as for the situation in venezuela, i would expect the us administration to try to put the opposition in power because it's been claiming for years that the elections are rigged, but there's actually no good evidence supporting that claim. election monitors, notably including jimmy carter (who said venezuela's election system was the best in the world), have for years rejected claims of election rigging in venezuela. the state department is likely to face a fight and domestic unrest if it tries to install the opposition. the vice president should take over, and she should call an election.

maduro himself is innocent until proven guilty and the accusations against him are unproven in court. he's entitled to a fair trial and people should allow the court system to operate.

on the one hand, what just happened in venezuela is utterly ridiculous and it's not out of the question that donald trump is the one going to jail, not maduro.

on the other hand, the united states just demonstrated it can do something that it didn't do in iraq, couldn't do in afghanistan and has not done in iran and it's sort of an open question as to why it didn't do this there, when it just demonstrated that it could have. i've been pointing out for years that the israelis constantly embarrass the americans by performing the kind of special forces attacks that the americans seemed incapable of doing. the world should note the display of force. and the americans kind of had to do that, after so many years worth of failure.

the legal issues surrounding this are profound. this isn't an act of war, so what jurisdiction does trump even claim to have? it's the attorney general that's going to have to take the fall. does the united states claim jurisdiction to evade the democratic process by unilaterally writing laws over the entire western hemisphere? i might object to that. there's no legal authority to do what they did, but they're also not on us soil while they're doing it. pam bondi is obviously not going to arrest herself.

there should be charges laid against multiple members of the administration over this, especially if the charges against maduro are quickly dismissed, as i would expect they will be. nobody thinks that venezuela is the source of any serious amount of cocaine. a lot of it comes from columbia, but everybody knows that it goes through mexico.

what happens if maduro is acquitted, or even released on bail?

homer appears to drive a pink dodge scat.

don't look at me, i didn't name the fucking thing.

i believe the chrysler mentioned in love shack is the dodge scat.

there's a baldwin named hilarious baldwin?

this is indeed hilarious baldwin.

"hop in my chrysler, it's as big as a whale, and it's about to set sail"

https://globalnews.ca/news/11477094/alec-baldwin-stephen-crash-car-tree-hamptons/

i believe this is the new dodge scat.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/detroit-windsor-auto-sector-vehicle-two-front-ends-9.7030337

"but zeno demonstrated the truth of the parmenidean perspective, in truth."

zeno's so-called paradoxes were solved by the development of calculus.

it's important to understand the history if you want to call yourself educated, but you can't still be walking around confused by zeno in the twenty first century. newton and liebniz resolved that issue a very long time ago.

change is real.

you'll have to deal with that.

i need to reiterate this point i made the other day.

the claim that regions cannot secede from countries is extremely dangerous to the democratic order. never mind the fact that it's bullshit, that these same people that argue that catalonia or donbas or somaliland cannot secede no matter what will also argue that ukraine or scotland or kosovo or taiwan can secede unilaterally. they'll say something about circumstances, but it just demonstrates they're not to be taken seriously and that they support secession when it aligns with their politics and self-interest and oppose it when it doesn't. there's no principle of international law at play.

however, if there was a principle of international law at play, it would be ass backwards.

the particular argument they use - that an area cannot secede unilaterally without permission of the unitary state - is particularly egregious, as it reduces to a complete rejection of democracy and a total denial of self-determination. it is imperative that democratic actors in democratic societies aggressively seek to completely reverse this position. self-determination means that a region has no requirement to seek permission to secede from a country, so long as that secession has democratic legitimacy. secessionist decisions belong solely to the geopolitical entity in secession; the region being seceded from has no rights in the matter and no say as to the outcome. wars to prevent democratic secession via invasion, occupation or other types of force must be seen as illegal and undemocratic. conversely, intervention on the side of democracy to help a region secede is consistent with a rule of law and means standing in solidarity with self-determination, which is a human right.

it is easy enough to understand why dictatorships in the middle east would reject democracy and self-determination but harder to understand the reason that governments in european capitals are taking such a completely ass backwards position, even if it's complete bullshit, until you remember that history was declared over 35 years ago and the idiots in the european ruling classes actually believe that. the map is forever frozen, because history has stopped. attempts to alter the map mean kickstarting history back up, which must be prevented at all costs. the last thing the european elite wants is a return to history!

that is obviously utterly retarded, but it is clear that these people need to be told that, and that their biases and beliefs need to be aggressively and forcefully challenged as empirically wrong. history is not over. wars still happen. borders still change. there will be revolutions and changes in government and changes in the type of government. we have migration changing societies. religions collapse and evolve. science advances. language changes. it was democritus that successfully argued against parmenides, but the idiots sided with aristotle instead, and it triggered us into a dark age when they did. the great victory of europe was in casting aristotle aside and elevating democritus over parmenides. the irony is that parmenides would approve of us repeating our own mistakes and tell us we have no choice but to do so, as we are stuck in this endless sisyphean futility of reality and the empty and meaningless existence that follows from it, and we cannot change, and never will.

choose democritus over parmenides.

it's imperative.

we all lose if you don't.

who is the best comedy duo of all time?

abbott & costello?

lauren & hardy?

conan & norm?

no.

it's kermit & cookie.

don't ask.

i've taken a subset of the year-end analysis as the records i'm considering worth noting, for some reason.

the full list is a few posts down, or you could check out the np: list on the side.

green means go, B+, A-, A, A+. these are releases i truly recommend checking out.
yellow means proceed carefully, C+, B-, B. these are not quite there, but almost.
orange means proceed only with extreme caution, X, E. sometimes, a lot of effort is put into something and it still sucks anyways, especially if it's made by millennials, who have a reputation for trying as hard as they can and still miserably failing. i am isolating these into their own category. i admit that some people may find something worthwhile in these records, despite the reality that they objectively suck.

otherwise, my suggestion is don't bother with it (F, D-, D, D+, C-, C).

however, note that only new releases from 2025 receive a colour code. notable re-releases may appear in this list withot a colour.

mifu	i love music	2025	warsaw, poland	B+	this record combines electric and classical guitar work with fairly freeform laptop generated noise collages. it is at times fairly sparse and unwritten and at times more dense and written up. i've listened to it enough to let it sort itself out a little and while i like the general sound and idea and approach, i have to point out that it requires a little more work, too. it's only the length of an ep and feels like one song rather than a record. i'm going to recommend this, but with the clarification that it's a tease rather than an lp.
julek ploski	nullcycle (reawoken)	2025	warsaw, poland	B	this is apparently a remix album with remixes by other artists of julek ploski originals from 2024, which i haven't heard. it's glitchier and less constructed than the previously reviewed record, which is not in it's benefit.
julek ploski	give up channel	2025	warsaw, poland	A-	i prefer my electronic music to be both melodic and abstract in order to be interesting. this record doesn't accomplish anything in terms of production or composition, but it's extremely well put together and a more enjoyable listen than the generic pop i've been trudging through. there's a playfulness underlying the more difficult presentation that is key to having it succeed as music and not just being a pretentious exercise in difficult sound art. i have to spend the time sorting through the shit to find the interesting records or i won't find them. this could be filed under experimental/electronic or under 20th century classical, which i suppose ought to be the definiton for 21st century classical. there are some goofy samples, but they don't drag the record down the way the cheese does in the previously reviewed album. this is well done and recommended.
death's dynamic shroud	the lunar curtain II	2025	los angeles, usa	E	an overly pretentious attempt at some of the worst elevator music i've ever heard. the vocal tracks suck. however, the record improves slightly if you just completely delete the first five insufferably pretentious tracks and start it at track 6, which is the most interesting track on the record. this hatchet work still results in a failing attempt at art music, and the vocal tracks are still loaded with cheese, but it cuts out the worst of the stench. the hesitation i'm having with just throwing this in the dung heap is that, despite the fact that it's repeatedly objectively terrible in it's repeated use of tired genre cliches and it's cringing application of the worst kind of cheese in the vocal work, there are a handful of interesting moments that largely come up in the sequencing structures. they just constantly ruin the sporadically novel sequencer work by burying it in these layers of cliches and cheese and these awful vocals. this is a characteristic of gen y music more generally - even when they are trying as hard as they can, it still sucks. i guess that's a characteristic of gen y more generally, though; even when they try their hardest, they still fail. life's tough, kids.
gumdrop	gumdrop	2025	los angeles, usa	X	this is a curious combination, and i prioritize novelty and creativity above almost everything else in music....except composition. you still gotta write the songs. sometimes, something like this is necessary to get to something else, and sometimes it just rots in obscurity. i don't know how seriously to take this, and i don't know if it intends to be taken seriously, but i can point out that i heard this this year and took note of it. i'm reminded a little bit of an album from 2019 called 1000 gecs that i liked a little bit in terms of being novel but likewise wasn't certain if i should take seriously. that record did very well, over time. this particular combination of chiptune production and screamo-rap vocals may hit me as beyond goofy and difficult to interpret as art, but the kids really like it, and i guess that reflects their decision not to take life seriously. when life gives you lemons, throw them at the cops. yet, it's not vacuous pop music, either; there is some thought put into making this impossible to take seriously and i have to take note of that as performance art, even if i wonder about the songs, themselves. that's the question, here: this is fun and silly, sure, but can you listen to this? i don't know. however, if you've succeeded in perplexing and confusing me, you're doing something right, even if i'm not sure whether you've succeeded in making substantive art, yet. i'm going to grade this as X, for now.
sierra veins	in the name of blood	2025	paris, france	B-	stripped down modern techno update on a 90s industrial sound. it's enjoyable, but a little primitive.
agriculture	the spiritual sound	2025	los angeles, usa	E	rock music has slowly become more and more retarded over time; you always had to be a little bit daft to do this well, but by the time corporate emo was taking over, i was done with it, and just listening to jazz. it had become utterly stupid. then, corporate emo inverted on itself in a way nobody predicted, and became the era's progressive rock, and i realized i was going to have to find a way to deal with my disdain for the incredibly stupid cliches in the genre if i wanted to listen to anything calling itself rock at any time in the near future, because the fuckers had taken over the genre, and that was how it was, whether i liked it or not. i never really came around to it, but just as i was finding ways to stomach it, it evolved into something even worse. somebody will yell at me for deriving black metal from screamo, and i know that skips a few steps, but i'm talking about the mainstream rock culture, not the development of the style. if i thought corporate screamo was stupid, black metal was a massive step into full retard, but the same thing was beginning to happen, and there just wasn't a way around dealing with the ubiquity of this new style of rock music if you wanted to find things that were new, as anything at all was going to go through both the screamo bottleneck and then the black metal bottleneck. art rock wasn't going to sound like it used to anymore and you'd have to deal with this, no matter how much you hated it, or you'd have to give up and stick to jazz. one very weird thing that happened is that this genre that was about killing fags (is that guy still in jail?) got taken over by women, gays and transgendered people, but that didn't make me more interested in it, it just took away a good way to make fun of it. now, in 2025, it's usurped the core structural norms in progressive rock music, so there's no way around dealing with it, but i'm not convinced that i can. when they just shut up and play, it's not that bad, but i haven't found a way to process this screeching and yelling, yet. i was able to solve this problem during the ubiquitous period of screamo by finding more hardcore or punk sounding vocalists, and waiting until the genre matured to the point where the lyricism was more developed. i haven't really found that path with black metal, yet, and it doesn't make as much sense to look for punk singers in black metal bands, as the history is oppositional. i have only been able to enjoy it when it's instrumental, when it's essentially loud shoegaze or when it features virtuoso guitar playing, like indricothere. i have no interest in the genre cliches: satan is stupid, heavy metal guitar solos are boring and these lyrics are never going to be intelligible in the genre because the point is that they aren't, which makes me disinterested in them. i'm not going to find a small group of evolved, progressive black metal bands that i'm able to appreciate as new art rock, i'm going to continue to cringe at this until the next thing replaces it. the form is fundamentally less redeemable than screamo was, and that makes it pretty awful, as everybody thought screamo must be the absolute bottoming out of western culture. we were wrong. i have listened to this a few times, and i'll give them an E for effort in terms of trying to be a little bit unpredictable regarding form, but it sucks, as art, and i'm not going to ease up on this the way i eventually forced myself to ease up on screamo. i'm going to have to wait this out. but, i fear the next thing is even worse, like using thoughts to generate pink noise with diodes, and running it through a high gain feedback loop, forcing the listener to decode it with a special fourier transform algorithm that you have to download with the album.
chat pile	in the earth again	2025	okc, usa	C+	i've found this band to be overrated for years. this is also overrated.
jo passed	weekend	2025	toronto, canada	C+	pop musicians need to shift with the pop form. bit of a weezer vibe.
north sea radio orchestra	special powers	2025	salisbury, uk	B-	this has several of the same people as lost crowns but is a far more listenable record. however, the middle part of the record drags it down a little. it's built like an early 70s pink floyd record in that sense.
lost crowns	the heart is in the body	2025	london, uk	E	being a trained musician in 2025 is extremely frustrating, as your choices are total obscurity or doing covers of bloated cliches, if you're lucky enough to get a job in the local orchestra. opportunities for creative music production are very meagre. so, you get projects like this. it's not enough to call this pretentious or even to say it has no commercial potential. this really doesn't go anywhere or do anything. it's complex on it's face (it's less complex than it sounds), but it isn't abstract or creative, it's just purposefully obtuse. it's difficult without being rewarding, as you don't gain anything by being patient with it, or suffering through it. there are reasons that medieval music is so ugly sounding - they had the mathematics of tonality all wrong and were always out of tune - and mimicking that in the era of supercomputers doesn't sound sophisticated, it just sounds out of tune. you want the record to develop at some point, but it doesn't. the drumming is the best part of the record. there's a subset of people that will think they're smart for "understanding" this and call you stupid for rejecting it, but you should not listen to them and take their self-righteousness as irony. when the primary selling point of your record is that somebody could write a phd thesis about it, it's not compelling, by definition. so, you could spend a lot of time with this, but you won't get much out of it in the end - it's awkward, ugly, empty and rotting in it's own filth. like the dark ages.
adebisi shank	this is the second ep of a band called adebisi shank	2025	ireland	B+	this is the skipped review of a band called adebisi shank, which is possibly the most hyperactive and cracked out band the math rock era produced. they don't change much from release to release, which i appreciate, as it means you can just fill up the 5 disc changer, or set up a five hour playlist at this point. if you like the other releases, you'll like this too.
foetus	succulence	2025	nyc (usa), australia	A+	jim. the legendary jim. jim is checking out, he says. i'll wait. this track is a gabrielesque epic, which is something jim did more of in the latter part of his career, with an idiosyncratic big band bombast. because if this is the apocalyse, you should dance down your death march.
jessica moss	unfolding	2025	montreal, canada	B	jessica moss is one of a number of musicians that i have followed for a length of time and that has recently made the issue in gaza central to her messaging in a way that i don't agree with, but i wouldn't consider it to be catastrophic. i don't consider jessica moss to be a supporter of hamas or an advocate of genocide against israel, but i recognize that she's uncomfortable with not criticizing an israeli government that she sees as acting in her name in what she thinks is a drastic overreaction. she would appear to be reacting out of embarrassment. she may accuse israel of overreacting to hamas, but i may rather suggest she's underreacting to the threat. i think a lot of people had difficulty grasping the immense level of hatred unleashed on oct 7th and don't want to engage in the difficult discourse attached to weighing realistic policy options available to the state of israel today in confronting 30 years of failed containment policies and consequently getting your head around the fundamental nature of what the existing population of gaza is. it's easier to adopt a humanitarian posture, without acknowledging or accepting that these are people that would cut your arm off for trying to feed them; you would hand them bread, and they would eat your arm. the state of israel bears responsibility in generating the situation, but that doesn't make the set of options available to it any easier. if you leave a dog alone in a cage for months at a time and it grows mean and attacks you when you enter the room, what choice do you have but to euthanize it? but these are not themes that would play out well in jessica moss' group of friends, or help her market her art to the audience she wants to market it to, which wants to talk about resisting state power and is in the process identifying itself as a collection of useful idiots to foreign fascist groups that would gleefully slaughter them for show, she would be the first to go, and in the most gruesome manner imaginable, where it was once a soundtrack for internalizing defiance of the here and now that directly confronts us. but she composes instrumental classical music. she generates a lot of sound, and some if it has more thought put into it than some of it that doesn't. this would be more on the jam/improvised side, and you can hear that she's working a lot with reverb and loop pedals to create drone-based soundscapes without doing much with them when she does. it's like building a foundation without constructing a house. it's passively enjoyable for what it is, but it doesnt command much attention; it's missing a lead, melodic instrument, which coud be anything she wants it to be, but which is currently absent. that is not always true of her solo work, but it is frequently true.
lingouf	cintamini	2025	normandy, france	B+	lingouf, who has been a well known (in certain circles) underground dj for decades, released this brilliant lp in 2008 that is very different than what he's known for, and i've kept checking back periodically to see if he's tried to expand his sound a little from the very harsh and guttural, distorted beats he is mostly known for, generally without positive results. this record is actually a little more mainstream and contemporary techno, which is neither going to appeal to his core fanbase (who are no doubt too old for that shit now anyways) or the art-techno audience that identified doeme as what it is. this is by no means bad, but it isn't brilliant, either. it's a little generic.
squarepusher	stereotype	1994/ 2025	uk	B+	i can't say i'd heard this before. squarepusher has developed a reputation as the brainiest of the 90s braindance artists, which is just a way to get around the embarrassing term idm, while nonetheless continuing to try to point out that this isn't ebm. the kids came up with this idea of edm which looks like a cross between the two and sort of is, but there was a time when people felt it was worthwhile to say "look, this is music. it's not just boom boom boom.", and it led to people calling it jazz as a way out, but to an extent you'd might as well just give up and call it progressive rock because it's so fucking british anyways, which nobody dares to do. what i'm getting at is that you hope an early squarepusher record is abstract, even if you expect it to be more rave and acid house than his later work, and that's actually more or less what this is. it's dated; it's from 1994, and you can tell. it's not helpful to analyze it as new music. but if you want some more very early squarepusher, well, here it is, and it's really everything you'd hope it is, too.
swans	birthing	2025	nyc, usa	A+	i still remember when swans were dead. the last few swans releases have really taken gira to a different level and, after having listened to this a few times, i think his sanity is an open question. this record is bizarre. there are certain crutches in his contributors that he relies upon, and he has a tendency to exaggerate bad cliches, but, for what it is, this might be the best record released so far this century. the problem is that it's almost impossible to listen to, and that's before you try to understand it, which i don't suggest doing.
geese	getting killed	2025	nyc, usa	E	i didn't make it through this one. the singer's not my thing. seems really phony and plastic and fake. the first song would be better if it was a reaction to finding a bum (that is, a homeless person) in his car than a bomb in his car.
guerilla toss	you're weird now	2025	nyc, usa	B+	guerilla toss wants you to think they're punk, and there was something punk about them in 2015ish, but this record draws from mainstream pop, nu metal and progressive rock, with little to no discernible punk influence. that's not a criticism, it's a description. i wouldn't normally listen to vocals of this type, and citing paramore nowadays would not be current, but it is the last thing i heard with this type of vocals, which is a good distance from the barking of yester year. it's still popular. i think. i dunno. the odd time signatures, prominent synth work and capable guitar narratives keep it flowing in a manner that seems intended for mtv, but they don't have mtv anymore. i'm not that old, i was a kid in the 90s, but i don't think this has that much in common with pavement or phish. rather, the very popular band (at it's peak) that this record reminds me of is late 70s or early 80s genesis, albeit not in exact style but in aesthetic and approach. these are relatively short, musically interesting, anthemic, arena-ready synth-rock pieces that would make phil and tony smile. that gives the record a pretty broad level of appeal. contemporary pop music of this sort is generally intentionally extremely facile, and while this isn't particularly complex either, it's developed enough to be interesting. at my age, i feel like i'm looking in on something, although i know i'm not; that said, if the intent here is to market a polished pop record to young people, and you know a few, maybe help these big kids out.
cardiacs	lsd	2025	salisbury, uk	B+	this is not really cardiacs. the key composer had been functionally dead for years before he died and it's clear enough that he didn't leave enough for a record, so some of his friends and proteges took over and the result is passable but not very impressive. they do the same pop song something like ten times. i initially described it as a parody and i think that's correct. i never thought i'd suggest they should cut a cardiacs record in half, but this multitide of identical pop songs is redundant and gets tiresome and if jim thought he was going to fool everybody, i think i'm on to him. his brother hated him for a reason; he's a sonofabitch. the lengthier and more disparate pieces hold their interest (it's ok if some of the instrumental interludes sound like they were written by somebody with mild brain damage, because it's true, and it adds to their quirky charm), but we only needed one of these interchangeable pop songs over an hour, and it's hard to imagine going back to the record when you realize it's the same song over and over again. maybe your average cardiacs fan in 2025 can't remember ten minutes ago, anyway.

2026 is going to be different than every year since 2019, which was the last time i had a good year.

i moved to windsor in 2013 and it started what became the most productive and happy period of my life, from 2013-2019. the period from 2006-2013 was unstable but broadly happy and positive but i lost my studio for a few months from 2011-2013 and it was a wakeup call that i'd better get to work, and i did. the period from 2002-2006 was a low point, for me, and mostly full of experiences and people that i'd rather forget. the period from 1996-2002 was very productive, coming out of a period of instability from 1993-1996. 

i lost 2020, 2021 and 2022 to the pandemic. some people found the pandemic useful; the social restrictions that my governments put in place completely ruined my social life, and i experienced no upside to it whatsoever. i got almost nothing done, in terms of art. i was fighting legal battles and focusing on my health. i won two small settlements and used it to buy some gear, but i didn't have the time to use it. the pointless and non-scientific based and mostly superstitious restrictions, which i refused to follow, generated massive problems for me that wasted huge amounts of my time, they didn't give me more time. in the long run, i gained resources to use to create with, but i lost massive amounts of my time, which was wasted in fighting the social order created by the restrictions, which i could not live with, and could not comply by.

things were set to turn over in 2023, but i realized my new landlords were parasitic investor-class rentier pieces of shit and gay drug addicts that lived a terrible lifestyle that they wanted to enforce on me but that i didn't have the finances to be able to move anywhere and would have to lock myself inside the place to both avoid getting evicted and avoid them and their lifestyle until the market improved, which happened in mid 2025, slightly after i got evicted due to the lies that they told the court. i lost all of 2023, all of 2024 and the start of 2025 fighting them off, and got absolutely nothing worthwhile done at all while i was doing so. i couldn't leave my place or i would have been evicted when i was gone and lost everything nd i didn't have time to get any work done.

after a challenging turn of events in the spring of 2025, i got lucky and landed on my feet, but the place i moved to was full of filthy pothead losers that insisted on smoking inside or directly under my window and i lost the summer again because i had to focus on getting out of there instead of on existing.

at the very end of the summer, the situation started to clear up. i first got a settlement from my new landlords, i then signed a new lease, i got approved for the cohb, i got approved for the cdb, i opened an rdsp and i'm still fighting off the landlords that evicted me, with the expectation of getting compensated for the costs i incurred as a result of this mess. i am financially stable, moving forwards; i will be ok, even if i need to find a new apartment again in the near future.

i expect to be able to get back to my normal lifestyle by the spring. i just need to finish a few things off, first.

first productive phase: 1996-2003

first bottoming out: 2003-2006

second productive phase: 2006-2019

second bottoming out: 2020-2025

third productive phase: 2026-2040

i had my shop vac delivered today; canadian tire. it was like 70% off, so i paid the $10 delivery fee. it's still cheap.

i went to sign for it. i'm wearing a little red tank top, and the guy looks at me,

here's your shop vac.

he's laughing at me. hot tranny wants a shop vac. is she working on her corvette down there?

i bought a vacuum and i bought it to clean my dirty basement, because it needs it. you fucking dick. 

but i want to actually take the opportunity to address this, and this really goes out to the cis-ladies more than anything else.

you have been taught to use your sleek lady vacs, with their curvy attachments and their slender bodies and you know the truth - they often don't work. you've been frustrated with these things, repeatedly. admit it.

is a shop vac a boy vacuum? is it for vacuuming like a man?

that's fucking stupid.

a shop vac is a high powered vacuum for very dirty spaces, for wet spaces and for messes that have larger items that you'd have to pick up with your dainty hands, no doubt in gloves, if you use your dainty lady vacs.

trust me, ladies - if you get a chance to use a shop vac, you should jump at it. if you have one in your garage, go get it. use it right now. it's the best fucking vacuum you'll ever find. you'll never go back. you'll be using it to suck up all that shit in your doorway and around your kitchen in no time.

and if some loser wants to challenge your femininity over it, you should kick him in the balls.

you know the one.

there is no such thing as somalia.

somalia does not exist.

somalia does not exist because the somalis do not want it to exist.

stop pretending otherwise. adjust to reality and create reality-based policy positions.

somaliland exists, it is a democracy and it should be recognized as such and supported by the west.

the status quo in east africa is unsustainable. claims of "somalian territorial integrity" are laughable. the closest thing to a government in somalia is the brutal, bloodthirsty islamic/fascist terrorist network, al-shebaab. 

i do not recognize the legitimacy of al-shebaab and i reject the territorial integrity of any islamic fascist group attempting to administer itself as a state.

somaliland declared independence 35 years ago. it's a sovereign country with a functioning democracy.

instead of blathering about "territorial integrity", the united states should be arming somaliland. the west should be picking a side in this war (which is dormant, anyways), but we won't do it, because we're beholden to the fascist governments in the region. they can go fuck themselves.

this small democratic enclave needs our help and we should have given it to them eons ago. we now have the opportunity to make the right choice and be on the right side of history, but we will fail to do that, as we have continually done since dhimmi joe biden flushed the foreign policy legacy of barack obama down the toilet in a startling display of orientalism and racism.

the old song gets it right.

if you arm eritrea then you won't have to pay her and everyone can go home.

we should not just recognize somaliland, we should arm it and even send it troops to help it fight the islamic fascists off and restore democracy to the region.

but we won't.

the underlying implication is that these muslim dictatorships are in full support of the fascist terrorist groups fighting to keep somalia in the dark ages.

the unstated context is that the arab world uses somalia as a source of slaves and that any sort of government, democratic or not, would upset the remaining arab slave trade, which continues to act as a source of necessary cheap labour in the gulf area.

israel is a taking a bold step, here, to advance democracy and human rights in the region and i would hope that canada would recognize somaliland in solidarity, but i'm not holding my breath.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-security-council-to-convene-emergency-meeting-on-israels-somaliland-recognition/

can't we at least lend it to them?

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

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

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

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

canada is a really big country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

is it more than $700?

is it more than $200?

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

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

as your salary increases, 

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

- your car payments increase, because you buy fancier cars

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

- your taxes go up

- you pay off your lump sum debts

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

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

but who gives a fuck?

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

you're not; not really.

so, why bother?

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

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

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

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

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

am i actually better off?

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

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

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

$408 odsp

$200 cdb

$401 cohb

$75 trillium

$120/3 gst rebate

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

~1100

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

things tend to work out for me.

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

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

don't say nobody warned you.

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

if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

and if you support fascist movements, you're a fascist.

and, i still think that the only good fascist is a dead one.

if you're going to choose to align with the most right-wing, most conservative, most religious political movements that the world has seen in decades, that is your choice, but stop calling yourself a liberal and stop calling yourself a socialist.

you are a fascist.

if you have any intelligence, you should be able to pass the mirror test, to look at yourself and see yourself for what you are.

generate some self-awareness for the movements you are standing with and supporting and be honest with yourself: you are a fascist, and you support fascism.

if george w. bush had gone after the wahabi cultists and salafists, who were mostly in saudi arabia at the time, i would have supported that. i would have supported regime change in saudi arabia as a result of the sept 11 attacks.

however, he didn't do that; he launched a war against a state that did not listen to american demands and hadn't for decades in order to dismantle a difficult state that the militants that attacked the united states had long wanted removed. instead of going after the terrorists, he did exactly what the terrorists wanted him to do. that war eventually extended to a regime change process in syria, which had the same baathist political movement in power.

i did not oppose the iraq war because it was an attack on muslims and i actually don't know anybody that held to that position, at the time. there may have been some backtracking near the end, but the baathists were officially secularists and iraq, despite it's problems, was using the state to redistribute resources in ways that the other states in the area (except syria) were not. iraq had the least muslim government in the middle east, which is exactly why they were targeted.

the arguments at the time were not in solidarity with islamic fundamentalism, which doesn't even make sense, but arguments that toppling the government would create issues with islamic fundamentalism, and that you can't enforce democracy with tanks, you have to let the people do it themselves.

what's happened in the last 20 years is that the liberal media has abandoned it's previous position on iraq, which was correct and principled, and replaced it with horrific talking points written by state media from islamic theocracies, that are in support of the movement for islamic fascism in the area. they've completely flip-flopped from opposing the removal of saddam hussein because it would lead to islamic fascism, which was universally seen as worse, to supporting the islamic fascists themselves on grounds of "religious freedom" and criticizing attempts to bomb or contain them by force. in the process, the liberal media has thoroughly aligned itself with contemporary fascism, and today acts as a mouth piece for fascist governments and as a vector for fascist propaganda, and has even helped generate fascist movements on the ground in the west.

frankly, i'm not even convinced that bush even understood what he did, but his daddy's goons, which he let back into power, took the opportunity to advance the aims of the muslim extremists that bombed him in removing the godless, unislamic, socialist government in iraq, which led to the country being taken over by religious lunatics, which is exactly what the saudis wanted.

obama then had to come in and try to contain the pandora's box that removing the baath party opened up and that is still wreaking havoc across the world. the point was to oppose that pandora's box from opening, and to oppose the forces it would unleash; but, today, the liberal media is aligning itself with the consequences of that pandora's box, and standing in solidarity with, and not in opposition to, the forces it unleashed.

my support for bombing isis is because i opposed toppling saddam hussein, and opposed toppling assad, who, together, were preventing gulf-backed islamic fascists from militarizing the region. i had a clear understanding of that at the time, and i have a clear understanding of the issue now.

i have always supported using the american military to fight the terrorists and i entirely understand that this is a conflict that will last for centuries, as other similar conflicts in history always did. this isn't a three year war, it's a generational conflict. yes. that's a correct observation, and that's the point; they're not going to give up in three years, they're going to keep trying to take over our secular society and enforce their dark age value systems, until we're able to wipe them out and force them to stop. i don't know what to tell people complaining that the war to save them from being enslaved by islam is taking too long, other than that fighting for one's freedom is not like buying fast food, and that things that matter sometimes take a long time. the criticism that we should give up and stop fighting for freedom because it is taking too long to win is amongst the most shallow and stupid arguments that i've ever heard, but you get what you deserve, in the end. if you don't want to fight for your way of life, don't be surprised if it's taken away from you.

i would continue to support overthrowing the governments in saudi arabia and iran, and i now would support overthrowing the al qaeda backed fascist dictatorship that took over syria and i would support driving the taliban out of afghanistan. my solidarity is with the forces of secularism, socialism and modernism. my solidarity is with the apostates fighting for freedom and democracy. i have always and will continue to condemn the religious groups trying to enforce their laws on people that don't want to follow them.

our man in the white house, he won't even usurp the power of the purse on us. he expects us to do it. what's up with that? - said no republican, ever.

even as little as ten years ago, could you imagine we'd be standing here in 2025 and watching far right republicans complaining that the president isn't interfering enough in their exclusive constitutional jurisdiction?

this is actually a deflection by the outgoing representative:

She said she wants Trump to focus on spiking health-care costs and affordability concerns — not what's going on overseas.

"No one cares about the foreign countries. No one cares about the never-ending amount of foreign leaders coming to the White House every single week," she said in a recent interview with NBC News.

the president of the united states has no mandate whatsoever to deal with health care or the economy. these concerns are the exclusive concern of the congress, and particularly the house of representatives.

it's her decision whether she wants to do her job or quit and go home, but it is her responsibility to write these bills, and not his. the president's job is to oversee the military and interact with foreign dignitaries, not to concern himself with domestic policy.

the maga supporters should be asking why ms greene is abandoning her post rather than writing the legislation she campaigned on. it's her job. it's not his job.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-bombing-strikes-peace-president-9.7028340

tomatoes are actually fairly low in nutrients compared to other fruits for sale in the store. they aren't bad for you, so there isn't any good reason to restrict tomato consumption, and i eat a fair amount of them myself, but i eat them with more nutritious fruits like red peppers, limes and avocados, and/or with high nutrient roots like beets or carrots and high-nutrient greens like kale and broccoli. tomatoes are better thought of as a low nutrient spice, like pepper or salt, whose primary purpose is to add flavour, than as a nutritious part of the meal. however, they aren't quite as useless as lettuce or cucumbers; they're in a middle category, with apples and peaches and pears, of fruits that you can do better than and should if you can, but shouldn't necessarily be actively avoided, if you like them. have a pear or an apple or a tomato if you like, but realize it has almost no nutritional value. if you don't want to do the research, just make sure you always have a red pepper and/or an avocado in any meal you eat with a tomato in it.

i would also suggest buying hydroponic tomatoes to maximize nutrients and to avoid organic tomatoes, as the pesticides that organic farmers use are more dangerous than the ones conventional farming uses. 

adding more carotenoids won't do much good. these are very poor sources of vitamin a (your body will convert them to retinol, but only if it has to, and at a much lower efficiency rate than previously thought. humans are in truth actually not very good at converting carotenoids, like beta-carotene and lycopene, into vitamin a. it is advised to seek true retinol, which is only found by eating meat, or consuming milk products, like cheese. i eat a lot of eggs, partially for that reason.) and there is no good science upholding any sort of benefit of lycopene, despite many attempts to find one in order to market tomatoes as healthy fruits. at best, lycopene is a very low potency form of vitamin a. lutein has a more established role to play in eye health, but you're still better off eating an avocado or a bell pepper, or a carrot.

tomatoes don't have much vitamin c and adding more would likely make them more citrusy. that would be a better addition, in my opinion. i'd like that, myself, but americans like sugar in ways that i don't. i prefer tarty citrus foods over sugary cakes and candy, but i'm a little weird. i would drink fresca or sprite when i was a kid by preference and choice, and not coke or pepsi, and i still prefer caffeinated mt dew to any cola, and dr pepper to coke. i used to get key lime or lemon or rhubarb pies for my birthday when i was a little kid, instead of chocolate cake, which i found made me bloated and sick. i preferred a good fruit filling - apple or cherry or rhubarb or lemon or lime - over chocolate filling or icing or sugar. i have always liked sour and have never really liked sweet. i'd get big turks instead of sugary chocolate bars. i'd prefer sour patch kids to smarties.

there are lots of sources of vitamin c in western diets and we don't really need more, but it would still be a better option than trying to cram more low potency vitamin a into the fruit, with little to no actual benefit to it.

i'm not opposed to genetically modifying food if there's a potential benefit to it, but i don't see any value in this, and will stick to the red ones. 

the tomato industry has been struggling for decades to market it's product as healthy because it's a fruit and it has this perception that people want tomatoes to be healthy because they're fruits. it should abandon this. tomatoes will sell as flavouring without the need to try to market them as healthy. it's enough for them to not be unhealthy - for them to be neutral - for them to be good flavouring agents.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/winnipeg/article/why-you-might-see-purple-tomatoes-at-the-grocery-store-next-year/

from what i can see, these people are accusing each other of doing the same thing to each other, but it was the fake left (who are authoritarian conservatives masquerading as a left) that started the fight. now, when faced with a counter-attack, they respond as though they're being attacked without cause. but, they started the fight!

the root cause of the problem here that needs to be addressed is the false moral superiority of the fake left that led it to decide it had some objective basis to censor speech it didn't like that is somehow different than when the authoritarian right does the same thing to it.

i'm left with little to no sympathy for the groups being targeted, as they brought this on themselves, and would rather point to the centuries old lesson of free speech that real leftists learned eons ego: if you censor your opponents when you are in power, they will retaliate when they gain power. so, don't do that.

free speech is absolute or it doesn't exist. you can't moderate free speech. and, as chomsky said, free speech means free speech for your opponents, it doesn't mean free speech for you.

....and certainly don't bitch and complain when they do to you what you did to them, if you insist on censoring them, despite the lessons of history that are right in front of you and which you refuse to learn. get off your fucking cross.

these groups are not leftists and are not allies of the left, they are conservative groups in disguise that are seeking to control what you think, feel, write, sing, draw and believe. they can go fuck themselves, and i hope trump's cronies take them down a notch.

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/europeans-push-back-trumps-authoritarian-sanctions-anti-disinformation-rcna250791

i support striking islamic militants everywhere and anywhere they are, for any reason, at any time. they are a scourge, a parasite, a disease, that needs to be eradicated.

the details of trump's claims about nigeria may be a little sketchy, but they are also more solid than the liberal media is claiming. if the basic claim is that isis is killing christians in nigeria, that basic claim is correct.

but it doesn't matter that they're christians. isis might instead be killing secularists, modernists, animists, buddhists, socialists, women, pagans, gays, gypsies, jews, slavs (all groups that isis would target), whatever; isis should be wiped out, regardless of what particular group they are targeting in whatever region. it is not the fact that the islamic fascists are killing christians that makes them a vile parasite that needs to be eradicated, it is the core of their religious beliefs, which have no redeemable qualities, and cannot be tolerated in a civilized global community.

it's not that polytheism is inherently less stupid than monotheism. i think the idea of multiple gods is logically superior to the idea of one god (if you can convince me that any god exists at all, you're going to have a hard time convincing me there is only one. an existence proof would be unlikely, and a corresponding characteristic theorem that shows uniqueness would strike me as incoherent. proof of the existence of many gods would follow instantly from proof of the existence of one god.), but this is really not the point i'm trying to make. an idea that is distinctly less stupid than another idea is still a stupid idea, and not to be championed because it's less stupid; less stupid is still stupid.

what i find more interesting and appealing about polytheism is the content of the stories, and not the question of existence, which i don't think is worth seriously considering at this point. if religion has any value, it isn't in the theological question (which is resolved. there is neither a monotheistic god nor polytheistic gods and that question should be abandoned and moved on from.) but in the cultural value of the underlying moral teachings and, in today's world, most importantly in the differences between how monotheistic and polytheistic societies see the place of human beings. i prefer pagan polytheism because it is culturally superior, and we do in fact see that in the syncretic forms of christianity that developed in europe and also, more recently, have been developing in south america, where they didn't completely wipe out their indigenous religions. the christians of constantine's time would call the lot of us a bunch of roman pagans, celebrating germanic rituals and holding to icons and romanic laws and cultural traditions. the pope is just a continuation of the office of the high priest of the sun god. da fuck is this? 

it's as though you stupid idiots don't even realize you're performing a cannibalistic ritual to dionysus every time you engage in the eucharist.

if you want to be objective about this, it's pretty clear that the greeks and romans, and germans and celts and slavs, eventually conquered the christians, from the inside out. there's almost no trace of the invading christian colonizers left anywhere. we have statues of the old gods everywhere, and people living the old ways everywhere. the pagans won. it's right in front of you. but you don't realize it.

the struggle is in preventing the victory of paganism over christianity from being engulfed in a new round of colonization by muslims, and the decrease in quality of life and enjoyment of existence that would follow from that. i don't want to have to spend my time fighting to save europeanism from encroaching orientalism, i want to spend my time enjoying being a european.

i watched a youtube video the other day about the origins of the flood myth. there's several earlier versions of this myth in sumerian and semitic mythology, as found on bits of clay tablets that are thousands of years older than the one in genesis. i'm not interested in the theological differences; there is no yahweh, there is no enki. it doesn't really matter how many gods are in the story. what is the lesson of the story? how does it change in the different cultures?

in my opinion, the jewish version is a dumbed-down version of a far more complex narrative in the older versions. in the jewish version, god wants to punish us all for not listening to him, so he kills us all. we're taught from a young age that this is a good story, with a good moral, but it isn't at all. it's a horrible story, and the version of god in genesis is a horrific asshole that should be condemned as what he is. we would chain this god up and bring him before the hague and sentence him to death. we would charge this god with hate crimes. this god has little to no redeemable qualities whatsoever; if such a god existed, it would need to be destroyed, and it would be the west that would destroy it, in an epic struggle to restore freedom and assert democracy over tyranny and backwardsness and barbarism. we could not coexist with such a horrible entity. but the jewish scriptures teach us that god's wisdom is infinite, that god made the right choice to kill us all, and we're not to question the wisdom.

well, ok, then.

but the older stories actually show disagreements amongst the gods and invite us to question their decisions. the reason that this one asshole god wanted to kill us all was that we were overpopulating the earth, and too loud, and too smelly and it's pissing him off, so he just seeks to crush us like we would stamp out gross roaches. hey, i can empathize with that a little; it's a far better reason to kill us than that we're gay, or worshipping a cow or something. but in the mesopotamian stories, there is criticism of that decision, and it is clear that the people were taught to question the gods rather than to obey them. was it a just decision? or was this god an asshole and should this god actually be punished for killing us? the mesopotamian stories, like the greek stories we are more familiar with, try to work out these more complex analyses, and subtle moral positions. the gods argue with each other. they can be right or wrong. the stories don't merely declare the monotheistic god infallible and decide it's judgement is unquestionable, they tell us to think for our ourselves and come to our own conclusions. the latter is culturally superior.

the direct analogues between roman, greek, germanic and celtic mythology and jewish mythology are less than the analogues between jewish and sumerian mythology due to the differences in cultural origin. eventual post-captivity judaism was heavily influenced by indo-european zoroastrianism, but that would be like if the greeks decided zeus slaughtered all of the other gods. it's still warped. the overlaps in stories don't really make sense until after alexander conquers the middle east, and they start speaking greek and reading greek literature and philosophy in the region, and jesus eventually emerges as this hebrew socrates. so, the comparison between the version of the flood story in genesis with the different and older flood stories is something that doesn't extend to a comparison between other jewish myths and corresponding stories in greek and roman mythology, more directly. the phoenecian mythology was more similar to the greek mythology, and probably influenced by it, but that doesn't make it's way into the hebrew scriptures, for whatever reason.

the analyses has to stand by analogy. i have to point out that the roman and greek stories are like the sumerian stories in assigning the gods personalities, in developing conflicts between the gods and in telling people to think for themselves, rather than obey their tyrannical lord and then argue that i would rather live in a society where the culture tells us to come to our own conclusions than a culture that tells us everything is burned into stone, and we do, because the pagans won, and that is worth protecting from another round of encroaching monotheism, which is always a massive cultural step backwards and yet is certainly currently pounding at the doors. rome went through a cultural collapse leading to the adoption of christianity, which took centuries to undo, and which we should fight hard to not let happen again.

however, the story of adam is even worse than the story of noah and an urgent and pressing reason to draw particular attention to the need to reconnect with indigenous cultural ideas, before we kill ourselves off. the monotheistic religions teach us that god created this all for us and we are to use it for our benefit. this is a distinct reversal of any indigenous belief system, and from any pagan system i'm aware of, which all teach us that we are a part of an interconnected system that we need to coexist within, rather than that we are in some way distinct from or outside of it. the idea that we are part of an ecological web and need to exist sustainably within it is a superior position to the backwards idea that we are at the top of the food chain, and this all exists for us to do what we want with it. many centuries from now, some smart race of aliens may tell the story of the destruction of human society and conclude that it was the stupid myth of adam that led the stupid humans to destroy their habitat, and destroy themselves. it is imperative that we find a way to undo the effects of the monotheistic religions on western culture in relation to this specific idea that we're outside of ecology and return to the indigenous european idea that we're a part of a ecology instead of being outside of it if we want to survive, and a return to cultural paganism is the best way to do that. the norse may have fought against the skraelings as much as they did against the christians, but they would have thought we were stupid for shitting in our own beds; the ideas of resource economy and sustainable growth were inherent to european culture, before the unsustainable middle eastern cultures, which had already ruined their own lands, brought their disastrous philosophies to us and enforced them on us with violence. whether we are able to reverse this one lingering and subtle but catastrophic and important position of monotheism and return to the indigenous position we once held will determine if we can survive or not.

i hope i've explained why i'm interested in returning to paganism. it's not about the theology. paganism is simply better aligned with freedom and democracy, and with sustainability and sustainable growth. these ought to be the three pillars of western society, moving forwards, if it is to survive the collapse of the global capitalist order.

the french had liberty, equality and fraternity.

we should have freedom, democracy and sustainability. 

monotheism has been our biggest retarding force for centuries in getting to a secular society and culture based in reason, and will remain our largest barrier to overcome for the near future.

i am not a cultural christian, i do not celebrate christmas and i do not see christianity as a way to somehow block other religions from infiltrating western culture. if anything, i am a cultural pagan, or a cultural europeanist, and i see little difference between christianity, islam and judaism in terms of their ideology, or their ability to destroy cultures and wipe out societies.

it is difficult to ignore the reality that christianity is a less extreme force for evil in this world than islam is, but that does not make christianity more moderate, and i would thoroughly reject that claim. there's plenty of victims of christianity out there. to the extent that christianity is less extreme than islam, it has little to do with their respective ideological frameworks, which are exactly the same thing, and more to do with differences in the underlying societies. white european culture experienced an enlightenment period that arab culture has not yet experienced and, for that reason, european culture has been able to extricate itself from the retarding influence of the religion and extirpate it from european society in ways that arab culture has to this point failed to succeed in accomplishing.

that is not a beneficial characteristic of christianity, it is a statement of the superiority of the underlying pagan european culture, that was able to throw off the yoke of jewish mythology and reconstitute itself, which is something that persians and others are still struggling with, in finding a pathway towards their eventual evolution out of islam.

as a cultural pagan or europeanist, i see christianity and islam as being identical to each other and equally threatening to the existence of freedom, free societies and democracy, which we can see from a broad view of history are indigenous ideas that, in eurasia, have only survived in northern europe. it would not take much for the tables to reverse.

i am not celebrating saturnalia this month, but if i were to celebrate anything, it would be the solstice, and the ways of the ancestors, and not christian mythology, which should be left behind.

if somebody at the centre wants to be real sneaky, they'll adapt a version of don quixote and dedicate it to trump, and make sure he's at the premier, for a special ceremony.

they can give him an award with a gold plated windmill.

it will be better when they just do constant performances of cats, anyways.

that's everybody's dream, right? no end to cats. it shall run every day into perpetuity. what a wonderful world. what a utopian vision.

plus, that way, trump can show up and grab them all, when they're not expecting.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/24/politics/kennedy-center-christmas-eve-concert-trump

it's a good reminder that trump is 70% performance artist, 30% arrogant asshole.

he's almost as hilarious as i am.

almost.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/24/politics/trump-santa-norad-calls

the truth is actually the other extreme - not only was jesus a hebrew and a jew, but it is also the case that most palestinians today are not arabs but hebrews.

jesus was a jew, and so were the ancestors of today's west bank palestinians, who live in historical judaea and are the descendants of the hebrews that once inhabited it.

the true palestinians, the philistines, were a greek tribe that lived on the coast (today's gaza) and that settled the region from crete around the year -1200. they were nether related to arabs nor jews. they were physically larger because they were aryans from greece, while the jews were itty bitty semites, stunted by poor nutrition resulting from centuries of middle eastern agriculture.

at this distant point in time, the ancestors of the arabs lived in yemen and somalia. they were south semitic speaking black africans.

what happened after the bar kokhba revolt is that the romans finished the carthaginian genocide by renaming judaea after the greek philistines, who had long lived nearby, thereby wiping the phoenecian jews off the map. the area was from that point known as philistinia, instead of judaea, although the switch was in truth not completely permanent, and roman administrators actually bounced back and forth for a long time afterwards.

when the arabs (from yemen) eventually invaded the region, they inherited the roman maps and the turks then inherited the maps from the arabs. they just took over the roman world and kept much of it in place, including the administrative divisions and also the christian religion, which was still dominant in the region until after the crusades when turks and turko-egyptians finally decided to wipe it out by force. the idea that christians slowly converted to islam for societal and financial gain, to improve their material conditions, is in fact a myth; the truth is that they paid their taxes, and successfully resisted conversion for centuries, both in eastern europe and also on the eastern mediterranean coast. the arabs were already long gone and a distant memory by the point that the turks started getting aggressive about it. the word palestine enters the english language from roman/greek philistine.

but the people that lived there were not greek philistines, they were converted hebrews, and descended from the ancient jews.

in fact, large swaths of what is today called palestine know that they're jews and didn't actually convert to islam until world war one. the multiple turkish genocides in the broader region to wipe out christian and jewish groups were apparently convincing enough to finally do the job, whereas centuries of taxation by islamic theocracies were not. and, whether you realize it or not, you are echoing and continuing this campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the region put in motion by the ottomans every time you deny that jesus was jewish.

there is a long history of trying to deny the jewishness of jesus. this loud, violent yelling through megaphones on the streets that jesus was not a jew but an arab, a group that did not enter the region for several centuries after his death, belongs in the same ideological and intellectual category as blaming the jews for killing jesus, a catholic position that led to pogroms and holocausts.

these people are not leftists, they are nazis and they should be aggressively labelled as what they are.

the claim that jesus, whether fictional or historical, was a palestinian (that is, a philistine) is ridiculously absurd and the people trying to convince you of as much should be laughed at, scorned and derided as outrageously ignorant in the most aggressive ways possible.

these people are not any sort of a left. these people are fascists and represent the far right.

to be clear: i've never seen a rodent or any sign of a rodent in the apartment itself. i've seen them crawl over a taped-up hole in the bathroom (underneath the upstairs kitchen, which is where they're really living) and i've heard them scratching at night. i also know that they are transiting through the laundry area.

i haven't seen a roach in here, either. if they are eating anything in here at all, they're keeping the roach population down. there's nothing else for them to eat in here.

so i don't really know if the insulation was left by a mouse, and maybe that's unlikely, except that i have a theory.

i think there's a small mouse around here, and rats upstairs. i've been going after the rats, and having some success in blocking them access. the mouse may see me as an ally for that reason. it might want to nest with me for that reason.

i'll also point out that a mouse would love my diet as it's high in cereals, bacon, cheese, yeast, hemp, avocado and spices. 

==============================cycle 6 eaten through, except for four exceptions

- dec 6th: the salsas for the cycle 7 bacon and eggs, together, with cheese and yeast.

- dec 7th: first cycle 7 bacon & eggs. no salsa.

- dec 8th: second cycle 7 bacon & eggs. no salsa.

- dec 9th: first cycle 8 quinoa, with lentils subbed for quinoa (to eat red pepper & broc)

- dec 10th: second cyle 8 quinoa, with lentils subbed for quinoa (to eat red pepper & broc)

- dec 11th/12th: first cycle 7 nachos. 2x juice. plus subway, bmt with bacon.

- dec 13th/14th: second cycle 7 nachos. 2x juice.

- dec 15th: second cycle 7 tomato sandwich, with uncle ben gumbo with dill and garlic, monterrey jack cheese, nutritional yeast, hemp seeds, caesar and frank's.

- dec 16th: first cycle 7 cereal, plus two instant oatmeals with an apple with a touch of chocolate soy.

- dec 17th: second cycle 7 cereal, plus two instant oatmeals and an apple with a touch of chocolate soy.

===================cycle 7 eaten through, except for four exceptions.

- dec 18th: first cycle 8 cereal, plus two instant oatmeals with an apple with a touch of chocolate soy.

- dec 19th: second cycle 8 cereal, plus two instant oatmeals and an apple with a touch of chocolate soy.

- dec 20th: salsa for cycle 8 eggs, together, with cheese and yeast.

- dec 21st: first cycle 8 bacon & eggs. no salsa.

- dec 22nd: second cycle 8 bacon & eggs. no salsa.

- dec 23rd/24th: first cycle 8 nachos. 2x juice.

======

if a mouse has been spying on me, it can see and more importantly smell (mice are nearly blind) that i eat well.

how far have mice been to being domesticated over the last several centuries? i mean house mice. if we weren't so busy trying to kill them, we'd keep them as pets. they like us. we don't like them.

what i'll say about the mouse is that if i can't find any droppings, i won't concern myself with it. i'd have to have a reason to go after it.

it's the rat or rats i want out of here and i'm still studying them to figure out how. it's going to be hard to deal with the problem so long as the upstairs tenants keep food out and in the sink.

i lost yesterday due to the leak and today due to catching up on sleep. i'll be awake overnight and trying to see what they're up to.

as an atheist, i actually think that merry christmas and happy holidays both suck. i'm not any more interested in hanukkah or whatever else than i am in christmas. they're both stupid.

i consequently have two better ideas, which are variations of the same idea:

- have a sexy solstice, which would require a little sass along the sexy part to get right or

- have a saucy saturnalia

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadians-merry-christmas-holiday-stress-poll

the united states already has control over greenland.

instead of being paternalistic and imperialist and controlling, why don't the americans try convincing greenland to vote to become a us territory?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-greenland-landry-envoy-9.7025607

to summarize.

- the senate still has the opportunity to intervene.

- the issue should be sent to the supreme court as a reference question

- the governor general should refuse to sign it, if none of that happens

- if it somehow becomes law, it should be challenged as unconstitutional in the courts, and the courts should strike it down

specifically, the formula for amending the role of the governor-general is in s. 41 of the constitution act, and requires unanimous consent:

Amendment by unanimous consent

41 An amendment to the Constitution of Canada in relation to the following matters may be made by proclamation issued by the Governor General under the Great Seal of Canada only where authorized by resolutions of the Senate and House of Commons and of the legislative assembly of each province:

• (a) the office of the Queen, the Governor General and the Lieutenant Governor of a province;

• (b) the right of a province to a number of members in the House of Commons not less than the number of Senators by which the province is entitled to be represented at the time this Part comes into force;

• (c) subject to section 43, the use of the English or the French language;

• (d) the composition of the Supreme Court of Canada; and

• (e) an amendment to this Part.