Saturday, April 11, 2026

this is an interesting question without a clear answer.

i would assume that, upon any expression of albertan sovereignty, they would be expected to assume the role of the crown. it would not be fundamentally different than patriation, which would be the precedent. however, it's worth noting that some indigenous groups have never accepted patriation and consider their agreement to strictly be with the british crown, and not with ottawa.

this would have no effect in quebec, because quebec was not added to canada by treaty but by conquest. there are no underlying treaties for quebec, except with the inuit in the very far north, in the parts of quebec that were in the hudson's bay company (rupert's land) at the time of conquest.

i don't have any kids, but i can tell you that, if i did, i would be getting them online and encouraging them to use computers as much as possible at a much younger age than 16.

the state has no business regulating this behaviour, and i don't accept their authority to do so.

Story oF BYRON THE BULB 


Byron was to’ve been manufactured by Tungsram in 
Budapest. He would probably have been grabbed up by 
the ace salesman Géza Roézsavélgyi’s father Sandor, who 
covered all the Transylvanian territory and had begun to 
go native enough to where the home office felt vaguely 
paranoid about him throwing some horrible spell on the 
whole operation if they didn’t give him what he wanted. 
Actually he was a salesman who wanted his son to be a 
doctor, and that came true. But it may have been the bad 
witch-leery auras around Budapest that got the birth of 
Byron reassigned at the last minute to Osram, in Berlin. 
Reassigned, yes. There is a Bulb Baby Heaven, amiably 
satirized as if it was the movies or something, well Big 
Business, ha, hal But don’t let Them fool you, this is a 
bureaucracy first, and a Bulb Baby Heaven only as a sort 
of sideline. All overhead—yes, out of its own pocket the 
Company is springing for square leagues of organdy, hogs- 
heads of IG Farben pink and blue Baby Dye, hundred- 
weights of clever Siemens Electric Baby Bulb Pacifiers, 
giving the suckling Bulb the shape of a 110-volt current 
without the least trickle of power. One way or another, 
these Bulb folks are in the business of providing the 
appearance of power, power against the night, without the 
reality. bi 

Actually, B.B.H. is rather shabby. The brown rafters 
drip cobwebs. Now and then a roach shows up on the 
floor, and all the Babies try to roll over to look (being 
Bulbs they seem perfectly symmetrical, Skippy, but don’t © 
forget the contact at the top of the thread), going uh-guhl 
uhhhh-guhl, glowing feebly at the bewildered roach sitting 
paralyzed and squashable out on the bare boards, rushing, 
reliving the terror of some sudden blast of| current out of 
nowhere and high overhead the lambent, all-seeing Bulb. 
In their innocence, the Baby Bulbs don’t know what to 
anake of this roach’s abreaction—they feel his fright, but
don’t know what it is. They just want to be his friend. He’s 
interesting and has good moves. Everybody's excited ex- 
cept for Byron, who considers the other Bulb Babies a 
bunch of saps. It is a constant struggle to turn their 
thoughts on anything meaningful. Hi there Babies, I'm 
' Byron-the-Bulb! Here to sing a little song to you, that 
goes— 


Light-up, and-shine, you—in-cande-scent Bulb Ba-bies! 
Looks-like ya got ra-bies 
Just lay there foamin’ and a-screamin’ like a buncha 
little demons, 
I’m delivin’ unto you a king-dom of roa-ches, 
And no-thin’ ap-proaches 
That joyful feelin’ when-you’re up-on the ceilin’ 
Lookin’ down—night and day—on the king-dom you 
sur-vey, 
They'll come out *n’ love ya till the break of dawn, 
But they run like hell when that light comes on! 
So shine on, Baby Bulbs, you're the wave of the fu-ture, 
And I’m here to recruit ya, 
._ In mi great crusade, 
Just sing along Babies—come-on-and-join-the-big- 
pa-radel 


Trouble with Byron’s he’s an old, old soul, trapped in- 
side the glass prison of a Baby Bulb. He hates this place, 
lying on his back waiting to get manufactured, nothing to 
listen to on the speakers but Charleston music, now and 
then an address to the Nation, what kind of a setup’s that? 
Byron wants to get out of here and into it, needless to say 
he’s been developing all kinds of nervous ailments, Baby 
Bulb. Diaper Rash, which is a sort of corrosion on his 
screw threads, Bulb Baby Colic, a tight spasm of high re- 
‘sistance someplace among the deep loops of tungsten 
wire, Bulb Baby Hyperventilation, where it actually feels 
“oe his vacuum’s been broken though there is no organic 
asis. ..\. § 

‘When M-Day finally does roll around, you can bet 
_Byron’s elated. He has passed the time hatching some 
really insane grandiose plans—he’s gonna organize all the 
Bulbs, see, get him a power base in Berlin, he’s already 
hep to the Strobing Tactic, all you do is develop the knack 
(Yogic, almost) of shutting off and on at a rate close to 
the human brain’s alpha rhythm, and you can actually 
trigger an epileptic fit! True. Byron has had a vision against 
the rafters of his ward, of 20 million Bulbs, all over 
Europe, at a given sychronizing pulse arranged by one of 
his many agents in the Grid, all these Bulbs beginning to 
strobe together, humans thrashing around the 20 million 
rooms like fish on the beaches of Perfect Energy— Atten- 
tion, humans, this has been a warning to you. Next time, 
a few of us will explode. Ha-ha. Yes we'll unleash our 
Kamikaze squads! You’ve heard of the Kirghiz Light? well 
that’s the ass end of a firefly compared to what we're 
gonna—oh, you haven’t heard of the—oh, well, too bad. 
Cause a few Bulbs, say a million, a mere 5% of our num- 
ber, are more than willing to flame out in one grand burst 
instead of patiently waiting out their design hours.... So 
Byron dreams of his Guerrilla Strike Force, gonna get 
Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, all of them, right in the 
face with one coordinated blast... . 

Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an 
organization, a human one, known as “Phoebus,” the in- 
ternational light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland. 
Run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Asso- 
ciated Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn 
owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General 
Electric Company in America. Phoebus fixes the prices 
and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the 
world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips 
in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any time 
to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great Com- 
bination). Given this state of general repression, there 
seems noplace for a newborn Baby Bubb to start but at the 
bottom. 

But Phoebus doesn’t know yet that Byron is immortal. 
He starts out his career at an all-girl opium den in Charlot- 
tenburg, almost within sight of the statue. of Wernher 
Siemens, burning up in a sconce, one among many bulbs 
witnessing the more languorous forms of [Republican dec- 
adence. He gets to know all the bulbs in the place, Benito 
the Bulb over in the next sconce who’s always planning an 
escape, Bernie down the: hall in the toilet, who has all 
kinds of urolagnia jokes to tell, his mother Brenda in the 
kitchen who talks of hashish hush puppies, dildos rigged 
to pump floods of paregoric orgasm to the capillaries of 
the womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of the 
night, reaches into the true Night of the Other, cold and 
naked on linoleum floors after days without sleep, the 
dreams and tears become a natural state.... 

One by one, over the months, the other bulbs burn out, 
and are gone. The first few of these hit Byron hard. He’s 
‘still a new arrival, still hasn’t accepted his immortality. 
But on through the burning hours he starts to learn about 
the transience of .others: learns that loving them while 
theyre here becomes easier, and also more intense—to 
love as if each design-hour will be the last. Byron soon 
enough becomes a Permanent Old-Timer. Others can 
recognize his immortality on sight, but it’s never discussed 
except in a general way, when folklore comes flickering in 
from other parts of the Grid, tales of the Immortals, one in 
a kabbalist’s study in Lyons who’s supposed to know 
magic, another in Norway outside a warehouse facing 
arctic whiteness with a stoicism more southerly bulbs be- 
gin strobing faintly just at the thought of. If other Im- 
mortals are out there, they remain silent. But it is a silence 
with much, perhaps, everything, in it. 

After Love, then, Byron’s next lesson is Silence. 

As his burning lengthens toward 600 hours, the monitors 
in Switzerland begin to keep more of an eye on Byron. 
The Phoebus Surveillance Room is located under a little- 
known Alp, a chilly room crammed full of German electro 
hardware, glass, brass, ebonite, and silver, massive terminal 
blocks shaggy with copper clips and screws, and a cadre 
of super-clean white-robed watchers who wander meter to 
meter, light as snowdevils, making sure that nothing’s 
going wrong, that through no bulb shall the mean operat- 
ing life be extended. You can imagine what it would do 
to the market if that started happening. 

Byron passes Surveillance’s red-line at 600 hours, and 
immediately, as a matter of routine, he is checked out for 
filament resistance, burning temperature, vacuum, power 
consumption. Everything’s normal. Now Byron is to be 
checked out every 50 hours hereafter. A soft chime will 
go off in the monitoring station whenever it’s time. 

At 800 hours—another routine precaution—a Berlin 
agent is sent out to the opium den to transfer Byron. She 
is wearing asbestos-lined kid gloves and seven-inch spike 
heels, no not so she can fit in with the crowd, but so that 
she can reach that sconce to unscrew Byron. The other 
bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror. The word goes out 
along the Grid. At something close to the speed of light, 
every bulb, Azos looking down the empty black Bakelite 
streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer 
matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every 
bulb in Europe knows what’s happened. They are silent 
with impotence, with surrender in the face of struggles 
they thought were all myth. We can’t help, this common 
thought humming through pastures of sleeping sheep, 
down Autobahns and to the bitter ends of coaling piers in 
the North, there’s never been anything we could do.... 
Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and 
the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies comes in and 
takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there, 
but it’s only information, glow-modulated, harmless, noth- 
ing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful 
that Byron once envisioned, back there in his Baby ward, 
in his innocence. 

He is taken to Neukdélln, to a basement room, the home 
of a glassblower who is afraid of the night and who will 
keep Byron glowing and on watch over all the flint bowls, 
the griffins and flower-ships, ibexes in mid-leap, green 
spider-webs, somber ice-deities. This is one of many so- 
called “control points,” where suspicious bulbs can be 
monitored easily. 

In less than a fortnight, a gong sounds along the ice 
and stone corridors of the Phoebus headquarters, and faces 
swivel over briefly from their meters. Not too many gongs 
around here. Gongs are special. Byron has passed 1000 
hours, and the procedure now is standard: the Committee 
on Incandescent Anomalies sends a hit man to Berlin. 

But here something odd happens. Yes, damned odd. The 
plan is to smash up Byron and send him back right there 
in the shop to cullet and batch—salvage the tungsten, of 
course—and let him be reincarnated in the glassblower’s 
next project (a balloon setting out on a journey from the 
top of a white skyscraper). This wouldn't be too bad a 
deal for Byron—he knows as well as Phoebus does how 
many hours he has on him. Here in the shop he’s watched 
enough glass being melted back into the structureless pool 
from which all glass forms spring and re-spring, and 
wouldn’t mind going through it himself. But he is trapped 
on the Karmic wheel. The glowing orange batch is a taunt, 
a cruelty. There’s no escape for Byron, he’s doomed to an 
infinite regress of sockets and bulbsnatchers. In zips young 
Hansel Geschwindig, a Weimar street urchin—twirls 
Byron out of the ceiling into a careful pocket and Ge- 
sssschhhhwindig! out the door again. Darkness invades the 
dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his 
dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light 
is the worst. Light, in his dreams, was always hope: the 
basic, mortal hope. As the contacts break helically away, 
hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply 
tonight crying, “Who? Who?” 

Phoebus isn’t exactly thrown into a frenzy. It’s hap- 
pened before. There is still a procedure to follow. It 
means more overtime for some employees, so there’s that 
vague, full-boweled pleasure at the windfall, along with an 
equally vague excitement at the break in routine. You 
want high emotion, forget Phoebus. Their stonefaced 
search parties move out into the streets. They know more 
or less where in the city to look. They are assuming that 
no one among their consumers knows of Byron’s immortal- 
ity. So the data for Non-immortal Bulbsnatchings ought to 
apply also to Byron. And the data happen to hump up in 
poor sections, Jewish sections, drug, homosexual, prostitute, 
and magic sections of the capital. Here are the most logi- 
cal bulbsnatchers, in terms of what the crime is. Look at 
all the propaganda, It’s a moral crime. Phoebus discov- 
ered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our 
time—that consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That 
guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a most powerful 
weapon. In America, Lyle Bland and his psychologists had 
figures, expert testimony and money (money in the Puri- 
tan sense—an outward and visible O.K. on their inten- 
tions) enough to tip the Discovery of Guilt at the cusp 
between scientific theory and fact. Growth rates in later 
years were to bear Bland out (actually what bore Bland 
out was an honorary pallbearer sextet of all the senior 
members of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short, 
plus Lyle, Jr., who was sneezing. Buddy at the last min- 
ute decided to go see Dracula. He was better off). Of all 
the legacies Bland left around, the Bulbsnatching Heresy 
was perhaps his grandest. It doesn’t just mean that some- 
body isn’t buying a bulb. It also means that same some- 
body is not putting any power in that socket! It is a sin 
both against Phoebus and against the Grid. Neither one is 
about to let that get out of hand. 

So, out go the Phoebus flatfoots, looking for the snatched 
Byron. But the urchin has already left town, gone to Ham- 
burg, traded Byron to a Reeperbahn prostitute so he can 
shoot up some morphine—the young woman’s customer to- 
night is a cost-accountant who likes to have light bulbs 
screwed into his asshole, and this john has also brought a 
little hashish to smoke, so by the time he leaves he’s for- 
gotten about Byron still there in his asshole—doesn’t ever, 
in fact, find out, because when he finally gets around to 
sitting down (having stood up in trolleys all the way 
home) it’s on his own home toilet and plop! there goes 
Byron in the water and flusssshhhh! away down ‘the waste 
lines to the Elbe estuary. He is just round enough to get 
through smoothly all the way. For days he floats over the 
North Sea, till he reaches Helgoland, that red-and-white 
Napoleon pastry tipped in the sea. He stays there for a 
while at a hotel between the Hengst and the Ménch, till 
being brought back one day to the mainland by a very old 
priest who’s been put hep to Byron’s immortality in the 
course of a routine dream about the taste of a certain 
1911 Hochheimer ...suddenly -here’s the great Berlin 
Eispalast, a booming, dim iron-trussed cavern, the smell of 
women in the blue shadows—perfumes, leathers, fur skat- 
ing-costumes, ice-dust in the air, flashing legs, jutting 
haunches, desire in grippelike flashes, helplessness at the 
end of a crack-the-whip, rocketing through beams of sun- 
light choked with the powdered ice, and a voice in the 
blurred mirror underfoot saying, “Find the one who has 
performed this miracle. He is a saint. Expose him. Expedite 
his canonization. ...” The name is on a list the old man 
presently draws up of about a thousand) tourists who’ve 
been in and out of Helgoland since Byron was found on 
the beach. The priest begins a search tol tain, footpath, 
and Hispano-Suiza, checking out each of the tourists on 
his list. But he gets no farther than Niimberg, where his 
valise, with Byron wrapped inside in an alb, is ripped off — 
by a transsectite, a Lutheran named Mausmacher who 
likes to dress up in Roman regalia. This Mausmacher, not 
content with standing in front of his own mirror making 
papal crosses, thinks it will be a really bizarre kick to go 
out to the Zeppelin field to a Nazi torchlight rally in full 
drag, and walk around blessing people at random. Green 
torches flaring, red swastikas, twinkling brasses and Father 
Mausmacher, checking out tits ’n’ asses, waistlines ’n’ 
baskets, humming a clerical little tune, some Bach riff, 
smiling as he moves through the Sieg Heils and choruses 
of “Die Fahne Hoch.” Unknown to him, Byron slides out 
of the stolen vestments onto the ground. He is then walked 
past by several hundred thousand boots and shoes, and 
not one so much as brushes him, natch. He is scavenged 
next day (the field now deathempty, columned, pale, 
streaked with long mudpuddles, morning clouds length- 
ening behind the gilded swastika and wreath) by a 
poor Jewish ragpicker, and taken on, on into another 15 
years of preservation against chance and against Phoebus. 
He will be screwed into mother (Mutter) after mother, as 
the female threads of German light-bulb sockets are 
known, for some reason that escapes everybody. 

The cartel have already gone over to Contingency Plan 
B, which assumes a seven-year statute of limitations, after 
which Byron will be considered legally burned out. Mean- 
while, the personnel taken off of Byron’s case are busy 
tracking a long-lived bulb that once occupied a socket on 
the porch of an army outpost in the Amazon jungle, 
Beatriz the Bulb, who has just been stolen, mysteriously, 
by an Indian raiding party. 

Through his years of survival, all these various rescues 
of Byron happen as if by accident. Whenever he can, he 
tries to instruct any bulbs nearby in the evil nature of 
Phoebus, and in the need for solidarity against the cartel. - 
He has come to see how Bulb must move beyond its role 
as conveyor of light-energy alone. Phoebus has restricted 
Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequencies, 
above and below the visible band. Bulb can give heat. 
Bulb can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, 
inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping 
eye, and operate among the dreams of men.” Some bulbs 
listened attentively—others thought of ways to fink to 
Phoebus. Some of the older anti-Byronists were able to 
fool with their parameters in systematic ways that would 
show up on the ebonite meters under the Swiss mountain: 
there were even a few self-immolations, hoping to draw 
the hit men down. 

Any talk of Bulb’s transcendence, of course, was clear 
subversion. Phoebus based everything on bulb efficiency— 
the ratio of the usable power coming out, to the power put 
in. The Grid demanded that this ratio stay as small as 
possible. That way they got to sell more juice. On the 
other hand, low efficiency meant longer burning hours, and 
that cut into bulb sales for Phoebus. In the beginning 
Phoebus tried increasing filament resistance, reducing the 
hours of life on the sly and gradually—till the Grid noticed 
a fall-off in revenues, and started screaming. The two 
parties by and by reached an accord on a compromise 
bulb-life figure that would bring in enough money for 
both of them, and to go fifty-fifty on the costs of the anti- 
bulbsnatching campaign. Along with a more subtle attack 
against those criminal souls who forswear bulbs entirely 
and use candles. Phoebus’s long-standing arrangement with 
the Meat Cartel was to restrict the amount of tallow in 
circulation by keeping more fat in meat to be sold regard- 
less of cardiac problems that might arise, and redirecting 
most of what was trimmed off into soap production. Soap 
in those days was a booming concern. Among the con- 
sumers, the Bland Institute had discovered deep feelings 
about shit. Even at that, meat and soap were minor inter- 
locks of Phoebus. More important were items like tungsten. 
Another reason why Phoebus couldn’t cut down bulb life 
too far. Too many tungsten filaments would eat into avail- 
able stockpiles of the metal—China being the major world 
source, this also brought in very delicate questions of 
Eastern policy—and disturb the arrangement between 
General Electric and Krupp about how much tungsten 
carbide would be produced, where and when and what the 
prices would be. The guidelines settled on were $37—$90 a 
pound in Germany, $200-$400 a pound in the U.S. This 
directly governed the production of machine tools, and 
thus all areas of light and heavy industry. When the War 
came, some people thought it unpatriotic of GE to have 
given Germany an edge like that. But nobody with any 
power. Don’t worry. 

Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pat- 
tern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of 
electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the 
streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gath- 
ers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon fila- 
ment was known in Germany), and the grander and 
clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday 
he will know everything, and still be as impotent as be- 
fore. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in 
the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open, 
all messages can be overheard, and there are more than 
enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don’t 
last long—they are either killed outright, or given an 
accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and 
most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been 
visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on 
forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change any- 
thing. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His 
anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will 
find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it.... 

Laszlo Jamf walks away down the canal, where dogs 
are swimming now, dogs in packs, dogs heads bobbing 
down the scummy canals... dogs’ heads, chess knights, 
also may be found invisible in the air over secret airbases, 
in the thickest fogs, conditions of temperature, pressure 
and humidity form Springer-shapes the tuned flyer can 
feel, the radars can see, the helpless passengers can al- 
most glimpse, now and then, out the little window, as 
through sheets of vapor... it is the kind Dog, the Dog no 
man ever conditioned, who is there for us at beginnings 
and ends, and journeys we have to take, helpless, but not 
quite unwilling. ... The pleats in Jamf's suit go weaving | 
away like iris leaves in a backyard wind. The colonel is 
left alone in Happyville. The steel city waits him, the even 
cloud-light raising a white streak down each great build- 
ing, all of them set up as modulations on the perfect grid 
of the streets, each tower cut off at a different height— 
and where is the Comb that will move through this and 
restore the old perfect Cartesian harmony? where are the 
great Shears from the sky that will readjust Happyville? 

There is no need to bring in blood or violence here, But 
the colonel does have his head tilted back now in what 
may truly be surrender: his throat is open to the pain- 
radiance of the Bulb. Paddy McGonigle is the only other 
witness, and he, a one-man power system with dreams of 
his own, wants the colonel out of the way as much as 
anyone. Eddie Pensiero, with the blues flooding his shak- 
ing muscles, the down, mortal blues, is holding his scissors 
in a way barbers aren’t supposed to. The points, shudder- 
ing in the electric cone, are aiming downward. Eddie 
Pensiero’s fist tightens around the steel loops his fingers 
have slid out of, The colonel, with a last tilt of his head, 
exposes his jugular, clearly impatient with the— 

These pine limbs, crackling so blue and watery, don’t seem 

to put out any heat at all, Confiscated weapons and ammo 

lie around half-crated or piled loose inside the C-Company 

perimeter. For days the U.S. Army has been out sweeping 

Thuringia, busting into houses in the middle of the night. 

A certain lycanthropophobia fear of Werewolves occupies 

minds at higher levels. Winter is coming. Soon there won't 

be enough food or coal in Germany. Potato crops toward 

the end of the War, for example, all went to make alcohol 

for the rockets. But there are still small-arms aplenty, and 

ammunition to fit them. Where you cannot feed, you take 

away weapons. Weapons and food have been firmly linked 

in the governmental mind for as long as either has been 

around. . 


On the mountainsides, patches will flash up now and 

then, bright as dittany in July at the Zippo’s ceremonial 

touch. Pfc. Eddie Pensiero, a replacement here in the 

89th Division, also an amphetamine enthusiast, sits hud- 

dling nearly on top of the fite, shivering and watching the 

divisional patch on his arm, which ordinarily resembles a 

cluster of rocket-noses seen out of a dilating asshole, all 

in black and olive-drab, but which now looks like some- 

thing even stranger than that, which Eddie will think of 

in a minute. . 


Shivering is one of Eddie Pensiero’s favorite pastimes. 

Not the kind of shiver normal people get, the goose-on- 

the-grave passover and gone, but shivering that doesn’t 

stop. Very hard to get used to at first. Eddie is a con- 

noisseur of shivers. He is even able, in some strange way, 

to read them, like Siure Bummer reads reefers, like Miklos 

Thanatz reads whip-scars, But the gift isn’t limited just 

to Eddie’s own shivers, oh no, they’rd other people’s 

_ shivers, too! Yeah they come in one by one, they come in 

all together in groups (lately he’s been growing in his 

brain a kind of discriminator circuit, learning how to sep- 

arate them out), Least interesting of these shivers are the 

ones with a perfectly steady frequency, no variation to 

them at all. The next-to-least interesting are the freqency- 

modulated kind, now faster now slower depending on in- 

formation put in at the other end, wherever that might be. 

Then you have the irregular waveforms that change both 

in frequency and in amplitude. They have to be Fourier- 

analyzed into their harmonics, which is a little tougher. 

There is often coding involved, certain subfrequencies, cer- 

tain power-levels—you have to be pretty good to get the 

hang of these. 


“Hey Pensiero.” It is Eddie’s Sergeant, Howard (“Slow”) 

Lerner. “Getcher ass offa dat fire.” 


“Aww, Sarge,” chatters Eddie, “c’mon. I wuz just tryin’ 

ta get wawm.” 


“No ick-skew-siz, Pensiero! One o’ th’ koinels wants his 

hair cut, right now, an’ yer it!” 


“Ahh, youse guys,” mutters Pensiero, crawling over to 

his sleeping bag and looking through his pack for comb 

and scissors. He is the company barber. His haircuts, 

which take hours and often days, are immediately recog- 

nizable throughout the Zone, revealing as they do the 

hhair-by-hair singlemindedness of the “benny” habitué. 


The colonel is sitting, waiting, under an electric bulb. 

The bulb is receiving its power from another enlisted man, 

who sits back in the shadows hand-pedaling the twin 

generator cranks. It is Eddie’s friend Private Paddy 

(“Electro”) McGonigle, an Irish lad from New Jersey, one 

of those million virtuous and adjusted city poor you know 

from the movies—you’ve seen them dancing, singing, 

hanging out the washing on the lines, getting drunk at 

wakes, worrying about their children going bad, I just 

don’t know any more Faather, he’s a good. b’y but he’s 

runnin’ with a crool crowd, on through every wretched 

Hollywood lie down to and including this year’s big hit, 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. With his crank here young 

Paddy is practicing another form of Eddie’s gift, though 

he’s transmitting not receiving. The bulb appears to burn 

steadily, but this is really a succession of electric peaks 

and valleys, passing by at a speed that depends on how 

fast Paddy is cranking. It’s only that the wire inside the 

bulb unbrightens slow enough before the next peak shows 

up that fools us into seeing a steady light. It’s really a 

train of imperceptible light and dark. Usually impercepti- 

ble. The message is never conscious on Paddy’s part. It is 

sent by muscles and skeleton, by that circuit of his body 

which has learned to work as a source of electrical power. 


Right now Eddie Pensiero is shivering and not paying 

much attention to that light bulb. His own message is 

interesting enough. Somebody close by, out in the night, 

is playing a blues on a mouth harp. “Whut’s dat?” Eddie 

wants to know, standing under the white light behind the 

silent colonel in his dress uniform, “hey, McGonigle—you 

hear sump’nP” 


“Yeah,” jeers Paddy from behind the generator, “I hear 

yer dischodge, flyin’ away, wit’ big wings comin’ outa th’ 

ass end, Dat’s whut I hear! Yuk, yuk!” 


“Aw, it’s th’ bunk!” replies Eddie Pensiero, “Y-you don’t 

hear no dischodge, ya big dumbheaded Mick.” 


“Hey, Pensiero, ya know whut a Eye-talian submarine 

sounds like, on dat new sonar? Huh?” 


“Uh... whut?” 


“Pinnnggguinea- -guinea-guinea wopwopwop! Dat’s whet! 

Yuk, yuk, yu KI” 


“Fuck youse,” sez Eddie, and commences combing ths 

colonel’s silver-black hair. 


The moment the comb contacts his head, the colonel 

begins to speak. “Ordinarily, we'd spend no more than 24 

hours on a house-to-house sweep. Sundown to sundown, 

house to house. There’s a quality of black and gold to 

either end of it, that way, silhouettes, shaken skies pure as 

a cyclorama. But these sunsets, out here, I don’t know. 

Do you suppose something has exploded somewhere? 

Really—somewhere in the East? Another Krakatoa? An- 

other name at least that exotic... the colors are so differ- 

ent now. Volcanic ash, or any finely-divided substance, 

- suspended in the atmosphere, can diffract the colors 

strangely. Did you know that, sonP Hard to believe, isn’t 

it? Rather a long taper if you don’t mind, and just short 

of combable on top. Yes, Private, the colo change, and 

how! The question is, are they chan according to 

something? Is the sun’s everyday spectrum being modu- 

lated? Not at random, but ae by this unknown 

debris in the prevailing winds? Is there information for 

us? Deep questions, and disturbing ones. 


“Where are you from, son? I’m from Kenosha, Wiscon- 

sin. My folks have a little farm back there. Snowfields and 

fenceposts all the way to Chicago. The snow covers the 

old cars up on blocks in the yards .. . big white bundles... 

it looks like Graves Registration back there in Wisconsin.” 


“Heh, heh... .” 


“Hey Pensiero,” calls Paddy McGonigle, “ya still hearin’ . 

dat sound?” 


“Yeah uh I tink it’s a mouth-organ,” Pensiero busily 

combing up single hairs, cutting each one a slightly differ- 

ent length, going back again and again to touch up here 

and there...God is who knows their. number. Atropos 

is who severs them to different lengths. So, God under the 

aspect of Atropos, she who cannot be turned, is in posses- 

sion of Eddie Pensiero tonight. 


“I got your mouth organ,” jeers Paddy, “right herel 

Look! A wop clarinet!” 


Each long haircut is a passage. Hair is yet another kind 

of modulated frequency. Assume a state of grace in which 

all hairs were once distributed perfectly even, a time of 

innocence when they fell perfectly straight, all over the 

colonel’s head. Winds of the day, gestures of distraction, 

sweat, itchings, sudden surprises, three-foot falls to the edge 

of sleep, watched skies, remembered shames, all have since 

written on that perfect grating. Passing through it tonight, 

restructuring it, Eddie Pensiero is an agent of History. 

Along with the reworking of the colonel’s head runs the 

shiver-bome blues—long runs in number 2 and 3 hole 

correspond, tonight anyway, to passages in the deep 

reaches of hair, birch trunks in a very humid summer night, 

approaches to a stone house in a wooded park, stags 

paralyzed beside the high flagged walks. ... 


Blues is a matter of lower sidebands—you suck a clear 

note, on pitch, and then bend it lower with the muscles of 

your face. Muscles of your face have been laughing, tight 

with pain, often trying not to betray any emotion, all your 

life. Where you send the pure note is partly a function of 

that. There’s that secular basis for blues, if the spiritual 

angle bothers you.... : 


“I didn’t know where I was,” relates the colonel. “I kept 

climbing downward, along these big sheared chunks of 

concrete. Black reinforcing rod poking out... black rust. 

There were touches of royal purple in the air, not bright 

enough to blur out over their edges, or change the sub- 

stance of the night. They dribbled down, lengthening out, 

one by one—ever seen a chicken fetus, just beginning? oh 

of course not, you're a city boy. There’s a lot to learn, out 

on the farm. Teaches you what a chicken fetus looks like, 

so that if you happen to be climbing around a concrete 

mountain in the dark, and see one, or several, up in the 

sky reproduced in purple, youll know what they look 

like—that’s a heap better than the city, son, there you 

just move from crisis to crisis, each one brand-new, noth- 

ing to couple it back onto. ...” 


Well, there he is, cautiously edging along the enormous 

ruin, his hair at the moment looking very odd—brushed 

forward from one occipital spot, forward and up in great 

long points, forming a black sunflower or sunbonnet 

around his face, in which the prominent feature is the 

colonel’s long, crawling magenta lips. Things grab up for 

him out of crevices among the debris, sort of fast happy 

lunge out and back in, thin pincer arms, nothing personal, 

just thought I'd grab a little night air, ha, hal When they 

miss the colonel—as they always.seem to do—why they 

just zip back in with a gambler’s ho-hum, well, maybe 

next time.... 


Dammit, cut off from my regiment here, gonna be cap- 

tured and cremated by dacoits! Oh Jesus there they are 

now, unthinkable Animals running low in the light from 

the G-5 version of the city, red and yellow turbans, 

scarred dope-fiend faces, faired as the front end of a *37 

Ford, same undirected eyes, same exemption from the 

Karmic Hammer— / 


A ’37 Ford, exempt from the K.H.? C’mon quit fooling, 

They'll all end up in junkyards same as th’ rest! 


Oh, will they, Skippy? Why are there so many on the 

roads, then? ai hy 


W-well gee, uh, Mister Information, th-th’ War, I mean 

there’s no new cars being built right now so we all have to 

keep our Old Reliable in tiptop shape cause there’s not too 

many mechanics left here on the home front, a-and we 

shouldn’t hoard gas, and we should keep that A-sticker 

prominently displayed in the lower right— 


Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your 

senseless and retrograde journeys. Come back, here, to the 

points. Here is where the paths divided. See the man back 

there. He is wearing a white hood. His shoes are brown. 

He has a nice smile, but nobody sees it. Nobody sees it 

because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice 

man. He is the pointsman. He is called that because he 

throws the lever that changes the points. And we go to 

Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or “Der Leid-Stadt,” 

that’s what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem 

about the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. © 

But we will not read it, because we are going to Happy- 

ville. The pointsman has made sure we'll go there, He 

hardly has to work at all. The lever is very smooth, and 

easy to push. Even you could push it, Skippy. If you 

knew where it was. But look what a lot of work he has 

done, with just one little push. He has sent us all the way 

to Happyville, instead of to Pain City, That is because he 

knows just where the points and the lever are. He is the 

only kind of man who puts in very little work and makes 

big things happen, all over the world. He could have sent 

you on the right trip back. there, Skippy. You can have 

your fantasy if you want, you probably don’t deserve any- 

thing better, but Mister Information tonight is in a kind 

mood. He will show you Happyville. He will begin by 

reminding you of the 1937 Ford. Why is that dacoit-faced 

auto still on the roads? You said “the War,” just as you 

rattled over the points onto the wrong track. The War was 

the set of points. Eh? Yesyes, Skippy, the truth is that the 

War is keeping things alive. Things. The Ford is only 

one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, 

rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is 

always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the 

War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now 

it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that 

are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. 

But the right people are dying, just as they do when 

armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the 

middle of the machine-gun pattem. The ones who do not 

have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show 

a moment’s weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones 

the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones sur- 

vive. The others, it’s said, even know they have a short 

life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they 

do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could 

eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to 

be killed in the War. That would be fun, wouldn’t it, 

Skippy? 


Jeepers, it sure would, Mister Information! Wow, I-I 

can’t wait to see Happyvillel 


Happily, he doesn’t have to wait at all. One of the 

dacoits comes leaping with a whistling sound, ecru silk 

cord strung buzzing tight between his fists, eager let’s-get- 

to-it grin, and just at the same moment a pair of arms 

comes up out of a fissure in the ruins, and gathers the 

colonel down to safety just in time. The dacoit falls on his 

ass, and sits there trying to pull the cord apart, muttering 

oh shit, which even dacoits do too. 


“You are under the mountain,” a voice announces. Stony 

cave-acoustics in here. “Please remember from this point 

on to obey all pertinent regulations.” 


His guide is a kind of squat robot, dark gray plastic 

with rolling headlamp eyes. It is shaped something like a 

crab, “That’s Cancer in Latin,” sez the robot; “and in 

Kenosha, too!” It will prove to be addicted to one-liners 

that never quite come off for anyone but it. 


“Here is Muffin-tin Road,” announces the robot, “note 

the smiling faces on all the houses here.” Upstairs win- 

dows are eyes, picket fence is teeth, Nose is the front door. 


“Sa-a-a-y,” asks the colonel, taken by a sudden thought, 


“does it ever snow here in Happyville?” 


“Does what ever snow?” 


“You're evading.” 


“Tm evading-room vino from Visconsin,” sings this boor- 

ish machine, * ‘and you oughta see the nurses run! So what 

else is new, Jackson?” The squat creature is actually chew- 

ing gum, a Laszlo Jamf variation on polyvinyl chloride, 

very malleable, even sending out detachable molecules 

which, through an ingenious Osmo-elektrische Schalter- 

werke, developed by Siemens, is transmitting, in code, a 

damn fair approximation of Beeman's reeiaie flavor to the 

robot crab’s brain. 


“Mister Information always answers spittle 


“For what he’s making, I’'d even question answers. 

Does it ever snow? Of course it snows in 1 Happyville. Lotta 

snowmen’d sure be sore if it didn’t!” 


“T recall, back in Wisconsin, the wind used to blow 

right up the walk, like a visitor who expects to be let in. 

Sweeps the snow up against the front door, leaves it drifted 

there... . Ever get that in Happyville?” 


“Old stuff,” sez the robot. 


“Anybody ever open his front door, while the wind was 

- doing that, eh?” 


“Thousands of times.” 


“Then,” pounces the colonel, “if the door is the house’s 

nose, and the door is open, a-and all of those snowy-white 

crystals are blowing up from Muffin-tin Road in a big 

cloud right into the—” 


“Aagghh!” screams the plastic robot, and scuttles way 

into a narrow alley. The colonel finds himself alone in a 

brown and wine-aged district of the city: sandstone and 

adobe colors sweep away in a progress of walls, rooftops, 

streets, not a tree in sight, and who’s this come strolling 

down the Schokoladestrasse? Why, it’s Laszlo Jamf him- 

self, grown to a prolonged old age, preserved like a °37 

Ford against the World’s ups and downs, which are never 

more than damped-out changes in smile, wide-pearly to 

wistfully gauze, inside Happyville here. Dr. Jamf is wear- 

ing a bow tie of a certain limp grayish lavender, a color 

for long dying afternoons through conservatory windows, 

minor-keyed lieder about days gone by, plaintive pianos, 

pipesmoke in a stuffy parlor, overcast Sunday walks by 

canals... here the two men are, dry-scratched precisely, 

attentively on this afternoon, and the bells across the canal 

are tolling the hour: the men have come from very far 

away, after a journey neither quite remembers, on a mis- 

sion of some kind. But each has been kept ignorant of the 

other’s role.... 


Now it turns out that this light bulb over the colonel’s 

head here is the. same identical Osram light bulb that 

Franz Pékler used to keep next to in his bunk at the under- 

ground rocket works at Nordhausen. Statistically (so Their 

story goes), every n-thousandth light bulb is gonna be 

perfect, all the delta-q’s piling up just right, so we shouldn’t 

be surprised that this one’s still around, burning brightly. 

But the truth is even more stupendous. This bulb is im- 

mortal! It’s been around, in fact, since the twenties, has 

that old-timery point at the tip and is less pear-shaped 

than more contemporary bulbs. Wotta history, this bulb, if 

only it could speak—well, as a matter of fact, it can speak. 

It is dictating the muscular modulations of Paddy Mc- 

Gonigle’s cranking tonight, this is a loop here, with feed- 

back through Paddy to the generator again. Here it is, 

i'm frequently annoyed by british or californian publications talking about michigan like it's being overrun by arabs. it's just not correct.

it might seem that way if you're in dearborn, but that's a few blocks in a diverse city. detroit is still majority black, not arab. and, in fact, this point is pissing a lot of them off, too.

as mentioned, i have a math degree and a history in polling. i'm concerned about the facts.

let's get the facts straight.

so, fwiw, here are some facts about the population demographics in michigan.

whites: ~7 500 000
blacks: ~1 500 000
hispanics: ~600,000
east asians: ~250, 000
arabs: ~250,000
south asians: ~ 150,000
jewish: ~150,000
native americans: ~100 000

east asians are a faster growing population in michigan than arabs and will zoom past them in the next ten years. south asians should overtake the arabs as the fifth largest group in the near future, as well.

languages spoken:

english: 91%
spanish; 3%
arab: 1%
others: ~5%

religious affiliation:

christian: 67%
atheist: 28%
muslim: 2%
jewish: 1%
other, including measurable buddhist and jehovah's witness populations: 2%

in 2024, trump won michigan by about 100,000 votes. this was more than 5x the swing in the muslim community, of around 20,000 votes. yet, arab funded media nonetheless ran the completely false story that trump won because he swung arabs.

there were simply not enough arabs to swing.

he won because he swung whites, and specifically white women.

running arabs is not a smart strategy in michigan, but running white women is, and it's what both parties should do if they want to win.
if you want to run in one or two districts in michigan, being an arab in those districts might be beneficial, but michiganders have had poor outcomes in supporting that.

if you want to run statewide, running on arab issues is definitely going to hurt your chances. severely. by doing that, you are instantly defining yourself as a fringe candidate that only appeals to ~1% of voters and allowing any opponent running against you to define themselves as mainstream and normal, in opposition to your fringe positions.
this arab guy is running a distant third and is only in possible striking distance because the top tier is splitting the vote.

he has no chance.

it will be one of the two white women, and that's good - that's how democrats win in michigan.
haley stevens' primary challenger appears to be mallory mcmorrow:

i haven't been following it, but the frontrunner in the race appears to be haley stevens.

she looks more like a michigan representative, and is more likely to win an election.

donald trump won in michigan because he did extremely well with white voters.

the democrats will need to swing those white voters back in 2028 if they want to win the state back.
further, michigan will never elect an arab representative. it is not a swing demographic. it's about 2% statewide, and condensed in two or three areas (dearborn and hammtramck) and generally has low voter turnout. a large percentage of them cannot read english and have little understanding of the democratic process. further, their politics are extremely right-wing and completely out of step with the liberal mainstream in michigan. the ones that can read and understand what is going on will vote republican because the republicans better represent their social values.

michigan's very jewish representative, elissa slotkin, is a better representative for michiganders as a whole, and what a future michigan representative is most likely to look like. you might also want to get a good look at the governor, gretchen whitmer. this is the future of michigan politics, not right-wing arab men trying to coopt the democratic party. 

they'd have better luck running as republicans, frankly.

further, michiganders have seen what happens when you elect muslims, in hammtramck. michiganders have been forced to defend their civil liberties from attacks by bigoted muslims in office. it's not an abstraction. it's a real concern.

if an arab manages to win the primary, which is so unlikely as to not consider as a serious possbility, the republicans will certainly win the election.

but that's not going to happen.

the democrats win in michigan when they elect moderate women with libertarian streaks, and that is who they will nominate in the next senate race.
young people should aggressively, strenuously avoid any political entity that markets themselves using the term "progressive". what that word means is "dead end capitalist politics with conservative values that reject addressing root causes, or confuse solutions with causes.". at best, these people are utopian morons. at worst, they're orwellian reactionaries.

seek out people that use terms like "socialist" and "anarchist", instead.
“Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your senseless and retrograde journeys. Come back here, to the points. Here is where the paths divided. See the man back there. He is wearing a white hood. His shoes are brown. He has a nice smile, but nobody sees it. Nobody sees it because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice man. He is the pointsman. He is called that because he throws the lever that changes the points. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or "Der Lied-Stadt," that's what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem about the Lied-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. But we will not read it, because WE are going to Happyville. The pointsman has made sure we'll go there. He hardly has to work at all. The lever is very smooth, and easy to push. Even you could push it, Skippy. If you knew where it was. But look what a lot of work he has done, with just one little push. He has sent us all the way to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. That is because he knows just where the points and the lever are. He is the only kind of man who puts in very little work and makes big things happen, all over the world. He could have sent you on the right trip back there, Skippy. You can have YOUR fantasy if you want, you probably don't deserve anything better, but Mister Information tonight is in a kind mood. He will show you Happyville. He will begin by reminding you of the 1937 Ford. Why is that dacoit-faced auto still on the roads? You said "the War," just as you rattled over the points onto the wrong track. The War WAS the set of points. Eh? Yesyes, Skippy, the truth is that the War is keeping things alive. THINGS. The Ford is only one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even KNOW they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War. That would be fun, wouldn't it, Skippy?”
they call themselves "progressives", but this is a contrived term. i don't know what a "progressive" is. that is language that has no meaning.

what i see here is something called a conservative. conservatives are, historically, opposed to war because they reject intervening in other societies (they are "non-interventionist") and because they support what was called splendid isolation in the 19th century. wars are also expensive.

the democrats have, historically, been a conservative party that is non-interventionist, isolationist and fiscally conservative.

as a socialist, i'm opposed to all of this. socialists are in favour of intervention and globalism and think currency is a social construct. we criticize the concept of debt and blame things like inflation on other factors. for example, the inflation germany experienced after world war one was intentional currency manipulation. it was not the result of printing money.

when i see statements like this:

“Voters, especially young people and working families, are exhausted by ‘forever wars’,” said Naveed Shah, an Army veteran and a political director at the progressive veterans advocacy groups Common Defense.

my response is not to identify with this sentiment but to laugh at it. being exhausted by "forever wars" is like being frustrated by having to breathe. it's like complaining about being tired for having to walk. 

socialists believe that war is a necessary component of society that cannot be transcended, so long as we have class and so long as we have inequality. there is no end to war. war is constant. war is permanent.

war is forever.

conservatives have historically believed that you get rid of war by finding tyrants to rule over you, but socialists argue that just creates more war in the form of revolution.

the reason that there is so much war in the middle east is because there is so much inequality there, there is so much poverty and there is a restriction on access to education in certain demographics. the reason there is less war in europe is that it is a relatively equal society with a high standard of living. this really has nothing to do with "colonialism" and socialists would not argue that it does. the people of the middle east are horribly brainwashed by their extremely repressive religion, which prevents them from forming revolutionary movements to take control of their own destiny with.

that's why targeting iran is such an important task from a socialist perspective.

but conservatives don't agree. they just want to submit to a tyrant to force people to behave. and so long as that attitude persists, conservatives/progressives will never transcend from their cycle of violence, which is caused by what they think the solution is.

meanwhile, socialists will continue to scratch their heads and laugh at the conservatives ("progressives"), as they complain about the essence of existence and long for nirvana on earth. utopianism never got anybody anywhere. maybe they ought to just kill themselves.

yeah, no shit.

they have already sent systems. they shot down the f15.

i told them not to piss around.

now, instead of having a new government in iran, we have the old government in iran, except with modern air defenses, and we have to fight them, whether we like it or not. trump has turned certain victory into necessary grinding war.

that's what happens when you negotiate.

that guy seems to have misunderstood what hammer time is supposed to be about.

i'm sorry.

i can't resist.



alf is certainly an example of an illegal alien that ate cats.

keep him away from the hammers.
just don't bring alf into this unless you want to bake him a cat.

did alf ever get to eat a cat? did the writers give him that moment of pleasure before e.t. picked him up?
if this were a norse saga, the young ynglinga would get the entire iranian delegation drunk and then burn the castle down when they fall asleep.
iran appears to be asking to be bombed, at this point.

again: please target the ruling party's infrastructure, not the civilian infrastructure. if you want to accomplish something here, you have to hit the upper class, not the poor.
personally, i think hunter biden v ivanka trump would be a better fight.
the truth is already understood: the canadian government is kidnapping these women and killing them to keep the birth rate down.

nobody will say that because nobody can prove that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_and_Murdered_Indigenous_Women
people outside of canada may not understand that indigenous women in this country have had a tendency to disappear for decades, and it's long been understood - but never been clearly proven - that there is some government body killing them in an intentional act of genocide. there was a government-funded inquiry, but it was little more than a cover-up.

i'm not sure why she connected the two acronyms together. they are not directly related concerns. in fact, the general understanding is that the women are being targeted to prevent them from breeding, so connecting it to the queer community would be missing the point.

but if there's an opportunity to raise awareness about the longstanding very serious genocidal concern of missing and murdered indigenous women in canada, it should be taken. this isn't something historical. this is ongoing. our government is never going to come clean on this without outside pressure.

the place i recently moved to is bordering on this property:


i made a request to bylaw on mar 24th about baiting rats in the backyard, after finding dead rats on the 18th and 23rd. there were firefighters here on the 4th but not the 12th. i mentioned that there was an encampment and the rats were connected to the encampment.

the tenants on this property that are getting evicted (enforcement is april 14th) appear to have been dealing drugs to the encampment, and i'm not sure what role the property owner has in the supply chain at this point. i would describe the ownership situation here as 'weird'. but i'm pretty weird, myself. i have no evidence and don't want to make assumptions but i'm going to assess the issue after the 14th. i've been told there are crackheads upstairs, and they're getting evicted due to starting fires. i can see they're connected to the encampment. i expect the issue to be resolved, but i realize it won't be if the property owner is the drug dealer. i can't prove that but i am not going to stay here much longer if it isn't. 

i made several calls to the sheriff in february and march asking about enforcement and didn't get an answer until april 1st. police showed up at my door for a "wellness check" on mar 30th, for shady reasons. somebody thought i was dead. apparently.

my issue is with the drug use, and with the rats, because they're an issue. this property has a serious rat problem. they seem to be dead, but the clean-up is going to be substantive and it's going to take some effort to get it under control. the encampment was attracting rats and attracting thieves because it was attracting drug users. it's not the drug use itself, it's the lifestyle required to pay for the drugs and the fact that drug addicts tend not to cleanup their shit. leftists tend to be ignorant and stupid on this point  - yes drug users steal shit to pay for their drugs and there is no utility in denying that. denial doesn't fix it.

a hypothetical homeless camp of drug-free people that are vigilant about keeping the space clean wouldn't bother me. that's not what this was. i'm glad they're gone.

if my request to bylaw or my calls to the sheriff helped clear the situation out, great.

hopefully, the situation improves and i can finish cleaning the place up this month.

Friday, April 10, 2026

the democrats need to run a serious candidate in 2028 because there's going to be a lot of shit to clean up.

kamala harris is not a serious candidate, and she's the singular reason they lost in 2024. she won't win a primary. it's a moot point.

they need to run somebody a little older with a lot of foreign policy experience, because whether americans like it or not, the president's singular role is foreign policy, and whoever walks in in 2028 is going to have to have a strong working knowledge of what they're doing.
i want to note some of the language used here. it looks...familiar.

i know who this guy is. he's very right-wing and not somebody i would cite. my argument is that this whole thing is backwards: iran is a fascist state, israel is a liberal democracy (with problems, but nobody is perfect) and the entire spectrum is reversed on this issue. the democrats are the conservatives now, and the republicans are the liberals; the liberals are swinging out to the right of the conservatives, who are not exactly running to the left, but are just letting the liberals cede ground to the ndp. in the united states, this is sort of a correction to historical norms. it's hard for us to understand it, but it's the 1960-2020 period that is actually weird. the democrats are supposed to be right-wing. the republicans are supposed to be liberal.

i don't want to confuse people. i'm a revolutionary socialist and i prefer liberals to conservatives, but the spectrum is broken, and a lot of people are misaligned. a lot of people are disenfranchised. revolutionary socialists believe peace is a naive, stupid thing that reactionary conservatives believe in. class conflict is perpetual. revolution is constant. iran is about the most reactionary, backwards, right-wing regime on the planet, and any socialist that actually reads would be fully in support of regime change in iran. that's the funny thing about the neo-cons - they're all trotskyists. they're all socialists, and they all sound like socialists, until you realize that they're all cynical and vulgar and applying marx to maximize greed. i'm not on their side for that reason. i'm the outsider, the actual socialist, that actually wants the kurds to win in iran. so you will see me break with the neocons quite abruptly. i'm not christopher hitchens, even as i insist that hitch was horribly smeared by both sides, and more than capable of defending himself, even if people decided not to listen near the end.

one of my favourite ironic quips is

i don't have a file, i have a filing cabinet.

variation:
the only target audience i'm reaching is the cia.

i know i have an audience but it's not clear who or what it is.

i've found several threads about me on fourchan, for example. these are creepy people that i wouldn't like much, and a lot of them are probably trump voters, but they seem to like me. they like my writing, mostly. i certainly do a lot of it.

but i'm a musician and i know i have an audience on that level as well, i've just never been able to entirely quantify or pinpoint it.

if you read this site a lot, realize i'm desperately poor. i live on disability. i come from a lower class background and have nothing to inherit. i'm cradle to grave poor, but i'm ok with that. i'm happy with little. what's getting under my skin right now is that i'm struggling to fight off an attack by investors that upended my life. the court rulings have been wrong, but i'm forced to drag people to the supreme court to correct them and the fact is it's not worth my time but i can't pay off the debt in any other way.

if you want to help me stabilize, there are some options on the right hand side of the page. there's a paypal donation link. i accept e-transfers to the email address on the side (the contact link). you could buy my music on bandcamp.

anything you can direct towards me will help get me out of debt, which is all i really need. i'm stable and happy but the debt is impossible, and it's the result of an unfair attack by investors that i was able to survive, but only due to my wits, and some good luck. this baseless and frivolous attack would have destroyed most people in my position, and the court facilitated it, instead of stopping it.

if i can get it to the supreme court, i should win. it's the superior court that's gone apeshit insane. the supreme court still works. most conservatives in canada will make the opposite argument.

but i'd rather focus on my art and i can't until i get this debt wiped out.

if there are any left-leaning liberals growing tired of mark carney and looking to join the ndp or the greens, this weekend would be the right time to do it.

this is a potential ballot issue that could bring people to vote. carney may have opened a pandora's box, here.

why would trump care about the midterms?

he's already passed everything he's going to introduce. he's a lame duck. he avoids congress as an ideological position. he'll veto anything that comes to his desk that he doesn't like.

control of the house in 2027 is of no real consequence or importance to trump's remaining years in office, and i wouldn't imagine that congressional considerations will have any effect on him at all.

so, it would appear as though reports of iran mining the strait of hormuz were correct.

naval mines of this sort are almost completely forbidden under international law. 

iran should be sent the bill for the clean-up operation and be held liable for damages resulting from the blockade.
i would hardly expect the americans to encounter much difficulty in hacking into a data centre in montreal if they want to.

the concept of norad requires data sharing. the americans would be right to view this with extreme suspicion.

i don't think canada needs offensive fighter jets at all. i think we need missiles and drones.

something that distant observers might found counter-intuitive is that the main opposition party in hungary appears to be to the right of orban, not to his left.
one of the things i do here is analyze polls. i have a degree in math, and experience in polling. i have a pretty good track record of avoiding algorithms and developing approaches on an election-by-election basis. elections are unique and always have factors to identify if you want to get a good prediction. standard models and textbook formulas don't work well in predicting elections.

i want to give you a heads up on hungary - the polling is unreliable. the outcome is entirely unclear.

every single government poll has orban ahead. every single "independent" poll is funded by the opposition. an analyst has nothing to work with, here. it looks very much like an iron curtain state.

something polling firms have found in iron curtain states is that even if the polling is clean, the respondents won't be honest with you. a very large percentage of people in these countries remain fearful about anybody calling them and asking them questions, and that works in any and every direction.

you further need to factor in the likelihood of corruption, both by the government and the opposition, which is high.

so, this is currently a toss-up. there is no way to analyze the data i have available to me, other than to label it unreliable. and, despite being an eu member state, i do not have confidence in the elections being free or fair - and that criticism is in both directions.

your guess as to how this turns out is as good as anybody's.
the gulf states have substantive military capacity. they spend a lot of money on defense. they should be embarrassed.
there is no utility in discussing the issue with lebanon, as they have no capacity to hold hezbollah accountable for it's crimes. if there was an international anti-terrorist force in lebanon to fight hezbollah, like there was in afghanistan to fight the taliban, israel might be obligated to let them take charge. but the demands on israel to stop amount to a complete suspension of international law, and it's replacement by some satanic amalgam of christian and islamic law that has no bearing in secular reality and cannot be taken seriously.

israel is going through the motions on this.

it gave lebanon the chance to talk, and it refused, which is consistent - it just proves yet again that lebanon is a failed state that is incapable of controlling terrorism and requires outside intervention to hold the terrorists accountable. israel cannot be expected to do more than this, and lebanon has rejected it.

my position is that these delays to allow trump to explore his delusions are just enabling the iranians to rebuild their air defenses, and it's just going to make the eventual necessary regime change more costly to accomplish in the end.
did the arabs get a little pushy in trying to tell trump what to do?

rumours have long been that the arabs have a history of being bossy with the americans. one wouldn't expect trump to react well to that.

now, i highly doubt that the iranians are going to give trump what he wants, but it's becoming clear that this is what he wants: to shift alliances away from the arabs and towards iran. the incoherence of this position doesn't matter. it's donald trump.

so, the arabs are calling starmer in, like the indigenous groups in canada insist on calling the queen, because that's who they made their agreement with. they feel shafted, and are venting, but it's their own fault.

i have repeatedly pointed out that i'm not a clairvoyant. i don't have a crystal ball. i can't predict the future. i'm a logician and an analyst, and i pay closer attention to empirical facts and less attention to ideology than most. i call it as i see it. and trump wants to be friends with iran and wants to throw the arabs under the bus to do it, but that almost certainly won't happen.

there remains no alternative to regime change in iran.

but trump is increasingly making this process more and more complicated and leaving a knottier and knottier mess for the next president to unravel.
what i'm getting at is that all evidence suggests that the americans actually signed this 10 point list the iranians are publishing, despite their refusal to admit it. why would they do that? it's not because they were going to lose the war. nobody questions that they would succeed at a ground invasion if they tried, but they made it clear shortly after this started that they didn't want regime change at all, they wanted to maintain the existing system, and capture it. he wants a hostile corporate takeover, not a revolution.

could it be that trump actually thinks that the iranian demands are in america's self-interest and more so than anything the arabs or jews are proposing?

the iranian demands are clearly not in the interests of the arab countries, but we know how trump thinks about this, and we know trump tends to agree with right-wing authoritarian states when given the choice. it's entirely plausible that trump would side with iran and tell the arabs to fuck off.

what we've been hearing from trump the last few days is suggestive of the idea that he thinks the iranian demands are beneficial to the united states and he wants a cut and not that he's seeking to maintain imperial position or the status quo in the region. he may consider the idea of closing the bases in the area, or moving them around, to be in america's self-interest, he may actively seek to personally profit from any tolls in the gulf and he may be happy to agree to pay for reconstruction, then hire himself to do it, at american taxpayer expense. 

of course, this is stupid of him. he's going to have to move to russia to pull this off. but he is stupid. we know that.
if you were taking bets on trump actually wanting to remove american bases from the middle east, what would be the odds on it?

the arabs are clearly fucking useless as allies, but people like me having been saying that for decades. that's not a surprise.

i've heard chomsky state a half dozen times that the saudis couldn't find the power switch on the weapons they were sold and would need american forces to operate them. then, what's the point? it's just machinery aging in a warehouse.
so, this is a weird and still developing situation but i would suggest the following right now:

short-term winners: united states
short-time losers: south korea, japan, india
long term losers: iran, china, ukraine, arabs, europe
long term winners: russia, israel, eritrea, djibouti, somaliand, egypt
i've also stated repeatedly that this was the arabs' war to fight, and they would need to fight it to win it, but it's looking relatively clear at this point that they are refusing to fight their own wars. there's a reason starmer is in the gulf instead of somebody like rubio.

the result of them refusing to fight their own wars is that it's looking like trump is going to negotiate away their standing in the region, in exchange for something of benefit to himself. 

that's what happens when you don't take responsibility for yourself.

as mentioned, the situation is still developing, but the arabs are likely going to be a major loser, here. 

trump will dump his losses on them to the extent that he can and they're going to have to eat it.
pacifists always lose.
while the situation is still developing, the united states clearly won the war and the biggest loser is clearly europe, and precisely because it picked pacifism over revolution.
the democrats are still fighting the last war, basically. and so is most of europe. it's at the root of the problem, but it's what happens when you do everything by surprise and can't even be bothered to give enough of a fuck to even try to brainwash people.
asking trump for an "exit strategy" in iran again demonstrates a fundamental level of ignorance as to the nature of the conflict. it's an idea lifted directly from iraq that the democrats are recycling and should not be. it reflects a poor understanding of the situation and makes them look stupid.

there were thousands of us troops in iraq. there are zero us troops in iran.

before you can have an exit strategy, you need to have an entrance strategy, and that is what trump is struggling with - they're trying to get in to iran and don't like the options available to them. the truth is that they have several options, but they won't implement any of them.

this "ceasefire" is consequently not a way out of iran but an attempt to get in to iran. the media is not understanding this. at all.

democrats should be asking trump to clarify what his entrance strategy is. right now, they appear to not really have one, other than to try to get iran to sign things they're never going to sign and essentially let them come in as business partners.

trump does not currently need an exit strategy because he hasn't entered iran. he can really just say "fuck it" and sail off. there's nothing to disengage from.
don't be surprised if trump does actually agree to pay for reconstruction in iran, then hire himself to do it.

they can call it the Iran Board of Peace.

maybe he can even get a hotel built there.

Thursday, April 9, 2026

it's been my own personal experience over the last several years that the rule of law has completely collapsed in canada, and we no longer have real laws, we just have tyrants in robes enforcing christian values on a baffled secular society that is increasingly rejecting the court system as irrelevant, because it won't follow it's own rules, but wants to run the society out of the back of a bronze age mythological text. i can see something similar happening in the united states. i suppose i shouldn't be surprised to see the same collapse in the rule of law occurring in europe, even as rates of atheism and rejection of faith are higher than they've ever been.

everything the europeans have said for weeks is the complete opposite of actual international law, even when they try to claim they're citing it.

actual international law should give iran a multibillion dollar bill to pay and get out of israel's way as it wipes out the group attacking it, but that's not what anybody is enforcing, at all. bigoted right-wing governments are trying to enforce international religion, not international law.
if iran refuses to pay for the damages it created, as it no doubt will, it's assets should be seized and redistributed.

...or, at least, that's how you do this if you actually want to enforce actual laws, rather than just make up laws that don't exist, and imagine how they should be applied, based on some stupid christian moral bullshit.