourse to conflict, but if the chinese get their way then we become a state. it's hard to see how there's any room for compromise.

the actual reality is that canada is probably better off cutting it's losses and trying to cause problems on china's periphery by creating stronger alliances with the koreans, the vietnamese, the japanese, etc. so long as the chinese insist that we are an american client that must communicate with them through washington, we should do what we can to increase the independence of the countries on the chinese periphery, and insist that we do not need to go through beijing to get to them.

but, the canadian government is delusional if it thinks there is any future of normalized relations between canada and china. they don't see us as an independent actor, and we're not in their sphere of interest or their sphere of influence - and this is the language being used by the chinese and americans right now, as they carve up the world without us.

we're not invited.

the truth is that i was hit on by both genders at mocad last week, and while it is unlikely that i'm going to go for a dude (and i think facial hair is revolting, remember - if you want to hit on me, please shave first.), there is absolutely no possibility at all, whatsoever, that i'm going to go for a female.

so, that girl had absolutely no chance. at all. zero. zilch.

and, that dude would have needed to shave, first - at least.

do you know how i actually react to the gpdr requirements, the pop-ups, the scripts that slow everything down, waste resources, kill bandwidth and just annoy the fuck out of everybody?

i have a javascript blocker in my taskbar. whenever i get the nag from the eu parliament (thanks. assholes.), i just prevent the page from running scripts and hit refresh.

i don't want to answer that question over and over again, and that's my primary issue here, as a voter - make the nagging stop. please.

i'd be more likely to vote for somebody promising to exempt canada from the eu rules than somebody promising to enforce them here.

if you don't want to share your personal information, don't upload it.

and, it should be up to the individual to manage what they're allowing through software, not up to the government to regulate it.

this is a job for firefox, not a job for the legislature.

but, i will reiterate: it is not the government's role or responsibility to protect a segment of a free citizenry from the free expression or speech of another section of it, and any suggestions that it is have no place in the discourse of a free and democratic society.

this is a non-starter.

if you want a guardian council, move to iran.

there's not a lot of details released so far, and, as i said before, it seems more like political rhetoric than actual policy - and again reflective of the alternate reality that this government exists within. i mean, who the fuck wants the government policing the internet? twitter?

it sounds to be me like they're trying to ruin the internet, and this is going to be horribly unpopular with everybody outside of the twittersphere, and probably cost them votes and maybe even seats.

but, as an aside, the extensive negotiation process enforced by the eugpdr every time you want to visit a website sure is absolutely fucking annoying and inconvenient, isn't it? can i not opt out of the eugpdr? i don't even live there.

you can't have "online privacy", it's a contradiction in terms. the internet is a public forum, and you need to treat it like one.

i guess i don't really care if people are paranoid about this, but i don't want it to inconvenience me in any way, and i'd like to have the option to just opt-in to data sharing, manage what i'm exposing myself to on my own and not be asked about it every thirty seconds.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/05/21/new-digital-charter-to-emphasize-canadians-control-over-personal-data.html

the difference is just that i understand that.

so, you think you have friends.

but, you don't.

none of us do.

what i learned a long time ago is that friendship is one of the many contradictions that are irresolvable within capitalism, and this is really just a question of maturity and life experience in getting your head around. i could even go so far as to define an adult as the following...

adult: a person that has experienced betrayal.

it's not a question of doing things differently, of changing yourself or of surrounding yourself with more pure people. it's a socio-cultural reality of the economic system we live in: friendship under capitalism is a joke, and you're a buffoon to suggest otherwise.

now, i don't want to be cynical about this, though. pointing out that we can't have friendship and capitalism at the same time isn't to doom friendship as a concept, so much as it is to present a pre-condition for it's realization. i mean, it's easy enough to see the truth of it: i'm too gentle for this, too lost in a set of discredited ideals. so, i'd be happy to be your friend, if i wasn't convinced you were trying to kill me.

as it is, i keep to myself because i know i'm too fragile, too vulnerable to exist.

i'm friendly. everybody knows that. but, i'll never trust you, and i'd ask that you respect that in not expecting me to.

what?

there's a quote about dancing and revolutions that is always relevant, but i like this one better:

your friends don't dance, and if they don't dance then they're no friends of mine.

it would be easier if everybody went to my bandcamp or patreon site on the side there and gave me $26, granted.

but, resistance means withholding labour as much as possible, even if it merely reduces you to an insolent slave, crying through the beating, in the end.

while i do acknowledge at this point that i've been out of work for so long (i haven't had a full time job since 2008) that i would likely be unable to find meaningful employment should i try (and i haven't tried since 2011, after spending 2008-2010 and 2012-2013 in school), and i likewise acknowledge that i have had no choice but to work in the past and done so out of threat of homelessness and starvation, i think i've been as clear as a human can be that i don't actually want a job at all.

i have presented lengthy, detailed arguments around this point, presenting labour in a capitalist society as a waste of time and life wasted on employment as a sad, pathetic, wasted life. the individual's task in a society such as ours is not to find employment or work it's way up the ladder to the top, but rather to avoid labour as much as possible. true freedom means abolishing capitalism, but the only way to approximate freedom within a system of capitalism is to escape the market as much as is possible.

stated tersely, there is absolutely nothing that employment can offer me that is worthwhile, no task that is fit for a free human being. all employment reduces to some kind of market relation, which is by definition reducible to slavery. my aspirations are strictly and purely in the realm of free expression: music, literature, politics and etc. all that any sort of employment could ever do is interfere with my real aspirations, thereby slowing me down and wasting my time. there is consequently no end point for me in employment other than misery, and most likely suicide.

i know that the world is full of people that would love a six figure salary, a 9-5 job and a loving family. i doubt i'd last more than a few months without losing my mind, and i am certain that i would choose death over slavery to possessions and status if it were to come down to it. if i woke up tomorrow with a high-paying job, a paid for house and a loving partner, i would instantly start planning a way to get a divorce, sell the house and live off of the investments. i could probably live for free for three years just by selling the car, right?

the evidence that i actually believe what i've been saying over and over again for years is in truth pretty overwhelming, if you ask anybody that's ever known me or seen me behave - the jobs i've quit or turned down, the life decisions i've made, the arguments and comments i've articulated and etc really going back to the time i was 15. the point i'm getting at with this post is that any attempt to suggest differently is just being dishonest. you don't have a clever diagnosis from a distance, and your pop psychology is bullshit pseudoscience. your argument is not intelligent; it's invalid. i mean what i say - and you're dishonest if you insist otherwise. and, this is going to be my approach if you push it - i'm going to wag my finger at you widely and thoroughly, and make sure that everybody knows that you're a worthless, piece of shit liar, regardless of how much stolen wealth you've accumulated, or how much time you wasted doing so.

we can have a discussion about the merits of capitalism, if you'd like. i like doing that, i think that's obvious. but, you need to take me at face value when i argue that the biggest problem with capitalism is how boring the quality of life is, and how meaningless existence is as a result of it. i mean, i didn't make this stuff up, you know - i can cite some smart people if you really want, from the ancient story of sisyphus to camus and all the anarchists in between. and, you can save your psychoanalytical pseudo-scientific bullshit for your victims. don't you waste your time on me....

i tried to turn off the fan again last night and then took a nap, and i when i woke up the headache was coming back in. i caught it before it "turned over", so i'm kind of sitting on the brink - i'm either going back into a migraine, or it's going to pass.

and, again, i could smell it. it's cigarette smoke, specifically. so, i've got the fan back on....

i left off on may 10th, meaning i lost ten days. and, i did feel better, but now i feel like shit again - and, specifically, i'm completely unable to focus on anything.

everything else aside, that's the thing that is making this so frustrating to me: once my head starts racing, i get scatterbrained and useless and i can't focus on anything.

i need complete sobriety in order to be productive. maybe you're different, but that's me - any drug at all makes me useless.

let's hope the fan clears the shit out of here and i can refocus in short order. if not, i'm just going to get slowed down that much further.

i mean, the real winners here are lawyers.

the bill that is floating through the congress right now - referred to as the equality act - is something that has been introduced at many levels of government in many places. it took something like ten years to get it passed at both the federal level and provincial level in ontario, but it has been law here now for several years. in fact, the process that led to our version of the equality act coming into law may be well known to people around the world because it is the exact amendment that produced jordan peterson's shamefully disingenuous and dishonest transphobic rant around the use of gender pronouns. if you're wondering what the fuck he was even talking about, the bill passed by the house of representatives is exactly the same thing that he had a demagogic panic attack over.

and, i'll be clear enough - i support these word changes in the law. i mean, if we're to enforce anti-discrimination laws, these are things that should be covered, certainly.

but, there's a tendency for observers to exaggerate the nature of a victory such as this.

i don't think that discrimination - of any sort - is something that you fix with government policy, but rather something that you fix by radical social activism. this is a tool for activists to use, and activists should be thankful for it, but it is a first step in the process rather than a last one and, in the long run, we'll get further with honest attempts at social inclusion than the heavy machinery of human rights litigation.

so, my response is muted, and it's no accident - it may be overdue, but i don't see these kinds of things as the victory that others do.

i was watching a kind of anti-putin propagandist make the awkward, if at this point widely stated, confluence of stalin with putin (because putin is responsible for how many deaths?), when he made the inevitable transitive projection: was stalin worse than hitler?

and, he deferred to the crude numbers, but then pulled back, as hitler's gross death toll would have no doubt been far greater in the end, including an additional 30 million soviet citizens, if his plans were to be be believed feasible, and we do have every reason to think he would have at least tried.

looking at hitler's plans for the soviet union, which he just labelled "living space", as though it were an uninhabited frontier land, are a useful prop in truly understanding his own depravity, and how truly divorced from any kind of theory or logic that it truly was. much of what we today call indo-european studies - which is an objective scientific study of a well-understood migration of peoples about six to eight thousand years ago and not a racist pseudo-science - came into being after the war, and much of it was developed by the soviets themselves, but even in hitler's time it was widely understood that the urheimat of indo-european speakers, religion and cultural origin must have been somewhere in the russian steppes.

what kind of white supremacist calls for the destruction of his own race?

in truth, when you look at the list of groups that hitler was calling for the extermination of, you see a veritable rainbow benetton coalition. at the top of the list, we have the jews and the gypsies, who are at least widely interpreted as non-white. somewhere rather far down the list you have the africans, who were certainly deemed inferior, but not of any pressing concern. more important to wipe out were the homosexuals and the communists, who would have mostly been white, in context. the irish, as white they were, were subhuman; the english were lazy, the slavs were useless eaters. but, alliances were forged with the oriental japanese, the swarthy italians and spaniards and even a number of turkish and muslim groups in the middle east. that doesn't really add up, does it?

but it was his plans for the slavs, specifically, that are so clarifying. the slavs are the whitest people on the planet, yet he appeared to have every intention of simply depopulating the old russian empire and moving his germans in to replace the extinct indigenous groups. and, he was explicit: the slavs needed to be exterminated. outright.

it was simply madness, full stop, and trying to make too much sense of it is simply not worthwhile.

trump will put those tariffs back in place as soon as it is convenient for him to do so, and we will all look very foolish when he does, won't we?

it may create a different kind of canadian politician in the long run.

in the short run, the government's focus should be on delaying ratification until the next president takes office.

what's the deal with my bike?

well, it was still there, actually - badly rusted, and with a beat up and cracked locked, but still there. i would classify it as unusable, but potentially salvageable.

i unlocked it and left it there; it's probably gone by now, but if it isn't then it's yours if you want it.

i'm just going to buy a new one and keep it inside; i can bring it back and forth under the tunnel, now.

and, that was the afternoon, although i had to stop when i realized it wasn't actually hot and humid out but cold and raining, instead. before the weekend, probably.

it is not possible for bernie to say anything right about abortion.

he must defer at every opportunity.

i'm sure he knows that.

facebook is so painfully slow....

it took all night, but i at least planned a path through detroit on the movement weekend. i am going to be a little obscure, but you may or may not see me at: tangent, el club, marble, the art park, the majestic theatre, the leland club and/or the tv lounge over the weekend. i will not be at the actual plaza festival, but i am planning on being out for three very long side parties over the course of the weekend, not unlike last year, although the venues will not be the same.

and, now i'm sleepy.

i want to get caught up on this by the end of the week. i think i can do that.

naw, i'm staying in tonight.

i was going to go to some all night dub step thing, but that makes no sense for a lot of reasons. dub step is horribly frustrating; it should be the forefront of electronic music, but it's in truth just about the worst cliche this side of la bamba.

but, i feel a hundred million thousand times better. let's hope the weather comes in stronger next weekend and we have a better summer this year.

that means it was just a slight return. just a little one. not the whole thing, just the start. soon...

(it's those giants hands. they could move mountains.)

how was the show?

well, i've skipped the opportunity to see them quite a few times in the past. i'm not really a big fan, either - i've been watching from a distance for years and years, pretty consistently frustrated that they never really went to the next level in their sound. think of it this way: my tastes are just that little bit too elite for this band. they've just never been quite good enough for me.

what that means was that my expectations were a little muted, and that i did enjoy the show, relative to what it was; there were strong moments, and there were long segments that should have never made the record in the first place, which is true of everything they've ever done.

the setlist was their second record start to end, with the first few tracks from source tags and codes as the encore.

i'll do this better in a bit...

i thought it was going to be warmer tonight. i have no plans, but i want to double check. right now, i expect to stay in.

i want to mention something else, though, and it's the issue about that dude that was messing with my drink.

i did not experience any signs of drugging last night, and can confidently state that my drink was not spiked with anything. rather, it is clear enough that the guy just didn't understand the seriousness of what he was doing as he was grabbing at my drink. i brought this up to him rather sternly and i do i hope that he walks away from the experience better cognizant of what not to do with strangers at a bar.

so, what happened?

well, i'm standing near the bar waiting to order a drink. it's a mostly older male audience for this show, so i'm having a little bit of difficulty getting to the bar over the mass of much larger shoulders than mine. and, these guys are going to take up two or three spaces at the bar each, too; it's a difficult crowd for me to navigate, and one i'm going to naturally find myself at the bottom of a pecking order surrounding. but, i eventually get to the bar, order the drink and some random stranger i've never met before goes to try and grab it out of my hand. he then just generally starts acting weird about the drink, even expecting me to give him the change i got from the bar.

i assumed he was doing a bad job of hitting on me (he was just being rude, truly.) and just walked over to the other side of the venue to ignore him. but, as i'm watching the opening act (who were pretty boring, truly), i'm running over what just happened and a specific thing that he did becomes kind of concerning to me - he placed his fist over my drink.

what am i talking about, exactly?

well, suppose the drink is lying on the bar, so that the spout is perpendicular to the table the beer is on. now, imagine a hand hovering over the spout of the drink, closed-fisted.

so, in total, i just experienced a total stranger sneak up on me, mess around with my drink, and hover a fist over the top of it, in a motion that seemed as though he dropped something in it. at this point, i've already consumed a fair amount of it. what do you do?

well, what i did was find him and confront him on it. why was he messing around with my drink? did he put something in it? if so, what did he put in it? i'm not going to enjoy this if i don't know what it is, but if i understand what's happening then i can adjust.

it actually became clear to me rather immediately that i was not dealing with somebody that dropped something in my drink but rather with somebody that was entirely clueless as to the concept of personal space. he was entirely oblivious as to why he shouldn't do what he did; he didn't think it through before he did it, and it wasn't clear that he understood my concern, once it was brought up. his only response was an appeal to individuality, he wouldn't do that, but that was not convincing because i'd never met him before.

i do believe that i have been drugged in detroit, and in fact more than once. this was perhaps not somewhere i expected any such concern to be at all serious. but, i had to react to what i experienced.

let this be a public service announcement: if you are a scruffy-looking dude at a bar of any sort at all, you don't want to do anything at all that might lead the female-identifying people in the room to think you drugged their drink. we have good reason to be concerned about things of the sort, as this is an actual real thing that actually happens in the actual real world. please be more aware of what you're doing.

so, i did get in to the trail of dead show for free last night. it's not the first time that has happened. i was let into a screaming females show for free once in ferndale, off of the top of my head. it's happened more than twice, though.

on it's face, it seems to have just been good luck - i happened to walk into the venue at the same time that somebody at the counter had an extra ticket. she scanned the extra ticket. score.

but, how plausible is that, really? i mean, the person that works at the door has all the extra tickets, right?

so, i'm not going to claim that i understand the actual factors underlying my free entry last night, but i'm appreciative, nonetheless: to whatever entity or ratio, naturalistic surely, that hustled me in last night, do please accept my heartfelt gratitude.

canadians are unusually polite, in fact, actually.

but, good things happen to good people, too. if i have faith in anything, it is that.

this is the first major initiative she's launched that she's actually correct about.

it's easy enough to forget that clinton campaigned for years on appointing judges that would implement a constitutional restriction on abortion rights. this isn't just public knowledge, it's direct from her campaign literature, over decades. in her statement of "safe, legal and rare", the emphasis was always on the rare, and the justification was always to do with the safety. she didn't like abortion, it bothered her on a moral level, and she never saw it as a right, or an issue of personal bodily autonomy - it was a question of making a compromise, a least bad choice, to protect a woman's health. so, there was this false narrative floating around in 2016: vote clinton to save roe v wade! no. clinton doesn't actually support roe v. wade at all, and would have done exactly the opposite. warren seems to be a little bit more pro-active about abortion rights for the sake of abortion rights, so you can see the contrast in their positions pretty dramatically. if something like what warren just put down here was actually on the table in 2016, that argument would have actually made sense, and i actually suspect that clinton might not have lost the female vote.

in the sense that this kind of legislation is only possible to talk about now after the long shadow of clinton over the democratic party has finally been cast off, this is long overdue - this was going to be an issue regardless of who won and regardless of who shaped the court, and something the broader party base should have mobilized around a long time ago. it will forever be up to speculation as to whether clinton's personal dislike for abortion rights was a factor in the slow pace of legislative reform around the topic, but that's in the past now, and i'll give warren props for taking initiative on this, finally.

everything else she's proposing is still stupid, though.

https://www.vox.com/2019/5/17/18628684/abortion-elizabeth-warren-platform-roe-v-wade

i would support a ban on charter schools, and also on vouchers. in ontario, i support the abolition of the catholic school system and the cessation of all further public funding to faith-based institutions. i would also support writing the curriculum in such a way that would essentially force private religious schools to offer religious classes as a voluntary after-school program; i would outright ban religion in private schools if it were possible and likely to be constructive, but it isn't likely to be constructive and probably isn't possible so the next best thing is to crowd it out by loading the curriculum up with so many other things that there is no longer room for religion as a separate class.

there should be one public elementary and high school system for everybody with common standards and testing, regardless of race, class, gender or anything else.

also: donald trump would be the most pro-zionist nazi of all time.

it's hard to make sense of the claim.

stated simply: it's ridiculous, and you're ridiculous for believing it or broadcasting or disseminating it.

i have been vocal about the necessity of violence toward "nazis" for a very long time, and while these socratic dialogues on youtube and elsewhere are actually an ideal medium for this kind of discussion, it's easy enough to take anything you want out of context and frame it in a way that seems silly or obtuse. i insist that my arguments were always quite subtle, but the bottom line is that you have to actually read the dialogue in order to understand the debate.

so, let's make two things clear regarding the necessity of violence towards nazis.

the first is that there isn't a choice in the matter, and that the absence of a choice is what defines a nazi as a nazi (that being the second thing). if you have a choice to avoid violence, you are not dealing with an actual nazi. so, let's actually talk about the second thing first, then.

it might surprise you to learn that i'm also a free speech maximalist, as i'm arguing that you have to show no mercy to nazis. isn't that a contradiction? well, if you're upset with me, then you're enforcing your own speech rules: you're trying to protect the nazis. you are raising your voice and telling me it's wrong to threaten nazis, and i should be quiet - which is policing my speech. then, you claim i'm advocating violence; but, that's what i'm saying about the nazis. the point i'm making is just that everybody actually agrees that some limit has to exist - nobody is in favour of unrestricted speech. we have laws against libel, against uttering threats, etc and nobody actually disagrees with this. so, when i say i'm a speech maximalist, i mean that you need the most stringent requirements possible to justify speech restrictions - it's not enough to be offended (anyone can be offended by anything; it's irrelevant), there has to be a concrete understanding of meaningful harm, it has to be meaningfully defined and it has to be a credible threat.

so, what's the deal with the nazis, then? who are these people? what is a nazi?

a nazi is not somebody that says something mean to you at a party, or acts in a passively aggressive manner towards you without justification or even somebody that says something racially derogatory in a crowded room. no, a nazi is something far more dangerous than that: a nazi is somebody that seeks to actively politically organize the machinery of society to eliminate a set of groups they find undesirable (like jews, or homosexuals, or leftists) from the gene pool, or from the cultural memory. so, a nazi does not merely say something mean about jews - a nazi is actively politically engaged in eliminating the jews from the planet. a nazi doesn't push a queer person aside; a nazi has the queer person executed. a nazi isn't rude to communists; a nazi has the communists rounded up and imprisoned, placed in camps or shot. it is due to the nature of the nazi's violence that reason and argumentation is foregone as meaningless; as you cannot reason with a hungry bear or a rabid dog, you cannot reason with a nazi - you must kill or be killed. the illusion of choice is held at your own peril. there is no logic but the logic of violence; if not pre-emptive, then in self-defence.

so, when i say that there is no peaceful debate with nazis, it's important to understand what i mean when i say 'nazi'. and, it's equally important not to be overly broad. see, this is the tricky part: i can place down an abstract definition of what makes a nazi a nazi relatively easily, but it's a lot more difficult to decide whether any specific group or individual fits that definition or not. due process is necessary, and evidence must be consulted as rigorously as possible. by placing nazis in a very limited, specific category and claiming there is no choice but to fight them, i am also implicitly arguing that violence has no place in the vast majority of discussions and debates. i will be just as quick to insist that you not throw that word around lightly as i will be to insist that those that fit it's definition are treated appropriately.

today, the most dangerous nazis in the world are not white supremacists (who have no meaningful organized movement) but are rather militant islamists. euroskeptics like marine le pen do not fit my definition of a nazi, but isis and hamas both do. the saudi theocracy is a nazi dictatorship. etc.

in a sane political climate, this would be a curiosity[ - something weird that nobody really cares about. but, bernie has painted himself into a corner by playing up the russiagate narrative so dramatically; had he been less fantastical on this narrative, which most good observers saw through, then he'd have a more rational footing to react to this from.

i don't know how many democrats there are out there that are going to get conspiracy-eyed over this. i'd guess that, right now, there are probably a measurable number of them. he may have talked himself into a lot of trouble.

the in and out candidate might be him.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/17/bernie-sanders-mystery-soviet-video-revealed-1330347

but, how do you enforce a polygamy law?

it's not against the law to shack up with multiple people. so, then, it becomes against the law when you take an oath to sacrament the union? this prohibition is supposed to be rooted in puritanism, but all you're doing with it is negating the value of the ceremony. it's just fuzzy logic, through and through.

this case has been a disaster from the start, because the crown pursued the wrong set of charges.

i don't understand why the government would even want to pass laws against polygamy. in a free society, few women would choose polygamy, but the ones that do would be making an informed choice. i don't know how a government can stand there with a straight face and claim it's upholding female autonomy around abortion rights, then tell women they're not allowed to be in a legal, polyamourous relationship. there's a ridiculous contradiction underlying female autonomy, there. the only way this line of thinking makes any remote amount of sense at all is if you bring in this backwards burkean/foucouldian model of male dominance, and all this bullshit about men having some kind of "natural dominance" over women - then you ban polygamy to protect the weaker sex. but, why are we having this discussion in 2019?

and, i don't even want to have the debate about "religious freedom". i don't believe in "religious freedom"; there's a stronger argument for legal polygamy stemming from female bodily autonomy. any feminist able to think the issue through should see that, clearly.

but, what was/is happening in bountiful was/is not a consensual community of non-attached adults, but rather essentially a sex farm for girls. little girls. to conflate this with any meaningful concept of polygamy, or reduce the crime of having sex with little girls to be that you're having sex with more than one little girl at a time, is really kind of disgusting.

so, they should have been charged with an array of crimes that included things like pedophilia, statutory rape, sexual trafficking, etc.

instead, they got a toothless conviction on a law that shouldn't exist, which amounted to a slap on the wrist.

this is closer to what they should be doing. i hope they get a conviction, as insufficient as it is, in the grander scope of it.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/decision-expected-today-in-case-of-child-bride-from-bountiful-b-c-1.4426497

when i hear trans people complain about how a silly technological gimmick is trivializing the "trans experience", my reaction is that they need to chill out a little bit and stop taking themselves so seriously.

relax.

it's not that serious.

and, you sound like a pretentious goof in insinuating that it is.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/in-gender-swap-photo-filters-some-trans-people-see-therapy-1.4426532