so, here we have it - 02/2014 done for the near future:

1) https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/02/
2) http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2014/02/
3) https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/02/
4) https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/

don't expect me to touch that again for years.

so, i've got the posting for 02/2014 done and am about to finish a final read through the blogs. and that will be it, for a while.

this is a sudden shift and something i wanted to avoid, but i have to put this aside for a while.

so, that means that each of the four february blogs is in a state of stasis that could last years. i'll post when i'm finished, but almost. i haven't added extra photos, email communications, discussions with family or landlord or etc and a lot of the other stuff i was putting into the blogs when i was preparing them for journal downloads, and i'm not going to for a long time. but i do have all of the posts in my master document reposted, for that month, and that's all you're getting for the foreseeable future.

when i eventually pick back up at this, the rebuild portion should at least be minimal and that might speed me up (given the work already done).

so, that's what i'm doing, and it's going to pick up, soon.

so, now ford is launching a war against covid in migrant workers, to prove he's not ignoring the problem. "look", he's saying, "we've found a problem and we're addressing it.'. well, bravo.

but, the reality is that if you pulled out just about any random subdivision of people in most places south of sudbury, you'd be likely to find rates just as high. this is really the only place they've gone looking for it like this (besides the geriatric facilities).

so, will he launch mandatory testing in, say, subsidized housing in toronto? in off-campus student residences in windsor?

not unless there's a problem to dramatically stamp out. and, nobody wants that.

just keep it away from the old people and we'll probably be fine. that's what the focus should have been from the start. if we've learned anything, right? surely? let's not get our hopes up...

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/premier-pledges-full-out-onslaught-in-response-to-surge-in-local-covid-19-farm-cases

i have now thoroughly sorted through the 2014 archives of this blog to reuse segments for the deathtokoalas and travel blog, but as i was finishing it up i realized that it wouldn't be fair to just leave that sitting for who knows how long, maybe even forever. if i'm going to fill in the deathtokoalas blog, i need to include the comments on music videos, which i was saving until i did the formal write-up.

i'm not doing those formal write-ups. i do have several liner notes for january, 2014 to finish, but i'm stopping there. so, when i get through this posting blitz that will mostly affect the deathtokoalas blog, these will not be final journals for this period. they will not include personal life correspondences, or any of the nerdier stuff related to filekeeping, on my end. they will just be the sum totals of the blogs, as they were.

i hope that straight posting out of a file can be done fairly efficiently, but i expect google to accuse me of being a robot and force me to slow down a bit.

i'm starting soon with feb, 2014. let's hope i can get through this quickly.

these are the other five candidates, and what a lark. it's not clear whether that guy with the top hat intends to be taken seriously or not.

i know dimitri lascaris from his work with the real news, and have a rough understanding of where he's coming from as a result of it. he's a bit of a hard-ass, actually; he does not like corruption. i have to say that he performed well here, even if his opponents were weak.

the fact that there's ten candidates is reflective of the place where the green party is, right now. if they make the right choice here, they could give the ndp (who continue to be uninspiring) a serious run for third party in the next election.

there's only five in the first part of this discussion, which could hardly be called a debate of any sort, and which mostly featured softball questions. it's kind of a shame that they didn't talk much about anything substantive...

i am not familiar with any of the three women on the council. the two males are both former liberals, and i am familiar with both of them. david merner is the kind of liberal i'd prefer to tend to avoid, but glen murray is actually the kind of liberal that i wish there were more of.

on paper, glen murray ought to be the front-runner here, by a good margin. as useful or knowledgeable as the other people may be, none of them has run a major ministry before. when or if these debates get going, he could potentially outwonk these people rather terribly.

but, the greens are a protest party, and glen's experience may actually be seen as baggage by a lot of voters that want to vote against the establishment, whether that's fair to glen or not.

for right now, all i can say is that this discussion didn't help much and i hope that the next round is more enlightening.

regarding the question about when you end the lesser evilism...

the interviewer seemed kind of frustrated by paul's insistence on the binary nature of the choice, which he seemed to write off as defeatism, but is in truth a realistic assessment of the political system in the united states, at the presidential level. the interviewer's frustration is as a result of seeing the decision through the prism of his own voting choices in germany, which is a multiparty parliamentary system with proportional representation, where the parliament elects the head of state without a popular plebiscite. one can indeed vote for smaller parties in germany, because the system allows for it. however, the election for the presidency is nothing like the bundestag elections, at all.

nor is it imaginable how it could be. how do you elect a president by proportional representation? can the president be 13% green? it's a run-off vote. these are your candidates...

see, i'm not actually convinced that the premise that trump is worse than biden is actually true. i line them up and i can't tell the difference between them. i actually worry that biden's hawks may end up more efficient than trump's hawks; that is, the difference in hawkishness may ultimately boil down to the greater competence of the democrats, to potentially disastrous consequences. trump has actually been quite reluctant to use force, and i appreciate that. i worry that we all may regret seeing biden as a more stable applicant.

there is a body in the united states that is a little bit like the bundestag, and it is the house of representatives, which does not assign seating via proportional representation, but does offer some possibility for third party resistance, perhaps more like you see in canada or britain. i don't think the rules currently call for it, but i would support a rule change to bring up a run-off vote in a scenario where there are initially three strong challengers; a president is an executive, and the nature of the position is such that a binary choice, in the end, seems proper. but, the dearth of third parties in the united states at the parliamentary level is an anomaly, and focus on third-party organizing should be directed at that level.

so, that's the answer to the question - the focus on third party organizing is overdue but it does not make sense at the presidential level, where a lesser evil choice is always inevitable, and should be rather directed at the parliamentary level, where third parties could conceivably pass laws. sanders lost. deal with it. further, recognizing that focusing third party energy at the appropriate parliamentary level is more efficient doesn't negate the necessity to make a sober contribution to determining the nature of the figurehead commander-in-chief. you still have to vote for one of the shitty choices, dammit.

so, it seems like paul quietly relaunched on vimeo when i wasn't paying attention.

it seems like you have to go to his site to watch the video, which is not a surprising development, as he often complained about people watching therealnews on youtube. but, it's catch-grabby web design. i just want a simple list of videos to click on, in order, to make sure i didn't miss one.

so, this may be the more ordered way to go at this.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/TheAnalysisnews-111882350255869/posts/?ref=page_internal

i'm going to finish that classical mechanics lecture series first, and i'll have a few things to say about it when i do. introduction to classical mechanics? ha! that's a trick, this is a meta grad course.

so, it sounds like one thing that could be done to increase the power of migrant workers without granting them permanent status would be to make deportation orders subject to judicial review - that is to put the issue before an immigration judge. if a worker feels like he's being deported due to standing up for his rights, he should have access to due process to determine if that is true or not, and be awarded damages if it is found out to be true.

ultimately, these issues are going to end up in the courts, anyways. so, granting permanent residence is really the same thing as providing for due process, in the end, in context. why not just give them due process, instead?

the hope of course is that the farmers address the issue in good faith, in the presence of a formal rights framework, in either way.

it's just that if we respond to every refugee & worker issue by granting permanent status, we'll be undoing a lot of our targeted immigration policy, which exists as it does for good reasons. my concern is really in ensuring that employers, in general, aren't able to use these programs as a way to avoid implementing labour codes, which appears to be exactly what the reality is. that should be the focus at hand...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-sees-jump-in-migrant-farm-workers-with-covid-19/

this is still the first wave, though.

i don't think it was preventable, and we're just going to see a time lag before it happens in ontario, although montreal may have already experienced the brunt of it. this is just the rest of the united states going through the phase of the process that europe and new york went through a few months ago.

it's an open question as to whether the steps taken to reduce the spread of the virus did so, temporarily, or if it just took a little longer for the virus to take hold in these areas. i'd lean towards the dominant factor being the latter, even if you can manage to barely measure a signal from the former.

i don't think we've seen a first wave crest yet in toronto. at least not according to the numbers. but i've been clear that i don't think the numbers released in ontario are very useful in understanding reality.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/only-two-u-s-states-are-reporting-a-decline-in-new-coronavirus-cases-1.5003399

i agree that the neo-liberal appropriation of identity politics for it's own purposes of socially engineering a more racially diverse elite is not a revolutionary politics, but i also have little opposition to it, and while i will sign off on any petitions arguing that it is ultimately a distraction for the left, i wonder if it isn't better to stand back and let it happen.

i understand that a component of the neo-liberal appropriation of identity politics is the expectation that minorities within the elite will act with influence in the communities they "represent" for the ultimate benefit of the elite, which is sort of feudal in character; i wonder if expanding access to the elite might rather aid in building the kind of cross-community solidarity that the working class, itself, needs to develop to better organize. what i'm saying is that there might be greater revolutionary potential in organizing in the future if we allow for this neo-liberal identity project to work itself out. after all, they've been using identity politics to rip us apart for ages, and it's actually kind of worked pretty well; having them undo their own control system, which has harmed us so greatly, may have beneficial outcomes, in the end.

or, maybe i'm being naive - maybe we're just being set up for the next round of divide and conquer.

so, i'm waiting this out, is what i'm doing, and i'm hoping it works itself out into something more revolutionary.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/bernie-sanders-protesters-democrats.html

i'm still building boundaries, abstractly, but some rules of thumb surrounding the differences between this blog and the deathtokoalas blog are developing as follows:

- the deathtokoalas blog will avoid direct news coverage altogether, with the exception of smart-ass remarks. note, however, that some institutions (like vice news) are not treated as news coverage, but as an entertainment broadcast about news, and that some hand-picked discussions from these sites are included.
- the deathtokoalas blog will not feature commentary or discussions around lectures, speeches or other lengthy interviews.
- the deathtokoalas blog will otherwise make an attempt to document all commentary and discussions around videos that are not posted to official news sites.
- the deathtokoalas blog will not include personal commentary, insofsar as it is separate from other comments and discussions.
- this blog will avoid commentary around music videos, unless there is a political component to it.

after some very careful thought, i'm hoping i can pick this up a bit.

it's interesting to see that kind of retraction in and of itself, though.

we're all taught this model in grade school about the planets rotating around the central fire, and we're told it's newtonian, the grand achievement of the copernican revolution, without spending much time contemplating the fact that the newtonian-copernican system is actually a revised ptolemaic system, with the gravitational center of the system corrected. worse, ptolemy himself was actually reversing existing greek systems (coming from aristarchus, with origins in pythagoreanism) that at least actually got the idea of heliocentrism correct. so, we may discuss how the understanding that the earth orbits the sun, rather than vice versa, was a revolutionary achievement in the history of science, but we fail to recognize that, through all of these changes, we've held to the concept of a system orbiting a center of some sort, without really challenging the premise. and, it's something that is taught to us over and over, no doubt as a consequence of the christian appropriation of newtonianism, something the english-speaking world needs to be more forthright and open about. so, we don't challenge our conception of the solar system as being this ordered, mechanical thing, despite the utter ancientness of the assumption - and the fact that it's totally wrong.

a much more substantive scientific revolution took place at the beginning of the last century, which finally broke the old pythagorean model. all of the ideas are developed in the system that was devised by newton, but they weren't properly understood until einstein. we realize today that the solar system is really not a set of well behaved planets orbiting the sun in this polite manner, but rather a system of masses that is suspended in it's own forces, engaging in a constant tug-of-war that no side can ever win. and, if we are to calculate their orbits, we must do so in such a way that takes into account the effects of all of the participants in this gravitational soup, which means constructing difficult n-body problems, rather than ignoring them as too distant or irrelevant. that simplifying newtonian assumption, that goes back to the pythagoreans, can no longer be tolerated.

but, what are the results? don't just tell me you've "lost confidence" in the outcome. do the actual work, and tell me what happens.

this retraction is curious to me. it seems to retract the article based on some inaccurate modelling of the planetary gravitational system (they seem to have ignored the gravitational effects of the planets), and then claims a lack of confidence in the results due to that error.

but, they don't mention whether they tried to correct the results of the paper based on that better modelling decision and what would happen if they did. generally, when a paper makes an error, it can be corrected.

so, has anybody attempted to make the proper adjustments and see what the effects on the results are?

i know that this paper was keyed in on by certain denialist groups as evidence of onsetting cooling rather than the reality of warming, but what i'm more interested in is the predictive modelling of solar sunspot activity. i think that the scientific consensus is that an extended solar minimum would not prevent warming due to increased greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere altogether, but that it will slow it down a little, with exaggerated regional consequences, particularly in terrestrial regions of the northern hemisphere. 

so, i understand that the publisher and one of the authors have "lost confidence" in the correctness of the outcome due to some poor modelling decisions. but, i'd kind of like to see it actually worked out, to see if those adjustments actually affect the outcome or not.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61020-3

i do hope that the ambassador bridge is eventually expropriated and turned into a pedestrian walkway. the bridge may be of questionable use for heavy loads in the near future, but it could very well remain maintained for lighter foot traffic for quite some time.

i'm going to have to move, eventually, and i'm wondering if i don't want to focus my attention in regions around the new bridge, rather than regions around the tunnel.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/michigan-court-rules-against-morouns-bid-to-stop-gordie-howe-bridge/wcm/f8408edc-1b38-425f-8563-f74307f49511/

so, it seems to be that the developing strategy in ontario is to delay the reporting, and tell everybody to wear a mask. that way, we can continue to try to ignore it, on purpose.

my position from the start is that these measures are useless in the long run, and there's essentially nothing a city like toronto can do about it. toronto is in a weird point, where the poor quality of the statistics that are available make it hard to measure whether it's reached a peak, like detroit or montreal. it could be that the delaying tactics were actually marginally effective, but in that case, that's all they were - delaying tactics. so, toronto is either unusually vulnerable to a late first wave attack, or it's got a lot of delayed reporting to do. either way, let's hope that the extended delay, reporting deficit or not, was enough that the system doesn't reach capacity along with whatever bump is inevitable on reopening.

and, let's hope that lessons have been learned about isolating the elderly properly. it should be a long time before normal social behaviour can resume again.

so, the mask thing is....it's a hope. really, the system is just giving up, realizing it can't wait this out, it can't delay and smother forever. so, go back to work. even if you're sick. just wear a mask.

my personal aversion to mask-wearing of any sort seems like somewhat of a marginal concern, in context. but, you still won't see me wearing one, in a city where there is actually no evidence of recent community transmission.

and, i'm curious how people react, in the long run.

i've got enough supplies, including some more marijuana, to last me another two weeks or so. let's see what happens.

workers tend to be far more naive about this than managers are, but don't you confuse yourself for a minute - the class war is perpetual. and, they'll strike whenever it's opportune.

if capital can find a way to use this as an excuse to decrease wages, it will.

i've made my aversion to the red cross, specifically, very clear - in addendum to my general aversion to the concept of private sector charity, which i'd argue should be outright abolished, and folded into government run services, instead.

but, they're really doing everything they can to avoid the obvious necessity, which is that they need to hire full-time, properly trained workers at living wages. they're going to bring in students, red cross workers...what's next, pilgrims? isis "refugees"?

until they get the basic fact through their head that they have to pay fair wages for labour if they want workers to give a fuck, our geriatric care sector will continue to lag others in the developed world. that's what we're doing wrong, and it's not just in this sector, it's across the board - we're not paying workers enough.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/coronavirus-live-updates-montreal-bar-owners-grapple-with-sudden-reopening/wcm/2622ef59-66ea-4707-be63-26239641522c/

no, listen.

china really, honestly needs to start behaving more responsibly. this is a growing major world power that appears to be trying to negotiate a hostage exchange with a mid-level economy, to evade the legal outcome of an ongoing extradition request. that any of this should for a moment be even given the slightest level of seriousness is preposterous.

so, you've got people like allan rock out there musing about how we're antagonizing the chinese, afraid that they might upset this country that continually acts like a rotten teenager. no. it's imperative that china be helped to grow up and behave more responsibly, and very quickly. otherwise, we're going to have a very strange world on our hands in a few decades.

so, the media has just fastforwarded this case through all kinds of stuff...

first of all, would intervening in the case be consistent with upholding the rule of law? there's a simplistic narrative in the media that just because the law allows for a specific power abstractly, that it can therefore be used in any way desirable, without following certain customs and regulations placed down by existing precedent, which is, in fact, actually a key component of analyzing whether a specific behaviour upholds the rule of law or not, in the specific anglo-canadian legal context. i guess that, in the chinese context, power is expected to be used; in the british context, power is expected to be restrained. so, any foreign reading of our law that deduces that the presence of a power allows for it's arbitrary use on command by some type of sovereign is reading it out without the context of our legal traditions, and is consequently doing so incorrectly.

there was recently a court decision in this case that the issue should proceed. so, for the minister to intervene would be to overturn the court - explicitly, directly. in canada, we have judicial independence, and intervening it is also a disastrous breach in the rule of law; that would be overturning a set of precedents that underlies our legal traditions.

it is unclear exactly when it would be appropriate for a minister to intervene, but it would likely be at the beginning of a trial, or perhaps at the end of one. the minister may, for example, deduce that the outcome of a trial is illegitimate, for some very clear and well argued reason. or, the minister may decide, at the outset, that a trial should not take place for some also very clearly and well argued reasons. these occurrences would need to be exceedingly rare for the minister to withstand accusations of abuse, and the system to withstand reform and reversal.

what is crystal clear is that the minister cannot flagrantly intervene in the middle of proceedings because it doesn't like a specific outcome, or due to political pressure of any sort. for, that is the rule of law, in context - judicial independence, as a central component of our legal tradition.

now, what about this idea of a hostage release?

well, first, we're talking about this like the prime minister can order this woman released for that reason, which is absurd. the prime minister is not holding this woman hostage, she's being held under house arrest by an independent judicial process.

ignoring the inappropriateness of the premise, do i think that actually carrying through with a trade is going to endanger canadians? this is rooted in the premise that terrorist groups may get a greenlight to hold people hostage under the expectation of payment, but that's kind of a weird argument. first, we're talking about an exchange of humans, not a ransom payment. second, china isn't a terrorist group.

well, wait a second - i just said china isn't a terrorist group. why is it acting like one, then?

and, this is my actual reaction to the scenario - what? we're talking about a hostage exchange with china, in 2020?

china needs to be told that it needs to discard all discussion of exchanging hostages as a pre-requisite for further constructive dialogue.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7105816/china-kovrig-spavor-wanzhou-intervention/

when they found cases in the meat plants, they didn't send the workers back to the factories, so long as they promise to self-isolate.

they shut the fucking factories down.

so, umm...

wash your leamington produce extra good, i guess?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-eases-isolation-rules-to-boost-covid-19-testing-for-migrant/

apparently, the federal government thinks it's not bound by provincial minimum wage laws, and that offering work below the minimum wage to students is some kind of act of generosity.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/feds-offering-students-1k-for-every-100-hours-of-covid-19-volunteer-work-1.4999165

$1000 for 100 hours of work is $10/hr, which is considerably below the minimum wage in all of the large provinces.

ontario - $14/hr

alberta - $15/hr

bc - $14.60/hr

quebec - $12.50/hr

so, if your kid signs up for this, s/he's essentially subsidizing the executives at some corporate charity, who get to siphon wages from the workers out of the "donations" to the organization. 

i understand that employment opportunities for students may be slim this summer, and this may have longterm implications on their finances, but that's not some kind of excuse for the federal government, of all institutions, to trample all over minimum wage legislation. 

so, somebody should launch legal action to ensure that these workers are being paid a legal wage, if they choose to take this labour on.

i've really had some difficulty slimming down the deathtokoalas moniker to just media related posts. i got loose with my definitions, for a bit....

so, i've been going over the blog repeatedly trying top make sure i understand what makes sense and what doesn't.

i hope to get a substantive amount done today.

what do i think about them reopening in windsor?

well, i never supported them closing in the first place, remember.

what do the facts say about this?

1) the border isn't closed, there's still people transporting goods back and forth, and there's even still health care workers moving back and forth from what was, at one time, a fairly hard hit region (although they seem to have recovered well, in the long run). so, the premise that the city is under a level of restricted movement in and out of it is a fantasy. i really maintain that there is little point in locking down a city that is on an open international border.

2) that said, there aren't a lot of cases here. the cases that are showing up are in the farm sector in the southeastern tip of the county. i bicycled there last week; it's about 55 km up county road 34, although you may be able to reduce the total travel distanced by taking the freeways in a car. leamington is not exactly far from here. but, that sector is relatively isolated from the city of windsor. i agree that pairing policy together with this region is of questionable utility to the city, and some form of separation or mutual autonomy may be beneficial to both of us.

3) the data in ontario is of limited help in determining policy, to say the least. everything is lagged by weeks or months. when they set up a testing centre in leamington, they shut it down after they started finding a lot of cases; it was easier to cover the problem up than to deal with it. if you're paying close attention to the way that data is being released, you can see fingerprints of this kind of thing everywhere. so, we don't actually know what the rates of transmission or even what the death rates actually are in toronto right now, because the data is being suppressed. it follows that trying to compare an obvious pr disaster for the province to information that we know is incomplete is kind of absurd.

4) you're left to conclude that windsor has gone from being perpetually ignored to being punished for fucking up the province's reopening. and, we're kind of stuck; because we've exposed a problem, we have to deal with it.

i don't see a lot to get excited about regarding stage 2, frankly. the things that would be opening would not be the things i'd see myself going to, and certainly not in the way they'd exist. i'm probably not going to actually go anywhere until they get to stage 4 or stage 5.

i don't think it's fair to pin the whole problem on this guy, or really much of the problem on him at all. he has little control over the situation, which as it's root cause is unregulated globalization.

see, and this is why this is so frustrating for so many people - they want somebody to blame. they want to look at what went wrong, fire the idiots responsible, fix the problem and everything's great forever. but, that's old economy thinking. nothing works like that anymore...

there is no single person to blame, nobody to take the fall, nobody's head to chop off. it's the system that's at fault, and the system that needs to adjust.

that said, if there is widespread protest against the mask laws in the upcoming days or weeks, i would call on his resignation at that time. and, i do believe that this abuse of power is indeed grave enough to warrant legitimate calls for his removal.

so, i would like to see him resign.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/online-petition-calls-for-removal-of-windsor-essex-medical-officer

i'm stopping to eat, and will run over this a second time afterwards, but i've got up to the end of aug, 2016 rebuilt for the two smaller blogs. that was just the first run from the music blog, but i did it like this because i thought it would be quicker to get the big stuff out first, and leave more subtle questions of inclusion for later. that more ponderous second run is going to start next, after i double check 2016, after i eat.

so, i'll be running back over 2014-2016 a second time, adding segments that are currently only published on this specific blog over that period.

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2016/
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2016/

i think this is an abuse of power, legally speaking.

the legislation that they are citing to enact this order is intended for small scale quarantines of the population, not to bring in sweeping rules and restrictions. the legislation allows for quarantine rules to apply to a "class" of the population; what the health unit is doing is labeling the entire population a class of itself, which may work in an introductory algebra course, but is an abuse of the concept when applied to applying abstract legislation to real-life use. this legislation was never meant for this purpose.

further, the grounds of applying this kind of legislation at all are at best questionable. while the virus does clearly pose heightened risks for understood segments of the population, the question of proportionality, here, is very relevant. is this a reasonable step to take given the actual risk that exists?

i think i have enough supplies to last me a week or two, i just need to double check my meds in the morning.

as noted previously, i am not expecting this to be adhered to or enforced. but, i want to understand what reality actually is before i dive into it.

https://www.wechu.org/sites/default/files/create-resource/class-action-order-face-coverings-wec-june-2020.pdf?mc_cid=99ac203490&mc_eid=97a466ded0

i've been vocal about my support for regulatory overhaul in the foreign workers sector, in fact i've called to abolish it and mechanize instead, but there is perhaps a better approach than offering these people permanent resident status. surely the law can find a way to invest people with social rights in this country, without making permanent residents out of them. i would be more likely to support a more thorough safety net and more detailed social rights for temporary workers as it's own thing, and please understand that there'd need to be some tax involved in that, than jump all the way to permanent residence. that should be something that has a higher level of value attached to it. and we do want it to be valuable, right?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ottawa-vows-crackdown-on-employers-violating-health-protection-rules/

i finished this on saturday night, but i didn't get a chance to give it a second gloss over until this afternoon.

i may make different decisions when i finalize these documents in the next journal release cycle, however far into the future.

for now, these are half skeletons of 2015, based solely on the music journal.

https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2015/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2015/

i hope to get most of the way through 2016 tonight, but i may get slowed down if google decides i'm secretly a robot and makes me click captchas between posts (or even shuts me right down).

so, i decided on saturday night that i'd do a grocery run yesterday, so that i don't need to be in the stores during the initial rollout of what appears to be substantive mask-wearing regulations. i overheard several people claiming they were in the store on sunday for that reason, and it in truth may have stimulated a mild grocery run. but, the evidence of that was mixed; there were long line-ups in some stores, and nobody at all in other stores. this would have been limited to windsor-essex.

so, that's what i did yesterday, and it took all day. i have some cleaning to do today, and should be back to what i was doing tonight or tomorrow.

i'm not sure what to expect. while i would, overall, expect minimal adoption and lax enforcement, at least to start, it's unclear what kind of force the county health authority is intending to use, or what authority it even has to use it. further, the wildcard in the mess is businesses that try to enforce it on unwilling customers, and any conflict that results from that.

i do not intend to follow any laws regarding mask use. but, i decided it was a good idea to let it play out a little before i decided how to react, if at all.

i more or less expect the law to be widely ignored and the potential for conflict to be low, but we'll see what happens.

stupid old man should have known better than to bring a knife to a gunfight, huh?

listen; severe mental illness can trigger some very erratic and irrational behaviour, and it's not beyond the pale for the officers to treat the situation very seriously. i want to be empathetic to the man's conditions, but not at the expense of public safety.

however, using guns to take down a crippled old man with a knife is excessive force, clearly.

a happy ending to that story would have probably ended with the man transferred to a psychiatric hospital. the presence of a negotiator aside, the police should have known to restrain themselves long enough to bring the situation to that specific endpoint. i mean, i think there's something wrong with telling me that the failure was that the police didn't wait for a negotiator; that is setting an incredibly low bar for the behaviour of the actual officers, who must surely be expected to have better judgement than this.

are they trained to behave like this? was it that specific unit brought in, that is trained to identify and eliminate threats? i can't take that as an excuse; that's a failure in training, at least for police use at the civilian level, as it did not take into account real world scenarios, such as this one. so, it goes back to the first point, actually; if you're going to tell me that the cops are just trained to react to situations and need to be directed by a negotiator, then i need to protest to the low bar set by expectations in police behaviour, which should at least include training in judgement on the use of excessive force. otherwise, these police officers should be deployed strictly for military use, and a separate force for civilians should be designed, with these concerns in mind.

so, telling me that they're doing what they're told is not an excuse, it's a description of the problem.

the thing is that this is actually the one situation where something like a civilian force is going to remain necessary to maintain. yes, he was a crippled old man with a knife, and excessive force in this situation was not necessary. but, he was also a crazy old man with a knife, that may have tried to use it. there's no social program to get rid of crazy, and we need to collectively be prepared to protect ourselves against it. so, i'm not particularly critical of the premise, and recognize that this is a situation where some kind of support personnel that could protect itself would need to be present on the ground.

the issue is the excessive use of force.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/siu-police-shooting-mississauga-1.5621243

there's no possibility that i'm being forced to wear a mask in public. do with me what you will.

https://windsorite.ca/2020/06/wearing-a-mask-at-commercial-establishments-will-soon-be-mandatory-in-windsor-essex/

the average trump ralley-goer is what, exactly? a middle aged male, likely of poor cardiovascular health, and potentially diabetic.

drink your kool-aid. drink it right up.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7089102/trump-campaign-staffers-coronavirus/

so, i finally cleared out the overposting at the deathtokoalas blog, which i'm posting a skeleton of for 2014 as a clean-up and put-aside step. i decided to just rip out the commentary altogether.

i had decided a few days ago that maybe the deathtokoalas blog could have this existentialist narrative attached to it, but what ended up happening is that following that existentialist narrative opened up into too much of a personal story, which is not the intent of that blog. that blog is intended to focus on media criticism. so, i just cut the commentary out altogether.

that side of the narrative is explored in the other three blogs, with varying levels of continuity.

so, i'm done with this now and am ready to move on to 2015.

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/

this was the elevation going from windsor to leamington yesterday, which is maybe why the wind felt so brisk.

and, that might explain why it felt faster on the way home, as well.

it seemed flat, but i guess there was a steady incline. i guessed as much moving home, on the other side of it.

interesting.

https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/canadians-support-universal-basic-income

i strongly recall there being a lengthy writeup about my day biking to leamington posted at roughly this time, but it appears to have disappeared. while i have toyed with writing a review now, which would be far more comprehensive than this playlist, i'm ultimately not confident that i would recreate the feeling i had over this day in the same way that i did then, and any writeup at this time would consequently necessarily be lacking. so, i would prefer to leave a post here calling out the barbarism of censorship, so that google can experience the shame of facilitating the silencing of a harmless person telling a harmless story about biking to the store to locate estrogen.

it was a good day, and i'm glad i at least filmed it.

but, shame on the entity, organization and individual that deleted this post, and then didn't even have the decency and courage to tell me it was deleted. and, shame on google for allowing them to do it.

how far did i bike today?

i went there and i went back. so, that's 54.5*2 = 109 km. that's about 68 miles.

google says three hours, and maybe that might be true if literally biking at a constant rate, but i stopped repeatedly for hydration, which is a real-life adjustment. it took me about four hours in either direction.

i don't feel that this is the limit of what i could do on a bike over a day. rather, i'm sure i could do more. but, i worry about the safety of the roads. much further than leamington, and i'm going to have to take a freeway, and i don't want to.

i'm also rather sun burnt, and won't know the extent of it until tomorrow.

i got enough for 25 days. let's just hope there's a better answer in 25 days....

how do i feel after that? i think it'll hit me tomorrow...

so, what's going on with me?

yesterday, i got a little bit upset about the border being closed for another month and went to get something to eat to kind of let me head settle before i started strategizing, and i decided that i couldn't waste the solstice sitting inside complaining. so, i went and bought a quarter of what so far seems to be better quality marijuana, at a reasonable price. it worked out to $65 for the quarter after taxes, which is in line with expected costs. we'll see how i feel as the solstice contains to carry on, but i'm feeling alright for just right now.

i didn't get a thing done last night at all, i just got lost reading articles, and made a comment or two on them. but, i was more just baked and wanting to passively read. it happens, sometimes.

this afternoon, i finally started calling around about the estrace and found 100 pills in an undisclosed location that is going to require some travelling to get to tomorrow. google wants to either send me up this gravel dirt path (which is going to be awful bicycling through) or down this abandoned rural, forested road, presumably because it's the shortest path. but, i'd like to travel mostly through civilization of some sort, even if that civilization is just farmland. i'm not keen about getting eaten while bicycling to get estrace. so, i've been charting my own path through the essex back roads, to try to maximize human contact while travelling. i'm realizing that this region is far more populated than i imagined it was. i think i can do this fairly reasonably.

so, i'm off for an adventure tomorrow.

the good news is that that's another 25 days, so if i can get all of the running around i need done, hopefully i can finish that thought process i started the other day relatively quickly. i never got around to cleaning up the overposting on the deathtokoalas blog, and should get to doing that tonight, maybe.

you can put me in the category of people that think this is for the best.

i've read a few articles lamenting the turn that canada has taken since the paul martin years, in truth, which were carried through with by stephen harper, and then picked back up again by the liberals. see, i think this is the kind of major error that defines confusion over canada's failure to return to it's very liberal 20th century foreign policy after the return of the "liberals"; the truth is that it was the martin purges that initially set this forward in the first place.

there was a distinct move towards aligning canada more directly with the united states during the mulroney administration, but it was kind of wobbled against by the chretien government, without stepping too far out of line. canada made kind of a bold stand against the united states at the united nations over iraq, refusing to take part in it because it was, in fact, illegal. but, it contributed to the invasion in other ways that it didn't feel technically contravened international law. as correct a stand as that was, it created a lot of headaches for a lot of people, and his poor relationship with the bush administration is actually a key part of the reason he was asked to step down midway through a strong third mandate. when martin came in, mending things up with the americans was a top priority. this reached a peak under harper, perhaps, but only because the existing president is so unpredictably hostile to a country that spent a lot of time trying to build very close ties. the model for this government was very close collaboration with a clinton administration, remember.

under chrystia freeland, this has taken a turn towards the absurd, with canada's aggressive involvement in venezuela being particularly disappointing. this is all being done, remember, to curry american favour, as this was seen as the best way to ensure access to their markets. we've demonstrated how far we are willing to go, and it is directly into the abyss.

now, nobody wants us making security decisions, and perhaps for good reason - right at the time when our codependent relationship with the united states is meeting up with a point of self-realization, and the failure of this policy is becoming apparent.

canada needs some time to reflect on what it actually is, and where it's going in the future. and, it should take the loss as the rebuke that it is.

i don't know if a return to a 20th century model is a salvageable or desirable proposal at this point, or if canada is even important enough to save, in the grander scheme of the board. but, we're clearly stuck, and need to find ourselves, somehow - either in the form of a renaissance of canadian liberalism, or as a colony of the united states. we can't have it both ways, clearly - the rest of the world isn't buying it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7070563/canada-united-nations-security-council-seat/

you know, dexamethasone and hydroxychloroquine are used for many of the same purposes, and the success of the former appears to be that it is succeeding in reducing those cytokine storms that identified hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment, for extremely ill patients.

it does sometimes happen that a specific formulation of a class of drugs may be more effective in a certain scenario, but if it is the case that dexamethasone is succeeding and hydroxycholoroquine is failing then some kind of reasoning as to why that is would be useful in demonstrating the point.

as it is, i'm not sure that small scale trials for the success of this new drug should be treated much differently than small scale trials for the success of the previous one were, and i'd not be at all surprised if clinical trials for dexamethasone end rather similarly to ones for hydroxycholoroquine.

there might be some specific difference in delivery or something; i'm not discounting it. i'm just a little skeptical, given that they appear to be prescribed interchangeably for most if not all of their clinical uses.

well, we know the virus travels in sewage. and, we know that lots of countries dump their sewage into the water. if the salmon was caught not far from a dumping site, including perhaps in british columbia, then it's not entirely insane to think the virus may have entered the salmon's gills, or otherwise been stored in it's bodies, even just via osmosis, as a consequence of living near a dumping site; it's another question to speculate as to whether the salmon may have been actively infected by the virus.

however, it's easy enough to argue that somebody may have sneezed over the cutting board, as well.

so, i would hope that other possible explanations are being explored.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/coronavirus-outbreak-china-who-1.5612838

there's a dog across the street, and the first couple of times it saw me walk by, it modulated between incessant yelping and curious distance. but, as it has seen me walk by a few times, it's grown accustomed to me, and is now approaching me with wagging tail and sagging tongue.

see, i think it's figured out what i'm doing when i go out. i don't want to say the magic w-word, it might know and get excited, and think....but alas, no. i will walk...shit...right by every time.

central to this change in reaction, i think, is the recognition that i live across the street. the dog seems to have noticed that, specifically, and been able to abstract close living conditions with pack membership. i live in this dog's hood, so i'm therefore cool to walk with.

it remains to be seen how the dog reacts to repeated rejection, as i continue to saunter by and leave it behind. in it's dog's mind, it no doubt believes it has an equal opportunity to walking, and it damned well knows i'm going for a walk - without him. behavioural tests on dogs have shown that they understand preferential treatment, and have an intuitive concept of justice around sharing, up to the point that they are, of course, immensely competitive for resources. it's the same contradictions we have, just in a more primal and less restrained form. so, the dog is going to no doubt feel left out, at some point.

the real revolution, of course, will come when the dog takes the initiative to walk itself. only then can there be true opportunity for all to engage in equal walking; for the dog to gain the freedom of a human to walk at will, it must seize it for itself. but, there is such a high level of responsibility to self-walking, including the need to regulate defecation, to avoid biting and to just plum out not run away, that it seems questionable whether self-walking is a realistic goal for the dog population at this point. there would really need to be a social revolution in doggy behaviour, and it would no doubt need to be expressed genotypically before it could be established with any force or regularity.

but, i wonder if the friendly dog again turns vicious in the end, due to dejection.

'cause i'm goin' for a walk. that's right. a walk. see ya doggy....

see, this is how we deal with the problem here in ontario - we pretend it doesn't exist.

windsor is one of three regions of ontario still in lockdown, because there's been a spike in cases around migrant workers. the city has called on the province to do mandatory testing, and is getting push back from the business owners, presumably because they know there's a problem. so, they're going to stop testing the migrants altogether; that way, they can get the numbers they need to open the city.

it's just the most local example of what has been clear for weeks - the numbers in ontario are useless.

but, this is what we're doing - we're pretending this doesn't exist.

https://windsor.ctvnews.ca/testing-centre-for-assessing-migrant-workers-in-windsor-area-to-shut-down-thursday-1.4987597

see, to me this brings up concerns about the virus mutating here in canada, because this hasn't happened elsewhere, and draws attention to the lack of meaningful surveillance here in ontario, due to an apparent attempt to smudge it out through delayed reporting of the data. what we don't know is the depth of it.

if we were more rigorous about collecting and analyzing samples, then we might have a better understanding of what is happening and how to stop it. as it is, it's going to be exceedingly difficult to stop an influenza-like virus from spreading amongst children, if it's been established as already having started. that was one of the major differences in the early stages of the pandemic - this didn't visibly affect children much.

if that fact has changed, then children should be added to the list of vulnerable populations, and action should of course be immediately taken to do so. we don't need this to hit daycares the way it hit the old folks homes.

listen, following the science means adjusting to the evidence. the evidence initially said it didn't hit or spread amongst kids. it's perfectly plausible that some mutation spread amongst adults quite a while before it started to spread amongst children. so, suggesting children should have been separated would be the wrong deduction, as the failure in policy came in respects to the adult population. but, now, apparently that has changed, and the policy should change along with it.

we really don't want this to hit daycares the same way it hit the longterm care facilities. let's learn something quickly. k?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/increase-new-covid-19-cases-under-20s-ontario-toronto-peel-1.5612526

this is what the region needs, and the government should be aggressively pushing for it.

imagine it...

you could manufacture the machines in abandoned factories, then deploy them to all night warehouses. you'd generate good jobs creating, upgrading and maintaining the machines, which would produce produce essentially at cost. and, given that ontario's grid is able to produce so much clean energy for almost no cost, we could potentially become a major export market for things we don't already export.

but, the market won't do it on it's own, it needs help from government to do it.

get these ones out into the niagara region.

this one does tomatoes, which is key regionally.

perfect.

let's see some major government grants for this kind of shit, to turn the industry over, and pronto.

with the proper move to indoor growing, we can have year-round produce without having to import slaves to do it - and at lower overheads, and therefore cheaper prices.

on top of that, if we can get the industry building the robots in ontario, on top of the dwindled manufacturing capacity, we can restart some meaningful industry, and create a slew of spinoff jobs with multiplier effects in the mean time.

i'm sick of nineteenth century thinking. let's get beyond this. let's move forwards...

good.

cancel this, forever - it's irreformable. it's legalized slavery, and we're actually worse than the americans in how we do it.

if we're going to bring people in on temporary work visas, we should be ensuring that they get the same wages, rights and benefits as native-born workers, and we should enforce the law by inspecting the areas frequently - and sending employers that break the rules repeatedly to jail.

but, we're not going to do that. and, if we did, we would defeat the point - we bring them in so we don't have to pay them the same wages or give them the same rights and benefits of native-born workers, because it's so much more profitable to hire a slave.

do i think that canadians should do this work instead? we're often told that canadians don't want to do this, which i think is a misrepresentation of the facts - canadians may not want to work at below minimum wage in an industry with no collective bargaining, but what's the actual problem here, insofar as that's true?

but, this is the wrong question to ask at this stage in history.

the right question to ask is if we can automate this, thereby emancipating the labour involved. and, the answer is surely that we're pretty close to it.

let's hope this is the push required to finally mechanize this, and end this barbarity once and for all.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/mexico-pauses-tfw-to-canada-covid-1.5613518

click here: 1:13:40 to watch leonard susskind use abstract theoretical physics to demonstrate conservation of momentum, under the assumption that the earth is flat.

listen....

it'd be fine if this was an introduction to newtonian mechanics in a grade 12 class. but, he just spent three hours building up an extremely abstract meta theory,  to throw it all away in a bunch of backwards assumptions that should not be made in the context of doing this in such an abstract way.

the earth is not flat, and dU/dx is consequently not zero.

yes, this is a course in classical mechanics. and, yes, that's a simplifying assumption that is just fine in the context of classical mechanics. but, wasn't the point of building up the theory he just built up to work through those assumptions more rigorously? why bother if you're just going to make naive newtonian errors?

there should be a limiting process, there - and, yes, you're going to end up with zero in the limit in the end. but i came here to see that done.

for now, i'm just going to ignore this catastrophe and otherwise let him finish.

if you're keeping track, though, we've learned watching these lectures that susskind is both a conspiracy theorist and a flat-earther.

so, that's two of the last three summers that have been wasted, now.

i didn't move down here to waste my life away.

this sucks :(

this government is a nightmare.

i'm almost willing to vote conservative to get rid of them. which is saying a lot...

first things first, that means i need to figure out where i'm getting my estrogen from this month.

i was hoping i could buy it in detroit.

i'm going to have to call around. i might have to find a way to get to leamington, or something.

i mean, what do you think i'm going to do?

go drink in somebody's back yard and talk about nothing?

go have sex?

that's boring...

the upside is that if i'm not doing anything then i should be able to save $200-300/month for later.

so, when they do re-open the border, i should have a nice sum put aside to spend.

even if they re-open here in windsor, there's nothing to do in this boring city, so expect me to sit inside on the computer all summer and complaint about the air conditioner upstairs making me tired and my disgusting neighbours smoking drugs.

worst summer ever :(.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/border-covid-extension-july-1.5613854

so, why don't i go out on the streets, then?

because i can't support a movement based on identity, under any scenario. in a real sense, this frightens me. and, i'm sure i'm going to just end up in a debate with liberals or centrists on the ground.

i'll stay out of their way and let them finish, but i'm just simply not interested in participating in anything that's not explicitly rooted in class politics.

and, i realize i have to let them make that choice without cooption or coercion - or it won't work.

windsor has somewhat of a vibrant bro-rock scene, but i'm not remotely interested in it. that's one of the more disappointing things about moving down here; the house shows lean firmly on the side of metal, which is a genre that i simply don't like.

as a small, half-rural area, it also has folk & country scenes, but i don't care about those.

there's just nothing here that's of any interest to me. i moved to detroit, not to windsor....

if this is permanent, i'm going to end up moving to toronto.

so, i've got the travel side done for 2014.

https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/

i think i overposted to the dtk side, and am going to go through carefully and double check. but, it should be done within a few hours, as well.

so, i'd like to call on the leaders of the united states and canada to put aside their petty, childish egotistical squabbling over stupid bullshit that nobody cares about and open the border, already.

this isn't about stopping the spread of a virus. there's no science, whatsoever, to back up the efficacy of border closures in stopping pandemics - it's just base fallacy. what it is is trumpian logic. and, no - our collective governments haven't lost their minds, and caved into the stupidity.

this might have initially been political in nature, but it's not anymore. now, it's about bruised egos.

and, it's stupid. it needs to stop.

there are cities on both sides of the border with large tourism sectors that are going to suffer dramatically over this, and that is not fair. small businesses in windsor should not be forced to suffer because the prime minister feels that the president insulted him. nor should small businesses in the united states be forced to suffer to uphold the president's ego.

as a border citizen, let me be clear: i don't fucking care about any of that bullshit. ok? what i care about is the fact that detroit is on the verge of reopening, and the fact that my summer is going to be ruined if i'm stuck here in boringtown shitsville, instead.

open the border, already....

there's a lot of strawmen of me out there. i don't fully know where they're coming from, or where they're propagating through, but i know they're there.

it's hard to react to something that you're not really fully aware of.

so, i'll make the request i've made before - my email address is on the side. you know i like a good debate. so, let me know what's going on.

so long as i'm not fully aware of what's being said about me, all i can do is ask you to come here to the source, rather than rely on these strawmen perceptions of me - or people trying to score points by knocking those strawmen over.

i crashed early yesterday and slept long. it's the weather, and the air conditioner isn't helping. i seem to just shut down and stop working in the cold. one more cold day and then it's set to turn for the better with some humidity building up tomorrow...

i got october done, which is not enough work. at this rate, it will take months to get through this. i need longer days than this...and less sleep.....

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/10/
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/

yesterday was kind of a weird day, in the end. i didn't push forward much...

i'm now up to the end of sept, 2014 (just the music journal) and am going to stop to eat.

1) deathtokoalas:
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/02/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/03/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/04/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/05/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/06/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/07/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/08/
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2014/09/

2) travel blog:
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/02
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/03
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/04
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/05
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/06
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/07
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/08
https://jessicamurraytravelblog.blogspot.com/2014/09

"so, wait. you would only support the blacks if they have politics you agree with? where's your solidarity?"

listen.

if you think i should support a movement based on identity politics, then i think you're what's wrong with the world.

yes, i will support you based on whether i like your politics or not, and if you think that's disagreeable, then i'll have to disagree with you.

as an anarchist of the left, i support police & prison abolition in it's most extreme and literal sense. however, i don't support "retributive justice" in any context, whatsoever; i think it's barbaric, and i think people arguing for it are barbarians.

and, i don't care about your race, your ethnicity, your religion, your gender or any other sort of identity you'd like to claim for yourself.

see, like i say - i support this. sort of. what i support is pretty much the most radical version of the abolition movement, and i'm fully cognizant that any movement to actually do this is going to probably end up working against my actual interests, for the simple reason that there's so little support for it. when you get people together in a city like minneapolis, the actual proposals are going to end up disappointingly conservative.

we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, on this. the social conditions for this kind of a change are not yet in place. and, you can call me a technological determinist if you'd like (i don't consider that to be an insult. i'd rather be a technological determinist than a historical materialist.), but it's not clear that we've made the final push past post-industrialization to eliminate the ruling class' system of worker control yet, either. but, as mentioned, this is likely imminent; if active policing is a function of industrialization, it's not clear that it ought to survive deindustrialization, or alter-industrialization, as it may actually be.

but, how much popular support is there for the retribution-first police reform movement that i admittedly initially kneejerked against, apparently partly due to bad reporting? i suspect you'd find that more people support sending the "bad apple" cops to jail, because that's how they're trained to see the issue. people, bizarrely, still seem to think the cops are there to help; they never have been, that's never been their role or function. they've always been there to protect property...

so, i know that the general reading of this is to yell that all of these white people must be racists for standing up for the cops, but i really think the truth is closer to the reality that they're brainwashed by the capitalist press into accepting the benevolence of the police state, just as 40+% of blacks seem to be.

i also need to interject a polling analysis. a poll like this is going to overweight urban & northern blacks, because they're easier to reach. they're actually not the majority of blacks, though. i would suspect that if you were more careful about sampling to ensure proper representation by rural, southern blacks, who are more conservative, then you'd mostly erase the difference, and get more or less the same result.

remember: the capitalist press will attempt to divide us by race at every possible opportunity. that is, to a major extent, it's actual function. and, it's no coincidence that the divide and conquer picks up in times of crisis.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/64-americans-oppose-defund-police-movement-key-goals/story?id=71202300

great. send the families to the sticks, it'll decrease rent in the cities and open up more space for artists to exist.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7062983/coronavirus-canadians-leaving-city/

and, yes, you would expect the union movement to be conservative and reactionary about this, because it always is.

stated tersely and bluntly, just about everything i've read from the union movement on this topic demonstrates a staggering level of ignorance about actual marxist economics - because these are people that organize on the ground, and have no doubt never read any marxist theory.

so, they'll say things like "we should resist a ubi in the face of automation because higher wages and good jobs are preferable", which is both total delusion and a literal negation of the entire concept of communism, which is supposed to be about the emancipation of the proletariat from menial labour. no, communists should not choose "good jobs" over freedom from capitalist expropriation! i used to call them brainwashed, but the truth is that it's worse than that; they're just ignorant, and disinterested in the theory they're supposed to represent. they don't know what they're even talking about, anymore.

so, they will no doubt resist ubi in the face of encroaching automation, just like they resisted cross-border unions and labour reforms during globalization - to their extreme detriment.

i tend to cite malatesta as having the insight that these groups will always operate in the interests of capital, because they don't know any better. they don't want communism; they want to protect their privileged positions in capitalism, and, like their capitalist masters, they don't have the foresight to see that their arguments are self-defeating - that they're just going to end up with nothing, as their boss automates their jobs.

the left is supposed to embrace technology, not move against it in reactionary or conservative ways, and detroit has a history of leading the way on embracing changes brought on by technology, in that manner.

this is the future, and we have an opportunity to push it forward right now, as we are assembled, in a time of crisis.

is a ubi actually communism?

most advocates want to tell you it's not communist, because they don't want to scare you. yet, here i am, using explicitly marxist terms in describing it. i have different motives, clearly.

the answer is that it depends how you frame it; i'm explicitly framing it as a communist idea because i'm in favour of moving to communism, but that's not exactly necessary...

the idea, as it exists in the contemporary discourse, actually comes largely from milton friedman, a right-wing liberal economist known for doing horrible things in chile, amongst other things. the way he formulated the idea was as a negative income tax, so that you'd have a minimum level of income, no matter what. under friedman's scheme, if you made $15,000 last year and the minimum income was set at $40,000 then the government would send you a $25,000 check to make up the difference, whereas if you made $80,000 then you wouldn't receive the gai, you'd just pay taxes. while i think the minimum income idea is a more implementable concept than just sending everybody a check (and would probably help stave off friedman's fear of inflationary policies, which are probably legit in context), i don't really want to frame this in terms of marginal tax rates, or progressive taxation. it is worth being clear, though, that, in friedman's formulation of the concept, capitalism can carry on as it likes - it's just an unusually generous form of welfare designed to ensure that nobody gets left behind.

rather, i want to think about it as a step towards common ownership of the means of production, in what is almost more of a fordist concept. yes, detroit - that ford. he has an ism. really. you can look up the debate between fordism and taylorism, but the shift was essentially a starkly liberalizing approach to workers' economic rights, for the end net benefit of the capitalist class. capital is always selfish, but sometimes it can be enlightened in it's selfishness - marx' claims of short-sightedness do have counterexamples, and fordism is perhaps the major one. so, what ford did was realize that his workers were also his most likely customers, and he therefore boosted their wages high enough to ensure that they could buy the products they made.

why is that important? because what's being lost in this move towards automation is that nobody is going to circulate money in an economy that doesn't have any jobs, and capital is going to end up the big loser, in the end. there's the short-sightedness; capital will automate to save costs, and then lose all of it's customers in the process, because it is too driven by greed to work it out. so, we'll end up with computers everywhere, 70% unemployment and a large underclass of people that can't afford to interact with the computers that took their jobs. the insight that keynes developed from ford was that a functioning capitalist economy requires that you give workers enough money to buy the things being made, which led to these ideas of keynesian stimulus spending, namely that to get the economy running again in bad economic times, the government increases the money supply to get people to buy things by sending it to them directly. and, it has to be the government that does it.

but, if all of the jobs are being lost permanently, we're not talking about short term stimulus spending anymore. we're no longer kickstarting the economy. instead, we're now talking about structural spending programs designed to give consumers money to spend to keep businesses running - and citizens healthy and happy.

in the very short term, this should function like a basic keynesian spending program, with multiplier effects and the whole shebang. in the long run, though, the whole thing should fizzle out, as deflation sets in - and the system of monetary exchange should end up abolished altogether, as we slowly take over actual collective ownership of production, and exchange commodities based on need, rather than due to a desire for accumulation.

so, while what i'd actually advocate today looks more like a minimum income tax, i'd rather talk about it like it's a jump to full communism, and bring in these explicitly communist terms. 'cause that's what i want, and how i want to frame the debate.

in a fully communist society, you'd have something that is more like a maximum income than a minimum income. there's this kind of misconception that everybody gets the same thing in communism, and i'm not exactly sure where it comes from; no leftist that i've ever read has ever argued for that. communism generally argues for distribution based on need. so, somebody with eight kids would get more of everything than a single person, because they need more of it. but, the general philosophy would flip over; you'd be restricting wealth, rather than eliminating poverty.

i don't want to step away from the debate, though - this is absolutely a step towards communism, and we should embrace it and be excited about doing it.

but, let me say this clearly before we start.

if i can't fucking dance...

let's get this party rolling.

i was just thinking outloud while doing dishes...

when the (next) revolution comes, what will it look like? and, the answer is that it will come in the mode of production, and in changes to the mode of production; the revolution will be the adoption of a universal basic income. all of these other revolts and protests are fun and everything, but it's the changes in the mode of production that lead to systemic changes and that's where the technology is taking us. that's the future...

and, it's the near future - the very near future. 

a large percentage of the jobs that have been recently lost aren't coming back, and they're not going to mexico (at least not all of them; some of them are, sure). this started decades ago, but seems to implement itself in phases, with the last phase being ushered in by the 2008 market crash, which mechanized large numbers of labour positions. is anybody tracking the mechanization of labour during this economic crisis?

but, something that's different about this technological shift is that it might hit the service sector harder than the manufacturing sector. retail has taken over such a large percentage of the labour market, so it's being targeted by capital, who will always seek to minimize labour costs.

so, all of these retail stores have been closed for months, with many of them moving to online operations. how many of them are going to reopen without staff? how many are going to reopen store fronts at all?

but, is this so terrible, really? do we really want these jobs? or, are we better off changing how we think about work, altogether?

we may be at a pretty vicious crossroads, where we have to make a very explicit choice between communism or barbarism. the sick, twisted fact is that if capital doesn't need all of these workers to turn a profit anymore, then they become useless eaters, and can essentially be thrown in the ovens. they came to european capitals from the countryside as peasants and to north american cities as poor immigrants (some, as the descendants of slaves) in the nineteenth century, with the purpose of running the factories; they were brought in, they were put to work and they were initially treated like expendable animals, before they revolted and won concessions via the labour movement, creating an ahistorically wealthy working class. but, they're no longer needed - and capital is generally very efficient in disposing with what it no longer needs, so long as there's a river near by.

in the long run, the only serious way out is the ubi. time may be catching up to the luddites, who were never debunked so much as delayed; i cannot believe that the number of jobs creating servicing self-serve kiosks will be comparable to the number of jobs creating by servicing customers. it just doesn't add up. that breaking point may finally be upon us, and what do we do?

so, i look at what's happening, while these changes in the mode of production are occurring, and i wonder. there's a lot of poor people dying, right now. and, there's a lot of people ready to burn the world down...

again: i can't go down there and make these arguments. the movement is designed to lynch me for it. i could seriously end up getting hurt.

but, i would call on the black left to take a serious look at the place we're in in history now, and ask whether this movement isn't an opportunity for a wider revolt.

because, the revolution is coming, and soon; the change in the mode of production necessitates it.

as expected, the nasty cold snap coming through here knocked me out this morning, and i'm feeling dehydrated and depressed over it. it should be gone in a few days...

i decided yesterday to do one page at a time rather than do it by month, so i got midway through july on the music journal before i crashed.

i think i'm alert, but it's too cold to think in here right now, so i'm going to do laundry & shower before i get back to this in the afternoon, when it's hopefully warmed up in here substantively.

trying to separate these three different identities is sometimes a hard task. maybe i should clarify it a little for myself, if not for others, so i'm not freaking myself out over it.

1) initially, dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja was my general posting identity. it's just a string of random characters, strategically chosen so that d starts and a ends. it means nothing, and just came out of the annoyance of trying to find a username that didn't have a number at the end of it, as those are always eyesores. some time around 2007 or 2008, i started posting very heavily on the cbc site using variations on this theme - there were dozens of accounts set up, all eventually deleted, and in the long run eradicated by the government. they disabled them all, one by one. i was hoping to get some of these conversations for the blog, but it's unlikely i'll get much, besides what's archived over email, which isn't much. and that's a shame, truly. there were some great debates there that are now lost. no thanks to michael ignatieff...

that handle ended up converted into a facebook page, which was essentially a link dump, that ran from around 2010-2014. i have most of the facebook page in archive; the tail end of it is the beginning of this blog.

while that handle was initially for everything, it is now strictly the political side of my posting persona, although it also functions as the general blog site. over time, much of that will get doubled to the music site.

2) deathtokoalas was initially an email address that i set up to send dumpfiles home from work, when i was doing tech support for microsoft. at the time, there weren't a lot of good options for sending large files over email. that was 2006/2007ish. i didn't start posting on youtube under this moniker until early 2014, and, when i did, i used it for everything - music reviews, politics, social criticism and also to market my own tunes. i shut that moniker down in early 2016, but it lingered, and i set the blog back up in 2019, to specifically focus on music reviews & media criticism, with the political component split off to this blog, and the music journal split into it's own space, as well. deathtokoalas also has a socratic dialog component to it that began with the dstkgfutydtikguyfduyogfia concept but has largely been lost, so lengthy debates will end up there, whether they fit the general theme of the blog or not.

yet, as deathtokoalas became this overreaching youtube identity when it existed, it's sometimes hard to split ideas away from it. in my mind, i seem to still want it to be this general youtube identity so i want the blog to contain all youtube posts, and i keep having to force myself to enforce the separation...which is hard, psychologically....

so, for example, there's times when i posted my music to youtube, and i want to crosspost the memory to the deathtokoalas blog, but i have to stop myself from doing it, as the music journal takes that task over, totally. the fact that it was posted under the deathtokoalas moniker at the time does not matter; the music journal is for music, this blog is for politics and deathtokoalas is for media commentary, specifically. let's get it right, jess.

3) and then there is the music journal, which will in the end double as a broad general journal, as well. it includes notes on recording (when it is happening), cross-references to blogs about recording and posts about where to buy completed recordings. so, that means it will take over that component of the deathtokoalas identity, and i can't be upset about deathtokoalas losing it.

ok.

i think i had to type that out to clarify it for myself in my own head. great. moving on...

i will be slightly updating the february and march deathtokoalas journals to ensure i'm being consistent and complete. i went back and updated the links for the music blog, at least, after all. it will not be long before i move into april, and let's hope i can pick this up.

i'm sure he has lots of questions to ask.

for example - should we thank him for his contribution?

if you take this guy seriously at this point, you're a buffoon.

he sure has a lot of gall, though. really. this is a guy with a deeply racist history, and we're supposed to think he's doing anything besides capitalizing on the situation for his own political gain?

it's a joke. he's a joke. and, you should treat his "concern" with scorn.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-adam-arrest-video-1.5609446

windsor is just so incredibly boring.

i'm a big city person. i didn't move from ottawa to windsor; i wouldn't move from a larger town to a smaller one. i don't want to live in a small town, i want to live in a huge city.

i moved from ottawa to detroit. really.

so, even if they were to re-open here tomorrow, i could very well just stay in for months.

when i first moved here, it took a year to get border documents and i went to a total of three concerts on this side of the border.

and, i'm not going to just aimlessly go for drinks, that's boring.

you know, there is an airport in windsor.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/u-s-travel-restrictions-covid-19-land-border-fly-1.5607741

this is stupid. i took a plane to florida once in the 90s; that's it. and, i'm so ideologically opposed to air travel, that i couldn't imagine myself actually getting on a plane for any reason at all. if i'm going to toronto, for example, i'd rather hitchhike.

but, it's starting to look like detroit may be reopening relatively soon. 

how much would it cost? out of curiosity?

.....and it turns out that the airport is completely closed, unfortunately:

http://www.yqg.ca/

foiled.

well, if it was under $50, i might have thought about it, depending on the show.......?

naw.

ok, i'm not done updating the playlists, but i don't want to do that anymore. i expected that to take, like, an hour - not a week

i'm going to eat and get back to reconstructing skeletons for the two smaller blogs this afternoon.

i want to support a revolution like the one that happened in france, not a revolution like the one that happened in iran.

and, if you think that means i'm not on your side, you're probably right.

listen - i know better than to conflate media reports of street movements with the views of people on the ground. there's no uniformity of thought in these movements; it's a collection of individuals with widely varying goals, and a general aversion to the status quo. it will run the spectrum from conservatives driven by some concept of morality to left-anarchists that want to burn the churches and banks down. as you know, i am on the very far left of this spectrum, but i'm sure i could find a clique of like-minded people if i went looking for them.

but, i have no interest in involving myself in the politics of race, or in the politics of religion, for that matter. this is not a healthy direction for the protest movement - it's going to end up looking like the iranian revolution, in the end, if we continue down this path. and, these foucauldians will get what they want. i consider this to be relabeled burkeanism, and i don't support any of it.

i would expect that if i were to go down on the ground and talk to people, it would only be a vocal minority of people that i'd find myself in any kind of serious disagreement with. i'd have broad levels of agreement with most of the people about what they're angry about, even if my prescriptions are well to the left of theirs. so, we might agree that there's a problem in the behaviour of the police, and then very adamantly disagree on what the cause of the problem is, and how to fix it, although some of the messaging in the media seems encouraging - it does seem as though there are more voices calling for police and prison abolition, and less voices calling for retribution or incrementalism, than i would have thought, based on the reports i've seen. i can't know what is happening around me without directly investigating, but, as mentioned, i'm not interested in doing it - i will wait this out, and reinvolve myself when the narrative switches back towards class. and, it will; there is no revolutionary potential or political future in the politics of race. it just reinforces the status quo.

the vocal minority that i'm going to disagree with the most are the group pushing neo-liberal identity politics, that essentially want to argue for a fairer playing field so that everybody can compete against each other more efficiently. these people (who are liberals, not leftists) show up at every left-wing protest, and try and dominate and control it, and somebody always has to stand up against them, which i've done in the past, but cannot do, in context - we need black voices to do this, this time. that's the trick the capitalists are using, here. the capitalist press will present these neo-liberals as the crux of the movement, because it reinforces the neo-liberal paradigm (look! the protesters just want the same thing as the banks do! they just want it faster. so, there is no movement.), but i do know better - i realize that it's just a small percentage of self-identified "leaders", who are largely being directed by or actually are undercover cops. the vast majority of the people assembled are well to the left of that.

i just can't be the person that shows up to this and makes these arguments, because the thing is designed to attack me for doing it. the moment that i uncover the charade for what it is, i'll get targeted as a racist. the thing is erected that way, and there's no escape from it.

i've tried to point out things, like burning the police station, that are more in line with a politics i can support, as a leftist. but, this is, broadly, a step backwards from occupy, in terms of political direction. i saw this coming; i think a lot of people did. it has to run it's course...

as a (mostly) white person, i just have to stand back and let the black voices work this out on their own. when they've worked this out, and want to get back to building a broad-based leftist political movement based around class, rather than a neo-liberal movement based around race, they can let me know.

i'm still waiting for the economy to fall, myself. this is not a lumpenproletariat; it's mostly a middle class movement. and, they just want a fairer playing field, to compete on. i don't particularly disagree, but it's not revolutionary in character. it's reactionary. it's conservative...