what do you really do about this?

the environment has to come before the economy, which means i'm not standing in solidarity with automotive workers that are being laid off to make way for electric vehicles. i don't want to send these people back to work manufacturing dirty, gas-guzzling suvs. so, what do you do, then?

this is a big facility, and the company is apparently losing a function for it. so, the primary concern ought to actually be in finding some kind of way to take ownership of the factory.

"you mean, you think workers should have control over their means of production?"

yeah. it's crazy, huh?

there's no use in flailing against capital, to try and save antisocial labour; it's a backwards, reactionary and conservative approach. but, that's what malatesta said, right? unions are necessary to fight against capital, but they are also inherently reactionary, inherently conservative.

once you get the factory out of the hands of the company and into the hands of the workers, the next thing to look at is how to make a more socially responsible product, like solar panels, or even electric cars. you then retrain the workers, and off you go.

but, i'm not going to cry over the demise of automotive jobs - good riddance to a destructive industry that has done enormous damage to the world we live on.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/no-change-in-how-unifor-negotiates-with-fca-amid-gm-saving-300-jobs-1.5128350

there was a time in the very distant past when the ndp were an example of something called "prairie socialism", based around a fundamentalist christian imagery and ideology. even back then, they were scary in their enforcement of puritanism and evangelicalism. it was bordering on being a cult. it is widely understood that their most important leader in the last century, thomas douglas, was essentially a nazi in his support for eugenics, which was something that was widespread on the "christian left". they supported all of the terrible, oppressive, tyrannical, conservative things that progressives supported in the progressive era.

the ndp's health care plan, as initially enacted in saskatachewan, was not single payer. rather, it was quite similar to obamacare, in that it was a law that mandated the purchase of insurance premiums, and attempted to decrease costs through group coverage. the single payer system in canada was brought in by the federal liberal party in stages from the 40s to the 80s, culminating in the canada health act by the elder trudeau, and modeled not after the system put in place by the ndp but rather after the nhs in britain - which was put in place by the tories. the ndp supported this system, but so did the conservatives, and the idea that the ndp were ever the "party of healthcare" or that douglas was ever the "father of healthcare" is really just party propaganda designed for internal consumption. it's historical accuracy is highly dubious, at best. every piece of legislation in our healthcare system was passed by the liberals.

in the 70s, douglas was pushed out by a clique of jewish socialists and they started to swing away from the "prairie gospel" messaging and towards the kind of universalist socialism that was popular amongst the jewish left at the time. they started to moderate in the 80s under broadbent, before being relegated to fringe status in the 90s under a sequence of unpopular female leaders. it turns out that the canadian left had a big problem with voting for women.

the party was revived by a city councilor from toronto named jack layton in the early 00s, who tried to brand himself as some kind of twee leninist, and was very much in the prototype of lenin in the sense that he was really a conservative in disguise. the ndp don't like to tell you this, but he was in fact an aristocrat, with a long family history in the conservative party. his father and grandfather were both cabinet ministers in right-wing governments; his son is now a city councilor in toronto. while the ndp under layton admittedly offered an attractive alternative to the governing liberals, who were moving quickly to the right, the truth is that they were at most a centrist, if not a centre-right, party by this point. layton's legacy is in continuing on with the moderating of policy that was started in the broadbent years. and, to an extent, they had to do this, because workers in the populated parts of canada had joined the middle class; they weren't interested in radical politics anymore.

layton died of cancer shortly after the 2011 election, and the party was taken over by a self-declared thatcherite from montreal, a former cabinet minister in the right-leaning provincial liberal governments of the 00s, one thomas mulcair. the ndp had managed a large breakthrough in quebec as a result of a backlash against michael ignatieff, a truly awful candidate in every way. mulcair continued the right-ward journey of the ndp, to the place it is now in the spectrum, which is just another neo-liberal party.

and, activists in canada have reacted accordingly by abandoning them; they are on track to losing party status, this election.

in 2019, the ndp is driven not by any variant of utopian socialism but almost entirely by oil politics. the notley government in alberta was an oil dictatorship, just like the previous and current conservative governments, running a scorched earth policy to maximize exports from the tar sands. notley was truly the queen of mordor, lost entirely to reason, and driven by a singular purpose. in southern ontario, it is the party of unifor, a union of automative and pipeline workers that are themselves directly financially tied into the ongoing environmental rape of the planet. it has been wiped out of saskatchewan, and will soon be wiped out from quebec. and, in bc, it is increasingly being squeezed against a rising green movement that no longer trusts it's motives or ambitions.

you will not get anything from the ndp at this stage in history besides a continuation of the petro state. and, thankfully, the canadian left seems to understand that - and is abandoning the party in droves.

the minimum wage in canada is set by provincial legislation and is province specific. i think there was a federal minimum wage in the past, but it fell out of disuse quite a long time ago, and there are actually good reasons for this: if a federal minimum wage were set to reflect the cost-of-living in the most populous province of ontario, you'd end up with starvation wages in more expensive provinces like alberta, where a living wage would be upwards of $40/hr. it's a big, diverse country. this is a policy that should be localized.

i would actually even support legislating it at the municipal level, but we'd have to change the constitution to do that.

i don't work, but i believe that ontario's minimum wage was frozen at $14/hr by the ford government when it took over last year, which cancelled a planned raise to $15/hr. this was put into place by the previous liberal government of kathleen wynne, which was by far the most left-wing government in the entire country, and the most left-wing government the country has seen in a very long time. they made some unnecessary cuts to services at the municipal level, but i was broadly supportive of the wynne-mcguinty government.

it follows that mulcair would really not have had the jurisdictional power to set or raise the minimum wage, and would have faced a strong backlash from the provinces had he tried. yet, the truth is that he didn't actually propose doing that. there was a big media hoopla in canada in the previous election about mulcair's promise of a minimum wage for federal workers being "misleading" or "dishonest", but i never found that he was confusing, himself. rather, the media misunderstood him, and then blamed it on him. but, let's be clear on what his proposal was: his proposal was to ensure that federal workers - unionized government workers - would get a "minimum wage" of $15/hr. this might have affected some part time students, at most. but, i would not consider such a proposal to be very substantive.

i've been vocal in my support for higher wages for workers, and any suggestion to the contrary is a bold-faced lie. the ndp are good at that....

i mean, there's all this opposition to gmo wheat, which i currently do not believe exists in canada.

but, wheat is a hybrid organism created by artificial selection: it is already genetically modified by humans.

the fact is that the activists don't know that (and i've talked to them. they don't.), so they're operating on fear, uncertainty and doubt in just opposing the unknown. and, they'll you that: they're afraid of something they don't understand.

there is a good reason to oppose the patent laws. i'm on board with that. but, i'm not afraid of gmos, and don't think you should be, either; i want to embrace science, and i want to live in the future, not the past.

the greens are actually pretty science-focused, but there's not a lot of them, right now, either. i might not agree with everything they say on the topic, but i can't expect to find the perfect party out there in the cloud, either.

at the least, i haven't yet seen the kind of embrace of anti-science propaganda from the greens that i saw from cheryl hardcastle. if it materializes, i'll have to adjust.

to be clear.

1) i have no opposition to labeling products as gmo, if it's what people want. i'd buy gmo items, if they were labeled; i know that they use gmo corn in doritos, and i know they use gmos in margarine and it doesn't affect my purchasing decisions. i think the industry is over-reacting in opposing it. so, it's not my issue, but i wouldn't campaign against it. but, as a standalone item, i'd abstain from a vote, because i don't think it's a serious health concern. sorry.

2) i have a broad, general opposition to intellectual property rights, as well as to regular old property rights, and do not think that chemicals should be patented at all. this would extend to an opposition to patenting seeds. so, i would actively agitate for and support legislation to ban companies like monsanto from patenting seeds.

3) are gmos safe? well, i don't see any reason to think they wouldn't be. while i will succumb to the argument that you can't know for decades, i think even skepticism around it is pretty far-fetched. your body is just going to break the consumed dna down as protein, either way; the enzymes in your stomach have no way of knowing where it came from.

4) i think embracing gmos is going to be exceedingly important in managing global food supply with rising populations in a world with a changing climate. it should be in the list of solutions to climate change, not something resisted by climate change activists.

5) i'm a logician, so i think there's a special place in hell for the naturalistic fallacy. and, i have a rather visceral disdain for fucking hippies....

if trudeau wants to run on a platform that makes it seem like he works for the world bank, may should campaign directly against him on it - and fairly aggressively.

i'm not in a swing riding. or at least, i don't expect to be in one - we'll find out soon enough. i'll have to watch the polls. there's a lot of recent immigrants in this riding that are likely to lean conservative, so if a conservative swing rises up on their backs, i'll have to vote ndp to try and stop it. i'll otherwise probably vote green.

the conservatives will probably run a muslim candidate in an attempt to push for this. so, you're looking at a mostly muslim religious right v. the ndp union base in this riding. if there's a green surge, the liberals may end up in fourth; they're not going to be seriously competitive.

the liberal candidate i voted for in the last election in the neighbouring riding (frank schiller) was actually anti-nafta, and while i neither expected him to win nor to change the party's perspective (which was cautiously pro-trade....pro-trade in theory, if skeptical about the existing agreements), it was a kind of protest vote to actually hit the 'x'. i didn't like the ndp candidate (who is known locally for protesting against gmos...i'll never vote for somebody like that.....), but i wouldn't have voted for a pro-nafta, business-liberal type of candidate, either. if they had run that kind of candidate, and i had to choose between pro-business and anti-gmo, i would have probably voted green. the anti-nafta thing was in fact a very important consideration for me... 

the liberal party's position on trade in 2015 was an open question, in that they didn't talk much about it. their past position was confusing, in that they supported "free trade" in principle but tended to be critical of the actual agreements. chretien ran on dissolving nafta, then had to settle for some weasel words from clinton, which was widely criticized but actually largely consistent with the party's position: free trade, but not necessarily free trade. it was a kind of "freer trade" position. they just didn't publish how they'd tweak that, and it really wasn't an election issue, or at least not from their perspective. i think they thought this was settled. i'm not sure how to say this without being sardonic: the position that the party has taken over the last few years is not going to be very popular in his own voting base. it's no doubt a part of the reason that he's had falling poll numbers, already. liberals in canada have historically been apprehensive about trade, and slow to embrace the neo-liberal paradigm; it's kind of downright bizarre to have the son of a protectionist come in and embrace this global regime, now that it's crumbling all around him. he might claim the country is immune to this, but the actual truth is that he's probably losing voters in his own base over his position on it. i'm not going to sort through the resolutions presented at the last party convention, but i would expect them to say something rather different than what trudeau is demagoging on about.

mulcair badly flip-flopped on the tpp over the course of the election, and it might be one of the things that cost him voters, but you have to be careful how you analyze this sort of thing. i would suspect that something like "if the ndp are the same as the liberals anyways, i'd might as well vote for the liberals" might have sunk in, and it might have been a factor in the shift; the tpp would not be the only part of that, but it would be a segment of it. you get weird and counter-intuitive outcomes in a three-party system; you'll get things like people on the left of the ndp base voting for the liberals in protest at a centrist policy in the ndp platform. so, it might seem weird that ndp support started to shift to the liberals when mulcair indicated support for the tpp, to the point that he had to really aggressively backtrack on it, given that the liberals were at least no less in favour of it, but it's the nature of the way things work in our system. by the end of the election, it seemed like mulcair was running directly against the tpp, despite initially supporting it - and still managed to lose votes to a party that all evidence suggested was more in favour of it. at this point, it's not clear that it matters what jagmeet singh says about the topic, given that the ndp has lost so much credibility on the left around topics of the sort. i would expect an ndp government to be pretty pro-globalization, at this point, regardless of what the guy says on the trail.

the greens have never backtracked on their alter-globalization position, and should be the preferred choice for voters that are unhappy about the current trade regime, and actively want to change it. that doesn't mean it's clear how they'll govern, it just means that they are at least providing some hope for some kind of policy shift.

i suggested in 2015 that may and the greens should make trade a central issue. it's even more important to do that, now.

at least clinton tried to lie about it, right?

trudeau's been doing this for a while now: he's campaigning as an unabashedly pro-globalist, openly pro-elitist.

people should throw cake at him.

he appears to want to run on a pro-nafta, pro-globalization platform.

it's hilarious. he's really this clueless. he seems to think it's 1988.

i'll just be happy when he's gone...and, yes, he'll be gone soon.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/05/09/trudeau-canada-best-equipped-to-resist-populist-tide.html

i'm reminded of the term "e-tard", which is used to refer to mdma addicts that end up in a state of emotional stasis as a consequence of overuse.

this is a survey with multiple studies, and they seem to all say one of three things:

1) some of them couldn't find a signal
2) most of them reported increased levels of cortisol in non-habitual users
3) some of them reported decreased levels of cortisol in daily users

so, the idea that marijuana reduces stress reduces to the idea that an addiction to marijuana completely dismantles your body's ability to cope with stress altogether, meaning you'd be unable to experience stress when you actually had to. the long term result of such a thing would have to be negative...

i mean, your body doesn't produce stress hormones by accident. they're there for a reason, and it can't be healthy to get rid of them.

and, i'm actually going to state that it appears to be a robust and accepted conclusion in the literature that it increases anxiety in moderate to casual users.

i guess i could just sit here and let this guy destroy my endocrine system to the point that i'm incapable of experiencing stress, but i hardly want to do that.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6174415/

if you're arguing that dismantling your endocrine system is an effective stress reduction method, you'd might as well just argue in favour of giving people lobotomies.

At socially relevant doses, Δ-9-THC raised plasma cortisol levels in a dose-dependent manner but frequent users showed blunted increases relative to healthy controls. 

right. so, this is proof of two things:

1) moderate thc use increases cortisol levels
2) you can actually smoke yourself stupid.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2863108/

if marijuana actually increases cortisol, it's certainly not going to act as a stress reliever or anti-anxiety agent.

you would think that any serious scientific argument for "marijuana as a medicine" would try to link marijuana use to decreased cortisol levels, rather than rely on subjective opinion surveys, which is what they seem to actually do.

the silence on the topic is telling.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453017301130

still no response from the doctor, so i sent a final fax, and we'll need to have it corrected at the follow-up.

it should only take a second to fix, so i don't know what the problem is. we'll find out on thursday.

i'm not feeling much better. what is happening? is it second-hand smoke? well, i'm not getting high from it. i know i can smell the drugs, and i know i'm having a bad reaction to it, but i have enough experience with marijuana to know what it's like and this isn't anything remotely like a pot buzz. when i went through this last year, it was more obvious that i was getting second-hand stoned, even if it felt like marijuana mixed with an unidentified stimulant - something i've never discarded in my mind. i tested positive for thc, remember. what i've been feeling lately is very different, it's just a wash of emotional "anxiety". what does that mean?

it's this kind of numbness, a dizziness, an absent-mindedness. it's an inability to focus, but it's also a really negative mood swing. i could describe it as feeling like i'm being squeezed, but that probably doesn't actually help much. is it the weather? it just won't stop raining, and just won't warm up, and i know i'm affected by it. maybe.

maybe it's cortisol. i talked about anxiety being hormonal, and wanting to check for specific levels of specific hormones in order to react. what i'm experiencing seems to be consistent with a cortisol build-up, meaning i might just need to get some more exercise - something i've already concluded, regardless.

the way to find out is to do a test.

i'm going to get up, make some coffee and eat. but, i suspect i may spend most of the day sleeping...

hi.

i no longer have time to pick up a new blood test sheet and have the tests completed, so we will have to wait until the 16^th. you should not expect test results in before then, as i will not be filing a lab that indicates concerns about a risk factor related to recent sexual activity with women. i at no point indicated as much. what i indicated was

1) that i have only had one consensual sex partner, and she was female, but that this relationship ended in 2006 or 2007. this would certainly not indicate a recent risk factor, as it was 12-13 years ago.

2) i was concerned about possible exposure to stds because i woke up in a man’s car after a night of drinking in detroit, and he was trying to convince me to have sex with him. i lost several hours that night, which was in september of 2016 (and not spring as i erroneously indicated, apologies for that). i also had bruises on my thighs, and a sore anus. i could even smell the lubrication in my farts, after requiring several hours to pass a bowel movement. while i don’t remember it happening, the obvious conclusion is pretty obvious: i had some pretty rough anal sex that night. i suspect that i may have been drugged at the bar. i understand that this would legally qualify as rape, but i have no evidence to work with and little understanding of my own projection of consent when i was blacked out. if somebody were to present me with evidence that i was passed out during the sexual activity (the anal sex) then i would change my mind, but i would not be interested in pressing charges against somebody that thought they were having consensual sex, just because i was blacked out. i apologize if anybody is upset by that, but i think intent is important, in context.

it follows that while i have very strong and compelling reasons to think i probably had sex with a male that night, i have no reasons at all to think i had sex with a female. nor do i have reason to think i’ve recently had risky sexual activity with any other female sexual partner, or reason to think i’ve had sexual activity with a female in the last ten plus years at all.

when i stated that my one and only consensual partner was female and many years ago, this was misinterpreted as a claim that i have recently had sex with a female. i need this corrected before i have my blood taken.

i would normally consider this to be trivial. on a purely social level, i don’t care whether people might think i have sex with men or women, or if they think i might have sex with both. the truth is that i don’t have sex at all, but i can’t control the perceptions of others, and don’t tend to pre-occupy myself with it as a concern. so, i don’t care if you think i’m gay or straight or bi, and i don’t care what you think about gay or straight or bi people.

however, as mentioned, i am deeply concerned that i am being harassed by the windsor police department, who are interpreting my gender expression as some kind of evidence of sexual deviance. there has recently been a rise of religion in north america, and a distinct rise in transphobia as a consequence of it. religiously motivated politicians are currently routinely using trans people as rhetorical punching bags, and this appears to have had some effect on the conduct by the officers in the department. i am deeply concerned that an officer may pull the file and use it as evidence that i’m some kind of sexual deviant - that my gender expression is some kind of nefarious ploy to gain access to women, or something. one way that religious politicians are using this is scare-mongering about using the bathroom. this is the existing narrative in religious communities, and the narrative i’ve been receiving from the police.

i have recently had poorly written health documents misinterpreted and used against me, documents i’m apparently not able to correct, so the necessity to ensure a higher quality in the documentation is something i need to be pro-active about.

again: the fact is that the contents of the file were a misunderstanding between myself and my doctor, and i have been pro-active in attempting to correct them. the lack of response is frustrating, but we can wait until the 16^th to have this corrected if we have to.

i’m also going to want to add a test for my cortisol levels, as a continuation of the line of thought that led to me checking for heavy metal poisoning last year. please remind me if i forget.

jessica parent

email: death.to.koalas@gmail.com; vm: 5199161358