the next step is for me to clean myself, and i'll need to be taking lengthy overnight showers on a daily basis for the next week or two, while i'm typing during the day.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
i'm choosing to be patient and methodical as i fight for each square inch one at a time. this is the russian theory of rat control, a slow and grinding and unstoppable movement forwards, inch by inch, month by month. resistance is futile.
- figure out where they are
- clean it up. immaculately.
- figure out how they get from where they were to where they are
- block it off using silicon, sprays, glue, chlorine, vinyl, etc
- repeat
eventually, i will get to the dnieper.
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
the grocery run on saturday threw me off a little, and i slept most of the day, but was able to get the rest of the caulking i needed done finished on sunday night (saturday morning) and monday night (tuesday morning), took a long shower on tuesday morning and then slept all day today. i'm awake and ready to type, but a few days behind. that's ok.
something i noticed this morning was a build up of black specs around one of the areas i sealed up, which was apparently something trying to get in there that i think was a spider because i noticed a couple of large black spiders crawling along the baseboards on the other side. i've seen a couple of these, but i can't identify the species. they are never in a web. whatever they are, they are trying to get under the floor and can't, and i'm cleaning up a lot of shit they're leaving behind.
as for the rats, i'm confident that they're out of the laundry. they were leaving territorial markers, but i cleaned it all up and they've stopped. the increased light in the corners, the constant cleaning and lysoling and the placement of bleach around several spaces is working in repelling them, although i think they migrated into the furnace room, which is also dark and concealed. if so, i'll have to deal with that a little later. i am not done cleaning up the ceiling yet (these are roof rats, they're coming from the top down) and will need to buy a step stool to get up and look in there to do it. there's a hole that some pipes disappear into with a nasty draft that seems to be an entry point and that i need to clean out and get some insulation into, which i'm looking to wait until the end of summer to do. i will enjoy the hot air through the draft in the summer, but need to clean the place up. the wall in there us exposed, and rats can climb it, so i'm going to drape over it with some shower curtains left behind by the previous tenant, and may buy a few more. that will make it more difficult for the rats to move downwards, although they could still follow the broad pipes in, unless i can block that off. it's better, and good enough to use the space, so long as i'm constantly cleaning. another annoyance is that the kids upstairs are constantly jumping on the floors, shaking doewn dust and wood chips and dried shit, although i think i got most of that out with the shop vac.
one of my containers of bleach was dragged away. so, that tactic worked, and i'll have to see if it killed anything, in the end. however, the tactic i'm taking is expulsion rather than execution. i'm mostly trying to block entry. i do have glue traps intended to block their movement, but i'm not setting up baits with snap traps, although i bought a few. not yet; not unless i have to. everything, right now, is about bobbytrapping the space, with the expectation that they're smart enough to see the traps, jump upwards 90 degrees in the air, look at each other on the way down and say "i...i'm...getting out of here...", then spin around and run straight out by converting their legs into wheels, somehow. that is correct rattus mechanics, is it not? i think you get the point.
but, if they won't leave? yeah - there's glue traps for them to fall into and piles of bleach staggered around all over the place, including in places they sleep, and if they want to try to drag the bleach out and spill it everywhere all over them, it will probably kill them when they groom. but i'm giving them a choice to run away and find somewhere else to sleep, or to try to drag the bleach out, if they're stubborn. i want them to run, but if they choose to be stubborn, i have to kill them.
i hope they get the son of a bitch, actually.
it would be better to take the nazi out and let syria have an actual civil war. secularism is by far the more popular viewpoint, and the secularists will handily defeat the islamists if given the opportunity.
you will note that this is similar to lebanon and iran, but the opposite of (southern) iraq.
the trump administration is trying to undo the narrative of islamic fascism as america's natural enemy that my generation grew up with and which defines the global outlook of most people under 50, in contrast to the cold war narrative that defines the lives of baby boomers. during the cold war, the bad guy was russia. in the post cold war period, russia is no longer a bad guy; the bad guy is now islam. while i don't really like the cold war narrative, because i'm a leftist, i'm largely in agreement with the war on terrorism narrative...because i'm a leftist. whether the communists were bad guys is a subtle issue, and the correct answer is something like "they weren't really worse than the capitalists, and, when you look at it carefully, they were probably less bad, overall". it's hard to get angry about communism or think they're going to ruin us all with their radical egalitarianism and want to fight them. but the islamists have no reedemable qualities and such a subtle discourse is not applicable. these are much badder bad guys, and it's much easier to hate a religious person than it is to hate a communist. if the communists won, it probably wouldn't be so bad; if the muslims won, it would be backwardsness and hell on earth, in a viciously barbaric legal system that rejects any concept of dissent.
to the trump administration, that appears to be exactly the problem. they don't like this narrative at all. they want more religion, not less religion. it seems to bother them that we're vilifying islamic fascists (or were) and are sending money to communist kurdish groups (or were) to fight off the fascists. this contradicts their basic principles and alienates the groups in the region that they want to align with, like the far right governments in turkey and saudi arabia...and, increasingly, in iran. this administration wants america's allies to be fascist extremists that want to enforce their dark age rules on everybody and america's enemies to be utopian socialists trying to defend themselves. the war on terrorism does not fit the narrative they want, but a war on transgendered people does.
as mentioned, this is mostly irrelevant to me. it's not going to make any difference to me on a day-to-day basis.
but if this embrace of islamic fascism by the highest levels of american government begins to filter downwards, we're all going to suffer dramatically, as they systematically take away all of our rights to make us pliable and obedient.
there seems to be some sort of attempt by some deep state intelligence agency to frame transgendered people as crazed mass murderers, apparently due to the american right's newfound embrace of islamic fascism. we don't have islamist terrorists anymore. now we have crazy trans people.
it's an easier scapegoat, i guess. it makes it easier for america to align it's foreign policy objectives with islamic fascism, and for the mainstream narrative to attack a group that is inherently secular, rather than one that suffers from the mental illness of faith.
i don't really care, frankly. it doesn't change anything of any substance for me, as an individual. i have never cared what religious conservatives thought about me before and i don't really care now. they can continue to go fuck themselves. i will continue to defend myself from attacks by religious extremists. i have never been attacked by a christian, but i'm constantly defending myself from attacks by muslims. that's been a constant, and this doesn't change that.
i'm a little more concerned about shifts in us foreign policy towards an alignment with islamic fascism, and out of an opposition to it. it's these shifts in foreign policy that are going to create more substantive shifts in the global order that are going to put everybody's freedom in jeopardy. my freedom was already in jeopardy, anyways.
the truth is that, in canada, the liberals' decision to try to turn us into a military dictatorship is a gift to the ndp, as it lets them run on transferring military spending to healthcare spending. they couldn't really do that before.
but, it's a measure of the value of a society's quality of life to compare how much they spend on shortening lives v how much they spend on extending them.
if we can spend billions of dollars a year on bombs, i don't want to hear about how there's no money for healthcare or education. that's absolute bullshit - the money is right there in the defense budget.
mark carney thinks he's john maynard keynes, but he looks more like adolf hitler to me.
his attempts to assert "sovereignty" are going to backfire and get us invaded. frankly, if i have to choose between being an arab colony or an american protectorate, i'd rather be an american protectorate.
so, i'll say it again.
i, for one, welcome our new yankee overlords.
Monday, February 16, 2026
without getting into it, the reason it's been cold is that the top of the earth got bombarded with a magnetic storm from the sun that broke up the polar vortex and sent cold air all over the place. there may be multiple causes of the sudden increases in temperature that cause the polar vortex to smash open like it did several times this year, but the way in which the vortex collapsed this year, sending cold air out in every direction, is strongly suggestive of a solar storm being the causal event, this time.
does that mean we're heading into an ice age? no. quite the opposite.
how these magnetic storms affect the earth's weather depends on when and how they hit us. if they hit us in the winter, they break up the vortex and make it colder by pushing cold air down into the lower latitudes. if they hit us in the summer, the increase in temperature will lead to mild to moderate warming outcomes that are more pronounced in the hemisphere that gets nailed, which is usually the north. this has to do with the current tilt in the axial procession, which makes the northern hemisphere more likely to get nailed.
the problem in the narrative in recent decades is that the media, in apparent collusion with competition for funding dollars in scholastic departments, has set the question up as a debate and competition. this is so absurdly capitalist. capital destroys everything; it has this reverse midas touch to it. so, let us go back to hegel and remember that competition just creates false dichotomies in place of the useful synthesis presented by dialectics.
if you want to understand the weather, you need to stop with the petty bickering between the solar scientists and the earth scientists, which generates false dichotomies, and get back to trying to build a proper synthesis of the two sciences. by discounting solar science on it's face, earth scientists have tried to explain things they cannot explain, and created absurd hypothesis, like the idea that sudden stratospheric warming is caused solely by ocean heat somehow breaking the laws of thermodynamics and jumping up into the stratosphere. conversely, solar scientists have tried to discount earth science altogether, in reducing everything to milankovitch cycles.
i assert that both fields are valid and both things are true.
- yes, global warming is caused by greenhouse gasses
- yes, ssws are usually caused by solar flares using well understood physics, and rarely if ever caused by rossby waves somehow breaking physics to warm the stratosphere
- yes, ice ages are caused by milankovitch cycles and often undone by volcanism
- yes, we're at solar maximum in what looks like a weakening solar output, at least for now
- yes, anthropogenic global warming is real.
we don't have the science to conclude we're going into a "grand solar minimum".
and we don't yet know what the resultant outcome will be if lower solar outcome coincides with increased greenhouse gas emission and a milankovitch cycle hurdling us back into a glaciation period.
there is nothing wrong with me pointing out that it might actually be true that if we don't saturate the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses then we might be heading directly into a glaciation, and that more and more carbon emissions might be the only hope we have of preventing that glaciation. but, unless some science is being suppressed, we're not there yet.
right now, the best science we have says that despite the weakening solar output and despite the milankovitch cycles, carbon emissions are going to lead to out of control temperature increases in the upcoming decades even if we do get them under control, immediately.
so, yes, it's been cold and it's been cold because the sun is throwing more radiation at the north pole, which is warming the north pole, and causing the vortex that keeps the cold at the pole to break up and scatter. what neither side of the argument is explaining to you is that, when that happens, it means the cold air collapses. we're not experiencing the north pole freezing over because the sun is weakening, although that could happen, too; we're experiencing the north pole getting nuked by the sun, and blowing the cold air out in all directions. it's cold in siberia and in canada, but it's actually warm at the north pole, itself. that's unusual - most cold snaps caused by ocean currents, to the extent that they weakly are, lead to high or low pressure systems moving heat on the earth around, so that the cold air shifts here or there. that's not what happened this winter. this winter, the pole got very warm, and the cold pushed out everywhere.
that means what happens next is that it gets warmer, not colder, because the nuclear weapon that the sun bombed us with blew up the polar vortex altogether. once that cold air pushes south and dissipates, it's gone.
so, that's the good news: the same solar event that created such a cold winter will result in a warm spring because it superheated all the cold air out of the northern hemisphere. we experienced this as a brutal blast of cold air, but that blast of cold air was a temporary result of an overall warming process and, once it dissipates, we'll get a couple of hot months now, instead.
the system is too complicated to try to predict further than that.
that's right, and this has been obvious for a while.
selling off assets to foreign capital is not sovereignty, nor is this asserting any sort of independence, nor is this going to result in stable economic outcomes. this is short term thinking and selling to the highest bidder under the umbrella of us hegemony.
you don't need much economic education to understand this. just look at the name of the body that we're seeking "investment" from - a sovereign wealth fund. arab countries generally have sovereign wealth funds. norway has one. canada does not.
so, whose sovereignty are we supporting? the answer is the obvious one: the country with the sovereign wealth fund, at the expense of our own.
the concept of canada has a serious issue in front of it that it needs to address if it wants to survive, and that is it's aversion to funding economic development using the bank of canada. why, exactly, do we have a central bank at all, if we can't use it to print money? we used to do that.
i've looked into this a lot because there's a lot of bad arguments on the left about this. the reality is that we used to fund infrastructure projects with the bank of canada but stopped in the early 1970s as an indirect consequence of something called the nixon shock, which occurred when nixon suddenly abandoned the gold standard without warning. since then, canada has borrowed money from private lenders and paid interest on it.
without getting into the economics of it, most of which i think is wrong, the geopolitics of it is that we followed the direction of american hegemony, as a client state. nothing that i know about pierre trudeau suggests to me that he wanted to do that, but he did that. call jean and ask him, while you still can.
if american hegemony is over, we shouldn't have to do that anymore, we should have a place for public funding of infrastructure and public ownership of infrastructure, like we did before the americans forced us to stop. this is one of the most substantive restrictions american hegemony placed on it's clients, and should be the first thing to be jettisoned in a multi-polar world.
that doesn't mean we should turn the bank of canada into a magic check book. it's not one. but, the collapse of american hegemony would mean the imf is no longer policing us, and we can stop paying out trillions to private debt holders.
canada needs to make this change if it wants to survive. selling assets to arab countries that want to colonize us is going to get us invaded by the americans, and if that is what our political class has in the plans to "restore sovereignty", i have no interest in it at all and i welcome our new yankee overlords.
Sunday, February 15, 2026
my broccoli was frozen last night, so i just made some eggs. groceries came in this morning, but my ground bison meat was thawed out by this evening, so i made the quesadillas first.
this is half a leftovers meal, although i also bought some things for it. i thought it was tasty. but it was also not how i intended, and it was pretty filling. i made three and could only eat one.
the bison was a food bank gift that has been in my freezer since the summer. the food available at the food bank was in fact often a little exotic. i guess the bison didn't sell well. bison meat was at one point a staple of people on this continent. this time, i found it was indiscernible from hamburger, and i couldn't have told you it was something different.
this was how i made the quesadillas:
- put the bacon on first. three slices in olive oil.
- put 300 g of ground bison in a larger pan and wait until it's brown. i had a taco mix the superstore was handing out a while back that i used once it was done. i added cumin, oregano, paprika and frank's.
- the bison should cook fast. reduce heat and let simmer.
- just dump the pan of bacon, with grease, in the bison meat and continue to let simmer.
- i am using the last 3 greek pitas from the pizzas
- slice each one in half
- i was intending on putting items on one side of each pita and putting the other side back on before baking, but these quesadillas are too loaded for that
- it may be useful to use a separate pan for each pita you cook
- make a separate bowl of salsa for each pita
- you may of course reuse the bowls
- salsa ingredients: one avocado, one clove of garlic 1/3 red pepper, 1/3 tomato*
*i had three pitas, remember
- for each pita,
- on one side of the pita, put mozzarella cheese all over the pita and cover with the bison/bacon chili mix on the stove
- put salsa on top of chili, and also put salsa on other side of pita
- put cheese over salsa on second side of pita
- put some jalapenos on both sides
- bake
while baking, open a container of sour cream and add chopped chives, dill to the sour cream
after taking out of the oven, put sour cream on quesadillas. eat with fork.
one of the best ways to identify between a real leftist, a socialist, and a fake left progressive/conservative is to determine if they are arguing using data or using appeals to emotions.
conservatives love to blame everything on "human nature". the idea that food is expensive due to greedy ceos is logically equivalent to the reductio ad human nature fallacy that defines practically all small-c conservative argumentation.
socialists, on the other hand, following marxist concepts of historical materialism and "scientific socialism", want everything to have a cause in economics. they will tend to avoid appeals to emotion and present arguments in empirical data and logical deduction.
the idea that things are expensive because ceos are greedy would not sit well with any actual socialist; a socialist would want a naturalistic explanation rooted in economic data, whereas a conservative would seek some failing in moral behaviour as the cause of an undesirable outcome. socialists want to tell you why things are how they are using some appeal to science; conservatives think everything is made good by god and want to blame anything that goes wrong on somebody's impropriety or corruption.
conversely, donald trump's plan to reduce food prices is to increase the supply of oil, and thereby decrease the price of oil.
while this doesn't address the underlying energy crisis, and it will further harm the planet, it has a higher chance of success in reducing inflation than nationalizing food distribution networks, as it gets closer to the problem.
i find this extremely frustrating, even if it's easy enough to understand why this is happening.
i made an attempt to deconstruct this when it came up in new york. is it going to work in toronto? i haven't seen data, but my best guess is that it worked in new york due to the very high immigration level in that city. there's a comparison between toronto and new york, but let's try to understand what that means from a socialist perspective and from a working class perspective, rather than an immigrant perspective.
the ndp's message here is very clear:
- small businesses keep costs down for comparable products
- big businesses make things more expensive for comparable products
why is that? because big business is greedy.
now, maybe that's true, although the data suggests it isn't, but what is the ndp's message here? is promoting small business over big business a socialist message, about the proletariat taking control of the means of production? or is it actually a small-c conservative message about the bourgeois small-business class taking more profit for itself by reducing labour costs?
i can't speak much about green bean supply chains in ontario, but apple supply chains are well known in ontario, and i can make an educated guess that is admittedly a priori about why the apples are more expensive at loblaws, which has to do with transportation costs. the small business is more likely to source locally, from a local apple grower, of which there are many in canada, whereas loblaws is likely to source from large suppliers that bring the apples to a centralized distributor and then transport them around. it follows that the apples are cheaper at the small business because you're not paying unionized workers union wages to buy gas to truck them over larger distances and that may very well be true enough, but loblaws has to stock thousands of stores and feed millions of people and so it requires larger distribution networks that seek to scale up production to economies of scale in ways that cannot currently be sustained strictly by local production.
socialism is not about sourcing local produce. socialism is about superproduction via economies of scale.
not only are the bourgeois class small business owners not paying working class unionized workers to distribute the product, but they are not paying fair wages to farm the product, either. this actually results in a much larger profit margin to the bourgeois small business owners at the end of the day. it is far more profitable, per apple sold, to import mexican slaves to pick enough apples in an orchard down the street to stock a couple of bins than it is to hire unionized workers to run a large scale, country-wide or province-wide distribution network.
the message from the ndp is that the profits of the bourgeoisie are more important than maintaining a union work force, so long as it keeps commodity prices down, in the end; that it's ok to undercut unionized wages by hiring slaves, so long as the result is lower prices. this small-c conservative messaging might elect a few power-hungry ndp mps, but it will only harm workers and only harm socialist organizing in canada. this is exactly the race to the bottom that underpinned nafta and that the last generation of new democrats was explicitly opposed to.
will publicly run grocery stores address any of this? they might succeed in breaking the market by presenting lower prices on the shelf if the store is mandated to do that, but it would have to be at the cost of higher taxes to offset it. a public distribution network would maybe be more efficient if it eliminated the deadweight loss that is generated by competition in supply chains and replaced it with a cartel system, but that waste due to competition is already minimal in this industry, and it would certainly generate higher wages because it would create more union jobs. it would either lead to higher prices to pay the higher wages or it would lead to higher taxes to create the illusion of lower prices.
you'd might as well just hand out gst rebates, instead.
the actual cause of high food prices is a serious problem and it requires a more serious solution than blaming greedy ceos that includes addressing the following:
- we transport too much food. we need to grow more food locally. we need to decentralize food production.
- we use too many oil-based pesticides and fertilizers, which makes the cost of food reliant on the cost of oil
- tariffs on canadian fertilizer that is not oil-based entering the united states will hit canadian consumers in the end, on goods that don't currently have substitutes made in canada (and have low elasticity in demand). eliminating the american farmers from the supply chain may help reduced costs in those scenarios.
these are issues that have to do with how we use energy first and foremost. blaming the issue on greedy ceos is easy but it's ignorant and it also completely undoes marxist theory, which is all about organizing in larger groups to stop small business owners from accumulating profit by exploiting workers. that small business owner selling apples picked by mexican slaves at a higher profit margin, per apple, than loblaws and passing on the savings in labour costs to a small consumer base (probably in an upscale neighbourhood) is a piss-poor argument for a socialist party to make, that's for sure.
if this kind of conservative populism helps the ndp win a few seats, it will be at the expense of socialist organizing and will only help the liberals maintain power. ironically, it's actually the liberals that have the better plan to address the energy crisis that is creating high food prices that is more likely to actually work in getting costs down.
Saturday, February 14, 2026
i have one more can of tomato sauce to use up for pizzas and 3 pitas left over that i'm going to use for a leftover meal of bison meat quesadillas, but i need to order some more groceries first. i'm out of olives for the pizza and don't have key quesadilla ingredients.
i'm going to jump ahead tonight and make another batch of broccoli soup. i have my new blender in and it's a substantively more powerful motor. i think i just put too much in the smaller one and it seized. bought it in 2014, so it lasted a long time, for the $10 i paid. i have two coffee makers (pot and single serve) and will buy another cheap one person blender, too. smoothies are no longer a key part of my diet, they've been replaced by orange juice, but i may revisit that.
this broccoli soup is a work in progress. let me remind myself:
===============
- put the bacon on first. i'm using an entire 375 g pack.
- take a full package of oxo cubes and let it sit in a bowl with water, stirring until it dissolves. this will be intense beef gravy.
- chop up broccoli florets
- chop up an entire bulb of garlic
- chop up 75 g of kale stalks
- chop up thawed or defrosted broccoli stalks and put them in a blender.
- add chopped up citrus peels
- add unflavoured, unsweetened soy milk
- blend a little, just to cut it up a bit
- use a very big frying pan
- start with olive oil margarine
- i'm chopping up kale stalks instead of celery. fry them in the margarine for two minutes, covered.
- add the entire bulb of chopped garlic. another two minutes, covered.
- add the blended mix with a 1/2 box of vegetable or chicken broth (500 ml) and the bowl of dissolved oxo cubes
- add the chopped broccoli florets
- let this come to a boil (uncovered)
- cook it covered on reduced heat for 15 minutes
- cook for another fifteen minutes on increased heat, until it's boiling again
while it's cooking, put the following in a bowl:
- chopped fresh dill
- two avocados (chopped)
- also, grate some cheese (200 g monterrey jack, 200 g mozzarella, 200 g cheddar, 200 g marble)
- chop up some bread (this time, i'm using up the remaining sourdough)
- put the contents of the pan in the bowl
- put the bacon with the grease and oil in the bowl
- add the following:
- frank's
- pepper
- cayenne
- oregano
- cumin
- paprika
- dried dill
- add bread
- add cheese
- microwave or broil to melt cheese (i'm broiling)
when done, add the following on top:
- nutritional yeast
- hemp seeds
- ceasar
- fresh broccoli florets
the last load of laundry from the pile of clothes in the bathroom just finished. i still have some laundry to do, but that's the bulk of it. i just need to finish caulking in the bathroom, and do a bit around the kitchen, and then i can spend the next two-three days in the shower cleaning myself, put on some clean clothes and spend some time typing.
i have four out of nine rooms essentially set up, but this is a weird space. yes, there's nine separate spaces in here, not including the furnace room or water heater closet. four of them are rooms with doors and the other five are distinct enclaves in a continuous space that is shaped sort like an H. there are five segments in an H, two on each of the vertical sections and the horizontal section. the other four rooms behind doors fall off of the H. there's still a lot of work to do, including work to do in each of the four cleaned spaces, but i can put that off for a few more days.
Friday, February 13, 2026
i don't want a pet rat. that's the basic issue.
if i could domesticate the thing well enough to shit in a box, i might even throw it some scraps but i don't want the thing.
i want the rats to run off. i'm trying to chase them off first. i can't have them bringing diseases in here, but i'd rather they just find a different house than have to kill them.
when my iron crashes, i get tired and i get cold. i can sleep for 30 hours at a time, and i'll be under a hot blanket, no matter now warm it is. it helps if it's warm, but it doesn't really matter. i just need sleep and i will be exhausted until i get it. i can put it off but i can't resist it in the end.
it was probably from moving the dresser. let's pick up from there. i did get the dresser moved in, i vacuumed everywhere in the laundry, picking up concrete and dirt and everything else, i mopped and lysoled and sprayed and cleaned it all up quite well, and then i crashed hard on tuesday night and i wasn't able to get the garbage out on wednesday morning after all.
on wednesday afternoon, i did another round of vacuuming and lysolling in the laundry, i vacuumed out the closet with the water heater and lysoled in there and then i pulled the stove and fridge out from the wall and siliconed all around it. i did not find a single egg or dropping behind or around either appliance. nothing.
between large amounts of sleeping, i've also now got essentially all of my laundry done, which is why i moved the dresser in. the laundry was somewhat of a bottleneck in finishing the cleaning, but it's now done. the laundry area is also a large walk-in closet and it should be fine for 10 months of the year in a normal year, and better when i plug the hole up with insulation. there's a large clothes rack for tanks and dresses, a nice wood dresser for shirts and sweaters and a cheap organizer for jeans and towels. there's also a large desk for sewing and any other clothes manipulations i may want to do. i do still have my old dresser in my bedroom, and while i lost two of the drawers to warps from the sulfur dioxide in the last apartment, i still have four of the drawers, for socks and underwear and bras and pajamas. that is beside a small desk for writing and some shelving, which bends over to a row of black tables for laptops, external drives, the ip phone, the alarm clock and my typing pc.
the rats are weird. i pulled everything out from away from the walls, looked under the rug, checked everywhere and i could only find a couple of scattered territorial markings. that's it. oddly, they only poop on the cement floor and will even go around the rug to prevent pooping on it. they will not poop on the rug. are they trained? were these pets? i'm still struggling with this. can wild rats show courtesy to their human cohabitants? can they understand you're feeding them and try to befriend you? rats have recently passed the mirror test, putting them in an elite category of intelligence that includes elephants and dolphins, and not cats or dogs. they've apparently been observed using tools to trigger traps. are they smart enough to be polite? listen, you dirty rat. go shit in the wall, and don't tell me you're here, and i won't go in there to get you. but you come and piss on my rug, and i'll drag you out of here by your fucking ears. got it? i cleaned what i did find, lysoled everything and need to stay on top of it. i need to check every few hours and pick up everything i can find, because anything i do find is intended to mark territory.
the rats are coming from the top down; they're roof rats. they live between floors, in ceilings, in attics. they don't want to be down here, they want to be up higher. but i also cannot keep them out, as they are coming from upstairs. the best thing i can do is constantly clean up after them.
i've been exhausted since wednesday night and have not been doing much besides eating pizza, doing laundry and sleeping, but i'm also feeling better now and should get the rest of the cleaning done pretty quickly now that the laundry is just about out of the bathroom. once i get the bathroom cleaned up, the next step is a very long shower, and then i can get back to the writing.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
trump apparently thinks that the gordie howe bridge is ripping america off because canada is not paying to access america's market. but there are already two international crossings in windsor (an aging tunnel and an aging bridge) and bridges in sarnia and niagara falls. there's also an ancient underground rail line. this is not a new border crossing, it's a replacement for aging infrastructure that has been in place for 100 years.
further, i think he doesn't realize that canada paid for this unilaterally because it's actually the other way around. the united states sees canada as an exporter of raw materials, but canada is actually a net importer of almost everything and the 401 is the single artery that the windsor-quebec corridor, which has something like 70% of canada's population, relies on. almost all canadians import almost everything from detroit.
canada didn't build this bridge because it needed an export route, it built it because it wanted to control how goods are entering canada.
the importance of detroit to canada's economy is difficult to understate. if we ever do get into a war, i would assume that capturing detroit would be canada's single largest strategic objective. i'd rather try to get detroit to join canada willingly, by enthusiastic consent.
do i think it's the end of american hegemony?
no. in truth, i think america is more powerful than it's ever been. it is fighting successfully in several major theatres. even in world war two, it did it one at a time. at no point in america's history could it do what it's doing now. the chinese are a longterm threat, but not right now, and not for a long time.
who does actually think it is the end of american hegemony?
vladimir putin.
i've been cleaning the last few days.
the bedroom is pretty organized and pretty clean and i'm happy about that.
i pulled out the shop vac this afternoon and cleaned up the laundry. i also moved the dresser in. there are minimal signs of anything in there, after i put the bowls of bleach down. in fact, i haven't heard them, either. that suggests they're either gone, dead or....down here.
i'm looking carefully and so far see nothing.
i should be able to get my laundry done and away in the next 24-48 hours, do some work in the bathroom and reclean the kitchen. the next thing is cleaning up the in-unit garage / work space and rearranging the living space but i think that can wait, so long as i'm able to get a good clean done in here.
i want to focus on being done cleaning by this time tomorrow morning, so i can get the garbage out, and get back to the court documents for a bit.
Monday, February 9, 2026
what a fucking retard.
we need to tell him to go fuck himself.
the reason canada built the bridge unilaterally is that michigan wouldn't participate in paying for it because the owner of the ambassador bridge bought the local republican party out.
if trump wants to offer that america pay it's fair share of the $6 billion it cost to build, canada should listen.
Sunday, February 8, 2026
the ndp's leadership dichotomy is curious.
avi lewis is running to be the third lewis to hold a leadership position in this party, as his father and grandfather were leaders of different branches of the party. so, he's the establishment candidate, right?
no. he's the outsider. the establishment candidate is a centrist mp from a conservative riding that presents herself as a conservative because that's how she wins her conservative riding. she is scripted, uncharismatic, careful and dull. lewis, on the other hand, seems to have some good script writers, and sounds like a confident idealistic visionary.
lewis isn't a young person. what are his qualifications, in middle age?
the answer is his name recognition. oh, and he's married to naomi klein. that's it. the latter sounds substantive, but the ndp practically banished naomi klein, who took the fall for thomas mulcair's hard swing to the right in 2015, that let the liberals run to the left of the ndp, which swept the carpet out from under them. lewis isn't just an outsider, he's almost persona non grata. they're only letting him run due to his name recognition in the first place; otherwise, he'd be banned, like yves engler.
there's a lot of other conflicts here that are being touched on but not talked about. organized labour is inherently conservative, and is resisting necessary environmental regulations. it is choosing to avoid short term pain, and not accepting the need of short term losses for long term, strategic gains. lewis is raising money and giving good speeches (is somebody helping him write those?) but he's not taking the base with him. lewis is jewish, and the ndp has a developing anti-semitic bent in it and is trying to position itself in alignment with it.
this is exposing a rift in the party that reflects the organizing structure. the ndp is not like the other major parties in canada in that it doesn't have local branches. the ndp is the ndp - it's the ndp in bc, in alberta, in ontario, in quebec. there are no provincial parties.
the rift is in realizing that avi lewis is raising all of the money but he'll never win a riding while heather macpherson is lagging far behind in fundraising and excitement, but she will probably hold her seat. the rift is in realizing that what the ndp is nationally, which is a party run on lofty ideals, is not the same thing as what the ndp is locally, in ridings it can actually win, which is more often a kind of compassionate or progressive conservatism, that often falls to the right of the liberals and to the left of the conservatives. i would not vote for that centrist ndp, but i don't live where they run; that centrist ndp may want to distance itself from the national party, which is raising funds in areas where it can't really compete.
the ndp should avoid the mess it's about to walk into, which is electing a leader that can't win a seat. this is the quandary. most of the remaining sitting ndps are like heather macpherson - they're broadly centrist mps, with strong conservative streaks. if any one of them were to step down for the leader, as is convention, avi lewis would be unlikely to retain the seat because he lacks the centrist qualities that helped them win. i can't think of anywhere he could run and win. but those centrist qualities don't reflect the party's base, which want an idealist. no single riding has enough voters to get avi lewis into parliament, but there are way more avi lewis supporters scattered around the country than supporters of anybody else. 40% of a small riding is far less than 5% of the whole country, but you have to win a riding to get into the house.
i'm left wondering if avi lewis might have been better off running for the greens.
as it is, i have no suggestions on where avi might want to run, but i'll point out that chrystia freeland's previous riding is better than most.
is canada ready for a public ban on all facial hair?
it's a quarter of the way into the 21st century, and there's no longer any pitiful excuse for this level of piss poor hygiene. it's clear public indecency. it's degenerate. perverted. disgusting. intolerable. further, it masks a level of poor self-esteem. the clear psychological reason that a person would hide behind a mask of facial hair at this late a date in history is that they're embarrassed at having such an ugly face and need to hide it underneath a pile of dirt and filth because they can't let the world see them for what they are. this low self-esteem and poor self-worth is a clear symptom of a substantive mental health issue.
enforcement should be mostly about fines for public disgustingness and gross indecency to start, to send the message that secular western society doesn't accept this and won't tolerate it. access to mental health professionals to help them manage their mental illness and develop a sense of self-worth should be available.
repeat offenders should face jail time for repeatedly offending the public and repeatedly endangering public health.
Friday, February 6, 2026
the tendency of fake left conservatives to go over board on pc censorship and scream about it loudly and cram it down everybody's throats as some kind of fake morality play is the reason donald trump is president. the vast majority of people don't like this kind of censorship and strongly disagree with it.
never underestimate the democrats' ability to steal defeat from the grasps of certain victory.
what i don't understand is this: if canada and australia decide they are both middle powers and want to increase trade with each other, as much carbon as that might waste, and as unrealistic as that may be, what exactly is stoppng the chinese from just blowing up the trade vessels and telling them both to buy from china, in a world without american hegemony?
if you would tell me the answer is "the rule of law", and "the international order", the reality is that that answer is laughable. that really would be the end of history, but in a different way. it would be the erasure of all history from the first world war to the colonial wars to the crusades to the roman civil wars, the punic wars and beyond. further, it is a uniquely orwellian response, as you are replacing concepts of american hegemony with ideas about following the rules. what has defined the world since 1945 is not an overwhelming american military backed up by a menacing nuclear threat, it's just that we all decided to be nice to each other and play by the rules. america's ability to enforce it's dictates at the tip of a nuclear missile is just the "rules based international order". who wrote the rules? and who enforces them?
i'm an anarchist, so maybe i'm more predisposed to these sorts of analysis than others, but who do i argue with about it? enemy ancaps. ancaps, an orwellian sounding term itself (anarcho-capitalists for those that don't argue about anarchism online), are the evil bastards that emanate from hell to destroy anarchist utopias with their property rights. and, what is my most potent rhetorical attack against these enemy ancaps, the argument they can never defeat? it's to remind them that markets are make believe, and you need a state with a monopoly on power to enforce the market, otherwise it collapses into feudalism or organizes into socialism, within about five minutes. the only people on the planet that want market economies are economists. everybody else is fighting for any other system they can come up with.
without american military hegemony, there is no possibility, whatsoever, of a rules-based international free market trading system. that will either get blown up by the chinese, or torn down by canadians, in about five minutes.
if the answer is that canada will protect itself by building it's own navy, and i worry it might be, then we need to brace for that. that means canada is actually arguing that it will replace american hegemony with canadian hegemony, and canada will need a war to accomplish that. a big one, one it will probably lose, like the germans did twice in the last century.
i'm just trying to understand mr carney, first. i'm having difficulty. he doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. he is constantly contradicting himself, and enacting policy that undoes his articulated theory.
but, perhaps the obvious orwellian answer right in front of us is actually the best one.
we do, after all, live in the era of orwell.
Thursday, February 5, 2026
i'm trying to understand mark carney and i'm having a bit of difficulty. let me see if i can get through this.
i'm a polynerd, but my formal education is in mathematics, computer science and constitutional law. i'm an expert in logic, which is why i'm good at arguing with people. i have an array of minors in topics that intersect with logic, like economics and physics....and music.
so, mark carney walks into a bar in davos and declares an end to the new world order, as the term has been used for the last 40 years. in fact, he's been talking like that in canada for a while. some people have suggested it's just political rhetoric, but he wasn't talking to voters in davos.
what carney is declaring an end to is the "rules based international order", and a term defined by opponents to it, like john mearsheimer, called "liberal internationalism". he cited the last president of the iron curtain state czechoslovakia, which no longer exists. while my father was a zappa fan, and i am fairly familiar with the vast discography, and was even a student of zappa's guitar playing, i am neither a rawlsian liberal nor a neo-conservative and would prefer to walk down a more hitchensian path of left-socialism and cite trotsky and orwell. we don't live behind the iron curtain, in eurasia; we live in oceania. the words that leftists use to describe this order are not "liberal internationalism", but american hegemony, and we realize this order started in 1991, not in 1945. it is the pax americana, the american hegemony, that allowed for a rules-based order. such a thing was not in place in the cold war, and could not have existed during the great power competition that defined the post-war era, from 1945-1991.
so, what carney is declaring an end to is american hegemony, the pax americana, and what he is declaring a start to is the old world order of great power competition that defined the cold war, from 1945-1991. he is arguing that canada, as a "middle power", needs to build a new non-aligned movement. it's worth noting that india signed a major trade deal with the eu about ten minutes later and is barely talking to canada, which it correctly sees as toxic.
then, when he gets home, an american car company closes a factory in canada for a product that was nearing end of life obsolescence anyways, and the liberal party unveils a new auto strategy that includes:
- a reversal of an ev mandate.
- incentives to generate foreign investment in the canadian auto industry
so, am i missing something? because i thought the pax americana was over. it was the pax americana that made foreign investment feasible, so long as it was from one american client state to the other. american military might secured the fdi in the american empire. the pentagon mitigated the risk and made it safe for japan or germany to build cars here.
if the pax americana is over, then how do foreign companies write off the risk of investing in canada?
or did that not cross the economist mark carney's mind? or did it, and did he neutralize it as doublethink?
it seems to me that if mark carney really believed that the pax americana was over, and really understood his own words, he would understand that the era of risk-free fdi is also over, and that canada needs to respond by using the bank of canada to build it's own industry, instead.
for him to go to davos and say what he said and then go home and legislate incentives to stimulate fdi in the auto sector suggests to me that something isn't quite clicking, there.
instead of cancelling the ev mandate and calling for fdi, he should be setting up a crown corporation to build evs for the domestic market. that would be the correct way for an economist to respond to the end of pax americana, if he understood it and believed it.
as it is, this won't be successful. canada assembles cars for export. with the lifting of american hegemony, all anybody in europe or asia sees in the premise of investing in canada is a lot of risk, and rightly so.
the olympics are a competitive behavior, and i reject all competitive behaviour as barbaric. on top of that, they're stupid. and the athletes are all gay. if there is anything that is both gay and retarded, and barbaric, it's the olympics.
however, the political class is making a lot of the olympics this year in trying to make it some kind of show of nationalism or something.
for that reason, i am going to explicitly support team ussr this year because i don't give a fuck about this. this is ridiculously stupid.
you vill lose.
Wednesday, February 4, 2026
Tuesday, February 3, 2026
if baking soda hits the rat's insides like a bomb falling on a madrassa in gaza, wouldn't bleach be even better?
is it any less likely that i'm going to get the thing to eat bleach than baking soda?
i don't want to feed it. i've seen the signs; DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS. they get aggressive when you do that, and associate you with food. i'd like to keep all of my toes, thanks. and my nose.
and my eyes.
if i give them baking soda or bleach or plaster and it doesn't work, they'll come back looking for more food. that's the worst outcome possible. i've succeeded in getting them out of this unit, but they remain in the ceiling, and are eating out of upstairs.
but i have a literal window into one of their nests. one of the property managers (the owner employs several) around here just ripped a part of the wall out to get at some plumbing a few weeks ago, and i covered it up temporarily with translucent tape. i can actually see them come in and out of there. i can get into the nest by opening it with an exacto knife and taping it back up.
i've put a few things in there. they drag them out or around.
i have taken an apple sauce container i got at the food bank and loaded it to the top with bleach. there's about a quarter cup of clorox in there.
now, rats are blind (all three of them) and rely on their noses. they follow their noses. so maybe the bleach just chases them out of there. great.
but if they decide they don't want to lose the nest and try to drag the bleach out because it smells awful, they're going to spill it, and it's going to get all over them. all over their fur, all over their skin.
and what will they do then?
they will lick it off. as filthy as rats are, they clean their fur fairly regularly. bingo.
any amount of bleach in their stomach will drop like an iron balloon, and kaboom. but, if they can survive that, it will convert to salt and poison them.
the better outcome is that they just get chased off by the smell, but if they try to move it, and they ingest any in the process, it will hopefully kill them, without feeding them.
*curls fingers*
*pets imaginary cat*
yeah, so let's decrease government spending, and slash discretionary household spending through austerity and mass layoffs, then. that makes sense. because when we go into a recession, we should immediately focus on reducing the deficit.
and, i mean, you can't blame them for writing the budget. it's not like everybody on the planet predicted this, or anythng.
the president is a retard and the prime minister is an economically illiterate fucking idiot.
i've finally got my bedroom more or less set up. i've been putting this off, but it's also become necessary now in order to clean the dust out of here, and seal up some holes. it does feel comfortable and homey in here now for the first time.
i will get some pictures up in the coffee table book. the bedroom is smaller than the upstairs apartment, but about the same size as the last basement, except i don't have a closet in this bedroom, so i moved a small writing or work desk in. when i get back to work on the discography...
actually, maybe we should have this talk right now.
where was i when i left off? it doesn't even matter anymore.
i'm going to put it like this. when i lost my studio in 2011, i was back to work again by mid 2013, although i lost about six months to the need to find a bus pirate. i therefore only lost 2.5 years, tops.
now, in 2026, i have been having difficulty focusing since 2018. some of it is my fault, but most of it isn't. i was in fact working on the writing from 2018 to the early months of 2023, which is when the situation became dire, and i have essentially lost 2023, 2024 and 2025. i cannot lose 2026.
i intentionally started over in 2014 because i had been planning on doing that and it was the only thing that made sense. i am back at that point in 2026, but with a dramatically expanded scope. in 2014, i was just finishing my demos and compositions. in 2026, i now have video, writing, image, http and other components to tie together into a full multimedia concept. my discography is no longer a stack of 200 audio cds, but is now a single external hard drive full of disparate media types integrated with each other.
so, i will need to start at the start, with the childhood journal dated to 1989, and just do it. at this point, there's no other possible approach.
no tylenol tonight. i'm dirty and filthy and disgusting and overdue for a very long shower, but i'm not sick anymore. no puking, no stomach, no diarrhea (i was constipated), but that was still the sickest i've been in quite a while.
i am almost done cleaning up the mattress. i spilled a very large amount of coffee on it. i find that soaking something in dish soap and scrubbing it with cleaning wipes will get most stains out and that then using lysol spray with paper towels until they run clear will get just about anything else out, although i tend to let it dry several times in between.
i should finally get the bedroom roughly in shape, including getting the bed off the floor, and i want to silicon around a few places after that before i get back to the court documents.
Monday, February 2, 2026
it is absurd for the federal government to bring in piles of refugees and then leave it up to charities to house them.
this work should be being done by an expanded public service, with unionized employees, and not by volunteers working for charities.
the federal government is the body that should step in and fund this group and if the federal government will not fund them then they should reduce the flow of refugees, so that they aren't reliant on charities.
you apparently can't buy rat poison in ontario in any kind of useful dose. they come in low dose tablets that require you to feed a rat for a week to kill it. the rat will never eat the same thing for a week if they get sick from it.
there's an old wives tale that baking soda will kill a rat because it can't burp. that sounds absurd, and you'd be right to be skeptical. i went looking around through youtube and there's a large amount of anecdotes, and a little bit of skepticism, but no scientific experiments. you'd certainly have to be an asshole to feed baking soda to a pet or captured rat in a controlled environment to see what happens. it's probably against the law and it should be if it isn't.
but i did find one hillbilly with a southern accent that actually caught himself a rat and fed it baking soda, and the thing did die. if it's legal to do that anywhere, it's legal in alabama. it turns out cletus was the only person on youtube that understood science, except he lacked controls in his experiment. the rat might have had a heart attack from getting captured.
then i thought about it.
the myth is that gas will build up and rupture the stomach because the rat can't burp. that might make sense if you're imagining the vinegar & baking soda volcano you made as a kid.
however, when you drop baking soda into hcl you are mixing a much stronger base with a much stronger acid and it should look less like a volcano and more like an explosion. you're not killing the rat by giving it gas, you're getting the rat to eat a bomb that explodes in it's stomach and, if it doesn't kill it, then poisons it by converting it's stomach acid into salt. the difficulty is in getting the rat to eat a sufficient amount of baking soda at one time, and you're not going to do that by rolling it up in flour. you want the rat to drink enough baking soda to cause an immediate reaction. if you can't get it to eat enough baking soda in one sitting, it won't work. it won't work if they keep coming back to nibble at it.
if that's the case, the same thing should happen if humans eat a bunch of baking soda. humans can burp, sure, but that's irrelevant. it's the explosion that kills you first, and the salt poisoning that kills you second.
one source claims there are about 15 reported cases of this in the medical literature. here is one:
i find this alternate mechanism convincing. i agree that you're not going to kill a rat from indigestion, and the issue of whether the rat can pass the gas via belching or burping is a red herring. baking soda's alkalinity far surpasses anything a rat would eat. it's the violence of a sufficient amount of baking soda hitting the hcl that explodes the stomach, causing rupture, and not a build up of gas from indigestion. and, if that doesn't work, the reaction will convert the hcl into salt, and the rat will be poisoned from the salt.
but how do you get the rat in your wall to actually eat that much baking soda at once?
Sunday, February 1, 2026
there is a market for natural cannabis, pre-legalization, that actually tastes like cannabis and feels like cannabis and excels as a social drug, rather than this medical grade cannabis on the market, which was engineered to replace opiates as a pain reliever, cannot be used socially because it knocks you out and just makes you feel dumb and tired. the manufacturers are not understanding demand, which is not for more and more potent pot.
they're trying to get people addicted. that's the point. it's obvious.
i remember talking to some meth dealers in downtown ottawa years ago. everybody knows they hang out at the rideau centre and that these guys are bad news, and work for gangs, mostly bikers. the cops don't clear them out. i needed some pot. i thought i'd ask.
i found one that was relatively chill and seemed to have some understanding of the supply chain and he told me point blank: the bikers won't sell marijuana, because it's not addictive. the whole point is that you addict your victim, so they keep coming back. pot is one-off. it's useless to them, and the market is too saturated. you can't get repeat customers selling pot, which is what they seek. you don't get the big buys, in the end. nobody is going to sell their car or mortgage their house to fund a marijuana addiction.
but the marijuana industry wants the repeat customers. they want marijuana addicts to act like tobacco addicts, to get hooked, to use regularly and keep buying regularly. so they are pushing the potent strains. you can't buy normal pot anywhere.
one solution to this would actually be to deregulate it so you can bring back the basement grow-ops by hippies paying off their mortgage. the gangs want the hippie's house. the industry wants the hippie's mind.
legalization was implemented catastrophically and the long term health ramifications will be immense. we're not talking about this and should be.
my rdsp grants came in today. look at this:
that is $3490 + 3490*3 (grants) + 11,000 (bonds).
that is $3490 + 3490*3 (grants) + 11,000 (bonds).
if i can get another $5000 in there by the end of the year (roughly), they'll give me another $10500 of grants. i'll get another $1000 of bonds, regardless.
i do not believe i have ever had an asset level close to that in my life. that is more money than i've ever had.
i can't touch it until i'm 59. i need to figure out how to get it to grow a little.
the karen case, which i have been quiet about, should see an order fairly soon. i had to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that the karen called the cops out of spite rather than out of fear, and i think she more or less made my case for me, in her own testimony. i just got out of her way. she seems to have contradicted herself repeatedly in a way that makes it clear she wasn't acting out of fear.
i'm also still trying to reverse costs in the eviction case and trying to grapple with how i can get a broken court system to fix a wrong outcome, when the system was broken with the intent of creating wrong outcomes, and then making it impossible to correct them. i am cognizant that i have to get this to the supreme court to get the correct outcome, and i'm confident that will work, but it's a lot of work, and i'm struggling with justifying that to myself, given that i'm starting over here, and i'm planning on future decisions now with the rdsp cash. i want to move on.
i need to wait for an outcome in the karen case before i can start making decisions about that.
i am not in favour of a large scale attack on iran. i am in favour of limited strikes, in order to help groups on the ground get over critical mass. the purpose of these strikes would be to dismantle the irgc overnight in a single fatal, decisive blow. these time windows are short when they come up and require a quick response. i do not know with clarity if such a thing is in the realm of what america can do or is in truth in my imagination but i strongly suspect that the united states could, in fact, completely wipe out the irgc in about an hour. the americans appear to have missed their current time window.
the americans should avoid drawing too many resources out of ukraine and into a war in iran.
you'd expect something like this in somalia or afghanistan. mexico can do better than this.
i don't want to get overly weberian on you, but the state needs to be able to stop this. otherwise, there isn't a state. anarchists would deal with this by declaring war against and ostracizing the thugs, but this is the kind of social dynamic where anarchism breaks and the theorists start arguing that the society doesn't meet the preconditions and isn't ready. the basic hobbesian social contract is that the state needs to stop this.
the americans are beginning to signal that, if mexico doesn't want to stop this, they're going to finish the war they started, themselves and, on some level, they will be justified in doing that, if the mexican state refuses to exist.
Saturday, January 31, 2026
i want to write a kind of open letter to the american deep state regarding donald trump.
you need to get this guy out of there. he's going to ruin you.
something that's going around the news is an explanation by the defense secretary that if canada doesn't buy those f-35s, norad is going to have to change. well, ok. there's some logic in that. that's a reasonable observation and something to point out to canada.
then, trump attacks our aviation industry and threatens to "decertify" our aircraft, which he couldn't do.
this is utterly retarded. your president is a complete retard. he frequently acts like an hysterical bipolar woman off her meds. he is fucking retarded.
i am not a military officer. i don't work for the canadian armed forces, in any way. however, when your president acts the way he's acting, it opens up legitimate questions in canada. perhaps norad does have to change.
you need to take control of this and get this retard out of there before he does something catastrophic.
today was my first full day since last wednesday. i'm about 70%. it's enough to be sure that i beat the pathogen, although it's not quite done yet.
i bought my new blender. it's a larger blender, and is more appropriate for making soup. i'll have to see if i think i can bring the smaller one back, but it looks like the motor seized. i had some groceries and an rx delivered.
i also got a large pile of silicone to seal the laundry up. the box spring is actually almost totally clean, finally. i've been scraping off the remnant dish soap and coffee with a very watered down lysol solution.
the furnace ducts badly need to be cleaned and i'll probably do it myself with the shop vac.
so, today was the transition day and i'm expecting to actually get something done tomorrow.
hey, the tylenol worked this time.
i got the eustachian tubes cleared a little, but it's mostly the tylenol. eating was actually pretty brutal.
it could be a while before i'm able to get over 50% still but i feel better than i have in a week and i'm going to try to get some things done tonight that are more than watching youtube videos while forcing myself to eat unusually nutritious pizza like things and sarcastically shit posting on my blog.
Friday, January 30, 2026
yeah, i'm largely feeling ok and i am largely even decongested but my left eustachian tube has some kind of dried gunk or snot in them and it's making my head feel like it's going to explode.
i think the only way to deal with this is by increasing the humidity and drinking a lot of water.
i think i'll be ok after i clear my ears out.
i unfortunately have a sinking feeling that, when this is all over and done, donald trump will prove his assholery in cuba and his true legacy of assholery will be best demonstrated by his actions against these people, these neighbours, that don't deserve it.
cuba offers very little to america
let us not pretend that the american navy is unable to protect itself from the cubans.
it's easy to spit on the americans and tell them to leave the fucking cubans alone.
but i think you don't realize how far behind they really are and how absent any other path really is.
you cannot have socialism on one island. they've done the best they can.
but this decision should be theirs and theirs alone and america should wait for them to call, not sanction them or bully them with weapons.
cuba is a society stuck in the mid twentieth century and they have no path forward out of their stagnation. the quality of life is reasonably good but it's at a cost of low efficiency everything, it has an unusually high carbon footprint and it's a matter of time before it rusts over and seizes and ceases to exist. this is not communism, it's a successful demonstration of a society that has thrived in isolation by refusing to adapt to the modern world and has no path forward but eventual and inevitable collapse.
the trudeau-chretien government made a lot of effort to reach out to cuba and was overwhelmingly frustrated by their belligerent responses. chretien is on record somewhere pointing out that canada did everything humanly possible to engage with the cubans, but they simply refused to help themselves.
how will the cubans emerge from isolation and what is the rest of the world to do? surely, we ought not wall them off like a caribbean sentinel island and send anthropologists in to observe them, to learn what it was like to live in the 1960s. we're pretty sure they're anatomically modern humans. the russians will not help them. they have nothing to offer the chinese. they have no future but america.
but i say to those comrades in cuba, those who are pure of heart, and who want to protect the revolucion, that all is not lost. i invite you to dust off your theory, and remember: the revolution must happen in america. come to america's streets. come to america's factories. the superproduction you have no access to in cuba is in truth within grasp in america.
does bombardier have actual factories and make actual products in canada or are they just some big company that mostly operates elsewhere and has a head office in montreal?
i've been wondering that for years.
i have never seen anything in canada, in advertising, in pictures, on tv, on google, at all, that was made by bombardier. they're a ghost. an abstraction.
i have little concrete evidence that they exist at all and have to take it on faith.
“It provides central banks with the space to take difficult decisions that benefit the economy, benefit the citizens of that country, over the medium term.”
that's the theory, but it's bullshit, and we've seen that over the last several years, as the central banks have caused a serious housing crisis in north america and pointlessly slowed down the economy while making no discernible effect on inflation. the central banks have made stupid decisions that have harmed the economy and harmed the citizens of the country over the medium to long term.
the basic point is that monetary theory is wrong. if we had a science of money that we could actually enforce independently of politics, this idea of independent bankers would make sense. however, there is no science of money, and the central bankers are not making better decisions that better affect people. they are in truth more often than not using out of date and demonstrably wrong formulas to make obviously bad choices, based on outdated and obsolete models, and they don't have a better science to use because there just isn't one. we're trained to look at them like scientists, but they're more like high priests asking oracles for direction. we have more than enough information at this point to make it clear that central banks are a dangerous, unstable and unsustainable way to run an economy. the central bankers are not experts in any meaningful sense, they're politicians like the rest of them, and they're making decisions that benefit a class of people insulated from the rule of law and that have legislated themselves above the rule of law, which is called investors, at the express expense of everybody else.
it's not entirely clear that trump should be taken seriously when he has argued for lower interest rates and it may just be the case that his recent hissy fit is entirely to do with not getting his own way.
but the evidence in front of us makes it abundantly clear that the idea that taking this out of the hands of politicians and putting it in hands of technocrats has not had and will not have the intended effect of putting experts in charge of something that politicians might screw up. over the last five years, the central banks have screwed up worse than any politician ever could and, crucially, they were completely insulated from any appropriate consequences when they did completely fuck up, as they clearly did. the data is clear that those rates should have never been raised in the first place. what's missing in the system and needs to be restored to bring back democratic accountability is a mechanism in which voters, taxpayers, workers and citizens can tell the bank "you fucked up, and i lost my house. fix the mistake you made.". otherwise, the future looks like unaccountable and technocratic rule by the high priest of the federal reserve enforcing the religion of monetary policy, and that future looks exceedingly bleak.
if donald trump thinks climate change will allow for mining in greenland, let him be distracted by that.
canada should focus on consolidating this instead:
unlike greenland, this is a region that will see dramatic, usable economic benefits from climate change, as miami and houston sink into the gulf of america.
canadian provinces are usually pretty big. i remarked earlier that we might want to revisit that, but it would be fairly complicated.
minnesotans are nice people, but minnesota doesn't offer much to canada, on it's own.
however, a combined state of minnesota, wisconsin, greater chicago including gary and michigan called something like the province of kitchigummi is a good, workable idea that should be seriously explored.
i suppose it would require something like chicago voting to become a part of wisconsin and gary voting to become a part of michigan, first.
i would not expect this idea to fly in southern illinois, indiana or most of ohio, but parts of pennsylvania and ohio may want to vote to become a part of new york in a separate process, and toledo could conceivably vote to join michigan.
in canada, i think it would be better if the bank of canada chair was a cabinet position.
in the united states, the power should be returned to congress, and the president probably shouldn't be firing fed chairs. however, there should be some way to replace a fed chair, and trump's hissy fit ought to trigger a reform process around selection and oversight of the fed.
i agree that interest rates are too high and would like to see them cut to almost 0.
central bankers throughout the world demonstrated tremendous incompetence in hiking interest rates to adjust to inflation caused by geopolitics in an open global economy and while inflation did come down, it's clear it's not because the rates were hiked. the philips curve was debunked 50 years ago, but economists still use it to set interest rates, because they have no better plan and no idea what they're doing. the idea of independent central banking is largely undemocratic and technocratic, and broadly not something i'm in support of at all. in a democracy, elected representatives should be able to decide how to set rates, or at least to replace decision makers if they are unpopular.
that was one of the most painful mornings in recent memory, but i know exactly what it was about, and i am feeling better, after standing in the bathroom with a running shower for a bit and brushing my hair. it's hard to actually shower in this weather, and any moisture from the shower gets instantly eaten by the fan and the heat. the fan works very well, a little too well, but i don't want to turn it off.
i'm going to try to stay up for a few minutes but i think i have to sleep this off. it's not gone yet. the tylenol doesn't work for this.
i'm jonesing for some of that banana shit. i still remember exactly what it tasted like. my mother was irresponsible and immature, but she wasn't stupid, and she understood the results of her actions, but she wouldn't even consider quitting. instead, she overdid it with the antibiotics. the doctor had to cut me off, iirc.
just when i thought i was over it, the earache hit.
i used to get recurrent earaches like this when i was a young child. the doctors and i both knew it was because my mom smoked in the house, but i'm not sure the earaches were uniquely caused by cigarettes. my mom was a drug addict. i knew she did a lot of heroin when i was older, but she randomly admitted at one point that she used to smoke meth in the house when i was a kid, without prompting, and i actually had no idea until then. i have seen the guy up there smoking outside, and he had what looked like a crack pipe in his hand. i believe he's been in canada for less than four months, and appears to be a muslim of african ancestry.
one way or the other, i'm going to be very annoying when i smell any kind of smoke down here, until i'm able to understand what's going on and react to it.
i used to take banana medication for these earaches. i don't know what it was.
they cleared up completely when i moved in with my dad.
they hurt. i've never had an aneurysm, that i know of, but they affect the whole side of your face. they feel like a blood vessel is throbbing under your eye.
but i know it's an ear infection, and the cause is a combination of the smoke and whatever is making me sick, working together to weaken my immune system.
i won't give it very long before i call my gp and ask for banana medicine.
for example, i spilled some sunflower seeds on the ground about a week and a half ago. i was just clumsy and dropped the spoon. i got as much up as i could, but sunflower seeds are small, and if you drop some, they'll scatter everywhere.
i have been picking them up periodically for days. i just picked another one up.
any sort of vermin would jump on a sunflower seed. rats, mice, roaches, whatever. the fact that i can spill sunflower seeds on the ground and still pick them up a week or two later tells me there's nothing living in my kitchen, thankfully.
i did spend some time sealing the kitchen up as my first priority, because i knew to. there were certainly roach sacs under the fridge, although i have not seen a single one since i moved in. but that might be what the mouse is eating.
so, i'm going to focus on just sealing up the laundry first and going from there.
Thursday, January 29, 2026
i'm more awake now and still concerned about what happened yesterday morning with my pants.
i have still seen no evidence of rodents in my apartment, but i went into the laundry today and noticed a few holes in the ceiling and some pasta, apparently from upstairs, on the floor. i double checked my own pasta and they have yet to get into it, or anything else. while i'm certain these are roof rats, and have had some roof rat droppings fall from the ceiling, i also noticed what appear to be smaller mouse droppings in the laundry, which i have seen before, but have never seen in my apartment. i'm once again convinced that there are both large roof rats between the floors that i'm largely being successful in getting rid of, although they're continuing to do damage, and a house mouse in the laundry in the basement that seems to appreciate me fighting the rats and i have to concede may, despite no evidence of it, be existing partly on minimal food crumbs left in the kitchen, and is getting in and out of the laundry. if the mouse is very small, i might be underestimating it.
i don't know how to make sense of a rodent gnawing through the jeans at my knees without biting me. cats will do something called knead you, which freaked me out the first time my grandmother's cat did it to me, but is a sign of bonding. apparently, rodents will gently bite as a sign of affection, which is again consistent with everything else. but i can't have that. was it trying to move me? was it trying to see if it could eat me by taking a bite first?
as i have seen no trace of rodents outside of the laundry area, i'm going to address this to start by completely sealing off the laundry area, totally, first by plugging up any potential entry with silicon. i'm going to need to order that tonight, as i'm just getting through my fourth container, and i only expected to need a couple. i'm going to buy about ten tonight and have them delivered tomorrow.
for now, i'm almost done cleaning my boxspring and should be able to clean the rest of the bedroom up quickly after that. it doesn't have to be perfect, but it's a mix of coffee and chocolate soy, so i want to get as much out as i can. i don't want to attract bugs.
as for the rats, i have heard them migrate out of my space and into the upstairs and i think they're entirely out of here at this point. i can still hear them in the upstairs bedroom, in the upstairs kitchen and in the staircase to the top floor unit, but it's distant, and they aren't scratching around in the bathroom anymore.
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