the government should make a choice: does it support peacekeeping or does it support fueling more war in ukraine?

it should not try to do both.

and it can't. the world won't let it. we'll be roundly and correctly attacked as hypocrites.

if we can't or won't present peacekeeping as a replacement for active participation in ongoing conflicts, there is no longer any self-interest in supporting peacekeeping, and doing so becomes rather foolish. we're just squandering resources for nothing in return. it becomes a waste of our tax money that would be better spend on building more subsidized housing in canada.

the point of supporting peacekeeping was to avoid involvement in conflicts like ukraine by telling the americans "look, we'd rather contribute like this.".

but, canada is actually essentially leading the offensive against the russians in ukraine. 

so, what is the purpose of canadian peacekeeping, now, then?

we've lost the plot.

canada's quiet support for the cuban position in angola is actually one of the most intriguing and contradictory episodes of the cold war. it's not well understood.

i'd like to remind or teach everybody, as the plot has been completely lost, that the purpose of pearson-trudeauvian peacekeeping at the height of the cold war was to avoid nato war commitments in conflicts we had ideological problems with.

so, rather than send troops to fight alongside white supremacists in angola or anti-communist forces in vietnam, we talked the americans into agreeing with us that it was valuable to stabilize africa by sending them food and textbooks.

from 1965-2005, canada was the most non-aligned member of nato. it's a difficult balancing act, as we had to try to align with the parts of american hegemony we liked while avoiding participating in the parts we didn't. and it didn't always work.

it's not clear that trump will accept these arguments. lbj did. nixon did. carter did. clinton did. reagan didn't.

peacekeeping is not something canada has ever done out of unselfish altruism. it's been a way to avoid harder war commitments in conflicts we conscientiously objected to.

frankly, there are not any such conflicts like angola, or vietnam, or iraq, in which america is currently involved in. canada went to afghanistan as a part of a un mandate, and that was the right choice. i would support canadian involvement in yemen, as these are legitimate bad guys and vicious barbarians that need to be wiped out. the closest thing to an iraq or vietnam is ukraine, and we are taking a very uncanadian position on that conflict, in supporting bellicose war rhetoric and very hot war that the americans are wisely trying to de-escalate. unlike iraq, a war of regime change in iran would actually be a noble enterprise. etc.

it is plausible that we might get asked to participate more in some of the proxy wars in africa, and support brutal parties that we are ideologically opposed to. that is the kind of thing that we invented peacekeeping in order to avoid, but there's a lot less of that in the world today than there was in 1970.

https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2025/05/canada-strengthens-support-and-commitments-following-2025-united-nations-peacekeeping-ministerial-meeting.html

there is no "trade war", it's just an excuse to ram through imf austerity packages and sell off public assets to american investors.

when i get this going in the next month or two, it may seem like the adherence to process is slowing me down, but it is actually going to dramatically increase my productivity by providing me with organization and structure.

i've been trying to do way too many things at once for way too long.

i'm not a twang guitar player. the songs i learned to play on the hondo telecaster included stairway to heaven, black magic woman and squonk - all les paul standards. yes, i was that kid playing the stairway solo at age 12. i replaced the telecaster with an ibanez with a locking bridge that was kind of not very strat-like; it was more like a prs. i have a replacement for that already, too. my hands are too small for les pauls; that's why i bought an sg. however, i am going to need a tele for the period 3 recordings, which are far more focused on live guitars than the period 2 recordings were, and i'm going to need everything to finish the period 4 material, which is psychotically dense and over-produced.

this rebuild consequently isn't going to merely be a performative exercise. i will use this stuff, and i will be anxious to get going, but i need to follow this process, and the mess of the last several years has just slowed me down that much more and made the need to adhere to process that much more clear.

at the least, once i get through 1989-1995, 1995-2003 should be relatively fast because it is mostly done. i will then mostly pick up again at 2003, where i left off in 2017.

i understand that listeners might be frustrated, but i have to get the entire package finished. for me, this is integrated. everything goes together. you'll have to wait, and that is more clear now than ever before.

i'm about 30% of the way through transporting items out of my storage unit and into my new apartment, which is about an hour walk, both ways. i'm a little out of shape, so it's actually good exercise for me.

i have mentioned that i'm going to be refocusing several times, now, and have been trying to kick back into some kind of productive cycle since the start of the pandemic, but keep getting distracted or sidetracked. at this point, trying to pick back up at the start of period 3, or trying to parachute back into the alter-reality would be difficult to even make sense of.

i am instead going to need to just start at the start and work forward. that means starting with the journal, in 1989, and just working through linearly. no alter-reality. no lynchian split narrative. just starting from the start and moving forward.

that means i'm going to be focusing mostly on building the offline writing, but also that i'm going to be restarting a number of blogs in real time, including the diet blog.

something i've been meaning to do since i moved to windsor is sample some of the local restaurants. the last month and a half has thrown me out of my diet and forced me to order food, which has got me back to thinking about that. i am intending on weekly restaurant updates at the diet blog, in addition to the diet blog itself. i've mostly eaten fast food over the last month, but i'd like to expand that to more of the local restaurants one by one. 

i also need to rebuild sections of my studio that were lost over the years, which is something i was doing before the house got bought and i had to deal with the legal fight over housing. i'll be doing that linearly, as well, as i go through the journal. i will get my first acoustic guitar, then my first electric guitar, and need to have emulations of them in my studio, for period 3 recordings. the first electric guitar was a hondo telecaster copy, which i have replaced with a hannah montana mini tele. it's actually a nice little washburn. i could repaint it a solid purple. the thing is that i have freakishly small hands, so i actually prefer miniature scale guitars. i also have an epiphone sg jr and a fender mini squire, both solid red. i will be looking for a comparable acoustic guitar, which my dad sold to buy me the tele. i still have my first amp, from 1992. i also need to get a recorder, as we had recorder classes in elementary school. my younger sister played piano from a very young age, and i also had that around. i'll rebuild slowly from there, and replace everything that was lost. i'll also need to fill in minimal missing sections of the existing discography, inri000-inri100 (1995-2005), but this is mostly a writing project that i've been eating away at since 2017.

i'm basically in the same mental position i was in in 2013. i'm overwhelmed and having difficulty focusing on any one thing. if i pick up somewhere in between, i'm just going to start running around in circles again, like i've been doing since 2017. 2013-2016 was extremely productive, but i started in 1995 and should have started in 1989 and i focused only on the music and have since expanded the scope of the project to include video, writing and other types of media. this time, i'm starting in 1989 and moving comprehensively forward.

but i will also exist. i will eat. i will go to shows. i will have political opinions. i would like to start vlogging again. etc. all of these things will happen in real time, in the way that they must.

what i can't be doing is trying to exist in ten different spaces in time. i'm not a tralfamadorian. i can do two things at once. that is all.

that means that this mass of writing and video from 2013-2025 is going to have to wait until it comes up in sequence before i can finish it, and that's going to be quite a ways into the future. that's fine.

when the journal is done, it's done. 

regarding the stalker,  i don't seem to have shaken them, but the depth of the harassment is clearer now than it was two years ago and it is now crystal clear that i'm going to have to get them arrested and put in jail. that was not clear before. it is now. i'm dealing with a true believer. this person will not stop voluntarily, they must be forced to stop, and i will have to force them to stop.