what the mess in hormuz is exposing is how broken the system of international governance has become in the years of neglect since iraq. this is actually europe's - and canada's - fault for refusing to uphold or administer it, and allowing the un to devolve into a powerless, empty anti-semitic israel-bashing club. if canada and europe had taken better care of these international institutions in the years since iraq, and not allowed american hegemony to run off the rails, we wouldn't be in this situation.

the media is clueless.

it is obvious that what is needed in the region is a un anti-terrorism force to go in and take control of the region and keep the iranians out of hormuz and also out of the red sea. the primary participants should be the gcc, but the europeans would need to be in the organizing seat.

american tolls to pay for something the un should be doing is unacceptable and disappointing but not an entirely unpredictable ramification of the european and canadian abrogation of global leadership since iraq. abstention from events around you is not a mature policy taken by mature adults. if europe doesn't want to take part in global affairs, it has little grounds to complain when it doesn't like the outcome.

this is a much bigger project than i thought. i don't have the cash on hand to do this all at once. i need to do this in phases.

today, i want to fill in obvious gaps, first. i'll focus on the list of science fiction authors after for the early 90s project, starting in 1989, when i was 8-14 years old.

the list of authors for the childhood journal that i'll be focusing on is:

1. isaac asimov

2. jules verne

3. ray bradbury

4. hg wells

5. arthur c carke

6. cs lewis

7. lewis carroll

8. stephen king

9. tom clancy

10. dean koontz

11. robert ludlum

12 john grisham

but i won't be able to collect many of those today.

this was posted in feb, 2019:

i'm racking my brain for actual books that i read in grades 7 and 8 - and even 9 - and i'm not able to come up with anything. i remember being given photographed handouts and asked questions around an ability to prove very basic comprehension, or being asked to read short texts and then produce an opinion piece around it. but, i don't think anybody ever handed out books to us and told us to read them.

i went to both elementary school and high school under the rae/peterson curriculum (harris won when i was in high school, and didn't succeed in changing the curriculum until the year after i'd left), and i'm learning just now that it was kind of an experiment. i did not receive any actual marks until grade 10; my high school transcript, which i still have, simply states "completed" for grade 9. i have records of standardized testing where i scored in the 95th-99th percentile, but i don't have grades for these years.

what i remember about the report cards is that they had a long list of criteria, and you'd be evaluated on a points system, with 1 the highest and i think 6 the lowest. this was just the teacher's arbitrary, completely subjective opinion. i remember getting lots of 1s in english and math, 2s or 3s in phys ed and some pretty low marks in the "shows respect for authority" and "works well with others" categories. even my university profs would have scrawled "does not work well with others" on my report cards if given the chance, and i'm not particularly embarrassed about it - i don't work well with others, and i don't want to, either.

i'm not even sure i can pick out much of anything of shape in these years really at all. we were split into classes that taught core subjects, and then shipped into different rooms for specific topics. so, i remember having a science teacher, a french teacher, a geography teacher, a music teacher, a phys ed teacher, a home ec teacher, a history teacher and then a kind of general "grade 7 teacher" that was tasked with everything else, which i guess is math, religion and english. but, that really meant that the curriculum was focused on the peripheral subjects due to the more rigid scheduling, and that math & english were largely unstructured babysitting periods with a lot of pointless busy work. when we went to geography class, or phys ed, we were there for a short period with a defined curriculum; when we went back to the general class room, the teacher could organize it any way they wanted to, or not at all, which was often the actual reality.

so, the system put more of a priority on learning french or geography than it did on learning math or english. we did regular spelling bees in grade 8 english class. and, i don't really remember taking math in grade 7 at all. grade 9 was more structured, in the sense that there were separate math and english classes, but i still didn't get graded, and i still don't remember reading any actual books. i explicitly remember reading shakespeare, but we read it orally in the classroom. and, there's a text called the chrysalids that i can't otherwise place that i might drop into grade 9.

of course, there's some possibility that i don't remember any reading projects because i was so efficient with them. there's a few texts from later in high school that i remember putting off until the last minute and then reading through in an afternoon. there's certainly some possibility that i just devoured it so violently that it never really got digested. but, the thing is that i liked reading, so i don't know why that would have been true.

i think the truth is that i was mostly baby sat all the way to the end of grade 9, and consequently don't have a lot to report on.

if i remember something, i'll insert it, but i think the way we're going to do this is that i'll be doing independent reading over these years, instead.

the chrysalids was grade 8, and i have a copy of it that i found used. i also remember doing a man for all seasons in grade 8, and the shakespeare. the only thing i remember from grade 9 is the shakespeare, and i don't remember anything from grade 7 at all.

there are a few shakepeare plays i'm not sure if i read in class or not. i should get a collected shakespeare. that's a reasonable thing to have.

however, i read a lot on my own. i can generate a list of several hundreds of novels that i bought with allowance money and read on my own initiative from grades 3-9. starting around grade 9ish, i was spending more time playing guitar and less time reading novels, and the first demoes were recorded in grade 10 (1996). so, this is the period i'm really focusing on in rebuilding this.

i moved out of my mom's basement and into my dad's basement between grades 7 and 8. my mom smoked and my dad's third wife was highly anti-smoking (she used to smoke). she claimed my collection of science fiction and stephen king novels smelled like smoke and told me i couldn't bring them with me. so i left them there and never really replaced many of them. she was a clinical sociopath with no ability to comprehend sentimental value, so it didn't make sense to her to collect books; in her view, books should be read and disposed of immediately after, and keeping them around is just hoarding clutter. she hated keeping anything at all around past it's immediate use. when she realized this bothered me, she did try to compensate by buying me new books (because why would i want books i already read?), which ranged from ayn rand texts (which i just thought were boring and terribly written) to tom clancy novels (which were ok) to grisham, koontz and ludlum. i read most of what those four authors had written up to about 1995 or so, and i also bought some newer king, but i just didn't have time for books after i started playing guitar more seriously. i never replaced most of the king or the science fiction - asimov, clark, bradbury, wells, jules verne, cs lewis, lewis carroll, etc. i had everything stored on a large shelf outside of my basement bedroom. in later years, my mom claimed to still have these books and became evasive when i asked about getting them back when i was older. it was relatively clear that she wanted to keep them. i've been unsuccessful in even getting her to just write out a list of them for me.

if i'm doing this now, i wanted to see what i had written in 2019 and it's not all that helpful. that's ok. i'll have to just remember it.

i apparently also have a music list dated to the summer of 2008 to recover on my external drive.

hey, i've got some ideas for strain names for the tragically hip's new marijuana line.

10. blown brain cells at high dumb

09. the tragic-saline drip

08. a head in the last century

07. systolic equipment attached to the back of a motorized wheelchair

06. 50 mission ct-scan

05. new lung transplant is sinking

04. saliva trickling down

03. disgrace, too.

02. an inch an hour

01. head cave

they were always too pompous to understand irony, and wouldn't understand it if explained to them, now. the band that lost their singer to cancer at 53 is now selling marijuana. astounding.

they've always been a microcosm of everything that is wrong with canada, so i guess this is kind of an expectation.

at 18:39

"my new lung transplant is sinking, man - and i don't want to hack.

*cough*"

at 18:40

Location:

i'd give their first record a three in my rating system (where 0 is the highest and 10 is the lowest), and the rest is 4 or 5. there's a greatest hits ep in there of around a half hour of music that's worth salvaging.

i got most of the way through cleaning my bedroom last night and stopped to catalog my collection of novels at librarything. these are just the fiction texts right now, because the fiction texts are going to be on shelves on the wall (the last thing to install) in the bedroom and not on the library shelf.  i also have a small overflow shelf that will hold books waiting to be read that, for now, will have everything on it, as i read and review fiction for the journal and alter-reality sections of the integrated multimedia project, which is first in the list. i finished entering the reduced fiction library i have left (it's only 70 books) and started typing out fiction books to buy to immediately fill in gaping holes when i had to pass out. i got sick yesterday when installing the aluminum. i think it was the glue, but i'm noticing some of these old books are giving me a sore throat. there's a type of hallucinogenic spore that lives in old books and can make you sick. i'm feeling a little better this morning, but i'm also now at 141.8 so it's time to make some toast.

i kept in the last bowl of soup i ate on...tuesday/wednesday.

this is a part of the process, as i had to move these old books into my bedroom and they've just been sitting out on top of boxes. they're all moving to the overflow shelf and will get up to the wall shelves in the next few months as i get through the journal project and move to the alter-reality. i'm going to buy a round of items this morning and add those to the list before i print the pdf and upload it to drive, but it's going to be similar to the cd collection. there will be a chronological list, an alphabetical list, an loc list and the library things pdf. the library things pdf will have information about exact pressings. all lists will have fiction and nonfiction, but i'm cleaning my bedroom so fiction is first.

i don't expect that i'm going to find as many book list snapshots as cd list snapshots, because i kept deleting it, and because the page didn't get as much traffic. i've long struggled with the question of whether this is pretentious or not; it clearly is, but it may be more pretentious to struggle with it. i think i should have a book list around in my insurance documents, when i had insurance in the 00s, but i tried to keep any list of books i uploaded anywhere restricted to references or reviews, strictly. so, the lists tend to be small, or focused on library books rather than books i owned. i'm worrying less about finding lists and filling the holes in out of memory for that reason. there's also the question of high school texts that i want to fill in while i'm at it and will be reviewing for the multimedia project, as well as some university level english texts that i sold and need to get back.

i have not, as an adult, read as much fiction as i did as a kid. that might change as i get through these writing projects. however, my broad perception is that storybooks are for youngish people, and reading novels is broadly something that most adults shouldn't have too much time for. there are exceptions, but it's not as much of a grown-up artform as symphonic music. grown-ups are going to focus more on reading as an academic process, for diy self-learning. we learn from reading novels, but it's a type of learning more valuable for young brains than older ones, as it's not direct information. grown-ups generally need more useful data. there's certainly a place for abstract learning for adults, but there's not always the time. i have more time than many adults, and this is exactly the kind of thing i want to use it for (i'm an anarchist. it's a part of the theory.), but even i need to be reasonable: this has limited use value. there is also the simple fact that the artform has collapsed into itself in the last 50 years and that fiction is going to find itself in a serious crisis when the 70 year olds and 80 year olds (and 90 year olds) start imminently dying. there isn't serious replacement happening. the form may permanently change in the near future.

i'm going to have a fair number of very old plays in my list. there was a time before the novel. we are on the cusp of a time after one. but we're not there yet and my personal library will have an assortment of novels, i just need to carry out a recovery process before i post it anywhere.

let me eat, then get through that, and the pdf should be up by the end of the day.

well, i now have my aluminum up on the ceiling. it's a slightly cooler day today but it's going to warm up tomorrow. it should keep the candle heat in as a basic test, i think.

it looks like the cement work i did outside the other day has held up well. i'm still peeling from the sunburn, but i have a little more cement to use up in the front, and then i'll need to buy some more and another couple of bricks to finish the job, on the outside. i haven't addressed it yet from the inside, but i'd might as well just relayer over the existing concrete, if i'm going to do it at all. it's cheap enough and easy enough. i just want it to completely dry out first.

the next thing to do is that general clean in here, which will include installing and updating a number of items. i'm going to do a kind of tidy u in the studio after, and then i'll need to get into the laundry and bathroom to do some updates, before i do a final finish in the kitchen. but i want to get those lists of lists in order first when i'm done cleaning the bedroom, and before i get to updating the laundry.

that's going to mean that i'm basically done in the laundry, the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom, the listening room and the library and need to focus on the side entry, the garage and the studio to finish up.

does that mean canada maintains sole ownership of the bridge?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/gordie-howe-bridge-opening-9.7266280

my bedroom ceiling is now completely full of amazon cardboard, taped over with weatherproofing tape. is this working?

yes.

it's stayed above 30 degrees in this room for weeks, even as the temp outside falls to 18, 19. we've had a couple of cool days and the temp in here has stayed put. it's great. i've found it helpful to run candles in the evening, but i don't have the heat on. it's just trapped in here.

the next phase is the aluminum, but i'm not sure i need it in the summer. i'll need it in the winter...

i'm going to clean in here and install a few things (shelves, mirror) while i'm at it. it will look closer to being done.

i bought some new sheets and some new pillows and they came in today. my old sheets had taken a little bit of abuse from sleeping with conditioner in my hair, which dulled them from bright pink to off-pink. and, my pillows have long sucked. i don't remember where they came from. i'm going to throw them on the couch. i also bought some new candles, two entrance rugs, a shoe mat and some more tape for the ceilings.

this is always constantly shifting around in circles, but let me write it out to understand it:

- i was putting the paneling up in the bedroom, and doing a few extra things in the laundry and bathroom before i moved to the kitchen

- i needed to get boxes out of the front in order to install the panels

- i wanted to organize boxes by room as i was getting boxes out of front  (boxes from 2013 items in pile, to start)

- before i could get into the front, i needed to clear the stereo table out of the side and put it in the right place, where there were then boxes

- needed to move the boxes first.

- the boxes contain books that go on shelves. 

- needed to install shelves in library and bedroom to move books to move stereo table.

- needed to clean area in front in order to install shelves

- needed to clean entire area to clean area in front around shelves

- needed caulking to clean entire area in front

- got some caulking, cleaned area (set up charging table, small shelf), moved shelving into the area, moved some other items out of the area, moved boxes of cds and wood to area

- set up library shelf, moved books to library shelf, used box for ceiling.

- decided to catalog books and cds and website with working profiles, organize by device

- in order to catalog, needed lists of old media

- wanted to set up listening area first so i could listen and catalog, after i had lists

- had to stop to clean bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, myself first

- had to get everything out of bedroom to do general clean

- had to set up listening room to get items out of bedroom <---done

now that i have the listening room set up, i'm going to listen to the cds that i already put on the shelf through my listening system and catalog them one by one. everything is now going through the 5 cd rotation, so 'll need to listen to everything five times before shelving it. after the fifth listen, i'll make sure that the information at discogs and at my web site are both up to date.

the pi isn't going to be set up immediately, but it should be set up soon. while some of these releases have reviews written, i'm not posting anything to the dtk site until it comes up in the web in the sense i described previously (starting with miles davis). i'm starting clean with the first davis release and it likely won't happen until all of the furniture is in place. right now, i'm just cataloging physical media, filling in holes and getting items out of boxes and onto shelves.

tonight, i'm focusing on getting everything out of the bedroom so i can get the aluminum up, and then on getting everything back in the bedroom. i then want to clean the bathroom and kitchen and then finish the list of lists, before i can get to doing things in the laundry, bathroom and kitchen again.

i have my listening room set up. sort of. i have what has recently been my main amp connected to my kefs (which are my preferred stereo speakers), with a pioneer turntable, a 5 disc cd/dvd player, a cassette player and the raspberry pi as media sources. the pi is itself connected to a variety of peripherals, and i'm going to connect it and the dvd player to a large external monitor on the wall. but, the pi is not installed yet, so it will be physical media until i get there.

i am disconnecting this listening system from my studio, and will be modernizing my studio monitors. my kefs still sound great, but they're 40 years old. i need something more digitally oriented.

i also got most of the cardboard up on the ceiling in the bedroom, and it's definitely helping a lot.

i'll be focusing on the general clean for the rest of the day and should be able to get some aluminum up on the ceiling very soon.

i mean, they have to do this. there's no other choice. there never was any other choice.

but there's going to be more casualties now than if they had just done it to start with.

it looks like centcom is trying to create a landing zone on the iranian coast.

but it's going to be much harder to do this now than it would have been six months ago.

i found my prolegomena to any future metaphysics. it was hiding in the fiction, under a copy of ulysses. that sneaky old kant. it's like the distance between the books only existed in my mind or something. but you can't get thinking like that, or you'll go crazy and start believing silly things like that euclid is absolute truth. such rubbish. but i'm glad i found it, because that was one of the ones that i couldn't clearly identify as stolen in a specific way.

i lost my figure with my weight over 150. i'm happy to see it coming back with my weight coming back down under 145. 

i've been exhausted this week, and i think they got in here to drug me when i was outside fixing the concrete. it's had no substantive effect due to the weight loss. but these retards don't appear likely to give up. they think their pretend god and their dark age rules matter. it's pathetically sad. they're going to have to go to jail,  and that's where they belong, it's just a question of figuring out the best way to get them there, and i'm increasingly looking at alternative tactics to get them arrested and charged. i just want them to go away and die somewhere and leave me alone. i don't care how we get at that end point.

i'm still focusing on getting the stereo set up first, then finishing a general clean, but i've been struggling with this sunburn since tuesday night. it's almost gone. in fact, as i mentioned, i should look better when the dead skin clears off, and fresh new skin pops up. i have pretty warm blood, but i do tend to shed, and if anything it's a little late this year.

this is not acceptable and should be met with a proportionate response.

the people of turkey and egypt alike are entitled to regime change, and soon.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/2slgbtq-cruise-denied-entry-turkey-egypt-9.7264048

lebanon does not yet have the ability to secure the areas it is demanding israel withdraw from and is acting against it's own self-interest in making those demands. lebanon should be seeking to work with israel to entirely eliminate hezbollah from the south of lebanon.

i would support a regional cooperation agreement between lebanon and israel once hezbollah is thrown out of the area, but that's up to them. lebanon is not like the other countries in the region; it is more like israel than syria or egypt.

while it would be helpful if netanyahu could clarify which villages are seeking annexation by israel, the premise is plausible and a contrasting report by al jazeera, which constantly presents false information, is hardly a valid source to contradict his claims. you can't believe anything they say. they're serial liars. i'd like to see a vote in the area before i take it seriously. but i'd rather see the regions that have recently been overrun by shia immigrants from syria annexed by israel than continue to be colonized by syrians under iranian domination. the indigenous inhabitants have largely evacuated the region and are now a minority in it. there's no answer that doesn't involve demographic overhaul, but the shia refugees should not be allowed to permanently settle there, they should be pushed back out.

in the short run, continued lebanese refusal to cooperate with israel is just going to result in dead lebanese people, a weaker lebanese state and a stronger iran. it's not smart.

iran's continued belligerence is doing nothing more than making the case against them and in favour of removing them.

i'm strongly opposed to endless, go nowhere tit-for-tat with iran, which is what has been going on and what the americans seem to want to do, in the endless delusion that the iranians are going to negotiate. i explicitly stated i'm opposed to that outcome and supported a single, immense, overpowering regime change offensive precisely to prevent it. 

the americans could have done this very quickly, and they might have received some criticism for it from stupid people, but it would have been a smart thing to do and greatly benefited the region and the world. instead, they've done this the dumbest way possible by dragging it out as much as they can because they didn't want to do it at all, and now have an unavoidable, grueling, expensive, twenty year proxy war with the chinese in front of them that will distract them from other parts of the world and further ramp up their external debts.

this is the consequence of bad leadership.

so, i did eat again last night, slept a few times between getting through it and spent a lot of time in the bathroom. i was only out for a few hours yesterday, but i got a bit of a sunburn on my cheeks, which is unusual. that, combined with the sweating, acted as a bit of a catalyst to speed up the pore-cleaning exercise underlying the purpose of the weight loss, and i woke up yesterday looking pretty filthy. it is manifesting as vicious acne, but i'm actually getting at some deep ingrowns, which is exactly what i've been complaining about - this inability to wash my face fully because i can't get to the clogged pores underneath the layer of fat, which is an unexpected, unforeseen and unwanted consequence of accidentally gaining a lot of weight. i'm realizing that the outcome will be a dramatic improvement, once i get over this hump of awkwardness in the next few days.

for now, i've got my face layered with acne soap, which is letting me get in there and pull these annoying thread-thick ingrowns out, either with tweezers or just with my fingers. i can normally just pop blackheads out by squeezing them with my fingers, which has historically been key to sufficiently cleaning my face, but i haven't been able to recently due to that annoying layer of fat. i am almost back to being able to do that, which will rapidly clear my cheeks back out.

even if i can't see the clogged pores under the layer of fat, it still affects the way i look. the small amount of gravitational mass in the filth clogging the pore creates a downward pull that results in a sagging effect, even when my skin looks completely clear. getting that sag out is fundamental to my appearance as jessica, and my inability to do so while i've been carrying this extra weight has had an extremely negative effect on my overall appearance, even if my face looks clear. it hasn't actually been clear, because i haven't been able to get in there to wash it out.

so, i'm looking extra gross just right now but am going through a cleansing process and it should lift very soon.

for tonight, in keeping with the ever shifting nature of this apartment cleaning operation, i am realizing that i need to set the stereo up before i can clean in the bedroom, because i'm taking the stereo out of the bedroom, and need to move it to finish cleaning. so, step one is now the stereo setup, and 'm back to cleaning in the middle of the room first.

my face is burning. it hurts. my eyes are clogged with goop. that means it's working and it'll be better when it stops.

i want the rest of the world to understand that would happened in canada in 2018 was not the legalization of marijuana. marijuana had been functionally legal in canada for decades. it was functionally legal when i was a kid in the 90s. 

rather, what canada did was normalize being a loser.

what the canadian state said was "it's ok to smoke an ounce of pot a day and live with your mom until you're 40. that's normal, now. don't beat yourself up over it. you're still good enough.".

the consequence now is that we have a generation of stupid that's been normalized to loserdom and we're going to have to grapple with that.

the results are going to be catastrophic. it's going to be seen as the single worst public health disaster of the 21st century, when the cancer rates and the brain damage data really come in. it's a policy that has no future but reversal.

in the short term, the least thing that the state can do is ramp up addictions treatment to get marijuana addicts off the drugs. unlike opiate addiction, marijuana addiction is treatable, it's not a waste of time and money. the state should be increasing resources on fighting marijuana dependency now, before it's too late.

i slept briefly after i ate, and didn't quite make it all of the way to the bathroom at the end. as mentioned previously, i've been dealing with immense diarrhea hours after i eat for weeks and i am tying it to being drugged with something. but the only effects of the drugs are diarrhea and acne. and headaches in between. it's quite odd. so, i took it as an opportunity to take a shower and do a general clean in my bedroom, which had otherwise been waiting for me to get to it in sequence, which is a process that is now taking too long. i got a little bit of that done, fell back asleep, woke up to the other half of it (the acne) and washed it all off. at that point, i decided to take advantage of the weather to do some work i had to do outside, instead, and then took a third sleep when i got in. in fact, i should eat again tonight, finish doing a general clean, order some things to finish the outside work and then get back to the music list tomorrow or the next day.

i am strongly opposed to canada wasting more money on submarines that could be used on something useful like healthcare.

i just sorted through a lot of media and found a lot of music list data. no book data, yet, but i think i know where to look.

i'm at 143.8, so i'm going to stop to make some toast and clean myself a little. 

i last had a big bowl of soup on thursday night / friday morning so i'm hoping it doesn't take too long to get back to 142. i want to get through the soup and the bread first now while i'm losing weight, and then eat through some other fridge stuff. i'm getting there, but i also know i look dirty and gross right now. *shrug*. there's nothing worthwhile to do here right now anyways.

my neighbours smell terribly and i actually don't know what the smell is. it might be a mouldy a/c. it might be drugs i don't recognize. i try to be fair when i meet people, but these particular african muslims are both startlingly ignorant and overwhelmingly disgusting people.

i agree with them. why shouldn't i be able to buy american booze or russian booze or any other booze? if you want to boycott them, you boycott them. i don't agree with you, and i have the right to disagree with you. don't force your beliefs on everybody else, you zealous and bigoted piece of shit.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/provincial-restrictions-us-alcohol-bill-republican-tenney-9.7260027

do you want more dirty, filthy, disgusting alberta tar oil in ontario?

i don't.

the best way to shut this project down is to stop buying oil.

maybe while they're at, they can bring elvis back from the dead.

i've tired of this. it's farcical. 

canadians need to stop burning poison as a part of their day to day lives. it's actually not that hard. the only excuse you have to use oil in 2026 is laziness. so, get up off your worthless fat asses and clean yourselves up a little bit. i'm fucking sick of it.

i'm disgusted by this country and the people that live in it.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/article/danielle-smith-doug-ford-announce-proposed-cross-canada-oil-pipeline-corridor/

yeah, i fell asleep again. ugh. sleep is boring. it's a waste of time. i don't understand cns depressants, or who would take them intentionally. it's boring and hellish and a wasted existence spent in a low productivity mental state. these people are better off dead.

so, i'm going to make my list of cd lists like i said, as best i can, and then i'm going to move to installing the stereo in the other room. 

i'm also going to post the top 30 organized by market value (the top 30% of the 100 cds uploaded so far):

i'm also going to post a couple of pictures of the first 100 releases (all that i have added to the list right now), organized by artist, and displayed as cover art. as mentioned, this is a more intuitive way to look at the data, for most.

this is the top 45 cds in the list, organized by market value. this is a more intuitive way for most people to look at the data. it's a little less than half of what's up so far, and will end up being around 5% of the total.

i should point out that there are also a handful of cds at the bottom of the list that are actually so rare that they have never been sold at discogs and that i suspect would fetch quite a bit if they were.

but my cds are not for sale.

in fact, because i lost a few days, i decided to re-approach the cd list. i'm redoing a lot of what i already uploaded and i'm refocusing on just dumping the data in to start and organizing it properly afterwards.

i was initially going to add ten cds at a time and listen to them as they came up but i got stuck and i'm deciding that's not the best approach.

what i just did was add the first 100 cds to discogs. i think i underestimated the size of the cd collection, after some big hauls that i am only properly cataloging now. the total should actually be in the 900+ range in the end, and that doesn't include non-cds. there's big jazz and classical updates coming. even so, this is a minimal list that needs to be filled in.

i'm dealing with headaches tonight. the tenants upstairs appear to be smoking crack, which is something i thought i got rid of, and it's continuing to make me sick. i recently learned a lot about shifts to the right in the canadian judiciary over the last 20 years, away from liberal and progressive ideas about non-smokers' rights and towards backwards, regressive and conservative ideas about drug use as a personal choice, and i have to accept that while the law is still on my side, the judiciary isn't. the hard shift to the right engineered by justin trudeau and kim campbell has essentially abolished any right that canadians used to have to fresh air, in favour of retarded right-wing ideas about drug addiction as a personal choice. it's the total triumph of the culture of stupidity. the law is still on my side now, but the corporate political establishment is trying to completely legalize drugs in order to profit off of people dying, and the so-called liberal political class is happily facilitating this. if i want to assert my right to a drug-free environment, i'm going to have to approach this a little differently. the courts are unlikely to stand up for what is called negative rights in the current political environment; they are only likely to support positive rights, and only in a very right-wing context.

there is currently no legal way for normal canadians to protect themselves from the despicable and damaging habits of disgusting, dangerous and unhealthy drug addicts. normal canadians are being increasingly forced to consume their neighbours' drugs against their will, and the court is increasingly refusing to protect their rights to live free from drug use. 

these losers are smoking crack in front of their kids. they don't have a health problem, they're demonstrating clear criminality. they belong in a jail cell.

so, because i feel like shit due to the bad habits of my neighbours, and because i may have difficulty in asserting my negative rights to live free from their interference in my health or my fresh air in the current political environment in canada and am going to need to figure out a different way to protect my rights and my health from their poor behaviour and bad habits, i'm going to instead spend the night focusing on updating some of these lists that i had put aside and try to get back to work in the morning, when i feel better. these losers tend to clear out during the week.

i've been having this issue lately where my body is tired but my brain isn't and it manifests itself as piles of eye gunk forcing me to sleep. it's very weird; it's like i'm going into chemical sleep while still conscious and awake and frequently actually trying to work. scientists try to create this condition and fail and i'm getting there accidentally through sheer willpower to maximize productivity in individual projects in getting something done before falling asleep. my workaholism is putting me into a condition of waking sleep that is knocking me out by force.

i lost the last few days to this but i got some sleep this afternoon and should get some work done tonight, if some various things cooperate.

i was updating the cd list with cds 40-50 when i stopped to eat. i need to finish cleaning up the listening space so i can move some items out of the kitchen and into it, and then get back to creating the thermal barrier between the units in order to keep the heat in downstairs. then i need to make some updates to the laundry and the bathroom before finishing the kitchen.

the tenants above me are constantly creating water leaks as a result of their poor lifestyle decisions. it's very distracting and very frustrating, and causing me to waste large amounts of my time dealing with it.

the terrorist death cult in iran is currently demonstrating itself as a cult of death by having a disgusting celebration for the life of a war criminal that lived too long and didn't get what he deserved until it was too late.

i don't believe in hell.

yeah, well, that's what happens when you levy tariffs on people, you fucking idiots. 

you shit in your own bed, then you complain about the smell. 

your policies have failed. you're losers. you have nobody to blame but yourselves. 

if the americans want canada to interact less with china, they should reduce the amount of tariffs they're levying, to start. otherwise, they will need to get accustomed to the status quo.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11950765/cusma-renewal-us-block-greer-china/

rosie o'donnell is the republican party's greatest asset, right now.

this is the harperesque scam that the carney liberals and their "new government" are trying to pull on you:

- cut the carbon rebate by 100%, which would have been about $150/quarter in 2024 dollars and close to $200/quarter in 2026 dollars, because it went up every year.

- increase the gst rebate by 20%, which is about $20

- claim that benefits canadians and the planet

clearly, mark carney thinks you're stupid, if he thinks you're going to fall for that, and the evidence suggest he's right - you are stupid and you are going to fall for that, at least in the short run.

well, i'm not falling for that. and i'm going to keep pointing out that canadians have been scammed by this government, until they get it and throw them out of office for it.

i appreciate the extra $20/quarter, but that's 10% of the $200/quarter i would be getting from carbon rebates.

my budget didn't go up $20, it went down $180. and i'll certainly be responding to that by trying to vote mark carney and his harper-strong conservative liberals out of office. 

thankfully, the change was offset by the canadian disability benefit, for me, but that doesn't apply to everybody.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/quarterly-payments-of-ottawas-boosted-grocery-and-essentials-benefit-start-today/

this is interesting:

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/al-qaeda-hezbollah-relationship

yeah, i'm starting to see articles claim that the new unelected fascist dictator in syria is in conflict with hezbollah because hezbollah was aligned with assad. this is 1984 level nonsense that would make orwell cringe. there's no truth to it at all.

the fascists in syria were proxies of the turks, but it was the americans that overthrew assad. the islamist/nazi syrian fascist terrorist group in charge in damascus right now is something we've seen little of in the west in recent decades: a cia-backed coup. it is for this reason that trump thinks he can order them around, not because they're in a conflict with hezbollah.

the natural fault lines between al qaeda (who is who is running syria, and who trump is trying to align with and gets excited about reaching around) and hezbollah are the old shia/sunni thing. these are both extremist factions, and their positions are extreme across the board; the al qaeda fascists think the hezbollah fascists are heretics and need to be wiped out for it. they do want to kill each other, but it has to do with religion, and at the end of the day the bottom line is that they share a common ideology of islamic extremism. 

while assad was never aligned with hezbollah, and was never likely to align with hezbollah because he was trying to save secular arab socialism in syria, which is a common enemy of al qaeda and hezbollah, there is some non-remote possibility that al qaeda and hezbollah might put aside their differences to fight the jews, because they are of course both nazis at their core. everything else aside, the jews are the greater evil to both hezbollah fascists and al qaeda fascists. the recent cia-backed islamist coup in syria resulting in an iranian ally in damascus where there was none before would be called blowback.

trump has this inability to see himself for who he is, and it has led him to decide that groups that can't stand him (like the pakistanis and the syrians) are actually his bestest buds. he can't figure out who his friends are. the pakistanis don't like him at all, and neither do the syrians. the syrians are not going to take orders from trump and, if anything, might be trying to wiggle their way out of this relationship with the americans.

that said, i would not support syrian military involvement in lebanon and that's not what i said. the lebanese and the israelis need to work together to get rid of hezbollah, and they could benefit from international cooperation through the un, which would be prioritizing this as an issue if it weren't completely useless. but, syrian military action against hezbollah would probably result in a destabilized syria, and an isis resurgence. the iranians would bomb them from iraq. you might get a war between syria and iraq instead of syria and lebanon, and the syrians would lose. it's a stupid strategy thought up by a stupid person that nobody in the region or outside of it respects.

what i said is this:

however, the basic issue brought up in western media of syria acting as a transit point between lebanon and iran hasn't changed and still needs to be addressed. this should be tied to western funding.

the demands on (the fascist dictator currently in charge of) syria to maintain us funding, short of being dismantled and overthrown, should consequently be the following

1) take your shia refugees back from lebanon. all of them. do what you will with them.

2) coordinate with lebanon and israel in building a common front to just get hezbollah the fuck out of there and figure it out after

3) that includes preventing the desert from acting as a caravan transit medium

4) respect lebanon's sovereignty as a christian state and israel's sovereignty as a jewish state.

what that means in different terms is that syria should be told to make sure that it is not acting as a conduit, transit point, laundering location, bank or other kind of financial sink for hezbollah funds, weapons, colonizers or terrorists to enter lebanon. it's not about syria bombing hezbollah in lebanon, it's about syria policing the border with iraq.

and it's about taking back their shia, who are not wanted or welcome in lebanon by the lebanese.

i'm at 144.2, so i'm going to stop to make some soup.

i just lost a day due to a systems crash but i'm just about back up to where i was at.

trump is now a lame duck.

but putin is 73. erdogan is 72. sisi is 71. and netanyahu is 76. 

none of these people will live forever.

something's about to break, and it could shatter.

turkey is on the brink of social collapse and israel will necessarily change direction with a new pm.

i'm not likely to be 100% in agreement of any framework reached by rubio and netanyahu but the direction they're taking in lebanon is the right direction and i hope they figure it out.

lebanon should not be a failed state, held hostage and overrun by foreign muslims trying to colonize it. lebanon should be a stable, modern, secular european state and it should aspire to join the eu by 2050, before the turks do. it should have prosperous western cities. both lebanon's history and it's future are in the west, but it must be as a sovereign state that can defend itself from invaders coming from it's east, and not as a colony of the european powers.

and i have another 10 cds to add, which will take me to 70. ready?

animal collective - hollindagain - $150 (found at cd warehouse in ottawa)

david bowie - heart's filthy lesson - $35

david bowie - christiane F soundtrack

micronaut - posi001

cevin key - music for cats

download - charlie's family

coil - musick to play n the dark 1, 2 - $500 (ordered from coil in 1999)

tea party - alhambra

tea party - 1991 eternal demo - $250 (windsor cbc radio copy. found for $2 at garage sale)

the unmarked are ~$20. 

that's another $1100, for 10 cds. i'm at close to $2500 for 70 and will be pushing $3000 for the first 100.

these aren't for sale, but i was curious. this is apparently market data from recent sales. the price is set entirely by past sales.

this is the top 7:

it falls off after that to round off the top ten, for now:

but there's only 50 cds uploaded so far. so, a full 20% of these old cds has a potential resale value higher than $25.

i understand some of these. but you could just get loveless or cf & m at the local store, couldn't you?

i've updated the next ten cds for the discogs list, so i'm up to 50 now.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nNhi2Z4vRr0hEP5OiK-6xxZP1G_b9OBW/view

there's a lot of list updates. i need to mirror that on my own site next and then get back to cleaning/installing.

i was at 145.2, so i'm going to eat. the next thing to eat is three big bowls of soup with four pieces of toast and cheese each, so i'm going to split each into two two meals and start with the toast. i'll eat the soup after i get back to 145. a couple of pieces of toast should be quick.

i was able to get the rest of the shelving in place last night before i fell asleep. i need another day or two but i'm almost done. i also got through all of those 14 cds except ep7, so we're moving to cataloging the warner list tonight before i get back to work for tomorrow morning.

the next ten will be 

pelican - australasia

hot hot heat - future breeds

belle and sebastien - dog on wheels single

fuck buttons - street horrsing

gorecki - symphony of sorrowful songs

mike keneally - the universe will provide

ps i love you 2008 ep

radiohead - airbag / how am i driving?

radiohead - karma police digipack single

animal collective - feels

i'm an extreme example. the shift in policy from carbon taxes, which are an extremely progressive form of taxation, to upper class tax cuts, which is extremely regressive taxation, will not cost your average taxpayer over $30,000 in the long run. 

however, carney's analysis is not based on math or facts, it's based on flawed political perception. it's magical thinking.

the actual facts are that most people are going to be worse off as a result of this shift, albeit not by as much, and they should slowly figure it out over the next few months, as the right-wing propaganda wears off and individual budgets assert themselves. people are going to realize they have less money now than they did a year or two ago and realize it's because they took away the carbon rebates, without sufficiently replacing them (unless you're rich. then you get a big tax cut this year. but that's only going to be the case for a very small percentage of people. most people are going to come up short.).

it's not entirely clear what the political ramifications will be once people realize they're actually economically worse off after having the carbon tax cancelled than they were when the carbon tax was in place. the political class seems to be trying to blame the decrease in income caused by the reversal of the carbon tax on grocery stores, on trump or on the phony war in the persian gulf. the phony war may have some minimal effect on inflation, but it won't be a fraction of the income lost from the removal of the carbon rebate for the vast majority of canadians. canadians should just stop to do the math and realize that they're $200 short this july because the government took the rebate away. however, canadians have proven that they're pretty stupid and pretty bad at math, so they might fall for the deflections and the liberals might get away with what is in truth a pretty devastatingly bad policy for low to medium income canadians, at the benefit of the corporate sector and the rich.

there are two major ballot issues that my votes in upcoming political cycles will be based on:

1) i will not support any political party unless it is explicitly secular

2) i will not vote for any party unless it promises to bring back carbon taxes

unless you take not one but both of these positions, you're wasting your time with me. i won't vote for you.

always good to make time for the classics.

it would have been expensive for canadian industry, but highly beneficial for individual canadians, who bought the corporate propaganda like the uneducated lumberjack retards that we truly are.

i'm personally out hundreds of dollars a years due to the change from carbon taxes to upper class tax cuts that my income is too low to qualify for and that was set to rise to thousands of dollars a year. the difference is a net decrease in my personal wealth of upwards of $30,000 overall, which i would have profited off of by not using carbon as an energy source. that $30,000 would have ultimately been transferred to me from users of fossil fuels, mostly industry, and consumers that support dirty industry.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-trudeau-carbon-emissions-climate-change-9.7254619

the long term effect of trump on the culture of the republican party appears to be the adoption of what republicans once called a "victim complex", when they criticized hillary clinton for it in the 90s. in fact, a stark and objective comparison between clinton and trump on the question of actual policy would be enlightening. americans thought they were avoiding a hillary presidency and they basically got 12 years of it (in truth, 20 years of it!) in disguise.

poor america. it always loses. aww. so sad. 

take pity on the wretched americans.

i spent the whole afternoon and evening cleaning the front of the house up, cleared out the next area to get in order and crashed late in the evening, and have been doing some loose ends over night. i have listened to most of the 14 cds i pulled out, and have pulled out ten more, for tomorrow or the next day:

80-90s warner/sire/elektra/atlantic for the historical lists:

ministry - psalm 69

cure - wish

tori amos - little earthquakes

mike oldfield - tubular bells III <---actually, cd is missing, and has been since 2017. it might be in a different case i haven't found yet.

ministry - land of rape and honey

jane's addiction - nothing's shocking

later time-warner reissue:

mbv - isn't anything (creation release)

others:

white stripes - elephant

i mother earth - earth, sky and everything in between

i mother earth - dig

those are the next ten for the lists.

there's a litter of kittens sleeping outside my window and i've caught the mother cat checking me out, but the mother cat doesn't seem to be that concerned about me. if anything, it may have been asking for food from me, but it was completely silent in it's interactions. it's twice the size of the previous cat, but is the same colour. is it possible that the cat came back, with kittens? there's a certain eye blinky thing that cats do when they appreciate and trust you, and it's understandable that it was doing that after i pulled it out of a vent. i think this cat might have come back here anyways. i've met enough cats to know that intelligence is rare in cats, and normal in dogs, but it does exist. this was an unusually bright cat. i'll need to figure this out in the next few days.

i think the cat can sleep by my window if it wants, if it feels safe. it is a safe space to sleep, and it's lush, and green. it seems to run along in the morning. it may actually be an abyssinian breed; whatever it is, it's large and thin.

i took some pictures of the front space, which i'm calling the library, this morning:

this is walking out of the studio into the hall towards the door (the library), where i've installed all of the shelving:

you can see the three cd shelves and the big book shelf. the white shelf on the other wall is going to be moved out of there and replaced with a second black book shelf. there's going to be a stationary bicycle in front of it, beside the couch, or on the other side (i might put a small table there, instead).

this is my current reference library, which i need to catalog and rebuild (it should be twice that size).

i was skeptical about these cubes for books, but as you can see they're just about perfect for library-style reference or text books, which i have a lot of and have long needed something like this for. this is an overdue solution. that system of ten cubes was $30 and i bought three of them. three of six rows are QA comp/math textbooks, but there's a cube full of law books and a row of history books, along with the various other topics i've dabbled in (physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, philosophy, engineering, music, economics, politics, anthropology, etc). it's very incomplete but is not a bad start and it's nice to get it all out of the boxes after way too long.

this is the (previously) broken cd shelf:

i got that big cd shelf on kijiji for $5 in the last basement. it was the perfect size, so i decided that it didn't matter that it was falling apart and crumbling, i'd just glue and tape it together. i was able to hold it together through two moves, but the young person that helped me move last time tried to prove his strength by lifting it straight up, which was dumb, and it caved in. so, it's been sitting in pieces for months. it took some effort to put it back together with glue, tape and finishing nails, but the thing about this shelving unit is that the back is extremely sturdy, so it will stay upright so long as you can get it connected to the sides. the bottom is really cosmetic. this shelf is intentionally upside down because the legs make good cd bookends for the top row. that will be full of cds soon enough.

next to that is the small cd shelf:

when i found this on the curb, i had to rebuild it with liquid wood, and i cut the shelves out of an older shelving unit, but it's held ever since. i was using this for books in the last basement. it will have cds down here. that's an old box of warped cassettes and dvds i've never played. don't buy me dvds...i never watch things....

this is a picture of the window on the bottom front side of the apartment, which i fixed the screen on, cleaned up, sealed for holes, realigned and put the curtain in for. 

that's an old curtain i've had for a long time and a new heavy duty curtain rod with rod holders that are screwed into a blind holder device that was already screwed into the wall.  so i didn't have to make new holes for the curtains because i could just screw them into the things for the blinds. there's some push pins in the walls that exist to get the curtains away from the window to let the sun in (good during the winter). there are some blinds i found here in a box in the back.

this is the main cd shelf, which i ordered from walmart, with a few more cds on it, on the wall perpendicular to the wall i was previously discussing.

i still need to build customized shelves for this. the height is ideal. there will be a 4th cd shelf placed right beside this one, where i currently have boxes of cds sitting.

this is the little bit of wall beside the main cd shelf:

it currently has cds that are on their way to the shelf (about 75% of total, with the other 25% in the other room) and shelving on it's way into the garage to get cut. i will eventually put a 4th (1st) cd shelf where those boxes are. the four shelves together should hold me for quite a while, if i can stay here.

this is the second of two small shelves i found on the curb near the previous basement:

 

i was not able to save this shelf the way i saved the other one, until this month. it's good, now; it just needs shelves. this unit, however, is not going in the library but is rather going in the studio and will hold various electronic devices not being immediately used. i will instead put a second cube shelf in this space to exand the reference library further, and probably put a stationary bicycle there as well. this location is good for the bike because of the placement of the stereo dead ahead, in front of the couch, so i can listen to music while exercising on the stationary bike. the only piece of exercise equipment i need or want is a bike, but i may put some effort into finding a good one.

this is a picture coming up on the front door.

i will prefer to use the side door to come in and out and use the garage internally and to take bikes in and out, so there will be little to no traffic in and out of here in the long run, but there is now until the side door gets fixed. i will not expect to worry about boots or shoes through here much. there will be a carpet on the other side of that door, and i may put one in here, too. it should be seen more as a hallway and less as an entrance. all of that area was aggressively caulked and sealed to plug holes and drafts..

i recently found this third small shelf on the curve, which is actually in good shape and just needed to be wiped down:

you can see the door on the side, one of my bicycles in the back (for now), the charging table in the cubby hole and the wired video doorbell system installed on the wall. i am using this new small shelf for now as temporary storage to hold items going in and out of the garage, but it may end up holding boxes of items intended to be used in the garage (bike tools, guitar tools).

this is the charging table:

i don't actually know what that table is supposed to be for. it might be a desk, it might be a changing table or it might have some unclear religious significance. it was here when i moved in. the bicycle will be moved behind the door soon, i just need to fix some things in the garage first. you can see the extension cord, with usb charging outlets, as well as some rechargeable batteries and a rechargeable power drill. coming in here soon will be usb a and c hubs connected to anything that charges (and isn't a bathroom item), from cell phones to cameras to vacuums. this area was also aggressively caulked and sealed for holes. there is enough space to put a chair in here, which is where i'll install the pc i bought as a video security system.

this is the new bottom of the door:

there is a 3 inch gap under the door which apparently leads into the insides of the house, allowing entry into the unit from in behind the wall, which i want to seek to avoid. this gap would be a source of cold air in the winter, bugs and potentially rodents, although i've seen no sign of them there. i stuffed the gap up as best as i could with plastic packaging, crazy glued cardboard over it, covered over it with packing tape and sealed over it with weather proofing. this may appear to be borderline stupid at first glance, but the weatherproofing should keep the barrier sealed so long as there isn't a parade of winter boots, and there shouldn't be. any entry through the front door should actually leave boots and shoes upstairs and off the rugs, but almost all entry should be through the side. i need to be cognizant of what this is, but so long as i'm careful about it, it should hold and should act as a temperature and pest barrier.

some upgrades to the door itself:

i installed the door stop, which is rated for 800 lbs, and half of the chain. the component on the door was actually already there, so i just screwed the other part into the frame.

what i'm doing today is installing the remaining shelving in a corner of the recording studio outside my bedroom and hopefully setting up the main stereo system in front of the couch. the only stereo i've had in here to this point is a small system in the kitchen intended for watching youtube and listening to standalone cds on. this was all cleaned up and caulked before i slept last night and left to dry for the morning.

my studio shelf (with cds and other media for studio use or from studio production) goes in the corner backing into the bedroom, a plastic organizer with cords in it goes on the far side of the outlet and that white bookshelf goes on the close side of it.

the studio shelf:

the cord organizer:

the white shelf, again:

while i'm at it, here is a picture of my couch, in front of the stereo system that is about to get set up. 

that clears out the bulk of the apartment and just leaves the studio and the side entrance.

i'm focusing on the large amount of shelving first because the majority of clutter i have had in here since i moved in is items that exist in boxes and will end up on shelves - cds, books, devices, effects, cords, computers, etc. when i get these last shelves in place, i'm going to pick a pile of boxes up off the ground and put them on the shelves. but i had to fix the walls before i could move the shelves into place, and i had to do various things in the bathroom and laundry before i could fix the walls in the main area. i think i have enough caulking to finish, now. i'm really almost done.

i didn't want the garage to be last, but it's going to be almost last, unfortunately. i do necessarily have to finish the garage before i can clean out the side entrance because that's where most of it is going, and now i have to wait for the weather to dry out first.

i have a lot of little things to buy in these areas - tables, shelves, etc. i'm far from done. i've pointed these things out. but i'm getting much closer to a space that is installed and functional to work in, rather than this mess of boxes and clutter waiting to get organized.

i just have a huge amount of belongings and i need a large space to organize it all effectively. this is actually almost ideal for what i need, but it required a tremendous amount of work to fix up properly. i am getting much closer, and the next update will be even better.

i'm happy that we're getting some warmer weather here. the last few weeks have been too cold for me for this time of year. there's a really lush green that's taken hold here in the summer the last few seasons, due to a combination of the rain, heat and humidity. the vegetation looks so vibrant. it's very pleasant weather.

the book and cd cataloging is something i want to do but not at the expense of weeks of lost time.

let me get back to work a little, first.

i have enough cds to listen to as i sort through the rest of the things to do and can catalog them after.

it took a long time to get those debussy pieces entered, partly because i stopped to also add cover tracks and remasters to the chronology.

the two updated links are here:

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/p/music-list.html   <---alphabetical

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/p/chronological-music-list.html  <---chronological

it should be clear where i'm going with this now after 40 additions, and the next thing to do should be to finish updating the list of lists and start cataloguing the books, but  have to put it down for a few days. i've been sitting here for too long, now. i need to get back to cleaning in the front and putting everything away again, and i need to get some more paneling up. i can get back to that after.

 should actually get the basic shape of this space in place finally within a day or two.

trump's approach towards the illegitimate nazi dictatorship in control of syria is instructive as to how he's going to actually approach iran. trump is not on the side of democracy, he's on the side of fascism. it makes the situation really worse than appeasement. he's worse than chamberlain; it's a nightmare scenario where an american nazi like henry ford was president on the eve of wwII. trump is not the stupid kind of working class nazi that waves flags and chants slogans and marches downtown and gets beat up by the pigs; trump is the kind of business class nazi that is all about cartelization and class hierarchy. the real winners in a fascist state are not the aryan race but the banking class.

so, i don't want to drop the front against fascism in syria. the islamic supremacist syrian nazis need to be fought everywhere they're found. they can be given no quarter. they must be eradicated by the civilized forces of the free world, as dark of a period as we may find ourselves in. nobody is coming to save us, we have to do it ourselves.

however, i may tentatively support the idea - and i think i'm talking to marco rubio here, as unpredictable an outcome as that might have been a few years ago. - of tying american aid to syria to coordination with israel in fighting hezbollah. stated crudely, i would support telling the syrians that they're going to get cut off if they don't work with israel to eliminate hezbollah. also tied to these aid packages would need to be a requirement that syria absorb lebanon's unwanted shia refugee population, which the indigenous christians in lebanon have grown fed up with and want gone, and which are actually almost entirely syrian in origin. the syrians may want to ship them to the east and that might be good for everybody. these kinds of population transfers are unheard of in europe but are normal in this area and have been since the assyrians. shipping the shias in lebanon, who are not indigenous but almost solely refugees, to the east of syria or west of iraq would transfer them somewhere where they have a like-minded culture and get them out of the hair of the indigenous christians and jews of the western mediterranean.

hezbollah pretends that it is protecting an indigenous population in the region, but this is absurd, much like absurd claims that palestinians are indigenous. what we call palestinians are about 70% converted hebrews and about 30% colonizing arabs that invaded not in the 7th century but in the modern era. both lebanon and palestine were 90%+ christian from the byzantine period until the 1700s, and lebanon retained that identity until the 20th century. the islamic colonization of lebanon and genocide of the christians there is barely a generation old; it's concurrent, it's ongoing. living people could and should be held accountable for these crimes against humanity. both hamas and hezbollah are at the front of foreign-financed shia colonizing movements, with the purposeful intent to change the demographics of the region from christian and jewish to shia and arab. this process has it's roots in the armenian genocide, which in truth is ongoing. that's what you're supporting when you wave these flags and attend these marches - the current incarnation of the evolution of the armenian genocide. uneducated fake leftists that simply don't understand what they're supporting should be embarrassed by their ignorance and malleability as useful idiots, but you have to educate them before they can understand their fallacies. 

hezbollah is not protecting an indigenous population, they are unwanted invaders that the nominally democratic state has condemned and that are aggressively colonizing the region with the explicit intent of chasing out the indigenous christian groups.

shipping out the shia refugees to iraq would have the profound effect of pulling support for hezbollah out from underneath it. hezbollah requires constant immigration, in fact almost entirely from syria, in order to maintain it's support level. trump might not fully understand it, but he is actually hitting on something profound, here.

there was a lot of easily deconstructed propaganda about assad in western media. i'm not going to get into that here because he's gone and the russians have bailed entirely, but one of the points pushed by the west was that assad was an empty proxy for iran. there was little to no truth to that. in fact, assad was a secularist at the opposite end of the muslim political spectrum to the irgc and the iranians hated him, but they had to tolerate him because syria and iran were both russian allies. they had to go to the same meetings and get the same memos. there was some moderate to trivial coordination when the russians demanded it, but no active collaboration. they were more like bitter enemies forced to get along by moscow. syria was hardly an iranian proxy. in fact, assad would still be there, if he was one.

however, the basic issue brought up in western media of syria acting as a transit point between lebanon and iran hasn't changed and still needs to be addressed. this should be tied to western funding.

the demands on syria to maintain us funding, short of being dismantled and overthrown, should consequently be the following

1) take your shia refugees back from lebanon. all of them. do what you will with them.

2) coordinate with lebanon and israel in building a common front to just get hezbollah the fuck out of there and figure it out after

3) that includes preventing the desert from acting as a caravan transit medium

4) respect lebanon's sovereignty as a christian state and israel's sovereignty as a jewish state.

those should be seen as necessary but not sufficient conditions to tolerate the syrian government, which still must be expected to hold elections immediately. but you have to work with shitheads in the darkness of war. this is no time for moral purity. a pragmatic syria policy should be welcomed, if it's actually pragmatic and actually advances western goals.