i'm in a frustrating scenario with my coffee situation. i drink a lot of coffee.

i have a 12 cup coffee maker with a broken pot. i have a 10 cup coffee pot without a machine. i have a 20 ounce single serve coffee maker, which is what i've been using for the last several years, that seems to have a short in it, but which i can't get the back off of due to a proprietary screw. i can't even figure out what it is. i'm going to try to jimmy it with a flathead and i'll make sure to replace it with a normal screw.

i have more counter space here and would like to have a single serve and a pot-brewing option, so i can decide if i want a pot or a cup. if i can fix the single serve and get a coffee pot for $5, it should be a simple fix, but a replacement 12 cup pot is going to cost me more than a new coffee machine, which i don't want to pay for. i have a coffee machine that works!

the basement apartment i recently moved out of had extremely hard ceramic tiled floors that would break anything that fell on them and got freezing cold in the winter. i had something like ten mugs when i moved in there; i had two when i moved out, and they're both small. i broke the last one about a year ago and i've been using soup bowls for coffee cups for the last year as a result, as i couldn't find big enough coffee cups online for a reasonable price that were made out of materials that i could be confident didn't have lead (and could take hot coffee without killing me or making me retarded). it's also the reason the pot is broken. the floors here should be more forgiving.

i bought two 21 ounce (621 ml) cups yesterday, which cost me about $13. these are stoneware ceramic made out of black clay, without any sort of paint or inlays and with visible air holes from the baking process. those vintage dishes your grandmother loves are deadly and should be smashed up and sent to the hazardous materials part of the landfill. 21 ounces is as big as you'll find for a reasonable price that is made out of a safe material that hasn't been glazed. it's sort of baffling that you'll find coffee mugs made out of items you can't even microwave. that said, i'm also going to get some 26 ounce glass beer mugs at the dollar store in the next few days with the intent of using them for coffee. the four mugs should be enough and will give me the option of more or less soy in the coffee.

if i have to buy a new machine, the cheapest option is a 12 cup from walmart, rather than another single serve. so i hope i can fix the one i have, too. that would cut it down to one rather than two machines.

what's my take on the hockey player trial in london?

the issue at trial is really not what a lot of people want to frame it as, it's strictly to determine whether she was or was not too drunk to consent. if she was sober enough to consent, there's no crime; if she was too drunk to consent, it's gang rape.  you have to be very careful when having sex with drunk people.

as it is, there's apparently a video where she consents, which i find to be very strange. it indicates that there's no mens rea on behalf of the players, as they asked the woman to film herself consenting. however, it also forms the key and really only relevant piece of evidence. i have not seen this video, but it should be relatively obvious to determine if she was able to consent by analyzing how drunk she is in it. if there's any slurred speech or lack of coordination at all, i would find them guilty, but if she consents by film and appears to a reasonable person to be sober enough to do so, then there's no crime to analyze, there's just somebody that made a decision they regret and are embarrassed about making and are looking to evade responsibility for.

the tommy douglas plan, which many canadians erroneously believe was the forerunner to our single payer system, was a way for farmers in saskatchewan to lower insurance premiums by buying insurance together in bulk. the premier wrote the law to allow for farmers to buy the bulk insurance, collectively. they still had to pay insurance packages and still paid premiums, but those premiums were lowered by the collectivized insurance, which allowed them to socialize risk. this was modeled on the canadian wheat board. 

this is also how obamacare works.

it's not single payer at all.

single payer was brought in by the liberals, and modeled after the nhs in britain. it was supported by all three of the major parties in a minority government. most of the legislation was written by paul martin, sr.

many years later, pierre trudeau packaged a series of scattered laws together into the canada health act and gave it quasi-constitutional status, introducing a series of barriers that would make it extremely difficult to dismantle.

greta thunberg,

you have to let the israelis check your boat for weapons if you want to get to gaza. there is no possibility they will let you dock.

do you understand why?

go back to south africa, elon.

the more that musk dominates the news cycle, the less reporting is done on something worthwhile, and that's exactly what the white house wants. 

i don't care about musk-trump gossip and want it out of my newsfeed. it's of no importance. stop clicking on those links.

we need to work together if we want to build a new society, and that's not something to give up on. we have to keep trying.

but, if we were naive then - if we didn't realize that cell phones and social media were state surveillance tools - we cannot still be now. we have to learn from that mistake and put our phones down.

occupy seemed like something different than your average protest. it's not that i ever thought that going out and marching and screaming would really change anything directly, and more that i was looking for a group of like-minded people to build parallel institutions with. you will get nothing done working in the system of government, because it's designed to prevent things from getting done. it would be great if it was that easy, but the reality is that it's impossible to implement change from the bottom up in a representative, parliamentary democracy; once in a while, we get lucky and have enlightened members of the upper class implement good ideas from the top down (which, contrary to the popular myth, is how the liberals wrote the health care system in canada, which is based on the nhs, not on the system advanced by tommy douglas in saskatchewan, which was not single payer but actually virtually identical to the affordable care act in the united states). it's just not a true form of democracy. you pick which oligarch you'd prefer, and they make decisions from the top down.

if you want to build parallel structures and try to exist outside of the status quo, you can't do it yourself. you need solidarity. that's what i was excited about with occupy.

but it was a setup run by the cops. i was in rooms at points with 20-25 people, and i was the only person in it that wasn't a cop. there wasn't one or two informants. the whole thing was orchestrated by squads of officers trying to get people to break laws.

i didn't do anything stupid, because i'm not a stupid person, but i was asked to on multiple occasions. for example, i have a pretty clear memory of a night where i was coerced into keying up a guy's car because he was accused of sexually harassing an employee, without any due process, which would have been an overwhelmingly retarded thing to do. it was a cop directing this, trying to get activists arrested.

i did end up on some kind of list and have been under overwhelming surveillance ever since.

if you're in california, you should stay away from these immigration protests. they're being designed by the police to act as a mechanism to implement facial recognition software, and once you get on one of these lists you will never get off of it. trust me.

we live in the era of orwell, and the technology has just gotten more advanced in the 15 years since occupy, which was a giant entrapment operation conducted by the police.

i noticed something interesting today: not one but several large apartment buildings up for sale in the downtown core. it would seem to suggest an expectation that the property won't be able to attract desirable tenants in the near future, which is an expectation of an extreme downturn. it's essentially capital flight.

this is actually what i want, as an artist. windsor/detroit should have some level of manufacturing, but it should also be cheap. our artist haven was being taken away from us by capital via inflation. we want it back.

if these units have recently been renovated, that's a net positive for any artistic community that sets up in them at affordable rents.

i got lots of stuff done today.

i'm currently enjoying a modified ceasar salad recipe and i want to eat a little before i post an update on it.