publishing inri073

it was in may of 2015 that i first contemplated the idea of a chamber works. i was creating compilations to end my second period, when i realized that a couple of the tracks that did not fit well into the orchestral works might work better as chamber pieces. so, the chamber works was intended as a kind of companion disc to the orchestral works, both to offer a different flavour and to collect the remaining tracks into a compilation of serious music, so they are not left out.

so, i went back and did a systematic evaluation of the period 2 material to see which tracks could or could not be converted into chamber pieces. the last three mixes were created at this time, while the first was removed of clicks.

then, i stopped. i decided that an electronic chamber works was an idea of questionable worth, and i should put the idea aside for a bit and take a look at the idea again upon reconstruction of the period 1 tapes.

what the issue really comes down to is how good the electronic strings sound. does this actually sound like chamber music, or does it sound like a computer creating chamber music? and, if it sounds like a computer, is the issue resolvable somehow?

when i came back to completing period 2 in the fall of 2017, i decided in favour of the release, as the sound fonts are convincing enough, even if one needs to ignore a few relics here and there. tracks two and three were subsequently added to the compilation.

i decided at the end that this format has some future to it, whether it is fully realistic or not. string music will probably never go away. but, composers are going to find themselves less and less interested in actual physical reproduction, as time moves forward. the question of realism in the tracks is consequently somewhat misplaced, as the chamber music of the future is likely to be performed by computers, and sound like it just a little bit.

initially written and recorded between 2001-2003 and remixed and recorded further over 2014-2015. an idea for this compilation was developed over the last week of may, 2015, but it was not finished or released at that time. corrected and expanded from october, 2017 to january, 2018. finally released & finalized as lp022 on jan 14, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017, 2018). 

credits

released May 2, 2003

j - controller input, programming, effects processing, mixing, digital wave editing, composition.

the various rendered electronic orchestras include piano, orchestral drum kit, violin, guitar, viola, cello, contrabass, various string sections and choir.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

publishing inri072

an unexpected result of the project to complete my discography, undertaken in late 2013, has been the construction of a handful of orchestral pieces, mostly as remixes of original tracks from the jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj period. while these tracks were initially written out as scored pieces for expanded instrumentation, they were generally written around the guitar and the expanded instrumentation was largely meant simply for colour. the exception to this is the psilocybin symphony, which was written as a piano concerto from the start and previously completed in early 2006.

the ability to expand these pieces into orchestral works is the result of the advances in vst sampling technology that have occurred since 2003. while changes in instrumentation have been accompanied by extra writing (mostly on the guitar), tempo shifts and other general rearrangement choices, the existing technology makes it very easy to rearrange a rock song for an orchestra, by simply multiplying staves and changing the sound fonts.

the condition i've set for a piece to be "orchestral" is that it must utilize the entire orchestra: it must have percussion, piano, horns, woodwinds/reeds and strings. guitars are generally treated like "first violins", whereas violins are generally not considered to be more special than other similar string instruments. some of the tracks also have prominent choral sections. all of these pieces meet this condition, except the last one which does not have a woodwind/reed section.

my delve into scorewriting ended in 2003; the material in my third phase is more focused on live and manipulated guitars and synthesizers. i consequently feel that this is an interesting summary of my second period, taken from a specific angle that is otherwise largely relegated to single-only remixes.

initially written and recorded between 2001-2003 and remixed and recorded further over 2014-2015, except track 2 which was completed in early 2006 and track 5 which was completed in 2017. the initial final compilation date was may 23, 2015, but track five was then added on oct 14, 2017 and the disc was finalized as lp021 on nov 29, 2017. track 7 was added as a download-only bonus track on jan 14, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017, 2018).

* download only 

credits

released May 1, 2003

j - controller inputs, drum & other programming, orchestral & other sequencing, live guitars, live bass, live synths, effects, sound design, digital wave editing, composition, production.

the various rendered electronic orchestras includes violin, viola, cello, contrabass, electric guitar, nylon guitar, guitar fret noise, bass guitar, synthesizer bass, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, english horn, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, saxophone, bamboo flute, flute, piccolo, synthesizers, mellotron, organ, piano, harp, koto, music box, clavinet, kalimba, xylophone, agogo, mallet, hammered percussion, woodblock, tubular bells, tinkle bells, glockenspiel, orchestra hit, melodic toms, electronic drum kit, timpani, orchestral drum kit and choir.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

republishing inri071

i've taken to splitting my discography into phases, and my hitch-hiking trip to british columbia is a very important separation point - both in terms of the nature of the material that came out afterwards and what is now a substantial body of work that came before it. that makes it a natural point to look backwards and build compilations of intersecting ideas.

a characteristic of my work is that it does not conform well to genre norms. this is not an accident; when compiling a record, i'm guided more by the late beatles' philosophy of vast diversity in a small space than i am by any kind of desire to collect together nice singles, or by some kind of compulsive organizing into categories or concepts. i write psychedelic music. that means something different in 2015 than it did in 1966, but the commonality is that it's necessarily challenging. i want all of my records to do everything at once, and accomplish everything by their end point. that makes compilations of this sort inherently difficult, because every song touches on every compilation idea at the same time. the jazz record would have the same tracklisting as the punk record, the classical record and the folk record - and none would really be what they're claimed to be.

the one exception to this conundrum is how i interacted with ambient music in this period. i very regularly utilized ideas from the genre, but i tended to interpret ambience as something that is necessarily obscure. in this period, ambient pieces are almost always outtakes or b sides. i tended to interpret covers and remixes as ambient pieces, probably because that was unexpected. when ambient ideas make it on to the record, they're almost always for effect: introductions, endings, connecting passages, that sort of thing.

when i began reconstructing my discography in early 2014, i came across a handful of songs i'd written out into midi format and put aside for later. a number of these ended up reworked into ambient pieces, and released as b sides. i also ended up converting some of the material i wrote in this period into ambient sound collages that are more in the style of music i created after 2003.

the end result is enough bsides and remixes to put together two full cds of ambient music. none of the tracks on volumes one or two are on any official record as they appear here; this is technically a collection of remixes and outtakes.

this package was initially released with a mix tape of fragments from 1996-1999, but it has since been moved into it's own release (inri035): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-works-vol-0

initially written and recorded between 2000-2003 and remixed between 2014-2015. sequenced over mid may, 2015. the final compilation date was initially may 20, 2015, but both discs were mildly updated with some more appropriate mixes of the same tracks on nov 29, 2017; disc subsequently finalized as lp020. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017). 

credits

released April 28, 2003

j - guitars (acoustic, electric, nylon), effects & treatments, bass, synthesizers, electric air reed organ, orchestral & other sequencing, drum & other programming, generative programming (sounder), "projectile synthesis" (audiomulch), granular synthesis (granulab), sound design, electronic and conventional drum kits, sampling, loops, films, voice, digital wave editing, composition, production.

sean - vocal ideas (tracks 4 & 7, disc 1), ring modulator (track 9, disc 1)
jon - background guitar performance (track 4, disc 1)
greg - drum performance sample source (track 5, disc 1)

the various rendered electronic orchestras include synth bass, electric bass, acoustic bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, nylon guitar, guitar effects, guitar noises (fret noises, pick scrapes, knocks), synthesizer, synth pads, mellotron, choir, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, string section, pizzicato strings, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, oboe, english horn, bassoon, clarinet, flute, piccolo, mallet, piano, woodblock, music box, xylophone, tubular bells, other bells, orchestra hit, electronic drum kit, melodic toms, drum machine and orchestral drum kit.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

“Every missile or shell we fired was at a valuable target, at underground targets,” Eisenkot said in March “We have developed a capability that allows us to strike them.”

you know that's what this is really about, right?

gaza isn't just an open-air prison. it's a model of a city in revolt. such technology can ultimately be exported to countries like the united states, in the event of the outbreak of armed civil unrest.

the talk of colonialism is weird. it's maybe true from a certain perspective, but it's an effect rather than a cause, and the historical underpinnings of it are somewhat spurious. at best, these are two opposing colonial cultures. but, it really has nothing to do with the actual reality of why israel exists.

israel is an american military outpost in the middle east, necessary as a counter-balance against a tense alliance with the oil-producing arab countries. it's primary function is as a testing facility.

so, finkelstein claims there weren't any rockets being sent from gaza. maybe he means a statistical zero, because the system was ultimately designed to test the rockets that were sent at it for it to shoot down. so, of course it shot down some rockets. it's a test simulation to shoot them down.

comparisons to the holocaust are not exaggerated, and that's why i tend to avoid the term apartheid. apartheid is an economic idea - it's a slave class that existed, for the benefit of the rich members of society. and, so, what they did in south africa was allow a select group of blacks to enter the ruling class, while keeping the apartheid system mostly in place. that cannot happen in palestine, where the people are not being utilized as a slave class, but merely tossed aside as useless eaters.

the united states actually presented an apartheid system as a solution to the actual genocide that's taking place, which is how i prefer to describe it. john kerry wanted to build call centres in the west bank, and convert the palestinians into a pool of cheap labour for multinational corporations. that would have resulted in an apartheid, where palestinians are kept occupied with labour for the dominant israeli group, while being denied basic liberties and civil rights. but, israel wouldn't allow for this. they just want the land they're standing on.

so, referring to the situation as an apartheid actually deflects from the deeper reality, that israel is carrying out a genocide in slow motion, with the ultimate aim of complete expulsion - or annihilation.

but, to america, it's just a war game. and, americans ought to understand that, for what it is.

notwithstanding pull from outside forces, this geo-strategic position is necessary for as long as america relies upon oil as a dominant input into it's economy.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this article also explains why he has long odds to win in 2019, at all. and, then what?

the ndp have found themselves in a position that i last remember seeing in canadian politics with the old progressive conservatives, when joe clark had to ask somebody to step aside to give them his seat. the party only managed to recover to the point that they could organize a merger with the reform party. whatever happens to the ndp, the canadian left needs some kind of serious renewal, likely in a new party.

what can they do in this mess?

well, there's two choices, really, within our parliamentarian tradition, and they rely on the strength of the leadership. grenier doesn't think that singh will ask masse or hardcastle to step down. what that means is that grenier doesn't think that singh is powerful enough in his own party to take a seat away from an incumbent. yet, that is, in fact, the parliamentarian tradition in this circumstance, where the leadership is powerful enough - and clark is one example of that happening. if grenier is right, and singh is not able to command a seat from a backbencher, then the party must pass a vote of non-confidence, and have singh removed as leader.

what's happening right now, where there are two entities moving in different directions, is not within the parliamentary tradition of canada. there's no way to describe this than watching the party implode and collapse.

somebody needs to take charge. either singh has control of the party and can get a seat from a backbencher, or he does not have the confidence of the party, and should be removed from the leadership.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-singh-seats-1.4477621

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

ah, good old ralph.

ralph's a good guy. that good old ralph. there should have been a good guy ralph meme, really.

if it's all up to ralph, it'll probably turn out ok - eventually, after he steers it through a dozen obstacles. but, i don't know how much of this is actually up to ralph. if it's up to anybody, i guess it's up to ralph.

this is the kind of thing that the old liberal party, of which ralph is a fading representative, would actually do right. these are the people that wrote our constitution, remember - and our constitution is what got this legalized in the first place. they're actually pretty good at writing laws. this is why i'm able to stand so far on the left and still retain a confidence in the liberal party: they really are good at writing fair laws.

so, when he tells you to be patient, maybe you actually should be. not idle, but patient.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-marijuana-pardon-legal-1.4484496

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

back in 2001, and bleeding into about 2003, i wrote a number of tracks into a scorewriter with the explicit intent of eventually having them performed by live ensembles. at the beginning of 2014, i decided that this wasn't likely to ever actually happen and went about completing the tracks in finalized forms - which happened over 2014 and 2015.

my initial plan for this compilation was to produce a record of midi compositions mapped to modern vst instruments as a "chiptune" (not literally) project, and have it double a record of fully realized versions of the tracks. as i went about completing the project, i began to realize that these vst versions were not sufficiently different enough from the finalized versions to justify a separate album and consequently aborted the project.

however, something that's happened since 2001 is that a more mature market has developed for midi-generated music, largely on the back of the success of the gaming industry. people have nostalgia for the sounds that their childhood gaming consoles made and an interest in listening to original music in the style of the soundtracks to those games.

i need to be clear that these are not gaming soundtracks - they're a mix of various types of classical and jazz, taking in influences from across the musical spectrum but essentially none from gaming. gaming isn't a thing i've ever really done, and the little bit i've done has tended to act as an excuse for listening to music (i had a mild civ2 obsession in early high school).

however, i feel that compiling a record of soundblaster mixes is something that could appeal to a specialized, niche audience and am going to put this record together for those people. i also feel it captures the headspace that i was in at the time. i've decided to mirror this soundblaster disc with the vst disc i was initially contemplating, to demonstrate where the technology has arrived at.

all of these tracks also appear on a set of cross-listed singles, and most of them are sequenced into a record at some point. there's more info on the track pages.

i've included the raw midi files in the download for further listening and modification.

these tracks were written from 2001 to 2003 and in some cases rearranged over the course of 2014 and 2015. all disc 1 tracks rendered through a soundblaster live! device that was manufactured c.1999. all disc 2 tracks created in cubase with vst software synthesizer technology. the compilation date is may 14, 2015. disc finalized as lp019 on jan 13, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

his release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2001, 2002, 2003, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). 

credits

released April 29, 2003

j - controller inputs, programming, composition, digital wave editing, effects processing, production

the various rendered electronic orchestras include acoustic bass, synth bass, electric bass, flute, clarinet, brass, trumpet, trombone, tuba, soprano saxophone, orchestra hit, violin, cello, string section (tremolo), drum machine, electronic drum kit, hand drums, finger snaps, nylon guitar, electric guitar (distorted, clean), steel string acoustic guitar, fret noise, sitar, banjo, pc card clavinet, music box, piano, organ, bells, synthesizers, mellotron and choir. 

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm actually not sure how i find myself in this position, here, at 2:00 in the morning.

i needed to detox today, but it manifested itself as typing in bed. i slept most of the day, not up until the afternoon. i wanted to clean, but cleaning means vacuuming and i don't know my neighbours well enough to hate them enough to vacuum at 2:00 am on a saturday morning. no, i'd rather at least wake them up at 8:00.

but, i'm not even convinced i can do that. i kind of feel like all i should be doing right now is sweating and typing, until i'm able to finish the plate of spaghetti i've been working on for four days, now.

what's the probability that i can get done through to inri074 tonight? well, let me give it a shot, right? it's just typing....

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

how old am i today?

i don't even plan to put on underwear at any point in the next 24 hours.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

ok: i might change my mind, one day. but, if i ever do, i won't publish anywhere but online, because i don't want to get out of bed to do it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i like analyzing things, but i have absolutely no interest in writing papers for publication, whatsoever. it would probably involve putting on clothes and meeting with people, and that's the part i don't like about it. so, i'll do this: somebody should, somebody should...

why don't i do it?

because i'm a musician. that's what i publish. that's my legacy. some other people can be mathematicians, if they want to be. i don't want to be....

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this isn't really news, it's just "doing the math" on something understood, with one exception: these timescales point to natural factors underlying these wide fluctuations, and demonstrate that the fluctuations we're experiencing right now are not in any way unprecedented.

that upholds lockwood over francis. but, that was already clear.

is there a dialectic in francis v lockwood? there might be. except that the reason she's getting so much push back from the academic world is that the physics underlying the idea is very strange. what she wants you to believe is that the heat propagates from the ocean into the upper atmosphere in the form of a wave, and then falls off somewhere else, in tact. that's really the perfect example of something that you can demonstrate the math of, but that is in the realm of imaginary physics. most of what she's demonstrated or suggested using these mathematical models has not been detected by actual experiments, and most physicists are beyond skeptical of the claims.

but, this isn't new. it's been happening for centuries. and, so one needs a more naturalistic explanation than climate change to explain it in it's entirety, going back to the maunder minimum.

(edit: actually, i need to be a little bit more careful about this. what i said ought to be correct, except that she very conveniently cut the tree ring dates off around 1725. saying there is increased fluctuations in the latter half of the twentieth century does not imply warming as the mechanism, as that is the same period that the sun decreased in output - that is why we needed a theory of global warming in the first place: we had global warming and decreasing solar activity, requiring us to look for an alternate cause of the warming. so, in order for this research to have any meaningful input into the lockwood v francis debate, she'd have had to construct the records back before 1725, to include the last period of low sunspot activity. that should have been the actual point of this. but, the truth is that comparable records already exist, so this convenient oversight is of little consequence - we should expect somebody or other to reconstruct the same wavy jetstream over the 1600s that we're seeing today, because we've already done that research, and we already know that that was the case.

i don't know why she picked 1725. she might not be aware of lockwood's work, as lockwood is a solar scientist. so, she might not have realized the importance of presenting the data from the 17th century. she may have consequently misinterpreted the importance of doing this work as a distraction, and avoided it.

somebody should fill in the holes rather quickly and demonstrate the point: not only is the waviness not unprecedented, but it was even more intense during the maunder minimum, demonstrating the (already well known, amongst solar scientists) correlation between solar intensity and jet stream waviness.)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02699-3

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

"I use those words advisably. I understand how powerful they are. But I cannot believe that in the history of the White House and in that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday." - dick durbin, the high-ranking democrat from illinois who clearly doesn't know a whole lot about lbj.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

"why doesn't anybody from norway want to emigrate to the united states, anyways? huh?" - the president of the united states of america.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

if you feel so strongly about it, i would like you to pen a 5000 word essay explaining why neither central america nor africa (or pick one. but the word count won't change.) are shitholes.

i could easily enough see myself describing a country like el salvador as a shithole. but, the president answered his own question, didn't he?

"why do they leave those shitholes and come here, anyways?"

i mean, does he have to ask the question? it's like asking why you bother to wipe your ass. it's just going to get dirty again, right?

yeesh.

when are the democrats going to stop calling the president names and make some substantive policy proposals?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's not the government that is imposing these values, it's the supreme court, by interpreting the constitution.

i'm not a taxpayer. but, if i was one, i would not want my tax money to fund any kind of religious operations at all. whatsoever.

however, i suspect that government is not cutting funding to religious groups in a wide enough or systemic enough manner to be consistent with the appropriate constitutional rulings. i would hope that this changes in the upcoming years.

for example, the government should not be funding arts projects if they have religious undertones, or promote religious messaging. there should not be funding for mosques or churches, who should also pay taxes. and, i would like to see the provincial government abolish all funding for religious schools, including the end of the catholic school system.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/scheer-summer-grant-jobs-abortion-1.4484588

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

well, ok.

maybe she doesn't like google...hey, she wouldn't be the first person i've heard of that doesn't like google. toss a dart in crowd, right? i'm not exactly the biggest fan, myself.

i found this:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318287618_Why_Are_Arctic_Linkages_to_Extreme_Weather_Still_Up_in_the_Air

a couple of thousand citations.  it's certainly lagging far behind.

but, this is a recent publication, where she actually acknowledges that her work is not widely accepted:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318287618_Why_Are_Arctic_Linkages_to_Extreme_Weather_Still_Up_in_the_Air

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

people, listen.

this is mike lockwood's google scholar page. he's frequently cited. quite respected. and, the paper in question is the most cited, too.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8280hQ0AAAAJ

if jennifer francis even has a google scholar page, i can't find it. she does not appear to be frequently cited at all.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i didn't really have any experience with it before, but from what i can see in front of me on my bills, the problem with electricity costs in ontario is not the government, it's the private sector - and the solution is a bigger role for government, and a smaller one for the private sector. what i'm seeing is confirming all of the scary predictions that opponents to privatization brought up during the catastrophic mike harris regime. we should be taking actions to undo this, not carrying on with it.

my second bill, which is going to be more like what an actual bill looks like, is going to look something like this:

usage:  178 kwh (this is maybe a little higher than average, because i'm still adjusting to things)
cost of electricity: $13.84

i wouldn't have much to complain about if my bill was less than $15. i'm doing my part, here: i'm being responsible with my usage. and, the state is rewarding me with a reasonable price. so, what's the problem?

well, then the private monopoly steps in...

delivery charges: $24.12.

(and, you can hear them slap the bill down on the counter while they say it, with a bit of a hellish laugh.)

so, i'm paying the company twice the cost of my electrical usage, as a fee for the privilege to do business with them, as the only option in town. this is preposterous, but i'm paying the company, here, not the government - the government can't order them not to do this, but has actually offered a rebate system to offset it, if you're poor (and i am).

this is the largest component of the bill, by far. and, it simply shouldn't exist at all. thankfully, my $68 rebate should make the bill go away altogether, once it gets applied in full. so, what is happening here, in fact, is that the government is stepping in to reverse the price gouging being done by these private companies.

so, how do you fix this?

well, it doesn't make sense to have competing energy companies; you'll need a monopoly on the lines, anyway. it never makes sense to lay two paths between two endpoints and then force people to compete over which is cheaper; just use some graph theory to find the shortest route, and then pile bridges on top of each other, if you must. electricity lines should be publicly owned for the same reason that roads, cable lines and telephone lines should be. and, then, what you're doing is putting up a front to the line monopoly; there's not an actual choice, there, but merely the illusion of one. these front companies for the line monopoly would not choose to compete with each other, anyways, because competition would be damaging both to each other and to the line monopoly. so, the actual reality of such a thing would be that you could choose which company logo you like the best, while they all offer the same thing. and, if you think this is an exaggeration, let me direct you to the cable internet line monopoly in ontario, where what i'm describing is the actual state of affairs on the ground. there's a dozen different companies that all want to sell you exactly the same thing.

the only difference between a line monopoly and a total monopoly is that a line monopoly creates superfluous jobs in management...

but, would a government charge such an exorbitant fee for delivery? well, it's not entirely clear why there ought to be a delivery charge at all. and, i think a government would actually fold pretty quickly under public pressure, whereas a private entity like enwin will just tell us all to eat cake.

the solution is that we need to retake public ownership of our electricity generation in this province, and stop these private companies from profiting off of what should be a resource held in common.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm by no means an expert on oprah, but i'm not sure that her politics are as unclear as briahna is suggesting. she was on tv everyday for 25 years, often discussing politicized issues, and i've seen enough of it to come away with the impression that she's rather obviously very conservative, even if i have to use the term "conservative" in a british or canadian context to get the point across. it's kind of annoying that there aren't any actual tories in the united states, because it makes it kind of useless to identify them. americans don't understand what that means. and, historically, the democrats were always the conservative party, anyways. 

i would suspect that there are millions of people alive that are over the age of 40 and actually have a pretty good grasp on what her politics are, merely by watching her show every day for decades. it actually probably wouldn't be very hard to find quotes from her where she frames things in certain ways that explain what she's thinking. but, what i remember from watching her show (mostly in the 90s and early 00s...) is that she used exceedingly judgemental body language incredibly often, and that she quite frequently quite blatantly looked down upon just about anybody that deviated from those obvious conservative values. the projection was always something like "how'd i get stuck with this job where i'm dealing with freaks all day?" kind of thing.

and, it's kind of differentiating. because, these people basically all did the same thing, but approached it from a different angle. jerry springer wanted to broadcast comedy; his show was a joke. phil donahue seemed legitimately empathetic, although he may have been a faker. of the bunch, geraldo is the one that seemed most interested in systemic inequality, and getting to root causes.

what oprah always projected was "i don't want to be here. get me away from these losers.". and, it really did project a deep social conservatism.

but, the united states doesn't have a liberal/conservative spectrum. it has a black/white spectrum. and, demographics as they are, the black party is going to have to have a conservative streak.

my suggested tactic: let oprah run, abandon the democrats and vote for a third party.

i mean, i just spent a few minutes on google and found out that:

1) oprah has publicly stated that she has often voted republican, in the past.

2) oprah supported the 2003 iraq war. this is especially notable because she did a lot of shows about it. that is, this is informed support for the 2003 iraq war; she knew what she was doing.

3) oprah opposes the estate tax (for obvious reasons.).

this is toxic to the voting base that the democrats need to win elections with. but, it's probably both a necessary and an inevitable path for the democrats to walk down...

so, i'm just coming out of an extended christmas break, and i'm going to be a little bit mentally wander-y for a bit, still. i lost the last few days to distractions, really...

what are my tasks this weekend and into next week and for the rest of the season?

1) i need to finish cleaning in here. this is still move-in cleaning. i had to wait for the isp guy, and then the maintenance guy. floors, especially. so, i'm going to take a few days to do this.
2) i wanted to finish period 2, first, but not now. now, i want to clean first so i can get to the next batch of writing in bed. what's left is just the cover art for inri070-inri074, and i've already shipped inri071, inri072 & inri074. cleaning won't be too long and this will be quick...
3) i'm going to need to go back and finish the outline for period 1. this is the third winter in a row i've tried to do this. i have to actually do it, this time. this will include catching up to the alter-reality. and, once the structure exists, i should be able to carry forward with it. and, i might as well set up the structure for period 2, too.
4) i'll have to do a lot of fixing of things before i'm able to get to period 3. i have a stack of broken and disassembled technology that needs attention. so, there will be an extended studio set-up phase that will also include things like buying bookshelves. basically, this is getting back to what i was doing in the summer, pushing back into the spring. part of that will be catching up on the vlogging, although that will also be a part of building the period 1 disc.
5) notwithstanding any further problems, i should finally be able to start period 3 by summer, hopefully.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

deathtokoalas

the idea here is real, but what you're doing is some kind of inverted conservative confirmation bias: you're affirming the effects of the tory media, which claims it is effective, but which all evidence suggests otherwise.

the fact is that the conservative base in ontario has been eroding for decades and there is no sign that this is reversing. they've tried everything. the right is so dead in ontario, that they've actually spent large amounts of time in the recent past trying to get ethnic minorities to vote for them. it's a movement in irreversible decline that is tied almost entirely to the older generation. and, they've just given up on even being conservatives; the most recent incarnation of the conservative party in ontario is really further left than the democratic party, because it's realizing that it has to be in order to be competitive.

the conservatives might win the next election. but, if they do, the popular vote is going to look something like:

conservatives - 35%

liberals - 33%

ndp - 30%

the reason for this is that the only actual swing demographic in ontario is between the liberals and the ndp. there used to be a larger swing between the liberals and the old pcs, but that has been slowly collapsing since the mid 90s, to the point that it's negligible. what's left of the conservative base just simply does not vote liberal, ever - and would vote for hitler if he wore a blue sweater-vest.

i mean, you could look at the data in the end and find evidence that the there was a 3% swing from the liberals to the conservatives and say "see!". but, if you do that, i'll show you that there was also a 3% swing from the conservatives to the liberals. you could make the argument, sure. but, what you're missing is the 10% swing from the liberals to the ndp that actually decided the election.

the people that are being "tricked" by the media are really the same people that always vote conservative, and they're just looking for an excuse to be a conservative. it's the party faithful. they're not in play.

personally, i think the liberals have a pretty good chance of surviving because i don't see that swing to the ndp materializing at this time - but that if that happens then wynne needs to be putting her successor in motion, immediately.

----

jim

To counter your argument, I'm pretty sure there is data that shows that when minimum wage is increased, number of hours worked decreases. Maybe the total job number doesn't go down or actually goes up, but the hours worked per person usually goes down. Maybe it's just in the short term, though, idk.

deathtokoalas

the number of hours that a manager needs to staff is determined by demand, not by costs. 

here's the thing: if you're working minimum wage then your boss is already minimizing your hours because they only want you there when they need you there, in the first place. if they were to lay you off, they'd be short-staffed, and if they could deal with being short-staffed, they would be. the reason that the minimum wage worker is working in the first place is that the employer needs them there.

if minimum wage increases are going to have any effect at all, they should be to increase demand, which would, if anything, increase the number of staff that is required to meet the demand. 

since reagan, conservative economics have been nothing short of incoherent; david is being empirical here, and that's good, but the idea that a tactic designed to increase demand will lead to job losses doesn't actually make any sense.

if there are any counter-examples, they would have to be very industry-specific. really, any job losses from minimum wage hikes would have to be ultimately tied to automation, and in the rare situations where production is so ramped up that costs are not determined by demand. these are going to be mostly unionized, require some skill and probably not be at the minimum wage to begin with.

one of the things that david points out here is that, as it is, more than 50% of workers are working less than 40 hours. these missing hours are the hours that an employer might cut due to a wage increase, but they can't be cut, because they've already been cut as a process of profit maximization. trust me: companies like mcdonalds and walmart are already doing everything they can to minimize labour costs. there's nothing left to cut. and, if some brilliant accountant could find something to cut without affecting profitability, it would be cut, regardless.

jim

That's a pretty good point. I guess just so long as the increase in cost of living lags behind your increase in minimum wage, the lowest earners should be fine.

deathtokoalas

actually, it's tied to inflation, too. yearly. so, if we get 20% inflation as a result of this, they'll have to boost the wages by another 20%, next year. some businesses might get away with this, if they're not contributing to the cpi. but, the cpi is constructed to focus on the things that real people have to actually deal with...

social assistance is also tied to inflation. so, if the grocery store, for example, reacts to this by inflating prices, the people that really need it will get increases, too. and, if rentiers want to raise the rent, everybody gets paid more, too.

so, if there's going to be an issue with this in ontario, it's going to be this: when wages and inflation get caught in this upwards spiral. and that is what i like about this policy: we've found a way to convert the race to the bottom into a race to the top.

i wouldn't expect this to actually play out. there's little appetite for it, from what i can see. most businesses will probably realize the benefit of the policy to increase demand, in the end. the real potential problem is from rentiers, and that tactic would be ultimately self-defeating for them - they're better off lobbying.

supernuts060

"Minimum wage" was used to keep black people out of the of the job market after slavery, because they would do the same work for a lower wage. 

Now it will be used against people with no experience (teens), old people, disabled people and new immigrants who don't yet speak fluent English. 

For $15/h employers will expect the a VERY productive worker.

deathtokoalas

i would like to counter your point, but what you just typed makes absolutely no sense at all.

supernuts060

Minimum wage laws effects low skill workers. Employers simply scrape off the top. If they have to pay $14 or $15.. They will only hire the most productive workers. Which will likely exclude people without experience.

deathtokoalas

well, that depends on the demand for workers, doesn't it?

if these managers had the choice, everybody on the floor would have experience, as it is. but, sometimes you get short-staffed and have to hire somebody else, or risk losing business because you can't find enough qualified staff.

this has nothing to do with the cost of labour, and the cost of labour has no effect on decisions being made in this regard, either.

i mean, what are you suggesting here? that you think employers are more likely to hire unqualified workers over qualified ones, if both are available?

they cost the same price. so, why would a manager hire an inexperienced worker if an experienced one exists to hire, instead?

when inexperienced workers are hired, and nepotism is not the reason, there is only ever one explanation, and that is that experienced workers are not available in some way - perhaps at all, or perhaps in the precise capacity that is needed.

if an experienced worker exists and applies, they will get that job 100% of the time, anyways.

supernuts060

Well if workers could negotiate their own contract that would best, for example.

"Hello Ms. Jessica, I am a high school student looking for experience, I understand you pay your experienced workers $15. I am more interested in earning work experience can we make a deal for $7.50/h?"

 

Now you as the business owner can still pay your more valuable employees $15/h but you can also have 2 inexperienced workers for the price of 1. The employees should be able to prove their value to the employer. Some businesses have tasks which are not deserving of $15/h, and low skill employees should be allowed to work for any amount of money they choose.

I think it is better than that a motivated high school student can work for $5/h and get some experience, rather than not get a job at all, because an employers cannot legally pay them less than $15.

deathtokoalas

ahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

*breath*.

AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

ok.

so, to begin with, student wages are actually a little lower, here. that is, kids under 18, which you don't want to give any kind of responsibility at all and only want to hire at part time hours, anyways. you can't run a business this way....

but i am adamantly opposed to any suggestion that children should try to undercut their parents for lower wages, and you should really be ashamed of yourself for promoting that kind of anti-social behaviour.

to put it another way: i don't care if teenagers have a harder time finding a job as a consequence of this policy.

...but your argument is ridiculously weak, to begin with. it's not likely to have any substantive or measurable change in teen employment.

workers are not in competition with each other for jobs or lower wages, they are in solidarity with each other against the upper class. and, in my mind, such a kid should be taken behind the shed, in the first place.

supernuts060

Not ashamed, if right out of high school you are competing for your parents minimum wage job, your parents obviously have no skills and should not have had kids. NOBODY is supposed to have a family on minimum wage. Trying to support a family on minimum wage is antisocial, and disrespectful to your children, shame on you.

I have been in competition with other workers, and so is my wife. We are compensated for our efforts to grow the employers business, we are not in solidarity with anyone but our own family. I respect people enough to allow them to make their own decisions, if they don't want to compete with me for a job, they do not have to. However i feel that not competing will have negative consequences on their life. The people who compete will not be making minimum wage for their entire life. The people who don't compete, will probably try to get the government to force their employer to artificially give them wages that they did not earn.

deathtokoalas

see, this is a very strange change in the mindset of conservatives, who have historically argued that the lower classes need to have many, many children in order to ensure that there is a sufficiently large enough pool of slave labour, including military labour, for them to draw upon. can you imagine the catholic church arguing in favour of contraception? but, perhaps you've just been caught in your own circular logic.

but, i'm not about to listen to a lecture in morality from what appears to be a scab. and, i'll reiterate what ought to be done to scabs when they're identified: picked off and thrown away.

supernuts060

I am not a conservative, I do not believe there is anything about our society worth conserving. I am simply Pro-Freedom, and government legislation on wages and business is oppressive and anti-freedom. 

Singapore has the second highest millionaires per capita (%17.1) in the world, no minimum wage, little regulation.

Qatar also has little regulation and the most millionaires per capita(%17.5) and minimum wage is $200 per month (very low).

I am simply advocating that we follow countries who are boosting the most people into the wealthiest categories possible. 

Canada only has 1.14 million total millionaires. 

You are actually the Conservative one here, i do not want to conserve anything that Canada is doing.

deathtokoalas

see, again, the way you use language is entirely incoherent. you claim you are 'pro-freedom', and yet you are arguing for the abolition of collective bargaining rights, by pointing to policies that exist in deeply unfree countries. they'll kill you in qatar for being gay, but you think that they're more free because they have more millionaires? 

what is the size of the middle class in qatar or singapore?

you should be arguing that you're in favour of slavery, not that you're in favour of freedom, because that is the result of your proposals: a return to slavery.

and, that is what you are trying to conserve, as all conservatives are: the hierarchical class divisions that exist in contemporary society. which is what i'm trying to abolish...

but, would you prefer the term 'neo-liberal', supernuts?

i can be politically correct, if you'd like.

supernuts060

It isn't "bargaining" if the government says "you have to pay minimum $15/h".

You should look it up yourself the economic opportunity there is superior to Canada.

But here is singapore.

Unemployment rate %2.2.. less than half of Canada's

Average wage $4795.00 Singapore dollars a month (1 Sinapore dollar = $0.96 Canadian dollars) AND THEY PAY ALMOST NO TAX.

People in Singapore retire at 62. Many people in Canada cannot retire. 

Yes people in Singapore are very "enslaved".. LOL you are so silly. 

I don't care about Qatar's opinion on peoples sexuality, i am only interested in their economic approach.

Gay people can make a lot of money in Qatar, and then immigrate somewhere else. 

I actually don't have a label, because i choose to take the parts of groups that have demonstrated to work the best for the most of their citizens, and dispose of the ideas that bring people down. Not all ideas i agree with come from 1 specific group (liberal, conservative, ect.) or countries.

deathtokoalas

the collective bargaining agreement underlying the minimum wage is an abstraction of the social contract between governments and voters. and, averaging wages in a brutally stratified society is a stupid way to calculate the existence of a middle class - which does not exist in these countries.

supernuts060

"Collective"- does not represent voters, just loud activists. Only half of Canadians have full time jobs, now the cost of creating jobs is higher in a highly indebted economy.

You talk about "slavery". Most of Canada is already economically enslaved, whether its jobs, housing, education ect. 

Those "enslaved" countries Qatar and Singapore you have a %17 chance of becoming very wealthy. In Canada it's a %50 chance you will be lucky to even have a full time job. 

No where is perfect, its better to be able to make $70 a day than $0 day. 

Minimum wage means you make $15/h or nothing. I am not as cruel as you, and i say the poor people of this country should be allowed to make a little something rather than nothing.

deathtokoalas

well, voters have a responsibility to speak up if they want to be heard, as well. that is also a part of the social contract. but, the changes are more popular than you're suggesting - it's not as though a small percentage of people rammed through unpopular changes. these came out of a popular struggle. conversely, it actually was a small number of people that pushed through the reversal of collective bargaining in places like wisconsin, against popular support for it.

you have a tendency to type nonsense that requires a lot of words to unravel. but, it's ultimately nonsense. and, i'm not interested in continuing this conversation, as a result of it.

 

isailwind

Raising minimum wage to 15 is moronic. Bottom line is if it goes up $4 then everyone else is going to want a $4 raise plain and simple.  Goods and services will cost more, there will be no gain.

supernuts060

isailwind,  Yea, sadly, we have elected leaders who dont know anything about how a bussiness works. Soon we will have 10$ cups of coffee because the person pouring it demands $20\H.

deathtokoalas

again: ontario's minimum wage is set to inflation. so, if you increase the cost of items, what happens is that you contribute to a ratio we call the inflation rate. normal inflation is around 2%, so minimum wage earners receive around a 2% raise every year. if inflation goes up to 5% or 6% or higher due to price increases from the wage increases, businesses will merely have to raise wages by 5% or 6% again the next year. this is a very strong disincentive for owners to raise prices.

supernuts060

NO, you really don't know what you are talking about. Businesses are not going to take the hit. They operate to make a profit, if workers don't give them a profit they close up shop and go to a place where it is more profitable to operate. Simple as that. The thing about rich people is that they create jobs, if we charge them more to operate, they take their business elsewhere, because they can afford it. The poor Canadians who need those jobs can't afford to just pack up and leave. Which is exactly why Singapore is getting a lot of business investment and jobs, they make it profitable to operate. 

Business owners will take the path of least resistance, $14/15 minimum wage is a big hurdle.

California raised minimum wage as well and lost alot of jobs.  Im glad i dont live in Ontario. Nobody with money will invest there because the people there will use the government to steal from them, instead of providing value to an employer for a fair price.

isailwind

If you're going from 11 to 15 a typical mc donalds will have to come up with another 250,000 a year, just to cover wages. It's ridiculous.

deathtokoalas

it's a significant redistribution of wealth. but, the laws are designed to force the business owners to absorb the costs, one way or the other. and the thing is that this approach was chosen because studies done on the way the economy is structured right now indicate that the vast majority of these low wage jobs are not in small businesses, but either in large conglomerates or in franchised outlets - the businesses can afford to restructure this way, which is why they're being forced to.

capitalism is, indeed, about profit generation, and profit maximization. businesses don't operate for the benefit of their employees. so, when the statistics come back at us and say that a disproportionate amount of profits are going to business owners, rather than to workers, we should not be surprised - that is the inevitable direction of unregulated capitalism. but, this cannot sustain itself, as the tendency to push the working poor into poverty is a primary cause of the cyclical downturns in capitalism; when workers don't have money to spend, the economy goes into recession. so, in order to stop capitalism from collapsing in on itself, it itself requires a system of regulation to ensure that incomes do not fall too low. self-regulation, in this instance, is contradictory to short term profits, and because the firm is a psychopath, it cannot operate under a long term strategy - it must be ordered to redistribute, when the statistics deem it necessary to do so.

some businesses will not be able to adapt and will close. they will be replaced by competitors with better business models that will absorb what demand exists for their products, and those competitors will create jobs to replace the ones that are lost. i have little empathy for business owners that want to blame the unsustainability of their poor management practices on government interference.

supernuts060

Why would companies want to compete in an area where self entitled people will get the government to force a minimum wage, "I have a million dollars to invest in a community, i am going to invest in a place where my investment will grow the least" said NOBODY EVER. Do you have empathy for workers who lose their job and no new companies fill in the lost positions?  Which is exactly what happened in California, nobody want to invest there.

I understand you think redistribution of wealth make the poor richer.. But China was cracking down on wealth, and now look and our housing market, it is full of chinese money, BECAUSE PEOPLE WITH MONEY LEAVE WHEN THE GOVERNMENT TRIES TO TAKE IT FROM THEM. The only people who get screwed are the poor Chinese who's economy just had billions of dollars leave.

deathtokoalas

jobs are not created by investment from rich people, they're created by demand from poor people.

supernuts060

LMAO!! If that was at all true, why would there be such thing as an "unemployment rate"???? 

You make no sense. Why is it that poor countries with the least wealth have the least amount of people working??? These countries have a huge demand of poor people, but no jobs.

deathtokoalas

the reason that the captured state, and america is an example of this, would seek to decrease employment levels is to reduce wages. the higher the unemployment rate, the lower wages can be depressed. and, they don't care about the longer term implications, because they're fundamentally sociopathic in nature. you are correct in a certain sense - capitalism is a fundamentally irrational system.

but, to be clear, when i stated that jobs are created by demand, what i meant was in countries that are in the advanced stages of late capitalism, as that was the context. that includes the united states and canada, but wouldn't include a country like india or china, where the unemployment is a combination of poor infrastructure and overpopulation (and, in the case of china, employment is very controlled by the state). these comparisons across states are dubious, in much of any way. when you get to the kind of overpopulation you see in asia,  there's just not enough work to be done. and, that is a problem because, unlike in advanced countries, the infrastructure doesn't yet exist to compensate for it. we'll see what china ultimately does about this, as it continues to move towards a more advanced stage of capitalism.

but, it doesn't matter what you're investing in, ultimately somebody needs to buy it in order for jobs to exist. spending billions on solar cars is just a waste of money if the demand for them fails to materialize. and, in order for the system to be sustainable, that demand needs to come from the lower segments of society. america used to understand this quite well, back when it was actually in a more advanced stage of capitalism than it is now (america has gone backwards since the 80s....), called fordism.

so, i think i need to clarify my point a little, because i know i'm confusing people, who are not used to dialectical reasoning and just see me as supporting the "enemy" in my position. i'm really not.

what i'm doing is looking at as much of the science that i can and trying to come to a balanced deduction. it's not really dialectical, but it seems that way because the narrative has been set up as opposing viewpoints, when it shouldn't be - it should be set up as collaborative understanding. this is what happens when you politicize science, you break it. by asserting a dialectic, i'm trying to break through the ideology and get back to the science of the thing. and, i don't actually feel that i'm explaining myself to scientists, who understand this, but to non-scientists who have politicized the situation and identified an enemy to attack.

scientists make shitty political activists.

so, there's a 97%, 98%, 99% - an overwhelming - majority consensus amongst climate scientists on the reality of climate change. i'm not a climate scientist, i'm just a nerd with a math degree, but i do share in that consensus for two reasons: (1) deferring to experts and (2) based on my less than limited ability to understand the science, it seems to add up in my mind. but, what does that mean?

the consensus on climate change has two components:

(1) the cause of the warming experienced in the past was created by human activity,
(2) notwithstanding some alteration in the system, current trends suggest the warming will continue. that implies "if action is not taken". it also implies "if external factors do not change". it even implies "if internal factors are not changed".

now, external factors are always changing, because we live on a rock that is affected by everything else in the universe. we can't build a model with infinite inputs. we're going to have to discard things in the model. but, the model of the universe is not the universe itself (sorry, positivists). so, there are going to be factors we overlook. and, that's ok, it's always a work in progress.

now, if a gnome coughs in the alpha centauri system, we're justified in ignoring that in the model. but, if the sun decreases it's output by a factor that we can measure, we're not. we're really not. we have to understand this. and, this is most definitely an external factor that can change and alter the outcome.

the consensus on global warming is not a fatalist death sentence, it's an extrapolation of the data, followed by a predictive model. the point is that we have to stop it, right? it's alterable. but, the earth is not a closed system. and, there's lots of things on the earth, even, that could have an effect, as well. some plate could fall off, and produce enough volcanic ash to fuck the whole thing up. we could go into nuclear winter. even the dirty coal being burned in asia is measurable.

so, by suggesting that external factors may have the ability to offset global warming - even if it's only in the northern hemisphere, near the jet stream - i'm not contradicting any kind of consensus. i agree that human activity caused the warming we've already experienced and that, notwithstanding some alteration in the system, things are going to heat up. what i'm saying is that something is changing in the system, and understanding what's going to happen relies on a better understanding of that change - and of any other changes we can uncover, moving forwards.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

as another aside, the fact that climate scientists use averages at all is kind of...it's not mathematically sound.

averages are good when there's a fixed variable of some sort. you can take an individual's average over a fixed task (exam scores, track times, etc), or you can take a fixed task like exam scores and then average it out over various individuals (joe, sally, etc). what you're really doing with an average is repeating trials over and over, and trying to get a guess on a "test statistic" that exists in some platonic reality - the idea is that the average exists in some cloud somewhere, and if you repeat the trial often enough then you'll reveal it. i'm actually not a platonist at all, but you'd be surprised by the things you hear from grown men with math degrees, behind closed doors.

what the hell are you even trying to do by averaging out temperatures over the entire earth, in the first place? there's no test statistic to arrive at. you're not finding some ideal concept of earthly temperature readings. once you get a sequence of ratios in place, you can find the test statistic for the average of that sequence, but what does that mean if the "average temperature of the earth" is a wonky concept in the first place?  it's not devoid of meaning at all, but it's more of a contrived ratio to determine policy (like the cpi, or the unemployment rate) than it is any kind of reflection of anything meaningful. it only make any sense in the context of itself.

consider the following ten data points...

toronto: -25
moscow: -20
stockholm: -15
london: -10 
paris: -8
riyadh: 45
singapore: 46
calcultta: 47
cairo: 51
tehran: 52

my understanding of things suggests that that could very well be a typical january, mid-century.

average temperature: 16.3 degrees. of course, this is a crappy data set, i'm just making a point. but, that's completely fucking worthless as any descriptive measure - it's only useful in comparison to the next data point.

now, suppose that the readings for these cities in 1975 was as follows:

toronto: -13
moscow: -8
stockholm: -5
london: -2 
paris: 0
riyadh: 35
singapore: 36
calcultta: 37
cairo: 41
tehran:42

that's reasonable for 1975, huh? i'm not looking it up, i'm making a point; i should have looked this one up. and bullshitted the other. whatever. the average temperature of this data set is also 16.3 degrees

therefore, there was no climate change over these years? eh...

i should be offering a mathematical solution right now, but i'm not entirely convinced that the idea of modelling the earth in this way makes sense at all.

you hear this push-back: weather is not the same as climate, weather is not the same as climate. i end up doing it myself sometimes. it's an easy way to explain away the fluctuations.

i'm not really convinced that you can talk about a planet's climate at all. i mean, the ratio has a purpose, but it doesn't actually physically mean anything. there is no "earth's climate", there is a collection of overlapping systems, and really several different climates that develop where these systems intersect.

and, right now, it looks like the north and south are moving in opposite directions, as a consequence of opposite causes.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm not at all interested in a red team / blue team approach to climate change; i won't support a political movement that i think is being dishonest in order to generate a narrative, i will call you out and tear you down with as much vehement scorn as the next liar.

in science, truth is not an abstraction, it's fact. scientists cannot tolerate this sort of post-modern, pragmatic bullshit. and, it won't work; there is no actual end point to this approach besides greed.

sorry.

there's two approaches to this: honestly convince enough people to make it a political issue and then push hard for it (it's the second part that failed under obama), or get lucky in stumbling upon a despot that understands the urgency of the situation and doesn't fucking care what the masses think, anyways.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, why do we have winter, anyways?

no, if you don't know look it up. if you think you know, prove yourself right. do this. this isn't phd-level stuff; you should have learned about it in grade school. maybe you did, and just forgot.

but, it's because the amount of sunlight hitting the earth fluctuates, causing changes in the upper atmosphere that allow cold air to move from the polar regions into the habitable regions. this 'polar vortex' is called winter.

so, realizing that, what would you predict is the result of the sun hitting historical lows in output? more winter, right? and, the correlation is there, if you go to look for it - as it was from antiquity until 1980, when it split due to increased carbon concentrations.

you won't find a scientist that contradicts the obvious. this isn't specialist knowledge, it's grade school science. what you'll find instead is a lot of talking around the basic point, because it's been so obfuscated by deniers. what you're doing to these scientists when you bring up the sun in a non-academic context is triggering them into bad memories that they've had of dumb arguments with scientific illiterates trying to pass themselves off as educated. you're forcing them to relive traumatic experiences, and not getting good answers out of them, because of it. they're more focused on not letting bad ideas perpetuate (and there are a lot of them...) than actually getting the right ideas out. so, when you actually bring up good points about the sun's effect on the climate, it gets ignored because they just don't want to talk about it. and, that's a failure that the talking heads need to address, because the sun is actually going through a phase right now where it's output is low enough that it will (regionally) offset the effects of global warming, at least for a while. if legitimate climate scientists don't take steps to address the point clearly and honestly, climate change is going to be seen as a theory that fails to make accurate predictions, and we're going to lose the argument - only to get roasted when or if the sun turns itself up. science cannot operate at a propaganda level if it wants to win public support. it has to be honest, and it has to win people over due to it's honest attempts to understand things as they actually are.

here's the thing: this is not as dire as people are likely to intuitively think. it's a modelling issue. it doesn't require a rethink to solve, it requires a tweak. the reality is that we don't understand the sun all that well, so we mostly model it as constant. we even have a term called the solar constant. but, the sun's output is not constant, and nobody is going to argue that it is.

what legitimate climate scientists need to do is put more effort into modelling the sun and then work those fluctuations into the models. remember: small changes in solar output can make big differences in the upper atmosphere. think of the way the sun hits the earth as a lightning strike on a lake - it ripples. and, that's where the "amplification" actually happens. in this case, what we're talking about is a decrease in total energy entering the system - and we understand how this works fairly well, with the oscillations taking repetitive shapes that are predictable functions of the solar output.

unlike the deniers, i would not expect that a better modelling of the sun would create a substantially different understanding of climate change. it's theoretically plausible, i suppose - only way to find out is to do it - but we understand the greenhouse effect, too, and the solar output would probably have to decrease by a larger proportion than is being contemplated in order to offset the effect. the point is that we don't have this model. because we don't understand the sun. the deniers, however, insist that the models can be improved - and that is tautological. they should be met halfway on this point, to prove them wrong, and to better understand the thing, as a whole. what better models - and this is a complexity issue, not a computing issue - would really help us with is in understanding the weather quite a bit better.

this article is an example of how to misunderstand the point:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/09/the-imminent-mini-ice-age-myth-is-back-and-its-still-wrong

i don't really have any corrections to make on the article. but, the scientific claim here, and mike lockwood, who is cited here in an equally poor but oppositely poor context than he is in the right-wing media, has volunteered to be spokesperson for it, is not that the decrease in solar activity will offset global warming but that it will lead to the kind of regional variations that were seen in seventeenth century england. the article is really an elaborate strawman fallacy, rushing to debunk a claim that no scientist has ever made.

it's all very nice and everything to point out that a regional decrease in northern temperatures is likely to be offset by an accompanying increase in southern ones. why do we have winter, again? but, tell it to the guy that's playing hockey on the thames in april, as india suffers through 55 degree heat.

it balances out, so there's nothing to worry about, right? eh....

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

deathtokoalas

this research was trendy in the mainstream media a few years ago, but it's actually been thoroughly debunked. and, this insistence that all weather is created by the same factors is actually conspiratorial thinking; what's presented here isn't a counter to denial type thinking, but it's parallel and analogue on the left.

carbon concentrations are not the cause of all weather.

and, the polar vortex is quite well understood as a function of sunlight.

deathtokoalas

the very quick response is this: we don't need to cite carbon concentrations to explain the cold we're seeing. we already have a standard, widely understood model. it's the same model that we use to understand seasons. so, this is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. and, it happens to be that it isn't consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.

i think maybe the conceptual problem people are having is that they conceive of the earth like the ancient greeks did: as though it's in a glass ball, free from the influence of outside forces. the universe is newtonian - predictable - and only gets chaotic when humans alter the natural equilibrium. in fact, the reality is that we're a jagged lump of molten rock, not spherical but only even roughly elliptical, and we're hurdling towards nowhere through an orbit full of bumps. we go through ice ages when we hit very rough patches - that is the theory of ice ages, converted into an analogy about bad roads. and, it's the basic theory of weather, too.

the reason we needed a theory of global warming in the first place was that the movement of temperatures decoupled from the sun. if the weather we were experiencing was caused mostly or solely by the sun, it should have been getting colder, not warmer. yet, it was getting warmer. contradiction. so, the weather could not have been caused solely by the sun....

as it stands, the recent exaggerated expansion of the polar vortex - which most people call winter - is happening in perfect correlation with the sun, which is entering a minimum during one of it's weakest cycles on record. if our science of seasons and ice ages is correct, our recent observations of the sun are predictive; the actual predictive science here is that this should, in fact, make things colder - regionally. and temporarily. and, this is exactly what is happening. there's no reason for what she's doing.

what jennifer francis is doing is really something along the lines of throwing an apple into the air, and trying to explain why it falls using magnetism. it's a nice story, jenn. but we already understand gravity pretty well - or, at least, we do observationally.

mike lockwood. look him up. he did the studies.

jessman9000

Deleting peoples comments only destroyed your own narrative.

deathtokoalas

i'm not interested in acting as a medium for the dissemination of false information, or outright stupidity; your comment is not correct. what deleting stupid comments does is sharpen the narrative, by eliminating the irrelevant, the superfluous and/or the incorrect. it removes misleading or useless information from the discourse.

i don't want to get into a huxley v. orwell debate, but that's where i'm going with this. when we're bombarded with false information, it's much harder to find the actual truth.

that said, i wish i still had the ability to remove stupid comments, but google has removed this under apparent pressure from right-wing extremists.

pk

FYI:   BBC Horizon 2005 Global Dimming

deathtokoalas

it is consistent with what i'm saying to suggest that coal particulates - and other pollutants - should be a measurable aspect of climate modelling. but, this isn't the same kind of long term problem, because the particles don't build up in the same way. it's more of a localized short term thing. but, if i was more interested in southern china than i am in the great lakes, i'd be arguing the point for a short term effect, absolutely.

grindupBaker

Earth surface is smooth, not a jagged lump. You referred to yourself and one or more unspecified persons as "a jagged lump". This seems quite likely but we are not sufficiently familiar with you to have high certainty of your similarity to a jagged lump.

deathtokoalas

apparently, this person is from saskatchewan, because they've clearly never seen a mountain before.

grindupBaker

you say "the reason we needed a theory of global warming in the first place was that the movement of temperatures decoupled from the sun". Correct but also note that the hypothesis of "global warming" was derived by Fourier more than a century before the experiment with coal had been conducted for long enough and measurements had been sufficient for long enough to confirm the hypothesis and make it a theory.

deathtokoalas

google is very bad at notifications. but, fwiw, i believe that what fourier demonstrated was merely the mechanism of the greenhouse effect, rather than any specific warming trends.

charles

Just another Russian troll calling him/herself Jessica. Yawn!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIUN5ziSfNc

deathtokoalas

well, i'm not a russian troll. but, you sure sound like a democratic party stooge.

my arguments do not challenge the climate consensus; francis' theory is not in it, and never will be.

charles

"democratic party stooge" LOL, Jess. I'm not from the US and A, not even from that continent.

deathtokoalas

i have no reason to believe you when you say that, stooge.

charles

I couldn't care less, Jessica. Nice name BTW. You transgender?

deathtokoalas

see, this is when the democratic party stooge reflexively retreats to identity politics to attempt to prove their faux liberalism.

charles

At least we know now what you're after

deathtokoalas

you'll have to fill me in on the conspiracy, stooge.

=====

wonderpope

This professor couldn't have explained the physics of how AGW affects the jet streams, and by that causes the local weather anomalies we are experiencing, any easier and clearer. She's not talking about carbon tax or one world government. She's basically saying "we're fucked" even if we would restore the carbon cycle to pre-industrial, because the surplus of CO2 we've been putting into the cycle in the past, let's say, 100 years will continue affecting the climate for 100 years more. And yet I read some cringe worthy comments on here, that show that some people have not listened to this video and aren't even attempting to dispute the data presented, but want to present the expert as a shill for some government entity. Don't get me wrong, skepticism is a good thing. But there's a reason why experts in a field understand things better than the average person...it's because they've spent all their life studying it.

We're driving this car called "human civilization" towards a wall at 200 mph...and instead of facing the problem and finding a way to reduce the speed, people seem to just try to turn their seats in the opposite direction to not see the wall coming towards them at a rapid speed.

deathtokoalas

in fact, this particular scientist's research is not accepted by mainstream academics.

you should look that up, rather than rely on youtube videos for information.

wonderpope

Please tell me exactly how mainstream contradict her claims. What, in your opinion, does mainstream science claim? what is the counter claim I need to look for? I can´t just google "debunking Jennifer A. Francis" and hope to find easily what you claim.

deathtokoalas

you have to realize, wonderpope, that most ideas that are not well accepted do not generate a large amount of literature debunking them. they're just ignored and forgotten. with francis' theory, because it was picked up by the msm without vetting it, what you're going to find is a lot of debunking of various validity from what are mostly very poor sources. actual scientists working in the field have largely just ignored it. i mean, these people don't have time for it.

as a consequence, it's easier to direct you to the actual mainstream theory.

you can easily find articles discussing lockwood's work on mainstream sites, like the bbc. he's actually received scientific awards for his work, along with promotions and the kind of titles that scientists covet, like a place in the royal society. this is the existing consensus: while climate is complicated, weather (and the jet stream is weather.) is caused almost entirely by fluctuations in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth. and, he's rather convincingly demonstrated the point that the existing slow down in solar activity will cause the kind of fluctuations we're seeing in the jet stream - thereby producing a predictive theory of more cold winters in the northern hemisphere, around the jet stream, during the existing minimum.

as mentioned, the most obvious problem with francis' theory is that it has heat and cold moving in directions that are not consistent with the theory of thermodynamics.

---

i googled a bit more. i'm kind of bed-ridden by choice, right now.

jennifer francis has, herself, done her opponents the courtesy of compiling a list of studies that contradict her own research (i do not know how many of them addressed her research directly, but probably very few did.), and then attempts to hand wave it away by claiming bad methodology - which is what scientists do when they can't admit they're wrong.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318287618_Why_Are_Arctic_Linkages_to_Extreme_Weather_Still_Up_in_the_Air

dan

I watched a video called "Jet Streams, more Jet Streams, and even more Jet Streams: AGU Science" In that clip he talks about a paper by Mann. When I heard that my BS detector turned up its sensitivity because Mann is the infamous author of the fake hockey stick graph.

To be honest what he says is mostly beyond me even though I understand standing wave theory and resonance quite well. God help those that are completely ignorant of such theory.  He appears to be talking about how modeling of the jet stream works. But the models don't actually emulate reality well and have demonstrated zero predictive capability.

No one argues that the jet streams play an important part in weather events and more study as to how they operate is welcomed.

But the jet stream performs much more like a meandering river than a simple wave function. It is a chaotic structure, not a pure sine wave function. Its path change is caused by minor and chaotic deviations to its flow path restrictions, its width,  and its inertia all interacting simultaneously.

So its apparent "frequency" and "amplitude" can never be more than a very rough approximation. Applying "quasi resonant effects". resonance, amplitude, Q, and R etc. apply only to sine functions. So I conclude wave theory models that use such simulations will never be able to adequately explain or predict chaotic jet stream behavior. 

He goes on to claim that aerosols contribute "hugely" to radiative forcing. If you look at IPCC reports you will see that a) the supposed effects due to aerosols have large error bars and b) as the reports become more refined their effects are being reduced. This fact has introduced a conundrum for alarmists because large aerosol effects have been used to tune models (to provide cooling to force them to agree with observed data) that contain high climate sensitivity values (predict more warming than happened). i.e. they appear to be incorrectly tuned to cancel predicted warming. Even at that, the models all quickly diverge from observed climate, predicting warming that does not occur. That would indicate that their sensitivity values are too high. Yet the IPCC averages 102 knowingly incorrect models and runs with a 3C sensitivity value!

He then goes on to talk about the paleo record reconstruction of the jet stream from ice cores. At best this is a poor proxy of snowfall location that eludes to a possible jet stream waveform. But the observation concludes that warmer periods had larger stream amplitude so he runs with it. To his credit, he admits "it's very difficult to determine what configuration jet streams had based on  (these records)".

The rest of the video sites other possible inferences and he points out that we need more research. I agree.

deathtokoalas

you might want to check your understanding of waves, dan. 

there is a basic theory in algebra that says that all continuous functions, no matter how complicated,  can be decomposed into a series of sine waves, called a fourier series. and, the fourier transform (not the same as the series) has widespread applications across the sciences. there is also a fourier theory, but that is pure math stuff. the question isn't really whether the math is reasonable, it's whether the theory is predictive, and the answer is that it only works when you cherry pick the data. this shouldn't actually be particularly surprising, though, because it's quite physically counter-intuitive.

the empirical question is really whether these waves remain in tact or not, that is the physics being challenged, and the evidence appears to be that they don't. the model then collapses as a result of bad physics, not bad math.

further, we don't try to understand the jet stream in terms of ocean currents, anyways. we try and understand the jet stream in terms of factors in the upper atmosphere. i mean, this is the theory: that the energy from the oceans is elevating itself into the atmosphere, and then wreaking havoc - which is a difficult idea on it's face and requires this clumsy mechanism to take seriously.

the biggest factor in the upper atmosphere, and especially around the earth's tilt, is the way the sun hits it. and, there is actually good science that makes predictive theories about jet streams based on solar fluctuations.

======

deathtokoalas

somebody ought to tell paul that if he wants to focus on climate change, he should hire a science journalist. i can't blame greg for this. and i don't claim anything malicious. it's just that it's wrong.

sertaki

Are you saying that a climate journalist would bring more credible facts to the table than an actual climate scientist who has worked on important studies herself?

deathtokoalas

what i'm saying is that a broader science journalist should have pointed out that this particular scientist is actually not well regarded in her field, and that her ideas are really distorting the narrative. not in those terms, exactly, perhaps, but through a probing analysis. see, aaron is a actually a good example, in the sense that he challenges people, albeit not when it comes to science, because he's not a science journalist, even when he plays devil's advocate. an interview with a very controversial researcher like jennifer francis should be presented as what it is, and should ultimately be about challenging the mechanism she's providing. this is rather presented as a science lesson, but what it's "teaching" is something that is at best extremely obscure - and probably just flat out wrong.

what you're doing is appealing to authority. and, she might be an authority on her own research. but, she's not a good authority on the broader topic.

you could throw a dart in a climate conference and find somebody who both accepts the climate consensus and is willing to challenge this theory on air.

and, it's kind of pernicious. because the reason this theory is getting more attention than it deserve is that it was run by the corporate left media. the guardian. the atlantic. now, the so-called independent media is running with it, because it appeared in the mainstream press, not because of it's actual value. that's not how this ought to work.

grindupBaker

I made an effort and spent some time with searches like "controversial research jennifer francis" and I've come up with nothing after reading NAS & all sorts of sites. So give a couple of links, just so we can confirm that you aren't just a coal/oil shill-fuckwit wasting our time. Just a couple of relevant links.

deathtokoalas

the reason i'm being obscure is that the arguments are technical.

http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/14_february_2014?pg=29#pg29