the media is talking a lot about the us running out of what are now legacy missiles. it's probably true, but it doesn't matter, as these missiles that are being used in iran are of absolutely zero utility against the missiles that china and russia have been developing, called hypersonic missiles.

i will be as clear as i can.

these missiles are intended to intercept incoming icbms. they would utterly fail against the icbms that russia has today. utterly. completely. they wouldn't hit a single one.

that means that while the united states still has a serious response capacity, it's a sitting duck. as of right now the united states would be unable to defend itself against a russian or chinese first strike. nor would these missiles have any utility if launched against russia or china.

what can the americans still do with these missiles? they can attack inferior military forces like iran. likewise, the russians can't do much with their own legacy missile stockpile besides use it up somewhere like ukraine.

further, the chinese or russians will eventually move newer defense systems into iran. america's time window to strike is short and closing, and then it had might as well dump them into the sea.

that is why this announcement is more important than concerns about us missile shortages:

there are always conspiracy theories when it comes to modern wars. they have varying levels of truth. some of them have no truth at all. the idea that the united states launched this war against iran to use up surplus, legacy and obsolete weapons is likely largely true, and the idea that this is what the russians are actually up to in ukraine is likely also largely true. this justifies the expenditure to congress. in fact, it necessitates it. but the reality is that this is required, even if nobody at the pentagon is publishing essays or op-eds about it.

expect the americans to continue replacing these legacy missiles with modern missile technology as they get used, and not to replace the missiles being used with similarly aged ones.

my critique of the government's covid policy was not a right-libertarian critique, although it often ended up aligning with the right-libertarian position. i never took the position that religious beliefs overrode the science, or that personal freedoms were more valuable than public health. rather, my analysis was the following:

1) the science did not uphold mask mandates for cloth masks. viruses are much smaller than porous cloth. this was well understood and the science was well established - there was no hope of slowing the virus down by ordering people to wear completely ineffective cloth masks. in order to be effective at all, a mask mandate would have to involve the kind of masks surgeons wear, and we had a severe shortage of these masks, which needed to be hoarded for use in hospitals. the mask mandate was not science-based but was in broad terms extremely anti-science. the real reason the government ordered a mask mandate was not to slow down the pandemic but to increase consumer confidence and try to prevent the economy from collapsing.

2) the science did uphold quarantining the elderly in geriatric facilities and strongly advising that those over 55 avoid all human interaction as much as possible, but the government tried to prevent that science-based policy by arguing it would create lonely geriatrics, as though being lonely is worse than being dead. ohhhhhhhhhh, look at alllll the lone-ly peo-ple. dada dada...

3) social distancing was a double-edged sword. if you did this very rigorously, it might help. but, if you did this wrong, you're just helping the virus evolve by creating selective pressures for air borne pathogens, and it's the latter that seems to have happened. 

4) mass vaccination was a dubious approach because the virus was evolving too fast. in the end, mass vaccination failed. in 2026, covid-19 is one of the selection of viruses that make up the disease referred to as the common cold. it's still spreading rampantly. people are getting it and not even noticing. that is what the smart people said was going to happen in the end on day one. there was little to no hope that mass vaccination was ever going to stop the spread of covid, and in the end it certainly didn't. the vulnerable have never had any choice but to adjust their lifestyles, and those still alive are alive because they did. those who were vulnerable that had faith in the government's approach to maintain economic spending ended up dead.

5) the science was abundantly clear that vaccination provided no benefit to the vast majority of people and was in theory only useful to help stop the spread, which it failed to do.

6) it follows that the science really never supported mandatory vaccination, except for (1) healthcare workers, (2) employees at geriatric facilities and (3) people entering geriatric facilities to visit relatives. there was no discernible benefit in forcing vaccination to cross borders, to enter sports or cultural events, etc and it should have never been considered. rather, the government policy should have been to strongly advise that anybody vulnerable to the illness stay at home and just not go to the hockey game or the concert at all, while normal, healthy people should have been encouraged to carry on normally, and avoid economic or social disruption.

broadly speaking, the state made a decision to try to force the young, healthy people to bend over backwards for the old and vulnerable out of holding to an ideological position, and the science never supported anything they tried to force down on normal people for the benefit of the sick. if the science made sense, i probably would have supported much of this, in principle, but the policies were always about the economy and were frequently drafted by ignoring the science to try to help the economy. the policy should have always been the opposite of what they did: they should have tried to minimize economic and social disruption to the majority by letting the virus go, and instead placed immense restrictions on the vulnerable in it's care and made extreme recommendations to those over 55 to avoid any contact with anybody at all. that's what the science actually said.

i always supported upholding science. i was highly critical of the state's policy because it didn't uphold the science. and i often found myself arguing that the libertarian position was more in line with the science than the government's position, because that's what the science actually said - avoid restricting the behaviour of healthy, young people and instead place extremely severe restrictions on face to face access with the old and otherwise vulnerable and make strong recommendations that those 55-75 just try not to go out for any reason at all.

those who were and remain vulnerable and are still alive are still alive because they listened to the science and aggressively minimized all contact with others as much as possible. those who blindly listened to the state and confidently went to the store or the show in their useless cloth masks and with their ineffective vaccines as protection to spend, spend, spend just ended up dead. healthy young people were forced to endure incredible hardships for no benefit to try to enforce that consumer confidence.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-19-response-canada-reflect-inquiry-dean-allison-chief-science-adviser-mona-nemer-9.7300026

small news organizations should re-evaluate their viability. they may find it makes sense to launch modern digital papers because the problem they were facing - competition with large corporations - is no longer real. windsor has some small local news sites.

what happened a few decades ago has been mostly undone. the local papers got bought by the big ones that merged them into their mainline production networks. small papers couldn't compete with that. but, in recent years, the big papers have shut down most of these small papers, even laying off the staff. the staff is ready to go in relaunching in a market that no longer has big papers operating, so the small papers would have no competition at all if they started back up. they should.

some start-up funding by the federal government might help but might not be necessary.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2026/08/08/federal-government-commissions-project-to-track-local-news-deserts-in-canada/

i am feeling a little better but i'm still brutally sick. i've lost about a week and need to get back to cleaning this morning.

the immense threat to global peace posed by a regional military alliance in the middle east is the reason the united states, and the british before them, have spent the last 200+ years creating conflicts between the differing regional actors, and a major reason why a policy of supporting the kurds was drawn up in the first place. an alliance between the saudis and turks puts religious and cultural minorities in the region at extreme risk. the jews are going to need to step in and protect people, and then you have a world war developing, and the kurds end up a central part of it anyways.

trump's utterly anachronistic, out of touch and irrational mccarthyite fear of communism is leading to completely terrible policy decisions. a functioning american hegemon would not have allowed this to happen, but the idiot in the white house seems to be encouraging it.

i have stated myself that coordination between the turks, arabs and pakistanis is the necessary alternative to supporting a kurdish uprising in iran. it's one or the other, and if the turks don't want the kurds, they'd better pony up.

but that's not the same thing as a mutual defence agreement, which is extremely dangerous to global peace.

fuck. 

it would be a lot easier and better to just arm the goddamned kurds. trump is such a fucking piece of shit. let's get this fucking over with.

this looks like an axis of evil, if you ask me. i've been warning for years that the third world war will be fought against a belligerent saudi arabia, lashing out against the world when the oil dries up. pakistan is unstable and extremist, and the turks are a dangerous menace to global freedom. these are three of the most unfree, most authoritarian and most dangerous countries on earth, and having them align poses a serious threat to american hegemony in the region. american strategy should be to divide and conquer.

https://www.trtworld.com/article/034401144329

the most important thing we can do to save canada is not fighting the yankees, it's building climate change infrastructure. florida will sink into the ocean, california will burn down, texas will become uninhabitably hot. the american problem will work itself out. but we can survive if and only if we build the infrastructure to protect us from what's coming, and we'd better get on it immediately.

there's actually a bit of an opportunity here for massive keynesian spending on climate transition rather than war. the americans are tariffing us exactly at the point where we need massive building projects. we need fire fighting infrastructure. we need flood infrastructure. we need seawalls. etc. we can save the economy by using government spending to build climate change infrastructure. i thought  we were going to do that in 2015, with the climate change branch of the bank of canada, but it turned out to be a joke. we're 10, 20, 30 years behind. it's a race against a climate catastrophe every bit as frightening as the nazis building the bomb first.

no. no. no. the media does not understand the reality of where we are in the climate crisis. 

the reality is that even if we had a Magic Button we could press that would stop all emissions tomorrow, we would still be in for 30-50 years of worsening climate change. this is the nature of how emissions build up, there's a lag. the fires we're experiencing today are the effects of emissions from 50 years ago. this is going to get worse for the entire lives of most people currently alive, and there's actually no policy that exists that can reverse it, except schemes to pull carbon out of the air, which are currently science fiction. the climate scientists told us in like 1999 that we were at the end of the road with this.

the ipcc itself doesn't even talk about reducing emissions anymore, it talks almost strictly about mitigation.

yes, we still need to get emissions under control. but, the days where governments could prevent climate change with emission policies ended 20+ years ago. this narrative has no basis in reality. the idea that we can stop this by reducing emissions is now in the realm of magical thinking. no, we cannot.

canada must dramatically increase funding for mitigation immediately, which includes resources for fighting fires and managing forests. the fires, the floods, etc are not preventable. they will happen. we cannot stop them anymore. it's way, way too fucking late for that.

banning us booze was not a rational reaction. if individual canadians want to boycott us booze that's up to them, but pulling it from the shelf does nothing to advance the national interest, it's just foolishly stomping on the elephant's foot. the sectoral tariffs are dependent on tariffs on us and should be tied to reciprocity. the americans have aggressively indicated that they are not going to remove the sectoral tariffs no matter what, so canada really has no choice but to retaliate. the americans are delusional to expect canada not to retaliate on a reciprocal basis; it's the booze tariffs that are irrational and don't accomplish anything except the feeling of standing up to a bully, who is still stealing your lunch money.

however, allowing american dairy into canada that does not meet canadian health and safety regulations would be a catastrophe and a fail and would be so devastating that i would call on the government to splinter and for an immediate vote of non-confidence to be held. that would be an abrogation of canadian sovereignty that would not be acceptable, and canadians should react by dumping american milk into the great lakes.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-u-s-booze-bans-trade-negotiations-9.7299529

i've been sleeping a lot the last few days. i am pretty sick, extremely stuffed up and with a very sore throat, after scrubbing the floors. i got the smell out of here, at least. and the floors are almost entirely cleaned up.

the steam cleaner came in wednesday morning, and i also bought a small amount of additional groceries with the leftover sum and put the shop vac on hold until the trillium comes in this morning or tomorrow morning (it's unpredictable when the pay date is monday, either saturday or friday, usually saturday) so i could get a number of kitchen finishing things, instead. one of the big things i have left to do is find a way to store my pots and pans. i have usually used the bottom of the stove, but this house has issues with pests, so that's not such a good idea. i want to get the items out of there and was looking at ideas like installing shelves or a rack with hooks. i found a good idea on the new amazon haul, namely three adhesive magnetic strips with a series of 18 magnetic hooks attached to the magnetic strips. the magnets are supposed to be rated for 80 pounds, so they should easily hold pots, pans, spatulas, tongs, etc so long as the magnetic strip itself doesn't get yanked from the wall. i'll try to balance it a little. this will get these things out of drawers and open up space in them and make things tidier and more organized altogether. i ended up getting a number of other necessary kitchen items while i was at it, but that's round one and round two is coming soon.

after sleeping wednesday afternoon, i woke up to a phantom doorbell ring and and a nasty ground loop in my video doorbell system. after disassembling the doorbell, i found the short in the mic, which was grounding on the housing. i also uncovered several signs that the system had been tampered with and it was humming because they reassembled it poorly.

over the last few days, i've also tried to keep an eye on the laundry to figure out if it looks like it's being used as an access point and i've seen enough evidence in terms of items being moved around to conclude it probably has. i'm wondering if the purpose of the ghost doorbell rings might be to draw me out, so somebody can drug my food. i feel like i have to seal up the remaining sections of the laundry, including the access to the furnace.

i decided last night that, because i was sick, i should not be attempting to lose weight by not eating for days at a time but should rather make smaller meals and try to hold steady at 139 until i'm feeling better, then let it drop and continue from there. so, i made a tomato sandwich to use up some bacon and will have small amounts of salami melts more frequently until i'm over this. i then essentially slept all day and woke up feeling terrible and have been reading the news for the day.

these frequent distractions are annoying but real life.

i need to get back on track and try to finish what i was doing over the next day or two.

these are very bad numbers for a democratic candidate in michigan, and reflective of the 13% turnout:

EPIC-MRA[296][F]	July 24–31, 2026	600 (LV)	± 4.0%	43%	46%	—	11%
SoCal Strategies (R)[219][A]	July 28–30, 2026	640 (LV)	± 3.8%	41%	42%	—	17%
Mitchell Research & Communications[297]	July 28–29, 2026	672 (LV)	± 3.8%	45%	45%	—	10%
Glengariff Group[298][O]	July 22–24, 2026	600 (LV)	± 4.0%	39%	49%	1%	11%

the first number is for the scruffy homeless-looking abdul el sayed. the second number is for the more presentable looking mike rogers.

michigan has not elected a republican senator since the early 90s. the margin has been narrowing in recent years, but the republicans have not won this state in decades. that makes it a reliable democrat-electing state. in fact, debbie stabenow reliably got over 50% and carl levin often got over 60%.

so why are these numbers so low? why can this guy barely poll at 40% when numbers in the state have recently been reliably 50+ for the democrats?

the first thing to note is that the republicans are actually polling about what they usually do; republican senate candidates usually poll in the mid to high 40s. it's rare for them to poll lower than 45%. this same candidate got 48% in 2024, and lost to elissa slotkin, who is turning out to be a very good senator. he will almost certainly get around 48% again.

what's happened is that large amounts of usually democratic voters are saying "i don't like this guy" by telling pollsters that they're undecided, and it's not because he's left-wing. he's not leftwing at all. like most arabs, he's extremely right-wing and accurately described as a quasi-fascist.

that undecided likely does not mean "undecided between the republicans and democrats". that 10-15% undecided is the actual left of the democratic party, who is uncomfortable with supporting a right-wing democrat and may decide not to vote at all. that's what just happened in the primary - very low turnout allowed the right-wing fringe candidate to win. if that is repeated in the general, the republicans will win in michigan for the first time in over 30 years and this tactic of putting scruffy homeless-looking people on the bill to appeal to a 2% minority will expose itself as foolish.

mr el-sayed's task is that he needs to convince the party's left to vote for him, instead of stay home, while not alienating moderates too deeply. he's not likely to succeed.

if turnout goes down by 10% in the end, the results will look something like:

mike rogers - 53%

sayed - 42%

others - 5%

and that would be the worst outcome for democrats in michigan in decades, by far. it is very likely what is coming.

greta thunberg has been completely brainwashed by islam.

it's actually a helpful case study for the secular left. she happen to be retarded, and less able to protect herself from brainwashing than others, and look what they've done to her. it's absolutely frightening, and a clear warning of the dangers posed by the religious right in co-opting the political left. let her be the poster child for the dangers of islamic brainwashing.

we live in an idiocracy with a judiciary made up of fucking idiots. i've been constantly frustrated by the sheer stupidity of the judges i've had to deal with, their overwhelming incompetence when faced with simple tasks involving analyzing clear evidence, their inability to process simple logic, their inability to follow their own instructions and their frequent levels of deep corruption.

i've already decided that the courts are a waste of time. canadians need to find ways to get to just outcomes outside of the legal system, because the legal system is broken.

today's astonishing order features an adjudicator that didn't understand grade school math, and wanted an expert witness to explain to him how to read a graph. i did not foresee this, but i'm not sure it matters much. i'm an expert witness on grade school math, and i told them that, but an expert witness is only required to explain grade school math to people that failed it. 

i don't think any level of testimony would have helped this guy understand something that he clearly lacked the basic education to understand. little less than sending him back to adult high school to learn basic math would have been helpful. he did not understand how to read the graph and was not going to understand how to read it. but if that's the person who's holding the gavel, what do you do?

there is no longer an appeals process in canada, due to vavilov. bad rulings with errors that might have previously been corrected on appeal are no longer allowed to have appeals to them heard at all. in the absence of a working appeals process, errors of fact and law become established as precedent and repeated in future rulings. the result is the co-option of case law and the perpetuation of nonsense built up on top of itself via stare decisis.

the last time we saw this in western culture was during the dark ages, when volumes of nonsense were written on the back of the ignorance of aristotle. we are falling back into the backwards judeao-muslim-christian ideological frameworks that we emerged from during the enlightenment.

our utterly broken court system has repeatedly astonished me. the point of failure is the incompetent judiciary, installed through insufficiently rigorous hiring processes. too many people get hired because of how they look and when they're screened for qualifications it's to align with a market libertarian ideology that is inconsistent with the crux of canada's settled common law, which is about individual rights. we're seeing the entire legal edifice collapse, and it's being replaced by this horrible catholic civil law that nobody voted for and few people want. but people aren't aware of what's happening, which is a massive quiet counter-revolution in the guts of the legal system.

canadians need to put a focus on electing secular politicians before it's too late, if it isn't already. it's extremely important. we're on the brink of a collapse into totalitarianism, and we've lost the courts without realizing what was happening. fixing the courts will come as a corollary of a move back towards secular governance. 

i was really looking forward to being able to just bike home after the show, or after the bar closes, at 3:00 am or whatever. i was looking forward to the freedom of not having to worry about tunnel bus hours anymore.

if they stick to these extremely restricted hours, trump might end up being right - not many people are going to want to use the bridge between 8:00 and 20:00. what if somebody wants to bike over to the hockey game? i'd imagine that would be the highest traffic use of a pedestrian bridge between detroit and windsor, is canadians going to see the red wings.

they'd have to leave before 16:00 and wouldn't be able to come back until 8:00 am. that would be utterly useless.

the path should be open 24/7, or at least have expanded hours from 4:00 am to 11:00 pm or something. 8-20 or 8-16 is completely useless to anybody expect joggers, and that'll get old in a few weeks.

the path on the bridge is only open from 8:00-20:00 in the summer and from 8:00-16:00 in the winter. so, if i'm going over for a concert that starts at 21:00 or a party that starts at 00:00, i need to cross in the early evening, and the thing i was hoping it would solve - having to find something to do until 8:00 am - is left unresolved. i'll still have to sit in the diner until 7:30 am. 

fuck it.

i'd rather use the tunnel bus. bring the bus with the bike rack back.

i don't understand who in their right mind would think that occupying latvia, which is a russian colony by any understanding of it's history and which has absolutely no value to canada whatsoever, would have greater strategic value to canadian interests than maintaining peacekeeping forces in congo or sudan, where brutal genocidal conflicts involving expanding arabic colonialism are raging and threatening to trigger into a third world war. 

canada should pull it's forces out of europe and put them in africa, not pull it's forces out of africa and put them in europe.

but what's going on here is the continuation of carney's trump wannabe foreign policy, where he criticizes america first for the cameras, but legislates it at every possible opportunity.

putting canadian troops in latvia does not make the world safer or expand canadian interests. however, removing canadian troops from africa makes the world a more dangerous place and harms canadian interests, by generating further push factors for immigration, by further encouraging systemic overpopulation and by increasing the likelihood of the spread of dangerous diseases.

trying to create a debate between whether we have fires because of climate change or mismanagement is politically slimy and erecting a false dichotomy. it's an example of the moral depravity of modern liberalism. the point is that a consequence of climate change - and the fact that we have failed to stop it by continuing to burn carbon - is that we now have an obligation to dramatically increase the amount we are spending on managing the forests, and the governments in ontario and elsewhere have been slashing budgets in a dumb attempt to find "efficiencies" instead. this is a failure in policy that voters should hold them accountable for. trump's position is not coherent, but he's right, and i'd support his proposals.

i'm reminded of the catastrophe in walkerton, where slashes to water management by the provincial government led to outbreaks in disease you expect in third world countries. we rightfully held mike harris accountable for that. we need to hold doug ford accountable for this.

canadians are going to have to get used to the reality that our governments are going to have to spend dramatically higher sums on forest management because we have failed to meet our climate obligations. the actuaries warned us about this - they told us the math was clear, that the consequences would cost dramatically higher sums than the preventive measures. we didn't listen, we just kept burning fuel. we fought against attempt to force us to change. and now we have to pay up and face the music and, if we won't, the rest of the world should impose those costs on us for failing in our responsibilities to ourselves and our neighbours.

a bouncer with a sense of humour might direct him to menjo's as a more appropriate choice for his attire and hygiene.

and, this is the culture in detroit: it's techno. it's a little cyber punk. it's not islam. 

he's going to see low turnout, like he just did.

most of the night cubs i would go to in detroit would not let abdul el-sayed through the door, at least not until he washed his face first. he would be told he looks too scruffy, and basically comes off as a loser.  the bouncers would be concerned he's there to harass the girls.

call it a fluke, call it corruption, call it a failure on his opponent's behalf. but detroit is not new york. detroit isn't 70% immigrants. he's going to have a hard time attracting voters in michigan, outside of two or three core regions that are quite small.

i don't live in michigan, but i certainly wouldn't vote for a neo-populist crypto-fascist like this guy. there's no way. it doesn't mean i'd vote for the republicans. it's the kind of election where i'd vote for a left leaning third party or not at all, because i wouldn't see any benefit in voting for a right-wing democrat.

who was funding all the big money super pacs supporting this guy that popped up out of nowhere at the last minute?

we don't know.

but it seems to be foreign interference from draconian, authoritarian, right-wing arab governments.

we know that it didn't succeed in increasing votes for this candidate, but we don't know yet if the superpacs succeeding in suppressing the vote for the other candidate, or if she just flopped on her own.

the math is easy enough to understand. in any election anywhere, this right-wing progressive fringe is going to get a certain number of votes, and they tend to be true believers, so they tend to get out to vote. something like 6, 7, 8% sounds right. those voters are always there, and they always choose these loonies.

but you expect an electable candidate to get the vote out and just plow over the fringe. they should be able to get 10% of the vote out, even in a low turnout primary. she couldn't do that; she got something more like 5% out.

my analysis still holds, the arab vote in michigan is concentrated in some areas and can result in local representation, but is actually very small overall statewide and really less important than the chinese or indian votes, although this outcome is certainly annoying to me. the guy won with like 8% of the vote because the mainstream candidate had no enthusiasm and swaths of people didn't vote at all. if you can't get the vote out at all, the fringe wins, and that's what happened. but, usually, the result of that is that they then get smashed in the general.

what i'm suspicious about here, however, is the influence of foreign arab governments as that seems to be a growing problem for the democrats, and it's clear that he was the big money candidate. the big money candidate didn't win by getting voters out. did all the money succeed in suppressing the vote, or did the congresswoman just not succeed in building her support? or did something more sinister happen, and votes disappear?

regardless, it seems like stevens couldn't get the vote out enough. even if there was fraud, american elections often have fraud and strong candidates beat fringe candidates anyways. money or not, and fraud or not, the fact that she lost to a fringe candidate indicates she wasn't a strong candidate.

with this matchup, rural michigan is going to vote 99% for the republicans in november and that's probably enough for an easy win. further, this candidate will have difficulty generating a voting coalition in the urban centres of liberal white women and blacks, which he just very convincingly proved. if you can't get urban blacks to vote for you in michigan, the rural whites will win in a landslide.

turnout in the michigan senate primary was reported at around 13%. whatever the reasons were for this, it demonstrates a lack of enthusiasm for the electable democratic candidate, and the result is that the growing right-wing progressive fringe overran the party and the democrats now have a far right crypto fascist practically nazi candidate in michigan of all places that really has no chance at all against the republicans.

my suspicion is that trump's claims of electoral fraud might have some value. primaries often have low turnout, but 13% is a little hard to believe. this guy has a lot of money from foreign states backing him. he was really the monied candidate. it's opening a new and concerning era in american politics, where the democratic party is finding itself at the whim of foreign interference.

this guy is not electable. i would expect to see michigan elect a republican senator for the first time in quite a while.

the only part of the vacuum that seems to be missing is the power adapter. i have the charger. and the vacuum revs up, indicating it works, but it's not charged.

power adapters don't cost much, and i might even one. i tried plugging one from an old modem in and it fits but i don't know if it' enough.

i should be able to figure that out.

on second thought.

i bought that shop vac because i needed it to clean a filthy basement and it was on sale. it wasn't a high quality device. they gave me back cash for it rather than replace it, but now it's no longer on sale.

i want to get a new shop vac. do i want this shop vac? not at this price, not really. it was a steal at half price. it's a rip off at full price.

further, i already cleaned the laundry up. i just don't need the shop vac in the same way that i did, then. that's no longer how i'm going to be cleaning in here regularly. yes, i want a shop vac, but now i want a better one for cleaning up messes, not one on sale for cleaning up piles of rat shit. i can actually get a better shop vac than that one on amazon for two thirds of the price. 

what i need now is a device to clean the dirty floors up with. the lysol and wet wipes worked well, but it took all day, it wasn't very much fun and i seem to have gotten sick from it. i had previously purchased a $30 electric spin scrubber, and it seemed to lift a lot of the dirt off, but it came right back, and that's not enough. i need more than that in here. i find mops to be gross and question how well they work.

so, i used the $55 they gave me back for the exploded shop vac to buy a $130 spinwave corded steam cleaner (regular $199), which is both a steam mop and an electric scrubber and is what i actually need in here. that uses the money i received from the refund to help me do the cleaning i need to do now. i then bought a $60 stanley shop vac with the same power rating as the one that blew, but that is a little bigger, has a longer cord, has more accessories and comes with a few dozen disposable dust filters, which will reduce strain on the motor. this device will behave more like a normal inside vacuum, that i can use to clean up dirt and other debris.

i also need to replace my dustbuster because it was used in the laundry, after having been previously broken. it's been worn right down through simple use. it still works, but not well; it clogs up quickly. it's held together with tape. it has busted through holes in the bottom of it's discoloured plastic. the only part of it that works is the motor; it's not worth fixing, it's done. i'm looking at getting something i can charge via usb, rather than plug in directly like this one.

the floors are clean enough for right now but i want them to be spotless and i want them to stay spotless.

what about the shorted shop vac?

it's a 4.0 hp mastervac with an 18.9 L bucket. it's not their cheapest model, but it's their cheapest more expensive model. after looking at my options, replacing the motor looks like it might be hard. i might be better off looking for a similar model secondhand. i should make sure that there's not a short somewhere else and i can't salvage it, but the light sparks would suggest that the short circuit is pretty certain. i may find myself buying a second hand shop vac for cheap instead, and just letting it break as i clean up the garage. i will need some other option for in there. i'm not breaking either of the vacuums i just bought in there, or a new dustbuster, in there. these are going to last a while.

the other two vacuums i have are a pet lover eureka that i bought when i moved to windsor and may just be clogged but that i've had difficulty opening to clean and decided wasn't worth the time in the previous basement (i'll try again) and a buture vc50 that i found here and that i actually think works but that might need a new charger. either of these would be good general vacuums, but the latter is maybe more likely to actually get fixed. i'm going to have to fix or give up on that pet lover pretty soon. it was a very good general vacuum, but it wouldn't get the floors clean in here the way i need them cleaned.

there we have it.

- the mastervac may be difficult to find parts for, except to buy a similar used one, and i may buy something else to start and look for something used in the long run. it will go in the garage and stay in there. 

- i have a better replacement shop vac coming for less. it will stay inside and be a general inside vacuum to clean debris off the floors. it may not be so good for carpets.

- i have an expensive $250 steam mopper coming at 40% off and the refund, for a total of 57% off, which will clean the floors (tiles mostly and some hardwood) up well and be pulled out for periodic use. it's a great tool to have.

- the versatile electric scrubber i bought for $30 will be better used as a tool to clean in harder to get to areas, baseboards, doors, etc. it's pretty good for what it is, but it's not enough for these floors.

- i have a usb dust buster coming to replace the very used dirt devil, which does have other parts, too. i never really used it as a general vacuum. the parts are still available to use for the next dust buster. i haven't usually had a dust buster but i'm going to in here, after shifting to the shop vac as a general vacuum. a little device in the kitchen is a good idea. 

- i'm pretty sure that i can fix this buture stick vac i found here, which is itself apparently worth $200. i think i just need to charge it. i would use this mostly for the carpets in here.

- i bought the pet lover vac cheap second hand, list price: $350. i'm not sure if i can disassemble it to clean it or if it just doesn't come apart. the device was engineered for dog and cat hair, which was great for me, because i drop a lot of hair. it never clogged. if i can fix it, great. if i can't, i might have to let it go.

i had to make quite a few calls, but they gave me a refund for the shop vac. this is better, for me, because i can use the refund cash to buy most of a new one (i had initially bought it on sale so i got the price i paid back and it won't cover the full price of a new one) and then probably find a new motor for the old one, now. otherwise, i'd have had to give them back the old one and buy a third one at full price. if it costs me another $50 to replace this one and buy a new one, i've got them both working at a sale price for both. and i'd have had to leave the house, putting myself at threat of getting drugged again.

i'm somewhat confused by this. 

i learned in grade school that the correct spellings in canada are british spellings. i consequently tend to use british spellings because that's what i was taught, to the point that my grade school teachers would have actually marked large red xes over american spelling.

i'm not sure if this changed at some point or if the truth is that the vast majority of canadians failed the second grade but got pushed through. i suspect the latter.

https://globalnews.ca/news/12008151/british-spelling-federal-government/

the upside about buying things from big companies is that they often make mistakes. so, some dummy delivery driver left $250 worth of groceries on my front porch and drove off without calling. i'm making it a habit to make complaints about this when it happens because it needs to stop. i have legitimately had $1000 worth of items stolen over the last year; it's all been replaced, but why do they do that? why not just call? it takes a second. you're not gaining $100 worth of productivity by having to replace a $100 delivery, in avoiding the 30 seconds it takes to call. you're throwing away $99 to save $1 on labour. and you're expected to tip these people, too. i'm usually home and waiting, i had just fallen asleep in front of the chromebook waiting for the call, and woke up 40 minutes later to the realization that there was no call, the groceries were just left unattended. if he had called like the instructions said, i would have got the groceries in person. now, these groceries seemed ok. but my position is that leaving the items there without calling is not being productive, it's being lazy, and it's a mistake i should clamp down on. so, i told them i threw the groceries in the trash because they were left on the porch.

i should have done that. in fact, i beat the neighbourhood cat to the booty by seconds flat. it meowed out me, expecting me to share. no ma'am.

if they leave something and it actually gets stolen - this has actually happened several times - i expect them to replace it. if they leave goods like books or cleaning supplies and i get them before the thieves, i'll complain but take the item in. if they leave food outside for the crackheads and animals to molest and expect me to eat it, i might, or i might not, but i don't want to pay for it and shouldn't - i'm getting a refund.

so i have an extra $250 this month. which is good because i need a new vacuum.

i scrubbed the floors down hard last night, just over the part of the apartment i'll actually walk through, to stop myself from tracking this layer of filth around. is some amount of this mildew? it might be. i think i learned scrubbing it down - i used a whole bottle of lysol - that it's likely a complex mix of things. i had recently scrubbed some of these regions, so it's frustrating to have to do it again, but it seems to have taken and the air quality seems to be better, although i did wake up with a sore throat. i also scrubbed most of the dirt off the counters in the kitchen, which is important. there's a small layer of white dust in a few places this morning but it's not like it was. i put a fan in blowing straight into the stairwell to the side entrance, which is under a flight of stairs going up to the top floor, which seems to be where the secondhand smoke is coming from. i think that made a difference, but i'll need to get in there soon to seal holes and clean better. i'll do another dust buster run this morning. this dust buster also needs to be replaced, but it's working well for now. i have two additional broken vacuums to try to fix - my old pet valu which blew a few years ago and some rechargeable thing i found here. i will do this soon, one way or another.

but i'm taking a broad shift in approach. i will get another shop vac - i haven't tested it yet but i'm calling canadian tire now because it's clear the thing shorted and that's a defect that should be replaced - but i will have in unit and in garage vacuums for now on. the laundry has been thoroughly sealed and is totally clean, now. but i'm not moving cleaning devices between the inside space and the garage again, or at least not for a while. i will either fix this device or get something else to use strictly for the garage, and get something to use solely for inside, as well.

if i can get canadian tire to replace this, great. otherwise, i'll likely buy another one of the same model and leave it inside, and try to fix the broken one and leave it in the garage. the pet valu was a very good vacuum, too, with a power head for the couple of carpeted regions in here, and i hope i can fix it as well.

i should then be able to get back to what i was doing, which is

- finish up in the laundry

- do a general clean in the bathroom, kitchen, bedroom

- shower

- cataloging books and cds, and working on the coffee table book, to get it in order for the first three rooms, including a video update for the laundry and a re-read of the things posted here since april 1st.

as i finish in each room (laundry, bathroom, kitchen, side entrance, listening, library, garage, studio, bedroom), i'll need to more thoroughly clean in it. i was intending on doing this anyways.

i won't need to go outside again for any length of time for quite a while. the best thing i think i can do is lock myself in for another winter.

so, i've got some work to do. let's do it. this place'll be done soon, and it'll be glorious when it is. i hope to get back to work soon.

i have orders for two further lawsuits coming soon. my cdb, trillium, gst and odsp went up by inflation in july. and i'm locked into the pohb at $400/month for another year, too. great.

the anti-india bias at the un is connected to india practicing polytheism and tied to a muslim supremacist ideology. it is secondary only to the anti-semitic bias in terms of concerns that need to be addressed in much needed un reforms.

canada should not be attempting to shield or protect far right sikh or muslim terrorists wanted by the indian government in any way at all.

conversely, canada should be working with the indian government to arrest extreme right religious terrorists that are wanted by them, and hand them over to the indians for prosecution in the indian courts.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/un-experts-urge-canada-to-protect-sikh-activist

this is a long weekend in canada, so it's not surprising that the loser stalker is here and smoking, although i can't smell the smoke directly. what i can smell is a strong layer of herbs and incense that is almost certainly being burned to cover the smell of the drugs, which i believe are meth or crack-cocaine. again. 

it's the same pathetic loser doing the same disgusting drugs and it's making me sick in the same way - exhaustion, sore throat and brutal diarrhea. it is having little to no effect on my hormones. they may be intending to alter my hormones, but i can't file evidence if there isn't any because it didn't work. the minimal and easily removable hair growth suggests minimal to fleeting changes in hormones that i may barely pick up at all. this seems to be intentional - they want to change my appearance and they understand their behaviour is prohibited by canadian law so they're trying to avoid detection. it's very tricky, and it just makes me sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist trying to correctly hold them accountable for it. i need to be careful, because the legal industry is full of wretchedly dishonest pieces of shit and the judges are frequently plucked from their ranks, by panels made of their own. but i'm pretty sure they got in here on sunday morning.

they need to just fuck off and go kill themselves. i have no patience, no interest, no tolerance. i just want to shoot them n the face and put their kids in foster homes. i'd support bunker busting them if they were in the rockies, but they live amongst us and are extremely difficult to deal with. we're going to need to rewrite laws and adjust legal approaches to prevent these people from harming us, but they try to operate undetected and they have tremendous amounts of wealth that they use to manipulate the media and attempt to confuse people. they frequently pose as minorities and victims, despite being the single most powerful lobby group on the planet. we have to realize and understand that they're here and comprehend what they're doing before we can address and reverse it and that might very well be the hardest part of this. they're going to target the trans, the queers and the liberal white women, who are going to need to build an alliance to protect themselves from attack.

i mostly lost yesterday after making a bowl of soup on saturday. i cleaned a little and did a bunch of reading about how to fix the vacuum and about how to get rid of the dust. the multimeter is here but i haven't used it yet and want to clean as much as i can without it. the shop vac was mostly for the laundry, which has been cleaned and fixed, and the garage, which is still to go. i shouldn't have been running a dirty shop vac in the apartment anyways. so once it's cleaned and i get a response from canadian tire (i'll call them after i do the mulitmeter testing and have data) i'll figure out what i'm doing to fix or replace that device. for now, i need to clean first without it. the smoke and ash was actually so thick on sunday morning - some time after i had disassembled the vacuum - that i had to throw out a glass of water sitting on the table, which was full of black soot. the fire alarm works, at least. the layer of filth is sitting on everything and is worst in the kitchen and the two entrances and least bad (almost not at all) in the bedroom and laundry, indicating the ceiling blockers are working. i'm going to get as much more up as i can as fast as i can.

what i'm going to do is the following.

(1) it's much cooler here now than it was. i'm going to take advantage of that by making it hot and humid inside and only opening the window a crack. it will be more humid in here than out there and that should push the dirty air out and flush the cold air in. i think it's working, but i need to watch out for loser neighbours smoking pot. 

(2) this will make it worse at first, and in fact i may have noticed it on the ground because the shower pulled it out of the air. the humidity will make the dust heavier and gravity will act as an air filter. but i want to get it out of the air and out of my lungs first and foremost, and out of my smell buds second. the stench of herbs and incense is disgusting, and as bad as the stench of the drugs themselves.

(3) i do have nicer, fruity or citrusy smells to replace these pungent gross hippie/nigger smells with but i want to get as much as i can out of the air first.

(4) once the soot from the gross herbs and drugs and incense (same thing. whatever. yuck.) being burned  is on the ground, or unfortunately on things, including walls, i can vacuum it up with a dust buster and wipe it down with disposable wipes and lysol. then i can try to correct the gross hippie smells with nicer clean smells.

(5) whether i can fix the shop vac or not, i'm going to buy a newer vac for inside and keep it inside. i need to create a separation between the dust and dirt left here, and the new dust and dirt created by the gross tenants, and dust and dirt i create myself, which i can better tolerate and deal with. the burning of drugs, incense and herbs is really not something i can tolerate or should be expected to tolerate, but canada is a failed state that is collapsing into a backwards, conservative society and i'm not going to reverse it by complaining. i need to adjust by protecting myself from the barbarians at the gates as best i can.

for now, i'm looking at getting the humidity up to 60%, letting it fall to 50%, repeat. i'll need to clean in between, until it's done.

america wanted a president with no ideology besides might makes right and it got one. it's not all bad. america should be taking notes on what nihilism means. it's a worthwhile experiment, on some level.

the clearest conclusion we can come to is a blatant explanation of why why don coyote has been married three times and would be looking for #4 if he wasn't on the brink of death.

donald will have has magical thinking. the iranians will submit. he's the dom. except he's not, he's the biggest beta male i've ever seen, and everybody just takes advantage of him and fucks him in the ass, and he asks for more.

yeah, the dust and dirt and ash is thicker in the garage, and a layer of it has settled almost everywhere n here, including areas i wouldn't really vacuum. i'm starting to change my analysis from the ash being caused by the vacuum to the ash breaking the vacuum. and i'm starting to realize it smells like cigarettes. 

it's second hand smoke from upstairs. 

that's utterly disgusting. 

i'll have to just keep cleaning and keep getting that aluminum up. and i hope that canadian tire replaces the vac.

i expected the stalker to come in here when i was sealing up the hole. it's why i did the work outside before i bought groceries. it's possible they tracked their dirty boots in here and it's a part of the problem. it's also possible that some of it is dust from mixing concrete.

but this filth is dark black, it's thick and it's ashy. it looks like it was created from burning something.

i suppose it might have also been partly caused by the wildfires.

whatever the cause, the solution is to get the shop vac in the garage and then to reclean everything. and this needs to be the priority. i guess it will give me the chance to reclean some spaces i recently cleaned and finish setting them up.

i've lost the day unfortunately. 

i noticed last night that my shop vac appears to have developed a short in it and exploded, which is slowing down the cleaning and requiring me to reclean everything. i'm going to try to get it replaced as defective. right now, i have a layer of black ash all over my floors, walls and stuff. 

the motor doesn't look damaged. it may have sucked up some cleaning supplies, but it's a dry/wet vac. i tried to clean it but it looks like it was too late. it was running loud and smelly, then generating smoke, generating bright green light, throttling, dying and then dead. i've never seen a motor act like that, but the idea that it had a short circuit does seem to explain it.

the switch and fuses are totally clean and brand new. there's no obvious blown component, which is why it looks like a short in the motor. it's only a few months old. in fact, the fuse even gave me a mild shock, which i believe is evidence it's working and there's a short in the motor. there must be a burnt out connection somewhere inside the motor.

i have a multimeter on order, which is something i should have but don't. it should prove the fuse is not blown. but if i'm wrong i'll try to swap it out.

i actually think there's enough evidence to decide i should throw out the motor but i'll wait for the multimeter.

my understanding is that the only likely causes of this are factory defect and exposure to chemicals or moisture. i was cleaning up dirt off the crumbling old concrete floor in the garage when it started smoking. the concrete strangely dried dark black, like asphalt. and now there's black filth all over the floor.

if i can fix this i will and then leave it in the garage. i'll get a new device for the inside areas.

i had also bought a floor scrubbing device so i guess it's time to use it. 

i will need to do some further serious cleaning in here before i do anything else.

i'm finishing up in the laundry. i'm going to pause but i'm probably done.

i put cardboard boxes up on the ceiling in the main part of the room with a mix of duct, packing and weatherproofing tape. i used a lot of duct tape, it turns out, because the wall is concrete and the joists are wood. i crammed insulation in the corners where i know the holes are and blocked a number of holes in the walls from the laundry to inside the walls of the house. this completely seals up the main room.

i did not seal anything in the water closet, and i left the corridor into the furnace open, for now.

i did this because i realized there are still smaller rodents running around in there. i didn't see anything and i've heard very little. even the evidence of droppings is very small. but it's enough. i think they're just staying out of there because it's not appealing to them anymore. there's no food. it's bright and clean. i legit kicked them out.

i want to block the entrances i think they're most likely to use but i also understand that cardboard and duct tape is not going to keep a rat out. bright light and no access to food will. so, i want to keep an eye on it further. i don't want them hiding food from the upstairs kitchen downstairs;  my laundry is not their burrow. i don't want them running into the laundry from the upstairs bathroom. i don't want them coming in from the backyard.

i will seal the furnace room itself but i think i want to keep access between the furnace and the laundry open and i want to observe a lit bit more before i seal up the water closet, if i do. 

the laundry should essentially be spotless, now. if it isn't, where is the filth coming from?

i am probably going to avoid the aluminum in the laundry because it'll be better applied elsewhere. i'm probably going to skip the bathroom, too. it's not a good idea to do this in the bathroom. i mean, it is if it's done properly, but if i make any mistake at all it could be a mess. it's not worth the risk of finding a rotting hole in the aluminum in a year or two.

it's a better idea to put the aluminum up in the kitchen.

so, i'm gong to need to finish up in there, do a secondary general clean, take another shower and then move back into the bedroom to focus on doing the cataloging and the coffee table book for a few days, before getting back to room 3 again, the kitchen. i'll post a video update for the laundry as well.

the big kitchen  update  is still to come and is the next big thing to do.

there will be people that will try to justify the attack by hamas, or question the reporting around it. there are people that deny the holocaust. 

you should let them explain themselves, understand their words and never speak to them ever again.

the legitimate purpose of the fully justified military operation launched by israel after the barbaric terrorist attack by hamas was to permanently remove hamas from power. virtually any response by israel would have been justified. the complete annihilation of gaza was not even yet a proportionate response to a massacre that far outside of the boundaries of civilization. 

hamas had to be removed from the planet in response. anything less would have been insufficient.

the removal of hamas from power is the definition of victory. the rest of it is mostly trivial. 

israel suspended the rule of law in response to these attacks, and it was justified in doing so, but this must come to an end. normal governance must return to israel asap.

it's over.

it's the best outcome possible.

the question as to what sources of light in the sky are valuable and what are pollution is turned on it's head by the fallacy of naturalism. the light that comes to us from stars is in many cases billions or trillions of years old. it provides us with absolutely no useful information about the current existence of the universe, as those stars are long dead, and whatever exists in the space those stars were once in has no connection to what is there now, in whatever dubious way you're defining space at all. you could never go to those stars. the light they throw into our atmosphere has no utility to anyone or anything and should in truth be rightfully thought of as pollution; if we could clean all the starlight out of the sky, it would allow us to see our direct neighbourhood more clearly. all that the light from these long dead galaxies is really doing is blocking the closest planets out.

but it's not like the mirror eats the light or something. it's not a black hole. that light is still there. you can put a telescope on the moon, or in orbit, you just can't look into the sky from your bedroom. but that's an utterly middle class concern. who gives a fuck.

i might take a position that astronomy isn't going to be very valuable to humans in the near future, until we colonize the area around us. we should be focusing on blocking out the distant past from the night sky and honing in on the areas directly around us, for now. there's not much that we can learn right now, and we have enough data to sort through to last us for centuries anyways.

the applications of the mirrors are more valuable than bourgeois concerns about light pollution, which are in truth backwards anyways. the stars are the ones polluting the sky; let's clean it up by getting rid of the stars.

i'm overwhelmingly in favour of this as it has tremendous potential applications. i don't know where this anti-science streak in society came from all of a sudden, but stupid hippie bullshit should never be listened to, ever. naturalism is exposing itself as the single greatest threat to human progress in our midst. these people that are opposed to ai, to automation, to technology, etc are opposed to human progress. they must be educated and defeated.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/reflect-orbital-approval-fcc-9.7287535

cancelling oil exports - or mineral exports - to the united states would eliminate a tremendous amount of wealth in canada. making ourselves poorer seems like a dumb way to stick it to the man.

it's a better environmental argument to leave it n the ground, and arguably worth supporting on that basis, than it is an economic argument to shoot ourselves in the face. it is abundantly clear that it will not change american behaviour, it will just destroy wealth in canada.

it makes more sense to try to recover losses by levying export taxes on americans. retaliatory import taxes and export blocking are both dumb tactics.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-trump-oil-tariffs-negotiations-9.7289518

i have spent a fair amount of time with this and the topic has two notable points of scientific interest, namely (1) it's the only thing you can quote (stephen) jay gould on directly without being pretentious (but don't do it too much) and (2) it's one of a small number of legitimate contributions to science made by richard dawkins, even if he often heavily cites eo wilson. there is something called the dawkins-gould debate about punctuated equilibrium or gradualism, about the nature of natural selection, defining debates about how to interpret the fossil record.

my hegelian synthesis (this argument is really a false dichotomy. gould was a gradualist, too. his supporters misrepresented him.) argues that the error is really in the cladistics model rather than a debate over evolutionary theory. due to linnaeus, and ultimately due to aristotle, who attributed a crude evolutionary theory to the "chaldeans", we've been using the wrong mathematical model to imagine evolution for centuries and centuries. we use something called directed graphs to model evolution - trees. we refer to the tree of life. this is inherently hierarchical and intuitively erects theocratic conclusions that aren't actually supported by the data. in the dna era, the solution to the underlying gould-dawkins debate has increasingly been identified as hybridization, which the models previously rejected as theocratically deviant, but which more and more data has increasingly identified as repeatedly arising naturally in areas where ecological niches overlap. contemporary environmentalists may be surprised to learn that polar bears are on a path towards genetic introgression back into the grizzly population and that it's being increasingly realized that this is a general demonstration of actual natural selection in real life, due to climate change, which happens often. this evolution is normal. the ideal of nature in a fixed state is not science, it's conservative religious ideology.

another example is the interbreeding of coyotes and wolves in eastern canada, which would create a large shift in the fossil record. coyotes all of a sudden are going to increase in size. it's the wolf dna and we know it.

so, the premise of all of these different species in the human fossil record is dubious. every researcher wanted their own species. every minimal change was presented as a novel variation. the question of whether they could fuck or not requires more rigour, and we can assume that they did if they could, and probably tried even if they couldn't.

a better mathematical model for evolution is a complicated graph with crossings that captures hybridization events (often due to climate change), which actually appear to be an extremely common evolutionary mechanism.

the footprints themselves may not hold up to scrutiny but it's not the more important point. the more important point is that the hierarchical spencerian tree model is ignorant and backwards and it's theological implications are consequently wrong. evolution is stochastic, statistical, chaotic. natural selection cannot be assumed, it must be proven that the shifts in population genetics are not genetic drift, which is a null hypothesis. the graph theory is more complex, but it's also a rich and profound theory.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/ancient-footprints-offer-rare-glimpse-into-lives-of-extinct-human-relatives/

aimlessly trying to bomb iran into submission is not a reprise of dubya's 00s iraq policy, it's a reprise of the clinton-gore iraq strategy during the 90s. trump is constantly clinton redux. he is aggressively avoiding regime change, when it would be the better strategy in iran (and was the worse strategy in iraq). he's tryng to force an oil for food type program but the iranians won't accept it.

i don't support this policy. it's not going to make the region safer. it's not going to have a pragmatic outcome. the americans will fail to force iran into submission, and somebody else will step in and push through regime change in the end. it's putting off the inevitable at a great waste of time and money. the result will be the same. and the process of regime change in iran is necessary and the outcome will be justice for the people of iran. this is a fascist regime that poses a threat to global stability, regional order and global peace and an ideology that needs to be eradicated. aimlessly attempting to bomb them into submission and failing will cost more money and kill more people than is necessary to get the job done. it's the most inefficient, ineffective approach to the same ultimately necessary solution of regime change in the end, because trump fears the  outcome of an iranian socialist movement on the ground and won't sign off on it.

but, despite realizing that this won't help much, that doesn't mean i have much sympathy for iran right now. they need to get their shit in order and take this decision away from people in washington. this is their future. this is their state to burn down. the decision should be theirs, but they need to make it.

as an openly identifying socialist, my politics are far closer to john fetterman's than they are to aoc's or mamdani's, who both strike me as well to the right of centre. this free groceries for rich kids scheme is about the most bourgeois thing i've ever heard. i would reject it as stupid because i'm a socialist. there's nothing socialist about it at all, it's just a handout for rich kids, and it would get paid for by a hike in union dues. it's a redistribution of wealth from middle age working class union members to upper middle class children of corporate executives. that's not socialism. that's the literal opposite of socialism.

the problem is that, in the united states, all politics is just code for race politics. nothing else matters. you can't be brown and conservative at the same time in the united states, despite the actual reality that the overwhelming majority of brown people are in fact extremely conservative. so everything else has to align around the delusions of archaic race politics that have little to no relevance a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

fetterman's a liberal, which is placing him in conflict with the shift to the far right that is taking place in the democratic party, as it tries to abandon any remnant of it's historical white voting base and fully embrace a religious and brown voting coalition. the new democrats are going to be extremely religious and extremely conservative (and extremely brown), but they're going to call themselves left-wing anyways, and i'm going to be diametrically deadset against them. so, he's being called a conservative, because the country doesn't know how to use language to describe what's happening. but the truth is the opposite.

the democrats have actually historically been the country's conservative party. the republicans have historically been the country's liberal party. the language in the media is orwellian, but the alliances are actually correcting themselves.

i think that john fetterman is actually to the left of his party and that the democrats are in the process of shifting to the extreme right, which is something he is resisting. if i were fetterman, i would probably feel more comfortable sitting as an independent and calling myself a liberal, and making an attempt to explain how liberals are discernibly to the left of progressives, who are really conservatives in disguise. as an adamant openly socialist leftist, i consider these progressives to be a bigger problem than republicans are, as the progressives are actual conservatives, and the republicans generally aren't really conservatives at all. it's the self-styled progressives that want to radically turn the clocks back to the 60s. republicans are broadly status quo. that makes the progressives dramatically worse. we're in the era of orwell, where everything is upside down and backwards, and everything means the opposite of what it claims to mean.

the bricks are in. i think i tried to avoid stating this too clearly. 

so, when i was cleaning in the garage area, i noticed that there was a gaping hole under the steps big enough to crawl into. like, you could crawl in from outside, if you knew the hole was there. i also found some used needles in the crawl space, indicating somebody had actually crawled inside. that might be why it frequently smelled like an ash tray in there. 

i immediately nailed the hole shut and noticed somebody had kicked it in the next day.

the landlord indicated he was going to fix it, but he didn't, it was just waiting and waiting. i wasn't able to move anything in there and set anything up in there until the space was sealed up. i finally just went around back and got some bricks out of the backyard and sealed it up with quikrete. i wanted to test it to make sure it worked before i did a second round, and it did. so, i bought some more quikrete and some more bricks last night and finished it up.

the issue is that somebody knocked a window out to run a furnace vent and just closed it up with drywall. so there was a piece of drywall facing the rain and snow and it decayed through. somebody knew it and was sneaking in there to do drugs.

it's fixed now and the leak that was there seems to be fixed as well, so i should be able to finally start moving things into the garage. i just want to wait for it to dry outside before i do a final patch run over it.

i redid a lot of the concrete steps while i was at it as there were big gaps where moisture, rodents or bugs could get in. i'm going to redo a lot of the walls in the garage as well, just to make sure there aren't any further leaks. it will look a lot cleaner with a fresh coat of concrete.

i also bought some roof sealant that i'm going to lather all around the outside to keep the water out. this is in addition to the downspout extender i put in, that has made a huge difference.

so, once i'm confident that the garage is clean and dry, i have a carpet i can put down in the corner. i also have a bicycle rack that i can lock my bicycles to, tables, lamps, tools, a heater and even a stereo. it has to be dry and sealed first. i'm almost there.

i also really sealed up the laundry the other day using cardboard boxes and that really cancelled the smell in there, which is great. it was a mix of garbage, mildew and food i'd find unappealing, as a white european. blocking the holes neutralized it entirely.

so i'm making major progress.

about a year and a half ago, the mayor of windsor acted like a dirty fascist in overriding the clear democratic will of city council to maintain tunnel bus service, out of an apparent anti-union political ideology. this ideological decision actually reduced operating revenues, leading to higher deficits, and had a clearly negative effect on windsor's struggling downtown core. the mayor apparently wants more church organized social activities and more family-oriented event funding. he's attacking the city's economy because he's an ideological conservative. he's also continued to destroy the library, and received nothing of any value for it while watching multiple physical library locations get sold off to dubious market investors, then collapse into disuse and disrepair. on top of that, he's wasted millions of tax dollars on repeatedly renovating recently renovated city halls, foolishly built a hockey rink on top of a green space downtown, spent a million dollars on a decommissioned rail car and continues to throw millions of dollars a year down the drain on an environmentally irresponsible christmas lights display intended to appeal to white christian supremacist identity politics.

there's an election this year and i want to see somebody run against these things and get rid of this shithead. cancelling the tunnel bus was stupid - it cost the city money and it hurt the local bars. the city should bring back the tunnel bus. the library has faced years of instability that needs to come to an end. the city should buy back the old library on ouellette. i'm tired of seeing the city waste money on family oriented programming that is stupid and lame. the rail car is a dumb waste of money. and the christmas lights are a waste of electricity and a waste of tax dollars to a celebrate a holiday that is largely culturally irrelevant in this society, which is overwhelmingly secular.

he's also refusing to implement overdue zoning changes and not taking federal money for subsidized housing, which is inflating property values and increasing rents.

the mismanagement at city hall is overwhelming. the city needs to unite to get rid of this guy. he's fucking terrible.

the charges against netanyahu are frivolous and absurd and the americans are right to try to shut this court down, which is behaving irresponsibly in carrying out politicized activities that are blatantly anti-semitic and without any remote evidentiary basis. the icc is looking and acting like a nazi tribunal and should be treated like one. if it walks like a nazi and quacks like a nazi, it's a nazi. europe has a civilizationial existential crisis on it' hand, as it increasingly collapses into fascism, and is increasingly requiring a serious protest movement to struggle against these rising forces of nazism and right-wing extremism that masquerade as a soft left, but are the exact opposite of it in practice.

netanyahu has legitimate corruption charges to face in israel.

the icc warrant against him is not justified by facts and should not be respected by governments anywhere. the credibility of the body is rather now in disrepute for behaving with political motivations aligned with the far right.

if canada were to act on these threats, it should be judged accordingly and held accountable for it. our international standing is currently incredibly low and falling. our institutions have low reputability. our government is extremely corrupt.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/netanyahu-flight-canadian-airspace-9.7288211

i'm going to do the things i need to do outside before i order more food. the stalkers seem to have come in here the last time i was outside working. i don't think they can get in except when i'm sitting outside, and they're driven enough by their delusions of faith and belief to do it. the basic problem with zealotry and self-righteousness is that you think you're right and you're just factually not. the wisdom in mill is cliched and annoying (mill and orwell. who do i think i am, christopher hitchens?), but worth acknowledging all the more for it. the basic point is correct - the issue on the table is that you might be fucking wrong, and you have to get that through your fucking head.

the pathetic losers aren't going to stop but i can keep them out by locking down. and i'm planning around next year at this point, unfortunately.

the upside is that the apartment will be finished sooner than later. i have the materials i need to finish everything up and when i get done the outside in the next few days i should be able to rapidly get to finishing up in the garage, and then it's done.

i need to get a fair amount of groceries. i've been eating small amounts all summer and am pushing down to 135 for the next meal, which is powdered chicken soup with grilled chicken breast. i am done the canned soup, but still have canned tomatoes for spaghetti. i have a pile of powdered soup mixes to sub in for quinoa and other things and will be catching up on the fruit as soon as i get through that. the diet i put myself on in may dragged that process out by a few months but it's almost there.

then, there are a small number of organizational things to do before i sit down and finish the cataloging and get to finishing the coffee table book.

so i'm making progress, this is just a crazy amount of work to do, and it's taking a long time to do it.