if you absolutely have to put somebody upstairs to try to hack into my computer over short-range radio (da fuck...), can you pick a clean person that doesn't smoke, please?

i have no idea why they're doing this at all.

but, talk about the worst stake-out cops, ever. i can smell them, i can hear them. i mean, c'mon.

it's more than just the smoke. she smells like she hasn't showered in quite a while; it's that stinky-ass smell that you normally get, specifically, with fat women.

take a shower, you dirty pig.

and go smoke somewhere else.

like, he's supposed to be gone this week. but, i can smell somebody smoking upstairs, and i can hear them talking, too. it's a female voice. and i'm fully cognizant of the fact that it's a cop filling in for him.

i can find no sign of any installed chip in this machine.

i cleared the cmos, and the bios isn't picking anything up. 

xp isn't picking anything up.

i don't see anything.

i'm going to have to test, i guess. 

ok, let me get the system back up and let me finish this up.

ugh.

there should be no work done in that region at all until a treaty is signed.

if i was the supreme court, i would tear that contract right up.

so, what would i tell the pipeline company?

i'd tell them that they need to wait for this nation to sign a treaty before they can move forward on any project, legally - and anything they sign or agree to runs the risk of having no legal force until such a treaty comes into existence.

i want to be clear: i'm not saying that this nation can't join the indian act, or shouldn't, or even won't in the end.

but, it hasn't at this point, and these indian act band councils are consequently extra-legal governing bodies that should be afforded no meaningful legal status.

maybe the way this ends is that the band councils opt to sign a treaty. i know there's been discussions on the point for many years. but, the court can't and shouldn't get ahead of itself by making assumptions about the outcomes of the treaty process.

until the process concludes, the court should be abiding by the status quo.

the way that british imperial law worked, and this was brought into the common law via roman precedent because the romans were the empire that the british had legal documents about and sought information about when conflicts arose, was that if you colonized an area with british subjects (terra nullius) then you introduced british law to rule over them but if you occupied or conquered an area that was already peopled (like india, or french canada) then you had to allow for them to govern themselves under their own laws.

canada was interpreted under british imperial law as a series of conquered french colonies first and foremost, and an area of unceded aboriginal land, second. so, the french colonies came under british dominion and kept their civil law traditions, which were at the time under the napoleonic code. this is why an algonquin claim about unceded territory in ontario would not be recognized under british law - it was conquered from the french. the aboriginal areas, on the other hand, were given a kind of suspended sovereignty. they could keep their land and their traditions, but only on the condition that they refused to cede their land to anybody else. specifically, the proclamation of 1763 gave the british crown the monopoly over land purchases, which american land buyers and sellers did not like one bit. it's still the law in canada, though - the crown, which now means the government in ottawa, still has a monopoly over indigenous land purchases in canada.

and, everywhere was eventually bought except for most of british columbia, which just never was. there have been some "land transfers" since then, but they've been unconstitutional under our own laws! really, the right way to look at the canadian occupation of british columbia is to compare it to the israeli occupation of palestine - people keep moving in, but there's no actual legal basis for it. the correct legal status for these areas remains defined by the 1763 proclamation, which defines them as a part of an "indian reserve", gives them ownership of their own land and denies their right to sell their land to any entity except the crown.

indigenous title in canada is not what these people actually want, as it's just another type of fief; indigenous title is not sovereign land rights, in canada. the nisga'a agreement presents a model that goes beyond "indigenous title" in the sense that it's actually a kind of peace treaty, which carves out a semi-autonomous area for the nisga'a people. i don't know what the various peoples in bc want, but if they want land rights, it's in the nisga'a agreement, and not in these judicial constructions of "indigenous title", which would keep them at the whim of the colonial government. there is not actually a way for the court system to award sovereignty...that has to be done via treaty.

so, this idea that "the white man's law" is oppressing them and allowing for this and they need to rebel against it is actually wrong, in this limited context. again: you can't apply these arguments in new brunswick, or ontario. but, in bc, british imperial law actually should forbid the application of the indian act on unceded territory, at least until a treaty is signed. the judge here is actually wrong, and the supreme court should reverse her ruling.

enforcing the indian act on unceded territory is roughly equivalent, under imperial law, to enforcing common law in quebec.

this is a major error of law that it seems like this judge has made before and that the supreme court should be taking a proper look at.

so, the court is arguing that it's own jurisdiction stems from the indian act, and that's the point that i'd argue is wrong, because the land was never ceded. it was occupied. as such, the indian act is the wrong type of law to use. they should rather be using british imperial law, which stems from roman precedents and allows the occupied nation to administer it's own laws.

we have a very clear precedent of this in canada, actually. it's called quebec.

by enforcing the indian act on unceded land in british columbia, the court is advancing the colonial project. the supreme court ought to reverse this.

my previous statement about the duty to consult applying to traditional law relies on the band council leadership accepting it, as that is the relevant body under canadian law. as there is a conflict here - something i knew, but forgot - that wouldn't be applicable, in context. the company's argument that it consulted the band council and sought it's approval would essentially be correct.

but, there is no legal basis for the band council to be making these decisions, as the land was never ceded or formally brought under the control of the indian act in the first place. for the supreme court to rule otherwise would be to argue for a unilateral annexation, which is something that is actually even inconsistent with imperial law, in this country.

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/19/22/2019BCSC2264cor1.htm

she had a following in conservative circles.

but, she was truly reviled and despised on the left.

personally, i think she was often just trolling, and i generally took her with a grain of salt when i didn't avoid her altogether. but, i'm a free speech advocate in ways that much of the contemporary left isn't. 

she was the type of writer that a lot of people wanted banned and censored.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/christie-blatchford-columnist-journalist-dead-68-1.5460763

there should be an injunction until the supreme court can deal with this.

i haven't read the ruling directly, but let's get a few things clear:

1) there are no treaties governing this particular space in british columbia (that is not true in ontario), so the jurisdiction of the constitution is questionable in the first place.

2) while the duty to meaningfully consult does not necessitate a duty to listen in all scenarios, i think it is reasonable to think that the supreme court may interpret it that way under the specific scenario of the existence of traditional laws, in unceded areas, if presented with that argument explicitly, which is something i do not believe has been done as of yet.

so, if i was the lawyer here, i would make those arguments - that this case should be dealt with under international law rather than constitutional law (this is very specific to some regions in bc, where that argument is actually seriously legally compelling beyond an indigenous pipe dream sort of thing....that wouldn't fly for a second in, say, new brunswick), because canada is technically an occupation force in this area rather than a national one, and that the duty to consult should include a special place for existing indigenous law, where it actually exists and can be convincingly articulated.

i otherwise stand in solidarity with the blockades, as well.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-anti-pipeline-protests-1.5460793

i might never really agree with buttigieg much on the issues.

but, he would earn my infinite respect by taking hold of this opportunity to go into these black churches and talk about the homophobia that exists within them.

that's the test that sanders failed, and he has the chance to pass.

for southern blacks to reject northern whites over issues of sexual and religious liberation would be a massive shot in their own foot.

....because the inevitable republican supermajority that would follow would not serve their interests. at all.

it's not my place to present an opinion on what order the primaries in the united states should be conducted in. that's ultimately a ballot question that should be decided by the people of america, and the outcome should be respected and implemented.

however.

let's not confuse ourselves as to what this discussion is really about.

if biden had swept iowa & new hampshire, does anybody think we'd be talking about how these states "lack diversity"? hardly. so, what is this, really, besides an attempt for biden to lay a lot of excuses for his losses?

we haven't seen any polling in nevada in weeks, but i think there's a good chance that biden is running a distant third or fourth. latinos may generally run a little to the right of the democratic party on social issues, which is something the party shouldn't cave in to, but vegas & reno don't present your typical latino demographics, and i don't think it's likely that buttigieg's sexuality is going to be the kind of problem there that it's going to be in somewhere like texas. i would actually be rather surprised to see biden ahead of buttigieg in nevada, at this point.

so, that leaves black voters, and i'll concede the point that they're not likely to like him, but why is that? they may point to various issues regarding race relations, but the truth is that buttigieg has good answers for all of this stuff - better than the answers that biden and sanders can provide for their own errors, such as voting for the crime bill. bloomberg has stop & frisk. klobuchar has her own problems. and, warren just hasn't had the opportunity to fuck up.

i could see if the alternative had a perfect civil rights record, but has there ever been a serious democratic party candidate that has? buttigieg will argue for the reality of systemic racism, and the truth is that he's right in that answer. there is no ideal candidate from this perspective, they all have serious blemishes on their record.

so, there's lots of reasons to dislike buttigieg and not want to vote for him, but if your argument is racial, and your alternative is biden, then you're either ignorant of the facts or being dishonest in your argumentation - there is no reasonable argument that biden is a better candidate for the black community. biden also has a history of questionable racial decisions, it's just a longer history because he's older. and, if you think buttigieg is too right-wing, how is biden a solution? that's just not going anywhere. in fact, i'd go so far as to say that there is no rational reason to vote for biden over buttigieg at this point, at all.

so, why don't they like pete?

you could say he doesn't have the contacts in the community, but that's not hurting steyer or bloomberg, neither of which have any contacts in the community, either. on the other hand, sanders has been trying for decades to get black support and can't get the time of day from them. so, that doesn't seem real, either.

so, why don't they like pete?

and, why don't they like bernie, either?

if buttigieg is smart, he'll turn the issue on it's head and start talking about the pestilence of homophobia in the black community. let me tell you this, at least - they're not going to like him much, no matter what he does.

i think the faultlines in the democratic party have been building for a while, and, while northern liberals shouldn't let the party go without a fight, they should let the process run it's course. no political configuration lasts forever, no coalition is permanent. and, the coalition between southern black conservatives and northern white liberals may be getting to the end of it's cycle.

a theoretical southern black party is going to have a hard time winning without some kind of support in the north, though.

what i will say though is that the decision to headhunt me actually reflects rather poorly on the institution.

by the mid 00s, it should have been crystal clear that i wasn't somebody that cared very much about this country, or should have been offered any kind of security clearance. and, that's maybe the irony, here - while i'm not working for another government, i can tell you straight up that i wouldn't have any particular allegiance to the canadian government, if they had hired me, and probably would have ended up as a liability, and skipped the country for somewhere warmer at the first chance i got.

imagine there's no countries...

and, no religion, too.

i don't have this patriotic slant that somebody like an edward snowden has; i feel no particular connection to this country, or it's governing institutions, and no particular calling to serve, one way or the other.

so, what somebody else may have interpreted as some kind of patriotic duty just struck me as a boring waste of my time. it wasn't even ideological, really - i mean, i certainly would have some moral problems with working for csis, but i wouldn't even get that far in working out the problem. it's just a job i wouldn't enjoy doing, and i made a decision a long time ago not to spend my life doing jobs i don't want to do.

i'm not even sure that i had explicitly defined myself as an anarchist, yet. 

but, if i didn't want to do it then, nothing has changed, now. i would much rather live on disability and focus on my art than work for csis at whatever pay grade, because it's the job that matters, not the pay check. sorry.

i will not have anything to say about nevada until they publish some polls.

if they decide not to publish any, that's a red flag into the fairness of the outcome, itself.

i don't know what they ultimately want or why they're doing what they're doing. it feels exceedingly childish to me. they don't seem to operate with warrants, or present any kind of legal justification for their behaviour. it's just some kind of a game that they're trying to win.

i guess that if i'm dealing with federal agents of some sort - and i don't know if they're american or canadian - then they may be trained to approach what they think of as cyberwarfare using these methods. that is, they may be trained to play cat and mouse like this. but, i'm not a hacker, i'm an artist, and i have no interest in this at all. i'm just annoyed at the amount of time i have to waste on this.

i was headhunted by csis in the mid-00s at one point, and basically told them to fuck off. i just didn't want to work for a security agency. but, these people are trained to interpret the world through the filter of conspiracy theories. in their mind, telling them that i don't want to work for them may be equivalent to admitting i'm working for somebody else.

the last few days have been full of unexpectedly long sleeps, distractions over the primaries and eating far too much. i just wanted to get back to work today...

i've been periodically concerned about illegal entry into my living spaces since about mid-2017. that's when this appears to have started, i think because my analysis of the last american cycle got a little too close to being right for the comfort of whomever is keeping an eye on me.

but, i've been under surveillance for decades, now. 

and, i know they don't think i'm some kind of a spy, for that reason - my file goes back to the 90s. i'm just concerned they're going to use that as an argument.

i don't know how much the arrest in 2018 had to do with this.

just an update on what i think is going on:

1) it seems like my landlord is working for some kind of police agency. he's told me he's a former firefighter, and the front is that he's an auto-mechanic. but, he only seems to actually go to work every once in a while, and he's often gone for weeks at a time - indicating that he gets an awfully large number of holidays, for an auto-mechanic. i don't know if he's working for a local agency or a national one.

2) so, whatever agency it is that's monitoring me just comes down here at will when i'm gone. i have to go out from time to time, meaning i have little to no means of protecting myself, when they have the keys to my front door.

3) they appear to have been previously hacking into my laptop via the bluetooth chip on my wireless keyboard. so, i disabled that, and the system was stable for weeks, until they got down here yesterday when i was gone. i now have to waste my time trying to figure out what they did.

i don't think that moving is going to help much. do i call the cops and go into a witness protection program to protect me from the cops? but, a person can only handle so much invasion of privacy.

i'm going to have to find some way to prove that they're coming in here and work it out from there, once i have.

for now, i want to finish what i'm doing. this is such a fucking waste of my time...

the reason my posts are full of typos since mid-january is that i'm posting from a gmail account that i set up for travelling with, and i can't get into the blogspot interface to correct them from here.

i keep that machine off the internet because i've learned that i have to.

and i simply don't know what they did when i was gone, but i guess if they didn't install some kind of wireless chip then they must have introduced some kind of timer.

and, i knew there was somebody in here the moment i got back because i set my recycle bin up in front of the door as a trip wire, and it was tripped. i was kind of expecting something like this.

all i can do is look for chips, wipe it down and hope it's not persistent.

what i've been doing over the last few weeks is booting into my laptop's hard drive via the production pc, specifically because i can't connect to the internet on that machine (or i couldn't up until they apparently installed some kind of backdoor yesterday when i was out). i would then do the word processing i've been doing on that internetless machine, and upload the files to the internet through the chromebook by copying them over with a usb key.

i was forced to do this because some kind of intelligence agency keeps taking out the boot sector in my windows 7 machine in an apparent attempt to prevent me from posting to the internet, which is beyond retarded. that's never going to work...

then, they went and reinstalled the backdoor on the computer that i'm not using to post with, apparently because they got confused as to how i was continuing to post here even after they installed these back doors.

ugh.

the more they try and shut me down, the louder i'm going to yell. i'm like that. i won't be silenced.

so, what happened?

well, i guess they must have installed some kind of wireless chip in my pc. i have to buy groceries, and i can't bring my tower with me...

but, now what?

i don't see anything in there.

i'm clearing the cmos and i'm going to let the capacitors drain and i'm going to take a very close look over the system board. what do i do if i can't find the chip? i don't know.

but, the idiots installed the chip on my production machine, and i'm posting from my chromebook. the machine they installed the chip on is permanently quarantined from the internet, and has no networking capability by design. i have no intention to ever use it to connect to the internet with - it's just for making music with.

and, again - they have not succeeded in preventing me from posting here, they've just slowed down my documentation process. idiots...

there's a pattern here, though. - my machine consistently crashes whenever i post something insightful here.

you should take that as evidence that i'm on to something.

and, bizarrely, my hard drive just finally crashed, right when i was about to get back to work.

i went out for a few hours yesterday...

i'll have to put this back together, now.

it's far more likely that the pols did something wrong than that the polls were empirically wrong.

does it matter if klobuchar cheated in new hampshire or not?

if you talk to experts on the topic, they often say things like "there are inconsistencies in every election and they balance each other out.". is that the reality here?

well, i need to be clear about what i'm saying and what i'm not.

i am not able to tell you who cheated, why they cheated, whether it made a difference or if they'll do it again. i'm simply able to look at the polls and look at the results and say "something's wrong here". and, unlike everybody else in this society, i'm not accepting the doublethink required to say "i guess the polls were wrong".

again: it is far more likely that somebody cheated than that the polls were this wrong, and the media has shown us the establishment's hand by clearly prepping us for a "klobusurge" (who comes up with this idiocy?). the media is arguing that the electorate changed, but that's just a transparent and bullshit excuse. no, the electorate in new hampshire didn't change that dramatically over the last four years, and if exit polling insists that it did then that exit polling is suspect, itself. proper exit polling should be done by somebody other than the media institutions that need to be checked up on, and the fact that this is not done at all in the united states any more is at the core of the problem i'm drawing attention to - this is not the first time i'm saying this, and won't be the last.

but, i can't tell you that amy klobuchar is personally a nefarious ballot-stuffing no goodnik cheater, and i would think it doubtful that she did the deed herself. i can't tell you that she was aware of it - maybe nobody told her. all i can do is look at the results and tell you they don't add up, and insist that the polls actually probably weren't wrong.

so, does it matter? well, it depends. those 6 delegates probably don't matter. but, if klobuchar's inflated totals come at the death knell of an elizabeth warren then that matters.

i'm not a private investigator, i'm not a prosecutor, i'm not a detective, and i have no insider knowledge - i'm a nerd from canada with a math degree, and i can't answer these questions.

but, the data doesn't add up. and, somebody fudged it.

if i can get an important point across here, it's distrust of the institutions.

you should have a healthy skepticism of what the state tells you, and a healthy distrust of all political parties.

when the polling has somebody at 5-7% and they magically end up with 20% as the media is propping them up, you should be skeptical about what's unfolding in front of you, and you should be questioning the fairness of the process.

that skepticism, that suspension of faith in the system, is important, more important than these specific election results.

you hear this line from politicians all of the time.

"the only poll that matters is the one on election day".

well, no. the polling is important, to ensure the integrity of the process is kept in place. and, when the election contradicts the polls, you should get suspicious - chances are that the polls weren't wrong.

i will make this stand over and over again - when the results of an election do not make sense, i will point fingers and call for an investigation.

the 24 delegates may not be worth it. granted. it's more about momentum.

but, there should be an investigation...

...because this doesn't add up.

it's not like there was a deficit of polling, either.

if there was only one or two low quality polls...

...but there was lots of polling done, and the outcome for this specific candidate is simply not reflected in it, and what that means is that independent measures of popular support do not uphold the results of the election.

and, no, the russians didn't rig it. the dnc rigged it...

turnout in new hampshire is maybe not down by as much as it appeared to be initially. it looks like it's a little lower than 2008, but higher than 2016. so, arguing that bernie didn't get the vote out is only a part of the answer - he didn't, but it only accounts for a part of the discrepancy with the polling.

it makes sense that there would have been some non-ideological voters in 2016 that he couldn't hold in 2020, but that doesn't explain the distribution of votes. the glaring inconsistency isn't bernie's support level, it's klobuchar's. there is absolutely no polling evidence supporting this outcome at all - there's some propaganda coming from corporate media, but when the propaganda predicts the result in contradiction to the polling, that's actually a red flag about the fairness of the results.

when the gut feelings of tv anchors better reflect the outcome than scientific polling, there is something very wrong going on - chances are that the polling wasn't wrong, and chances are that the gut feeling wasn't more right; chances are that the election was rigged, and the tv anchor was in on the process.

my initial attempt to explain the situation by pointing to turnout was an attempt to provide a naturalistic explanation for an event that the evidence doesn't seem to support the likelihood of. if that isn't working out either, and it looks like it isn't, then we're left with a glaring contradiction between the polling and the results, which usually suggests a rigged election. the media's overwhelming support of a specific candidate seems to give itself away.

so, i'm changing my analysis - i think that amy klobuchar's numbers were falsified. she was propped up by the media days before, but none of the polling had her higher than 10%. when the polling disagrees with the results by this much, i don't tend to argue that the polling is wrong - i tend to argue that the process is unfair.

it's impossible to know who suffered at the benefit of klobuchar's vote totals being falsified upwards, but the main beneficiary of a split in the moderate vote was bernie sanders, who would not have won otherwise. i can't magically assign all of these votes to buttigieg - he actually outperformed his polling as well, but by an amount that is scientifically quantifiable. he didn't double his polling numbers, he's in a reasonable margin of error. but, you'll note that biden and warren both received 0 delegates.

the party itself might be pushing for generational change...

so, that's my official analysis - the results of the primary deviate so strongly from the polling that preceded it that i am casting doubt on the fairness of the election. and, i've done this more than once, now.

i believe that the results of elections on this continent are routinely falsified, in a way that north americans would naively assume is done in countries like russia, but isn't done here. it can happen here. it does all of the time...

i know what i posted about iowa the other day, but sometimes it takes time to believe the data. this idea of a falsified split to benefit sanders seems crazy, but i need to reiterate the point: when the polling fails to predict the outcome of an election, you should not deduce that the polling was wrong. you should question the fairness of the election. and, in context, the media's clear preference for the actor with the strangest results really clarifies the point.

and, you can only get so far with gramscian conditioning on this point. it's too much to invoke gramsci. it's more like some kind of manchurianism.

it's less complicated to argue it was rigged.

so, what happened?

yes, klobuchar got a bounce.

but, the real story is that sanders couldn't get the vote out, and the bounce was exaggerated by low turnout. buttigieg also benefited from this.

so, the numbers are in and klobuchar has indeed managed to stay over 19%, to my bafflement.

i'm not sure if i explicitly stated it or not, but i figured the narrative around klobuchar would be around whether she was viable or not - that she might get barely over 15%, if she was especially lucky, but that the culmination of the polling suggested she'd probably end up at something more like 13%. the polling also suggested that buttigieg would end up somewhere around 20%, although i'm less surprised that he overshot it, because he had some concrete reasons for momentum.

i was not personally impressed by klobuchar's debate performance at all; as mentioned, it came off as the last gasp of a dying candidate. and, this result itself hardly wins her the race - it may be that the last gasp was more like a last wheeze, and she's going to hack it out for a bit before she keels over.

sanders, on the other hand underperformed relative to most of the polling, although i sort of saw that coming - i pegged him around 25%.

when you have that combination of factors - the candidate popular with the young crowd underperforming, and both of the candidates that are popular with the older crowd overperforming by roughly the same amount, 4-5% - chances are that the thing you got wrong was actually turnout. and, indeed, turnout wasn't very impressive.

so, was there a surge in klobuchar support? she got a bump, clearly. but, the reason the polls undershot her by the same amount that they undershot buttigieg would be that they overestimated turnout by sanders supporters. and, that is where the inflation comes out of the numbers.

if sanders had gotten the vote out, she would have ended up closer to 15%, and buttigieg would have ended up closer to 20%, as sanders got closer to 30%.

but, he didn't.

is it fair for buttigieg supporters to blame klobuchar for costing him the win, then? well, it's kind of entitled, don't you think? it would be just as valid to flip the argument over.

what is true, though, is that the competition between these candidates allowed sanders to win, even on a weak night for him, and that if the moderate wing wants a win then it's going to need to figure that out.

if.

right...