i just want to clarify that my comments around sanders accepting pension funds were specifically related to social security, and were explicitly a reference to the solvency of the system. social security should be means tested - perhaps only weakly, but at least partially. it is arguably the case that sanders would be outside of any reasonable cutoff in terms of eligibility for social security, rules i do not know the details of.

further, the comments were generated by explicit references to sanders accepting "social security payments", a term that may or may not have been intended to be interpreted literally, and yet which i did interpret literally, as exactly that. i apologize if i was led to sloppy conclusions by sloppy journalism, if it is indeed the case that i was.

a private pension is a different concern than social security. i don't think that private pensions should be means-tested, i think that the decision is contractual, and to be arrived at either by direct negotiation or, more realistically, through collective bargaining. the fact that the private institution is a government body may bring up a set of interesting questions, but the government body is still a private institution, and these were consequently not the concerns i had in mind.

i will agree that, if pressed on the point, sanders may want to consider donating some money to snow removal in burlington or something. but, my thoughts were on a very different line of thinking than rep. khanna's.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/23/sen-bernie-sanders-gets-mayoral-pension-while-running-for-president.html

i went in here a few times to get poutine.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/vibe-lounge-leslie-mwakio-food-licence-1.3887890

what an article like this obscures is that there's recently been a lot of genetic introgression from wolf dna into the coyote population, leading some experts to speak of a hybridization event; in any case, the rural coyotes around the gta are bigger, meaner and more aggressive than the coyotes of previous generations. stated simply, they're evolving.

there's a underlying pretext in the article that the son was in some danger, and that would no doubt be cautioned against by coyote experts, who would point to statistics indicating the rarity of the attacks, but this is ignoring the recent introgression. these animals are clearly more aggressive.

we have this cultural attachment to "nature" as this eternal, constant thing that we should avoid interfering with, so that it may continue on in stasis. but, this is a dramatic misconception of reality. while we are trying so hard to avoid disturbing it, like it's some divine quantum interaction that we can suspend indefinitely by ignoring, life around us continues to evolve.

coywolves are something we ought to take very seriously, even if the correct thing to say right now is that the situation requires further study before acting upon.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/coyote-co-existence-policies-mean-pets-are-never-safe-dog-cat-safety

you know, given the size of the incarceration rate in the united states, allowing prisoners to vote could seriously swing a few elections. there are some difficulties, though.

let's say you commit a crime in new york city, and get sent to a penitentiary upstate. you would still be in the same state, even if municipal elections are a somewhat tricky jurisdictional concern. but, let us suppose that you have a residence in california, you are arrested in new jersey for a crime you committed in new york, and are sent to a locked down correctional facility in new hampshire. where do you vote?

the jurisdiction is important, as there would be some likelihood of the inmates of a large jail assuming political control over rural counties, should the number of inmates outnumber the number of residents in the region - a scenario that nobody would find acceptable. and, what if the result of some controversial referendum is close enough that the number of inmates voting is an effective swing? what if a referendum on gun control is successively blocked by the margin of the inmate population?

i believe in a concept of citizenship. while it is best to maximize the scope of voting rights, it should always be done with an eye towards the parallel expansion of citizenship obligations. incarceration is the temporary cessation of both your rights and your obligations as a citizen, and there is consequently some ground for restricting the franchise to those who are actively incarcerated. i would rather meet the debate at the door and instead propose that any restrictions on voting rights due to prior convictions should be entirely abolished.

if one is concerned about voting rights for the incarcerated, it would perhaps be more productive to pursue policies designed to reduce the size of the prison population than an expansion of the vote to the incarcerated population.

a vote from behind bars is always going to be an act of absurdity.

was the christchurch shooter even a christian? regardless, what would some christians in sri lanka have to do with him? it's an infidel response, and reflective of the dangerous tribalism of religious affiliation. but, it's another example of why i'm not interested in interfering - let them kill each other off.

anyways, i'm through the first two days of august. i should be in windsor by the 5th, and then i lose internet access for a month, although i had a laptop at the time and was typing late nights at the timmy's....

should i put that in the travel blog? i'm thinking about it; i'll take a look at it. i think a lot of it is kind of reflective writing that could fit the travel blog theme. i was certainly typing in a public place, at least. there's going to at least be a mention of the trip in, which featured a man named don complaining for hours about the dangers of windmills. this guy, who had been dating my mother off and on for years, also made an overt sexual pass at me right in front of her, and i felt her see it. a child, when in close proximity to it's mother, knows innately when she's viciously angry. i did about the only thing i could do in the context of being driven 800 km from home with all of my belongings by a guy that's now openly grabbing my thigh, which was to completely ignore it. but, she cut off all contact with him as soon as she got home. i don't think i mention that context in the conversation. but, i made a snide comment about it as soon as i got into windsor, and that might be a decent transition into further travel blog entries for the month. i'll see how it reads.

i mean, i don't want to mislabel my father's cd collection. it wasn't a vault of unreleased recordings by unknown artists, or full of special collection editions, or out of print copies, or anything like that. it was really a string of common label 90s reprints of 60s and 70s classics, even if some of it went unnoticed at the time. the closest thing it came to indie rock nerdery was some less popular eg records releases, stuff with holdsworth and bruford on it, and even that was all virgin records imprints. it was really nothing to fight over in terms of rarity or market value.

it was rather defined by his own interests as a very amateur drummer, so amateur that it only existed abstractly in his mind during any period i knew him, although there was a rumour that he played when he was younger. he often had a drum kit around, and i frequently took advantage of it; i never saw him actually play the instrument. but, the fact that he interpreted music through the drumming meant that his tastes were skewed to artists with strong drumming, and his collection was in fact centered around specific drummers he took a liking to: phil collins, bill bruford, terry bozio, keith moon and later on mike portnoy and mike mangini. as a guitarist and keyboardist, i found myself analyzing it by a different set of criteria, but that collection of drummers (as well as others) was certainly involved with the creation of some substantial music over that period, so there was a strong cross-section to draw from.

but, the truth is that it was mostly a collection of "common titles", and that was exactly what i was looking for. it was these physical copies of these classic recordings, as common stock as they may be, that i discovered on the wall in the past - records like animals, the lamb lies down on broadway, sgt peppers, the dark side of the moon, etc. platinum recordings. common titles; sure. exactly.

so, just to be clear - this library i had in front of me wasn't some plethora of obscurities. it was just the classics. and, that's my point.

to be clear, when my sister said she took the discs she wanted, i would presume she meant some vocal jazz like billie holiday, and maybe some 60s pop like joni mitchell or bob dylan. or maybe the doors. i don't expect that she'd have had any interest in the psychedelic or progressive sequence in the collection, in pretty much any way. not even the floyd. like, she's the kind of person that thinks the beatles lost it after help.

so, i wasn't concerned about her taking the discs i wanted - to the extent that she knew them at all, she didn't like them much. and, she may have even been honest in deducing that there wasn't anything i wanted, simply because she knew so little of it.

"in the court of the crimson king. hrmmn. never heard of it. j wouldn't want that."

i actually wasn't concerned about d taking the stuff i wanted, either. his was the opposite situation: he already had all of the stuff i was looking for. he didn't need another copy of dark side or sgt peppers or selling england.. or whatever else.

as pointed out, i actually found most of it. despite what they said, it wasn't picked over, it was sold. the only thing i couldn't find was the zappa...and it is probably because it was given away or lent out early....