you could always turn it into a mall...

it probably couldn't withhold the weight of people in it.

so, what do i think they should do with the al aqsa / temple mount complex, for example?

what i actually think is that they should turn it into a museum, and i'm not really interested in having a discussion about competing religious access to different crumbling walls here in the 21st century. it's a ridiculous discussion to have, and i'll get up and walk out of the room if it erupts. these people are all idiots that aren't worth listening to.

we need to look towards the future, and leave religion in the past as we walk forwards as equals together.

i've mused in the past about creating a new religion, but it's just a social engineering ploy. it's worthwhile to contemplate it, though. i mean, they say that most of the region converted to christianity, and that was probably something that was invented by roman social engineers to create unity. it worked, for a while. ironically, the muslim invasions would have likely failed if it weren't for theological debates about things like monophysitism, which alienated the egyptians and the descendants of the hebrews, but you learn from your mistakes, right? it did work for a while.

so, if you could create some new messianic religion and then convert both the palestinians (who are the descendants of the jews, remember.) and the jews to it, you could conceivably eliminate most of the root causes of the existing problems, even if you end up creating more in the long run. at the least, prying people away from their existing mythologies is probably a positive step towards an atheistic future.

but, i'm only half serious. and i am half serious.

i don't want to tear it down, it has value to archaeologists, historians and anthropologists. but, we need to find a way to leave this debate behind, because it's really, actually a pretty stupid and backwards thing to be fighting about.

what would be ideal would be for hebrews and arabs to move forward towards a secular society, together. if i am going to fight for anything at all, it is that, and is only that.

there's not going to be a two-state solution in israel. it's not a question of what you like or don't like, it's a question of what's realistic and what isn't.

that said, i'm not shy in pointing out that i don't like ethnic nationalism and i don't like the idea of the nation state and i don't want the world cut up into segregated, ethnic enclaves. however, that's secondary to what the reality on the ground is at this point, which is that israel controls almost all of the west bank, leaving nowhere left to actually put a palestinian state.

i understand that this is hard for people of a certain age, that have been pushing this idea at least since camp david. that was 40 years ago. the facts on the ground have changed, since then.

we can do better than jared kushner, but this is something that's going to require a fresh and new perspective on, and it's inevitably going to come via generational change.

as stated previously, i support a single state with equal rights for everybody. i know this is hard, but it's the only realistic choice in front of us - whether i like it better or not.

i don't often have time for historical ceremonies, but d-day is something we should maintain some collective memory of.

to begin with, it's probably the only time in history that britain invaded france. even the plantaganets were already there.

jokes aside (yes, that was a joke. sorry.), if you know or knew or heard about somebody that died that day, you have a right to pride regarding it. and, that's a rare statement coming from an anarchist.

there have been very few wars in history that had to be fought; this was one of them. and, we should remember the singularity of it as much as we remember the thing itself, as it should help us to see the triviality of the next war we have thrust upon us.

so, is hate speech free speech?

yes.

but, all that means is that the government shouldn't be regulating speech, even if it's "hateful". that doesn't mean that the "hateful" speaker has a right to be heard. free speech also means that protestors have the right to drown out the "hateful" person, and prevent them from being heard, if they really insist - so long as they are not being threatening or harassing, themselves.

what free speech really means is that the government needs to back off, that it shouldn't pick a side, and that it's neither there to police nor protect free expression: this is up to us, as citizens, to work out.

so, as a free speech activist, what i want to see is protestors yelling down ann coulter while the cops sit quietly and watch. should the yelling turn to violence, she would then deserve protection. but, she does not have the right to be heard over the crowd, if the crowd decides otherwise - she only has the right to be drowned out.

in order to gain control over the space, she would need to be asserting property rights, which is a different concept than free speech. once she is in a private space, she can use private security to assert her privilege - not her right - to be heard in a space she has property rights over, or that an owner is asserting property rights over on her behalf. and, i actually don't like that, either, but i'll respect it as the existing legal order in most cases.

generally, a public speaker would not have these kinds of property rights at a public university, and should not, either. the public university should be seen as a state institution, and should not be regulating expression one way or another.

so, again: if you have a speaker at a public university being drowned out by protestors, then that is not a violation of speech rights but an expression of it. if you disagree then, at best, you're confusing property rights with speech rights.

the only way that a speech violation can occur here is if the police come in and try and control the situation, as the government is then taking a side in a debate that they are obligated to avoid taking a side on.

and, at least somebody is taking the right perspective on this.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/internet-speech/social-media-blackouts-are-authoritarian-power-move

and, yes, our own idiot in toronto has picked this up entirely, backwards framing and all.

again: it is the students that have actual speech rights here, and they should be launching a constitutional challenge against the orwellian "free speech" policy. but, they've bought right into the narrative, and seem to actually believe that they're opposed to free speech.

...because they're fucking idiots.

https://www.marxist.com/canada-student-protests-suppressed-under-guise-of-free-speech.htm

we need the aclu to start doing mass teach-ins or something.

really.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters

what i support are free speech protestors - that is people holding up signs and disrupting events in the name of promoting free speech - but this has become somewhat of a unicorn, a kind of contradiction in terms, in the idiocracy we've inherited from our parents.

of all the idiocy we see before us, of all the orwellian backwardsness, of all of the dystopic screwiness, the way the speech debate is framed is the single, worst offender. nothing is this vacuous.

it is tragic that the discourse is so poor. truly. it's depressing, really.

and, i will slam you both, at every opportunity.

tl;dr - both sides of this debate are full of idiots, both sides are technically equally wrong, and neither side knows what the fuck they're talking about.

if you've been following my writing for any length of time, you already know that i think that the contemporary debate on free speech in the united states is incoherent, and i'm not on either side of the debate.

i've already posted this in many places, but i'll summarize my perspective here.

i do not think that a posh for-profit speaker can claim "freedom of speech" to silence a crowd that is opposing it. rather, it is the crowd that is exercising the freedom of speech in drowning out the posh speaker. so, the crowd has speech rights, here, not the speaker.

but, the issue has been framed in a way that is legally, philosophically and rationally bankrupt, in attempting to argue that the protestors are infringing on the for-profit speaker's right to speak - something that exists nowhere in any law at all.

insofar as the constitution of either the united states or canada is relevant, it has nothing to say about the rights of for profit speakers to speak at universities. what it has to say is that the government cannot interfere to control the outcome. what that means is that the only group that is guilty of breaking the constitution is the police.

i haven't had the occasion to involve myself in these debates, up to this point, but what these students should be doing is launching constitutional grievances against the relevant police forces. but, they're so horribly ignorant that they don't even understand what they're actually doing, or what is actually being done to them.

i will gleefully make you look stupid if you try and paint me on one side of this debate that is incoherent through and through, and that i am viciously in opposition to both sides on. so, don't bother.

this is a perfectly orwellian article: protecting free speech is equated with dismantling it.

the freedom to speak does not imply the right to be heard, and the only entity in society that has any obligation to uphold speech rights is the state - but it is important to recognize that the state is unique, and imperative that we don't attempt to draw parallels between the special obligation that the state has to protect speech and the behaviour of private citizens.

free speech is the right to yell in a crowd, not the right to speak on a stage.

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/now-that-justin-trudeau-has-tasted-de-platforming-directly-he-should-help-stop-it

this is one of the few things that you can cite foucault on, and one of the few topics he wrote about that is worth reading. and, you should actually read it - he will correct a lot of widespread existing myths.

was jesus gay?

well, i don't think he even existed at all. but, it's a question that is more interesting than may initially appear obvious, in the sense that it can help us understand how wrong our current mainstream (not scientific. mainstream.) understanding of homosexuality is.

you usually start this off by appealing to his band of merry men, and claiming that it's kind of obvious that somebody that asks grown men to denounce their possessions and follow him around the countryside must be gay. i mean, what did they do when they weren't creating bread out of thin air?

but, you're kind of missing the broader historical point, and the reality that sex between men was pretty normal in the greek world, which is the actual world that jesus lived in, rather than a jewish one. the jews were allowed to return to israel by the persians (or were perhaps actually first settled there by them.), but then they fell to alexander, and when the romans moved in it was just as the hegemon - the area was really deeply greek from the time of alexander to the years immediately preceding the crusades, which was nearly 1500 years.

in classical greece, as in classical rome, sex was something buddies did with each other to prove they were friends. so, you have propaganda about roman emperors that "wore their male partners out", which was just mean to broadcast their strength and dominance and virility. in america, we had "don't ask, don't tell"; in the ancient world, sex between soldiers was encouraged by the leadership to demonstrate fraternity and equality, as they fought to uphold a warped concept of liberty. and, the mystery cults that were dominant at the time of jesus would have been full of all kinds of sex, with all kinds of people, including those we would today consider to be far too young to consent. if the mass has a memory of bacchian ritual embedded within it, it's worthwhile to ask what part of the body you're consuming.

it's easy to forget that these categories we have - "gay" and "straight" - didn't exist until the victorian period, and are a consequence of exiting the dark ages, where they'd burn you at the stake for sodomy. before the rise of christianity, people didn't think in these categorical ways, or try to find an answer as to why people were "different" - because they weren't. homosexual sex was perfectly normal.

so, you hear this sarcastic question - "when did you decide you were straight?" - as though you can't answer that, and it therefore follows that you didn't decide you were gay, either. but, you did decide you were straight, as a part of a process of socialization and normalization growing up in childhood. you weren't born that way, it's not a default, it's not inherent or more normal.

so, did jesus have sex with his apostles? i think you should assume that this is obvious, and the burden of proof is on demonstrating that he didn't.

but, following that logic, i'm going to take them every six hours with the intent to maintain a constant dose, as my body is actually going to metabolize most of what i'm taking in two to three hours.

i'm concerned that if i take them bid instead of qid, i'll just end up pissing it out.

so, i'm going to get something to eat, and i'll need to make some calls when the sun comes up, but i don't plan to leave the house until i'm caught up and a few weeks ahead on the concert research, finally.

and, i could get september, 2013 published while i'm at it.

what i've been doing, and the test results justify this, is taking extra androgen blockers as i feel i need them.

and, i think what i was tying to cortisol is probably actually testosterone. i didn't end up with the cortisol test, because it doesn't make sense relative to my schedule, and i was smoking drugs at the bar last week.

so, if i'm feeling anxious or agitated, i just take an extra one. for now.

once they're gone, though, i'll be off the cyproterate altogether.

so, the answer is "not yet". one thing at a time.

if i switch, it will be to a patch, but i'm not sure that fits my lifestyle well, at this point. maybe when i'm older...

for right now, it's the cyproterate i'm worried about and the testosterone i want to flat out get rid of.

if i'm removing my testicles largely out of concern for my liver, shouldn't i be switching to injections?

my primary concern about the injections was always that they were carcinogenic, and i'm not sure that recent studies uphold this concern, but you have to understand the difference between the way this works.

if i start getting injections, what happens is they give me enough estrogen for a month all at once, and it slowly gets metabolized and excreted. so, i have a maximum estrogen level a short time after the injection, and then decreasing levels for weeks. functionally speaking, what that means is that the actual experience i'd be undergoing is near constant estrogen withdrawal, which is kind of missing the point. i haven't seen anybody make the link, but i wonder if the high suicide rate in mtf trans people could in some way be tied to these injections, as withdrawal is...well, it's the hormonal reaction associated with menstruation, but literally on steroids. again, the thought process is that the actual experience of having injections is a short "high" followed by weeks of withdrawal. you would also expect to see bursts of physical effects, followed by decreases; for example, you might see a brief and rapid increase in breast growth (often cited as the reason people want injections), but this would be followed by decline, and then another spurt, and you'd kind of have to get used to that every month - which i suspect would be very difficult.

injections of modern estrogens, do, however, come without the stress on the liver, which has side effects of blood clots from coagulation factors. but, i should point out that these risk factors were mostly tied to what is called conjugated estrogen, that is estrogen that the human liver has difficulty metabolizing. what i and most people take is a middle risk factor - not as dangerous as the old horse estrogen that they used to take in the 60s and 70s, but not free of the risk factor the way that the injections are (as they bypass the liver).

if you take them orally, it's a different game - rather than load yourself up with an absurd amount of estrogen and then wait for it to metabolize, what you do is take small amounts constantly, to maintain a constant hormone level. that actually means that i don't have a cycle at all, i'm just on estrogen all of the time, similar to women taking birth control pills, which, let's be honest, is really a modern woman, isn't it? the difference is that i'm taking something like 150-200x as much as estrogen as women on the strongest pills are. well, i'm on 8 mg/day, now - you do the math. and, the more you take, the worse off it is on your liver...

removing my testicles will increase the efficacy of the estrace because it won't be fighting with what's left of the testosterone anymore, and fwiw my testosterone test came back at 0.4 - clinically acceptable, but just barely. it was lower than that last year. it's still in the range of "chemically castrated", but at the very upper end of it. it's just tolerance, like anything else, and you would expect to have to increase your dosage over time. i want it closer to 0.1, but i don't want to increase my dosage, because the cyproterate is legitimately hard on your liver. when i get the testicles out, that should fall back to negligible levels again.

i don't expect to actually cut my estrogen, but taking the testicles out should remove the need for another dose increase for quite a while.

oh, and how much to get my balls snipped out?

it's free.

as per usual, my health is absurdly ideal - glucose levels lined up directly with the averages, and cholesterol levels on the dangerously low side.

the doctor is continually flabbergasted by the cholesterol, stating things like "these are the lowest cholesterol numbers i've ever seen". he keeps asking me about my diet.  but, the real answer is not what i eat but how much; my cholesterol is low because i keep excess storage to a minimum, by not eating more than i need and getting enough exercise to burn off or convert storage when it appears. it really is just a conservation law.

physics is all.

i will have an interview with a nurse in july to get a rec to get my balls out. literally. i'll keep the sac though, as they'll use it to build a vagina, one day. they're just going to make a little cut, sever them from the pipeline up and pop 'em out. voila - no more testosterone. so, that will likely not be until early in the year, or late in this one.

i'm also upping my estrogen from 6 mg/day to 8 mg/day, and i'm not sure how i want to do it, yet. probably every six hours, but maybe 4 every 12. i dunno.

for now, i have enough groceries to last some time, so i am taking a showering and heading to sleep, with the intent to catch up and then some before i leave the house next.

....so, that means i should be able to get back to what i was doing for a few hours.

i initially suggested i would do the reviews first, but i need to catch up, first, now - i spent too much time sleeping this week.

i was expecting to need to do some write-ups for my appointment tomorrow (about an orchiectomy), but what he gave me was a form letter for the doctor to fill in, and i'm not going to do that. i mean, i can't write a letter for the doctor. if that's what he wants me to do, i'll have to tell him i misunderstood.

testicular removal is a very minor step in transition, and usually isn't done alone but rather as a part of a larger surgery, like a vaginoplasty. the thing is that, for right now, i feel like i'm plateauing. it is true that i try to live in a female identity full time, but i have to temper the statement by pointing to physical reality: i know i don't exactly pull it off. so, i'm in an awkward position where i want to be living full time, but know i'm not fooling anybody.

what removing the testicles will do is completely eliminate testosterone production, which will do three things for me. the first is the obvious, namely that i will become unable to produce testosterone. however, i already produce very little testosterone due to the large amounts of anti-androgens i'm on, so that itself is not going to be experiential, except that i won't have to experience the annoyance of resetting every time i'm late on a dose. if i sleep in or otherwise am 4-5 hours late on a pill, i can feel it in my pants, and i want that to stop. the second is that it will take a huge strain off of my liver, and that is actually my primary concern: i don't want to be doing this to my liver any more. the third is that eliminating this battle between the androgens and anti-androgens that is constantly raging inside me should actually allow the estrogen to work more effectively, which should allow things like larger breast growth. i can't continue to increase my estrogen every 12 months, either, i need to deal with the source of testosterone.

it's only going to be after i've gone through another lengthy period with zero testosterone that i'm going to feel comfortable with taking final steps to full transition. if i had started this process in my teens, or kept to it in my early 20s, things would be different. but, as it is, for me, what i'm hoping is that removing the testicles will be enough that i can really be convincing enough to be living full time, and then take it to the next step from there.

if not? well, i know i don't want kids, and i don't have any interest in women. i'd rather be a eunuch than a cis-male, and if that's what i have to settle for, i can deal with it.

when they bring out the cowboys, you know it's getting real.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1124685/spain-usa-cuba-venezuela-donald-trump-helmes-burton-act

then, what do you call a society based on free markets and free speech, if conservatives are supposed to be about government domination over everything?

that would be called a liberal society, and it's proponents would be called liberals.

what do you actually call a society where the government runs everything?

it's called a monarchy, theocracy or feudalism.

and who promotes these systems?

these people are called conservatives.

well, it's a bullshit poll.

the right answer - that socialism is when the workers take control of the means of production - is not listed in the responses. so, how do you react to a poll that gives people a multiple choice set of responses, without providing the correct response?

to be clear,

1) "government ownership of some aspects of the economy" is a wrong answer. socialism is about the people running the economy, as a transitional phase to communism, which is when the state is abolished altogether. you should be exceedingly suspicious of anybody trying to tell you that socialism is about government control over the economy, as that is little more than a right-wing talking point.

2) "abolishing private property" is the closest thing to the right answer, but it is not the same thing as seizing control over production. there is a substantial intersection. i mean, if forced, i'd pick this one, while realizing it's lacking.

3) "lack of civil liberties" has nothing to do with socialism. wrong. right-wing talking point.

4) "end poverty and provide access to services" is a corollary, but not a definition. socialism would aspire to this, and it would be true in a functional socialist system, but it is not the definition of socialism.

https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/446377-20-percent-of-americans-cant-define-socialism-even-as-its

"and, now i would like to introduce our keynote speaker, jim balsilly, who is going to speak about how to make a competitive firm uncompetitive."

why not put him on an expert panel with kim campbell and michael cowpland?

there's a junta for canadian success, if i've ever seen one.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/checkup/is-it-time-to-delete-facebook-1.5155783/they-re-exploiting-a-regulatory-gap-former-rim-ceo-calls-for-penalties-on-social-media-companies-1.5159551

so, that was another sleepy day, but i'm actually back into my normal routine, with it.

i got all of the cleaning done this morning before nodding off around noon. now, i'm up and should be able to get a lot of typing of various types done tonight.

i've actually been arguing for a very long time that the liberals need to do something about the tory media in this country. but, i don't think that a bailout package is nearly enough or nearly understands the depth of the problem.

it is typical of this government to think you can get what you want by sucking up to people, and it's tempting to read something into trudeau's privileged upbringing; is the crux of the matter that the most important thing that trudeau learned from his father was how to butter him up to get what he wants? but, your dad is probably mostly on your side anyways, whereas the president of a neighbouring state and an inherently hostile media are not.

we have too much media concentration in this country, and some steps to break up the big companies and reduce their market share would be a big step in the right direction. ideally, that market share would be gobbled up by independent bloggers on the internet.

but, trudeau doesn't really want a diversity of sources - he wants to capture the industry, and use it to his advantage, much as his predecessor didn't want to shut down the cbc, so much as he wanted to take control of it (and did).

if harper's attempt to control the state media was frightening in it's authoritarianism, what do you say about trudeau's attempt to control private sector media?

as is the case with so many things right now, this is a serious issue in search of a serious policy maker to tackle.

this is a sad, embarrassing day to be a canadian.

i mourn for the loss of my country.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-venezuela-embassy-1.5159498

this appears to be a fact-based analysis of bernie's historical income sources and levels, and how many houses he's owned. and, it's actually rather flattering to him.

the idea that it is anti-semitic is desperate and wrong and should not be repeated further, as it harms the credibility of people making the claim.

you sound stupid, stop saying it.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/24/bernie-sanders-millionaires-226982

this is a projecting article, and i pointed this out weeks or even months ago.

i don't think the data is there, yet. but, this is what the establishment wants - it wants you to support warren instead of sanders, and it wants you to do that because her policies don't threaten it.  they've been setting this up from the start.

she does not support single payer health care, and her industry reforms are all in the form of setting up bodies that can be easily captured to avoid serious oversight.

she's exactly what the bankers want, right now - and that's why she gets such glowing media praise.

the establishment candidate is not joseph biden, and in fact they don't like him. the establishment candidate is elizabeth warren.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/as-sanders-reprises-greatest-hits-elizabeth-warren-is-surging

this is very silly, at this stage in the race.

in order for her to win the riding, she'd have to swing conservatives. ndp voters aren't going to be happy with her record on things like marijuana legalization, breathalyzers and assisted dying; conservatives might be, but they're viciously partisan, so it's a non-starter.

i actually think she would have probably been a liability in that riding to the liberals; i wouldn't have voted for her as a liberal, even before snc.

we will have to see who else ends up running. but, she will probably play spoiler, it's just not clear yet to whom.

https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/jody-wilson-raybould-has-the-lead-over-trudeaus-liberals/

the liberal party of the past would have told the americans that it would only support regime change in venezuela if it were upheld by a security council vote, in which case it would join the alliance produced by the global governing body. and, if global consensus could not be reached, we would withhold our active support - although they could still buy weapons and intelligence from us if they insist, and the price is right.

i want to be clear: i'm not saying that the liberals of the past would have rejected regime change outright, and am in fact rather explicitly pointing out that they wouldn't have. what i'm pointing out is that they would have rejected the idea that the americans have the right to act unilaterally, and outside of international law - and rather pointed to the united nations as the body that has the sole right to make these decisions. our historical liberal party would have then stuck to the decision made by the global body, with little wavering on the point.

and, why would they have done this? because they understood that a world order where the americans can use their military arbitrarily puts us at grave danger. they didn't care about iraqi or vietnamese or venezuelan civilians. no; don't think that, you're missing the point. what they cared about was ensuring that a rules-based international order existed that would prevent the americans from doing things like blockading the juan de fuca strait, or seizing the tar sands or invading and/or bombing quebec. if they can bomb vietnam or iraq or venezuela whenever they want, and without answering to anybody, why can't they bomb us under equally flimsy pretexts?

well?

why can't they?

what the sitting liberal government has done is abandoned this leveraging or balancing approach in favour of full on brown-nosing. the new principle at work in canada-us relations is that we're best off sucking up as best we can, in hopes of generating special treatment. so, we are to go out of our way to demonstrate that we're really the bestest of friends, and always were.

this is a continuation of a change put in place by the harper government.

and, it's failing.

because it's absurd and transparent and disingenuous, and ultimately irrelevant - trump doesn't care if you want to be his friend or not.

people will look back at the wisdom of our foreign policy in the second half of the last century, and wonder what caused canada to lose it's intelligence, starting in the mid 00s. and, the answer is at the root of so many of our problems: we decided against educating our children.

let's get the basic facts on the table: there were no canadian troops in vietnam or iraq, although we did provide peace-keeping or training forces after the fact. the reason we did not participate in these invasion forces has nothing to do with pacifism or anti-war rhetoric, but was rather solely because the invasions were not agreed upon by the united nations.

chretien has been crystal clear from the start that he would have sent troops to iraq if the united nations had backed the invasion, and we have a testable way to demonstrate the accuracy of this claim, because he did send troops to afghanistan, under the united nations mandate.

this is not an original idea that i'm espousing, but is rather the central thesis of any book written after the second world war on canadian foreign policy. i'm not letting anything out of the bag. the americans understand our position, or at least what it used to be. and, if you don't understand what i'm saying, then you don't know what you're talking about - it's that basic, that fundamental, to canadian foreign policy.

our position on venezuela is consequently a dramatic break from our historical position, because it for the first time in our history (as a british colony until 1982, and a sovereign state since) acknowledges the primacy of the monroe doctrine, over the supremacy of the un charter. that does not mean that it is the first time that we've aligned with the united states, and it clearly is not. but, it is the first time we've acted as a client state, disinterested or unaware of our own interests, and focused solely on the promotion of washington's, in the hope we'll get some kind of reward from the white house. we have never, ever, ever done that before. at all.

it is perhaps naive to ask the government to investigate.

but, what else do you do?

i don't know when we're going to come to terms with what is happening.

and, it is even very possible that valcourt doesn't actually know.

but, the evidence is pretty clear: there is some clique or agency within the canadian government that is, in fact, attempting to systemically exterminate the indigenous population by targeting the women, who continue to disappear at alarming rates.

that fits the definition of genocide, in my view.

but, nobody knows who or what is organizing this - it's covert, and shrouded in mystery. there are no released documents, no conspiracy theories, no secret csis plans - just all of these females that disappear after being taken into custody, with no explanation or further elaboration as to why.

i was in loose communication with the sisters in spirit when i lived in ottawa, and i've looked into this. one of the more distressing pieces of information that you see when you look at the data is that it is frequently the case that the last person that the missing person was seen with was a police officer.

the truth is the opposite of what valcourt is saying: the report is a cover-up.

everybody that's looked into this knows what the truth is, but nobody wants to state it, and it's not stated in the report, either.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/valcourt-mmiwg-report-1.5159437

i guess i had to catch up on sleep this weekend; i've been sleeping since friday night, awaking only to eat.

i could blame it on the weather but there's probably a better answer: i went to four parties last week and smoked a lot of cigarettes at them. i don't smoke when i'm at home, so i've been thrown back in withdrawal. nicotine is a physical addiction...

there is no possibility that i'm going to start smoking habitually again, but that could go a good ways to explaining why i'm so tired right now.

i need to get up, though. i need to clean, i need to do some writing. coffee, it is.

but, nothing has changed: i'm still sorting through concert listings and trying to plan a good trip to london and/or toronto to file, some time in the middle or the end of the summer.

i'm going to call the oiprd on monday morning and chew them out.

this is just a reminder: i have until mid-september to file the human rights complaint, and if i have to wait until then, i will. there are no time frames around the other suits.

the longer that it takes for the oiprd to get it's review completed (and i'm still waiting. it's now over two months since they agreed to the review.), the worse off they'll look in the eyes of the judge. it was supposed to be done by mid-april....

there's a few things canadian politicians don't do.

- they don't talk about baseball. ever. that's instant death. and, the same rule ought to apply to basketball.
- they don't refer to americans using terms like "us" or "we".
- they don't drink american beer.
- ...and they don't launch political initiatives using references to historical american policies.

this is what i want to hear the ndp talk about, not some "green new deal".

https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/

and, you'll notice that it is very canadian in a lot of ways. that's important, because we're not trying to rebuild a rust belt that we don't have, we're trying to fundamentally change how we see the world around us.

if jagmeet singh wants to be taken seriously, he should start by forgetting about parroting the american propaganda (itself not very inspiring. are we going to elect the ndp so they can have a non-binding resolution of no substance defeated on the house floor? this is empty politicking, and smart leftists can see through it.) and instead giving this national treasure we have named naomi klein a call.

remember when she proposed something like this four years ago?

how did the ndp react?

so, why should anybody take this horribly vague "new green deal" farce seriously, an idea created in a foreign country, when they won't act on a detailed plan presented by their own very real party apparatchik?

no. the fact that they're walking down the american path rather than our own is evidence that they're lying through their teeth - as they always do.

it's taken some time for it to come out as robust, but you really are looking at a distinct liberal--->green swing, here, with continued stagnation from both the ndp and the conservatives.

right now, the liberals are going to lose because they're bleeding support to the greens.

the ndp is a tainted vessel; there is no future for them, after the notley fiasco. i've been arguing for years that they're usually worse than the liberals when they actually win, but after oil queen notley, they have about as much credibility as the old parties, now - the jig is up, it's time to walk away. so, the goal for everybody on the left in this election needs to be to have the greens beat the ndp, outright - both in votes and in seats.

the liberals and conservatives are so similar at the federal level at this point, that it doesn't really matter which one wins. the focus needs to be more about the future of the left, and to have the greens repositioned as the actual protest party in the country.

i wouldn't bother taking much of what he says seriously, frankly.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/jagmeet-singh-climate-change-green-party-1.5157591

this is the relevant precedent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_the_Regime_of_the_Straits

canada's attempt to control the northwest passage as a purely "internal waterway" is inconsistent with international law and doomed to failure.

rather, the international law on the topic should lead to an agreement similar to the one that governs the bosporus, where the turks maintain some rights to inspection but ultimately are forced to allow for free passage.

a reasonable person would ask the following reasonable question: is there a way to travel between greenland and alaska (or russia) without transiting canadian waters? and, there is not actually a way to do this. it would not be reasonable to conclude that, because there is no way to do this, canada should benefit from the ownership of the straits; rather, a reasonable person would recognize that our monopoly over the area requires us to allow access to passing vessels, subject to very limited and measured expressions of sovereignty. and, we are expected to behave reasonably.

the issue of resource exploration is a different one, and we are on much firmer ground there, although we shouldn't actually exploit it.

i was really exhausted today...

maybe it's the weather. maybe i just needed to catch up.


i think i'm up, now, and i need to focus on end of the month things like cleaning before i can sit down and start writing those reviews,

in the meantime, am i going to go to a hip-hop show in detroit?

no.

not a chance.

have fun, though - hope it works out.

to put it another way...

the reason el club was successful was that it tapped into a lucrative market that opened up after the magic stick changed formats, from a rock/punk club into an urban club. the magic stick has had problems attracting people since then, and has quietly started booking rock shows again in the larger theatre downstairs.

with the demise of el club, a large and lucrative market for a rock bar in downtown detroit is again on the table.

this is a huge opportunity...

it just needs a more responsible operator.

there's actually a sort of a pattern, here.

these venues set up in detroit and, because they are capitalist enterprises that are ultimately trying to make money, they make marketing decisions to try and appeal to the people that have money to spend, which, in detroit, is going to mostly be people past a certain age - and these people are either going to be mostly white, or mostly asian. i mean, if you really want to make money in detroit, or most other places, then go full asian...

then, the community - which everybody knows is overwhelmingly black - starts complaining that the programming doesn't appeal to them, is racist, etc, when the truth is that they're just trying to make money and just trying to appeal to where the money is.

but, people mostly aren't racist anymore (i understand that this doesn't apply in this specific case.), it isn't accepted socially in any context anywhere, and nobody wants to be seen as racist, so they listen and adjust and try to make the programming more appealing to broader demographics in order to try and prevent the pr fallout that comes from everybody thinking you're a fucking racist, even while knowing that they made the choice they made in the first place for good financial reasons.

then, once they've made their programming adjustments to be more inclusive, the thing that actually happens is that the place empties out; the people that used to go there are no longer interested, and there's just not enough disposable income in the market they're trying to tap into, which is why they didn't go after it in the first place. so, they lose money, and they either close or have to find a way back to where they were.

if i was an asshole i'd say fine: white people out of detroit. they don't want us here, let's go. but, i know that this is what caused the city's problems in the first place, it's just been inverted. what we used to call white flight has been converted into black slight; what was once a bunch of white people fleeing the scary black areas has become those black areas erecting fences and saying "this is ours". and, it's not any better when the blacks are pushing the whites out than it was when the whites were trying to escape.

there will be another attempt to set up a rock venue in downtown detroit, and it will have a mostly white audience when it happens. i just want to stress the importance of being racially sensitive from the start, in understanding that the person or group that does this next is walking into a situation that is already damaged from so many decades of conflict, that you can't start from a point of mutual understanding and that you have to take special steps to reach out from the start.

but, we want this to work, in the end. we don't want segregated communities, and we don't want ghettos.

it's an empirical question, people. and, if empiricism bothers you then walk away - it's all i have for you.

here's the link to the events at the club. go ahead and sort through it and see what sells out and what's mostly empty.

https://www.facebook.com/elclubdetroit/events/

the article suggested white 20-somethings, but the bar was actually geared more towards white 30 and 40 somethings. they were bringing in grunge bands & alternative rock acts - some of them influenced by the music of the 90s, and some of it literally the music from the 90s. the melvins show was famously so ridiculously packed that it got canceled as a fire risk; this was the 80s seattle band that kurt cobain cited as his biggest influence.

but, i'll draw attention to two specific shows. one is an east coast no wave band called a place to bury strangers, and the other is a popular young rapper called chief keef. the place to bury strangers show is at the end of july and is sold out; the chief keef show is in mid june and there are still tickets available.

does that mean that a place to bury strangers is more popular than chief keef? well, that would be an absurd proposal. chief keef is a mainstream act, that has cracked the billboard 200. a place to bury strangers is an underground rock band, and their last two records don't even have wikipedia pages.

the venue is all ages - and makes a point about it.

given that detroit is 80% black, and chief keef is a big star, why can't he sell out a 300 person bar in southwest detroit? and, why can this underground rock band from new york do so with ease?

and, you can point to the systemic racism - and i'll agree with you - but you're just exacerbating the point, because you're articulating a real problem, and then rejecting the only possible solution.

none of this excuses the alleged behaviour, and that's not what i'm trying to do - if the allegations are even 20% true, he should never be allowed to set foot in the bar ever again. but, there's this undercurrent that the community doesn't want a white bar with people coming in to spend money - it wants a black bar that reflects the tastes of the community. and, the problem is that it doesn't make any economic sense, at least not until you can get the people that live there more disposable income.

i mean....

i get that this guy was being a jerk. and, good riddance. fine.

but, detroit can be frustrating when it comes to this, too. i've never seen a city go so far out of it's way to try and stunt investment.

so, the concern is that people from out of town (many who are white) are coming into the area and spending money. most cities actually go out of their way to design economic stimulus plans because they want that, they don't argue that it's "pushing out the local residents" (many who are black). now, i grasp that the way this guy was doing this appears to actually have been literally pushing out local residents by underpaying or not paying them at all, and bringing in workers that lived elsewhere - and no city would want that either. what everybody ought to want is a scenario where you create economic projects that bring in people from out of town (sometimes called tourists), who then spend their money in the local economy, which is then distributed to the locals, who then have money to spend on what they want to spend it on. that's called stimulus, or investment and it's what you're supposed to want, if you're a vaguely leftist liberal keynesian type. what they seem to want is loans for small businesses, while acknowledging that there's no market for what they're selling, because the poverty rate is structural.

what i'm getting at is what everybody knows: if they set up a bar designed to appeal solely to the local residents, it's going to fail, because they don't have the disposable income. in order to get the disposable income, you need to do things that create jobs - and then you need to find ways to attract people to spend money to pay the workers doing those jobs. then, once they've made some money, they can buy a venue, and put on shows for a local population that has disposable income from the employment created by the outside investment. detroit refuses to get this - it wants the end product without building it. this is just another example.....

i wish they would have tried to unionize or something rather than walk out, because the best outcome for everybody in the short run would have been for el club to keep being el club, and have it's profits better distributed amongst the workers, who could then use them to build the economy they want.

if the bar fails in the end, the neighbourhood loses a substantial income source, and everybody is worse off.

fwiw, the artist that i saw there on saturday - actress - happens to be both british and black.

that doesn't have much to do with why i was there, but it does happen to be actually true.

most of what i saw there were white rock musicians, because that's where they played, because it's where the best sound system was. but, the thing is that detroit is like 80% black, and rock music has a 90% white audience. so, any rock bar anywhere in detroit is going to come up to the same basic contradiction, unless you put it in a suburb like ferndale, which is kind of a shitty deal. it's a lot easier to put the thing downtown.

i guess the answer is to listen better.

but, i mean, i don't have a lot of patience for wage theft, either. if i knew what was going on, i would have  brought the iww in.

i'm hoping they can save the sound system somehow....you don't want that going to waste....

that article actually makes me wonder about what happened to me that night at the bar in february, 2017 where i ended up with a concussion and assumed it was an accident.

hrmmn.

this is very similar to what i heard the other night, so i guess it checks out.

if he's gone, he's gone.

but, the venue is still too small. which, i mean....it's great in the right circumstance. it's just a question of booking the right acts for a small space, and acknowledging that it's not the right space for others.

https://www.metrotimes.com/table-and-bar/archives/2019/02/25/new-ownership-takes-over-el-club-after-founder-accused-of-wage-theft-and-racial-discrimination

i heard some gossip about the situation at el club last night.

what i heard was third hand and one perspective, and i'm not willing to act on it until i hear some more information. but, whatever is happening at the location, it is clearly either scaring people off or pushing them out.

while i don't want to support a bad venue, at the end of the day, i'm going to go to where the bands are playing. and, i want to point something out about el club: it's actually a very small venue.

there's a sign on the door that says capacity: 305.

everything else aside, the sound in the club is good, and it at least ought to be a solid venue for a smaller act to play, if the issues can work themselves out. but, if you're an out of town band, and you think you can fill up a 300 person venue easily, then, everything else aside, i'd suggest you look towards a larger venue, because you're going to sell out el club very fast, and then everybody loses - you sell less tickets, people can't get in and the people that do go end up squished together.

what the city of detroit needs is an el club that can fit 500-600 people in it. what it has are the majestic and st. andrew's. and, the fact is that the culture at el club is no longer that different than the ones at these larger venues.

so, everything else aside, i'd request you think about picking the larger venue, if you think you can sell out el club.

stop for a second.

what are the historical parallels to a character such as osama bin laden? i've compared castro to mithridates eupator, but the pontic rebel is only one in a long line of roman hostis publicus - many of whom modern historians claim never actually existed, or were otherwise so dramatically exaggerated by the roman propaganda that they might as well have never actually existed.

sorting through propaganda, and validating or invalidating it, is a major part of a historian's job description. it is a substantial part of what a historian actually does.

so, i want you to contemplate a very real possibility - that future historians may actually argue that there never was anybody named osama bin laden. and, given the evidence they have before them, it may be the most reasonable deduction.

i will reiterate: this discussion is not currently in the realm of discourse, because the dearth of evidence is so staggering. i would like to be able to have a discussion and/or debate about who was responsible, but i need the government to release it's evidence before i can do that. all any of us can do is speculate, one way or another. the difference between my position and the mainstream position is simply that i am pointing out that the entire accepted narrative is purely speculative, and deductively equivalent to any conspiracy theory. but, then i'm taking a step back and saying "we can't do this. we don't have the basic facts.".

so, i will at least stand with the conspiracy theorists in requesting that the government finally release it's dossier, if for historical documentation rather than anything else. i mean, you don't think that historians 300 years from now are going to think that oswald acted alone, do you? there's enough time now, from that event, to understand that what we are told, and what so many of us continue to believe, is not what history will record.

but, i will lay something down fairly assertively: it is hard for me to understand how this happened without the aid of some kind of state actor, whether it was inside the country or outside of it.

so, to be clear: what that means is that if i do end up supporting the update bill in the end then that doesn't mean that i all of a sudden support nafta.

there's no contradiction in supporting the update package, and continuing to work to rewrite or dismantle the deal. and, if bernie wins, i would hope he pushes to renegotiate.

so, i may decide that this is better and be pragmatic about it, but i am sure that i won't decide that it's good enough, or stop agitating for change.

and, i have been clear for a very long amount of time that i am categorically opposed to intellectual property rights.

do i support the new trade agreement?

of course not, or at least not in absolute terms; this is still nafta, and i've been opposed to nafta for 25 years. that hasn't changed, and the reasons for opposing nafta haven't changed. what's changed is that the liberals and ndp have both swung hard to the right, and are expressing support for something that they used to oppose. i'm still where i always was.

but, the issue before us is not whether we can rip up nafta or not, it's whether we're going to accept the precise provisions, and i haven't seen enough of a close analysis yet to determine whether i think the positives are going to outweigh the negatives.

i mean, i've seen some language about labour standards that i like, and some language about intellectual property rights that i don't like.

the final text of the bill is not yet clear, so i don't know. i may support the revisions to the deal, in the end, while still opposing nafta, overall - or i may decide that the strengthened enforcement of intellectual property rights is more dangerous than the increase in labour standards is worth.

we'll see what the american congress comes up with.

we need to put the process on hold.

you can't be signing deals with an unreliable partner, and the united states is currently an unreliable partner. that is the language we should be using: we cannot rely on you to keep your word, america. and, we need to send a clear message to the americans that if they don't clean up their act then we're not interested in signing further deals with them.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/05/31/no-warning-for-trudeau-of-trumps-latest-tariff-threat.html

actually, i think this is completely absurd and preposterously tyrannical; we can't have the government going in and snooping around in your social media sites and firing you because they don't like your friends. that's despotic.

i hope that he sues for wrongful dismissal, and the court lays down some proper restrictions on what the government is allowed to do and not do, here.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5334013/the-commissionaire-former-door-guard-fighting-rcmp-allegations/

i watched something on lady grey this morning when i came in, and had to take some time to recollect myself. my rationalism is pretty cold, and i understand that the state is power and needs to put down rebels in order to keep being the state, but i have a general soft spot for children in my third law reality. it was never her fault. really. so, is it really the low point of english culture, of british civilization? it might be. for all the depravity that happened under monarchy and feudalism, and under the reign of this particularly murderous monarch, there must be very few documented executions of children.

anyways.

i was late for pile, but they were also unfathomably early. piii-ile! i figured they'd come on at 23:00, earliest, but they were a quarter done when i get there a few minutes after ten. the opening bands must have been very short sets. alas.

they let me in for free again, at least. 

i was just late. no reasons. i think i caught most of it; it seemed to be exclusively selections from the new record, and was good for what it was. and, i got some good rants out in the smoking section before i left.

i need to fast for a blood test tomorrow, so i don't know how useful i'm going to be for the rest of the night/morning, but i could conceivably get some reviews in. or not. i'm not overly focused on it at the moment.

it seems like trudeau tends to agree most with the last person he spoke with.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pence-vp-trudeau-nafta-trade-ratification-1.5155777

i mean, if it's supposed to be a consolation prize, i don't want it.

if they win, can we trade the trophy to get the stanley cup back?

canada has an nba franchise?

whatever.

so, i don't know yet.

i think i have a good idea of where i'd want to go if i go, but i'm not sure if i'm going anywhere, yet. it's going to depend a lot on how the weather shapes up over the next few days.

right now, i'm going to take a nap and then i'll get up and eat and start planning the day.

i identify as gen x because i don't want to be thought of as a millennial, and that isn't an empty statement. if you think people in the 35-55 age demographic have much at all in common with people in the 15-35 age demographic, you're simply wrong. for example, i am not a digital native; my only access to a computer until i was about 15 or so was in the computer lab at school. not only did i not have a cell phone in high school, but almost nobody had one until *after* i'd graduated university. i did not grow up listening to electronic music or hip-hop, but rather grew up listening to rock music from the 70s-90s. all of my cultural references and perspectives exist from the period before the technological revolution took over, and i had to adjust to it just like everybody else that is older than me did. so, i am very, very, very different than a millennial, and you're just going to get bad data if you try and lump me in with them.

am i more like a boomer then? no. as a cultural stereotype, they're fucking awful, selfish people. i mean, they're not all assholes, but being gen x in a lot of ways is defined by a reaction against the nihilistic, hedonistic, corporatist commercialism that defined the boomer generation.

i'd actually make the opposite argument - i'd argue that millenials are more like boomers than gen xers are, and that if you want to do this right, you need to skip generations, because we're all reacting against each other. i actually feel a stronger level of affinity with the parents of the baby boomers than i do with either the baby boomers or the millennials; this is less about young v. old and more about being squeezed between the depravity of the past and the depravity of the future.

if you ask a boomer they'll tell you the same thing, about how they had to rebel against their parents, and then get outgrown by their teenaged kids, who were yelling at them to grow the fuck up by the time they turned 15. and, you will no doubt hear the same thing from millennials, who find themselves frustrated by their children's cynicism and realism - which is something i'm looking forward to.

so, don't walk down this path of trying to separate the culture, or the voters, into young v. old. that's always been wrong; you need to skip generations, because the kids will always reject their parents in favour of their grandparents.

i thought freedom gas was what happened when you have too mean freedom fries.

they'll need to do a lot more than this to ketchup to the russians.

it's a flatly stupid idea that makes no economic sense under any sort of trade theory and is defined solely by american hubris and arrogance, and that's all there is to it.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/department-of-energy-refers-to-natural-gas-as-freedom-gas.html

i will be posting reviews for the last two weeks shortly, but i need to figure out if i'm doing anything this weekend or not yet, first.

this is the right approach, although i will tell you what the right answer is: they need to accept a need for greater water management, one way or the other.

so, maybe you abandon a few areas to the river, but that's a first step and not a last one - you still need to accept that there is going to be more water in the river more often, and find a way to engineer an answer to it.

in windsor, we need to install a modern sewer system and the council is just dragging it's heels on the reality of it. ottawa is going to need better infrastructure to control the river, and it knows how to do it, it has a complex series of locks as it is, it just needs to do the proper surveying of the region in order to figure out where to build what.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/jim-watson-doug-ford-letter-2017-209-floods-1.5154457

i mean, take a look at some of this "fake news".

you don't think we can teach our kids to be able to spot this, to figure it out? then, you have a pretty low level of respect for human cognition, don't you? why not throw away the whole charade, then, and just install a technocracy? we're too stupid to make the right choices, anyways.

i point this out pretty regularly: it was jefferson that argued that you need an informed populace for democracy to make any sense. if you're going to condemn voters to ignorance as a bunch of hapless idiots that need to be conditioned to make the right ballot choice, then you're not really a believer in the principle of democracy, you're just a vulgar gramscian, trying to come up with a sneaky way to manipulate voters into doing what you want them to; you're a machiavellian tyrant, you're not a democrat. we need to be systemic about this, but the purpose has to be in ensuring that voters have the cognitive tools to make an informed, self-interested choice. that's democracy. these other ideas are not.

i am fully confident that a well-educated populace will make the right choice; in fact, so are the oligarchs, and that's why they won't educate us.

don't fall for that; fight for education, not censorship.

we do not have a crisis in social networking.

we have a crisis in critical reasoning.

no.

listen.

this is ideological...

i'm an anarchist, so i believe in collective ownership of property, which is the definition of actual anarchism, but being an anarchist also means that i'm not in support of nanny state policies that try and control people's access to information, how they think or how they act. if i wanted any of that, i'd just be a communist; it is mostly speech issues that are the reason i'm an anarchist and not a communist.

what we need is better media literacy, and better critical thinking skills. as a culture, on both sides of the north american border, we have been trying very hard for generations to eliminate our critical thinking skills. now, we've come up against a technology that is demanding us to be better thinkers, and we're failing to do it, and we're failing to do it because we're not being educated properly. we need to come to terms with the errors we've made in the neo-liberal period, and reverse the cultural decline in the promotion of individuality, of independent thought.

so, i do not support restrictions on social networking; i support a return of critical thinking in the education system. and, it is not a minor concern - it is a very strong ideological break point that you are on one side of and i am on the other side of.

i will stand with the free speech activists, as i always have.

https://fair.org/extra/lie-the-sandinistas-wont-submit-to-free-elections/

i will not be supporting charlie angus when jagmeet singh is forced to resign in the fall.

https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/9395856-charlie-angus-trudeau-government-pushing-for-action-on-tech-giants/

here's a pot calling a kettle black.

yikes.

you can't make up stuff like this; it's in the "too surreal for the onion" category.

and, if this is the approach the government wants to take, it will need to change it's spokesperson in order to generate any sort of credibility whatsoever.

hearing this from freeland cannot be interpreted any way other than as a bad joke; she has absolutely no credibility, whatsoever, at all - and it's 100% entirely her own fault, for excreting such an immensely large volume of completely irredeemable, absolute and total bullshit.

the chinese are right to ignore her.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/chrystia-freeland-canada-china-michael-kovrig-spavor-detained_ca_5ced7e8de4b009400937d74d?ncid=other_trending_qeesnbnu0l8&utm_campaign=trending

yeah.

literally run an actual international banker.

for fuck's sakes.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/05/28/liberal-insiders-looking-at-mark-carney-as-trudeaus-successor.html

because sri lanka is a bastion of free expression and democracy, a place that backwards countries like canada and the uk should strive to be more like in their approach towards civil liberties.

if we only we were more like sri lanka....we can dream, we can hope...one day...if we try really hard....

what an idiotic, absurd farce.

bravo to zuckerberg and sandberg for refusing to give these buffoons the time of day.

and, i will lead the street protests, myself, if i wake up to a facebook ban in this country - a premise that i am not actually taking seriously.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/facebook-grand-committee-tuesday-1.5152436

i hope they increase welfare rates and subsidized housing availability to compensate, because this is a formula to increase the poverty rate.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/alberta-youth-minimum-wage-kenney_ca_5ced628be4b0bbe6e334411b?ncid=other_trending_qeesnbnu0l8&utm_campaign=trending

tornadoes happen when hot air slams into cold air, which is why they happen in transitional periods of the year. so, will climate change produce more tornadoes? well, that depends on if it produces more extreme temperature gradients, and that's a very specific question that is more regional than global.

hurricanes, on the other hand, are caused by very hot surface temperatures over open bodies of water. it is a complicated and dangerous thing to do, as there are so many other factors, but the research that exists does suggest a substantive predictive correlation between rising open temperatures and the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. you can make a very crude but very real connection here: more hot water = more hurricanes. that's legit.

you can't do that with tornadoes, because it's not about the global increase in average temperatures but rather about how large the difference in temperature is between competing air masses.

so, let's say the average summer temperature in your region increases by five degrees celsius, but you still find yourself subject to extreme blasts of winter cold. then, you'd get more tornadoes where you live, as the difference between your hot and cold weather extremes is getting larger, which is what causes the tornadoes. on the other hand, if you live in a region where the winter temperatures increase by a large amount, but the summer temperatures remain moderated by the ocean or something else, then you'll see a decrease in the number of tornadoes.

if climate change works out the way the models suggest, and models have margins of error, then i would suspect that the american midwest would see a decrease in the number of tornadoes, which would get pushed further north into canada. the reasoning behind this is that the higher levels of latent heat in the south would act as a greater buffer for the polar winds. the tornadoes would not stop, they would just move further north. but, the south should not get excited, as that means more hurricanes, instead - and, subsequently, more flooding in the mississippi drainage system.

globally speaking, i wouldn't expect an increase in the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere to create larger temperature gradients overall, unless it is happening in conjunction with something else (like a solar minimum), so much as i would expect to see a difference in the overall distribution of tornadoes. some areas would see less tornadoes, others would see more; the sum total of tornadoes, globally, would remain roughly constant.

it's one thing to run your mouth off on social media where nobody really cares what you say and whether it's true or not, but you expect a congress person to actually take the time to do some proper research if she wants to actually be taken seriously by actual adults.

i remember getting asked to play "marco polo" when i was a kid, and thinking they were talking about exploring china. can't we play gulliver's travels, instead?

wait. why are you all running amok?

it actually took me years to figure out what the fuck they were even talking about.

(i just watched a silly documentary on marco polo who, of course, did not actually exist. at all.)

he should call up richard wolff, and make a big deal out of asking him for advice.

he is the expert, here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/05/28/bernie-sanders-backs-policies-dramatically-shift-corporate-power-us-workers/

this article is based on 35 year-old propaganda that is relevant to almost nobody alive today.

the premise is that sanders ought to be in trouble because he supported a communist government in central america in the 80s, but sanders' position is that this wasn't a communist government, and he's right: it wasn't. sanders is even letting the right define the term "communist", which is far too generous, but at least allows for the debate to exist around defined terms; he is conceding the definition of "communist" as "unelected dictatorship", then pointing out that the sandanistas were actually a democratically elected government.

now, here's the thing: if you're like 80 years old, maybe you remember the talking points from the reagan administration and the propaganda from whatever the government news network was in the 80s. i think it was actually abc at the time. something like this might reactivate memories of ancient propaganda, and set you off like a manchurian candidate. it's possible.

but, to 90% of the voting population, the war in nicaragua is something you read about in a history book. and, guess what the history books say? the truth of the matter: that the sandanistas were democratically elected, and in fact very popular amongst the voting populace. it was their popularity that necessitated us intervention, because this is what america has been doing overseas for years: overthrowing popularly elected governments and replacing them with repressive dictatorships, like the contras.

now, you're going to try and counter my statements with some government lies, but, listen, that doesn't work anymore, because we're talking about history, and the books have already been written. the whole world knows this lie.

i'd encourage republicans to push this point; it will only help him, because the fact is that bernie was right.

but, what i'm more curious about is what anybody has to say about biden's role in iran-contra. that is a serious political liability.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/bernie-sanders-pro-sandinista-past-problem.html

and, just for the record: i have never at any point in my life ever listened to anything labelled 'ebm'.

i liked the punk rock component of industrial music, but was interested largely in the politics, not in the sexuality of it. industrial music was initially an outgrowth of the radical leftism in the punk movement. what you call 'ebm' was largely the undoing of this. all of a sudden, industrial music was about leather and black makeup, instead of radical leftist organizing - and if you're more interested in black lipstick than noam chomsky, or you don't even know what the fuck i'm even talking about, then we're simply not coming at this from the same perspective. i have absolutely no interest in that subculture at all.

it is true that genesis p'orridge was an important person in the early rave scene, but he was an old situationist, and he was just looking for a bunch of kids to radicalize. but, nonetheless, i would consider the outgrowth of actual techno to be more "industrial" than ebm is. i'll repeat that: techno music is a better evolution of the ideals underlying industrial music than ebm is.

but, in the 90s, when people used the term ebm, it was contrasted against something else: idm. you had what was called "electronic body music" that existed for the purposes of exploring hedonism and bohemianism through sex, drugs and empty commercialism. this was a very american means of expression, but i hated it to it's core. on the other hand, you had what was called "intelligent dance music" that existed for the purposes of exploring electronic sound design as an art form. this was a more european form, and actually primarily british during this stage, rather than german. my tastes in electronic music were defined by what was called "idm", and included an interest in artists like autechre, aphex twin and squarepusher.

so, if you thought i'd show up at an ebm show, you don't know me very well; if you knew me at all, you'd have known i would have stated a pretty vehement disinterest in the form.

the kind of industrial music i like is essentially a combination of techno and punk rock, in the sense that it combines the anarchist social values of punk rock with the music of techno. it has not really existed since skinny puppy's first break up in 1994.

again: i understand that it's warm in much of the rest of the...well, the world....right now, but the fact is that it is cold in eastern canada right now, and that includes detroit and chicago. further, we can argue about why the jet stream is the way it is right now, but it's clear enough that the reason we're experiencing what we're experiencing is that the jet stream is running unusually far to the south for this time of year, which is allowing colder arctic air to stream down to the lower latitudes. this arctic air is usually bottled up by this time of year, a process that has yet to happen this year. so, we can debate why this is happening [i claim that we're at the bottom of a solar cycle, and this is both predictable and quite 'normal'; you might argue for something else], but we know the mechanics of what's happening well enough - the jet stream is running lower than normal, this year.

the longest day of the year is june 21st. if this yearly process of bottling up doesn't happen soon, it might not happen at all - and this winter is going to be brutal as a result.

so, i will state this as clearly as i can: if you live north or east of detroit or chicago, do not be surprised if it doesn't really warm up at all this year, even while the city 50 miles south of you has another record warm year. there's a hard boundary asserting itself up the st lawerence right now, and the weather this year could be starkly, even frighteningly, different depending on what side of it you're on.

but, things can happen to shift the jet stream that are not related to the sun. remember: this isn't about measuring how much light the earth is being bathed within, so much as it's about magnets operating on the outside of the earth, which is tilted slightly away from the sun. so, the sun is only one input variable, and the actual shape of the jet stream will be determined by a complicated interaction of many, many variables, not only by one.

an active hurricane system could set the jet stream off, and at least give us some reprieve, although the solar condition right now would likely mean that this cold air would shift rather than retreat. so, if you get hurricanes in the right position in the ocean, you'll end up with the cold moving from toronto to calgary, and that would be better for everybody that matters.

that is probably the best we can do, this year.

but, i'm not predicting a deep minimum, i'm just pointing out the reality of a local one. the sun will be back soon.

if i were mark zuckerberg, i would be proud to be found in contempt of a parliament that shows nothing but contempt for the citizens it pretends to represent.

mark zuckerberg is not a canadian citizen, and owes our parliament absolutely nothing. he should raise the issue with his ambassador, who should strongly rebuke us for bullying a foreign citizen to raise cheap political points.

the parliament, and the ruling liberals, should be ashamed of itself.

and, with each stupid, hare-brained attempt to save itself from it's own abysmal failure at ruling, this dying government digs itself further into the notoriety of quite plausibly being the worst government the country has ever seen.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/facebook-contempt-parliament-1.5145347

the fact is that i'm pretty exhausted, even now. i'll be fine in a few hours, but i probably made the right choice. i may have started getting messy if i tried to push it much longer.

to be clear: the choice i had on sunday afternoon at 13:30, after staub, was to wait around until the next raft of parties started, which was really not until 22:00, although i would have snuck the shoegaze show in in the evening as i was waiting. if i had biked down to the diner for 14:00, and finished eating at 15:00 or 16:00, i would have almost certainly passed out as i was waiting for the shoegaze show to start, at 18:00. i would have had to have kept myself occupied in order to avoid passing out.

this is why i was hoping staub would run until at least 16:00. that way, i could dance away the afternoon, eat and hit the rock concert. alas...

on the way home, i was toying with the idea of eating at home and going back but i didn't even get that far; i crashed within seconds of getting in the house. i was legitimately exhausted. and, while i could have maybe slept from 14:00-20:00 and made it back out for 00:00, i didn't really seriously contemplate it.

so, i would have needed a short, free party to crash for the afternoon, to patch in, from around 15:00-18:00. but i'm double checking the after-parties schedule and sunday afternoon looks like it was actually a dead point. there were early morning shows that ended at noon, over-priced brunches, and some over-priced day parties. but, the only thing really happening was the festival, itself.

so, i can see what would have happened - i would have ended up trying to hang out at mocad or something and falling asleep at the table. then, i would have struggled through the shoegaze show and gone home, anyways.

but, i'm still relatively new to this, and they do the same shows every year, more or less. i can revisit this next time.

if i had skipped staub and left early, i could have been back for the freaklimate show, meaning i would have been looking at starting late on sunday night, then looking for an early morning party on monday, before going to day parties on monday, the monday night party and then probably not the early morning tuesday party. while the prospect of wasting five hours early on monday morning is probably easier than the prospect of wasting three hours later on sunday afternoon, it's still the same problem - and i'd no doubt be exhausted by the monday night show.

no. i like the idea of having the rock show on sunday night, but i'm also not exactly a big fan of either of those bands. i rather want to hope that somebody books something solid up against movement on the sunday, next year, and i'm able to find the logic for the extra push. i think i planned the right path, it just didn't work out.

it's also cold in detroit right now, and i knew that was going to be the case, and i think it had an effect on my thought process. if it was sunny and hot, rather than cold and rainy, i might have decided i can weather it out with a coffee in the park. but, you get that chill in your bones and start craving a blanket.

i know i can't win this mental battle; i might feel a little regret for coming home "early", but i suspect i'd have regretted going, too, as i'm not able to get up to the monday night show. i would have probably needed to sleep all day today, and not likely to get out again until tuesday. the question is whether i ought to be at the sunday show or the monday show, i guess. so, it really is a choice between one or the other, isn't it?

so, this year, i think i did what made the most sense. but, i'm hoping to pull this off that little bit better next year, to get at least one absurdly long day in....

i hope the weather co-operates, too. people are no doubt frustrated by the cold, right now.

and, of course, i was staunchly opposed to the invasion of iraq, as were most canadians, on the basis that it was illegal under international law, and threatened to erode the international global order, which it has done.

further, i have no memory of engaging with any media that suggested that saddam hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. my memory was that the media and government assigned the attacks to al qaeda, and the reason the united states invaded iraq was to dismantle the "weapons of mass destruction", which the international inspection teams were adamant did not exist, and for which no evidence was ever found to demonstrate their existence.

if there was ever a debate about invading iraq as retaliation for 9/11, i completely missed that. sorry.

for the record.

my initial hypothesis of the world trade centre attack was that it was an inside job. what i mean when i say that is that my initial feeling when living through the attacks was not "the united states is under attack", but instead "the united states military is launching a coup". so, that was my starting point, my initial condition, my base assumption.

however, i have never been involved with, organized with or even really communicated with any kind of "truther" movement. further, the minimal amount of information i've sorted through from these groups has largely struck me as a series of red herrings. broadly speaking, even if they could make their arguments convincingly, it wouldn't actually prove anything.

what are the actual facts, here?

1) the united states government has never released any kind of evidence that bin laden or al qaeda were involved in the attacks. strictly factually and legally speaking, the official position of the united states government - the hypothesis, stated without any proof, that a shady terrorist group called al qaeda blew up several buildings in downtown new york - is actually the most fully developed conspiracy theory in the history of conspiracy theories. no conspiracy theory has produced more media, or generated more speculation. but, there is absolutely no proof at all, whatsoever, for this claim.

2) while there are some inconsistencies in the government's story, it's hardly enough to prove they're lying.

3) the "truther movement" appears to be more interested in distracting from meaningful questions than generating meaningful answers. to state that they have failed to present a compelling alternate hypothesis would be an understatement.

4) the failure of the "truther movement" to articulate their argument compellingly does not mean they're wrong.

i am not going to kneejerk against "conspiracy theorists", or tarnish the concept of alternative research. i do not have a religious epistemology but a scientific one, meaning that i am not looking for absolute truth anywhere in existence, but rather for a series of constantly changing, constantly shifting approximations to reality. as we study and learn more about things, our understanding of them changes. historians, too, are constantly reevaluating evidence to uphold or deny the historical record, to try and figure out what is propaganda and what is actually true. the historical constant is not in any concept of absolute truth, but in the fact that governments are constantly lying to advance their own interests, meaning that the role of the historian is to question what a government says, not to accept it on face value. there is consequently a proper role for conspiracy theory in academic discourse, so long as it is approached using the scientific method. and, i'm actually going to label you a mindless idiot and slam the door in your face if you disagree with me about that. einstein, darwin, gallileo, marx - these were all conspiracy theorists in their day. understand that before you sharpen your knives; we need to collectively be more proactive in our critical thinking skills, to learn how to weigh evidence on our own, and not to rely on the dictates of official media and government narratives. our existence as a free thinking, scientifically-inquiring culture relies upon it.

so, in my mind, you don't win the argument by yelling "conspiracy theory". you need to be more rigorous than that - you need to cite evidence, you need to cite proof.

but, my analysis of the situation right now is that neither side of the debate has done that. the government's official conspiracy theory is no more convincing to me than the one presented by the truthers. neither argument passes basic scientific scrutiny, and neither argument would hold up in a court of law. it follows that the correct position to take on the topic is agnosticism; an honest observer would have to state that it is not at all clear who was responsible for the attack, and either hypothesis is equally valid until such a time comes as more evidence is revealed by the government to properly scrutinize.

the truthers have made a rather dramatic error, though, in trying to gather positive evidence that the government was responsible. short of finding direct electronic communication documenting the attacks - and if it was done from inside the government then these documents would exist in the proper agency - there was never going to be any convincing way to prove the government did this. these documents would need to be declassified before you could even have a meaningful conversation about the topic, and they will be one day, and we will no doubt learn that the truthers had a few decent insights, even if the smoking gun remains redacted. there are periods of byzantine history where the best way we can describe the existing historical record is to state that we know that records were destroyed and rewritten for that period; we can know that the history is wrong, without knowing what the actual history was, and therefore know that we can't know what actually happened. this may end up being the correct academic perspective in the long run - we may have to accept we'll never actually know.

i would recommend waiting for the government to actually release an unredacted version of their dossier before commenting further.

until then, both unproven hypotheses are equally valid - if you believe in science and evidence, and uphold critical thinking, and won't be intimidated by the senseless bully pulpit that is the corporate media.

these marijuana condensates floating around nowadays can be quite potent. how you react to a "dab" is ultimately a question of tolerance, but there is a possibility that you might overwhelm yourself and need some time to recuperate. 

if you're in a scenario like that, you don't need water, because you're not dehydrated. don't get me wrong: i like water as much as the next person. if you want some water, have some water. but, it doesn't take the edge off of the high; it's not a meaningful solution to anything.

a better idea would actually be coffee. but, there's ultimately not another option besides waiting it out.

so, if you find yourself knocked over after a dab, the reality is that you simply ingested too much thc too fast and now you're just simply too stoned to move and flatly need to wait for your body to process it.

the good news is that you can be quite confident it will pass relatively quickly. you're not likely to lose consciousness, to black out, to lose your memory or to otherwise lose your individuality as a conscious person, to become somebody else. it's more of a frustration than a serious danger, even if your body is clearly putting the brakes on in telling you that it can't process that much thc that fast.

the delivery mechanism is engineered for habitual users that don't get much out of smoking pot anymore. it's meant to be intense, and if you don't have the tolerance, you're going to get knocked down.

so, if you were worried about my well being or otherwise curious about why i seemed in a daze at around 6:00 this just past sunday morning, that's your answer. i wasn't overdosing on anything, i wasn't suffering from exhaustion or dehydration, i didn't need water (although i appreciate the offer) and i wasn't even drunk. rather, i found myself way too stoned after hitting some intense condensate and had to let it pass. that was all.

i recovered fairly well, actually, and was able to keep dancing until they closed marble at 13:00. i was still feeling that dab five hours after it happened though, which is an unusually long period for a marijuana high. so, i got distance from it after the initial intense reaction.

i'm not trying to scare anybody; in fact, i'd do exactly what i did a second time. i'm just reminding everybody that that shit is powerful, and the reaction i experienced is not unexpected. it really was just pot.

i had a good night, actually. actress was phenomenal, and while i wish the night was staggered a bit better i did manage to at least get a bit of everything i wanted to dance to.

saturday/sunday
23:00-02:00: actress [el club]
02:30-05:00: texture [marble]  [rubinstein, parasole]
05:15-?07:00?: art park  [intense dab @ ~ 6:00]
?07:15?-13:00: staub [marble]

if staub had gone on a little longer, i would have ended the night at one of these two spots:
18:00-00:00: basement & nothing [majestic]
00:00-07:00: freaklimate [salon]

but, the five hour wait was too daunting for me and i opted to get home, instead.

i'll be back out tomorrow afternoonish.

bernie's stance on iran is a ballot question, not a gaffe.

if you're that angry about it, you'll need to vote against it - because i can assure you that there are plenty of people that will very explicitly and very consciously vote against another war in the middle east.

friday:
20:00-21:00: detroit techno militia pre-party [bookie's]
21:30-22:00: prelude [northern lights]
22:30-06:30: modern cathedrals [tangent]

i should have showed up earlier and stayed at bookie's until 22:00, but the afternoon got thrown off waiting for a party i didn't go to to release the address, which ended up being too far from tangent to bounce between, and i was hoping to catch a different vibe at northern lights, which was more of a patio party than a dance club. i wanted to dance last night, but it might may have been nice to stop and listen to some modular synth noise in between aerobics sessions; i was hoping they'd end up in midtown or newtown, but they ended up in southwest, and it wasn't feasible.

besides that tweak - i should have went to bookie's earlier and stayed there later - i had a good, clear night and actually felt pretty refreshed when i got home, although i had no option but to sleep.

round two is either going to be extreme or absurd, depending on how it flows.