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/