laundry/walk-in closet/bathroom

the bathroom is off the kitchen, and the laundry is off the bathroom. these three rooms - bathroom, laundry, bedroom - are about the same size and placed side to side at the back of the house.

the bathroom required more caulking than the other spaces and i'm still looking to put a few mirrors in and caulk over the window, and there will need to be some work done fixing the walls, but it's pretty close to being finished.

the laundry/walk-in closet/sew room is an unfinished space, like the garage/sun-room in the front. this is the one part of the apartment i have confirmed rodent activity in, through an entry point somewhere back behind the piping. the entry point is also the source of a significant draft that i'm not going to plug up until the fall. i had to do a tremendous amount of cleaning in this space.

walking into the bathroom.

the door to the laundry is to the immediate left of the door to the bathroom. there's a door to the hot water tank there, too - so three doors. the boxes in front of the door are a temporary measure to prevent insects or rodents from crawling under it.

this is the entry into the laundry. the three rugs on the ground (which is concrete) were all there when i moved in and cleaning each of them was a priority in this space. i also scrubbed, lysoled, wiped, swept, mopped, vacuumed, scraped, sprayed and did whatever else i could to get the concrete floor as clean as i could. the dresser was left here by the previous tenant, but in the main part of the unit.

stepping onto the rug, taking a step forward and looking left opens up a narrow concrete space surrounded by recently built over wood planks, underneath a heating shaft going back to the furnace (also in a closet downstairs). i suspect that this was at one point a hallway and lobby coming in and out of the backyard. there's still the remnants of an old door frame, here, including a metal chain. in that space, the previous tenant left a large clothing rack that i have filled up with tank tops, dresses and old shirts from a previous life. there is enough space to get in there and to pull it around a little. i also installed a $10 amazon lamp as a light fixture by taping it around the wooden joist. there's a switch, but it's always on. so, there's the closet.

this is a nice dresser. as mentioned, it was left here. i don't think it's actually an old dresser, but it's manufactured to look like one. i have filled it with a variety of tshirts, long sleeve tshirts and sweaters of varying thickness, organized by thickness. i have a lot of shirts. the dresser is actually totally full.

i bought this wardrobe organizer on amazon for $40 and was not impressed by it. it was supposed to have a more closet-y shape to it with "shelves" for pants and towels and have a rod with some clothes hangers in it for jackets. i was going to use it for exactly what is in the picture - jeans, towels, bedsheets, etc - but i ignored the intended shape of the wardrobe and just built a 4x3 organizer with four shelves and 12 cubby holes, which i'm using for (1) different sized jeans in the close column, (2) various types of dust covers for electronics in the second column and (3) rags and clothes i want to try to sew before i give up on them. i have a big pile of jeans with rips that i want to sew.

this useful little shelf was also left here and is perfect for a laundry shelf. the shelf is broken, but it doesn't matter if i use it like this.

so, that's the wall.

on the back wall is the craft table i'm using as a sewing table and general clothes making or fixing table. i bought the table for $20 on kijiji. the shower curtains hanging from the wall were intended to block the draft but are now also acting as a deterrent to rodents, along with multiple cups of bleach to block paths and a handful of glue traps to catch anything that falls. i'm going to eventually clean them and then put them over the walls, and will likely buy some more for that reason. this is to cover the walls both for cosmetic reasons and because rats cannot climb on shower curtains. i need to buy a chair for in here as well as a step stool to get into the ceiling to clean. the lamp on the ground was left here and will probably not stay in this room, as there are two other $10 amazon lamps intended for this space (currently in the bathroom).

this is a mini sewing machine that i bought for $50 and should do what i need but, if it doesn't, i could get a bigger one, too. the extension cord was recently bought on amazon and has usb ports in case i need them in here. you can see an open hole under the bathtub that has been a problem but that i'm not hearing activity in more recently. i will probably seek to block that.

this is the dryer, on top of what i believe is an ironing table. i don't have any clothes i would iron, but it's there, and that table will open up when i get a chair. in fact, there are foldable wood chairs in the table, but i'd rather get a more comfy chair. the dryer belongs to the owner. it works fine. i was initially confused by the indoor vent, but it's actually helpful as a source of heat in this space.

the washing machine, also owned by the owner, was dirty and mangled, it needed to be taped up and the dispensers are broken, but it works well enough if you just put liquid soap right in it. it's a shame that it's a little busted, but it works, so whatever. the reflection of the duct is for the fan that was put in in december.

so, that's the close wall.

i bought this shop vac on sale at canadian tire for $50 and it has made it much easier to clean in here, but i'm not done in here yet.

this lamp is above the washer and was here when i moved in as well. this one will stay there, and i bought the other three in this room to be the same type as it.

back to the bathroom.

i bought that dust buster on amazon for $30 about two years ago.

this metal shelf was purchased on amazon for $40. the cardboard taped to the shelves is to eliminate the holes and comes from two cut up cereal boxes. it's shampoo/conditioner on bottom, towels on second rack, then soap and cleansers, shaving items and oral care items. 

i built this as a makeup shelf in 2015 and there's a little still there, but it's now intended to hold hair items on top, toilet paper on bottom and frequently used items in between. a full makeup table exsts, but  haven't screwed t together yet. there are some shower shelves i haven't installed yet on the bottom.

i bought this as a towel rack in the previous basement. i don't remember how much it was. i have a larger mirror to put behind it, but i need to buy a shelf to put it on first.

here's the whole wall.

the shower was actually pretty clean and may have been recently reinstalled. it had to be recaulked, which i did. i put my own shower curtain on.

i had to put a little silicone in to keep the shower handle on, but i'm actually not replacing this shower head, and i usually do.

this is directly above the bathroom sink. there is a window where there would normally be a mirror. it's to ground level, quite large and directly visible from outside. it's kind of creepy, actually. instead of looking at a mirror, you're looking out a window.

so what i did was cover it up with a drape and get a fan put in for starters. there's a window behind that. there's two of those $10 amazon lights taped to the drapes and a small shard of a mirror that was previously leaned against there but fell to the ground and got smashed.

what i am going to do is take the drape down, seal up the window and then cover over it with a large piece of cardboard. that has the pieces of the shattered mirror glued on to it. i'm going to have a string of bright usb lights placed around the shards of glass. it should have a pretentious art deco look to it.

that will be my bathroom mirror with vanity lights

as for myself, i'm still recovering from a year's worth of damaged hygiene. i'm looking better everyday.

there's the sink. it was pretty dirty, and the sink wasn't leaking, exactly, but needed to be tightened. it was not connected to the wall well and a lot of caulking was needed to fill a crack at the wall. it's much more sturdy now. the black soap holder replaces a margarine lid and was an amazon buy.

this is the fan they put in, and i'm glad they did. brand new. works great.

this is where the rodents have been sleeping. one of the managers just punched the wall open to fix a leak. it is actually the kitchen sink and not the bathroom sink that is directly above this. i put some glue traps and a container of bleach in there and i think there's actually a dead rat in there that's decaying because they did move the bleach container and now i'm seeing insects in there. i am not touching it for now. i've just taped it over, and they won't touch the tape, but i have at times seen several in there. it's weird. i can cut open the tape with an exacto knife and put things in there, then tape it back up. getting in there and cleaning it out with the shop vac will need to be done at least once, but not until i'm ready to dispose of the contents of the shop vac. the rats are not afraid of me, for some reason. they'll just stop and look right at me. it could be the height difference (cats will not fear you if looking in through a basement window either), but rats are not remotely as stupid as cats are, and cats are legitimately fucking stupid.

i will need to get that fixed. for now, that is gross, but of minimal concern.

the tenants above me are not from canada and don't seem to be that concerned about cohabiting with rodents.

the toilet was extremely dirty when i moved in, but that's not why i changed the toilet seat. the toilet seat was for somebody that must have been barely five feet tall and must have looked essentially like a child. i bought that toilet seat in 2014 for $50 at home depot, and it's been in a bag since 2018, and became mildly discoloured. the containers on the side are bleach and vinegar, and the top is full of powdered bleach. you can see where i tried to seal up the floor and the sink in the back.

you can see the powdered bleach on the replaced toilet seat. it worked well enough.

 i bought a makeup and charging table with a separate mirror and lights for this space but i have yet to set it up due to concerns about water leaks from the rodents sleeping in that space. that will go there when the rodent issue upstairs is resolved.

that's a picture of the wall, missing the makeup table (that power cord will go on the table and the lights will all be swapped out).

...and, that is looking out of the bathroom and back into the kitchen.

walkthrough remaining spaces

this is looking from the bedroom to the front door. the immediate foreground is where i'm building the recording studio. there will be shelving with a stationary bicycle closer to the front door.

this will be where the exercise bike and shelving for cds and textbooks is put. most of the items in the picture will end up in the garage.

the garage is behind this door, which leads upstairs to a lobby with a front door. i have not cleaned out the garage yet, but it will be the next task. that will let me clear a lot of this stuff out of there.

this is a shot looking back to my studio desk.

i don't really need a living room because i don't have people over or watch tv. but i'm going to set up a listening room with a stereo, one or two couches and some coffee tables. this is looking through the living room into the kitchen.

this is looking back at the listening room from the kitchen (with the hallway leading to the front door behind it)

kitchen

some things in the kitchen are being redone or revisited, but i set up the kitchen first and posted a summary of it:

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2025/10/step-one-in-setting-this-place-up-was.html

i have added caulking to the floors and am going to be swapping out some shelves due to load issues. i haven't set the saw up yet.

the coffee table book is still coming, and these pictures will be better organized, but this is a terse documentation of the cleaning i've been doing this month.

bedroom:

as mentioned, the bedroom is relatively small. to me, bedrooms need to have beds, dressers, closets, stereos, bookshelves and writing/typing spaces. the thing that can't fit in here is a closet, which has been moved to it's own space.

the bedroom had drafty baseboards, but i didn't notice until the cold snap. right now, the floor is still thawing from the freezing winter, but the drafts are sealed. the windows weren't that bad, but they were sealed. 

everything was scrubbed, washed and vacuumed, including the bed. the bed took a while to clean a coffee spill and some general dirtiness off of. 

i'm not done in here yet. i need shelves and i need to put books on the shelves. i have not set up the typing system or the stereo. my celestions need new tweeters.

walking in.

broad view.

the kefs will eventually go in the living room, after i get new tweeters for the celestions, which will go here instead. i found these matching speaker tables on the curb for free.

i bought this dresser for $50 when i first moved to windsor. the system on the left is the living room system, temporarily connected to the kefs in here. the bedroom system with the tweeterless celestions is currently beside it. there is also a monitor for the studio and a printer/scanner, here. the bedroom system will move to where the living room system is, the monitor will go in the studio and the printer will come down on to the dresser, where it is now. i lost two of theses drawers and have instead just taped the front of them to the dresser. the four drawers have socks, underwear and pajamas. the rest of my clothes are in the walk in closet.

i bought this desk in the apartment i was briefly in over the summer, for $20. it was intended to be a sewing desk, but there's a better sewing desk in the walk-on closet. the chair was found for free on the curb. i need to do my taxes this weekend. this is a writing/typing desk, for when i want to sit up to work. the laptop on it is also temporary, as is the 90s ethernet cable.

i have a filing cabinet and some shelves to move in to this space but haven't yet. this shelf will be for larger reference books. note the caulking on the baseboards.

the whole wall. the windows did not require much caulking. the windows open to a fenced area and don't require drapes, so i might not bother.

the back wall. i have some wood to install some shelves for paperbacks on it. there will be two (for now) full wall shelves stacked with novels, for the journal project. that's my old sarah painting from 2002.

the modern bedtable - hard drives, laptops, usb keys, ip phones...and kleenex boxes. gantz graf, baby. that chromebook is my current typing pc, which i need to upgrade. there are two newer hp chromebooks in the pile that don't expire until 2030. two of these tables were cheap walmart buys and one was bought second hand on kijiji in 2015ish.

the bed. 

again. the white cylindrical object is a hepa air filter, which is less necessary now, but i'm still using. there's an alarm clock and a container of pomegranate grapefruit palmolive dish soap i use as an air freshener.

i will get some smaller tables to put on top of these ones to organize and declutter some of the smaller items.

my airgapped typing pc, a lenovo office pc, is in this box, ready to be setup with a custom windows 7 image.

the other kef with the other table, plus an electric heater on a box. the box has the shelving unit for in the corner in it.

looking out into the future studio.

it's not entirely clear what's going on here.

several reports in arab-funded papers are claiming the kurds were defeated by the syrian army. these reports replace the usual pictures of female fighters, which western media has liked to print, with very unkurdish appearing bearded men, following islamic dress codes. this looks to me like it's islamist propaganda, which the western press has a tendency to fall for, and it's not clear if there's any value to it at all, or if it's distorting reality and contains some truth hidden in it.

it does seem to be clear that there has been a kurdish withdrawal from what are historically armenian and assyrian regions that arabs have been occupying since they were settled there by the ottomans after the armenian genocide.

the kurds have claimed that they never intended to occupy these "arab" areas but were holding them to prevent isis from returning to them and were waiting for the proper conditions to withdraw. what we're seeing are not conditions that would be considered acceptable, as they amount to a functional isis victory, and it's clear there was a retreat from a surprise attack. but, it's important to understand that they were only there to hold the area, in the first place. the kurds would not be expected to put up much of a fight in these areas.

i certainly oppose a return of isis, but it seems as though the americans are in support of an isis takeover of the syrian state, under apparent saudi pressure. the kurds have a fight on their hand if that's the case.

the kurds should be able to defend themselves against random isis terrorist cells and against the syrian army, if they have to. the part of the narrative in western media, which is funded with arab money, that's not making sense is the idea that the syrian army defeated the kurds and drove them out. that's laughable. the kurds will beat the shit out of the syrian army, which is no better than a terrorist cell, if they have to. the kurds can fight the iraqis if they have to, too. they can also put up a good fight against the iranians.

the kurds cannot fight the turks and the kurds cannot fight the americans. if the kurds were legitimately defeated, that would suggest either the turks or americans are responsible.

but, that is what isn't clear. 

i have read some reports in kurdish media that are stating that the syrian state has agreed to stay out of rojava, which is smaller than the area you've been seeing on maps for several years. i would not trust the fascists that have just taken over syria. however, i have yet to see claims that the syrians have moved into rojava.

if the kurds can hold rojava proper with minimal interference from the nazis in damascus, they will maintain their sovereignty. i certainly would not expect the syrian army, run by terrorists, to be able to succeed in dislodging the kurds from their actual homeland, or have any say in how they choose to govern themselves. it will be a dangerous relationship for the kurds to navigate, and time will tell if it is sustainable. the new regime in syria is not like the government in iraq, or even the government in turkey, which are nominally democratic. it's more like the government in iran. i would suspect it isn't.

but one would expect the kurds to withdraw, analyze and wait rather than stand and fight and that seems to be what they're doing.

claims that rojava is on the brink of destruction would be reliant on what the turks are up to, and that doesn't seem to be a serious threat at this point. it seems to just be saudi propaganda.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260220-for-syria-s-kurds-dream-of-autonomy-fades-under-damascus-deal

i need to reiterate that i think the united states can completely wipe out the irgc in less than 12 hours and that it isn't restrained by the kind of cultural considerations that the russians have been in declining to target ukrainian politicians. the americans can, should and probably will just wipe them out.

what happens next is likely to be messy and take a while to sort out, but there's no particular reason why the americans need to get involved at the outset. it is probably in america's long term interest to let iran figure it out and call washington when they've got their shit in order.

this is actually an algorithm and a policy that i would support in a number of theatres, if clear guidelines are set around the characteristics of the governments being annihilated. in order for a government to qualify for overnight liquidation by the united states, it would need to be sufficiently authoritarian (theocracies would be the worst offenders) and demonstrate sufficient human rights abuses against it's own people.

the iranian government is the worst state actor on the planet and clearly most deserving of liquidation by the american world police. there are other states in the mena that are deserving of liquidation, and a few in southeast asia.

hiring mercenaries.

great.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/government-plans-boost-canadian-forces-221227434.html

restricting refugees' access to services will not reduce costs, it will just redistribute them. if canada is going to have refugees, those refugees need to be funded by federal taxes. if there is no money from the federal government to fund resettlement, it should restrict refugee entry to levels it can financially support.

"letting the market deal with it" is not the solution, it's the problem.

that said, most canadians agree with this. trudeau seems to have had an abusive childhood that warped his perspective of who he was. he thought he was a prince, but he didn't have a treasury, except the country's; he was a philanthropist without a fortune to distribute. canadian taxes became his fortune to distribute for his philanthropy. trudeau was completely out of touch with public opinion on this point, which wants a generous but sustainable approach to resettlement.

there is a process for alberta to follow if it seeks a constitutional amendment and it has the right to try to do that. this is a very difficult process, but, on this particular issue, it has a moderate possibility of success.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/danielle-smith-alberta

we should only hope that the unconquered sun, the sol invictus, should not smite us for our insolence.

the word insolence is of etymological value.

the local weather forecast has been having a lot of issues over the last few months. it gets the right idea, but has difficulty nailing a scaling factor, and consistently misses timing by several hours. it may forecast a warm up, but be off by five degrees, or a cool down and by off by five degrees. they have generally been better at this over the last many years. what's going on?

the forecasts this week make it clear to me what is happening.

- today, it was dark and rainy. they correctly forecast the rain, but the high is about five degrees lower than predicted.

- the days before that were sunny and warmer than seasonal, although pretty blicky cold still. they got the idea right, but the actual high was about five degrees higher than forecast.

it's fairly clear that the factor they're missing is sunlight and that the sun is affecting the weather right now more than usual.

this might be partially due to blackbody radiation on the earth and the cold surface temperature releasing less heat overnight or when it's cloudy while the ground remains frozen, but the factor is the sunlight.

listen.

concerns about the clear reality of nazi collaboration in western continental europe aside, the invasion of the atlantic coast of europe, which canada participated in, was largely a liberating process. sort of. the first thing the anglo-american forces did was slaughter the socialists, of course. during the war, the resistance to the nazi occupation was more aligned with stalin, as the russians were fighting a real war, and the british were fighting a phony war. the nazis merely meant to occupy france; they meant to depopulate russia. hitler's attack on stalin was stupid, and the russians were going to win, regardless. it was a matter of time before the red army drove into berlin, paris and probably on to madrid, where they would have set up puppet states out of the resistance to the german occupation. so, had the forces of capitalism not come in from england to "save europe", the result would have been the socialist soviet republics of france and spain, and probably of italy, too. the anglo-americans had to kill all of them socialists as the first order of business, to make sure the continent was safe for investment. this is not taught history, but there were large massacres by incoming british, canadian and american soldiers.

but what is at least true is that they didn't support the nazis. they may not have wanted an american occupation, but at least it wasn't the nazis. all evidence suggests that the dutch and french are appreciative of canadian efforts to undo the german occupation, even if the resultant american occupation wasn't their intended or desired outcome.

in historical israel, on the other hand, there was a war going on between the then current occupiers (the english and french) and a previous occupation group (the arabs), as the long standing hegemon, the turks, also an occupier, had been replaced. nobody welcomed british troops to the mandate area as liberators. the arab tribal leaders were aligned with the nazis, and fighting to overthrow the british. these troops were in place to occupy the region and prevent an uprising, not to liberate it.

it's easy to condemn the arab groups for aligning with the nazis out of free will rather than being forced to submit to them, although it's clear they had a common enemy: not the british, but the jews. however, that's not really relevant. the british should not have held on to the area so long after world war one. if the arabs wanted to join the axis powers, and hitler and mussolini would have them, that was their prerogative. the next step would be to blow them up as axis powers rather than occupy them to stop them from joining the axis powers, and that would have been a better outcome, with a more clear result. had the british blown up historical israel in the second world war instead of protecting it, it would not be having the problems it is having today. if 1945 is year zero, the calendar in historical israel was never reset. that's the problem.

it is fundamentally incorrect to equate graves of colonial soldiers in gaza with fields of dead canadians in belgium or france.

the canadian presence in historical israel was tied to a british occupation of it, and the graveyard in it is a marker of the anglo-french colonial presence in the region.

it is correct that it be demolished.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/gaza-cemetery-graves-9.7093884

for myself, i am done major cleaning in here for a little while. i'm now focusing just on vacuuming, spraying, wiping over the four finished rooms, on a daily or bidaily basis.

the next step is for me to clean myself, and i'll need to be taking lengthy overnight showers on a daily basis for the next week or two, while i'm typing during the day.

i'm choosing to be patient and methodical as i fight for each square inch one at a time. this is the russian theory of rat control, a slow and grinding and unstoppable movement forwards, inch by inch, month by month. resistance is futile.

- figure out where they are

- clean it up. immaculately.

- figure out how they get from where they were to where they are

- block it off using silicon, sprays, glue, chlorine, vinyl, etc

- repeat

eventually, i will get to the dnieper.

the grocery run on saturday threw me off a little, and i slept most of the day, but was able to get the rest of the caulking i needed done finished on sunday night (saturday morning) and monday night (tuesday morning), took a long shower on tuesday morning and then slept all day today. i'm awake and ready to type, but a few days behind. that's ok.

something i noticed this morning was a build up of black specs around one of the areas i sealed up, which was apparently something trying to get in there that i think was a spider because i noticed a couple of large black spiders crawling along the baseboards on the other side. i've seen a couple of these, but i can't identify the species. they are never in a web. whatever they are, they are trying to get under the floor and can't, and i'm cleaning up a lot of shit they're leaving behind.

as for the rats, i'm confident that they're out of the laundry. they were leaving territorial markers, but i cleaned it all up and they've stopped. the increased light in the corners, the constant cleaning and lysoling and the placement of bleach around several spaces is working in repelling them, although i think they migrated into the furnace room, which is also dark and concealed. if so, i'll have to deal with that a little later. i am not done cleaning up the ceiling yet (these are roof rats, they're coming from the top down) and will need to buy a step stool to get up and look in there to do it. there's a hole that some pipes disappear into with a nasty draft that seems to be an entry point and that i need to clean out and get some insulation into, which i'm looking to wait until the end of summer to do. i will enjoy the hot air through the draft in the summer, but need to clean the place up. the wall in there us exposed, and rats can climb it, so i'm going to drape over it with some shower curtains left behind by the previous tenant, and may buy a few more. that will make it more difficult for the rats to move downwards, although they could still follow the broad pipes in, unless i can block that off. it's better, and good enough to use the space, so long as i'm constantly cleaning. another annoyance is that the kids upstairs are constantly jumping on the floors, shaking doewn dust and wood chips and dried shit, although i think i got most of that out with the shop vac.

one of my containers of bleach was dragged away. so, that tactic worked, and i'll have to see if it killed anything, in the end. however, the tactic i'm taking is expulsion rather than execution. i'm mostly trying to block entry. i do have glue traps intended to block their movement, but i'm not setting up baits with snap traps, although i bought a few. not yet; not unless i have to. everything, right now, is about bobbytrapping the space, with the expectation that they're smart enough to see the traps, jump upwards 90 degrees in the air, look at each other on the way down and say "i...i'm...getting out of here...", then spin around and run straight out by converting their legs into wheels, somehow. that is correct rattus mechanics, is it not? i think you get the point.

but, if they won't leave? yeah - there's glue traps for them to fall into and piles of bleach staggered around all over the place, including in places they sleep, and if they want to try to drag the bleach out and spill it everywhere all over them, it will probably kill them when they groom. but i'm giving them a choice to run away and find somewhere else to sleep, or to try to drag the bleach out, if they're stubborn. i want them to run, but if they choose to be stubborn, i have to kill them.

quebec actually wants more control over it's immigration policy. france cannot just deport people to quebec.

but i could imagine macron calling legault up and a bunch of cabinet ministers sitting around a cabinet table dumbfounded, followed by an awkward silence.

and then

il parle francais.

they should deport him to quebec.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11669836/france-suspends-crinon-after-fight-vs-canada/

i hope they get the son of a bitch, actually.

it would be better to take the nazi out and let syria have an actual civil war. secularism is by far the more popular viewpoint, and the secularists will handily defeat the islamists if given the opportunity.

you will note that this is similar to lebanon and iran, but the opposite of (southern) iraq.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/12/five-plots-to-kill-syrian-president-or-ministers-were-foiled-last-year-says-un

you know, it would be interesting if some group of barbaric thugs showed up around the strait of hormuz and started sending advanced ballistic missiles at iranian vessels coming in and out of it.

i'm just saying.

is there a facebook group called dropouts for ford?

that's right, you should study being a fatass ignoramus, instead.

then, if you come from a wealthy enough family you can be a high-level politician without having any substantive education at all.

who needs an education when you can have feudalism and class hierarchy, instead?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-osap-cuts-9.7094009

the trump administration is trying to undo the narrative of islamic fascism as america's natural enemy that my generation grew up with and which defines the global outlook of most people under 50, in contrast to the cold war narrative that defines the lives of baby boomers. during the cold war, the bad guy was russia. in the post cold war period, russia is no longer a bad guy; the bad guy is now islam. while i don't really like the cold war narrative, because i'm a leftist, i'm largely in agreement with the war on terrorism narrative...because i'm a leftist. whether the communists were bad guys is a subtle issue, and the correct answer is something like "they weren't really worse than the capitalists, and, when you look at it carefully, they were probably less bad, overall". it's hard to get angry about communism or think they're going to ruin us all with their radical egalitarianism and want to fight them. but the islamists have no reedemable qualities and such a subtle discourse is not applicable. these are much badder bad guys, and it's much easier to hate a religious person than it is to hate a communist. if the communists won, it probably wouldn't be so bad; if the muslims won, it would be backwardsness and hell on earth, in a viciously barbaric legal system that rejects any concept of dissent.

to the trump administration, that appears to be exactly the problem. they don't like this narrative at all. they want more religion, not less religion. it seems to bother them that we're vilifying islamic fascists (or were) and are sending money to communist kurdish groups (or were) to fight off the fascists. this contradicts their basic principles and alienates the groups in the region that they want to align with, like the far right governments in turkey and saudi arabia...and, increasingly, in iran. this administration wants america's allies to be fascist extremists that want to enforce their dark age rules on everybody and america's enemies to be utopian socialists trying to defend themselves. the war on terrorism does not fit the narrative they want, but a war on transgendered people does.

as mentioned, this is mostly irrelevant to me. it's not going to make any difference to me on a day-to-day basis.

but if this embrace of islamic fascism by the highest levels of american government begins to filter downwards, we're all going to suffer dramatically, as they systematically take away all of our rights to make us pliable and obedient.

there seems to be some sort of attempt by some deep state intelligence agency to frame transgendered people as crazed mass murderers, apparently due to the american right's newfound embrace of islamic fascism. we don't have islamist terrorists anymore. now we have crazy trans people.

it's an easier scapegoat, i guess. it makes it easier for america to align it's foreign policy objectives with islamic fascism, and for the mainstream narrative to attack a group that is inherently secular, rather than one that suffers from the mental illness of faith.

i don't really care, frankly. it doesn't change anything of any substance for me, as an individual. i have never cared what religious conservatives thought about me before and i don't really care now. they can continue to go fuck themselves. i will continue to defend myself from attacks by religious extremists. i have never been attacked by a christian, but i'm constantly defending myself from attacks by muslims. that's been a constant, and this doesn't change that.

i'm a little more concerned about shifts in us foreign policy towards an alignment with islamic fascism, and out of an opposition to it. it's these shifts in foreign policy that are going to create more substantive shifts in the global order that are going to put everybody's freedom in jeopardy. my freedom was already in jeopardy, anyways.

the league should have listened when they told gary bettman that shootouts would ruin the game.

if they just went to overtime instead, everybody would still be alive.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/shooter-killed-ex-wife-and-a-son-in-rhode-island-ice-rink-attack-police-say/

the truth is that, in canada, the liberals' decision to try to turn us into a military dictatorship is a gift to the ndp, as it lets them run on transferring military spending to healthcare spending. they couldn't really do that before.

but, it's a measure of the value of a society's quality of life to compare how much they spend on shortening lives v how much they spend on extending them.

if we can spend billions of dollars a year on bombs, i don't want to hear about how there's no money for healthcare or education. that's absolute bullshit - the money is right there in the defense budget.

we clearly need to cut military spending, then.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11669653/ontario-unsustainable-health-care-spending/

mark carney thinks he's john maynard keynes, but he looks more like adolf hitler to me.

his attempts to assert "sovereignty" are going to backfire and get us invaded. frankly, if i have to choose between being an arab colony or an american protectorate, i'd rather be an american protectorate.

so, i'll say it again.

i, for one, welcome our new yankee overlords.

without getting into it, the reason it's been cold is that the top of the earth got bombarded with a magnetic storm from the sun that broke up the polar vortex and sent cold air all over the place. there may be multiple causes of the sudden increases in temperature that cause the polar vortex to smash open like it did several times this year, but the way in which the vortex collapsed this year, sending cold air out in every direction, is strongly suggestive of a solar storm being the causal event, this time.

does that mean we're heading into an ice age? no. quite the opposite.

how these magnetic storms affect the earth's weather depends on when and how they hit us. if they hit us in the winter, they break up the vortex and make it colder by pushing cold air down into the lower latitudes. if they hit us in the summer, the increase in temperature will lead to mild to moderate warming outcomes that are more pronounced in the hemisphere that gets nailed, which is usually the north. this has to do with the current tilt in the axial procession, which makes the northern hemisphere more likely to get nailed.

the problem in the narrative in recent decades is that the media, in apparent collusion with competition for funding dollars in scholastic departments, has set the question up as a debate and competition. this is so absurdly capitalist. capital destroys everything; it has this reverse midas touch to it. so, let us go back to hegel and remember that competition just creates false dichotomies in place of the useful synthesis presented by dialectics.

if you want to understand the weather, you need to stop with the petty bickering between the solar scientists and the earth scientists, which generates false dichotomies, and get back to trying to build a proper synthesis of the two sciences. by discounting solar science on it's face, earth scientists have tried to explain things they cannot explain, and created absurd hypothesis, like the idea that sudden stratospheric warming is caused solely by ocean heat somehow breaking the laws of thermodynamics and jumping up into the stratosphere. conversely, solar scientists have tried to discount earth science altogether, in reducing everything to milankovitch cycles.

i assert that both fields are valid and both things are true.

- yes, global warming is caused by greenhouse gasses

- yes, ssws are usually caused by solar flares using well understood physics, and rarely if ever caused by rossby waves somehow breaking physics to warm the stratosphere

- yes, ice ages are caused by milankovitch cycles and often undone by volcanism

- yes, we're at solar maximum in what looks like a weakening solar output, at least for now

- yes, anthropogenic global warming is real.

we don't have the science to conclude we're going into a "grand solar minimum". 

and we don't yet know what the resultant outcome will be if lower solar outcome coincides with increased greenhouse gas emission and a milankovitch cycle hurdling us back into a glaciation period. 

there is nothing wrong with me pointing out that it might actually be true that if we don't saturate the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses then we might be heading directly into a glaciation, and that more and more carbon emissions might be the only hope we have of preventing that glaciation. but, unless some science is being suppressed, we're not there yet.

right now, the best science we have says that despite the weakening solar output and despite the milankovitch cycles, carbon emissions are going to lead to out of control temperature increases in the upcoming decades even if we do get them under control, immediately.

so, yes, it's been cold and it's been cold because the sun is throwing more radiation at the north pole, which is warming the north pole, and causing the vortex that keeps the cold at the pole to break up and scatter. what neither side of the argument is explaining to you is that, when that happens, it means the cold air collapses. we're not experiencing the north pole freezing over because the sun is weakening, although that could happen, too; we're experiencing the north pole getting nuked by the sun, and blowing the cold air out in all directions. it's cold in siberia and in canada, but it's actually warm at the north pole, itself. that's unusual - most cold snaps caused by ocean currents, to the extent that they weakly are, lead to high or low pressure systems moving heat on the earth around, so that the cold air shifts here or there. that's not what happened this winter. this winter, the pole got very warm, and the cold pushed out everywhere.

that means what happens next is that it gets warmer, not colder, because the nuclear weapon that the sun bombed us with blew up the polar vortex altogether. once that cold air pushes south and dissipates, it's gone.

so, that's the good news: the same solar event that created such a cold winter will result in a warm spring because it superheated all the cold air out of the northern hemisphere. we experienced this as a brutal blast of cold air, but that blast of cold air was a temporary result of an overall warming process and, once it dissipates, we'll get a couple of hot months now, instead.

the system is too complicated to try to predict further than that.

that's right, and this has been obvious for a while.

selling off assets to foreign capital is not sovereignty, nor is this asserting any sort of independence, nor is this going to result in stable economic outcomes. this is short term thinking and selling to the highest bidder under the umbrella of us hegemony.

you don't need much economic education to understand this. just look at the name of the body that we're seeking "investment" from - a sovereign wealth fund. arab countries generally have sovereign wealth funds. norway has one. canada does not.

so, whose sovereignty are we supporting? the answer is the obvious one: the country with the sovereign wealth fund, at the expense of our own.

the concept of canada has a serious issue in front of it that it needs to address if it wants to survive, and that is it's aversion to funding economic development using the bank of canada. why, exactly, do we have a central bank at all, if we can't use it to print money? we used to do that.

i've looked into this a lot because there's a lot of bad arguments on the left about this. the reality is that we used to fund infrastructure projects with the bank of canada but stopped in the early 1970s as an indirect consequence of something called the nixon shock, which occurred when nixon suddenly abandoned the gold standard without warning. since then, canada has borrowed money from private lenders and paid interest on it.

without getting into the economics of it, most of which i think is wrong, the geopolitics of it is that we followed the direction of american hegemony, as a client state. nothing that i know about pierre trudeau suggests to me that he wanted to do that, but he did that. call jean and ask him, while you still can.

if american hegemony is over, we shouldn't have to do that anymore, we should have a place for public funding of infrastructure and public ownership of infrastructure, like we did before the americans forced us to stop. this is one of the most substantive restrictions american hegemony placed on it's clients, and should be the first thing to be jettisoned in a multi-polar world.

that doesn't mean we should turn the bank of canada into a magic check book. it's not one. but, the collapse of american hegemony would mean the imf is no longer policing us, and we can stop paying out trillions to private debt holders.

canada needs to make this change if it wants to survive. selling assets to arab countries that want to colonize us is going to get us invaded by the americans, and if that is what our political class has in the plans to "restore sovereignty", i have no interest in it at all and i welcome our new yankee overlords.

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/canadas-new-uae-trade-and-investment-deal-is-bad-news/

my broccoli was frozen last night, so i just made some eggs. groceries came in this morning, but my ground bison meat was thawed out by this evening, so i made the quesadillas first.

this is half a leftovers meal, although i also bought some things for it. i thought it was tasty. but it was also not how i intended, and it was pretty filling. i made three and could only eat one.

the bison was a food bank gift that has been in my freezer since the summer. the food available at the food bank was in fact often a little exotic. i guess the bison didn't sell well. bison meat was at one point a staple of people on this continent. this time, i found it was indiscernible from hamburger, and i couldn't have told you it was something different.

this was how i made the quesadillas:

- put the bacon on first. three slices in olive oil.

- put 300 g of ground bison in a larger pan and wait until it's brown. i had a taco mix the superstore was handing out a while back that i used once it was done. i added cumin, oregano, paprika and frank's.

- the bison should cook fast. reduce heat and let simmer. 

- just dump the pan of bacon, with grease, in the bison meat and continue to let simmer. 

- i am using the last 3 greek pitas from the pizzas

- slice each one in half

- i was intending on putting items on one side of each pita and putting the other side back on before baking, but these quesadillas are too loaded for that

- it may be useful to use a separate pan for each pita you cook

- make a separate bowl of salsa for each pita

- you may of course reuse the bowls

- salsa ingredients: one avocado, one clove of garlic 1/3 red pepper, 1/3 tomato*

*i had three pitas, remember

- for each pita,

- on one side of the pita, put mozzarella cheese all over the pita and cover with the bison/bacon chili mix on  the stove

- put salsa on top of chili, and also put salsa on other side of pita

- put cheese over salsa on second side of pita

- put some jalapenos on both sides

- bake

while baking, open a container of sour cream and add chopped chives, dill to the sour cream

after taking out of the oven, put sour cream on quesadillas. eat with fork.

one of the best ways to identify between a real leftist, a socialist, and a fake left progressive/conservative is to determine if they are arguing using data or using appeals to emotions.

conservatives love to blame everything on "human nature". the idea that food is expensive due to greedy ceos is logically equivalent to the reductio ad human nature fallacy that defines practically all small-c conservative argumentation.

socialists, on the other hand, following marxist concepts of historical materialism and "scientific socialism", want everything to have a cause in economics. they will tend to avoid appeals to emotion and present arguments in empirical data and logical deduction. 

the idea that things are expensive because ceos are greedy would not sit well with any actual socialist; a socialist would want a naturalistic explanation rooted in economic data, whereas a conservative would seek some failing in moral behaviour as the cause of an undesirable outcome. socialists want to tell you why things are how they are using some appeal to science; conservatives think everything is made good by god and want to blame anything that goes wrong on somebody's impropriety or corruption.

i'd actually like to see the greens address this properly by addressing the energy issue and arguing for decentralized production.

all the immigrants love the public grocery store plan because it promises to spread out the public subsidies they get and increase their purchasing power, even though it won't work.

...except the ukrainian refugees. they don't like this.

for some reason.

why is that, do you think?.

conversely, donald trump's plan to reduce food prices is to increase the supply of oil, and thereby decrease the price of oil.

while this doesn't address the underlying energy crisis, and it will further harm the planet, it has a higher chance of success in reducing inflation than nationalizing food distribution networks, as it gets closer to the problem.

i find this extremely frustrating, even if it's easy enough to understand why this is happening.

i made an attempt to deconstruct this when it came up in new york. is it going to work in toronto? i haven't seen data, but my best guess is that it worked in new york due to the very high immigration level in that city. there's a comparison between toronto and new york, but let's try to understand what that means from a socialist perspective and from a working class perspective, rather than an immigrant perspective.

the ndp's message here is very clear:

- small businesses keep costs down for comparable products

- big businesses make things more expensive for comparable products

why is that? because big business is greedy.

now, maybe that's true, although the data suggests it isn't, but what is the ndp's message here? is promoting small business over big business a socialist message, about the proletariat taking control of the means of production? or is it actually a small-c conservative message about the bourgeois small-business class taking more profit for itself by reducing labour costs?

i can't speak much about green bean supply chains in ontario, but apple supply chains are well known in ontario, and i can make an educated guess that is admittedly a priori about why the apples are more expensive at loblaws, which has to do with transportation costs. the small business is more likely to source locally, from a local apple grower, of which there are many in canada, whereas loblaws is likely to source from large suppliers that bring the apples to a centralized distributor and then transport them around. it follows that the apples are cheaper at the small business because you're not paying unionized workers union wages to buy gas to truck them over larger distances and that may very well be true enough, but loblaws has to stock thousands of stores and feed millions of people and so it requires larger distribution networks that seek to scale up production to economies of scale in ways that cannot currently be sustained strictly by local production. 

socialism is not about sourcing local produce. socialism is about superproduction via economies of scale.

not only are the bourgeois class small business owners not paying working class unionized workers to distribute the product, but they are not paying fair wages to farm the product, either. this actually results in a much larger profit margin to the bourgeois small business owners at the end of the day. it is far more profitable, per apple sold, to import mexican slaves to pick enough apples in an orchard down the street to stock a couple of bins than it is to hire unionized workers to run a large scale, country-wide or province-wide distribution network.

the message from the ndp is that the profits of the bourgeoisie are more important than maintaining a union work force, so long as it keeps commodity prices down, in the end; that it's ok to undercut unionized wages by hiring slaves, so long as the result is lower prices. this small-c conservative messaging might elect a few power-hungry ndp mps, but it will only harm workers and only harm socialist organizing in canada. this is exactly the race to the bottom that underpinned nafta and that the last generation of new democrats was explicitly opposed to.

will publicly run grocery stores address any of this? they might succeed in breaking the market by presenting lower prices on the shelf if the store is mandated to do that, but it would have to be at the cost of higher taxes to offset it. a public distribution network would maybe be more efficient if it eliminated the deadweight loss that is generated by competition in supply chains and replaced it with a cartel system, but that waste due to competition is already minimal in this industry, and it would certainly generate higher wages because it would create more union jobs. it would either lead to higher prices to pay the higher wages or it would lead to higher taxes to create the illusion of lower prices.

you'd might as well just hand out gst rebates, instead.

the actual cause of high food prices is a serious problem and it requires a more serious solution than blaming greedy ceos that includes addressing the following:

- we transport too much food. we need to grow more food locally. we need to decentralize food production.

- we use too many oil-based pesticides and fertilizers, which makes the cost of food reliant on the cost of oil

- tariffs on canadian fertilizer that is not oil-based entering the united states will hit canadian consumers in the end, on goods that don't currently have substitutes made in canada (and have low elasticity in demand). eliminating the american farmers from the supply chain may help reduced costs in those scenarios.

these are issues that have to do with how we use energy first and foremost. blaming the issue on greedy ceos is easy but it's ignorant and it also completely undoes marxist theory, which is all about organizing in larger groups to stop small business owners from accumulating profit by exploiting workers. that small business owner selling apples picked by mexican slaves at a higher profit margin, per apple, than loblaws and passing on the savings in labour costs to a small consumer base (probably in an upscale neighbourhood) is a piss-poor argument for a socialist party to make, that's for sure.

if this kind of conservative populism helps the ndp win a few seats, it will be at the expense of socialist organizing and will only help the liberals maintain power. ironically, it's actually the liberals that have the better plan to address the energy crisis that is creating high food prices that is more likely to actually work in getting costs down.