that said, it's a good time for politicians to go on tv and talk about sacrifices for the greater good, in eradicating a deep threat to human freedom. we will all have to make some kind of sacrifices, to ensure that the religious extremists in iran are destroyed.
Sunday, March 29, 2026
if the ndp were very smart, they might be able to position themselves as a new liberal party right now, as the liberals swing so hard to the right, and electing an upper class elitist like avi lewis with bad economic policies and good social policies would be a good step on that path towards appealing to liberal voters. liberals annoyed with mark carney should like avi lewis in principle, until they dig under the surface.
the things that liberals won't like about avi lewis are not up for debate and won't be addressed, and he will struggle with them for that reason.
but that is the obvious tactic the ndp needs to try. they're going to fail. but they need to cut their losses with working class voters and go hard after upper middle class voters, instead. that's who elected avi lewis, and it's who is going to vote for him, if anybody does.
so, what do i do?
well, i'm not going to vote for the conservatives, either.
i have tended to vote green or not at all. the rise of avi lewis won't alter that, for me. right now, i'm likely to continue to not vote.
would i vote for avi lewis?
i might support some of his positions on social issues, but his economic policies seem designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. for example, he actually wants to increase the number of temporary residents, and the number of foreign students. those decisions would severely harm me, and are not in my class interest.
the answer is that i probably wouldn't, for that reason.
the italian prime minister is a retard and nobody expects her to say anything intelligent.
but macron will bitch and moan that "freedom of religion" must be respected in jerusalem, then support banning the jews from mumbling at their own fucking wall. and he's supposed to be the secularist, and they're supposed to be the lunatics. get your head around that kind of hypocrisy.
i think they should bulldoze all of the religious sites in jerusalem and build a city park in their place.
while it seemed somewhat uncharacteristic of israel to restrict christians from going to church, and i was curious as to why, i have absolutely no solidarity for christian worship and would largely support restrictions on public masses in jerusalem during easter. but israel is not a secular state.
i find the statements by macron alarming in the context of laicite and would hope he receives backlash from french voters for it.
it turns out it was a security restriction and the jewish police, on account of being jewish, didn't realize it was easter or plan for it.
trump didn't want a war with iran, and they might have prevented one if they had acted more rationally, but they acted irrationally and now they've sealed their own fate. there may have been a path to a deal previously but there is not one now. they may have been able to avoid regime change before, but they can't now.
it's all over for iran.
their behaviour, and their rhetoric, necessitates their permanent destruction.
yeah, something is leaving me dead bugs as gifts.
spiders.
boxelder bugs.
the first roach i've ever seen in here.
what is the difference between a mouse and a cat, besides size? mice are clearly more intelligent. cats are basically large rodents.
i don't want to jump to conclusions, but this mouse is very generous with it's gift-giving, and i've just never seen it.
Saturday, March 28, 2026
it looks like avi lewis is going to win the leadership. but, i would expect that heather macpherson will keep her seat in the legislature in the next election, and avi lewis will not succeed in winning one for himself.
the ndp are consequently now faced with a problem that you see in canada with what we call fringe parties, which is that they can get an mp elected here and there, but they can't get their leader elected. we saw this most recently with the green party, and they had to go back to elizabeth may.
mr. lewis has already made attempts to win seats twice, in 2021 and 2025, and lost both times. there is no obvious place for mr. lewis to run where he might win. i frankly don't think there is a riding in the country that he's likely to win in.
further, mr. lewis' ethnicity (i don't suspect he's very religious) is likely to generate a large amount of hostility amongst core ndp voters, and i'd get some popcorn for that, as it's likely to be entertaining watching canada's previously left-wing party collapse into far-right conspiracy theory rhetoric. but it's coming.
i don't exactly disagree with the outcome. mr lewis was clearly the best candidate. but he's also the most unelectable candidate in canada in 2026 that you could imagine creating out of clay, if you could, and it speaks to a contradiction in the ndp voting coalition, and donor base. lewis will be able to hold 10-15% of voters across the country, but the ridings the ndp has been able to hold since mulcair have tended to be a little right of centre and more traditionally conservative, and the mps it actually elects reflect that. it follows that the mps that the ndp is able to elect are fairly centrist, while it's donors are more to the left, and there doesn't seem to be a way to address that other than to pick a fight with the liberal party, which the ndp tends to lose when it does, because the liberals constantly run to the left of the ndp on issues that actually matter, and the liberals have a far more left-wing record in actual governance. it's hard for an informed leftist in canada to actually vote ndp, given their record in government. the ndp actually have this really bad habit of unexpectedly swinging hard to austerity. at this point, they can't blame it on bad apples. it's happened across the country, and it leaves them in ruins.
a lot of former ndp voters are now conservative voters, and avi lewis is not going to swing them back, so how does he win a seat? he can't. and he won't.
this is the deep secret of canadian politics: the ndp is not a socialist party but is actually a real conservative party. not a post-thatcherian neo-liberal party, a pre-clarkian, stanfeldian, diefenbakerian old-timey conservative party.
so, they're kind of fucked.
lewis wants to be the guy that saves the ndp, but he's going to be the guy that buries them, and what happens next to the ndp is going to be ugly. he's going to win the vote, and then get attacked by his own party, which doesn't want him to win, and it's going to get vicious. this is going to alienate his donors, who are going to bolt to the greens or liberals (or bloc) and it's going to leave behind the ugliest part of the ndp, to collapse into a new socred party, and then fade into obscurity.
there may be some more floor crossings from the ndp to the liberals. unfortunately. because canadians didn't vote for a majority, but that will make it real, until the next election.
i admit i never got over the death of optimus prime.
i was once so full of hope and joy. it shattered me, and i've never been the same since.
it is the source of my deeply cynical, existentialist outlook on life and the reason i can't take anything seriously. it taught me that nothing matters.
i cried my little eyes out.
with the exception of a short time window from about 1993 to about 1997, about when norm got cancelled, and when i was in my early teens, i actually know almost nothing about saturday night live.
it was on saturday nights.
i didn't tend to find myself in front of a tv at midnight on sunday morning.
we didn't have youtube back then, and i didn't have a pvr. i tuned out.
i probably would have watched it more if it was on sunday night or a night in the week. i watched a lot of conan when i was a kid, because it was on during the week.
in hindsight, that was kind of a high point for the show, i believe. they kind of lost the plot when they axed norm. and people started dying, which makes for bad comedy. i do have an opinion on cast members like will farrell and jimmy fallon, and it's not remotely positive. these were not funny people. at all.
but i just didn't watch it after about 1998, and nobody i knew watched it, and it never got spoken of. i really have nothing to say about it.
i have seen more reruns of sctv or monty python or older snl than i have of post-norm snl.
most of these colleges are diploma mills and should close. the provincial governments should step in and revoke their licenses. if you can't exist without importing D students from india, you shouldn't exist at all. these are students that can't get in to real schools.
on the other hand, the real schools that will survive this should be taking the down time as an opportunity to build student housing, to prevent low income canadian citizens from being forced to compete for rental housing with temporary residents.
if you need to import students to prevent your third rate school from going bankrupt, house them on your campus, and don't force rent inflation on canadian citizens. that's not a valid economic model.
further, third rate students from third world countries are not an acceptable source of cheap labour for small businesses. these small businesses need to follow proper labour practices and hire canadians at legal wages. if these small businesses can't pay legal wages, they should close.
small businesses are bad for labour rights because they're not unionized. we should be slowly getting rid of small businesses in favour of conglomerates with unionized workforces, not propping them up by importing slaves for them to exploit. if your business model needs slaves to be profitable, your business shouldn't exist.
no. bill 18 is a dangerous attack on the rights of disabled people to self-determination, and there is a broad consistency developing - the canadian right, which includes the liberal party, consistently refuses to accept the concept of individual rights, both at home and abroad, and is instead consistently enforcing religious values about "dignity" on people that have won the constitutional right to be free from these religious beliefs.
the federal government needs to stand up for the rights of the disabled to kill themselves on demand like any other group, and take the albertan government to court to force them to enforce the law.
i wish i had used the benzalkonium chloride earlier. it cleared it right up, in a few spots. i'll keep at it until it's gone.
it doesn't tell me what it was, as it would kill anything, but it tells me it probably wasn't the ants, bed bugs, fleas or anything else like that.
i'm glad that's dealt with as it was freaking me out.
there are people thinking about this theoretically, which is good. i mean, who is writing these ai programs? kids with degrees in oracle or java? they won't get this.
i would assume this is going to get fixed.
the companies need to come clean on this.
The impossibility of having a general method that can assert whether an arbitrary AI is aligned or not does not mean that it is impossible to construct an AI that is provably aligned. Instead, it should be interpreted that there exist many AIs that cannot be proven to be aligned or not, while there is also a countable set of AIs that are proven to be aligned. Therefore, it is our objective to develop and utilize such a countable set of proven aligned AIs. The architecture and its development process are fundamental to ensuring safety.
Developing an AI model that always halts allows for the alignment and other properties of the AI model to be asserted computationally, a task that would be computationally impossible for arbitrary models.
yeah, i've looked into this idea of "ai scheming" and it's nowhere near as complex or profound as some people want to decide it is. i think people are looking for sentience and finding it where it doesn't exist. it says more about the analysts.
the good news is that it suggests incompetence rather than malice. these are not demonstrations of sentience. they're essentially programming errors.
in every example presented, one of two things are true:
1) the ai was programmed to lie, and it did.
2) the ai was asked to solve a problem that computer scientists call undecidable and it creates an error that is being misinterpreted as the ai being dishonest, because it's what the researchers want to see.
what is an undecidable problem?
In computability theory and computational complexity theory, an undecidable problem is a decision problem for which it is proved to be impossible to construct an algorithm that always leads to a correct yes-or-no answer.
this may be a mindfuck to people, because computers can solve everything. right? no. in fact, computers can't even do basic math because they're base 2. computers are constantly making simple mistakes, and we're forced to write incredibly complicated software, and design elaborate pieces of hardware, to catch all of the mistakes they make. end users don't see that, until they do. but computer bugs are so 90s.
when was the last time you saw a programming mistake make it to production?
well, that's exactly what "ai scheming" is.
the program should be doing better error correction in trying to catch these undecidable problems and guiding them to determined outcomes, or in preventing users from breaking the algorithm. these are programming mistakes. the software engineers should not be tripping out on them, they should be correcting them.
now, computability theory is a pretty big branch of applied mathematics and it's pretty established and in fact pretty old. one of the results of computability theory is that there are uncountably many undecidable problems. so you can't catch every mistake.
but you can design the program to tell the user that it broke it. and i think doing that would be extremely helpful in training users to interact with the program correctly.
not every request or command has an answer. if the program can't answer, it should say that. if the problem is undecidable, or creates a contradiction, it should say that. it shouldn't always produce a response.
not every question has an answer, and that is a fundamental result of modern mathematics. users should be trained by the ai to understand that.
Friday, March 27, 2026
they don't need to control or occupy iran, they just need to overrun it.
5,000 troops is enough to take the southern coast, including baluchistan. they would need to rely on the iranian opposition in the interior, but they don't seem to want to.
a serious invasion of iran from the south would need to use arab troops. i would not support that; i support facilitating an uprising against the fascists in the north, and some partition of the arab and muslim areas out of iran.
this bill is extremely poorly written.
as it exists, it expands the power of the governor-general by an act of parliament, which is ridiculously unconstitutional and a gift to anybody opposing it.
my main opposition to the bill is that it grants governing powers to the governor-general, who is an unelected functionary and not a member of government, which is utterly terrifying in it's contempt for democratic process. others may have other issues with it. i would personally probably be fine with the bill if they rewrote it to give the powers to parliament instead of the governor-general.
this bill could be and should be opposed as unconstitutional on the grounds that it gives new powers to the governor-general by an act of parliament, which is constitutionally barred by s. 41:
specifically, the formula for amending the role of the governor-general is in s. 41 of the constitution act, and requires unanimous consent:
Amendment by unanimous consent
Amendment by unanimous consent
41 An amendment to the Constitution of Canada in relation to the following matters may be made by proclamation issued by the Governor General under the Great Seal of Canada only where authorized by resolutions of the Senate and House of Commons and of the legislative assembly of each province:
(a) the office of the Queen, the Governor General and the Lieutenant Governor of a province;
(b) the right of a province to a number of members in the House of Commons not less than the number of Senators by which the province is entitled to be represented at the time this Part comes into force;
(c) subject to section 43, the use of the English or the French language;
carney's eurocentrism is fairly clear and we are at risk of creeping monarchism under his new tory government.
this should have been rejected by the senate and should have been rejected by the attorney general but it seems to have gone under the radar.
it should be fought in court on the grounds that increased powers to the governor-general are unconstitutional and a form of creeping monarchism.
whatever the cause was, a good run on my legs with benzalkonium chloride wipes got rid of the itch pretty fast.
i'm not a doctor. or a chemist. don't listen to me. think for yourself.
but, fyi, in fact, the active ingredient in most cleaning wipes, which also usually include hydrogen peroxide as a secondary ingredient, is also used as the active ingredient in anti-bacterial creams, like this one:
if i get an rx in the end, it could very well be for a skin cream version of a cleaning wipe, and it will be better for my skin in the long run if i do.
but in the short run, if i can just kill it with cleaning wipes, that's fine. it might burn and bleed a little. that just means it's working. it'll heal.
the ai systems people talk about are run by big capitalist institutions and are all closed source, which is a big issue. we don't know what they're doing.
i'd rather see a good round of nationalization, but the inmates are running the asylum in late capitalism. that's unlikely.
more likely is the market choosing an open source alternative so we can get rid of any malicious code by crowd sourcing.
i don't have any particular use for what's being called ai in my life and don't expect i'll pick it up or start using it. it's 2026, and i don't have a cell phone. i use a voip office phone because i prefer normal phones to cell phones. i had to buy an mp3 player with android to have access to some specific apps and hardware functions, like scanning, without exposing myself to the liability of a sim card.
i'm the weirdest person in the world - i have a computer science degree and no interest in technology. they told me to do it to get a job and i thought it would be a good idea to educate myself, even if i didn't follow that life path. but then when i didn't want the job, i didn't keep up with the technology. modern technology is mostly overpriced crap with little use value, and it decreases in quality as it increases in price with each successive generation. i have found myself using my education to try to repurpose inexpensive old technology that nobody wants rather than waste money adopting the newest trends.
i'll have to find a use for ai before i start using it and i doubt that will ever really happen.
but i'd encourage people to choose open source alternatives.
the thing you should be afraid of is proprietary software programmed to hurt you, not your computer turning into an evil decepticon and coming to eat you. your biggest fear should be unregulated capitalism, not advances in algorithmic science.
there's no such thing as "ai scheming". that's complete science fiction. if an ai says something creepy to you, it doesn't understand what it said. strings are strings. all data is the same.
there is such thing as technology companies scheming, and they appear to be trying to trick you into believing the scifi fantasy that the ai is coming to life, rather than the reality that they programmed it to steal your data.
if people start reporting ai systems stealing money out of their bank accounts, there's going to be some people that are going to need to go to jail for fraud.
it's not the technology you should be afraid of, it's the humans behind it. the humans need to be regulated. the technology doesn't.
i can't find anything in here except ants and pill bugs. it looks more like i'm allergic to something. rodent allergies are not uncommon, apparently.
if something is biting me, i should be able to find it and kill it. if i'm allergic to something, it should go away when the allergen is removed. i'm more concerned about bacteria or mites, although i see no evidence of the latter.
i'm going to start wiping my body down with disinfectant wipes 2-3x a day and see what effect it has. i'd expect that ought to kill any bacteria or fungus and severely harm any mite or tick.
if it doesn't go away in a few more days, i'm going to have to get to a clinic to figure out what it is.
this is nonsense that is exploiting the general public's ignorance about ai.
i'm by no means an expert in ai, but i took graduate level courses on ai when i was in university and i know exactly how these systems work. they should not be called ai, but they have been for a long time. i took these ai courses in 2012/2013 and was taken aback by the term at the time.
what we call ai is advanced database search algorithms using complex and dynamic decision trees.
the study is written to scare people and the guardian is reacting as intended. they are imagining something like the stephen king short story trucks, or some movie i can't name drop - computers ignoring their inputs. that's nonsense.
forget asimov's laws of robotics. that's not even relevant. you're just dealing with databases.
what you're seeing here are systems that are being programmed to behave maliciously, either by the companies that made them or by hackers getting in, but probably the former. the threat of malicious humans working at poorly regulated technology companies using technology that few people understand is infinitely greater than the threat of a search engine going haywire into god mode.
if the ai deleted your email, it's because it was programmed to, and because you're not really in control of the program, the company that made it is. that is a problem.
one good idea is to nationalize the ai firms so they are working for the people and not to profit off the people.
signing a deal with iran doesn't accomplish anything. their words are worthless. their agreements have no value.
if they were rational, they'd sign the deal to end the bombing and break it five minutes later. they aren't. they won't even sign a deal they don't intend to adhere to because their delusions of faith make them too proud. they'd rather get bombed. their god will save them.
it's dumb v dumber.
but this process should have worked in dismantling the iranian state, which is a valuable outcome, and it would have if the americans had any intent to actually do it, and i still support using overwhelming force to remove the iranian regime and still expect it's inevitable that that will happen, once the americans elect somebody that isn't a retard and doesn't have a book to sell.
trump doesn't care about iran, and he has no interest in regime change, or in democracy, or anything. he just wanted to negotiate to get the glory of signing a deal.
it follows that, if you let him, trump will just get up and walk away without accomplishing anything, if he's convinced he can't sign a deal. he doesn't want to follow through. he never did. he was bluffing.
he didn't even position troops in the region before he started bombing, and now he's trying to get out of using them before they get there.
if the americans let that happen, if they just get up and walk away because the iranians won't sign where they're supposed to, he's going to give these idiot conservatives ammunition for the next 20 years, and i don't want to deal with that.
finish what you fucking started.
and take trump out if he won't do it himself.
the fake liberal press, which is in truth deeply conservative and wants iran to win because it is deeply conservative and actually wants to live in a society like iran rather than destroy it, has picked up the delusional narrative that the united states went to iran to fight and is going to lose because it is immoral.
this is making me want to break things, including trump's face.
the americans went to iran to start a negotiation with an irrational party and found itself surprised, somehow, by iran's irrational response. and now they don't want to follow through.
they never intended to bomb iran and they never intended to invade iran. we are seeing a failure in trump's theory of negotiation. we are not seeing a failure in american military dominance.
i urge the american deep state to get trump out of the way, stop pretending they can negotiate with terrorists and aggressively take over to get rid of this fascist state in iran that is an extreme threat to human freedom, using any and all means available to it.
if canada wants a seat at the grown-up table, it should stop acting like a child, and this minister is one of the worst we've ever had in this respect.
the most recent example is that, instead of offering logistical support to fight hezbollah, they're threatening to boycott israel. then, they don't understand why nobody calls them.
what side is she on? does she think people can't figure that out? she should acknowledge that she has a conflict of interest and resign from cabinet, before she commits an act of treason and end up in jail.
this is another set of dumb statements and canada will be ignored once again. it's clear we need a change of government to restore our standing on the world stage.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
if the gross, ugly rats are dead, is the wittle mouse that wants to be my friend, and who is just as gross, still here?
in fact, i think i've seen increasing signs of it coming out, now that the rats are dead.
the rats would likely eat the mouse if they could catch it but mice are dramatically smaller than rats and they may have a hard time catching it. the mice must view the rats as big, evil giants.
i won't bug the mouse if i can't see it or signs of it.
i hope it stays in the walls and eats the bugs.
it's nice to see the israelis took out the navy guy, but this isn't going anywhere unless the americans do it, and it's not what they want. they want a deal.
the opposition need to act immediately.
iran has no future and this is not the end of this, but it's apparently going to take a president with bigger balls to get the job done.
as far as i can tell, they haven't even hit 1% of the ruling class, and there are thousands of clerics and judges and other bureaucrats that need to die for the regime to collapse. they didn't even try. they just blew up some boats and planes to created some leverage. who gives a fuck.
i supported wiping them out in one blow and i meant wiping them out in one blow.
i don't and never did support bombing their military to create leverage in order to sign an agreement.
it appears as though the iranians are leading dumbass donny around by his nose at this point.
there's not going to be a "deal".
unfortunately, it's looking like trump is too much of a pussy to finish the job and would rather be manipulated by terrorist thugs into a false negotiation process that will accomplish nothing, just so he can say he signed a deal.
what a loser.
something i've learned over the last few years is that justin trudeau stacked the ontario superior court with complete morons, who were picked for dumb reasons, like that they were indigenous, or muslim, or black or female. this created an incredible problem, because when you put stupid people in positions of authority, they're more likely to abuse it. the decision to arbitrarily utilize institutional power is a sign of low intelligence and i'm seeing it over and over.
our court justices have always had problems with science, math, technology, etc. court justices tend to have little to no education in science; it's a serious problem, and it's longstanding. they tend to basically be english majors. but english majors have a certain mentality to them that makes them unlikely to abuse power, or use it recklessly because all the books they've read taught them not to. the trudeau appointees i've interacted with are consistently disinterested in this, and willing to abuse any power handed to them in any way they can, which is kind of just like trudeau, himself.
we elected an unqualified moron and he put idiots on the court. we should not have expected otherwise, but the situation is longterm and is going to create serious problems in the lives of a lot of people, who have to deal with specious rulings written by dumb airheads. there was an expectation that the party would prevent this kind of thing, and it didn't. canada needs to learn this lesson and never elect another unqualified aristocrat ever again.
it's the white women that are the worst. it's like he went out of his way to pick the most hysterically irrational, dumbest bitches he could find. and that's now the court. and those are now the rulings people have to try to deal with.
i'm in the process of appealing a case to the supreme court that is the result of the court of appeal making an error in understanding the statute that is so rudimentary that an 8 year-old could identify it. the statute says if. the court has discarded the if.
worse is that the court has itself dealt with this reading comprehension error several times already. i've given the court a half dozen references that indicate that the issue is dealt with in case law and it won't address it.
the resultant situation is absurd - the court has been shown it's rudimentary error and even shown that the rudimentary error has been corrected repeatedly in case law, but will not address the error. it is holding to it's false reading, and that's the end of it. it will not allow itself to be corrected, because it's run by stupid, irrational bitches that don't listen and don't learn and get off on abusing power.
we've all met the stupid bitch that won't be corrected when they're wrong and yells and cries and has a hissy fit and throws things at you instead. we don't expect them to be superior court justices. in canada, they are, now. this is the most substantive legacy of justin trudeau.
the court needs to be an antidote to the serious social problem of the stupid bitch, and not a corollary of it. stupid bitches aren't going away. society needs a way to prevent them from hurting people, which has historically been the courts. in canada, we gave them control of the courts, instead, and now they're abusing it, which was predictable, and which any intelligent person should have seen coming.
so, i have to drag their retarded asses to the supreme court to get them to fix a basic reading error any little kid could identify. it's a waste of everybody's time that is the result of poor hiring decisions made by the pmo.
let this be a lesson: don't put stupid people in power, because they will bring more stupid people with them, and even if you can get rid of the first stupid person, you might not be able to get rid of their stupid friends.
it's somewhat hilarious to see bernie sanders go full conservative retard in launching a quixotic crusade against artificial intelligence.
hey, bernie. do you know what they call it when technology takes away jobs from workers/slaves? that's called communism. and, do you know what they call people that resist it? conservative reactionaries.
now, that said, if this change occurs without any sort of government oversight, it is sure to create a mess of unemployment, but fighting against progress is sisyphean and would be pyrrhic if it were successful. cancelling ai is a foolish approach to dealing with the challenges presented by it.
rather, it would seem like some legislation written by somebody like a senator to help displaced workers find new jobs, or to capture and redistribute profit streams, would be a better approach.
i'm not sure what the senator really wants in the end if he's opposed to technology eliminating shit jobs. that's the point of being a leftist. fighting for increases in working conditions is one thing, but it's a reaction to a simpler time and a less advanced technological reality. when you have the ability for the machines to take over in front of you, and you're fighting against it instead of for it, you're neither siding with workers nor with capital. you're just resisting change for the sake of it. you're just afraid.
i'm strongly in favour of ai displacing workers and any worker would be, but i understand that such a change will require a parallel shift in ownership of the machine and in how commodities are distributed. fight for that. don't fight to turn the clocks back, or off. that's neither pro-worker, nor pro-management, nor leftist. it's base conservatism. and i don't support that.
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
the romans actually did break into iran a couple of times, but they couldn't hold iraq. if the romans could have held iraq, they could have conquered iran. the roman people had an aversion to it and that mattered. it was too far. the roman world, as the romans saw it, ended at the zagros. it was probably a greek thing. i dunno. i know that the romans had a hard time holding armenia and mesopotamia and that was the reason they never held iran, although there are roughly five examples of roman emperors marching right into persia and taking the capital.
they wouldn't go south of the sahara or too far down the nile or into the arab peninsula or up the rivers of the black sea, either. they had their own self-determined limits.
iran is a big country, but it's hard to defend, and it has been conquered with small forces several times throughout history - the persian invasion itself, alexander, the arab conquest and the mongol conquest were all carried out with very small numbers of troops.
the americans don't need to colonize iran.
i actually think that an invasion would be much easier than some analysts are suggesting. history has three widely studied clear examples of how to do it.
the iranians have been through this before, too.
when genghis khan sent emissaries to the region demanding a tribute, they were killed.
the result?
40 million dead muslims, most of them iranian in ancestry.
their god did not save them then.
their god will not save them now.
irrationality must have a price.
this won't be as bad as that.
this is a perfect example of iranian irrationality. it is trying to rationalize irrationality.
the iranians are not an equal at the table. their concerns are not to be taken seriously, and all they've done is isolate themselves and get themselves blown up, and it's just going to get worse. it is the very idea that they have any leverage to alter the outcome of the situation that is irrational, and it's driven by the delusion of their faith.
negotiation means compliance and a rational actor would understand that and comply.
when the iranians say "every time we talk to them, they bomb us", it's because they refuse to be rational and comply and submit to overwhelming military dominance, which has been the underlying situation for decades. they don't get it. there was no other outcome. the americans have been extremely patient, but time's up, and they have to submit and comply, or be slaughtered and erased from history. those are their choices, and the fact that they don't understand that is a function of their inability to reason rationally.
the americans keep giving them a chance to do what they're told, before they're blown up, and they continue to refuse, and continue to choose being blown up, and then lash out at their neighbours, who now also want to blow them up. they think they can win a war to control a strait and are going to force the americans to go in and do it instead of understand the inevitable outcome and save everybody the effort.
the iranians will themselves be forced to pay reparations to the countries around them via siphoning out profits from their oil sales. this is like the nazis demanding reparations for dresden.
once again, the choice iran has is to submit or die. that is the choice iran has had for forty years. time's up. our media calls that a "negotiation", and iran wants to pretend it is going to be allowed to negotiate. this is irrational. if they were rational, they would submit and avoid getting destroyed.
they can't submit or otherwise behave rationally because of their faith.
their god will save them.
it's pitiful. and they deserve what's coming.
i've been unable to stay awake the last week or so. it seems like i got drugged again. but are the stalkers back?
i'm not sure.
i'm making a tactical decision to wait until mid april to see what happens with the upstairs eviction. i'm not feeling good about it right now. something's not right, but i'm being intentionally denied access to information. they won't like how i respond to that but i need to wait to see what happens, first.
i smell like somebody drugged me, and i'm tired like i've been drugged, but i'm not experiencing most of the effects i was previously. i might be dealing with the environmental effects from the losers on the third floor, but i haven't smelled anything except occasional cigarettes.
all i can do is sleep it off and try to feel better.
the iranian mullahs apparently wanted to negotiate with somebody that looked like a chimp, like they do, so they requested dogface vance to bark his way through the meetings. i'm sure that won't be a waste of time.
listen.
trump tried his negotiation tactic and it utterly failed. a lot of stupid people are going to say a lot of stupid things, but the reality is that the iranians are not rational actors. the venezuelans, who are actually a functioning democracy despite claims to the contrary, albeit one that needed leadership renewal, turned out to be rational actors. the cubans might turn out to be rational. the lebanese state is rational, it's just broken. the iranians are deeply irrational and cannot be negotiated with.
trump should have known that and he didn't because he's naive about the effects of religion on rational discourse. trump is not a christian; he doesn't believe in god. he is a vulgar marxist. he sees religion as a tool of control. he is correct; religion is a tool of control, but he seeks to manipulate it rather than dismantle it. he was not able to comprehend the blowback in iran. he saw them as allies that needed a kick in the ass, rather than as psychopaths that needed to be hung in public.
if trump won't learn his mistake, which was treating the iranians as rational negotiators, then the mechanisms to remove him from decision making need to be invoked.
the iranian state has demonstrated repeatedly that it must be destroyed with overwhelming force and extreme violence. get on it.
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
how do you like your icon now, tobacco industry?
but maybe that's the point.
because smoking hasn't been cool in decades. smoking has been for losers since the 80s. so, the industry is right, in that sense: justin bieber is the biggest loser i can think of and therefore the best person out there to sell smoking as 'cool'. in that sense that losers think they're cool.
the tobacco industry has a long history of viral advertising.
some of these are product placements.
most of them are.
my advice is don't get habituated. smoke at parties; don't smoke at home, and don't smoke alone.
the problem i had quitting smoking was that it made me too tired to do anything.
i quit at the end of 2015, after not really starting until very late 2001 and going cold turkey for long periods between 2001-2015. so, that was less than 15 years, but really less than 10 years actively smoking. i smoked socially at parties in the 90s; i was a teenager in the 90s. i turned 20 in 2001, which is about a year sooner than the people i went to high school with. it had to do with the fact that i turned 4 in january, 1985. the rules about going to kindergarten are that you can go to 4 year old kindergarten when you're 3, but only if you're born before new years. i couldn't go to 4 year old kindergarten until i was almost 5, because my birthday is in early january. therefore, i was almost a year older than everybody, all the way through school, even in university. i tended to get along with older kids - three or four years older - better than younger kids or kids my own age, so it was extra frustrating. but, it meant i could buy cigarettes at the store legally in january, 2000 and basically none of my friends could. except jon. he could.
cigarettes were cheap then, too. $3.00. $4.00. $5.00 was way too much. a gram of pot was $10 and has experienced zero inflation, since. you'd pay that for a six of something. so, it often made sense for me to show up at a party with a pack of cigarettes, smoke a handful when i was drunk and/or stoned, and hand the rest out to my friends, who couldn't buy them, or give them to rolling buddies to roll with.
what i learned was that the best way to wake the fuck up at 4:00 am or 5:00 am, after drinking alcohol and smoking pot all night, was to have a cigarette. cocaine wasn't an option for us, and i have never touched the stuff, nor did any of those kids. except jon. jon did. too much.
the reality is that nicotine is a powerful stimulant. if you don't smoke all of the time, smoking two or three cigs will wake you the fuck up for an hour, and then you can get up and go home and sleep it off.
but if you get hooked, which i didn't see coming and should have been more vigilant about, then the opposite thing happens - if you don't smoke ever hour or two, you fall asleep. you become utterly exhausted. the physical addiction is quite daunting.
so, i should just sleep it off, right?
sure. i tried that. like, 50 times. unfortunately, i had to go to school, or go to work, or write an essay, or study for an exam. i had to stay awake. so, i lit up a smoke, and it worked. that's why it took so long.
eventually, i had to sleep it off for a month and then i was quit.
after 2015, until my social life died in the pandemic, i was able to go back to smoking at parties, which is what i wanted the whole time but just couldn't force myself into from 2002-2015. i found the key was to have respect for the possibility of addiction and make sure i was only smoking at parties, never cheating, never sneaking. i could handle that, and i did. i found that the nicotine had a more powerful effect once the tolerance wore down to nothing, as well. the nicotine began working as a stimulant, again. that was why i smoked in the first place, so i wanted to maintain that by not abusing it, and it worked. i realized the need to have that smoke at 6:30 am, coming out of an all night underground party in detroit, before i got on my bicycle back to canada. it woke me right up, and made sure i didn't pass out in hamtramck, or at the russell, or in the art park, or something.
but i've been essentially cold turkey since early 2020, when they shut down the bars. others reacted almost oppositely but, for me, the end of the bars meant the end of smoking, because i had quit smoking at home in 2015 and i had every intention of sticking to it.
this is important because it's our shared cultural history, from the tip of ireland to the ganges river, and from the arctic ocean to the mediterranean sea. but we've all been colonized, and we've been tricked for centuries into fighting stupid wars with each other.
if we could get rid of the semitic colonization - judaism, christianity, islam and mormonism - and assert a common indo-european identity, we could build a unified post-colonial cultural identity across europe and asia built on indigenous indo-european cultural values of respecting and co-existing with nature, rather than the semitic idea of controlling and dominating over it. and we need to do that.
easter is stupid. sure. but, take the time to try to transcend your colonial conditioning and reconnect with your indigenous origins. we're not going to save the world holding to this semitic colonial society, or continuing to be brainwashed by their tools of religious domination. it's a pre-requisite to breaking free.
it looks trivial. it's not.
the christian apologists will lie to you in telling you that egg decorating was invented in the victorian era and is a capitalist neo-pagan idea that corrupts the real christian easter. and, you'll shrug it off because you don't know any better. i'm not going to yell at you and call you ignorant about this, because who fucking cares. i agree. it's obvious that it's not exactly a passover tradition, so why not believe it was invented by hallmark and coca-cola?
but it's not true.
for your general reference...
egg painting is an ancient indo-european practice. actually. like the goddess of the dawn, ostara, it shows up all over the place in indo-european religons. for example, it's a key tradition in the zoroastran nowruz festival, which has roots in the indo-aryan period. spring equinox egg painting was certainly normal in ancient persia, before anything - before christianity, before reformed judaism, before the jews even returned after the captivity. this is amongst the oldest traditions in the world. it wasn't invented by american capital.
it shows up in baltic and slavic pagan traditions. prominently.
and there's really every reason to think the ancient germans, including the ancient angles and saxons, had some egg-painting practice, even if the christians made sure to destroy any record of it.
this information is easily googleable.
don't believe the christians. they're the fucking worst.
the government's decision to drag it's feet in implementing this important court decision, which upholds the inalienable right of a sovereign individual to commit suicide, must be reversed.
if the government does not want to implement the court order, it should use the notwithstanding clause and put the issue in the political arena. i, for one, would consider the right to self-ownership to be a ballot question and explicitly vote in favour of the right to kill yourself.
this decision must belong to the individual and not to the state and certainly not to some fucking religious shithead.
there's a lot of nonsense about "greater israel" on the internet.
that's not the nonsense that israeli war planners are directed by.
israeli war planners are actually directed by the nonsense of bronze age mythology.
this is the correct nonsense:
my understanding is that if you're trying to draw the map of the middle east out of the back of a bible, the south of lebanon is a part of the holy land, and therefore a proper part of israel.
however, beirut and damascus are both outside of the holy land and therefore both not kosher in this analysis.
this is ridiculous and should be entirely cancelled.
all new immigrants to canada should be assessed strictly on an individual basis. whether an applicant does or does not have family in canada should be considered 100% irrelevant in determining immigration status. the income of an existing citizen should have absolutely no relevance on the admission of their parent or grandparent, who should be analyzed individually, and strictly on their own qualifications.
being wealthy should not give you a waiver to import your family into the country. that's essentially buying citizenship for your family members. in feudal europe, it would have been called nepotism. it's absurd.
citizenship is to be determined by rules set by parliament, not bought and sold on the free market.
nor should you gain citizenship via marriage, or automatically be allowed to bring a spouse in to the country. you and your spouse should be assessed as individuals and admitted or rejected individually. all children of applicants over the age of 18 should be assessed individually and rejected or admitted individually, as well. children between the age of 12-18 should have a less stringent set of requirements and potentially be rejected individually in extreme cases.
this law is feudal in character and should be completely abolished.
we need to get back to a strict application of the points system, with no exceptions or workarounds. if you don't qualify, too fucking bad.
Monday, March 23, 2026
one of these religious groups hit it on the head.
“Bill 21 states that there exists something fundamentally wrong and harmful with religious practices, some of them in particular, from which we must protect the public,” argued Olga Redko, lawyer for Ichrak Nourel Hak and other Muslim teachers in the province.
"The message that they've received is that they're not worthy of participating in provincial institutions because their expression of faith is contrary to Quebec's values," she said.
there you go. you got it. exactly. you understand perfectly well.
that is the opinion of the overwhelming majority of quebeckers.
and.....you don't care. you want to try to force your values on their kids anyways.
you selfish piece of shit. go fuck yourself.
i've told you why i support bill 21. what do i think about the constitutional challenge?
it doesn't stand a chance. the court might rule the law is unconstitutional, but it has no jurisdiction to unilaterally amend the charter. there is a process to amend the charter, and an appeal to the supreme court is not it.
the appeal is a performative act by the federal government. it knows it has no chance of success. in fact, if it thought the appeal had a chance of success, i think it's extremely unlikely that it would risk the wrath of quebecois voters in launching it. the liberals, at both the provincial and federal level, have actually supported very similar legislation.
so, the whole thing is a political stunt by ottawa. it has no chance of success. the supreme court should probably even declare some of the groups arguing against the law to be vexatious litigants, as their arguments have no legal basis and are absurd and a waste of time. while the court cannot declare the federal government vexatious, the appeal is clearly vexatious to the letter of the term, in every conceivable way. it's not a serious legal argument, it's a time wasting and performative political exercise.
the supreme court has a lot of power, but it cannot amend the constitution. that's it. case closed. go home.
the purpose of the notwithstanding clause was supposed to be the opposite of this. a right-wing government in alberta led by peter lougheed was afraid that ottawa might do something like pass a law banning abortion (in canada, our roe v wade is called morgantaler and didn't happen until 1988 and could not have happened without the constitution, as ratified in 1982) and wanted a trump card. the justice minister at the time, jean chretien, did not support this position. nor did mr chretien support the inclusion of property rights, religious rights or religious language in the constitution, which was what lougheed concerned about, exactly. what if this crazy guy chretien became prime minister one day?
pierre trudeau famously kicked chretien in the shins in response, and we have a notwithstanding clause, notwithstanding chretien's opposition to it.
if the court really doesn't like bill 21 in the end, something i'm not convinced will be the case, it has the option to state as much. it would then need to do something called balancing, using a process called an oakes test. the oakes test asks if the law is a justifiable rights restriction, even if it's unconstitutional. this is not the united states.
so, the court needs to ask:
- is the law unconstitutional?
- is the law consistent with the quebec constitution?
- if the law is unconstitutional, is it a justified rights restriction?
- if the law is not a justified rights restriction, does the court have jurisdiction to overturn it?
the government might get the answer it wants on every question except the last one. i don't think that's going to be the case, but it might be.
a possible outcome is therefore the supreme court releasing a scathing analysis, but finding it has no jurisdiction to overturn the law.
i think that a more likely outcome is that the court's majority will conclude that the law is consistent with quebec's charter, and decide that that is more important. this might, in theory, be a law that can only exist in quebec, the notwithstanding clause notwithstanding. that would clarify how provincial governments in the rest of the country need to act if they want to emulate the law in their own provinces.
i live in windsor, on which is sardonically called south detroit. i've been to hamtramck quite frequently, which was a small polish community in metro detroit before it got swarmed by muslim immigrants. hamtramck was at one point the live music capital of detroit because the rent was cheap and it had it's own little downtown.
the muslim immigrants took over the city hall and tried to ban the gays and the music. the non-muslim residents of the city are extremely liberal and actually helped to get them elected, only to have the knife stabbed in their back. they never supported liberal anything. they're the most conservative group in the country, and in the world. it's created a nightmare, in which a segment of detroit has been forced to fight for it's survival against an immigrant community trying to wipe them out.
the only reason that hasn't happened in toronto is due to amalgamation. if toronto had not amalgamated, there would be a hamtramck in the gta by now.
but you can look at the school council in toronto to get the point.
compare the public schools in toronto to montreal and you'll understand why quebec passed bill 21 and why it's necessary to implement it. due to bill 21, montreal will survive. toronto is on the path to being the next detroit.
it would seem like kushner is talking with the shah, who is the "respected iranian leader" trump is talking about.
i don't support putting the shah back in power, but this was predictable enough. if trump can't get a good stooge in the regime, he'll parachute one in.
my solidarity remains with the resistance groups on the ground, and the same logic about timelines applies to them. iran is done. now, it's a race against time as to who can get in there first.
- the chinese, with lingering regime support
- the iranian resistance, which is lead by the kurds, with israeli tactical support
- the americans, via the shah, and likely with arab troops and a small american marine force
that's what is developing.
all.
set.
go!
i don't have the burrow lines, so i don't think it's rat scabies.
the least wrong answer seems to be that these damned rats, which seem to be dead, tracked in some fleas, and i'll have to figure that out. ugh.
it's a nice apartment for cheap. this is why it's cheap. but i'm smart. i'll figure this out.
i may have to get tested to figure out what's biting me. i have removed two dead rats and i have some kind of itchy rash. i don't know if it's fleas, mites or rat scabies but i don't think it's all just ingrowns.
i don't have my kit set up yet, man. fuck off. stop biting me.
the only insect in here that i've been able to actually find and observe and see are black ants. i have tried to block up some holes but it seems a little much for ant bites.
i dunno.
it looks like a contradiction, but in fact i pointed out the same thing in ukraine, when things looked like they were on autopilot. they were. and they are now.
people imagine that war is random and crazy because it's seen as irrational and stupid. war is what happens when hot-headed yosemite sams can't get the damned rabbit using their faculties of reason and resort to the stupidity of violence out of desperation. right? wrong.
in the modern world, people get paid to plan wars out years ahead of time and when they happen they're predetermined and, by extension, virtually impossible to stop. there was almost nothing that the russians could have done to stop ukraine from happening, in 2014. a deep state contingency plan kicked in. post-kgb forces started operating independently of centralized authority. if putin claimed he had no idea, he was probably being honest.
so, who is making decisions in iran?
the answer is that they were already made before this happened, and what's unfolding was pre-determined, pre-scripted. we're left to wait for the program to finish and for the ammunition to run out. there are no negotiations possible because there's nobody to negotiate with, in addition to the system being structurally and inherently irrational by design. there's nobody to push stop. there's a system running without a control mechanism.
the iranians are dead. we just have to let them die in front of us, and it might be painful. i don't know what's been programmed or how long the show lasts.
the americans and the world should be trying to figure out what the chinese are doing.
so, what the fuck?
"I AM PLEASE TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST.
"BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WITCH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP"
don coyote is absolutely certain that he's a master negotiator, and his brilliant tactic of bullying irrational actors into submission will be overwhelmingly successful, so he's going to give the utterly insane iranians another chance to get their heads out of their asses before he pounds the shit out of them, which he clearly had no intent to do, because the iranians were supposed to be good little mullahs, once trump got them shaking for their lives in their turbans.
right.
five days?
who is taking bets on the likelihood of china taking over the strait in the next five days? i'll put $50 on yalu, jim.
we've got five days. that's all we've got. five days.
my brain hurts.
a lot.
at the end of the day, we're all fucking monkeys living in extended clan groups, and this is how primate society works - we expel the ones we don't like.
it's better than submitting to the biggest ape with the biggest club.
and you should remember that the latter is, in the end, what all the religious monkeys actually want.
a lot of fucking hippies are going to bitch and complain that laws like bill 21, or the much stronger french laws, "exclude" people.
but, that's the point.
excluding people because you reject their values and beliefs is the most fundamental characteristic of democracy and any system that takes that away is a body blow to the concept of democratic freedom. freedom of association is more important than freedom of speech, as free speech requires freedom of association as a pre-requisite to be workable. it is utterly imperative that the secular majority, where it exists, is able to exclude the religious from participating in society, as a statement of principles and values. rejecting that is synonymous with rejecting democracy.
but we know that that's the point and that that's what these counter-arguments are about. these people don't give the slightest fuck about democracy. they think they're special. in fact, they think they're superior. they think they deserve special rules because they're superior, and that their beliefs are not subject to criticism because they're better than you, and they'll even try to silence you if you try to criticize them. well, look at what they actually believe, and process how stupid it is, and then try to get your head around the delusional thinking underlying that. then, they wonder why they're being excluded, and complain it's not fair.
sociologists would describe laws like this an informal means of social control. the ostracism is intended to send the message that they're being excluded because their beliefs are not acceptable. that's the point. that's the intention. if you realize it, you understand. they need to get the point and adjust, not sit on their thumbs and bitch and whine about it.
to me the issue isn't about politicians, it's about public servants, including teachers and doctors. while i'm not particularly upset about a ban like this, and get it, i would also argue that the restrictions on political symbols at work don't really apply to politicians because they aren't providing services, or not exactly. it's subtle. a political staffer that provides services to a population in a riding should not be able to display political or religious symbols while doing so, but for the politician itself, it's somewhat irrelevant. kind of. broadly, but not really.
i would not vote for a politician that displays religious symbols and would choose not to associate with them if they win. that's largely enough, as i probably don't need to interact with them directly, and they aren't exactly public servants.
but the keffiyah ban should logically be extended to hijabs and other religious symbols, so long as it exists, and even if i don't think the legislature is a valid area of regulation, in this respect. i'm more concerned about keeping politics and religion out of schools, hospitals and places where services are received, like service ontario.
it's kind of a step in the right direction, though, even if it misses the point.
i understand that a lot of people insist a religious symbol is something different than a political slogan, and will get offended by the suggestion. but i don't give a fuck if they're offended.
nobody is able to explain why a religious symbol is something different than a political slogan and, in the process, they consistently concede, explicitly or not, that it isn't something different than a political slogan at all.
in ontario, i think a ban on religious symbols at work would fall under the scope of the following legislation:
key to this is the idea that a religion is the same thing as a political party, in a truly secular state. arguing otherwise is the part of the debate i have difficulty understanding; i don't understand how somebody can tell me a religion is something different than an opinion, and still think we live in a democracy. if you're going to look at me with a straight face and tell me religious beliefs have some special sanctified place and are different than any other opinion, you are legislating faith above the law, and don't believe in equality or democracy. if religious belief is the same as any other opinion, than a religion is nothing more or less than a political party, and it should be taxed like a political party and have restrictions on donations to it that are the same as donating to a political party. further, any activity in support of that religion or political party would be banned at work, including symbols associated with the religion / political party.
the united states has a similar law called the hatch act, and there is some case law supporting the same position at the federal level in canada, but i don't want to look it up right now.
quebec's bill 21 is important in canada's constitutional rights framework because it ensures that the non-religious, who are the vast majority of canadians, have the right to exist in true freedom from any kind of religious coercion and are not being forced by state dictate to interact with people they would otherwise choose not to associate with. i don't want to have to tolerate religious people, i have no legal or moral obligation to tolerate them and i expect the legal and constitutional framework of the country i live in to uphold my right to not be forced to tolerate them.
i would like to see bill 21 enacted federally and applied to the federal work force, as well as encted provincially and applied to the province of ontario.
i do think that the government of quebec made a mistake in enacting the notwithstanding clause as it frames the question in the wrong terms. there are already strong restrictions on political activity in the public service, and there is no discernible difference between a political party and a religion in a secular society. they really didn't need a new law to ban religious symbols in the workplace, as it falls under the prohibition on political activity.
as an atheist, i feel extremely uncomfortable interacting with religious people in any way at all, for any reason, and insist i have the right to receive services by people that do not believe in any kind of god, at all times. this is about my rights to live free of religious coercion, which are important. the supposed, so-called right to believe in imaginary nonsense is not important, it's utterly retarded, and the idea should be done away with entirely in any advanced, modern, secular, enlightened society looking to the future instead of the past.
Sunday, March 22, 2026
while i don't think that civilian energy infrastructure is a valid target and therefore oppose trump's ultimatum, iran's delusional response merely demonstrates the point.
if the americans wanted to control the strait, they should have had that as an immediate objective and the fact that they didn't is a failure at central command. trump approves the strikes, but he doesn't write the contingency plans. i'm sure the contingency plan exists - 100% sure. somebody failed to put it in motion.
it's really little more than a minor annoyance. the americans will easily take control of the strait once they get the process in motion.
however, i have been clear that i think the americans should be blockading the iranians. my best guess as to why they aren't is that they don't want to upset the chinese, which is just another layer of nonsense in the americans' thinking. who do they think just launched a missile at diego garcia?
the houthis?
the taliban?
i mean, c'mon.
if the americans towed away a few tankers worth of iranian oil intended for the chinese market to it's strategic reserve, that would be a long-deserved kick in the teeth. truly.
in the end, these outcomes are't mutually exclusive. the americans can take control of the straits and blockade iranian oil exports. but they don't appear to be interested in the latter. in fact, that waiver for iranian oil is to replace kuwaiti or gulf oil. the americans are actually functionally encouraging the iranians to eat into the market controlled by their gulf allies, who they are bombing on behalf of. it's all absurd.
right now, it's a matter of time before they take control, and the media's analysis and suggestions otherwise are idiotic. it's a mixture of anti-semitism, anti-americanism and rank morally righteous conservatism.
i find myself with odd allies today, but i'm driven by ideas and not by allegiances, and i call them as i see them. there's a right-wing, conservative giddiness setting in at the idea of decadent america losing to the religious extremist islamists. it's absurd wishful thinking, but it lets us know what these people are thinking about when they're wishing. it's a longstanding problem in the west; the secularism is in many ways a thin veneer that hides a longing for a return to complete backwardsness.
the sooner that trump stops pretending he can negotiate with these psychotic lunatics, the faster the americans are able to get in there and take over. if he continues to delude himself and delay the inevitable, he runs the risk of looking weak and stupid, as he eventually goes in with a whimper rather than a bang. and if he waits long enough, he might find the chinese beat him to it.
i've been trying to figure out what the hell's been biting me and there's no evidence besides the bites.
there were some spiders in here, but they've been gone for a while. i've seen no signs of roaches since i moved in. i have looked thoroughly for bed bugs and there's nothing. further, the bites don't look like bed bug bites to me, and are mostly on my lower body.
i'm tentatively concluding i'm being bitten by rat fleas, but i haven't seen one. it seems like the least wrong answer.
i have no potential exposure to scabies or anything like that.
this morning, as i've been waiting for the temperature to come up, i took a closer look and realized that all of the bites have a commonality - there's an ingrown hair in every single one. so, are they just ingrowns? it seems unimaginable.
i really want the summer to come in asap and the junkies upstairs to leave asap so i can clean up in here and rule out potential causes.
i'm told the junkies will be forcibly removed by the sheriff on april 5thish. the eviction date is april 1st. i have called the sheriff, and they cannot confirm that.
i'm making a tactical decision to completely lock myself inside until may to be sure that they're completely gone and i don't have any interaction with them as they're being removed. there may be some physical altercations, as there's a lot of people in the back yard and in the garage. there's going to be desperate people trying to get in places and drug addicts trying to get something to sell for dope. i don't want them to even know i'm here at all, and they might not. the windows are shuttered or boarded up. one or two of them know i'm here but i think most of the junkies think the basement is currently empty.
if somebody tries to smash in here, i'll have to smash their head in like i smashed the rat's head in. but i don't want to give them access points or ideas. i want to stay quiet and wait until they're out of here, and then give it a few weeks to be sure they're gone.
the issue i'm primarily concerned about is theft. junkies just steal everything. you can't trust them and you're stupid to try to.
i have made it a point of principle to completely avoid interacting with them. when they talk to me, i ignore them. i hope the message is clear enough that i'm not their friend and don't want to help them.
once they're gone, i'll be able to finish setting this place up.
i do think the rats are gone. the reality is that they'd rather be outside. but we'll see.
donald trump is 80 years old. he's the stubbornest, grumpiest, dickiest old man at the geriatric facility. he doesn't learn new things. he's set in his ways.
these are poor characteristics for a president, but the united states has become a gerontocracy, and we'll all have to navigate that. his replacement will be old, and their replacement will be old. trying to run a young person is just going to be unsuccessful, until the boomers die, at the least.
the democrats should run bernie sanders because he's old. it will increase his chances, because the voters are old, and they want old. that, and the young people are a bunch of shitheads themselves, but that's not even the issue, as of yet.
so, don coyote wants to negotiate. he wants to be a bully. then he wants to make a deal.
he wants to give iran an offer it can't refuse.
ok. i don't agree. but ok.
threatening to bomb the power plants is dumb. they don't give a fuck about that. that is just going to maximize misery.
if donald trump wants to be a bully and create leverage to make a deal tell him to threaten to bunker bomb the presidential palaces. tell him to blow up the governing infrastructure - the halls, the meeting places, the eating houses, the hotels of the rich and the powerful.
i think they probably still won't listen.
but they might. and if they don't, let the hell rain down on the decision makers, not the people.
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