20-04-2016: melt banana - infection defective (detroit)

their music:
http://www.melt-banana.net/

review:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/04/20.html

vlog for the day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPd2kz0SUg8

my music:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com

05. distracted by the democratic primary (trying to finish archiving) (dvd 5)

19-04-2016: winter archiving is over; hello to spring cockroaches (& new york primary)

chained vlog forward:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPd2kz0SUg8

tracks worked on in this vlog:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-1

it took me a while to figure out what was going on here. the doctor was kind of vague. we agreed i should be checked for stroke symptoms, and there weren't any. he told me it was probably a migraine, and i agreed, but it just struck me as a little extreme. so i've been worried about tumours, degenerative diseases...

in fact, i think what happened was a condition called transient aphasia (explained: https://migraine.com/blog/migraine-symptoms-transient-aphasia/) that is associated with severe migraines. i actually mention in the video that i'm experiencing "tracers", which is usually referred to as an "aura" in the migraine literature. but i actually manage to get myself in aphasia a little after 40:00.

j reacts to the inherently anti-democratic nature of two-party political systems

i think this is half-right. but, it is stuck in two-party politics.

i've lived my whole life in a three-party system. we have a conservative party that is roughly equivalent to the american democrats [in the late 70s, when it was morning in america for the conservative movement, the canadian conservative party was campaigning on legalizing marijuana]. clinton & obama would both be tories in canada. we have a liberal party that is historically more equivalent to the american green party - but would also be the party of your elizabeth warrens. and, we have an ndp that has historically been a socialist party and advocated for things like state-controlled industry. in fact, they succeeded in nationalizing the oil industry for a while. sanders would be a member of the ndp in canada.

your republican party would be a fringe movement in canada. the closest thing would be the social credit party, but it's a bad comparison, over all.

now, the spectrum may be skewed left up here. but, that's not really the point i'm getting at. the point is that we have three parties, not two, and so we have three orientations: right, left and center. in practice, it's neither the left nor the right that run the country - it's the liberal party in the center.

we could do this a few different ways. i like to bring in the idea of dialectics. because, if you look at the old literature, democracy has something to do with dialectics. the thing is that america has never really understood this, though. there's this idea in the american political philosophy that if you get right and left at each other's throat, you end up with synthesis in the form of bipartisanship. so, you hear this all over the spectrum. working together across the aisle. it's scary language, on some level - reflective of a one-party state. but, if you know where it comes from, you get that what it's really about is synthesis.

except that has never been what has happened. in a two-party system, you never get any kind of real synthesis. what you get are tugs and pulls on the center. you get pendulums sweeping back and forth. the right hand erases the left hand, and then the left hand erases the right - in the long run, it is the opposite of synthesis.

the reagan era undid the fdr era. and, the next generation will return the favour and throw reagan in the dustbin, as it resurrects fdr. will this go on forever? will the pendulum swing into perpetuity?

if so, the founders will have failed - they intended for synthesis. the two party system was about dialectics, not pendulums.

and, what of canada, then? well, the three-party system actually presents a functional dialectic by sending thesis and anti-thesis to the partisan extremes, and letting serious policy happen in the centre. so, it happens to be that the same party that brought us single-payer health care in the 60s also brought us balanced budgets in the 90s. by existing in the center, and synthesizing ideas from the parties on the left and right, the liberals are able to govern broadly empirically - and not ideologically.

i've been saying this for months, actually. matthew is absolutely right to point out that the democrats are not a party of the left, and at all. but, the solution is not for the left to take over the democrats. matthew also correctly points out that this will help the right more than it will help the left. the solution is for the left to stop co-operating with the democrats, to spin itself off and let the democrats sit in the middle. to me, the great excitement surrounding sanders is that he might be the catalyst to construct this three-party system, and finally let the dialectic work.

remember: conservatives are only wrong about 85% of the time.

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/20/11466376/bernie-sanders-future-democrats

spring bug update

i've caught two in the last twelve hours (one around midnight, the other around 8:00 am) near the front door, which is a little different. essentially every roach i've ever seen in here has been near the plumbing on the far side - in the kitchen usually, or maybe in the bathroom or sometimes in the closet in the bedroom. but always clearly near the plumbing as a water source. so, to see two of them come in from the other side like this is a little different.

so, i did some liberal spraying along each of the four doorways around the two entrances. i suppose we'll find out how many get trapped in it over the next few days. but, it seems to suggest there's been a population increase in the back area. it's generally stated that seeing roaches in the day is a bad sign.

i haven't seen any on the plumbing side yet this year, but i will be doing spring cleaning over the weekend - which means spraying behind the appliances and replacing the steel wool.

the headaches have subsided. and i want to be clear that i wasn't trying to be accusatory. i was just trying to figure out if the unit was sprayed when i wasn't here, as that struck me as a likely explanation for what was happening. pure intuition. and, obviously, i would like to be informed when the unit is going to be sprayed, if the unit is going to be sprayed. but i wouldn't have raised the issue if i wasn't getting dramatic symptoms coming from the air - not just headaches, actually, but visual hallucinations (tracers) and at one point an inability to speak. i mean, i spent a day in the hospital. they told me i had a migraine, and maybe that was it, but it kind of seems like i was poisoned. again: i'm not making accusations, exactly, i'm more just contemplating possibilities. however, because i've sprayed down here this morning, i've now contaminated myself regarding any testing. i wouldn't have sprayed if i didn't think it was gone, anyways. at the very least, realize this: if there was spraying down here this month, i got some pretty nasty side effects from it. so, that shouldn't happen again without telling me what's happening so i can adjust...

i am now moving this laptop back into the bedroom, and getting ready to turn the pc back on. the last thing i have to do on the laptop is clean this page up, but it won't make sense to do that right away - i'll have to do it as i'm rebuilding the alter-reality (and the period disc) from 1996 on. and, in order to get there, i still have to sort through some things, to make sure i've found everything i can.

i don't know if there are still usenet or mailing list archives for me to access online, but it's secondary to finding what i can in squirelled away pst files first, anyways. iirc, it was about mid-1997 that i started rambling on the internet. the alter-reality starts in the summer of 1996, and will consequently kick back in around july. but, then i've got a year before i need to worry about it. and, i consequently may put it off for a little while, depending on how fast i find things.

i'm hitting a strange show tonight (melt banana / melvins...and i'll probably stay for napalm death, too, depending on set times), because it's 4/20. but, i think i should get through most of this scavenging by the end of the day, too. and, then i can get back to finishing what i started doing back in december.

almost there. seriously.

and what do i have to show for it? well, i've pulled down over a gb of text from the internet. 1.2 gb. of text. stored in word documents. i jest you not, this is the truth. message boards. youtube. email. facebook. it's 1.2 gb of text. since 2011. and understand this: i have many times more than this from before 2011. so, when i claim that i'm building an alter-reality with a lot of writing....

it'll be really obvious what i'm doing as soon as i start doing it. and i'm just about there.

and, did i mention that i quit smoking, too? that was really important. and, frankly, this was a pretty productive way to do that. time is a strange intangible and everything. i'd prefer it if we weren't stuck running out of it. and, i may be lucky enough to catch the cut-off point after all. i'm beginning to think i was too pessimistic. but, i don't regret this. and, if i can catch immortality after all, then i'm just setting myself up for it. hey, that cut-off point is coming soon, whether i catch it or not.

j reacts to sanders losing in new york (and what he should do next)

so, i got in before the results - it was clear this was going to happen within a few days of the vote, even if i didn't realize the consequences of a closed primary far ahead of the vote (as so few did, apparently).

but, i still don't think it really says anything about clinton's relationship to blacks, in general. it says a lot about clinton's relationship to older, wealthy blacks. but, that was never in question. she does well with older, wealthy whites, too.

it's true she did well in the less wealthy areas, too. but, i want you to realize how absurd this reaction is: the sample size was too small to draw any meaningful conclusions from. that is absolutely ridiculous, but it's also absolutely true. if you hit the new york times results precinct by precinct, you'll have a hard time finding a precinct with more than 400 cast ballots. the harsh reality is that you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from such a biased sample. the fact that they're mostly life-long democrats is probably more important than anything else.

the remaining states aren't going to be as bad in terms of voter suppression, and should provide a better sample. i really wanted new york to give us better data, but the arcane rules that are in place make it even less useful than the previous collections.

anybody that is attempting to use the new york results to demonstrate something that was predicted about demographics, or use it to predict something in the future about demographics, is being dishonest. the only thing of any real value that the data from new york tells us is that dyed-in-the-wool life-long partisan democrats are strongly supportive of the clinton dynasty. which is not news.

--

but, again - let me state this clearly.

sanders will almost certainly lose the democratic nomination. and the media is pushing hard for him to drop.

but, he should not drop. just because he's probably going to lose the nomination doesn't mean his campaign is done. i've laid out the reasons he should run as an independent, and why he could very well win. there will be much wrangling on the way there, but it's mostly just an elaborate set of excuses to drag the process on until he can go solo.

could he have won new york tonight if the primary was open? well, they didn't even cast two million votes. there's twenty million people in new york. it's well within the realm of possibility. and, it's consequently not a very strong argument.

shit hillary said vol 35

"It’s a phoney referendum and it is going to be used by Assad to justify what he’s doing to other Syrian citizens."