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 smoothies are no longer a key part of my diet, they've been replaced by orange juice, but i may revisit that.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.

if you are relatively kind to a wild rat, will it be relatively kind to you in return, or is that disney logic?

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.

my iron crashed this week, so i have been sleeping more than usual, but i am almost done cleaning, finally.

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.

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.

https://www.sootoday.com/local-news/virtually-no-us-content-trump-threatens-to-block-opening-of-windsor-detroit-bridge-11858593

table of contents for apartment redesign and set up coffee table book

0) narrative

1) kitchen

2) laundry / walk-in closet

3) bathroom

4) bedroom

5) living room

6) in-unit garage

7) side entry

8) front entry 

9) studio

A) appendix A - budgeting

B) appendix b - notes

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.

this just in

the democrats are now supporting a complete ban on any portrayal of the prophet muhammad.

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.

is this racist?

who gives a fuck?

i hear that the democrats have hired the ghost of william jennings bryan to represent them in their show trial against donald trump, for his heresy in portraying a human being as a primate. 

the cops are out of control in this country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/world/canada/toronto-police-arrested-drugs-corruption.html

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.

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.

i'm backin' the ussr.

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.

i did not vote for mark carney.

you can be sure i never will, now.

canadians should be embarrassed.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-auto-strategy-announcement-evs-9.7073975

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.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/article/canadas-economy-is-on-life-support-and-country-is-in-recession-says-economist/

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.

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.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/difficult-decisions-charity-warns-windsor-refugee-shelter-at-risk-of-closure

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:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6091513/

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?

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.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/article/psychological-distress-among-ontario-teens-has-nearly-tripled-in-a-decade-study-finds/

my rdsp grants came in today. look at this:

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.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/kidnapping-mexico-influencer-9.7066638

the last time the united states had a psychotic idiot like this in power was jfk, and the deep state did the right thing in taking him out.

the cia should make a deal with donald trump: if you resign, we won't assassinate you.

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.

macauley culkin just posted a tribute on twitter to his mom dying in response to catherine o'hara's death.

has this guy had his nose broken, yet?

what a douche.

why doesn't trump invade the faulklands instead?

it's not that other presidents couldn't bully and push around the cubans, it's that every single president since 1963 has had the decency to avoid doing so.

you can judge the maturity of a culture by how it treats the vulnerable.

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. 

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.

let us not for one second be misled by the nonsensical projection of cuba as a threat to american naval power in the caribbean.

let us dispense with the glaring fiction that the cubans somehow pose a threat to the american navy.

let us dispel with the absurd notion that the american navy is threatened by the cubans.

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.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/carney-calls-trumps-us-fed-chair-pick-warsh-a-fantastic-choice/

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_megalopolis

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.

if canada were to admit states to the east of ontario, it would likewise want to do something like combine the several states in new england into a new province.

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.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/minnesota-join-canada-jesse-ventura-9.7067000

how is it possible that nigel farage still has a political career at all?

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.

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.

a lot of things are better here, tonight.

this morning, i started to wake up a little bit after taking a dose of vitamin d. i had cut my supplementation of d last year to isolate the source of testosterone and have been mostly inside, with little sun, since october. i bought a bunch when i moved in but hadn't taken any yet. i decided it couldn't hurt and might help. i can't build a causal model, exactly, but i started feeling better within a few hours after the second dose of 1000 iu. considering that i was probably pretty low, it has some scientific basis. it was likely better than a placebo. i'll be going back to regularly taking 1000 iu a night, now.

when i started to wake up, i realized i was on the brink of pneumonia (it hurt to cough) and started aggressively hacking out phlegm to clear my lungs, which also cleared my sinuses. i coughed a frightening amount of yellow phlegm up. when i was done, i began to notice that the tenant above me was clearly chain smoking in the house and the sickness, combined with the heat, was hiding it. while i'm certainly sick with a bacteria or virus, i realized it was the smoke that was making me cough.

that means the stalker is probably upstairs.

i did a handful of things to adjust that, including moving the hvac filter into the bedroom, repeatedly running a dustbuster in several places of the house, vacuuming the floors and running a lot of water, including letting the shower run repeatedly. it seems to have helped dramatically, as well.

i'm confident i'm feeling better and should be able to get back to work in a few days.

what's happening in canada right now is probably best described as a type of existential dread.

when you hear people say "we want the rules-based international order" back, what they're saying is that they want the 90s back. they want more american hegemony, not less. it was the collapse of the soviet union and the onset of american hegemony that created a "rules based order" with the end of history. it's the unilateral withdrawal of american leadership that is collapsing it, but i think this will be short-lived and trumpian isolation will be incomplete and quickly reversed.

the 1945-1990 period was the exact opposite of a rules based order. it was a period of competition and espionage between great powers, rampant coups in "middle powers", puppet states, catastrophic proxy wars and extreme spheres of influence that split up the entire world.

there never was a "liberal international order". that's just newspeak for the american hegemony that set in when the soviets collapsed.

one of the best way to identify a fake leftist is to listen to how they speak about america and the west.

i'm often not too fond of american policy, and i've expressed that here. however, i am also fully cognizant that every single writer in the history of socialism - every single one - knew that the revolution must happen in america. even the ones that focused on the germans knew the real revolution happens in america. 

there are no legitimate counter-examples.

when you hear people running their mouths off about the decay of america or the decline of the west, realize that these are longstanding conservative tropes about the arrogance of babylon that have absolutely nothing to do with socialism, and you've managed to find yourself in a gathering of the right, not the left. when you start hearing people rambling about this garbage, about the overthrow of the west, or the return of some traditional religious or ethnic group, you should just get up and leave. these people are no allies of the left.

the soviets would sometimes support these groups. they often didn't. it depended on whether cynical soviet calculations thought supporting them would be of benefit to russian geopolitical strategy. when the soviets did support these groups, they would nurture any hatred that their nationalism invoked in them, and the americans did the same thing when they supported the mujahideen in afghanistan, or the nationalists in china. south korea spent most of the cold war as a right-wing hyper-nationalist dictatorship bent on destroying the north by overwhelming force, but kept in check by the chinese, and the americans, who said 'no'. this had nothing to do with right or left, it had to do with great power competition between the united states and russia. the post-war order was not defined by some set of rules written in the 90s, it was defined by rivalries between moscow and washington. the "post-war order" as used today means the order that emerged after the cold war, not after world war two, and i don't think it's shattered at all. the cold war was defined by spheres of interest and immense competition by great powers. the liberal media narrative is bizarre. right now, i see little evidence that american hegemeony is being challenged, anywhere. the americans are succeeding in dominating latin amerca, the middle east and eastern europe at the same time, and probably could not have done that even in the 90s. what is happening is that the americans are unilaterally withdrawing at the height of their own power, because they've lost the plot, no longer understand divide and conquer, don't remember why they invaded and occupied the world in the first place, and think they're better off in isolation. in fact, the british made exactly the same mistake under disraeli, and it was the proximate cause of the first world war, as it opened up a vacuum for the germans to walk into. as stated previously, i would expect the germans to do exactly the same thing yet again if the americans decide to withdraw from europe. america's fortress in greenland won't protect them from german submarine attacks, but an open ended occupation of berlin will.

what i'm getting at is that no leftist would talk like this. actual leftists that have read actual leftist writers don't oppose western civilization, but adhere to concepts of progress, and expect that the revolution, when it happens, will in fact happen in america. it's certainly not going to happen in angola or yemen or venezuela or palestine or iran.

the "national liberation" struggles, when you look at them, are almost always right-wing religious groups seeking to overthrow authoritarian socialist groups or bourgeois liberal groups and when they aren't, like in iran, the fake left has nothing to do with them.

the left is not about fighting america. it's not about fighting the west, it's not about "american decline" and it's not about fighting colonialism. these are all right-wing tropes and suggestive of conservative ideology trying to co-opt you. the left is about the proletariat taking control of the means of production and the distributive justice that follows from that. when you hear people that identify as leftists or organize on the left talk about these other things, you should identify them as what they are, and get up and leave.

we're now starting to see useful idiot fake leftists actively argue that the western media is inflating the death toll in iran, and i'm even seeing that argument jump up at the cbc, which is embarrassing.

we have limited access to iranian media in canada, and i think that's a problem. sanctions don't tend to work. but we shouldn't be banning media from iran and allowing media from saudi arabia or qatar. there's no logic in that.

i don't want to censor these people, i want to identify them. if you show up at a left-wing protest or organizing movement, and you're actually in support of hamas or iran, i want to know who you are and i want to expose you as what you are.

leftist organizing structures need to be aware of these co-opting efforts by islamists and islamist useful idiots and seek to protect themselves from them.

in the meantime, canada should place a 200% export tax on oil entering the united states and use it to aid laid off workers.

i would like to stand up and loudly state good riddance to these dirty, gas guzzling, last century vehicles that have no future in canada or the world.

if canada wants to maintain it's industrial base, it should focus on building vehicles that people want, which are smaller vehicles with high fuel efficiency that cost less to fill up and are better for the environment, or electric vehicles connected to a clean electric grid. many canadians, myself included, want to forget about owning a vehicle altogether and focus on clean public transit instead, or already do that.

the only market for these dinosaur vehicles is the rapidly declining american south. reasonable americans don't want to buy these shit vehicles, these backwards gas guzzlers, these anachronisms from a bygone era, either. unfortunately, the american car industry will not produce modern vehicles because it's interlocked with the fossil fuel industry.

if canada retools these factories to build modern vehicles, the americans will be banging down our door to buy them, because the american companies won't build them.

if america will not evolve or adjust, we need to separate our industry from them and move forward. but, we should also ensure we invite the northern states of michigan, of washington, of minnesota, of illinois, of vermont, of new york, of massachusetts to join us in looking towards the future instead of trying to bring back the past.

our own governments should have already banned production of these deeply damaging vehicles and, in truth, was grappling with how to do it. these dirty trucks have no future in canada. a time was quickly approaching where they would be made in the united states, for a backwards american market, or not made at all.

canada should nationalize the factory and retool it to produce modern vehicles, by either starting a domestic company, which canada should have and bizarrely does not, or by selling the assets to modern companies from east asia or germany.

they can't move the factory. if the company was headquartered in canada, this would be less likely to happen.

canada should take advantage of these changes to make needed and overdue changes about how we use carbon in this country, not moan and complain about them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/gm-oshawa-to-lay-off-1-200-workers-friday-9.7065457

ugh. this guy's a retard.

self-determination is not treason and democracy is more important than nationalism. alberta has a right to self-determination, and it has a right to self-determination, regardless of what the rest of canada thinks about the situation.

nobody asked him his opinion and his opinion has no relevance, in context.

if alberta wants to leave canada, good riddance to it. unlike quebec, it will provide nothing of utility or value to a modern economy in the 21st century. it's politics and people are backwards, uncanadian and embarrassing and they will do nothing but slow us down. canada is better off without it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11643234/remier-eby-alberta-separation-treason/

this is utter insanity.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/lacombe-agriculture-research-centre-closure-9.7065873

i want to make a suggestion to mr carney.

speak of what you know.

do not speak of what you don't. 

you have the resources to defer.

i also just want to briefly comment on this gay hockey player tv show.

i don't watch tv. i have no idea what this is.

but i suspect it's just confirming what every american already knew, which is that all canadians are gay. right?

is there an american hockey player on the show yet? i bet he knows the ten commandments.

i want to walk back something i said about the gst rebate the other day because i appear to have been mislead.

the initial reports said the gst rebate would increase by 25% for the next four years.

what that usually means is 25% per year for the next for years. for me, that would be:

(540*1.25^4 - 540) = (1318.36 - 540) = 778.36

778.36/4 = 194.59, and that's almost back to where the carbon tax rebates were, at around $200/quarter.

i therefore suggested the gst rebates were replacing the abolished carbon tax rebates, which were abruptly taken away without compensation, which was extremely harmful to almost all low income canadians.

however, that appears to not be what the government intended. rather, they appear to be using confusing language, and apparently meant that they are going to increase the amount once by 25%, and take it away after four years. that would amount to an extra (540*1.25-540) = $135/year over the next four years. quarterly, that would be $33.75 per check for the next four years, and then that will apparently disappear, as well.

i understand that it's an hst rebate, so it's intended to return the amount of taxes i paid on groceries. for myself, because i actually buy food when i'm at the grocery store, i pay essentially no taxes on groceries. food is not taxed in canada. the only item in my normal diet with hst added to it is doritos. the items that i would buy at a grocery store that are taxed are thing like toothpaste and shampoo, and when you add it up entirely, i probably make money quarter over quarter on the gst rebate.

but this does not come close to replacing the carbon tax rebate checks, or the increasing amounts that ow income canadians were set to receive from it in upcoming years, and the government disappointingly still has no plan put forward to replace those quarterly subsidies.

i qualified for the dtc, and i have been able to replace that lost subsidy with the cdb, and then some. i also qualified for the cohb. overall, i'm better off than i was last year, as i found ways to compensate.

many canadians did not and i am still looking to this government to explain how it intends to compensate low income canadians for the ghosted carbon tax rebate checks.

the reality is that anybody anywhere in the anglosphere who has studied the issue formally in any abstraction would know that it was settled british law to let the french settlers keep their culture and any dickhead or asshole british administrators trying to force english culture on the french would have actually probably gone to jail. it's not exactly common knowledge, but it's not exactly esoteric wisdom, either.

the reality is that while carney likes to cite rudimentary sources like thucydides (i read that in first year classics, too. greek civ 101.) in a pretentious way that is intended to make him look smarter than the average bear and smarter than he actually is, any actually educated person would realize that the two speeches, at davos and in quebec, actually both demonstrate deep levels of ignorance regarding the issues he's actually dealing with today, which are not homo economicus.

the reality is that if you were listening to carney speak carefully, and you actually understood what he said, you know he mostly made a fool of himself. the reality is he's been continually doing that for well over a year. he sounds smart, if you aren't, but what he actually is is overwhelmingly pretentious. he's actually continually thoroughly demonstrating that he's in way over his head and has no idea what he's doing or what he's talking about.

there's been a lot of attempt to study the way that economists think because it seems to be drastically different than the way almost everybody else thinks. the homo economicus syndrome is a manifestation of sociopathy in the form of a personality disorder. mark carney would seem to be a prime example in demonstrating the sociopathic symptoms of homo economicus syndrome, which uniquely presents in economists.

i have in the past suggested watching the corporation to understand mark carney.

i did not previously know the role that francis bacon played in developing the common law of conquest, as it was used in canada, and elsewhere in the british empire. i was taught the common law of conquest in a 3rd year university course on indigenous law in the process of getting my third degree at carleton, in sociology of law. they put down the law in a textbook format, attributed it to blackstone, stated it, said it was based on roman law, and didn't get much more into it than that.

so i just learned something, myself.

i slept briefly this morning, for about an hour, with a pair of jeans on. i was exhausted from sitting up for a long time to eat and just wanted to stretch out and i nodded off. i got up to defecate and was awake. i'm fairly sure i did not have any holes or rips in these jeans when i went to sleep and do recall looking at one of my knees some time last night, because i had to bend down to pick something up. i noticed when i got up that i had what looks like bite marks and scratch holes in both of my knees.

i was not bitten through my jeans.

i tend to sleep in the fetal position and that is bad for pants. but these jeans weren't just ripped from wear. there are puncture holes on both of the knees.

there is still absolutely no trace of them in here. but i'm a little worried.

i don't have any food for them to eat in the basement and thought i had chased them out of here for that reason. i imagine they have very poor bowel control and that if i can't find anything it's because they aren't here.

there is a summary of the britsh common law of conquest, here:

https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AJLH/2004/8.pdf

i also want to point something out about what carney said the other day in quebec, given that quebec nationalists did not like it very much.

it's certainly true that carney's speech was remarkably naive. carney framed the relationship between canada's french and english as being some kind of historic anomaly of tolerance and enlightenment. the quebec nationalists jumped at that to point out centuries of assimilationist policy.

in fact, it's worth pointing out that the english did not do anything novel in quebec at all, but rather followed very clear existing british imperial precedent. the actual law in place in the british empire at the time, which the british empire applied all over the world, was that when you conquer a people in tact, you have to allow them to keep their own laws, language and religion. that wasn't something uniquely canadian, the british applied that rule everywhere, to everyone, and the british precedent actually came from roman law, as brought into the british system via common law. the romans allowed conquered people to keep their culture, so long as they paid their taxes. the issue was placed before the english judiciary, who studied it, and adopted the roman position.

there is nowhere in the broad british empire where the british conquered a people and enforced their language or laws on them. in india, for example, the local legislature only governed british settlers. the local indians were allowed to keep their laws. but, eventually, they opted to reform their system to adopt a legislature.

now, it's true that some random brits have run their mouth off over the years.

but quebec still has civil law, still speaks french and still has more catholics than protestants, even as it has moved towards a policy of secularism after the quiet revolution. canada has broadly followed the british imperial law, rooted in roman law, and allowed quebeckers to maintain their culture.

the truth is that donald trump, who has publicly repeatedly claimed he doesn't believe in climate change at all and suggested it's a chinese plot, is now essentially imagining effects of climate change in the near future that will require centuries to arrive at. donald trump didn't listen to the scientists when he was denying climate change, and his perception of how the arctic is going to open up is now rooted in fantasy, not science.

the science suggests that it may be the case that the north pole might be ice free for a week or two in the summer by 2060. the polar regions would continue to freeze in the winter. i am not aware of any predictions of the northwest passage actually opening up year round at all. there are some suggestions that it might be open for four months some years some time in the 2100s. it's about a 2 month journey through the passage, so even a four month time window is barely usable, unless you want to winter on the other side. projections for a truly usable northwest passage are so far in the future, and would require so much unchecked global warming, that they're barely worth contemplating.

the reality is that the shipping lanes are not opening up and that, even in the worst case scenarios, it's going to be at least 100 years before this is even worth seriously talking about. 

what does that actually mean, though?

it means a shipping lane full of dangerous ice bergs and unpredictable weather events. if the passage is three weeks slow in opening, or freezes over six weeks early one year due to weather, you could lose billions of dollars. nobody is going to rely on that any time in the near future.

there are real ramifications of climate change on shipping that the science supports, like an ice free, year round great lakes shipping route. hudson bay may become accessible year round.

but the reality is that the giant arctic ice sheets are not going anywhere for many decades or centuries to come - not even in worst case scenarios, which climate activists still hope to prevent.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/increasingly-awkward-case-of-canadas-demilitarized-arctic

if the idiot savants running nato continue to argue that a peace agreement with russia must include nato "peacekeepers" in ukraine, which is the outcome that russia invaded to prevent, then the russians will have no alternative but to continue to grind the ukrainians down until they get to the dnieper, even if it takes 20 years.

my packaging doesn't have a size, but i'm underestimating. these pitas appear to be 7" across, each.

the area of two 7" inch pizzas is calculated as:

2(π*(3.5)^2) = 24.5π.

the square root of 24.5 is a little less than 5. so, two of these things is equivalent to a 10" pizza made by a dishonest cook trying to rip you off a half inch, which is probably all of them.

i would split the recipe up, but the point is to make as much as i can get out of a can of tomato paste, and that's two medium pizzas, apparently.

my pizza is a little different this time, but it's a constant that, while the recipe makes 4, i can only eat two at a time. i haven't measured these but they're perhaps 4-5" pizzas. it's two small pizzas, but two very small pizzas. but also two very loaded very small pizzas.

- put the bacon on first

- chop one large green pepper into four parts and cut each one into small bits, and put them in small bowls

- chop up roughly a third of a fresh pineapple into chunks

- grate an entire block of mozarella cheese

- put four greek pitas on baking trays. i have two on a cookie tray, one on a pizza tray and one in a square casserole dish

- you may want to put olive oil on the pitas first

- on each pita, sprinkle: (1) dried dill, (2) basil, (3) oregano, (4) thyme

- also put hot sauce on it

- when the bacon is done, transfer it to a plate to let it cool, slightly

- note that i cook my bacon in olive oil margarine. so the remaining grease has bacon grease, olive oil and canola oil. rub that on your pitas with a small spoon to create a kind of pesto.

- rub the tomato sauce on over that

- then put the green peppers, pineapple, bacon, olives and whatever else

- put the cheese on

- bake

- cut four avacodo halves up into small chunks and put them into four small containers

- put a small amount of diced garlic in each container

- when it comes out of the oven, put the avocado/garlic topping on

- but a tablespoon of nutritional yeast (with b12) on it

- use more hot sauce

- slice it into four

- if you can lift this with your hands, congratulations.

- the pita will crisp up, but it should be pretty loaded

- you are probably better off using a fork

it's still not clear what this is, but the large amount of indigenous american items (avocados, green peppers, avocados) suggest it may be some kind of loaded quesadilla, as much as anything else. it's a franco-greek-mexican-italian pizza-like thing.

this is horrific and unconstitutional and i certainly hope somebody has a lawsuit on the way to get rid of this nonsense.

https://immigrationnewscanada.ca/new-canada-ifhp-co-payments-2026/

yeah, i'm zonked.

i've been sleeping for days. i've been through two boxes of kleenex. i'm totally dehydrated.

if i did pick something up at the doctor's office on wednesday, i can understand why they were there. 

but, if that's the case, it should pass in the next day or two. if i'm still sick on monday, i'm going to need to get to a doctor. 

no signs of bubos or bleeding. my eyes look normal. i think it's a bad cold or covid.

i'm going to make some more pizza and go from there. i hope to have my head cleared in the next 24-48 hours, or i'm going to get worried.

how can i make sense of this?

it might be that "moderate" regional actors, like egypt, who have been critical of the new regime in syria, which is clearly a fascist government, are concerned that they might destabilize their own countries. egypt doesn't align well in the normal islamic theocracy v democracy spectrum in the middle east. egypt is a totalitarian, mostly secular state that is most likely to be destabilized by islamists and would observe their rise in syria or palestine with extreme caution.

graham may be pulling somewhat of a cato in seeking to divide and conquer a little, and that's standard american policy, in a way that might escape trump or go over his head.

it is not in america's interest to have a strong islamist state in syria or to continue to allow the turks to devolve back into ottoman authoritarianism. if this is graham's way to get that across, i have to agree with him, which doesn't happen too often.

legislation with teeth to protect the kurds would apply to syria, turkey, iraq and iran.

https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/890262/senator-graham-unveils-save-the-kurds-act-vows-sanctions-against-those-targeting-kurdish-forces

this is unexpected but i'll take it.

https://hawarnews.com/en/graham-signals-sanctions-to-protect-kurds-warns-against-abandoning-them-in-syria

donald trump would appear to be a poor judge of character and poor judge of people. he does not pick good friends.

ask ghislaine maxwell.

america's new friends don't seem to be very good friends.

but america is not a good friend, and donald trump is a very bad friend.

so, you know. you get what you deserve.

the reason that the turks and saudis are both dead-set on this, despite both being in a longstanding cold war again iran, is that they worry that the precedent will be set against them. and they're right. 

i don't think that torpedoing khamenei's residence is going to topple the regime. it might, maybe, moderate it. he's a fucking stubborn old man and his time to die is already past.

i don't think removing mbs in saudi arabia would help either, as he actually appears to be more moderate than the older generation, which is still technically in charge. mbs is but a mere prince. he might even still get snubbed. it happened to bandar bush.

i do think that taking erdogan out would be helpful to the turkish people, but i don't think that's on any table except the anarchist's table, and that table is not invited to the white house.

could you imagine the germans or the danes or the french denying america access to their air space? the turks are even in nato.

with friends like these, who needs enemies?

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/saudi-arabia-will-not-allow-its-airspace-or-territory-to-be-used-for-military-actions-against-iran-crown-prince/3812690

this would be a complete nightmare scenario. we'd be forced to adopt widespread market economics and would cease to be canada. we'd might as well let the americans conquer us.

canada's population should be relatively small to maintain our social services and way of life - it should be in the 30-35 million people range. there are already too many people here, and the government should already be trying to reduce the population.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11639688/canada-population-2075/

that didn't happen. it's 19:00 and i've been sleeping soundly since 5:00.

while the officers did have grounds to use non lethal force, and had justification to arrest him for physically resisting, and, if i was there in the crowd, and i knew he had a gun, i'd be happy to see him go away, there were no grounds to repeatedly shoot him with intent to kill at short range, and kristi noem's description of the events has no reflection on reality. and this is not the first time.

she should resign or be fired.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/jan/27/gregory-bovino-tim-walz-donald-trump-minnesota-minneapolis-ice-alex-pretti-us-politics-live-news?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-69793e318f087d9994defb97#block-69793e318f087d9994defb97