on some level, income taxes are kind of stupid, because you're not really taxing labour. labour doesn't generate wealth, directly. income taxes are in truth taxes on property, and are in reality paid for by the employers, not the workers. income taxes are taxes on the profit of the employers, not taxes on the labour by workers. income taxes are consequently a kind of hidden corporate tax. you could just cut wages and shift the tax burden to the employer and it wouldn't make any difference in terms of collecting taxes, but it would help in eliminating ignorant attitudes in the working class. when you put the income tax on a person's pay check, you trick uneducated workers into thinking the money is being taken out of their wages. this can have extremely negative social effects, as it can generate poor attitudes about government in the working class.

my understanding is that this was initially done to show the workers that the government does something for them. it's supposed to make the workers say "i'm buying government services with my taxes, so my taxes are justified". instead, it tends to harbour resentment in the working class, which misunderstands who is paying the tax and thinks it's getting ripped off. this has backfired and should be undone.

the only deduction on a pay check should really be for public pensions. income taxes should be shifted to employer taxes, instead. it's a trivial accounting shift that only happens on paper, as employers are the ones that truly pay income taxes, anyways. you'd do this by asking employers to pay a kind of head tax based on the number of workers they employ, and the number of hours those workers worked. if the employer pays out x number of hours of labour at n % income tax, it would pay x*n% in taxes. it would need to file that with cra at the end of the year, and workers would still need to send their stubs in to verify their hours worked, but the actual taxes would be done and paid for by the employer, not the employee. tax credits would work functionally the same way.

this would lead to stagnating or declining wages (not real wages, though.) for a while until it balanced out, but you would hope it would lead to more positive attitudes in the working class about the value and function of government services, in the long run.

today was a cloudy, humid, cool rainy day. i like rainy days, just not every day. we haven't had a day like this here since june. days like this tend to generate a vicious ache in my stomach, which is due to apparent sensitivity to atmospheric pressure, and consequently knock me out for hours at a time. however, the increased humidity in the air, which is noticeable, also helped speed up the rehydration process, which is just about finished.

i have been waking up limp the last few days. it seems to be out of my system. i'm just about ready to get another blood test, which is key to the package of documents i'm presenting to police to get this creep arrested with.

i wanted to get something done today, but instead spent it sleeping, due to the weather. i should be able to get something done tomorrow.

so, that's what we're supposed to accept as truth - that little innocent ukraine was attacked by the big bully russia for no reason, and nato is coming in to protect them, and without any interests in the region of their own.

that's the statist narrative. we're supposed to believe and repeat that.

ok.

i'm just trying to understand the western media narrative.

does it expect that people are so ignorant and misinformed that they don't understand what the war is about, and actually believe that putin is just a bloodthirsty dictator out to conquer the world for self-aggrandizement?

i suppose that if you push the following line continually, that ukraine was randomly attacked for no reason, then it follows that putting nato troops in ukraine to protect them from random russian thuggery is being done for security and protection, rather than conquest and expansion.

but, what kind of reader or viewer would be that ignorant? if you're going to read the news at all, you'd think you'd at least have a basic understanding of what was happening.

i remember the old quip from a few decades ago that fox news viewers were less informed about events than people that didn't watch the news at all. it seems like that might be the expectation about people that watch any news, nowadays.

the russians tend to be pretty logical.

this is the logical response to what unfolded in washington yesterday, and i'd expect them to continue to escalate over the upcoming days and weeks.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/russia-launches-largest-attack-august-ukraine-after-trump/story?id=124768391

why is my ip address geolocating to washington dc?

the romans - intelligently - realized that there were endless streams of perpetual barbarian hordes. you could fight one horde to the death, only to get ambushed by the next one. trying to actually defeat the barbarians was a sisyphean task of endless futility that made existence mundane. you can't be an artist, or a philosopher, if you have to waste your whole life fighting barbarians.

instead, they'd get the barbarians to fight each other. they'd trick them, constantly. they'd get one group to make deals against the other, they'd spread false rumours (did you know that gog, leader of the gazundhites, is gay? or that his family dresses like peasants?....who say this about gog? grrrrrar. the gazundhites will blow you out of existence.....), they'd arm both sides, or pay one group to protect them, and the other to fight. they set up a kind of conveyor belt so that the closest barbarian was always fighting the next furthest one, but then they'd always make sure the closest one would lose by turning on the closest one, and then getting the one that replaces it as the new closest onr to fight the next furthest one. this was referred to as imperial treachery, and it was like something out of a long running saturday morning cartoon. i'll get you next time, basileus!

so, the history is full of these tactics utilized to get the barbarians to fight each other instead, and it was always just to get them to war outside of the empire instead of in it.

hey, it worked for a thousand years. in the end, it was really the french that destroyed them, not the turks, and the romans made the mistake of letting the french in the city. their tactics didn't fail them. they got stabbed in the back.

the bureau of barbarians was located adjacent to the ministry of silly walks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Barbarians

there's no logic in the way the west expects putin to respond.

logically, putin should escalate first. there's a lot of things the russians have refused to do, like bomb out bridges, because the idea is to deflect the war to ukraine (the borderland) rather than fight it head-on in russia. putin isn't trying to conquer ukraine, he's just trying to keep the fighting out of russia, proper.

it's an old roman barbarian management tactic: the barbarians are going to fight you and there's not much you can do to stop it, so you keep the barbarians fighting away from the cities, instead of near them.

if ukraine is ordering 100 billion dollars of weapons, russia needs to treat this more like an actual war and try not a distraction mechanism, and try to win rather than just burn them out.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/trump-says-he-has-begun-arrangements-for-face-to-face-meeting-between-putin-and-zelenskyy/

exactly.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/19/ukraine-war-briefing-zelenskyy-entices-trump-with-100bn-arms-deal-in-return-for-security