can't we at least lend it to them?

it's like we lost a war against ukraine and are paying them tribute payments.

"and, in other news, canada has decided to write itself a $500 billion check and then flush it down the toilet."

https://globalnews.ca/video/11592098/canada-pledges-billions-to-ukraine-as-fighting-intensifies/

this is why there is nothing north of ottawa, nothing northwest of ottawa for 2000 km, and only the city of quebec, on the gulf of st lawerence, to the northeast of ottawa. i grew up here. it's at the fringe of civilization.

canada is a really big country.

you can't live in most of it, and you can barely live in the southernmost 5% of it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/freezing-rain-expected-to-hit-ottawa-area-sunday-night-9.7028666

spinning the toronto star back off into an independent company might be imperative to save the country from backwardsness.

and smart conservatives, as few and far between as they may be, should realize it.

so, the hard work involved in this is that you now have to undo decades of propaganda that nobody really took seriously by engaging in discourse.

i've realized recently that a big part of the problem is al jazeera, which is state controlled (states that are as extreme right-wing as you get) media targeting western opinion, and that this is accurately described as foreign interference by fascist arab governments. however, i'm not going to argue that al jazeera should be banned, and i strongly opposed and continue to oppose banning russian media. you don't change how people think by denying them access to information, you do it by maximizing access to information.

likewise, rounding them up and putting them in jail is just going to martyr them, and the idiots love martyrs. that's a non-solution. that doesn't solve anything. they just come out more resolved than ever.

engaging in discourse is hard work. it'll take a long time. it's a fight on our hands.

but this is what we're fighting for - the superiority of discourse. this isn't an ethnic conflict.

the biggest problem we have in front of us is that we've lost the small-l liberals, because the stupid conservatives took away all of their media. the toronto star, the globe and mail and dozens of smaller liberal media publications all got bought out and dismantled or demented by conservative publishing firms who thought doing so would hep them win elections, and the government did nothing to stop it. now, we have no liberal media left in this country, and what you're seeing here is the result of it. all we have left now in this country is failing old tory legacy media outlets that nobody wants to support. small-l liberals end up tricked into reading al jazeera instead, and it just confuses them with propaganda, because that is the purpose of it, it's the reason al jazeera exists in the first place, to interfere in western democracies by generating propaganda for naive liberals to consume.

if this turns into intolerant christians arresting intolerant muslims at gun point because the muslims are offending the christians, we've already lost.

you gotta get in the trenches and do the hard work and if i can find the time i'll help but i'm swamped. there's no easy answer to this.

but step one is that the small-l liberals need their local media back. you'll never get anywhere with this without that first.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/matthew-taub-eaton-centre-mob-wasnt-a-protest-it-was-a-warning

how much money do you have every month for disposable income after you pay all of your bills, including groceries?

is it more than $700?

is it more than $200?

i know this won't last, which is why i need to navigate this moment wisely to ensure i'm in a stable environment i can create in for years to come.

the way i've always looked at it is like this: in contemporary western culture, almost everybody (99% of us) is roughly equally poor and has roughly the same disposable income, but we have varying levels of debt and taxation depending on our salaries. the result is that increases in wealth in our culture get almost entirely eaten by the financial system, and nobody really benefits by making more money, in terms of actually having more money to actually spend.

as your salary increases, 

- your rent or mortgage increases, because you rent nicer places or buy bigger houses and you have to do that, too, it's not optional, really.

- your car payments increase, because you buy fancier cars

- your credit card payments increase, because you buy fancier clothes

- your taxes go up

- you pay off your lump sum debts

- you spend more on kids because you breed more, because you get laid more often, one way or the other

the result is that whether you make $30K/yr, $50K/yr, $100K/yr or $1000K/yr, you end up with the same amount of money to spend per month, but you live with different "grades" of belongings representing different classes of wealth.

but who gives a fuck?

your fancy mansion is made of the same wood and concrete and drywall that my below market rent basement is. it will crumble just the same. you chase off the same mammals, you kill the same roaches. the bank is better off, but are you better off? are you really better off?

you're not; not really.

so, why bother?

now, some libertarian capitalist douche bag will seize on this as an argument that socialism reduces productivity, but the point that i'm making is that nobody benefits from increases in productivity in a capitalist society except the banks, anyways, so your bogeyman is actually capitalism and not socialism, but why would i give a fuck about productivity if it just goes to the rentiers in the first place? why wouldn't i boycott that system on it's face? if rising productivity has no effect on my individual material conditions in the capitalist system, i have no reason to give the slightest fuck about whether i'm "productive" or not. it's just the rentiers bitching that their rent isn't rising fast enough and they can go fuck themselves. that's not even capitalism. it's actually feudalism, but it's the facade of capitalism that allows the feudalism to maintain itself and prosper. if you want to get at and dismantle the feudalism, you need to tear down the facade of capitalism. it has nothing to do with socialism, and you may find that socialism is actually good for productivity after all if you'd  just shut the fuck up for a second and give it a try.

i was born a prole and i understand it and i understand there's no way out and i seek to make the best of it.

maybe the fancy car and the fancy house is valuable to you, but it's not valuable to me, and i don't care. i want a clean, safe space that is big enough for me to work in, and i've got it, for now. i want practical shelter for functional use value, i don't want empty displays of wealth. all walls crumble, in the end; they're all made of the same thing, they're all the same. you're just the same pile of dirt and microbial shit, in the end.

the result is that i may be far less wealthy than you but i don't think i'm worse off. if you strip away the illusions of upgrades in material conditions that the banks hold your hand and lead you through as they elevate you through this ponzi scheme we call "class" and fuck you in the ass while doing it, the only differences between you and i are that you work harder for the same practical outcome, you have less fun than me and you have more debt and more responsibility than i do.

i spend almost nothing on maintaining my bicycles and $0 on gas. i avoid cell phones. my rent is cheap. i have no credit card debt.

am i actually better off?

my cohb money came in on christmas eve. it's $401. so i have enough for the $3500 transfer into the rdsp before dec 31st, after all, but i have to go in on monday to talk to them about my account. i should also get the extra $120 for gst this month.

i consequently just bought a shop-vac to help me clean up the dirtier parts of this place. it's a $50 five gallon shop-vac, on sale for a highly reduced price. this is an old house that tends to crumble and is in the process of being rebuilt on the spot from the inside and that will come in handy for a long time, i think.

my monthly income, after rent, is now going to be:

$408 odsp

$200 cdb

$401 cohb

$75 trillium

$120/3 gst rebate

=================

~1100

even if i put $400/month into the rdsp, that still leaves me with $700/month to spend on food and fun, which is a lot, considering i don't have any bad habits. i haven't been on an adventure to detroit in a while but i'm straight edge between them.

further, every single one of these payments increases every year because it's all tied to inflation. that $1100 will be at $1500 in no time.

i'm so used to being dirt poor that it's almost a culture shock. it's not going to change how i live day-to-day, as i am still focused on setting up my apartment in the immediate term and on my art for the rest of my life, but it will allow me to put some money in the bank, both in terms of short term and long term savings and to be able to just buy things when i need them. that is the real change, avoiding the need to save for things in advance. i should now have savings available, instead.

within a few months, when everything's set up, the money should mostly go into the studio.

at $2100/month,  my income is now over $25000/yr. i'm still comfortably in the lowest tax rate, but i have $100,000 in used tax credits from going to university for so long. that means i'll get $100,000 in taxes back before i pay any out.

i don't want to misrepresent the situation. i have now completely maxed out on social assistance without experiencing a substantive hike in rent but it's because i went through a horrible experience; i'm a disabled person that got thrown out on to the street by capitalist rentier parasites looking to feed on my rent payments, and is still fighting to rectify that in a court system that has swung so far right in recent years that it's flung itself off the cliff of logical discourse. the judges don't read a thing that's put in front of them, nowadays, they want you to summarize it in twitterspeak for them. they won't accept anything on appeal. the court system is broken. i applied for everything, and i eventually got everything. everything. and i'm not going to waste it on drugs because i'm not a drug addict, i'm going to use it in the way i'm supposed to use it. this level of assistance is unusual for a single person, in ontario, but it's because i went through an unusual circumstance. the system will take care of you here in canada, in the end, but you have to let it bludgeon you pretty badly, first.

i got unlucky, but then i got lucky. things were bad for a while, now they're going to be good for a while. 

things tend to work out for me.

again, it happens to be christians getting killed in nigeria. it's druze in syria. it was yazidis in iraq and, before that, it was armenians, assyrians, kurds. socialists. jews.

"when they came for the christians, i didn't say anything."

don't say nobody warned you.

you gotta fight fascism everywhere at all times and donald trump is a strange ally, but i'll take it, if he's up for it.