this is specifically what i was looking for:

While aggressive measures (e.g., widespread antiviral use and restriction of movement) to attempt to contain or slow an emerging pandemic in its earliest stages were previously considered possible on the basis of modeling, experience from the 2009 pandemic has resulted in general agreement that such attempts are impractical, if not impossible.

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/flu-influenza/canadian-pandemic-influenza-preparedness-planning-guidance-health-sector/table-of-contents.html

but, trudeau was smarter than everybody else, ignored everybody and asked god for divine guidance, instead.

of course.

...because that's what you'd expect an incompetent clown that was elevated to power based on his father's achievements to do.

every time, too.

never fails.

it took me some time to find this, so i'm going to tag it with "white paper" and remind myself to search for "canada.ca".

april 3, 2020

if this was supposed to be the plan, it actually seems to me as though they only got through the first couple of pages of it, and kind of winged it from there.

in fact, most of the things i've been calling on them to do are explicitly mentioned in the guidance plan, it's just not being followed.

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/flu-influenza/canadian-pandemic-influenza-preparedness-planning-guidance-health-sector/table-of-contents.html

at 07:37  

i thought there were some posts where i quoted from it more thoroughly; either my memory is blurry around that, or somebody deleted them. and, i can only again call on whoever is doing that to stop, or face the censure of history for it, in the end.

"but, a travel ban is common sense."

you expect that kind of backwardsness from doug ford - and we certainly got it.

you expect better policy from the liberal party of canada, and what trudeau has done is fail the legacy of his forefathers and tarnish the reputation of his party.

fail.

he's a failure.

and, we all, collectively, failed in putting him in power.

he should have stepped down before this even started, and should have at least known to relinquish decision-making authority to somebody competent when it did.

the lesson to future politicians is clear enough, though.

never listen to evan solomon.

ever.

at all.

i pointed out roughly a year ago that the white papers that came out of sars - written not just by the canadian government, but the canadian government under a liberal leader - strongly urged against travel restrictions, because the economic effects associated with them would be disastrous, and the efficacy would be minimal to non-existent.

and, the white papers were right - surprise!

...and justin trudeau, taking advice from evan solomon through a filter of trumpist logic, was wrong. no surprise... 

it's the perfect example of the dunning-kruger effect, and the best example against aristocracy we've had plopped in front of us in decades.

in the end, we'll let history sort this out. for now, we'll need to wait until we have an election before we can get rid of these border restrictions, and the evidence in front of us isn't going to matter much.

can he cite any actual  peer-reviewed science in his verbal diarrhea, full of specious reasoning and empty aphorisms?

noooo.

listen: mr trudeau is the last person in the world that i would ask to defend a policy. he's just a bad actor. what he says is irrelevant.

but, in the end, the party is going to have a lot to answer for in pushing through these disastrous policies that are not only not supported by the basic science, but are actually explicitly contradicted by it.

so, you have a choice in who you want to believe here,

- decades of peer-reviewed science

- or justin trudeau's personal hunch, apparently as incredibly influenced by trumpism, on a politically populist level

you can pick your epistemology, here.

but, don't be surprised if i insult your intelligence if you pick the wrong choice.

as mentioned, i don't expect the border to re-open until after the next election, whenever it is. the party has painted itself into a corner, politically, it has nothing to do with the science (which very unambiguously argues against the efficacy of border closures, and even argues they're counter-productive), and nothing to do with whether it's been effective or not (and it clearly hasn't been - we're going to be the last country in the developed world out of this, and may get beat by the likes of india and mexico).

https://www.cp24.com/news/trudeau-defends-canada-s-travel-restrictions-as-effective-but-open-to-doing-more-1.5395376

yeah.

and, this could get messy, as they may react by cutting up the school boards, if they lose.

and, there's another angle, as well - the english schools in quebec are mostly very upper class. it's really the only reason they exist at all - it's a powerful, wealthy minority. do they want the influx of muslims and sikhs?

https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/quebec-will-appeal-bill-21-court-ruling-exempting-school-boards

and, again - do you think that's a conservative argument?

i don't.

i'm not somebody that's going to mince words or present weaselly arguments to you, i'm blunt about it - i don't think "religious freedom" is a thing and i don't think it should exist in the constitution at all and i'm explicitly on the side of removing it and i hope we get there, in time.

but, i actually honestly cannot support the idea that belief is a legally relevant concept.

the fact that you believe something should have no legal relevance, whatsoever - what's important is whether what you believe is objectively true or not. the court should have no reservations at all in telling you that what you believe is false and irrelevant.

nor should one's beliefs have any relevance at all in whether they are exempt from any laws.

if i could undo that part of the constitution, i'd delete it completely in a second. it was a mistake. but, until we get there, i can only support weakening it as much as possible.

i actually kind of miss the discreteness of people going out to a field, or in a back alleyway to smoke. the stigma around it was kind of a good thing, as it meant that people made sure they were smoking somewhere that didn't bother the people around them.

overt drug abuse isn't a good thing, and we'd do ourselves a favour to resurrect a concept of discretion around use.

it shouldn't be socially acceptable to just light up a blunt wherever you want - you should be expected to get away from the world a little, if you want to do it.

listen, if you want to smoke drugs then smoke drugs, just don't smoke them in my apartment, please. i'll smoke them sometimes, too - away from where i live.

but, a day to celebrate marijuana is pretty stupid.

and, the way people act on 4/20 fits the technical definition of retarded pretty much perfectly.

i have no qualms in dubbing this retard day, at all - even if i'm known to smoke a little on this day, away from the retards, from time to time, myself. 

not this year - there's no concerts, and i want to be doing something more productive, right now. so, go smoke over there, please.

(points away from where i'm breathing)

i tried to nap but it's like inhabitably dry over near my bed, right now. i don't know if it's just because the heater is on full blast in the cold snap (which i like) or if it's because he set up some kind of contraption to suck the life out of the air, but it's too dry to sleep in there, right now. so, i'm dragging myself.

and, when it's dry, it's dusty, which triggers my asthma. i've had three attacks in the last 48 hours.

it's also retard day today, although it's not really bad right now - it was this morning, but it was more tobacco than pot.

but, i've decided that if i'm missing anything over june then i'll have to find some other way to rebuild it. 

in the long run, it's more important that i'm able to write into the word document in a linearly coherent manner, and i'm wondering if that's not the better way to do it.

for now, i want to move on.

now, that said, this ruling has the potential to backfire because it's going to push religious minorities into the english school boards. so, you'll end up with english speaking religious groups rather than french-speaking religious groups, which is a potential nightmare for the people supporting the policy. for that reason, you should expect the quebec government to appeal it, on the grounds of sovereignty that i previously articulated. 

your religious beliefs are just your political views, nothing more and nothing less.

i'm sorry, i thought this was at the supreme court - it's still in quebec superior court. so, much of what i said is sort of reversed, in context.

the ruling makes sense. and, i agree that this dress code should be specific to public sector employees when they are at work, and not apply to day-to-day life.

i'm sorry, but i reject the entire premise that religious freedom should be protected by the law at all. this is a dress code, a church is a political organization and this woo about religious belief should be struck from the law altogether. do you think that's a conservative argument? because i don't.... 

but, i actually think that the supreme court will be more likely to overturn the exemption for english boards than overturn the entire law - that's a quebec thing that doesn't apply in broader generality. you can ask the quebec courts to rule on the quebec charter and deduce that english schools should have minority rights, but when you ask the supreme court to rule on the canadian charter, the issue becomes 100% about quebec sovereignty.

like i say - i think the issue is about political symbols in the workplace because i reject the idea that religion is different than politics. that's why i support the ban. but, that's not going to be heard in court. and, while i got the court wrong in my initial analysis, this ruling was predictable, nonetheless - and is likely to be upheld on appeal.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-21-religious-symbols-ban-quebec-court-ruling-1.5993431

see, i can understand how google might get confused with this device, but that device said it's been logged in since january.

wouldn't google have logged the device out by now if it was a ghost?

but, i can't do anything about this, and i know it.

like, it might be that this poor guy has to deal with chain-smoking cops in his house because i'm down here.

but, i think he's probably a cop, too - but doesn't smoke, himself, just merely has to tolerate it from the other one.

and, i'll say this again - can you please get a cop that doesn't smoke up there?

there seems to be at least two people up there. one is a woman that smokes heavily (and i truly hate to the core of her being) and is 100% a cop and the other is the guy i rented from who i don't think smokes and i'm not completely sure is a cop.

i only ever see and communicate with the guy and i'm not supposed to know the woman is there - but i can both hear her and smell her.

they seem to do shift work, so that there's somebody awake up there 24/7.

so, i mean, it's been months. what have they been doing?

just listening? reading? editing posts? deleting comments?

are they logging into my email and scrubbing it?

i don't even know.

i mean, i have no idea what they're actually looking for, i'm just deducing they think i'm some kind of a spy.

it could be even dumber than that.

i should probably change my password, but they're just going to create problems again until they steal it again. or, maybe google is actually letting them in, anyways. i don't think that's helpful.

there's nobody to call to report it to - it's the fucking cops doing it. if i asked them to investigate, they'd just cover it up.

but, this is what your tax dollars are spent on - overwhelming surveillance of a transgendered artist on disability, that is severely interfering with my productivity. and, they'll have history to answer to, in the end. 

let this be an expose of the damaging aspects of the security state, by proxy.

again - what does a person do when they come face-to-face with these things?

it's just absurd.

logic doesn't help.

yeah, i just removed a secondary login from a chrome os device from the google security page that was dated to january 12, 2020. this device had the same ip address as me, uses the same isp as me and has the same os i do.  that means one of two things:

a) i orphaned a login from that time. but, i only have one device running chrome os down here. why didn't google identify that device with this one?

b) the cop upstairs is logging into my account from a spliced line, which i already know exists by monitoring my isp traffic.

it seems like the latter is the truth.

and, like i say - the idiots actually, honestly, seriously think i'm a russian spy, to the point that they're physically hacking my account from upstairs.

so, what do i do next, then?

i mean, if they aren't just removing posts but are actually going into my email and deleting copies of those posts, what can i do about this?

what i'm going to do is plead with the people responsible to fuck off. i have no power, here. i can ask google to be just, and that's about it; i can ask the enforcement agencies to reconsider if what they're doing is reasonable. if what i'm posting here is substantive enough to justify this kind of heavy-handed manipulation, it's surely of historical value. and, there must be a way to rebuild it.

i've made this request before - please put the deleted emails back where they were, and please rebuild the posts that were removed.

and, take this statement as a warning: you will be condemned by history, if you don't.

that's right - or you will suffer the fate of yourself. but, i realize the absurdity. i understand that all i can do is yell.

so, i sat down yesterday morning and tried to figure out when i first put this hard drive away, and then wondered if i could rebuild the logic around it and then realized that i didn't seem to have a record of posts after june 19, 2020 up until the end of july, 2020 for some reason. no archive. at all. 

that said, i have some posts dated to late july that correctly count the number of posts in july. i also have a backup archive in my email dated to nov 11, 2020.

now, that date is important to take note of because it was the day that my youtube account was temporarily suspended. so, i backed up my blog as a precautionary step.

i've spent the last 24 hours cross-referencing that backup with the posts and with my email and, once again, i can't find any missing posts. but, the backup was taken after my site was suspended.

it's just very, very weird to me that i don't have any record of anything between june 19, 2020 and july 29, 2020, even if i'm pretty sure that nothing is missing for july (and i have it backed up to november, 2020, now). i was definitely backing up posts over may and over the first part of june. i seem to have stopped for an unclear reason, when i got back from my bike ride to leamington.

oddly, posts are uncharacteristically low over the last part of june, as well.

that was also the week i bought a quarter, which is a naturalistic explanation - i was posting less because i was stoned. but, that doesn't seem quite right, either. and, surely i would have tried to catch up, right?

so, if they were going to delete posts, what would they delete posts about? my reaction to the pandemic? posts that could be misconstrued as being pro-trump (i was never such a thing...)? conspiracy theories?

no - none of that seems to be missing.

it took me some time to figure it out, but it seems to be a post i made to the fox news site suggesting that the russiagate scandal was a cia plot that got my account temporarily suspended. and, if anything is missing near the end of june, 2020 and the start of july, 2020 it would appear to be posts about the we scandal, where i suggested that it was obvious that the whole thing was obviously a money laundering scam.

here's the daunting thing about this: it's not just posts that might be missing, it's email archives of those posts. the email archives exist to document the posts. that's the point. so, when i go into my email and notice that there's no archives at all for over a month...

it helps me answer the question: who is harassing me? who's responsible for all of this cyber-harassment i'm dealing with?

it might be the pmo, or some canadian enforcement agency acting under the guidance of it. the americans wouldn't care about that.

sorry, to clarify - she was put on the bench by mulroney in 1989 and elevated to chief justice by jean chretien in 2000.

this ruling might very well baffle and shock people.

i've posted this a few times, but i'll post it again because it's relevant.

when trudeau won in 2015, one of the things everybody was hoping for was that the liberals would shift the court further to the left. the existing chief justice, beverly mclachlan, had of course been appointed by the last progressive conservative prime minister, and had evolved into an unexpectedly left-libertarian chief justice. i'm a big fan, actually. but, we kind of fluked out - she was appointed by the right.

shortly after he won, she had to retire. she was 75. it's the law. so, the liberals had their chance. great, right?

now, if you think merrick garland was bad, get a load of this...

you'd have to ask him what he was thinking, but, in some kind of fit of post-partisanship or something, he actually asked a former member of the social credit party (kim campbell) to pick the next chief justice. this wasn't a red tory, or a moderate conservative - this was a woman from the furthest right reaches of the conservative spectrum. see, but she was a woman. and, in trudeau's silly post-ideological fantasy world, her gender was more important than her politics.

and, she predictably picked the most conservative judge in the list.

so, now we do have a right-wing court - because trudeau asked the conservatives to pick the justice for him. and, this might be the first ruling that makes him look decidedly stupid, for doing it.

there's a lot of complicated components of this case, and i do support the law and hope it is upheld. when everything gets whittled down, it's probably going to come up to an oakes test - it's probably going to be ruled unconstitutional, but then the court will need to determine if it's a reasonable restriction of rights in a free and democratic society, which i would argue it is. 

unfortunately, our constitution also has a veto in it and, while i support the law, i don't like that quebec wants to use the veto for this purpose. to me, that's the more substantive issue here, the trivialization of the notwithstanding clause.

my take on this is that hijabs should actually be banned under the public service employment act, and this extra layer of law is superfluous (at least insofar as it applies to federal workers). but, the right precedents to cite are the precedents related to the "political activities" section of the public service employment act. the crux of my argument is that overt displays of religion are a form of political propaganda, rather than some kind of intrinsic belief, or something. and, that's just secularism taken to a post-modernist next level: i don't even accept that religion is a valid idea. your church is just a political group, and should legally be treated the same way that we treat a political party. no woo about religion in law, please - let's be strictly rational about this and interpret a church or a mosque as what it is....and membership in a religion as what it is, too.

i think that this argument would be successful, in court.

but, the government of quebec does not appear to have taken up my arguments on this point, so i don't expect the ruling to have anything to do with it. they're insistent on arguing for the concept of sovereignty, instead, and i suspect that they'll get it - but i don't like how they're doing it.

of course, quebec has a charter as well, and these arguments would not be effective at a lower court. those who oppose the ban may have made a tactical error in going to the supreme court and letting quebec cry "anglo domination!" rather than a local court, where their issues could be more directly considered. too late now...

so, that's what i'd expect - yes, it's unconstitutional, but they used the veto, and tough titties. the subtlety in the ruling will likely lie in whether they do an oakes test or not, and what it looks like, and i'm going to hold off on that because we have a relatively new justice. i would not expect mclachlan to save the law via an oakes test, or at least not via the arguments the government is using (and, to be clear - the government doesn't care about this, it's just pushing the point about autonomy). this new guy is decidedly less libertarian, and he might deliver a ruling that seems a little uncanadian to most people that grew up with mclachlan leading the way.

and, that's something we're going to have to get our head around - trudeau shifted the court dramatically to the right, and doesn't seem to fully understand it. he may be more upset by the ruling than anybody, tomorrow.

so, i expect the law to stand via the veto, and i suspect it'll stand via the oakes test as well, but i'm less confident about the second point.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-21-religious-symbols-ban-quebec-court-ruling-1.5993431

today's post is inri031, and i really wish i could remix this from scratch to take the vocals out, but alas - here it is in a slightly better form than it once was.

=====

this track was initially a part of inrimake (inri032), but it never really made sense to put it there. that's a remix/cover album, and this is two forgotten experiments. it makes more sense to spin it off here. 

this track was meant to be a new beginning, but, instead, exists in a sort of purgatory. musically, it's radically different than anything else labeled 'inri'; thematically, it's a logical extension of inri. i really wanted this to be a fresh start, but in the end i had to leave it in the inri pile. in places it's sort of evil, in other places it's just a little too precious. 

my dad swapped houses in mid 99. again. this would be a frequent annoyance over the next few years. i can date this clearly to the summer of '99 as the first thing i did in my new basement. that change of surroundings contributed to the feeling of wanting to do something different... 

while it is an original track, it ended up on the covers disc for two reasons. first, the lead guitar loop that cycles through the track came out of a stoner jam session in the basement of a friend of mine. it's sort of hilarious to realize it took three years for another human being to get an influence here, even if it was a throwaway jam session. that was really just an excuse though. the real reason it was on inrimake (inri032), rather than on inridiculous (inri033), is that it fits in better with the prog theme of that disc than the noise theme of the other one.

the lyrics have been a problem since they were recorded. sex sells. shock sells. i had to psyche myself up to do it. it's all tied together, though. where was i going with this, anyways? 

'99 was the summer between grades 12 and 13 ("oac"). yes, ontario had a grade 13. get your laughs in. it was actually a pre-university year. universities would take the grades from the "oac" year as the entrance requirements. we didn't do SATs or anything. most universities have something like this for "mature students"; the weirdness is in making high school kids do the extra year. a few places (like quebec) still have similar types of pre-university screening... 

anyways, i'm going into the oac year and i haven't even really given the whole vocation thing a passing thought, other than to reject the idea of defining my life through the concept of labour. there were a few weeks in the summer where i had sort of decided not to go to oac at all. i was actually *excited* about escaping school, focusing on a minimum wage job and spending my free time smoking pot and writing music. i really didn't want anything more out of life than this. and, if i happened to get lucky and sell some records, even better. i was eventually talked down from this position through a process of bribery. that didn't magically construct vocational aspirations, though; i ended up overloading on oac credits for the simple reason that i didn't know what i wanted. 

(i ended up grudgingly accepting entrance into a software engineering program, literally switched to cosmological physics within a few weeks, switched to math after that, then bounced around from music to english to women's studies and ...) 

so, again, i'm stuck between grade 12 and 13 and really dreading what the future holds. finding a way to sell some music would be an escape from this. i concluded that, tactically, my best approach at the time would have been to focus on something sexually explicit that gains it's power from it's shock value. there's a bit of desperation underlying this. 

so i wrote a sort of graphic depiction of sexual domination within a male homosexual context. see, the thing is that it isn't very convincing. it isn't very convincing because it's contrived for profit. i'm being bluntly honest about the logic that produced this track because seeing myself in the mirror like this actually had a large effect on me. once i realized what i'd created, i was completely disgusted with myself. in it's initial form, liquify was the first 3:36 of this track. it sat on my hard drive for several weeks, waiting for me to finish questioning myself - who i was, what i was doing, whether it was worth it. 

i came to two conclusions. 

the first was that contrived music sucks. i realized i wasn't going to get anywhere faking it, anyways. if i wanted to build an audience, the only serious approach i had was honesty. 

the second was that, even if it works, being fake isn't worth it. i was rejecting the beaten path because i didn't feel i belonged on it. accepting some kind of Official Alternative Beaten Path wasn't solving anything. 

so, i should just do what i want, and tell anybody that doesn't like it to fuck off. 

the second part of this track flowed from that epiphany. it's a pure prog workout, discernible from 1972 solely in it's updated use of technology. probably for the first time, the notes really mean something to me, here. if you listen, you can tell. 

the ending scene of the jim carrey masterpiece, the truman show, fades the track out. it's meant to document the importance of the film in helping me work through what i was working through. as of january 2014, i've mildly modified the track to fade out the truman show ending, which was just a little too cheezy & precious. 

so, yeah. there's a few more inri tracks. but this is really the point where inri dies. 

-- 

the first five minutes were initially a different track, and are split off here for the final version to document it. i didn't initially commit to this pairing; i always intended to finish the first section as a separate track. it really wasn't until 2014 that i finally decided against it. 

the version that ended up on 'inrimake' was a slightly less finished mix than the version that i archived as mp3. i must have further altered the track between the time that i burned the inrimake disc (october, 1999) and the time that i saved the track to mp3 to archive (january, 2000). i didn't notice this when i edited the track in 2014. but, i've brought the newest version in for the final remix. 

-- 

when i ran through the discography in 2014, i stopped on this track for a few days and ultimately had to admit defeat around it. i wanted to turn the vocals down, but the mix was simply too saturated to do anything about it; everything i tried had a set of unintended consequences, and it just seemed prudent to not touch it. i was able to get around these concerns for my final mix, which is dated to sept, 2017. i've also split the instrumental section off and given it the title that i used for early versions of inricycled. 

recorded over the spring and summer of 1999. originally released on inrimake in october, 1999 (with an accidental phase reverse). the first section was modified further at the end of 1999. minimally altered and split into it's own ep on january 3rd, 2014. spliced further, appended to and remastered over sept, 2017. re-released and finalized on sept 28, 2017. as always, please use headphones. 

the lead version is now on the outtakes compilation, inrimoved (inri042): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrimoved 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1999, 2013, 2014, 2017). 

released august 1, 1999 

j - guitar, effects, bass, synths, piano, loops, drum programming, vocals, samples, cool edit synthesis, sequencing, digital wave editing, digital effects processing, production

i would rather call on the conservative party to get it's house in order.

whatever that means.

while i'd like to get rid of doug ford as well, now is not the time for political bickering.

schreiner's the one with his head on straight, here.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7769145/ontario-premier-doug-ford-covid-resign/

it's about time that the left started opposing some of these measures, and this might be the only place in the world where we have the left being the left and the right being the right. at least we haven't entirely succumbed to the backwardsness and orwellian redefinitions.

yet.

and, i actually think this is important, because you're otherwise going to have a loaded spectrum, where people that oppose these restrictions have nowhere to turn but the far right.

so, we figured it out, like i asked you to however long ago.

good.

that said, it's a baby step - they're still supporting specious travel restrictions, for example. but, let's not lose this toehold on the correct side of the spectrum - let's get this right.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7765156/ontario-covid-19-restrictions-ford-david-fisman/