so, this is my shortlist for the next six weeks, which is really just a peruse through.

24: fly pan am  @ meteor (windsor)
27: blanck mass @ ufo

oct
02: joy formidable @ loving touch ----> defeater @ sanctuary.
03: melvins @ el club.
06: legendary pink dots @ el club.
09: caravan palace @ garden theatre

last weekend:


25: chelsea wolfe @ senate theatre
27: swervedriver @ el club

i wouldn't mind seeing the lpd, but i doubt i'll be able to afford it. rather, that joy formidable / defeater sequence may be it until the end of the month, and that's fine, as it's a more normal month. i mean, i don't normally go out 5-6 times a month like this. it's usually once or twice.

so, i think i'm more treating the show next tuesday as the end of september and then keying in on the last weekend of october. let's hope it's at least pleasant out.

i could find more stuff.

but, i want to plan around getting to toronto to file, remember. that's likely to be in november....

if it's a quiet month, that means i should also be able to do things like catch up on groceries (which i've been sparse about this month.), buy that fan and get that crack filler for the baseboards.

i don't multitask well. let's get those documents done...

just to state the point in clearer detail using simple language...

i was essentially charged with stalking somebody, but i've never met that person - i don't know their address, and i don't know their phone number. you can't stalk somebody like that, so the charges were dropped. now, i want to file a human rights complaint against them for falsely charging me with stalking them, but i don't know their phone or address, so i can't do that. so, i'm going to ask the police to provide the address (it says in the report that they went to her house.) via an access to information request, and enforce it through the human rights tribunal.

there is a fundamental principle of justice that an accused be able to face their accuser, and i don't have enough information in front of me to be able to actually do that.

so, i think they have an obligation to provide the information.

so, what am i doing tonight?

when i filled out the human rights complaint against this "caroline chevalier", i had to come to terms with the fact that i didn't know her address and didn't know how to find it. i can't do this unless i know her address. so, what to do?

the only safe way for me to do this is to file an access to information request. yes, i'm going to file an access to information request to attempt to determine the identity of the person that charged me with harassment, because i know nothing about them. such is the level of absurdity underlying the charges.

but, i'd rather get them to do it, and the reason is that i can maybe avoid learning certain details that way. listen: i don't care about this person. at all. but, she manufactured this stupid situation where she thinks i do, or pretends to think i do, or...i can't psychoanalyze somebody that i've never met. the point is that this is a kind of a good faith gimmick - by asking the tribunal to get the information in confidence, i'm avoiding the delusional appearance that  have any interest in tracking her down.

how, though?

i decided that i would file the complaint and then communicate with the tribunal as to how to proceed further, given that there's no obvious answer. i talked to somebody on friday, who is suggesting that i can file a request for an order from the windsor police.

so, i would essentially be asking the access to information group at the windsor police to file an affidavit with the person's address on it. i need this address to file a human rights complaint against this person for having me arrested. and, i'm not going to be able to contact the person that accused me of harassing them directly, because i don't know how to.

what i'm hoping is that the absurdity of the situation helps me in the long run. but that means i need to milk it - if i have choice between two options, i need to pick the more absurd one, at all times.

this is about as absurd as the system gets, though.

and, what's the update on the smell?

the sewer gas leak is plugged. totally. i get a whiff of something once in a while, but it's not coming from the cleanout. so, that's fixed.

when i left on friday night, it had been cool and dry for most of the last two weeks (but hot for a few days), and the fan was running. there was no smell in the basement at all.

when i came back, the fan was off and there was an ammonia smell in the same corner i had dealt with weeks ago - and always when i was gone. i already knew that it wasn't the amp that was the cause of the smell, but having it come back when....

...when it's hot? no. it was fine when the fan was running, so, when the fan is off? or, when i'm gone, really?

i'm starting to wonder if it isn't dog urine...

i've cleaned in there a few times today already by running lysol around it, but i don't want to dismantle the whole unit to get underneath it, and i suspect i might have to.

on friday, i will need to get the fan, and i will need to prioritize sealing those cracks relatively soon, too. what's the october concert schedule like? we'll do that, soon, too.

listen, pick your favourite axiom.

here's one: do as ye will, harme none.

selling drugs harms people. fatally. therefore, you can't do it, in a free society - you'd need to be expelled or killed for it.

decriminalizing drugs means, at some point along the way, you've decided that the profit motive trumps everything else. you've said "yes, people are making a profit from killing people, but..". and, you can come up with whatever set of excuses you want, but at the end of it they're necessarily bullshit rationalizations: you're buying into the neo-liberal paradigm and accepting their set of rationalizations.

what the people in these affected areas need - and are asking for - is more tools to chase the dealers out.

nobody's actually asking for decriminalization, except the people that stand to profit from it, and these are the sickest people out there.

we need to stop coddling and protecting the dealers.

i'm going to state this clearly and tersely: i think dealers of opiates, methamphetamines and cocaine should be lynched in public by angry mobs.

like, seriously.

that's the actual right way to deal with this.

again: in an anarchist society, we wouldn't exactly have drug laws. rather, the community would mobilize to keep drugs out with extreme force. dealers would know that if they were to get caught, they'd get lynched, and that should be the normal state of affairs, in a free society. in this case, anarchy means that nobody protects the drug dealers from harm, and freedom means a lack of restraint in enacting justice against them.

if you want a society where drugs are just another commodity on the market, what you're looking for is unrestrained capitalism, which is what we already have. it's a status quo process tied into advancing neo-liberalism, and which any resistance party needs to try to prevent.

socialists don't like drugs. we never have, and we never will.

that hot air in the atlantic (which is climate change) is holding steady, and, if we're just that lucky, we might fluke out and get one more weekend out.

but, that cold air coming down from the jet stream (which is the sun, and not climate change) is looking pretty ominous.

i suggested a fast, brutal changeover to winter, and i'm going to avoid it for now, but much of the country isn't, and we might not be so lucky the next time.

i'm hoping that the sun is coming back; early signs appear to be that it won't be until next year.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/classic-clash-of-the-seasons-between-western-and-eastern-canada-with-both-august-and-november-like-weather-ahead

ok, i'm not voting for them, either.

good luck, guys. i'm sitting this one out.

my official endorsement for the 2019 canadian election is to spoil your ballot. don't vote.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/elizabeth-may-election-decriminalize-drug-possession-1.5292817

yeah, i'm withdrawing my support for bernie sanders at this point.

he may claim that he needs to build a multiracial movement to win, but if doing that means morphing into the same neo-liberal candidate that he was presented as an antidote to, then there's not a lot of point in him winning.

i'm concerned about how his views on a number of social positions appear to be "evolving", and it's not for the better. i suspect he's converted to islam and hasn't told anybody; he's a stupid old man.

i'm not endorsing anybody else. and, flatly i'm not likely to even pay much attention.

he needed to attract voters like me in order to win. by doing almost the exact opposite of what he needed to do more or less across the board, he's failed to do so, and he will be lucky to finish third when it's over with.

we're all better off looking for a third party with a good health care policy. that is probably the greens, and it's better to get started now than to keep wasting time on bernie.

i repeat: i'm not spending $50/month on electricity to run a dehumidifier to reverse the damage being caused by his a/c, and dry out all the p-traps at the same time, while making myself miserable.

it's his a/c, it's his foundation and it's ultimately his problem if his a/c ruins his foundation. i just want the smell dealt with.

all he has to do is turn the a/c off. really. it's that simple.

yeah, so, if the issue with the fan is hair in the motor - the only thing that makes sense, without concluding it was vandalized - then i'm not getting it out with scissors or tweezers or anything else. in order to disassemble these fans, you need an obscure kind of screwdriver that i don't have.

the only way i'm going to fix this is to try and spin it out, which means i'll need to run it in the bathtub repeatedly to try and pass it through. the hope is that if i spin the blades strenuously enough then whatever is overpowering the motor will reverse.

in the mean time, it is absolutely gross in here, but it's also too cold to open the window, so i'm just running the hot water all day instead and hoping it clears the shit out from the pipes. so, i guess we'll have to run the hot water non-stop for the next week. i can get the laundry going overnight, too, which should help.

hey, if he wants to be an asshole and break my $20 fan, we can give him a $300 water bill in retaliation. the guy's a complete waste of oxygen. i hope it forces him to sell his car.

and, i had made a lot of progress in cleaning this place up a bit, but i guess we'll have to wait until the end of the week and start again.

and, there is no possibility at all, whatsoever, that i'm going to turn the dehumidifier on. the problem down here is that it's too dry, not that it's too damp. and, if he'd just turn off the air conditioner, there wouldn't be a problem with condensation under the floor at all.

i've been pointing out for years that the liberal party is deeply american-centric, and they're going to run themselves into irrelevance if they don't fix it.

if this doesn't wake them up to that point, nothing will.

so, is he going to get away with this?

the most truthful response is that he wasn't doing that well in the first place, and if it only costs him 2%, that 2% could be his majority. so, don't be glib on the numbers - it seems to only be affecting a small number of people, but if they vote (or don't vote), it could still hurt him.

are canadians racist, then? do we need to look in the mirror.

no.

listen, i think that everybody needs to stop interpreting canada through an american filter, and that's the real takeaway from this. i posted my logic: the make-up itself isn't racist, it's only racist if accompanied by the stereotypes, the brutal performance. and, the video might have been what i'm describing, but it's not clear  and nobody seems to want to imagine it that way. that's more or less what people are saying: it's not racist. why do you think it's racist, it's just make-up. are you racist?

and the answer is supposed to be, "but, it's the history."

to which the canadian would say "in america? i'm not a fucking yankee, that means nothing to me. that's not my history. so, stop americanizing everything and put the thing in a canadian context, in the context of canadian history. that's what they teach us to do in school, right? did we have that here? so, i don't know what you're talking about."

the canadian is not done yet, she just paused. she continues..

"so, maybe if we were in the united states it might be racist, but we're not. so, i guess i don't get it, sort of; i'm not american, so it doesn't bug me. maybe if i was american...but i'm not..."

you might argue we're ignorant of history, but my imaginary canadian is actually right: whose history? it's not ours...that's not our context.

so, you could argue that we don't care, and be right.

but, maybe we're actually on to something, up here, about what we should and shouldn't care about?

trudeau's embrace of democratic-party style political correctness and identity politics might come naturally to him, because he's a member of the upper class elite. but, he's an alien in this country - impossible for the average canadian to relate to on the most basic level, and entirely irreflective of the average voter. the hypocrisy that is striking so many people as so profound is being misinterpreted because there was a general misunderstanding that we mostly agreed with him about all of these things in the first place. as a result, the number of people that are surprised by this seems to be quite small - the majority of canadians either already hated him for the hyper-pc everything, or they could already see through the hypocrisy of it, and didn't care.

again: don't think it won't cost him. it might, where it matters, still.

but, don't expect a mass movement to erupt based on a mis-step in the context of american history. most canadians don't see us in that way, and that should be the real takeaway: we're a foreign country, with a parallel history, and we will interpret things in the context of our own history, thank you.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/how-did-canadians-react-to-trudeaus-blackface-images-with-a-big-meh-polls-suggest

how was the weekend?

i'll write a review, maybe, some other day. tunic were nice and loud, which is what i wanted. i stopped at the trumbullplex for an hour or two and commandeered somebody's bottle of wine (i asked politely, actually), before ending up at the park for a bit, where i ended up with somebody's unwanted remnant 12 of beer, which was two cans. so, it was that kind of night. then, i left the park as it cleared, and went to marble for a bit, and then went back to the park with some of the post-marble crowd.

i hope the windsorite that i met on the way in and caught back up with at marble made it back to canada safely. i did suggest the park, but she wanted to go home.

i never do balloons, but somebody handed me one and i knew i was out for the night, regardless. result: i couldn't walk for like two hours, which meant i got to enjoy the fire fizzling out. by myself. this park is a swell spot and stuff, but i've been uneasy about the way people leave fires going there on more than one occasion; on this night, it worked out relatively well.

so, i didn't get to the diner until 9:00, which meant i didn't have any time to blow in the late morning.

i ended up at a house party, next. i was initially intending to finish my coffee there and get some drinks in the afternoon, but, as it happened to be, a local brewery dropped off 250 free tall cans of beers. well, hey. right place, right time. i think i had five (it may have been six) before i left to go back to marble. i also found some marijuana edibles at some point that afternoon, and it started to hit me a little bit by the end of the night.

this house party had a lot of local djs at it, in a sense it was a who's who of underground detroit djs, and people were pretty much just hanging out and eating and stuff. i don't think i got a chance to thank anybody before i left...

i don't want to say i was messy at marble, because that's the wrong idea. closer to the truth is that i just kept nodding off and coming back; less messy, and more useless. i remember it; i wasn't blacked out or drunk, if anything was hitting me it was the edibles, but i was exceedingly tired and seeking a third wind that never really came.

so, i got a lot of people asking me if i was ok, and i may have gotten a little bit grumpy after the seventeenth time. i think i was well behaved, but i apologize if i was brusque with anybody. it just got a little annoying. there are exceptions to every rule but, generally, when somebody is sitting it out at a club, you shouldn't keep bothering them by asking them if they're ok, you should just leave them alone and let them figure it out. unless they're overdosing on something, which should be obvious when it's happening, whatever they're processing will pass, and there isn't ever going to be much that your glass of water can really actually do.

i can't blame the edibles with 100% certainty, but what i experienced is roughly consistent with other edibles experiences that i've had and i'm willing to suggest that they were probably the dominant factor, overall. they tend to make me extremely tired, or even knock me right out, but it's different than an alcohol black out because you mostly remember it..

so, i was tired, but the night isn't blurry. i remember it quite clearly, actually,

i was predominantly there to see vibert, and mostly just curious about the other sets. i really felt like being outside on this night, as well. i caught a part of his set and remembered thinking he sounded like everybody else, so i went for a smoke, and then he was doing some more warp-y kinds of stuff when i got back. but, then i started nodding and i had to sit down for a bit. so, i didn't get as much out of the set as i hoped for.

however, there was an ambient set outside by dave shettler right about then, which was actually more of what i needed at the time and something i greatly enjoyed. a lot of what he played was actually sort of similar to the experimental side of the stuff that i recently published, the cycles per second and the trivial group stuff. i can't tell you what drug was dominant, right then - the large amounts of alcohol i'd had over the last 33-35 hours, the smoked marijuana, the eaten marijuana - but it was a good combination, and the highlight of the weekend.

i was able to recover after 7:00 for two more beers and a bit more dancing, before finally getting out of there close to 10:00.

so, were the edibles a bad idea? i'm not reacting well to them, but i have no dosage guidelines, i'm not creating controls and my experiments have consequently been a little unfocused. so, i dunno. it seemed to be a little strong on this night...

the best way to ensure that the liberals hold to their promise on the medicare file is to give the greens the balance of power to pull the plug if they don't.

there's no obvious cause, and i have no interest at all in figuring it out.

it was sitting in one spot for a long period, so the cord is not likely to be damaged. and, there's no logic in thinking something exploded.

there was a lot of hair in it, and i've got most of it out as best as i can. but, it doesn't seem like that's the right answer.

there's other signs of somebody being in here, though.

i don't know....i know that i can't deal with the dry air all week.

i'm going to give the fan a chance to completely dry out and try again this afternoon.

i neither have the know-how, nor the tools, nor the interest to actually fix the device. i'll just buy a new one.

but, i can't handle living in the a/c all week. i'll need to open one of the windows, somehow, to undo the a/c.

i can spin the fan with water.

it's not seized...

there's no visible stress point on the fan, no signs that anybody tried to dismantle it, no signs of a cut wire, etc.

it seems like there's no power. it's on the same surge protector as my laptop, and that's fine.

i keep thinking that it must be the hair that's stuck around the spindle, which is proving difficult to get off. but, as the weight in hair and dirt and dust that is slowing down the vibration is slowly done away with, i'm not getting any more evidence that i'm on the right track.

but, how do you break a fan in a way that's not obvious?

a magnet?

the fan refuses to turn back on...

should i be able to hear it trying? i can hear it when it's on, but i think it's mostly the blaades.

and, it's getting cold in here from the air, now, too (.

if i can't get the fan to work this week, i may have to open one of the windows, and improvise some kind of a screen for it.

it is way too early to write sanders off.

but, he's doing everything wrong.

and, it's just getting worse...

...and a social conservative, too.

obama was also a far-right market fundamentalist, after all.

i still don't see where she can win. this is a projection; the numbers aren't there.

but, if the media somehow gets it's way and anoints warren, and the country lets them do it, you're all going to find yourselves incredibly disappointed by what she actually does, which is unlikely to be substantively different from the obama administration.

so, he hires a guy named 'faiz shakir' to be the face of his campaign, turns into a msm talking head (while they beat him up on air over and over), refuses to show up to any kind of queer event and then wonders why he can't get half the country to give him the time of day any more.

bernie does appear to have changed.

i hope he plans on running for re-election in georgia or something, because his days are numbered in vermont. and, that's the saddest part about this - they won't care when he's gone. no memorial. no plaque. no watch. he'll be pushed out without a second thought....

it's either the worst run campaign in primary history, an example of absolutely startling ineptitude, or it's planted with ops, and designed to fail.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bernie-sanders-has-a-problem-her-name-is-elizabeth-warren/2019/09/22/1223d6a6-dd57-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html

so, when you see warren out there acting like she's at a pep rally (brought to you be adderall.), there's actually some reason to look into that a little deeper.

in a real sense, warren would be the cheerleader-in-chief.

the reality that actually existing capitalism has come face-to-face with, and that to an extent is neoliberalism, is one where it's come to terms with a basic, fundamental flaw in the very fabric of it's own existence: competition is unnatural.

you have to teach kids to be competitive, they don't do it on their own. you have to create regulatory bodies to try to force firms into competing, because they won't do it on their own (at best, they might try to undercut to gain market share, but then they're in the cartel in no time. a stable market should have tiers, anyways, so that's usually harder than the simple math in the textbooks allows for.). it turns out that you need so much government to make a free market work, that you'd might as well just redistribute everything, anyways - and that the best approximation to a free market has to be almost the total opposite of the initial abstraction.

so, you don't really have this debate between governments and markets, because markets are just statist constructions that essentially give you back what you gave them (if you're lucky...). what you should have is merely an understanding of the importance of government.

and, a little wisdom should tell you that all of this energy that is created and spent on designing and enforcing markets could be better utilized elsewhere.

so, what happens when you introduce a new competitor into a market, then? do they bring the prices down through competition?

hardly.

they just join the cartel...

maybe we should have a little talk about the historical arguments that classical economics used to advance, why they're wrong and how modern economics corrects for those mistakes. i have a feeling that this is what this cycle is going to be about for me - that i'm going to end up in a lot of arguments with democrats and liberals about market theory.

you may have been told that competition reduces prices because each of the competitors wants to find ways to get the business of the consumer. when this happens, firm a and firm b get into a bidding war (essentially, a race to the bottom.) in order to save the sale. as a demanding and self-interest driven consumer, i bet that sounds like the best idea for you, because everybody wins, right? well, so long as by "everybody" you mean me, then everybody wins, and everybody...else...loses. what i'm trying to get across is that the premise is absurd on it's face: we don't live in an economic reality where the rules ensure that the consumer wins and everybody else loses.

let's have a little common sense here in understanding what actually happens. the firms don't say "competition is bad for us and good for consumers, so let's do lots of it! fuck our shareholders!". rather, what the firms say is "wait a second, you want us to compete? for you? yeah. right. we've got out our own self-interests here, and it's not you, consumer. sorry. rather, us firms are going to get together and set the prices at whatever we want it set at, and fuck you for complaining about it. and, so long as we stand together, what are you going to do, consumer? huh?"

and, i'll tell you what the consumers need to actually do, which is take control of the firm, but consumers lack revolutionary potential, so they never actually say that. rather, what they do is go crying to the government...

"reeeeegulaaaaaaaatoooooooors. these firms won't compete! it's not fair! make them compete. it's good for consumers, like me.". unfortunately, the regulators work for the firms, and they're actually there to prevent the government from forcing them to.

and, that's where we're at - this silly game where the government tries to pretend it can "spur innovation" and "incentivize competition". but, the firms don't want to compete, and the government can't actually make them. what the firms want to do is collude.

meanwhile, prices come up and down based on all other kinds of things, including the costs of mass production. socializing production is efficient. that's why firms socialize as much as they can, internally.

i don't see any snips or anything.

i'm probably being paranoid. but the dry air in here right now is awful :(. it feels like i'm in a bar, with all of the fog. it hurts to breathe....

so, i came home this morning and noticed my fan was no longer running.

it's odd, to say the least. it's not a powerful motor, so i guess there's some chance that some hair is stopping it from spinning, so i'm trying to clean it, but it's not currently helping.

i couldn't imagine that the motor blew. they're designed to be on all of the time.

so, is there some chance that somebody from upstairs came down and ruined my fan? well, if he doesn't want to listen to the fan, he can listen to me cough instead - and he's going to get a lot of it, because the difference with it off is dramatic.

and, it's ultimately pointless, because i'm going to buy another one at the first opportunity, which would be friday.

entering a tenant's apartment is considered an indictable offense in canda. it's trespassing, harassment and vandalism. there's no context where it's permissible.

we'll see if we can get the hair out of there or not. if i can't, it's going to be a long and frustrating week for everybody, as i struggle to fight against the dehumidifier and the smoke.