now that trump has his tax cut, he can spend the afternoon in his golf cart thinking about arnold palmer.

i went to start the day yesterday with some dishes and cleaning by sunrise and got that done effectively, but i ended up deciding to wait until my bras dried before i got into the shower yesterday morning, which resulted in sleeping until close to noon. they were still mildly damp, so i got a coffee and got a first run on filing email before eventually getting in in the afternoon.

after struggling for several hours, i did get out to let the conditioner sit and realized it was worse than i thought, until it wasn't. it's weird how that works, and i have seen it before. right when you're about to give up, it cleans out.

there is a goopy film that keeps getting in my hair and tangling it. my hair is naturally very thin and straight, it shouldn't be tangling like this, and wouldn't if this shit wasn't getting caught in it. whatever it is, it has been recurrent for about two years, and it consistently take about a week to clean out. there has also consistently been noticeable breakage that's occurred when i do clean it out, making me wonder how it's getting in there and if it's still being periodically cut. these despicably gross people stalking me have cut my hair previously, but the areas on the side aren't the areas i've been keeping note of, in terms of overall length. cutting my hair at these points would be a more subtle form of assault than chopping it off, but just as bad. 

i initially got out around 16:00 to let the conditioner sit, typed a little, got back in and rinsed. it was at this step that the film started to come out a little and my hair started to straighten/clean itself back out a bit, finally, but it's not complete. i need at least one more day.

the cleaned hair is far thinner than it was a few weeks ago and i don't have a good explanation for that.

i got out the second time closer to 19:00 with the intent of rinsing and pausing, took some pills and wanted to eat, but instead passed out with little memory of it and woke up close to 22:00 to the sounds of people talking and feet trampling, to an overwhelming smell of a heavy smoke i don't recognize and to a vicious hemiplegic migraine. i was able to wake up for long enough to slam some tylenol and eat another half a container of kd (saving the rest for this morning), but i then completely passed out until almost 6:00 am. i've been continuing to struggle with the migraine all day.

i've been trying to get my hair washed, to do some laundry and get out for some groceries all week, but it hasn't worked itself out yet. i am getting there. the kd + chick peas, with the various leftover items i documented, does work in that context, as i wouldn't use it for anything else. i had three boxes, and have eaten them; i am also out of chick peas now, amongst the other things i noted. i will need to get back in schedule over the next few days, but do still have out of place items, including some instant oatmeal to eat. i've decided the best way to eat the oatmeal is every few hours in containers of two. it follows that the wednesday meal was the kd and i'll be eating through the instant eatmeal, which is at least a good source of iron, all day on thursday. i'll want to add something else to that later.

i've been waiting until after 23:00 before i get in the shower again, to ensure i have 24+ hours between hair washing. i think that should finish this process sufficiently.

tonight, i need to do the end of the month / june clean, which is a little different. i bought a desk for a sewing machine, but i won't be able to set it up for a while, so i'm going to move it into the kitchen for now. that will stop me from eating in the bedroom, and get me eating in the kitchen. that will in turn help me set up a few things in the bedroom, so it's some progress. on top of the laundry and groceries, the thing in front of me remains email filing and legal work, and i need to get that going.

but, the point of getting rid of trudeau is that he was trying to be america's bitch, and wouldn't take no for an answer. canada's entire trade policy was based on the idea that we're america's bestest ever friend and we would love them and kiss them and never let them go.

the reason that trudeau resigned, and the reason we ditched him, and the reason we went to go find a banker from england to take his job, is that we weren't going to do that anymore, because it was embarrassing and shameful and ineffective. it didn't work!

it has taken roughly three months for carney to end up in exactly the same situation as trudeau. he should not expect different results.

...and the right thing to do is call for a federal election.

i never want to see another motorcycle again.

they have no utility in today's world.

it's just completely wasteful, completely disgusting.

motorcycles should be banned. outright.

gross.

you don't thermoregulate at 21, you thermoregulate at 37.

and you evolved in a jungle.

like, wake up; 30-40 degrees is your natural habitat. you should thrive in that. 

you suffer because you're fat, you eat garbage and you don't exercise.

- 15 degrees is cold enough to need a sweater and maybe a jacket, unless you're right in the sun

- 20 degrees is enough to take the sweater off, usually, but still cold

- 25 degrees is just starting to warm up, but still uncomfortably cold.

- 30 degrees is a pleasant, comfortable temperature

- 35 degrees is hot enough to turn a fan on

- ...and if i had a window a/c by law, i would set it to 40 degrees, which is when it becomes justified to waste the energy.

the americans have been abundantly clear that they do not intend to lift the tariffs, which are permanent (for the next four years) and structural and intended to generate tax revenue.

our elected leaders are either deaf or stupid.

yeah, it's a step towards a complete collapse of sovereignty, is what it is.

it's like when a dog runs around your ankles, expecting a treat. this isn't sovereign trade policy, it's abjectly pathetic, and that's what the americans are taking note of, our complete reliance on them.

https://thelogic.co/news/canada-foreign-steel-usa-deal-leblanc/

it turns out the disgusting fat losers in the ndp want the whole world to be disgusting fat losers just like them.

i cannot think of a more right-wing policy that wastes more energy than mandating a maximum temperature of 26 degrees, which i would not adhere to.

advocates should be ashamed of themselves for pushing such a wasteful policy, which effectively cancels summer. is this the mr. burns party? why not just build a sunblocker?

26 degrees isn't even hot, it's cold.

get some exercise (lose some weight!) and wear less clothes, you fucking losers.

this is a more foolish war than iraq. ukraine has no possibility of success and has never had any possibility of success and people arguing otherwise are imbeciles operating on the delusion of faith.

it's been clear for a while that the tactic to bleed the russians was backfiring, and the americans were instead bleeding themselves. they need to cut their losses and get out.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/02/us-halts-ukraine-weapons-shipments

this idea of a publicly subsidized grocery store in new york city is a prime example of socialism for the rich. what this seems to be about is a way to subsidize businesses that don't pay their interns, without relying on the food stamps system used by poor people and blue collar workers, because that system is for poor people. the unpaid interns doing free work for businesses downtown and living in apartments rented by their parents are the educated children of the wealthy; they can't be using the same system of food welfare as the poor. instead, they need a parallel system intended to cater to their tastes, and to ensure they don't have to interact with the poor, or suffer the indignity of getting food stamps.

it would probably be more reasonable to just put them on snap and embarrass and shame everybody into just fucking paying them, but you can't have that in america. there are shareholders to report to.

so, the city has to step in instead. how do you fund such a thing? in the united states, i believe food stamps are federally funded. these grocery stores, if they are subsidized by the city, would have to come from property taxes, as that is where cities generate funds. who pays property taxes in new york city? not the wealthy living in their mansions on the water or upstate whose kids will rely on the publicly funded grocery stores, or people working downtown to pay rent and living in apartments. the answer is blue collar property owners, many of them unionized, and working in trades or services.

and, there you go - you get the blue collar working class paying to feed the children of the wealthy, who are living off government welfare. socialism for the rich.

you'll excuse these blue collar workers, however, if they point out that it seems a little more like taxation without representation than it does like socialism.

my hair just won't come clean, it keeps tangling up in knots. it's utterly disgusting. i may just have to rip it out with a heavy brush.

windsor is not quite as bad, but downtown ottawa on canada day is not recommended, at any age. i have memories as a young child of my dad just fucking screaming at people to grow up...

the city becomes scattered with smashed beer bottles and beer cans, cigarette butts (and i suppose joints, nowadays), turns into a mass public urinal with people pissing everywhere, etc. 

canada day was even worse than a roughriders game.

as stated, i'm not particularly adverse to having a beer in public. however, the type of people that gather in public on canada day, specifically, and the way they behave are things to strenuously avoid. it's peak grossness, truly.

it's been a while due to various reasons (i have barely left the house since the start of the pandemic, as my house got bought right when restrictions were easing and then i spent two years fighting off an aggressive attempt to steal my identity, which appears to be continuing in a new apartment), but i like to go out to concerts, and i have a tendency to drink in public.

however, there are a few days of the year that i generally don't like to go out on because the city gets ruined by drunk idiots, and canada day is one of them.

this just in

mark carney has agreed to give donald trump the sudetenland. that's right - carney is handing over the sudetenland.

after all, america has had socialism for the rich for decades.

this guy mamdani calls himself a socialist, but apparently cuomo actually won all of the core democratic constituencies, and mamdani actually managed to win the election by getting republicans, and specifically wealthy white ones, to vote. it looks to me like a continuation of the march towards white collar upper class control of the democratic party, and the continuation of the party's inability to generate candidates and policies that appeal to it's base.

"champagne socialist" is probably being nice, but we've seen quite a bit of this kind of thing from new york, recently. 

the danger is if unions and other core democratic constituencies get so alienated that they vote republican, and it's certainly possible. new york is actually ripe for that kind of thing.

in the short run, it looks like the wealthy elite in new york got their guy, at least for now.

did andrew cuomo campaign for mayor over powerpoint?

i changed my mind about the kd - it was my monday meal after all. in fact, it was a pretty big bowl and it took me most of the night to get through, which distorted my schedule. i wasn't finished until close to 5:00, when i stopped for a short sleep before getting up to do dishes, vacuum and clean the fridge as broadcast and then get into the shower after the sun came up, and i wasn't out of the shower until close to noon. i was getting tired, so i got out to sleep, with the thought that i'd finish washing my hair the next day.

this persistent film - which i suspect is secondhand marijuana smoke but am weirded out by - seemed to be mostly out, until it started to dry. unfortunately, there's enough of this film left in my hair to bunch it up on the sides, which prevents it from sitting loosely on my shoulders, and is extremely unattractive. worse, when it dried completely, the result was less hairspray and more blow dry, which is even more disgusting. the only thing more disgusting than hairsprayed hair is blowdryed hair. i don't have a shirt that says "$2 slut" on it and am not looking to buy one, sorry. yuck. i'm extremely grossed out by this, and i had never seen it before 2023ish, but i've seen it a few times since and i know it washes out, as gross and frustrating as it is. hopefully, today is the last day, and one more day of long showers ends this disgustingness. 

it does suggest the return of the loser stalkers this weekend, and i have heard them downstairs. it's a weird holiday weekend (tuesday is a holiday) in canada, and that's when these losers show up. what i'm learning from this is that modern psychiatry is as dumb as any other religion, and should be treated by rational people with the same amount of contempt and disdain that all other religions are. there's no other way to put it at this point. this is a bunch of magical thinking, a bunch of complete nonsense. it doesn't have the slightest empirical basis. you'd might as well be mumbling prayers at the wall. they keep coming back and as disgusting and frustrating as the situation is, the only way they can actually hurt me is through drugging me. they can babble bullshit at me when i'm sleeping all they want, so long as they don't drug me it's just as likely to have an effect on me as their prayers are to be answered. there's really not a functional difference between the therapy they're performing and sympathetic magic, as a form of prayer. this is what psychiatry has been reduced to in the absence of empirical direction, empty rituals that require deep faith in specious theory to even comprehend. what a sad display of futility and stupidity.

i have a blood rec that is waiting to go. i'll catch them if they fuck up. otherwise, as much as it pisses me off and makes me want to break their faces, i suppose they can waste their time on prayer and magic all they want. 

....the fucking idiots.

i just wish they'd go pray somewhere else where i can't hear them.

so, i woke up around 21:30, poked around online, tidied up a bit, cleaned my bras by hand in the sink as i do (you needed to know that) and got some more pasta running a little after 23:00. this recipe is a little lighter:

- the 2 cloves of garlic went into the bowl first

 

- i just made the kd in the bowl, next [food bank item]

- add pasta

- add margarine

- add "cheese" mix 

- add 100 g of grated marble cheese  [end of cheese]

- mix

- dump a can of chick peas in the large bowl [food bank item]

- add one tbsp of oregano, one tbsp of thyme, one tbsp of basil

- add 1 tbsp of cumin, 1 tbsp of paprika, 1 tbsp of hemp seeds, 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast, 1 tbp of sunflower seeds

- add frank's

i finished this up about an hour ago and made some coffee. 

without the added ingredients, the combination of cumin and chick peas in the kd makes it taste like hamburger helper, which i haven't had in 20-30 years.

remaining items in the fridge are: chicken bone broth, beef broth cubes, a half a bulb of garlic, a half a pack of hemp seeds, a few tbsps of margarine.

i would estimate i have enough coffee left for two cups.

i do have piles of spices and canned food, and intend to do a big food bank run on friday.

this morning, then, will be the same as the last few days; i need to start with some minor cleaning, get in the shower just after sunrise, keep rehydrating and cleaning the film out of my hair until it's gone and then aim for laundry by the end of the day.

as mentioned, the next step is catching up on email and legal documents.

this is terrible:

Ottawa likes to point to energy efficiency standards. A washing machine made in B.C. that meets the provincial standard still needs to meet additional federal standards before it can be sold in Alberta or Ontario. This new law means the B.C. standard would replace the federal one.

it's a lowering of standards, a race to the bottom.

i strongly oppose the blanket removal of all internal canadian trade barriers all at once, without study or justification. these items should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis, and it should require decades of study to determine the ideal approach, which may entail removing some barriers while maintaining others.

removing a 150 year old tariff should require some reasoning, 

as it is, mark carney has taken the musk/trump approach of just breaking it without bothering to understand it, and the result is that there will be winners and losers from the legislation. some companies may benefit from increased market access, whereas others will suffer. 

there will be significant layoffs and substantive job losses, mostly in the smaller provinces and more rural areas. this is going to severely hurt a lot of people, who didn't have the chance to adjust.

i could accept the premise of a maximum summer temperature in principle, but not as low as 27. on a day where it's 27 and cloudy, i would often need to put on pants, or a long-sleeved shirt. 27 is moderate to cool, it's not warm. 

further, such legislation is inherently misogynist, as it directs temperature regulations towards cooler temperatures preferred by men, and even by heavyset or obese men.

in order for a maximum temperature enshrined in legislation and enforced by law to be inclusive of women and healthy people, it should be something closer to 40 degrees. a legislated maximum temperature should be 35 degrees celsius, minimum.

i hate air conditioning and will not have it imposed on me.

they'd better make sure a window a/c put in my unit is installed extra securely, because they might find that it has a tendency to just fall out of the window and on to the ground outside over and over again, repeatedly smashing into pieces.

i would violently oppose a bill forcing me to endure temperatures less than 27 degrees celsius in july and august, when i like the temperature to be 30 degrees, minimum, at all times.

i'd end up turning the stove on all summer.

i like my scorching hot apartment and am annoyed by my neghbour's air conditioner, which i absolutely hate.

i have a fan blowing hot air into the apartment to counteract the a/c downstairs and stop it from making me cold in the summer.

why doesn't the government focus the money on addressing obesity and reducing smoking, instead?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/politics/toronto-city-hall/article/were-not-letting-it-go-advocates-say-government-needs-to-do-more-to-ensure-people-arent-living-in-scorching-hot-apartments/

i don't have any particular attachment to the digital services tax, but i do support the broader premise of taxing income/profits as preferable to taxing consumption, and i'm extremely put off by canada's decision to cave to that kind of tactic. you don't negotiate with a carnivorous animal, and it's stupid and naive to think you can. carney has continuously broadcast the flawed premise that the americans are a rational actor. they aren't.

all we've done is tell trump that he can push us around and get what he wants. he'll do it again, because it worked.

we should have, instead, told them that we will not return to negotiations until they lift duties on softwood lumber.

what is a vulgar marxist?

this is an imprecise term i've seen used in multiple ways over a long period of time, so i should clarify what i mean. i use the term to refer to a capitalist that sees marx as providing deep insight into the operation of capitalism, and marxism as a system that can subsequently help a savvy capitalist to achieve their aims, if it is understood properly and deployed effectively. a vulgar marxist would use 1984, or the shock doctrine, as a user manual to establish deeper levels of capitalist control. the idea is that a vulgar marxist does not want to argue against marx, but to use marx' insights to strengthen capitalist domination.

fdr is often cited as the paramount vulgar marxist, in this context. in canada, pierre trudeau is often interpreted as a vulgar marxist.

my normal pasta recipe would be as follows:

- weigh 110 g of dry pasta, preferably fettucine

- cook to al dente in a covered pot.

- slice and chop up 100 g of salami into small squares (i use spicy genoa or hungarian)

- fry in olive oil (or olive oil margarine) until a little crispy

- chop 150 g of fresh pineapple into small squares

- on a large flat plate add - one half a tomato (diced), one half a red pepper (diced), one avocado (diced), two cloves of garlic, one carrot, one beet, one tbsp of oregano, one tbsp of thyme, one tbsp of basil, some fresh dill (chopped)

- add pasta on top of vegetables

- add 1 tbsp of olive oil margarine

- add pineapple

- add salami

- add 1 tbsp cumin, 1 tbsp nutritional yeast, 1 tbsp paprika, 1 tbsp hemp seeds, 1 tbsp sunflower seeds (or just chomp the last one)

- add a lot of ceasar dressing (this is the pasta sauce)

- add 100 g of grated marble cheese

- microwave for 1:45

- add frank's, pepper, cayenne

- serve with tall glass of 25% grapefruit, 75% orange huice

========

i don't have a lot of those ingredients on hand, but i'm going to make some kraft dinner tonight as a stop gap just to fill me up until tomorrow, because the oranges and bread weren't really a meal. this is not intended to be a pasta meal but rather to use up what's in my fridge as a continuation of the sunday meal's fridge-clearing process. it's going to use the kd as a base in a large bowl and will be prepared as follows:

- the kd pasta cooks for 7 minutes, according to the box. my water wasn't hot enough, so it went for 12. [food bank item]

- chop two slim jims, and fry in margarine while waiting [food bank item]

- dump a can of chick peas in a large bowl [food bank item]

- add a can of pineapple tidbits [food bank item]

- add 2 cloves of chopped garlic

- add pasta

- add slim jims

- add margarine

- add "cheese" mix

- add 100 g of grated marble cheese

- mix

- add one tbsp of oregano, one tbsp of thyme, one tbsp of basil, some fresh dill (chopped)

- add 1 tbsp of cumin, 1 tbsp of paprika, 1 tbsp of hemp seeds, 1 tbsp of nutritional yeast, 1 tbp of sunflower seeds

- add frank's

- add ceasar

i microwaved it to warm it up.

it's an acceptable stop-gap, but not the pasta i'll be eating this week.

i got out of the shower yesterday evening to get something to eat, which was supposed to be temporary; i was supposed to get back in shortly. instead, my sunday meal dragged out a little longer than expected, as i stopped a few times and got distracted. i passed out briefly around 1:00 am, woke up and made some coffee and meant to setup my old five discer in the bedroom, but that took longer than expected; i did some writing, and then fell asleep around 7:00 instead of getting back in the shower in the morning. this turned out to be a long sleep - all the way until about 17:00 pm. i think i needed the rest, and it actually let my hair get it's shape back a little; after washing it all day yesterday, it had developed a weird flatness that looked awful, which was due to the tangled sections under the visible sections getting cleaned, which has been the problem for the last few weeks. this is partly due to growing out of the awkward phase of regrowing; what i'm describing is my hair reestablishing layers, due to the breakage that's occurred over the last two years. i want pretty even and pretty straight hair, so this is pissing me off. it looks more like normal hair again today.

my sunday meal was what was left in the fridge, and i ate it in four steps - two oranges, and then six pieces of garlic bread, in three waves. this is not a meal, exactly, but it almost entirely clears out my fridge, which is the last thing in the kitchen left to clean. all that's left in there is a bit of marble cheese, some drips of ceasar dressing, a bulb of garlic, a handful of dill and some various soup broth, including beef broth and chicken broth. i still have a lot of canned food and a lot of pasta left, so i'm going to make some kraft dinner tonight to really clear out the fridge (except the broth, which i will need to find ways to eat this month, as i did in may and june), clean it out, spend the night in the shower, try to get some laundry done in the morning and then try to get out around noon. i have two pasta meals left in my first meal cycle (which is four plates), but the item i have the most of in my pantry is excess pasta of types i don't normally eat (like penne), so i expect to be eating pasta for most of the next several weeks. it is increasingly clear that i will need to have another month of adventures in food bank food, and maybe get back into schedule for august 1st. maybe. the kd tonight will contain everything left in the fridge except the broth plus spices and yeast for nutrition and be the end of my sunday meal.

the system i set up last night is a jvc xl fz-158 five disc changer through the yamaha cr-620 and into the celestion ditton 110s. i explained that my dad gave me the celestions with the nad for use with my pod (which didn't work as intended) and probably noted that the cr-620 was also a gift that he purchased at a garage sale in the distant past. he at one point had the cr-620 set up in his unfinished basement with a record player (which i also have) in one of the many houses he lived in, but it was rare for him to have an unfinished basement, and he ended up giving me the cr-620 for use with the celestions (i actually think that's where the celestions were initially being used) around 2008ish or so because he was told by my stepmother to get it out of the house because it was too old looking. my stepmother was very shallow, in that sense. anything that looked like it was vintage (furniture or electronics) could not be allowed anywhere where it could be seen; everything always had to look like it was recently purchased, brand new. she would not allow a record player in the house at all, apparently, as it was too old looking. it's the literal idea of keeping up with the joneses taken to extreme levels of psychosis. it was ok to have older gear in the unfinished basement, or hidden in my bedroom when i lived there, but as soon as they moved somewhere with a finished basement, he had to get rid of it, as he could not put a behemoth chrome stereo receiver from the 1970s in a finished basement, it just looked too old and out of place. these items were consequently transported to my apartment partly as a way for him to store them for future retrieval and use, as that's what he always did with vintage gear in the past, he hid it in my bedroom, which she stayed out of by mutual agreement. and, she would literally just turf stuff she didn't like the look of, she didn't care what it was worth or what it sounded like. my room was the only safe place in the house, so he no longer had a safe place to hide things once i left. i had the 620/celestion pairing initially set up in my bedroom on bronson in ottawa as a secondary system (with the newer panasonic 5 disc cd-changer, which is actually a dvd player, and which he gave me around the same time), and that three piece system transferred to the living room on marion, before being disassembled on curry because it was really a studio apartment and i didn't think it made sense to have two systems (i eventually set up both the kefs and the celestions together). i am back to having two distinct systems here again (four actually) and have reassembled the celestion/cr-620 pairing (after rejecting the nad for the celestions a second time) but have swapped the panasonic 5-disc for the jvc 5-disc because the panasonic has become the main cd/dvd player, partly because it's newer and partly because it's more functional and partly because the jvc developed some issues after retrieving it from storage in 2013.

i initially got the jvc as a birthday present in 1998 and it has followed me everywhere since. it's a relatively inexpensive player that doesn't read dvds or mp3 cds but does have some advanced programming features. when i got it out of storage in 2013, it had a noticeable dip in the metallic exterior, indicating something had probably been dropped on it. i have used it sparingly, since, but have generally had it placed in my bedroom near my bed and intended it to be used for listening to music through headphones while i'm reading in bed, as it has a separate headphone out and doesn't need to go through an amp. i realized some time around the year 2022 that the tray was jammed.

i did fix the tray issue some time last year, but have struggled to get the player to engage until this morning. i'm going to operate on the hypothesis that the lasers are slightly out of alignment but that they will realign themselves with use. therefore, the more i use the device, the better it will work.

it was able to play songs from the big chair this morning without skips or crashes. great.

this will allow me to listen to a broader subsection of my cd collection, and not just the aor stuff that the nad can drive through the yamahas without clipping below 50 hz, and specifically while i'm getting to work on catching up on email in my bedroom.

that's right. while trump's position on income taxes is very old-timey conservative, his position on undeclared wars is not.

because trump is about class, not ideology. it's been right in front of us the whole time and we've missed it. you will not understand trump with a bourgeois political analysis, you need to bring in marx. in a sense, he's the most vulgar marxist the capitalist world has ever seen, even more so than the vulgar marxism of roosevelt in the 30s.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/trump-military-iran-nuclear/683348/

the corruption charges that netanyahu faces in israel are legitimate, and the israeli state has a functioning independent judiciary. trump should certainly not be issuing ultimatums to israeli courts.

this is very different than the charges israel faces in the hague, which have no real jurisdiction, and which are clearly without evidentiary basis. however, israel should defeat these charges, not boycott the court.

trump appears to be confused. that is not uncharacteristic of trump, but his administration needs to get him to shut up on the issue of threatening the independence of the israeli judiciary, which nobody should tolerate.

transition fuels are so 90s.

too late for that, now.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/article/canadas-liquefied-natural-gas-touted-and-doubted-as-a-green-transition-fuel/

it's actually worth noting that the united states has not been involved in any of the myriad african conflicts of the last 20 years, opting instead to focus on building infrastructure in a limited geographic area in the southern part of the continent, and leaving the heavy fighting to proxies backed by financing from egypt, turkey, the uae, russia, france, the uk and china. the british funding in rwanda wa a scandal that the recent change of government has addressed. the biggest source of funding in congo for years has been the chinese.

for the americans to step into congo like this is a clear challenge to the chinese, but it's apparently being done differently. they're not backing an army by proxy. rather, they're selling the idea of stability as a way to increase american investment. war chases off investment. have we changed so much since the days of cecil rhodes and royal dutch shell?

probably not. but, the americans are at the least broadcasting an amount of distaste in engaging in coups and low level wars to physically hold mines and a desire to have free market access and open competition, instead. shit, it's like somebody finally took the kitchen debates seriously. trump as neo-nixon in a world where history moves backwards gains more traction every fucking day.

is this serious? it depends. it doesn't solve the fighting on the ground, in a literal sense; it doesn't address the religion, the ethnicity, the language or the piles of dirt they kill each other over. however, if the people funding this shit from a distance for financial gain are pulling out, it could slowly remove access to weapons and could lead to national armies chasing the rebel groups out of the mines, forests and rivers and holding it for bankers, instead. if the result is that the financial backers decide to stop funding war and start funding security, you could see a subsequent end to the religious and ethnic conflicts, and pretty quick.

the caveat is that if trump is really turning the clocks back, he'll be happy to bankroll a fascist dictatorship that will stop the warring at the expense of trampling over civil liberties, and you'll get a series of brutal dictatorships protecting the interests of capital by viciously attacking civil rights instead of generating instability and chaos, like we used to have in africa. that is what trump told us he wanted to do.

i think that a refocus on africa is overdue. after the universally panned iraq war, obama was supposed to have an asian pivot that never really happened and was supposed to refocus on africa, which he tried to do but largely failed to organize. trump 1.0 and biden both flailed, and musk's messaging suggested a foolish alignment with white farmers in south africa, which would really turn the clock back. this agreement in congo looks like a preferable shift in direction, on it's face.

i'm a little skeptical. the chinese might react by dumping millions into congolese rebel movements. however, i think this is the right direction for the west to take in africa and hope it continues. control over africa will be extremely important in the next 200 years - more so than control over the south pacific, and certainly more important than control over greenland. crucially, if the chinese get a lock on africa, they have a staging ground into the americas that can probably not be defeated. the americans need to meet them in africa to stop them. it's something the us has been broadcasting for 20 years, but hasn't been able to actually get done.

trump has the bbc on his side, now. this is like a zombie film. the whole town is a part of the cult. 

canada should interpret that very ominously, but should not be surprised. we were naive to expect otherwise.

i don't know why we didn't get on the phone with mexico, immediately.

i've been in the shower all day. my hair is fucking brutal. i'm stopping to eat and will likely be in there again all night.

it's something i noticed in the last apartment, and mostly cleared up in the hotel, but is now apparently back, at least temporarily: this kind of thin, gooey film in my hair. shampoo doesn't work. you have to sit in the shower for hours and condition it about twenty times before it starts to come out, and then it comes out like you're peeling gunk out of it. if you let it dry midwash, it's like you have hairspray or gel in your hair.

i would never put hairspray or gel in my hair, ever. yuck. gross.

i don't know what's causing this, but that's what i'm doing this weekend, is sitting in the shower and washing my hair. it might be second-hand marijuana smoke that's the culprit.

there has been some smoking downstairs, and i have made some complaints. that might be it.

who in canada would still shop at a bay like department store?

the answer is chinese women, and they make up a substantive demographic. white people would find something like this kind of stuffy and upper class, but the chinese like that.

she has a business case.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ruby-liu-hudsons-bay-leases-1.7573682

trump has been clear enough that his shift towards tariffs is a shift away from taxing profit or income and towards taxing consumption. he likes this precisely because it incentivizes saving over spending, which is a typical conservative fiscal position, and one that most economists today think is recessionary and regressive. it's less that class-focused old timey conservatives like trump disagree, and more that they don't care. it's class war. it helps those with inherited wealth at the expense of those that need to work.

this is why he doesn't like the digital services tax in canada.

but, trump was not elected as president of canada. he has no mandate. he should back off.

this is also a last-chance salad soup, as i'm using up various things that are at their ends. i will need to get groceries in the next few days, after i deal with my hair, which is overdue.

so, i used up the last bit of olive oil margarine in a big sauce pan by melting it, then chopping up the rest of the kale stalks and frying them in the margarine on medium for three minutes, covered. the recipe calls for celery; i generally sub kale stalks for celery. i the added an entire bulb of chopped garlic and let it go another three minutes, covered.

then, i added the chopped broccoli stalks and a full box of vegetable broth [946 ml]. i let this come to a boil (covered). i then cooked it (covered) on reduced heat for fifteen minutes, and for another fifteen minutes on increased heat.

i did not blend anything, i just transferred it to a bowl and added

- 100 g of old cheddar

- 100 g of mozarella

(this uses up the cheese)

- chopped fresh dill

- nutritional yeast

- frank's

- pepper

- cayenne

- oregano

- cumin

- paprika

- hemp seeds

- ceasar

again, this is a big bowl of soup and i don't think i need toast, or an orange.

cooking the broccoli makes it edible, but it's broccoli. recall. the broth would benefit from a beef cube next time, i think.

i mentioned i've been in a holding pattern since monday. 

i did finish organizing the living room early on sunday and early on monday, and spent a large amount of time on these days exfoliating, culminating in a shower on monday. i meant to get out to get some groceries, but didn't; i had an rx delivered on tuesday. this had to do with the condition of my hair, which has had conditioner in it since monday evening.

it's been the same thing day over day on tuesday, wednesday, thursday and now friday - wake up in the afternoon, exfoliate in the evening, eat around midnight, clean all night and and then sleep in the morning, all while listening to cds in the kitchen. at this point, i've got everything organized into the space it should be in, i've got everything off the ground and i've got the floors and general space relatively clean. i've had some plumbers and drywall workers here as well and they're still not done, but almost. i still have a large amount of organizing to do and am going to need to do things like buy new tables for the kitchen, but that can wait. i am overdue on that shower, which i should take this morning. i need to do laundry, i need to get groceries and i need to catch up on email in here.

after having the leftover gravy as soup on sunday night, i ate up the rest of the beets, which i should have had in the previous leftover salad but missed the existence of. it was five beets in ceasar and frank's, with yeast and hemp. this gave me brutal beeturia. i then had my monday meal early on tuesday morning, which was the ceasar without subs, except white bread for brown bread. this happened again on wednesday morning, for my tuesday meal. i then doubled up on thursday morning by having wednesday and thursday together, which amounted to 10 medium sized eggs, four pieces of toast and four slices of bacon. see, i normally but extra large eggs, but the food bank gave me medium eggs, so i made five instead of four, over two meals together. it was a good meal.

my friday meal was a little different. one of the things remaining from the last food bank run was a frozen pack of white things that i wasn't sure about but thought might be noodles and a frozen pack of red sauce that said "pad thai". i had to google this. they were rice noodles, with a fish sauce - like the tamarind i used to make sweet and sour soup. what do i do with this? do i cook it? nuke it?

i decided to microwave it in one minute bursts and stir it until it was warm all the way through. again, i don't eat microwave dinners, but i know how it is. frozen in the middle. i was not letting that happen.

when it came out, it was a big meal - the entire bowl. i added cumin, paprika, hemp seed, cheddar cheese, oregano and nutritional yeast, plus a can of chick peas. this was done to add vitamins, minerals and protein, as i didn't feel like this giant pile of rice noodles was very substantive, and wasn't even sure it would fill me up. indeed, i was hungry before noon, which is unusual.

the noodles came out chewy and al dente and i decided that can't be right, but i googled it and it is actually how they're supposed to be. the sauce was pretty bland.

so, i have to admit i didn't enjoy the frozen (store bought?) pad thai and will probably leave it for somebody else next time. i'd be tempted to use the sauce for something else and just make baked spaghetti out of the noodles. it would be a weird spaghetti, but probably better.

if i start going to the food bank more frequently, i'll teach myself a bit more about these rice noodles and what to do with them.

tonight, i'm making that broccoli soup i've been talking about. recipe in next post.

so, this paralegal i filed a t2 against wants to give me unsolicited legal advice.

right.

there's a song for that.

that's actually next out of the box and on to the shelf. ironically.

i've been in a holding pattern the last few days, but it's done. i will be organizing and setting things up for months, but everything is up off the floor, the furniture is all in the room it's supposed to be in and the place is clean enough to live and exist in. it'll be one thing at a time until it's done.

i need to soak. badly.

and i need to catch up on email. quickly. that's going to be my weekend.

the intelligence said there was no weapons program in iran, but then that the weapons program wasn't dismantled by the strikes. i mean, this is 1984-level doublethink, here. if there wasn't a weapons program, how could it have been not dismantled? unless we be strictly logical, that is a way out; the program could not have been destroyed, because it never existed. qed.

the only thing to learn from the intelligence assessment is that the americans don't publish intelligence reports.

i used to go to hammtramck every other weekend. there were multiple venues, many of which have apparently evaporated or gone underground, although i haven't actually been there to investigate. alcohol, live music and gays were all prominent in these spaces, until 2020.

the blind spot in the american left - and i've written about this before - is that it interprets everything through race, because that's america. as a canadian, i can see that. we don't have that blind spot, here. so, an american leftist can not equate a muslim with a christian, because they're not seen as white. forget the fact that islam and christianity come from the same place in the world; muslims are the oppressed, and christians are the oppressors, due to the white supremacy of christianity and the brownness of muslims, which is the foundational and fundamental characteristic, not the basic reality that moderate islam is substantively more psychotic than the craziest christian right-wingers you'll find anywhere around here. that is how hammtramck happened; it was due to the racial blindspots on the american left. worse, it's exposing a sort of underbelly on the american left that's been apparent for a long time: if you are the religious right, and you want to infiltrate and co-opt the left, you do it with black or brown people. these activists won't see you as a religious right-winger, they'll see you as an oppressed minority.

in theory, i agree that i would like to see the muslim brotherhood's activities restricted in canada.

however, i cannot support a witchhunt or specious attacks on political grounds. i do not suppose it would be particularly difficult to find real examples of actual unlawfulness, and any attempts at prosecution should be based on factual law-breaking, not vague claim of anti-semitism.

where a group like this frightens me is in it's potential to organize and try to enforce islamic law on the general population, both arab and non-arab. they are not far from critical mass in specific isolated areas, and how they behave when they get there should be watched very carefully.

if you want to look up a nightmare scenario, look into a small city in michigan called hammtramck. this was once a polish enclave, but when muslims got to critical mass and took over city council, they banned live music and went after the gays. the residents of the area - one of the most liberal enclaves in detroit - were baffled, as it was the liberals and gays that fought for the muslims in the first place, ironically against conservative christians. their naivite and ignorance and inability to equate islam with the christian right bit them in the ass, and the best region of detroit has been temporarily destroyed.

there are areas of toronto where such a thing might potentially happen, if a city were taken over, which is admittedly less likely. hamtrammck really shouldn't exist at all. it's surrounded by metro detroit and should be folded into it. that might be how this is solved, in the end.

for now, it's a warning to take note of, and ask the leftists in the area. they've been hit the hardest and have the worst stories to tell.

i just need due process. i won't support a witch hunt, which will backfire.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/muslim-brotherhood-and-qatar-have-established-extensive-network-across-canada-report

mark rutte has been a complete retard for decades. don't feign surprise.

in fact, she was lucky to survive.

i have long suspected that virtually every disappearance of young children is an animal attack.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/police-suspect-animal-attack-after-girl-seriously-injured-in-quadeville-ont-1.7570272

large amounts of muslim immigration concerns me because muslims will want to enforce their rules, and i strongly dislike their rules and don't want to live under them.

but, this is reality:

and it's suggesting we've overdone it and need to pull back before it's too late.

i agree that it's weird.

however, if it indicates some shift in the government to be less muslim or less asian and more european, which is something worth analyzing in terms of recent immigration trends and raw stats, i'll take it.

strictly statistically, canada has been on the path to becoming not very european at all and that was worrying and needed to be addressed. the hindus don't bug me so much, but i don't want to live in a majority muslim or majority black or brown country, and we're on the way there.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-carneys-bizarre-fixation-with-calling-us-european-makes-no-sense

i actually like this weather.

here's a suggestion that might help, if you don't: wear less clothes.

ok.

so, it seems like the chinese flew the payloads out of iran before the strikes on the facilities.

it seems, then, that this was probably a deal between trump and xi to eliminate a problem neither wanted to exist, and the b2 run was mostly political theatre. i might guess that the chinese are taking on some inspection oversight, with iran identified as being in their sphere of interest, which gives the chinese responsibility to deal with the issue. it puts the movement of planes to guam in a different, perhaps defensive, context.

while the signals are that it's uneasy, any level of detente between the us and china should be welcomed, with caution. the americans have to fundamentally understand that china sees america as an empty continent, peopled by an inferior race, to colonize. the idea of peace, however uneasy, is naive. that's a war that will eventually happen, and it must. we should put it off as long as we can, though, even if it means shifting back to this older global order described recently by mersheimer.

this allows trump to tell netanyahu to knock it off, before he starts a war. i support regime change in iran because i'm a radical socialist, but trump has less reasons to actively agitate for such a thing and it's not entirely clear why he'd want it. 

if iran really wants to shut down the strait of hormuz, the americans should help them out by blockading it.

remember oil for food? they don't, apparently.

it is hot in here, no doubt. there was some wind today, but it knocked over my fan and broke it, which makes it that much worse tonight. i need to buy some new fans. the low tonight is apparently 25 degrees with 35 degree humidity. that's very warm for this climate. the high today was 35 degrees.

i slept very briefly last night after i had the soup, and then spent the night organizing the living room, which is the recording space. i am not actually setting anything up yet, i'm just organizing it in place so i can clean and can more effectively get the new couch in, when the idiot property managers replace it. the more i think about this, the more i'm convinced that it's just rank, abject dumb. i'll take the new couch one way or another, thanks.

the thrown out or stolen couch was my dad's couch. i think he bought it around 2005ish, because it smelled like one of my golden retrievers, who had died years previously. he himself died in 2013. i didn't ask for the couch, but my stepmother instantly discards of everything and anything, and is somewhat psychotic about it, often rebuying items she discarded of for no good reason. it was loaded onto the truck and transported to windsor. i've moved it three times, and now it's apparently thrown away. i still have the cushions....

but you can't just throw out my couch. that's ridiculous. you're going to buy me a new couch, the easy way or the hard way. as the couch was about 20 years old, i suppose i'm due for a new one. so, thanks?

i got most of the way done, stopped to make poutine early in the morning (6:00) and fell asleep again, this time until about 15:00. i spent the evening exfoliating again, made some more soup this evening, slept again and now need to get back to finishing organizing the space and cleaning the floor. the very hot, humid weather has got me sweating off piles of dead skin, which is what i wanted. and i'm due for a major shower. there's a list of things i need to do in the next few days that are long overdue.

so, let me get back to this - dishes, coffee, cleaning. i might have the entire space set back up by mid day.

i still don't know why trump assassinated frodo, though.

the harry potter guy better keep an eye out.

it is not surprising for the far right to stand with right-wing islamic extremism. that makes sense.

what doesn't make sense - and needs to stop - is fake leftists siding with the islamic right, which is at it's core a movement for arabic and islamic colonialism, in the ignorant and misguided perception that it's trotskyist. it's not.

when you look at yourself in the mirror, and you see marjorie taylor greene looking back, it's time for some soul searching, kids.

....and, then, marjorie taylor greene proves to everybody that she really is an anti-semitic dark age christian, and a member of the american taliban, by siding with the backwards crazies in the openly fascist islamic "republic" of iran.

put your niqab on, bitch.

no, really. please. you're a prime candidate, to hide the ugly. was your mom so into the dark ages that she had a thing for horses on top of it? you could actually marry your horse back then; just ask nero. america would be better off if this bitch put her niqab on and just went to some cold, dark alley to pray for peace for the next ten years. it's the same make-believe nonsense anyways, right?

the nad--->yamaha system cannot do subsonic frequencies. it distorts badly.

it has consequently had problems with recent peter gabriel records, which are apparently mixed for an audience of elephants (i haven't tried adrian belew yet...), and with a few of my own recordings, which i acknowledge were absurdly built via sample manipulation in cool edit. i took a short piece of music and pitch shifted it in the wave editor to fit specific pitch shifts, like a sampler. this utterly floored the bass frequencies and created a mess, which is intentional, but it means you need to be able to reproduce it or it just crackles and pops.

something like pelican's australasia sounds a little thin, but it does dance music (nin's the perfect drug single) fairly well. it excels at pearl jam, which makes sense - that is the type of music the nad does. ymmv.

i think it's the nad, mostly, and that these speakers have limitations but the nad is struggling nonetheless. i'll have to see how it handles something like "fall of civilizations" coming right from youtube via the chromebook, as there's a direct a/b. the cr-620 drove these speakers quite well. if the nad can't, it's the weak link.

well, they told us they were going to do this.

my understanding is that there were not serious nuclear programs in these facilities, which does open the question: what was down there?

whatever it was, the united states just spent a lot of money on a very sophisticated attack that amounts to a show of overwhelming force. it sends a message to everybody that the anericans still see themselves as the superpower, until further notice. 

the russians know what was down there. my guess is that, whatever they say, they're glad it's gone, too.

this poses minimal threat and minimal harm, as it is. the danger is somebody miscalculating in overreaction, but i think that is unlikely. 

so long as that's it, we'll have to keep wondering what they actually did, but that should be the end of it. i'm more concerned about opposition forces on the ground.

i would have voted against both halves.

but note that what was developed in the new house is a "grand coalition". these are rare in canada, and almost always work the other way around. for example, stephane dion propped up stepphen harper - and got hammered for it.

you might have to go back to the 1960s and lester pearson to find another example of the conservatives voting to pass liberal legislation in a minority parliament.

this is not because the conservatives have decided to be reasonable, it's because the liberals swung hard to the right under carney.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/liberals-conservatives-pass-major-projects-legislation-in-house-of-commons/

i needed to get the gravy off the stove before it started to grow mold, so i made some more onion soup like soup and a general "needs to be eaten up" mega meal, which i used to do more frequently but has become rare since i've moved to the meal plan.

- remaining beef broth

- three strips of bacon

- old cheddar

- mozarella

- white bread crust

- dill

- hemp seed

- frank's

- pepper

- nutritional yeast

- caesar

with two slices of white toast (i never buy and rarely eat white bread) and a last chance salad composed of the last yellow pepper, an avocado, broccoli florrets, the last carrot, hemp seed, nutritional yeast, oregano, frank's, ceasar.

that eats up a few things. 

i'll probably finish the potatoes in the morning.

as for the last few days, it hasn't been as productive as i'd like. i've simply had to waste hours and hours exfoliating, and rehydrating, as i am utterly dehydrated. there's been some drama here that i don't feel like narrating, as it's not what i want this blog to be about. it will come up in time.

i woke up on monday morning before noon with the intent of doing a quick clean of myself and getting to the food bank first, then to pick up an rx and then to get some groceries, but i instead spent all day in the bathroom scraping dead skin off my face, before getting out to the rx at the last minute and pick up some groceries on the way back. i noted my couch was still there when i came in on monday, and hoped to get it in the next day. i made my potatoes when i got in, and fell asleep relatively early. this made sense because i only got an hour or so of sleep on monday morning.

i then spent essentially all day on tuesday in the bathroom exfoliating. i am actually making progress, but this is thick and stubborn. the weeks of hauling items across walkerville in a shopping cart left me utterly dehydrated and somewhat filthy. i have to moisturize it up, sweat it out and scrape it off, which is even grosser, but that's reality. when i get the skin cleared up, i'll need to focus on rehdryating my hair, and then bleaching it when it's rehydrated. i'm a little over due (my yearly bleach job is usually in may. it should get done before july.). i got essentially nothing else done, and didn't get the couch in.

i was woken up on wednesday morning by somebody sent to look for bed bugs in my apartment (they didn't find any). i spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning and exfoliating yet again. still didn't get the couch in.

on thursday morning, i was expecting a plumber. i heard some rumbling in the hall around 10:00, so i went out to check and found an electrician. i also noticed my couch was gone. i was able to determine by the end of the afternoon that the couch had been removed by property management because "they weren't sure who it belonged to".

i sent them an email on june 5th telling them it was my couch and i couldn't get it under the door. they also told me in an email on may 12th that they were ok with me leaving items (like bicycles) in the common area. the only other person on the floor knew it was my couch, because i told him. i'm consequently left to conclude this was retaliation, and i had to file a lawsuit.

i again spent all day friday and all day saturday exfoliating, and am making progress clearing up the filth and dead skin. i have restarted the np list, in the process:

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/p/np-list.html

i have made no progress in organizing the apartment because i'm prioritizing exfoliating and rehydrating my skin and hair, first. i am going to need to prioritize catching up on email, as well, but rehydration is the primary concern at the moment.

there's a very narrow class of ideological pacifists that can balance this, and i may not always agree with them, but i think it is imperative that they exist. medea benjamin enrages me more often than not, but i strongly support her right to express herself, and think it's imperative that her and others like her continue doing what they are doing, even when they are clearly overwhelmingly wrong and when action is necessary and just. but you have to hold to your pacifism. you have to be rigid. you have to be honest.

...and this point should be made to phony leftists in the west who clam to stand for perpetual revolution, or against colonialism, or for whatever angle they articulate when challenged: you might support the kurds, and avoid being hypocrites. you don't. you stand with regimes that represent, practice and enforce everything you falsely claim to oppose. you make me fucking sick.

i clarified in an earlier post that i'm not in favout of carpet-bombing iran or reducing it to rubble so much as i'm in support for providing air cover for radical left groups on the ground, which i realize is unlikely, unless we help the kurds carve out a bigger area. i would support air support for the kurds, to help them control a larger amount of iran. and i think that might actually destabilize the regime enough to take it down.

i would not imagine that american bombs are going to help.

however, i think that if you let the jews operate freely, as they have been, the result will be beneficial to every actor that i'm in solidarity with, at the expense of those i oppose. i consequently would not support direct american intervention, except with the kurds, or in careful alignment with jewish strategic aims.

the problem is that the americans don't like watching. it makes them look bad in front of the russians. 

my tuesday meal was the red potato bacon-sour cream-dill-gravy-cheese thing.

my wednesday meal was plate two of nachos for this cycle, but without the salsa and in two stages. first stage was the regular nachos recipe, without bacon and without salsa. the doritos were also substituted with the the spicy garlic flavour to try it, and i found it underwhelming. this was consequently pretty basic nachos:

- doritos

- hemp seeds

- nutritional yeast

- cheese

microwave, then add ceasar, hot sauce. that's it.

my bacon was saved for later in the night, and consumed with the remaining gravy from the poutine in something that was similar to french onion soup. remember that the "gravy" is actually beef soup broth. i took my two slices (usually used with nachos) and put it in a bowl with the gravy, dill, nutritional yeast, frank's, hemp seed, the rest of the monterrey jack and the rest of the onion bread. this was a good little bowl of soup for very early on wednesday morning.

the thursday meal was a reprise of the previous salsa meal, doubled up as before, to compensate for the remaining two missed salsas, and with the remaining mising glass of juice.

the friday meal began the next cycle with a ceasar salad without substantive subs (white bread for brown bread. that's it.).

and saturday is repeating the poutine.

there are still 2 pasta meals from the previous cycle before i can move to the next cycle and i still need to make some broccoli soup. i will get a third poutine out of this bag of potatoes but not a fourth.

the britney spears testimony at the puff daddy trial is apparently pretty devastating to everybody. 

i'm the same age as britney spears. exactly. she's a few months younger than me. i wouldn't say i was a fan of hers; i didn't come from a family that paid for expensive cable to start (they probably could have), and i wouldn't have watched cable if i did. i actually recall being rather appalled by the way she was being marketed, as a person the same age as her. even as a 17 year old, i realized this was legal pedophilia, and i wondered out loud if it was a part of some kind of systemic attack on female autonomy by the underlying system of hetero-patriarchy. you could see it coming before it happened. if you think what developed in the 00s was some kind of shock, watch some britney spears videos from the 90s and compare them to something like spice girls. the messaging is pretty disparate, and pretty dystopic.

i had actually finished reading a text called gravity's rainbow by thomas pynchon about the time, and there's a subplot about a trafficked child star named bianca. on naive read, this is empty smut, and somewhat contemptible. however, what he's exploring is how nazi propaganda used pornography, including pedophilia, to try to generate higher population growth for the master race. i immediately related that to the young ms. spears. i may have been the only person my age of either or any gender alive that was interpreting britney spears through the filter of nazi propaganda, as reapplied by hollywood's integration with the cia and with madison avenue. we're not that different. 

i've consequently had a lot of empathy for this woman for decades. when the world was running her through tabloid muck, i realized she was being victimized, because i realized she was victimized from the very start. she has been perhaps the grossest symptom of our sick society for as long as i can remember, for most of my life. and she had no say in the matter, no way out. i got it, because i read that book.

i don't think you can get court audio, but i've seen a transcript, and my understanding is that it's changing people's perceptions. it's better late than never, but it won't matter if we don't learn, and we don't take the steps to understand the depth of continued female sex trafficking in our society - something we don't believe is real.

and, i'm left in the ironic trap of experiencing the same thing for the last five years, because i am being stalked, i'm being drugged, i'm being harassed and i'm apparently being filmed, and i can't get anybody to take me seriously. i wish i had court video that i could send to people questioning me. it might not help me catch the fuckers, but it might help trigger the kind of protective mechanisms i need right now and i can't get access to.

if you can find a transcript or a video, you should read or watch it.

have you noticed that trump and putin are trying to outdo each other on unpredictability? it's reflective of the absurdity of post cold war hegemonic capitalism. in the cold war, everybody was trying to avoid bombing each other. nowadays, both sides compete over who is more deranged, and more likely to push the button first. it's a badge of honour.

you know the world you're living in is beyond insane when you're citing phil collins as a political analyst.

we revel so deeply in our rejection of logic that we celebrate breaking game theory as a tool of analysis. rational actor? what does that even mean?

to the extent that it is true that the russians gave up because reagan scared them into standing down by refusing to behave rationally, which i understand is substantive, the lesson we've all learned is that we get ahead by rejecting logic. success requires an embrace of irrationality. the crazy always win.

if this was the cold war, there would be an attempt to make sure the other side understood what you were going to do before you did it, because the cuban missile crisis was a real event and not a tv show and because one too many bombers got just a bit too close, and because some heroes that have been forgotten made courageous decisions to ignore their chain of command, and were right to do it.

today, trump wants to keep putin guessing, to try to catch him unprepared.

and putin wants to make sure trump doesn't know what to expect in response.

because this is hegemonic capitalism: the triumph of the illogic, madness gone wild.

the basic idea behind what carney just announced is "trump is right, let's follow his lead".

ugh.

see, tariffs are hard and it's easy to be stupid.

if you put tariffs on countries importing steel, they will put tariffs on our exports. exports will decline. meanwhile, if local steel was preferable, you wouldn't need tariffs in the first place. the result is more likely to be recessionary than protectionist. you end up with less exports and less local consumption.

oops.

picking a fight with somebody else to mitigate the issue with the americans is not wise. our issue is with the americans. keep the measures directed.

the reality is that steel is filthy. let the americans do steel if they want. let's put export taxes on them and build houses instead. if we just do keynesian stimulus, we don't need extra tariffs on other countries.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/trumps-tariffs/article/canada-to-adjust-counter-tariffs-against-us-on-july-21-carney/

even those in support of the fascist regime in iran mostly agree that it was not intended to be a monarchy, but it seems like that is what it's become. 

iran remains a very young country. if they actually try to pass power to the current dictator's son, it is hard to imagine iranians accepting that as a valid outcome.

they're a bunch of backwards ignoramuses.

now, that said, if there have recently been hypersonic weapons launched from iran (i think that's unverified), somebody in russia needs to explain how that happened.

eventually, images of iran's top secret nuclear program will be released, and they will look something like this:

oh, great allah

deliver bomb for us

to smite our enemies

the great and little satan

ooga booga booga ooh.

Israeli airstrikes killed at least 24 Iranians across the country on Tuesday morning, bringing the toll since Friday’s surprise attack to at least 224 people dead and more than 1,400 injured, Iran’s health ministry said. 

in gaza, they exaggerate to make israel look bad and warp public opinion. it's well-established.

in iran, they under-report to make themselves look stronger than they are to sway domestic opinion.

i wouldn't be surprised if the death toll is 10x that.

guess they shouldn't have launched that missile attack on israel last year, huh?

hey, remember when iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at israel, and israel sent one strike and then assassinated one guy in response?

i'm just saying.

this is kind of overdue. iran kind of had it coming.

on the other hand, i'm happy to see india and canada normalize relations. that is a positive development.

from what i can ascertain, iranian scientific capabilities (in general) are pretty pathetic, and it's always been that way. iran has at times written some good poetry, and the kurds had their hey dey in the dark ages, but if the iranians had any science at all in antiquity it was utterly forgotten during the islamic invasion in the 7th century, which burned and destroyed everything. from what we can tell, iranian society from the 4th century bce to the 7th century ce was actually foundationally greek after alexander chased off the achaemenids. the achaemenids, themselves, were obsessed with the phoenecians and the jews, and they let these semitic groups take over the administration of their large empire. after the arabs came the mongols, who were worse, and the area has really never recovered from the mongols.

the persians/iranians were good at war, and they were good at economics, but all evidence we have tells us that they have always sucked at science.

i think the iranians would love to build a bomb, and they kind of clearly need one, too. they never will because they can't; they're not able to. this foray into fundamentalism and backwardsness isn't going to help them.

it's a red herring, anyways. their allies - china and russia - would never allow it. more realistic is that the chinese will station bombs in iran or central asia to protect the minerals, which are quite substantive.

i'm more interested in dismantling the iranian state and supporting groups fighting for that on the ground. this might be bullshit, but i'll take it as a way in.

i want to clarify that a full scale invasion of iran is probably a bad idea. well, almost. there are ways to do this. the turks, for example, could lead a nato force into iran. american or european troops would generate the worst kind of backlash, and potentially undo any tentative gains made over the last few years of massive street protest against the tyrannical regime in place.

i would, however, support taking out iranian leaders of all and any sort (it would be a good day for the world if they could take out mr. khamenei) and would tentatively support providing air cover for key groups that the american military almost certainly wouldn't provide air cover for. kurdistan could be due for some major growth. the kurds are a broadly more tolerant style of governance (that's the real reason the turks hate them), and a bigger, deeper kurdish toehold in iran could be enough to get those dominos falling, without doing things that are counterproductive. there's enough people in iran that want out of the islamic state governing model that a parallel state could get some traction, if it can get up and going.

i mean, the other idea is carpet bombing, and that kind of sucks. i'm ultimately in solidarity with secular, socialist and democratic (and white. let's be honest.) groups struggling against the mullahs (and the arabic colonialism in the area). i don't want to blow up iran. i do, however, think that (unlike iraq, which was a brutal secular dictatorship keeping the fundies in check at the butt of a machine gun because it had to, as we witnessed), iran might appreciate some help liberating it, if it's done the right way.

trade irritants aside, what does canada gain by actively interfering with american strategic goals in eastern europe and the middle east?

trump is basically right that the g7 is a waste of time, and that it would be a better use of time if the russians were there. there's been this visceral response in canada that the russians are war criminals, as though the rest of the countries invited (they invited saudi arabia and the uae) are not, and as though that even matters. it's a very juvenile approach to a negotiation process, as though bad decisions made by putin make him less important.

trump is saying "i want to talk to important people with decision making authority and get important things done on a global scale.".

canada is responding "why don't we just hang out and smoke a joint in the rockies and be friends instead?".

and, trump is telling us we're a waste of time for it. he's right.

it actually tastes more like onion soup, with potatoes instead of bread.

cool..

the next thing in this fridge to eat is a large pile of red potatoes. what am i going to do with this?

- fill up a pot of potatoes with cold water

- bring to a boil

- let sit for fifteen minutes

- take each out to a plate, chop in half or four

- dump into a large serving bowl

they're cooked; kind of mashy, but they're red potatoes. i've had these before, at dinners like christmas or thanksgiving.

- dump margarine on the potatoes

- dump sour cream on that

- add a chopped avocado

- add a tbsp of hemp seeds

- add some fresh dill

- add ceasar

- add nutritional yeast

- mix

meanwhile, fry up four or five strips of bacon and add four ox cubes to three cups of water, and dissolve. wait.

- grate about 200 g of mozzarella and dump it in

- mix it up

- turn heat off the gravy and let sit. stir occasionally while waiting for bacon to finish.

- chop bacon and add

 - add gravy

- add pepper

- add frank's

i should get three, maybe four of these out of the bag. it's a good mea.

yesterday afternoon, i tried the spiral beach again first, through just the celestions, and was happy with the output. the next record i wanted to test in the bedroom was sister machine gun's metropolis, as it's another synth record i had around that i know well. it's a record i could test the setup with. the outcome was acceptable and i'm happy with this. i then stopped to eat.

my monday meal turned out to be the salsa i made on sunday evening, which was an expansion of my normal salsa recipe.

my normal salsa is prepared for nachos and for eggs and consists of:

- one lime

- one beet

- 1/2 tomato

- 1/2 red pepper

- 2 big cloves of garlic

- one avocado

- 1 tbsp cumin

- 1 tbsp paprika

- 1 tbsp oregano

- 1 tbsp cayenne

- pepper

- frank's hot sauce

i skipped the salsa for the two egg meals this cycle and also for the first nacho on sunday moning, so i doubled it up in a large serving bowl and expanded it into a meal by adding a can of chick peas, ceasar dressing, nutritional yeast, hemp seeds, dill and some grated cheese. i also swapped the red pepper for yellow pepper and fresh tomato for canned tomato, as both were food bank subs. this was a big bowl of salsa. i'll probably have this again in a few days as a separate meal.

i needed to get the kitchen cleaned up, so i set up the yamahas and nads on my old coffee table, ad-hoc. i listened to the sister machine gun first, as i was cleaning. i was initially not sold on it. disc two to try was the do make say think, and i realized quickly that the problem was that the input was too loud. triggering the low level made the do make say think sound far better, and it got a few cycles to test it thoroughly, culminating in my decisive post early in the morning. the sister machine gun also sounded substantively better on second listen, with the low level triggered.

i was eventually able to: 

- do two runs of dishes,

- thoroughly clean up the space

- get a new cabinet installed up on top of the stove

- clear out a pile of boxes

- vacuum

- scrub

- move to shelving units into the hall for cds

- moving the sewing table into the bedroom

- move around a large pile of boxes from one room to the other

- make some coffee

- do a lot of exfoliating. it's getting there, after a rough few weeks of moving, etc where i didn't have time to wash or shower and the weather has made the living conditions in here extremely harsh and dry. its been pretty gross.

as has become the norm, i got a little sleep in the morning, after cleaning up the kitchen.

i've got the nad set up in the kitchen with the 6 ohm speakers.

it sounds better with the low level button pushed, but i'll point out that my source is currently a dvd player that is probably sending the signal out very loud. i would like to turn down the input, actually. that will be less of an issue when the in is the chromebook, as i can and will turn down the input.

do make say think's country hymn is a challenging record to reproduce and it's doing ok, even with the likely driven input (shouldn't a dvd not do that? maybe that's exactly it, that the device is designed that way by flaw). this is likely more than i will need this amp to do. i think this will work fine.

so, the kitchen system is going to be:

- nad 3020e in low level mode

- yamaha ns-e55 (these are 6 ohm, 50 watt)

- expired lenovo chromebook running in guest mode for digital audio (via usb) or streaming media (audio and video) from bandcamp or youtube. i am able to put a hard drive in this device but it does not currently use one by design and preference. this is primarily for watching the news or documentaries when eating, in the kitchen. through the tuner or tape in.

- it's currently a sony dvp ns-325 as optical drive source and will likely stay that way. this plays dvds, cds and mp3 cds (cds with mp3s). through cd/aux.

- there's a boxed widescreen monitor connected to this system.

- there is also phono input on the amp, and will be an extra tuner or tape in that will probably not be immediately used.

i could send a dvd video out to the monitor in theory, but i have had minimal interest in buying video dvds or bds and only have a few scattered burns. that is likely all i will need in the kitchen.

the bedroom system will be:

- yamaha cr-320

- celestion ditton 110s as primary

- to be purchased 30-50 watt secondary speakers

- cd audio from a jvc 5-disc changer from the 90s, cd only. no mp3 cds.

- i am looking at getting a recent blu-ray player with a usb in that plays flac natively and has an rca out. this will be for digital audio over usb and also for any optical media with dvd, bd, mp3, wav or flac. it should be under $100, as bd is being phased out due to netflix.

- i have a record player and two cassette decks for potential use. it might make more sense to put the record player in here.

- i am not currently intending to watch video in the bedroom, but that might change.

- this device only has four ins - cd/aux, tape 1, tape 2, phono. so, i could not use all five ins and the phono is not usable for anything else. it is not likely that i will set up a cassette deck in here.

the typing pc (the main bedroom pc) does not currently have a soundcard out to connect to an audio system, but does have a legacy altec-lansing system connected to the integrated sound out (1/8th inch computer jack). this system is very annoying, because you can't turn the subwoofer off, but the satellites actually sound quite good, for what they are. it was intended for gaming, not audio. it was purchased with my 90s pc and intended to be for music production, but my dad got badly upsold on that one. as mentioned, the system would be good for gaming, but i don't game, and that's not what it was meant for. i have barely been able to use it at all. i will have this connected on the computer table, but it's just intended for the computer, not for audio.

if i connect a video source to the cr-320, it will be from a laptop and not from the typing machine, which is intentionally kept isolated as a glorified typewriter.

isn't a military parade just a big air show? don't americans love their air shows?

here i am! rock me like a hurricane!

they played that one, right?

i'm not very invested in this, one way or another. is it supposed to scare china? is that it?

whatever.

today, i woke up a little earlier and tried again with the four way system, this time with the windows open. that is real life and both introduces noises and reduces reflections. i also pulled the celestions a little bit closer to me and a little away from the wall.

with the initial four-way setup, the ssris record sounded better with the celestions closer, which is because it turned down the yamahas. i decided to move to a different record, so i pulled a similarly self-produced record by another canadian rock band from the same time period; the record is ball by a band called spiral beach, which no longer exists. i saw spiral beach play a handful of times in ottawa at venues like zaphod's and at festivals like the blues and folk fest. i picked this up used in a small independently run record shop in a doomed mall in the west end of ottawa proper, called carlingwood, that i do not believe exists anymore either (the guy might even be dead). this record is a little more compressed than the ssri record and it was immediately obvious.

running the spiral beach record through the four-way sounded ok, but now the yamahas sounded a little tinny and loudspeakery due to the higher compression, which makes sense. this record sounds better through just the celestions, although i will try again with an 8 ohm speaker as a secondary. i'm probably looking at pioneer cs-x5s for cheap, which are full range surround sound speakers and i think should work well in a reverse surround setup like i'm designing here. the reverse surround is really introducing some nearfield studio monitors right in front of me, while i the bulk of the sound continues to come from behind me, which i'm used to in my bedroom. of course, if i lie down in my bed and put my head on my pillow, it's not reversed anymore, it'd normal surround; it's only reversed when i sit up in bed and am typing. i'll have to test. if not, i have some cheap low watt full range decent quality utility speakers.

i then switched back to the ssris record with just the celestions in their new speaker placement and while i am noticing the absence of the boost in midrange volume from the missing yamahas, it is demonstrating the limitation of the source - which is good.

i'm going to test a few more records with this celestion setup this afternoon and then test the nad with the yamahas tonight.

on saturday, i again woke up around noon. i had a guy that wanted to sell me a sewing machine desk for $20 and drop it off for me. great; done. this desk will fit perfectly in the closet, and i will be able to move the chair back and forth between the sewing machine and the writing desk. i took a shower, i ate the rest of the apples (they were getting a little sweet), which was i think 6, and then ate an entire package of apple sauce just to be ridiculous about it, along with a small amount of jam left in the container. i wanted to make some coffee and sit down and test the speakers while doing this write up, but i had difficulty getting going.

i pulled an ssri record out of a box called effeminate godzilla-sized wind chimes and tried it through the nad, expecting it to give it a bit of a work out. this is the first and last record that the nad failed on, as it was a pretty spectacular fail. this is a largely self-produced record by a couple of kids from bc in the late 00s that has the unusual quality of citing cardiacs as an influence. i picked it up after seeing them play at the old zaphod's beeblebrox in downtown ottawa. if you know cardiacs, you know why i picked this as a speaker workout test; the record has prominent synths, guitars, bass and drums that fill out the spectrum, contains detailed arrangements and production and features multi-part harmonies and complex counterpoint melodies through much of it. i know my jvc could make this record sound good through these celestions (the kefs are better). the nad made it sound like it was put through a compressor-limiter that squished the sound right to death, and this is the kind of record to use to demonstrate this kind of difference, because it wasn't engineered for loudness, and isn't designed for radio and wasn't crushed to death in a pro studio. you should be able to hear the edges on the square-waves on the bass sequencer that opens the record, for example. the nad just completely killed it.

here is the trick to this - most people would prefer the sound of the nad and think it sounds "more correct", including most expensive professional engineers and producers, because they've been trained to listen to over compressed music. and they're wrong. the nad actually sounds terrible.

so, i quickly dismantled that and set up the yamaha cr-320 instead, which quickly returned the record to a more open, less compressed sound - which is how it was actually mastered and engineered and what it actually sounds like. you might disagree, you might prefer the nad, but the mathematical reality is that you're wrong.

i then set up the 6 ohm, 50 watt yamaha ns-e55s, which is what i had connected to this yamaha cr-320 in the last apartment, as secondary speakers and tried the ssri record through a few placements and a few combinations. 

- all four speakers on top of the shelf

- just the yamahas

- just the celestions

- with the celestions down a little, and the yamahas in the shelf

- just the celestions, to the side of the shelves.

the yamahas are full range speakers and their lower resistance makes them louder than the celestions when wired through the same amp in parallel, despite being 50 watts and the celestions being 110 watts. i didn't think to stop to do the math, but i shouldn't have done this at all, as this old amp shouldn't be running at lower than 4 ohms ever and 1/8 + 1/6 ~ 3.5. i don't think any damage has been done, and it could probably handle that in real life at low volume for quite a while before exploding, but i don't want to do that again. this amp is very old - it's older than i am. i can run these 6 ohm speakers by themselves, but not in parallel with 8 ohm speakers, pretty much ever.

what i learned is that i wouldn't want to do that anyways as there's not a way for me to turn the yamahas down and i don't want them to overpower the celestions or the kefs or whatever else they're connected in parallel to. these are secondary speakers, not primary speakers.

however, i also decided that the celestions do sound better when paired with a full range speaker that has more defined mids, letting the celestions work more for their mid lows. i just want to turn them down a little and can't.

before the end of the night, then, i had decided the yamahas would not be being used as a part of any audio system, but would be used for the kitchen tv system. i would need to buy some new 8 ohm full range satellite speakers in the 30-50w range and experiment a little. 

i made some ad-hoc nachos early in the morning with a box of crackers i got from the food bank as a sub for the doritos, and without the salsa at all, as i will be having the salsa separate in a large bowl this afternoon. i was in bed slightly earlier.