there is nothing on the market that would be acceptable to me at this point; anything comparable to this unit is considerably outside of my price range. it just stresses the importance of standing my ground in the face of persistent harassment, and letting the system come to a correct conclusion in the face of fraudulent reports.

the sad reality surrounding the whole thing is that they won't be able to rent this unit to anybody in the long term. the basement is full of cockroaches. the odours are terrible: cigarettes in the hallways, sewer gas in the back space and pollution from the windows most of the year. when you can get some fresh air, you have to deal with nuisance cats shitting everywhere and neighbours chain smoking in their driveway. you can imagine the kind of undesirable that this wouldn't bother: maybe a 45 year old single male that chain smokes, lives on welfare and is drunk most of the time.

i was told the previous tenant had to end their tenancy because they were sent to jail.

there's essentially no insulation in the back wall. so you have to deal with the air conditioner upstairs in the summer and the basement draft in the winter. if they succeed in converting the unit to gas and the tenancy to paid utilities, paying rent here will mean you're heating the entire basement, and most of the upstairs - because he doesn't turn his heat on unless it's -20. so, the basement tenant is essentially going to be paying heating costs for the entire building.

the tenant they're looking to attract is consequently going to be a low-income chain smoker that doesn't mind living in filth and is willing to overpay for utilities for no apparent reason i can see. i hear he rides a unicorn to church.

i am the best they will get. at least the old guy realized that. i guess he had a little experience with the previous tenants down here, and what a unit like it is able to attract.

i am going to take a precautionary step, though: i am going to apply for subsidized housing. and, i am going to claim that i am in an abusive situation, because i am.

i should have been put in subsidized housing years ago. i mean, i'm on permanent disability, it's what the program is for. i applied for it in ottawa, but i wasn't able to stay with my grandmother long enough to wait it out and had to leave the city, instead. they eventually approved me, but i was already here, and it didn't make the slightest bit of sense to go back.

i've been here long enough now that i can apply, here. i don't know how long it will take...

...but it's really the only way out of this that i can put a positive spin on: i could conceivably get a comparable space, and actually end up with a reduced price. and, good luck to them getting somebody else in here.

but, i'm going to stand my ground. i'm going to make them prove the case. because i presume that they can't. and, everything aside, i don't want to leave.

i just hate moving. if i could snap my fingers, i'd take myself up to a third or fourth floor apartment with windows that open to fresher air and walls that keep the neighbours' a/c out. but, getting from a to b isn't worth it. i'd rather stay here and hold my ground.

i need to state again that i do not intend to leave windsor until i complete my discography because i will not be able to afford the space required to hold my gear much of anywhere else. i could have been done by now, but i've wasted much of the last two years on nonsense. if i leave for waterloo, which is my most likely next destination, i will probably sell my gear before i go.

the idea of moving to waterloo is to shift from an artistic purpose to an academic (mathematical) one. i could very well end up living in the library for a while. but, i was not expecting to end up in waterloo until i hit my mid-40s or early 50s. i'll likely be in windsor for another 10-15 years before i move on.

i intend to eventually end up in the northern end of the province, in my twilight years.

i will not end up back in ottawa, unless it is homeless and penniless and in the short term, before i move away again. i simply cannot afford to live in the city.

so, i woke up to an eviction order - signed hours after the mediation process - that i needed to leave so that a parent could move in.

which one? the obese man's ex-wife?

does she like cockroaches?

they can do this in ontario. sort of. they have to demonstrate a need to put the parent there, which is probably going to be difficult. they can't just decide that they're going to stick mom in there for a year for the fun of it, they have to have a good reason. and, it has to be true, in the first place.

they have the burden of proof to demonstrate it, and they can expect a rigorous cross-examination.

frankly, even if they do have a parent to move in, and they need to, it's going to be hard for them to convince a judge that they just forgot to tell me that in mediation and that this has nothing to do with the last several months of harassment. so, we have bad faith on two levels:

1) the mediation agreement was arrived at in bad faith, and is consequently void.
2) the eviction order was provided in bad faith, and will fail. in fact, i think it's toothless: it's an intimidation tactic. i don't expect it to actually go to court. it's just supposed to scare me into moving.

i was hoping to push this forward into september. but, they broke the agreement in less than 24 hours.

again: was i fool to put it off? the answer is no: this would have happened anyways. putting the file on hold did not lead to a fake eviction notice, they would have done it anyways. but, it does allow me to put the harassment proceedings - and the fake eviction notice will be a part of them - into a single case, which both makes me seem less interested in conflict (which is true.) and less interested in financial gain (which is also true.). in the long run, it just strengthens my argument that there is a pattern of consistent harassment.

if anybody is capitalizing, it is the paralegal, who appears to be more interested in taking advantage of clueless property owners than building his own reputation. and, if i made an error it was in hoping for good faith from a lawyer. the ideal outcome remains in helping these people better understand what the law says; unfortunately, this guy seems like he wants to just take advantage of them.

i am going to have to spend some time in the next few days looking at moving options, as a backup plan, but that will not void any of the legal proceedings - including the inevitable filing of a false eviction claim, which i can theoretically file after moving. if that ends up happening, it will pay for the process. i don't expect my options to be very good (to avoid moving backwards, i will need to find a two bedroom all-inclusive apartment for less than $700/month - and, remember, i am legally incapable of working), but i have to explore them.

if i were to move out, and i saw that they relisted the apartment, re-opening the file under that premise would be a very strong argument: months of harassment culminating in a fake eviction notice would indeed land me a sum. and, if i'm moving out, i'll take it.

i need to do some cleaning tonight, and then get a few things mailed in the morning. i'll take a look at this over the next few days, with the aim to mail some things on monday.

aug 29-30 vlog, where i prepare the case against the landlord for harassment, go to court and withdraw, with the hope that the issue might resolve.

if they want this to end, it's really simple: all they have to do is leave me alone.

i actually put this truth in the court documents: even if i were to walk out of the court room with the full settlement (which has now inched up to 4679.46), we'd still have to find a mediation process, afterwards, or i'm just going to take them to court every month.

i even offered to give some of it to charity. it's really not the point.

that number can keep growing. the bigger it gets, the larger a fraction of it gets, too. it can eventually get to a point where i shouldn't expect to see it, even if i win it. but, that's fine, because it's not the actual answer to anything.

the preferred answer was an epiphany. i was hoping i could help. sure, it's still possible. right now, the right answer is a legal mentor to get them to follow common sense legal principles - to tell them when they're fucking up and tell them not to.

that is infinitely more valuable to me than an unending court battle that i keep winning.

they fucked up within hours: i have two more examples of harassment, just this evening.

but, things are different, now: i have a paralegal that has at least taken a couple of courses to run it through, and he has to tell his clients whether or not these things are worth doing.

they are minor concerns, in isolation: removing an air freshener from my window sill, changing the speed of the fan that i won by court order so that it's barely working. neither of these actions cost me anything. more importantly, refraining from these actions doesn't cost the landlord anything - but carrying them out could cost her a whole lot.

any decent paralegal should look at the situation and say the following,

"well, jessica is correct: you cannot be vandalizing her window sill, as it is an extension of her living space. anything on the sill is her property. removing an item from the window sill is the same thing as removing an item from her apartment. and, she won the court order on the fan, too, so you should basically never touch it, for any reason. if these situations were one-offs, this would be a waste of time. but, they are part of a pattern of harassment that could land you in a lot of trouble. this isn't worth fighting, and this isn't worth doing. you should sign the paper - and you should leave the fan alone, and leave items on her window sill alone, too."

that is dramatically more productive from my perspective than getting into a stupid shouting match and dragging the thing to a judge.

but, i don't expect this to evaporate tomorrow. it's going to be the paralegal's responsibility for the near future to get these people to start acting like grown-ups. it could take a long time. but, in the long run, if the behaviour is slowly corrected, the issue is resolved.

otherwise, we go back to court within weeks - and i'll do it, because it's the pattern that matters, not the precise issue.

i gave them another chance...

.....to fuck up.

well, it's kind of true.

what i did was put the case on hold in order to deal with a paralegal. it's easy enough to scoff at me: i gave them a chance to get a lawyer involved? am i daft? or just imbued with gentlemanly concepts of fair play? but, it's actually better in the long run.

see, i'm far better off giving them as many chances as i can, like a tiger playing with a kill, than i am in trying to devour them multiple times. i'm going to get annoying if i take this to a judge every few weeks, and i want to avoid seeming aggressive: i am, after all, suing for harassment. i'm the victim, here. it needs to be unambiguous. i'm more likely to get a big settlement if it's at the end of incredible patience than i am if it looks like i'm coming back for seconds and thirds like a greedy glutton.

beyond tactical considerations, i'm actually genuine: what i want is for the shenanigans to end at no cost to me. it is perhaps true that the root cause of the problem is that they're all so legally clueless. perhaps a good deal of this would not have happened if they had sought proper legal advice. so, there is some reason to think that putting a lawyer between us could have a seriously positive effect.

also, i'm intuitive enough to realize that what this paralegal really wanted was to avoid the court date out of fear of being beaten by an amateur. the truth is that i actually intimidated him. he's not going to shape up in the course of weeks or months, but he may give the case less formlessness, and actually make it easier to sue as a consequence.

i actually hope that this is the end of it; they gave me back the $50 filing fee, but left me on the hook for the other $40 i spent on paper and mailing costs. i'd be surprised if it is; i should be able to add those costs on to the next date.

if i refile i can add all of the things that have happened since july 20th as further examples - at no extra cost - and increase the fine to six or potentially seven months at a better probability of winning and potentially with better evidence.

i'm sleepy. but i'll be getting to better and more productive things when i wake up.

so, i went to make a smoothie this afternoon, in the thunderstorm, and came back to a laptop with a dead processor.

this is the same laptop that was previously having electrical problems. and, i noticed that it was seizing up a little bit, this afternoon - so it didn't come totally out of nowhere.

once again, though, this laptop fails in co-ordination with my living room desktop, which went into the loop for the first time since replacing the hard drive. i don't know what that loop actually is, but i've designed the system around the need to reinstall to get rid of it. it may actually be a network virus. what's extra curious is the correlation: i seem to be getting periodic attacks by some kind of intelligence network that take everything down at the same time.

i vlog! i blog! i give you information for free!

oh, and my phone came in the other day, but don't expect me to actually use it any time soon :P. not now, with all these priorities...and, certainly not the way anybody expects. at least it's there though, right? have fun with it.

and, no, i'm not blaming the russians. i understand that the russians actually have extremely limited cyberwarfare capabilities, and are simply not technologically advanced enough to do much of anything they're currently being accused of. if i was attacked by a rogue intelligence gathering service, it was almost certainly by the good old cia. i don't think i'm very interesting to the chinese or the israelis, which are the only other serious operations running.

the storm is a good cover, right? hey - explain why everything all comes down at once, then.

nonetheless, occam's razor is to ignore the sputtering this morning and just blame it on the storm. did i get a surge? well, the power didn't actually go out, although i do think that i had a close lightning strike. but, nothing else in here got fried, and this laptop was actually on one of the better protected circuits. it doesn't quite add up; i'm not convinced.

given that i had all of the windows open, i actually think it may be more likely that the static electricity in the air got to it and shut it off as it was running hot. that would be terrible luck, basically. i've tried some dry boots and it's not working; i get the caps lock single flash, and it just shuts down. so, i'm going to have to let it sit and drain itself for a week or two. if i can fix it easily, it will be by unplugging it for a while.

for now, i swapped the drive out and am back on the backup laptop, as i was over the course of may and june. i hope it doesn't take as long to come back...

...but, even if it comes back sooner, i'm thinking i'll stick on this machine as a short term access point and go ahead and install the new drive in the other machine, which is what i was planning on doing shortly, anyways. that's what i'm going to be doing for editing in the long run.

if it doesn't come back, should i buy a new processor? i'm not confident about disassembling it. so, i might buy a new stripped down laptop (not necessarily the same model), actually, and just put the new components in it. i mean, i just bought a new hard drive and 8 gb of new ram or this: it should be running a fast sshd with 8 gb of ram. the optical drive works. if i can just get a barebones board/screen/case combo for $50 and then upgrade it with my new components, it will justify the existing investment and really be a helluva calculator. i've already spent around $200 on it, so i'm not just going to discard it - i'll find a way to reintegrate this component, one way or another.

but, am i getting fed up with it? sure. i'll give it a week or two to come back and then move on.

so, i'm probably on this machine for a good while. i haven't taken it up to 4 gb of ram yet but will soon. and, that should make it more than sufficient as an access point until i get around to reconstructing the studio.

that was a messy weekend. i found myself on a pcp buzz (i need to stop just smoking and/or eating whatever random thing anybody gives me - this was laced pot, i've been through it repeatedly and know it when i get it, it was a specific trip. i even know who i smoked it from, as i could taste it. it's a burnt taste, like hashish, but more intense) after actress, and stuck outside the bar until 5:00 am. again: i wasn't actually drunk. i didn't pass out, and i didn't vomit. i was just inoperable due to the high. in fact, i could have walked somewhere, and no doubt would have if i didn't have my bike, but i decided against bicycling until the buzz passed. safety first. well, i would have just sat outside the diner, anyways, right? i could sit outside the bar and smoke or sit outside the diner and smoke, what's the difference? as before, it took a while longer than i expected, but i caught the early bus, in the end.

saturday was even weirder, as i didn't get over until 00:30 and found myself at a party that ended at 9:30. i managed to get a lunch hour pizza on the way home, and then took until midnight on sunday to finish eating it. i again think i smoked something that kept me awake. this is the primary argument for legalization: you just really actually don't honestly know what the fuck you're smoking. you really don't. i know i was awake for 36 hours before i feel asleep.

...and that i then slept all day monday, and most of the day tuesday.

i now need to be in court in nine and a half hours, and it will be fine. i've got the information i need compiled and put together. i just need to figure out what i'm printing and what i'm not printing, and plan the rest of the morning around getting there on time.

i've decided that i'm going to wait until i get a ruling before i file a third case. this really isn't a lot of fun, after all. but, the point of this is to get them to stop, not to bankrupt them. if i put them in too difficult a situation, it could actually make it harder to sell the building. and, if i win the case, it could give me the leverage i need to make it stop.

i mean, to be clear: i plan on filing. 5 attempted evictions without cause requires a response. it's just that i'm going to want to do one thing at a time, so i'll give them a chance to respond, first.

http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.ca/2017/08/i-got-large-order-on-saturday-night-11.html

ideally, you want an educated society. it's a necessary condition one way or the other; even voting for representatives requires some understanding of where the representatives stand, so it's kind of just putting the question off. further, brexit had a layer of self-determination attached to it that is very real to average voters. the self-interest of the nation as a whole, measured by the likes of mr. dawkins, may not be the same thing as the perceived self-interest of an individual on the ground.

i would not have voted for brexit. but, britain has historically actually not been a part of europe in any meaningful way - that is a recent idea. if you had have suggested to disraeli or to shakespeare that britain, france and germany would be a part of the same alliance under the same emperor, they would have laughed at you. it is the post-war pax americana that we've all lived all our lives in that is historically absurd and unstable. or, to put it another way - did britain vote to join the eurozone in the first place?

dawkins claims he's unqualified to vote. but, dawkins is a man of formidable intelligence. if he had any self-interest in the outcome, he would educate himself. he is unqualified to vote precisely because the outcome will not affect him in any way. the people the outcome will affect are small business owners and farmers, primarily. their self-interest is not the same as the self-interest of the bourgeois and banking classes - by definition.

none of this changes the premise that the vote was held under conditions where access to information was severely distorted by social media. but, the solution is to argue for greater education, not less democracy. and, it's a little disappointing to see richard dawkins, of all people, miss the point about public education.

aug 26-27th vlog, where i enjoy one more warm weekend for the summer, and finally get the all nighter in i was looking for. 

this is embarrassing.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/propaganda-and-provocation-russia-scoffs-at-canada-s-baltic-war-games-1.4263213

aug 25th vlog, where i go to see actress and get slowed down after the show by what seems like a low iron attack.

i've said this over and over again: the best argument against racism is history.

actually, if you listen to white supremacists, it's clear that even they don't actually believe in it anymore.

the original nazis were all about how superior they were. they wanted to wipe out or enslave all of the other races, to make room for themselves. and, remember: they weren't even white supremacists- they were strictly german nationalists. the french were franks, but they had a real hate on for russians and the british, too. they even thought the poles (who live right next to them and in fact probably founded berlin) were subhuman. they were bellicose, arrogant and certain in their delusions - they were superior, and all others would be defeated by their superior intelligence and superior tactics. naturally.

today, white nationalists are all about protecting the fragility of their endangered race and their threatened culture. they talk of a "white genocide" on the bottom end of an inferiority complex. listening to them talk, it's weird to even call them supremacists at all.

of course, the truth is that they don't understand history: this white race that they've imagined never actually existed. white people probably came from central asia and intermixed with all kinds of indigenous people as they migrated into europe. in the historical period, europe has seen large scale levels of immigration from the middle east and from asia and more recently from africa. the closest thing you're gone to find to a pure white person is probably somebody off the finnish bottleneck, but even they speak an uralic language.

so, you can't even define what they're claiming is superior. what's ever come out of ukraine?

but, if you forget about that, how do you want to do this? if white people are superior, how can they be being exterminated in a genocide? now, ignoring that you can't define white, you have to find a way to define superior. well, if superiority is determined through natural selection, a white genocide suggests white people are not superior. if it's over brawn, it still doesn't work; and, if it's over brain, white people are getting outsmarted, too.

so, what these so-called white supremacists really have is an inferiority complex and a fear of not holding up. what they want is a safe space where they can breed without being polluted, because they know they're too weak to dominate the people around them - like putting a critically endangered species that can't adapt into a wildlife enclosure in a zoo.

it's the reality of it.

the tactic in canada is to slow them down until it's not profitable and they pull out.

this is a step forward.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/08/24/energy-east-pipeline-review-will-include-carbon-emissions-a-first-for-canada_a_23166201/?utm_source

this is somewhat of a surprising position from ashton & caron. the article does a good job of explaining the context, and the idea of quebecois sovereignty being paramount does make sense in a canadian context.

i don't agree with the narrative that the ndp's fall in quebec was about the niqab. the liberals had the same position as the ndp. the article makes more of an attempt to cycle around this by providing a more complex narrative, but i still think it's ultimately flawed. rather, what happened in quebec in the 2015 election was that the bloc pulled enough support away from the ndp to allow the liberals to leapfrog them; the bloc and the ndp split the left-of-liberal vote, and the liberals came up the middle. a lot of these ridings were won with 25-30% support as a consequence of truly competitive four-way races that were almost impossible to predict beforehand, but what i pulled out of the trending was a bloc bump - and that bloc bump was really mere percentage points away from leading to a return of the bloc, which would have also left the liberals with a minority government. that's what i predicted, anyways, and it was really the only error i made (i underestimated liberal seat counts by the amount that i overestimated bloc seat counts, helped by the fact that i saw the ontario sweep coming when nobody else did).

there does remain some possibility that a resurgent bloc could return the liberals to minority status in 2019. this is a far greater threat to the liberals than andrew scheer is. the ndp is a complicated player in this, as they exist between the two parties in multiple ways and can consequently pull support from either party - it is the fight between the ndp and the bloc for the left sovereigntist vote in quebec that will probably determine the outcome of the next election.

attempts to be more appealing to quebec voters are consequently extremely rational.

nor do i agree that quebec's silent revolution is unique to the province, or that canadians outside of quebec have a different viewpoint on this. rather, i'd argue that the western provinces - primarily alberta - are isolated, here, and even that is potentially an overstatement. canada is an overwhelmingly secular society, from coast-to-coast.

what is different about quebec is merely the political dynamic at play, which gives a stronger voice to nationalist parties. but, these nationalist parties are actually comparably tame. if a nationalist party of the sort were to pop up in alberta, it would be of the sort that they are warning against, not the sort they are cautiously accepting under the parameters of quebec sovereignty. nor is it clear that this is outside the realm of realistic probability. ezra levant remains popular on the canadian right; the conservative party's attempt to distance itself from him may potentially even backfire.

but, what the sovereigntist dynamic in quebec allows for is a vehicle to discuss things that does not (currently) exist elsewhere. both error bars are correct here: the spectrum in quebec amplifies voices to emulate the systems that exist in france, while the spectrum in the rest of the country silences those voices. scratch the surface, and you'd be unlikely to find a real difference.

my advice to the ndp was to avoid this. and, you'll note something that the pundits seem to forget: the values charter underlying the debate has actually failed every vote that has been centered around it. quebeckers have, in fact, consistently rejected the values charter. the existing provincial government's mandate is partially based on it's rejection of it!

recent history has demonstrated that the handful of seats that are up for grabs in rural quebec are in fact not worth abandoning the island over.

the best thing to do is to avoid this debate. but, charlie angus has the right electoral strategy, if the goal is to actually win. quebeckers, themselves, do not actually support this.

what do i think about the substance of the policy, though?

well, i'm partial to the idea of banning religious symbols on public service employees - that is crosses or crescents or stars of david. but, here's the thing: the niqab isn't actually a religious symbol. it's a fashion decision rooted in cultural hubris, sure, but it's not actually a part of islam.

...and, i'm opposed to the fashion police.

the constitution isn't likely to uphold any laws of the sort, but they can always use the notwithstanding clause, and no doubt will, as they did with the language laws. but, the fact is that there isn't even a logical connection between upholding a ban on religious symbols and enforcing a ban on niqabs and burqas. it's just not what these things actually are.

they're just scarves. really.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/08/24/ndp-leadership-hopefuls-split-on-religious-rights-in-battleground-quebec_a_23177599/

http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/everyone-knows-john-a-macdonald-was-a-bit-of-a-drunk-but-its-largely-forgotten-how-hard-he-hit-the-bottle

"we'd like to welcome you, today, to the boris yeltsin school of international affairs."

i'm going to side with the union.

i can tell you that the right honourable sir john didn't remember much of his own history.

in fact, do you know who the closest contemporary figure to sir john a mcdonald really is, in terms of ideological persuasion? rob ford.

that's right: sir john a. mcdonald was a hopeless drunk and an open racist. and, when he wasn't involved in a massive corruption scheme around building a cross-country railroad, he was pretending to rail against the gravy train.

imagine your great grandkids walking into rob ford public school. well, you shouldn't feel much better about sir john a. mcdonald.

teaching your kids the history is important, but that doesn't have much to do with what you name your school after.

how about this: how about we name our schools after neighbourhoods instead of after divisive historical tyrants?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/wynne-john-a-mcdonald-schools-1.4261433

it's a different code of conduct between gay men. they'll grab each other, slap each other, grope each other, think it's ok to randomly kiss strangers, etc. it's the culture. i guess part of being a gay guy at a gay club is being tough enough to take a random kiss, and muscular enough to push it off if you don't want it.

"why are you here then, sweetie?"

well, point taken, i guess.

i don't want to make it seem like i've been assaulted, although some people would define some of it that way. but, it's not exactly what i'm looking for in a night out, either.

so, why do i go to straight bars, again?

again: because i don't want to get hit on by men. it's the same reason that cis-women go to gay bars, just spun around the other way.

i have enough experience regarding this to know that gay men WILL grope me. every gay bar i've been to in every city i've been to one in has ended the same way, which is pushing some horny boy off me. even gay guys in straight clubs hit on me.

i'm not into it, i never have been.

i may get hit on mildly by women at straight clubs, but that's far less annoying than getting mauled by gay men. and, i frankly don't care if i piss off the straight dudes.

but, let it be clear that the point of conflict is with straight men, primarily.

yes, i've met the odd hetero ciswoman that gets catty and jealous and competitive, and they get can get downright nasty with me, but i tend to avoid spaces where those kind of women congregate - the ciswomen in the spaces i go to are mostly goths and hippies and nerds and if they're feeling this urge to destroy me then they don't act on it.

no, the primary problem comes from cismen, and there's two underlying reasons:

1) they can't fuck me, and are uncomfortable with how they're feeling about it.
2) their girlfriends are eying me, and even if they don't end up talking to me it's still giving them ideas.

i don't think i'd be better off in a lesbian bar, i'd just open up a more confusing can of worms.

i just need straight/open bars that aren't specifically trying to build a business model around access to young women. that's the situation where i'm going to run into problems, as i become a kind of poor product, as access is what the bar is actually selling. then, the straight men start bitching about it because i'm just taking up space in the bar.

detroit is going through an unfortunate police crackdown this summer. hopefully, better late night options present themselves moving into the fall.

i actually listened to this quite a bit back in 2012.

again: abstract british techno. whatever colour your skin is. they used to call it 'idm'. people don't like that. i get why. it's still useful.

but, this is what i actually want to be dancing to at 4:30 on a friday night. and i'm kind of looking forward to it.

i will state again what i said weeks or months ago...

trump can't unilaterally rip up nafta. he needs to go through congress. but, canada can do that.

we can give trump what he wants; we can help him bypass his congress. and, what is he going to give us in return?

how about a return to the initial fta, straight up? that would scratch out chapter 11. and, while i'm opposed to chapter 19, it's probably the best leverage that the canadian delegation has to keep it. then, we can build something with modern language on top of it.

it's unclear why canada would want to maintain a nafta agreement with mexico, but i'm sure they'd be willing to negotiate a new trade deal.

the universe says...

"let it be known to jessica..."

point taken. but, fuck off. i'm staying here.

let it be known to the universe: if i were to be evicted tomorrow, due to some cruel backwards legal error, the chances of me going back to ottawa are effectively zero.

i repeat: i have absolutely no interest in going back to ottawa.

the only thing that existed in ottawa that meant anything to me was my father, and he died in 2013. the truth is that i would have left ottawa years earlier if i had the money and drive, but my finances were kind of tied up with my father's, and for that reason i had to stay put. years ago, my preferred destination would have been montreal. today, i'd have probably ended up in toronto.

i'm really a big city kid; i don't like rural areas. between the christians and the wild animals, i just don't feel safe in the suburbs, let alone the countryside. on top of that, i'd end up so bored i'd almost certainly become a hopeless pothead. i'm not the type of person that would go out and explore the forest, i'm the type of person that would stay in and pout about how boring living in the sticks is.

i'm not much into thoreau, or his viewpoints. i'm really more into kropotkin. but, i'm very pro-technology. what i really want is to use technology to abolish labour and have everybody living in apartments making art.

i've mused about stopping in waterloo on my way up north, to somewhere where the air is cleaner. but, i'm still going to end up in a city. i'm going to be looking for something cheap when i do this, of course.

for right now, i have no interest in leaving windsor and would find something else here if i had to.

rule #1 of the internet: don't argue with deathtokoalas on a publicly accessible forum.

again: what is the welfare state?

the welfare state is an attempt by capital to mitigate the effects of unemployment, as they existed in the depression, and thereby strengthen the control of capital. the welfare state is a required condition when capitalism enters periods of crisis and unemployed workers are threatening unrest, general strikes and potentially a revolution.

historically, the welfare state has come about in a coalition between conservatives and socialists, and tended to be rejected by liberals, with their theory of markets, who argue that capitalism is only failing due to the corruption of the state in the first place, and unrest is best quelled by letting the markets freely produce jobs. conservatives (including the conservatives in the democratic party) have historically sided with socialists in rejecting these arguments, and instead opted to build welfare states to placate the starving masses into putting down their pitchforks. these welfare states include those built by bismarck, roosevelt and churchill. canada is actually the strange one, in that our welfare state was actually built by the liberal party (under mackenzie) - but in emulation to those built by the conservatives in england (under labour agitation, and rejected by liberals) and by the democrats in the united states (who were broadly the conservative party until the new deal, and didn't really exist on the left of the republicans until the republicans moved to their right with the southern strategy).

a smart and non-ideological president would be reacting to the unrest on the ground by expanding the welfare state first, and taking steps to create jobs second. that's what churchill would have done as much as it is what roosevelt would have done - not because it is socialist, but because it is realist in it's rejection of market utopianism.

capital has a choice in adjusting to it's own greed: placate (and reform) or repress. repression is dangerous, because it could lead to revolt. the smart thing to do is placate and reform. and, historically, plenty of conservatives have realized that.

btw, you know that marx used to do something really similar to what i'm doing here, right?

let's be clear about this.

it's not like nafta accidentally gutted the manufacturing sector; this was an entirely purposeful project, for the purpose of maximizing revenue for shareholders. this much is clear: nafta was supposed to outsource jobs to mexico. that was the purpose of the agreement.

so, when these talking heads make the circuits through the corporate media, they're right to say it was a success - it has successfully shifted production to mexico, which has weaker labour standards and weaker environmental laws to get in the way of profit maximization. that's what it intended to do, and it's been a great success in doing it. they're right. no ambiguities.

but, there were supposed to be all these other jobs created, instead. laid-off workers were supposed to retrain for higher paying jobs in more technical industries. it's never been entirely clear whether anybody really thought this would happen or not, but by now it's clear enough that it hasn't and it isn't going to. but, this was always approached as a kind of corollary, a sort of necessary cost involved in moving production to more profitable jurisdictions, which was the actual purpose of the deal.

now, we have all of these laid-off workers creating all kinds of unrest. the system is at least working in directing this unrest towards race riots instead of towards bankers. but, it's not an ideal situation. the ideal way to eliminate social unrest is to create jobs and send these people to work.

it follows that capital must acknowledge that mistakes have been made and that some steps must be taken to redistribute some wealth to prevent further unrest. in recent history, democrats have been more likely to argue for a maintenance of the welfare state to keep this unrest in check, whereas republicans have pushed through "poor laws" under the guise of welfare reform, officially under the delusions of market theory. but, we may be in the process of a role reversal.

to be clear: i don't expect trump to be a champion of anybody except the banks. but, given it's flirtation with steve bannon, the party may be more keenly aware of the need to create jobs for these people, and the corollaries of failing to do so, than you think.

this is a strawman argument; i've never heard anybody push the idea of banning components that are produced at too low of a wage.

but, mexico's low wages are not an accident. they can't unionize. the cops are thugs. these are issues that the government has to address. in a word, the problem in mexico is corruption.

would you would do, then, is introduce punitive tariffs in regions that do not apply appropriate labour standards (including collective bargaining rights and proper wage floors), as well as environmental standards. there's no banning involved. there's just pricing out

..and, if that leads to labour unrest, that's a good thing.

i'm not naive: i understand that none of these governments represents the interests of workers. what mexico really needs is a way to kickstart it's labour movement, which is currently bogged down by government regulations. if i wanted to be snide, i could say something about cutting the red tape around the rights to organize and strike.

what a nafta deal can do is actually minimal - it can lay a law of decent standards down, and exclude them through tariffs if they won't comply. it's mexican workers that then need to rise up and demand their rights. and, if you think that sounds like colonialism, you can type me up an essay explaining your viewpoint from a cushy seat in the ministry of labour rights.

again: we're not going to get a lot out of this from the top down, and we should all be aware of that. but, there is some possibility that all of this unrest is leading capital to the realization that it needs to do something about the unemployment levels that nafta has left us with. forcing mexico to acknowledge collective bargaining rights is actually a pretty basic requirement. it's easy to say that the deal shouldn't have gone through without it, except that it was actually the point, and we can see that this was a mistake (we have increasing levels of unrest, not tech jobs for all). this is in truth very much long overdue, entirely feasible and entirely attainable - and all decent people should support it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/business/economy/nafta-labor-unions-wages.html

again: you can gender me how you want, but you're setting yourself up for a fall, and i'm not going to cushion it for you: i'm going to let you break your face on the pavement.

it's really better if you just listen to what i say.

but you can learn the hard way and get hurt, if you insist.

so, anarchists on the ground have long suspected that the 'black bloc' protesters are what you call agents provocateur.

this isn't exactly a conspiracy theory. it seems like it is in each instance, but it's more of a question of trying to identify a known phenomenon. this is something that was invented by bismarck and has been utilized by police forces in north america for a very long time. the black bloc in the quebec city ftaa protests was actually 'doxxed', although you wouldn't have used that term at the time - but it is a factual statement to state that there were black bloc agents working for the state at those protests.

so, we know that there are going to be agents at protests, the hard part is identifying them. but, it's not actually hard to identify them, if you've been to a few protests - especially if you're the meek tranny that they want to move out of the way. when a cop grabs you by the arm, you know it.

it's tempting to say something about how this is the stupidity i warned you against. but, this is clearly the work of a provocateur. and, the more important thing to draw attention to is the threat that the government may use the situation to roll back even more civil liberties, because that is probably the reason that this happened in the first place.

http://globalnews.ca/news/3683586/counter-protesters-clash-with-police-in-quebec-city/?utm_source=GlobalToronto&utm_medium=Facebook

fwiw, i think that the stories of bannon's influence were greatly exaggerated: trump only ever saw him as a pragmatic and cynical means to win and hold power, and now that this is crumbling, he's served his purpose and is out the door.

the idea that bannon had any real influence is not upheld by any evidence; it seems to me like it was less about bannon controlling trump, and more about the banking wing of the republican party using bannon as a useful idiot.

"you'll be the first to go..."

i actually remember the first day i walked into classes pretty well. my first class was calculus 102, which was a full year credit long course for honours math students. i was walking into a math/physics double major. there were a couple of pure math students, but it was just the general elite math course, meaning there were other double majors: math/economics, math/chemistry, math/comp. sci. i think there was even a math/psych student. there were no engineers, except the ones at the butt of the jokes.

it was a small first year class by university standards - maybe 40 students. the small class size was a consequence of the course being set aside specifically for honours math students, that is students that were expected to carry forward in honours math courses. i ended up switching, but a lot of these students had obscure degree requirements and would have ended up graduating alone in their classes.

it was in a room that wasn't any larger than a high school classroom.

i was expecting a room full of absolute nerds. what that meant, to me, was an abstraction of the berkeley stereotype; not pocket protectors, but pink floyd shirts. more broadly, i was expecting to meet a bunch of kids that didn't care about social expectations and didn't adhere to norms and had spent most of their lives as outcasts as a consequence of it.

i wore a pair of disshelved jeans and a loose-fitting plain white t-shirt with a faint mustard stain on it. i didn't bother showering or shaving.

i was kind of mortified when i walked in and instead found a bunch of extremely rich kids wearing exceedingly expensive clothes and talking about network television.

if that day had turned out differently, if i had met the nerds i was hoping for, i might have engaged. but, the fact is that i should have turned around right then and there - because i knew it, in my gut.

i've said this before - if i could go back in time, i wouldn't study an academic subject, at all. rather, i'd take the money and invest it and live off the dividends.

my school years were really spent mostly focused on music production. second year was particularly bad; i rarely went to class, and didn't bother studying until the day before the exam. i say i didn't get along with anybody in the class, but i didn't really try very hard - i just didn't have any interest. i'd say i spent maybe 5 hours a week on my school work through second year, and 100 hours a week working on music. it was abundantly clear where my interests were, but i had to make counter-intuitive choices to maximize my ability to explore those interests - i didn't have the freedom to just sit and create, i had to either go to school or get a job. getting a job would have been far more time consuming than going to school, so i "went to school" out of necessity (but didn't actually go to school).  i didn't even want to be there at all. there was actually one surreal period where i spent more time helping my dad with his homework (he was taking a business management course through correspondence) than i did doing my own.

any decisions i made about labour were always made to maximize the amount of time i could spend recording. so, the actual reason i went to university was that it meant i didn't have to go to work (and, i didn't have to go to work because i refused to go to school if i had to go to work, anyways). you could maybe feel badly for my father about the whole thing, as he was just constantly trying to coerce what he (mis)understood as reason out of me, and i just kept coming up with these responses that clearly broke his heart. but, i wasn't going to go be an engineer to make my dad proud, or something. i'd rather fucking kill myself.

i didn't really have a plan for the future. i mean, i guess i hoped the music would be successful; i think i knew it never would be. i didn't even want to be a superstar, i just wanted to be able to survive by doing what i actually cared about. but, my long term plans were always based on the assumption that it would eventually work out, and i'd be able to find ways to survive in the mean time.

i never had any intention of using my education to get a job; it was just a way to avoid going to work and maximize my time spent on art. so, the amount of time that i spent doing school work was in truth always quite minimal - and, my emotional and intellectual investment into it was in truth always quite scarce.

if you're going to meet me at a bar and talk about things i've put on the internet, i'd rather we talk about the music. it's the music that i've put my actual effort into. it's the music that i've tried to publish. it's the music that i actually care about. it's the music that i want you to interpret me through.

i have not published any math or science and do not expect that i ever will. i'm not upset about this. but, there is still a lot of discography to work through.

this paradox is particularly useful in demonstrating my argument that physics is essentially impossible to do until we understand space.

put simply, we need the following work flow:

1. understand the space we exist in (space in a kantian or descartian sense, not outer space).
2. start math over from scratch, with a proper understanding of space (in fact, we can find most of the work already done).
3. reconstruct the physics using the math that now exists, which properly understands space.

what we have right now is something more like:

1. do physics that needs complicated math to understand space.
2. ask the mathematicians for it.
3. rely on their expertise that it's "right".

meanwhile, the mathematicians are being perfectly open about the fact that the math they're doing makes no attempt to verify whether it's valid in the universe we inhabit or not. nor do the mathematicians care if the math they're doing is true in this universe or not, either. the circle completes: that's a physics problem.

there was this argument advanced by the likes of kant that math is the perfect representation of perfect knowledge, and philosophers actually ran pretty far with it, but, while kant was writing, gauss (a very competent and very famous mathematician) was actually in the process of disproving exactly what kant thought was perfect knowledge. oops. regardless, this kantian delusion has really set hold in the minds of physicists, for some reason. you'd think physicists would listen to gauss instead of kant! not so, though.

(of course, physicists listen to gauss instead of kant every time they do relativity. but, as they're doing relativity, they repeat the kantian lie that mathematics is some kind of language of nature. the problem is that nobody makes physicists study their own history, or take a credit worth of philosophy classes.)

the math itself is a model. that's what mathematicians will tell you: math is not a perfect description of space, and nature doesn't adhere to it as a script, but is merely a model to better understand it. but, it's a non-empirical model. and, we know from experience that non-empirical models always fail.

maybe you've heard of this, maybe you haven't. if the system of mathematics allows for this, that system is obviously not modeling our universe very well. we should consequently expect that any physics that relies on a flawed system of mathematics will also be flawed; that a system of physics based on a mathematical model that is full of contradictions and paradoxes will also be full of contradictions and paradoxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox

ok, this is my embed, i just have to wait for it to exist:

this might be a better workaround to youtube dropping flash, as it still seems to work for embeds.

let's see...

that one doesn't embed the playlist. let me try this:



it doesn't like the idea of embedding the watch later. this is just proof of concept:


the embed was wrong, this works:


maybe i should try again for the watch later..no...

what exactly are we importing via st. john's and why aren't we producing it in a way that requires less transportation?

the companies surely realize that this is just going to make them less competitive. but, we ought to be trying to reduce trans-oceanic imports, anyways. if it makes local goods more competitive, that's a good thing.

but, it's a really dark reflection on this company that they expect some kind of tax revolt over measures designed to save the lives of endangered whales. that's a very disturbing view of human priorities.

better yet: why don't we boycott oceanex?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/oceanex-right-whales-surcharge-1.4252721

aug 18-19 vlog, where i decided not to waste the weather by essentially wasting the night.

to be clear: modern physics has obvious engineering applications, and that's fine. but, i really don't care about that.

what i care about is an epistemology - a way to understand the universe. as mentioned, i realized quickly that i'm not a scientist: i don't think like one. the few friends i had were always musicians; i never got along well with the kids in these science classes i took through high school, but i guess i thought things would be different when i got to university (they weren't). it's not like i found a group of like-minded people in the math department, either, but there were at least a couple of hopeless social outcasts in the math program at carleton that i could smoke and make misanthropic wisecracks with.

the reality is that i would have probably found more like-minded people in the philosophy department if i had bothered to go over and look, because i was approaching science as a philosopher rather than as a scientist - i wanted all the knowledge to myself, with little interest in actually doing anything with it.

i mean, people asked me what i was going to do with a math degree, and it always struck me as a stupid question: as though the purpose of going to school is to prepare yourself for your place as a cog in the system, or to better the world or something. it didn't even cross my mind. i didn't have an answer, because i'd never really thought about it. i just wanted a search for knowledge.

at the end of the process, i resigned myself to existing in too primitive of a space in human evolution to get the kind of answers i want. so, just hand me my guitar, instead.

but, i'm not going to deny the engineering applications of modern physics. it works well enough from that perspective, even if i think it's up against a really hard block in the near future.

but, as a way to actually understand the universe, modern physics really fails terribly in producing satisfying conclusions - and that's all i ever cared about.

but, let's say high school physics was all modern physics - let's say i went through a curriculum that didn't even mention classical physics. no apples falling on people's heads, just straight to relativity in a curved universe and god playing dice at the subatomic level. would i have enrolled in a physics program in the first place?

emphatically: no. i enrolled to study a newtonian universe.

i'd be a lot less cynical about physics if they had just told me the fucking truth in the first place. but, i would have probably studied biology, instead.

put simply: they lied to me three times, then they put something completely preposterous in front of me and asked me to believe it, and i simply didn't - instead, i walked away.

and, i've never regretted it.

but, i need to be explicit: i didn't believe it. well, how many times do you expect you can lie to me before i tell you that?

there is an underlying theory. give me a call when you work it out.

i don't know if they still teach kids classical physics or not, but i can tell you that i didn't want to let go of something i understood well for something that struck me as past the point of absurd and into the point of dystopic disinformation. i mean, i realized pretty quickly that i wasn't a scientist. i never had that quest for discovery that i guess a lot of kids had; i didn't have this zeal to fix the errors or solve the mysteries, i was just frustrated that i had to take the same course every year because it was wrong last year. rather than take the information as it was presented, fully cognizant that i'd eventually be told most of it is wrong, i found myself trying to get ahead of the program and figure out what they were going to tell me is actually wrong. the intent may have been to foster skepticism, but it instead left me unable to even take any of it seriously. i went for the assumptions nobody touches: photons obviously have mass, but you're assuming they don't, so then what?

a scientist would look at all of this as a challenge to work through. i wasn't remotely interested. what i wanted was to understand the truth, not to spend my time doing experiments and guessing what assumption was useful and what wasn't.

math offered me something that modern physics couldn't: it let me search for truth, rather than leave me guessing at approximations. but, i could have switched into math and taken physics courses on the side. i didn't. and, the reason i didn't was that i hated doing the labs; i hated using my hands, i hated doing the actual science. my electives were actually mostly math courses.

i've never fully shaken the idea that what they're teaching at the universities is a distraction, and that the government is carefully pulling kids out of classes to teach them the actual science. that's how little sense that quantum physics made to me: it struck me as a conspiracy against reason.

i don't want to live in a world defined by random probabilities. i want a theory of physics. and, i'm not interested in learning about the quantum theory, for that reason - whether it is true or not.

i've never claimed to be a physicist, or to have any expertise in physics. in fact, i've stated repeatedly that i abandoned physics very early because i thought that the quantum theory was absolute bullshit. and, i still think that. i exist in a largely classical reality.

i have never taken any advanced courses in physics.

my degree is in mathematics.

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/caivano-and-elliott-warning-a-new-nafta-could-prevent-vital-medicines-getting-to-millions-worldwide

the legally correct way to have this discussion is to frame it around property rights, and extend concepts of speech that exist in real life into the digital world. it's not as difficult as you might think, except that there's a piece missing - we don't have any publicly owned spaces on the internet. in real life, it is the public square that protests take place in for the precise reason that nobody can clear them out - and we have constitutional rights that ensure nobody can clear them out. this just doesn't currently exist on the internet.

further, having the backbone of the internet run by private companies is a lot like having privately owned roads - it's not sustainable in the long run. the actual internet is of course run by the military; in the long run, it's inevitable that this will be maintained as a part of municipal, regional and national infrastructure. i've long argued for the nationalization of transmission lines and dns servers - and, yes, that means the cops can pull you over if you're drunk, but there should be constitutional protections that prevent them from stopping you from marching down the street. having all of the streets in private hands is a kind of technological feudalism. it may perhaps be when they abolish net neutrality and start charging tolls that we stand up and reclaim the lines.

WHOSE BROADBAND SPECTRUM?

the internet itself is then arranged into sites that exist on privately owned servers. the owners of those sites rent space on these privately owned servers, which is like a business renting space in a commercial complex. of course, some businesses own their own buildings, too. when you go to the forum on the site, it is like entering into a coffee shop or bar and chatting with the people in it.

so, who is going to throw the patron out? the owner of the shop/site - entirely at their discretion. that doesn't need to change, much.

and, who is going to evict the tenant? the owner of the property - in accordance with existing law. this law needs to be written, but my analogy should make it clear how it should be written.

the missing piece is that space for public expression, which is protected by constitutional rights. it's up to people to agitate for it and then keep it truly free....

...but you can't be arguing that you have the right to go on to a private server and say whatever you want, then accuse a private business of a speech violation. that's like walking into a bank, taking a shit on the counter and claiming it's protected - then arguing that the bank is not upholding the constitution. it's completely incoherent.

what should happen here, then? well, the government should be policing the roads. they would need to declare the site an unlawful assembly. and, the site would have access to due process.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/charlottesville-neo-nazis-white-supremacists-tech-hate-1.4253406

some kind strangers watched over me in a point of weakness last week.

i returned the favour last night.

universe: we even?

i'm not one to hold on to monuments of the past for the sake of it; if a historic church is in the way of a new development, and the new development is a useful allocation of space, i'm generally going to be in favour of tearing the church down. in that sense, i'll be the first to argue for tearing down monuments to failed ideologies - whether those monuments be to the confederacy or to the church or to any other institution that has held back progress.

but, i realize the importance of maintaining history where it's warranted, as well; i'm not a member of the taliban.

there's lots of reasons to be careful about this. the statues and monuments are, after all, public art. sometimes they're representative of a certain style that existed in a certain period, and have value in their maintenance for studies of art history. others have inscriptions that should be maintained for the historical record. generally speaking, statues of this sort experience the end of their lives, which can exist in debilitating lapses into dementia, in the retirement homes of art museums - and often to protect them from looters or vandals. it seems like it's time to put some of these statues away.

but, again, it's important to listen to what people are saying, and be leery of voices that want to destroy history, outright - and make sure they do not come into positions of power.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/protesters-arrest-confederate-statue-durham_us_5995b749e4b0acc593e5ef8b

https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/08/18/us-dairy-divided-over-canadas-supply-management-system-in-nafta.html

you must be aware of the history, and avoid becoming influenced by bolsheviks, whom will stab you in the back at the first chance.


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

smashing nazis is necessary.

but, advancing a revolutionary cause means smashing up the banks.

actually, i think the focus ought to be on harnessing the revolutionary potential floating around, not on getting bogged down in a war between nazis and authoritarian marxists; and, as the nazis identify themselves, the stalinists do, too.

again: smashing nazis is necessary. but, preventing co-option by the authoritarian left is also essential. it wasn't franco that defeated the anarchists in spain, or in ukraine, either - it was stalin. he was always the greater threat to us, as he realized we were always the greater threat to him. if you trust them, they will destroy you.

but, beyond that, there's a certain application of divide and conquer at work. in the midst of all of this, where is the class analysis? where is the revolt against capital? where is the revolution?

if people want to go, let's go. but, let's do something productive while we're at it, please - let's make sure we're actually organizing. otherwise, this is ultimately just a waste of time.

...and, they will merely laugh as they continue their consolidation of power, watching us bicker from their towers, above.

so, what this article is telling me is that these third way people don't understand economics.

the kneejerk response is that the way to increase opportunity is to offer free tuition, and i support that, but not in that context. free tuition on it's own is likely to restrict opportunity by creating increased competition for scarce positions and even more downward pressures on wages. we are already over-educated for the job market that exists; we have people with master's degrees waiting tables, and people trying to balance defending their thesis with their coffee shop job - and potentially even realizing that there are more long term opportunities at the coffee shop.

debt is a burden, sure. but, the more pressing requirement at the moment is job creation.

and, how do we create jobs? c'mon kids: how do we create jobs?

(*crickets*)

by stimulating an increase in aggregate demand!

(oh. yeah. of course. increasing demand. how could i forget?)

the tuition thing is actually supply-side economics. it's not sanders' argument, mind you - he wants to cut the debt, which works out to a tax cut for the lower middle class, which is the kind of tax cuts you want, in order to stimulate the economy. it's better thought through than his opponents would have you believe, because i've never seen a costing with a proper multiplier effect worked in. the truth is that it will actually pay for itself in tax revenue, as all of that money lost to tuition instead gets spent on stuff.

which brings us back to the initial question: what do you do to increase opportunity? you stimulate an increase in aggregate demand, which is the only way that we know how to create jobs. and, how do you do that? you give more money to people that have less, so they can spend it.

if these guys had any idea at all what they're talking about, they would realize that.

but, maybe they just want to open up more spaces in astronaut school.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/business/economy/democratic-party-economy-inequality.html

you know, a couple of years ago, these same car companies were at the treasury, hat in hand, begging for a bail out. the problem with shifting production outside of nafta is that there's not going to be anybody willing to save you the next time you go bankrupt - and you will, because that's the nature of poorly regulated capitalism.

obama made a huge error in spinning these companies off. he should have just nationalized them. and, maybe trump might want to think about that - and remind them of it - if they get too snotty.

maybe if we the people took control of the auto sector it would fucking convert to fucking electricity already.

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/us-nafta-demands-on-auto-rules-of-origin-could-backfire-experts-say/article36020951/

the reason i moved to pc financial was to avoid bank fees. as it is, pc financial gives me free debit card access and free checks. i don't care about the other things, but if they start charging me a monthly fee then i'm moving to a credit union.

i don't currently have teller access, and it can be a little annoying sometimes. if i can get teller access, it's a benefit - but it's not worth paying a monthly fee for.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cibc-president-s-choice-simplii-financial-1.4250110

democracy is not something that happens when you elect somebody in a ballot box, it's something that happens when members of the community get together and govern themselves. the model that antifa uses is actually an example of actual democracy, rather than some kind of antithesis to it. but, the burden of proof then falls on the antifascist body to ensure that what it is struggling against is real.

i've said this repeatedly: if i felt that antifa were actually struggling against actual nazis, i would be on their side in a second. the people marching in charlottesville were clearly actual nazis. as far as i can tell, that is the first time in recent months that that has actually been true.

you can't argue with nazis any more than you can argue with a lion. i understand his historical arguments, but i suspect that what he is saying is too literate for most americans to follow. this is something more tangible for people that don't know the history: imagine you're face to face with a mountain lion. do you think you're likely to talk your way out of this, or do you think you'd better defend yourself? now, let's all recognize that nazis have the mindset of remorseless predators. you are not an opponent, you are prey.

it's just absolutely imperative that you identify nazis correctly, and that you do not misidentify conservatives or liberals as nazis and then treat them the way you would treat nazis, which is what was happening at some of the other protests. and, the way you do that is you involve yourself in the collectives; the answer to the problems inherent to democracy are, in truth, almost always more democracy, as they are truly problems of democracy being poorly applied.

these are perspectives coming from an anarcho-communist, who is both a socialist and a civil libertarian. there's no conflict between these viewpoints; in truth, they make the most sense in conjunction with each other: true libertarianism is communism. you should be wary of people that want to set up a dichotomy, as what they are telling you is that they do not truly believe in civil rights and are using the situation for personal gain, and perhaps dangerously so.

he is right that there is no equivalency, but his arguments really leave a lot to be desired.

i also want to point out that if the administration starts falsely blaming attacks on leftists then it is not likely to be the consequence of some inability to deal with reality, but a tactic of suppression. i'll need to break my own advice here and use a historical comparison: hitler dissolved the legislature by burning it down and blaming it on communists, then claimed he needed special powers to fight them off. this is another reason why it is so important that antifascists pick their battles wisely as, equivalency or not, the reality is that the majority of the country abides by a pacifist christian value system that sees all violence as equivalent and will be easily manipulated into handing over stronger police powers should it be shown enough pictures of "left-wing extremists".

smashing nazis is necessary. but, you have to make sure that what you're smashing is actually a nazi. it's critically important.

i did an apology tour last night to the people that i puked all over. i think it went well, although there was an encounter afterwards at donovan's that i simply didn't understand at all. i reiterate: i didn't understand at all. maybe somebody can explain that to me at some later date. i dunno.

but, i'm learning that i have doppelganger in detroit. this person may frequent ann arbor, as well as the clubs in corktown and mexicantown in detroit.

i suppose it would be useful to meet this person. however, i can't react to things i didn't do. and, i'm sorry - it's kind of other people's responsibility to make sure they've got the right person.

october 7, 1763.

it was actually an important date in the history of both the united states and canada: the royal proclamation, that declared that the king of england has sole ownership of all indigenous land in north america. therefore, colonists were forbidden by law from purchasing land directly from the native americans. instead, only the crown could buy the land from the natives, which would then partition it to the colonists using a feudal parcel system that we refer to today as 'fee simple' - all land in the colonies would be arranged into fiefdoms owned by the crown, for rent to colonists. this is an understood factor in the war of independence, as the colonists wanted what is called allodial title, in buying land from the natives, who up to that day were considered sovereign land holders under british law. this would give them real ownership, and avoid the ability of the king to inflict property taxes.

the royal proclamation essentially extinguished a right of indigenous land title under british law; at the stroke of a pen, the king declared himself the owner of the entire continent, despite the existence of sovereign tribes living on the land.

you would think that indigenous groups in canada would look at this day as the darkest in their history, as it was the end of their legal sovereignty under colonial law. but, they are instead taught that this was the day that the king recognized their rights under the law as british subjects. there were public celebrations in indigenous communities to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the proclamation.

i've been in absolutely surreal debates with indigenous people around this topic that have just left me baffled.

this is a small step. but, everybody should welcome it.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/ontario-first-nation-ottawa-sign-self-governing-education-agreement/article35996541/?reqid=8b5fdb28-f90e-4239-a0eb-e5dc62b02f71

treating your workers like serfs is not a "specific efficiency", and bringing in the ricardian machinery around it is simply disingenuous. but, you expect that from the fraser institute.

http://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/unifor-hopes-to-put-mexico-in-check-with-once-in-a-generation-nafta-re-negotiation

i've been over this with nafta polling before: nobody's ever opposed the idea of a trade agreement with the united states, what's always been contentious are certain aspects of it. you have to get really modular in your polling if you want to get a handle on what people are thinking about this. you want to see the trees here, not the forest; these vague questions just obscure the point.

i was too young to be actively engaged in the debate. but, i think that the liberals were both right to oppose it and right to sign it - and i think that most of the ways they criticized the deal have proven astute and poignant, and overwhelmingly correct.


remember: the liberal position was never against reciprocity (it was their idea...), but against certain components of the deal that were seen as surrendering sovereignty. what happened, of course, is that the ndp performed very well under broadbent and the party split the vote; polls in the 80s were not aligned with the conservative position, but split between the liberal position (necessarily trade, but not necessarily nafta) and the ndp position (no trade deal at all).

i certainly hope the party approaches renegotiating the deal with the same broad mindset it had in 1988, with an attempt to try and fix some of the problems they had to let get away at the time. again: their criticisms of the deal have proven astute, poignant and overwhelmingly correct. there's the part on chapter 11, for example: i'm not convinced that a turner or chretien government would have been able to overcome opposition in their own party to sign a deal with that in it. and, it has caused serious damage in canada. we would be far better off without that chapter. it probably wasn't worth cancelling the deal over, though. freeland included that in her list of demands, and you just wouldn't see that kind of language coming from a conservative government because they've never opposed it.

on the other hand, democrats and republicans say basically the same thing on trade; you could take statements by bush and obama and throw them in a hat and mix them up and legitimately not know who said what, except maybe through hints in sophistication of language. and, obama ran and won on the same buy america provisions that trump ran and won on, too.

granted: in the end, the liberals may end up sounding like the conservatives on trade. more precise polling would demonstrate that this will be a liability for them. but, if the older voices in the party win out, the canadian position on certain things may even be (perhaps pleasantly) unrecognizable to even well-informed canadians. as the american trade people have up to this point done essentially all of their trade negotiations with conservatives, they may not see this coming, or even be aware of these differences, and we may catch them off guard on certain points that the conservatives have never opposed, or bring issues to the table that the conservatives never brought to the table.

the liberals should know that people are going to be paying attention, and are going to want to see the liberals demonstrate that they are not just the same thing as conservatives, on trade. this is a substantive voting issue. and, the party has an opportunity to finally define itself properly, on it, by drawing attention to the differences, which is what it should be doing, at least domestically.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-nafta-talks-polls-1.4247820

aug 15-16 vlog, where i go back to the anarchist house to apologize for the food poisoning outburst, unaware of the potential underlying cause of iron deficiency.

no, actually, i'm sick of this.

enough time has past that you should be able to throw your party allegiances in the trash, or at least put them aside, when it comes to clear empirical observation. whether you were a disgruntled sanders supporter or a trump supporter, you need to pull your head of your ass, now: it was the most obvious thing in the fucking world that trump was the media's preferred candidate. that is the reason i predicted he would win.

all of the major networks gave him way more coverage. even the liberal ones. even the jewish ones. and, perhaps especially the liberal jewish ones.

if you're still holding to the absolute canard that clinton was the establishment candidate, you need to go kill yourself, already. ffs.

or, you can look at it like this: if she was the establishment candidate, she would have won, right?

https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/info/20010/risk_factors_and_prevention/149/mediterranean_diet

so, what's my political wisdom on where trump stands on nafta?

i told you they didn't want to get rid of obamacare, and would fuck around for months over it. i was basing that analysis on things i had read at sites like counterpunch during the obama years, but i'm not aware of anybody else that saw what happened coming. and, i told you about the russian fiasco before it happened, too - because it was just the obvious logical corollary of the clear fact that the cia rigged the election to put trump in power. trump was an inside job! so, what about nafta?

in fact, i've already posted this here several times: "cancel the tpp and rewrite nafta" is going to, in the end, become "replace nafta with the tpp". and, you don't need to go to obscure sites or have a math degree to figure that out, it's all over the business press.

one of the selling points that obama used for the tpp is that it had environmental and labour standards, although how these would be enforced in a country like indonesia was never made clear. the precise focus of improving mexico's labour standards is a lot easier to grapple with, and consequently a lot easier to support. it's attainable. i mean, they told us that free markets would increase standards of living in mexico; that was a lie, and a malicious one, but it wasn't some fatalistic necessity - mexico should have higher living standards and doesn't due to absurd amounts of corruption. but, it's certainly created jobs, at least, and that's a precursor to use government to balance the playing field and actualize the promises that market economics has failed to deliver, and will always fail to deliver. i can support this. and, i don't know how you get mexico to let go of it's oligarchic corruption without getting threatening with it, either.

i've been saying for a long time that the way you save nafta is that you have to get tough with enforcement in mexico. they're a laggard, here. and, they're dragging the whole thing down.

the part of the tpp that was most daunting was it's strengthening of intellectual property rights, which is going to increase the price of everything at the benefit of almost nobody. this is something we're going to feel more in a country like canada, as it's going to hurt our regulatory systems that keep prices down. this is something the left needs to fight. it's going to be the focus of opposition.

but, i don't know what a cost-benefit is on this, yet. some of what i'm hearing may actually be a real improvement. is it worth supporting an agreement that levels wages out, if it increases drug prices?

i do think that the trump administration wants a "deal". but, this is different, because it has to co-ordinate with actors outside of the country. and, i'm not sure it's going to get what it wants, partly because what it wants is kind of outlandish.

there is a different government in canada now, as well. that is going to be the biggest difference between tpp negotiations and nafta renegotiation. obama was basically a republican, anyways, so he didn't disagree much with republicans on trade. trudeau is dealing with a different dynamic - he, himself, may share most of obama's views on trade, but he's dealing with a lot of opposition in his party that sees tpp and nafta style deals as a process of ending canadian sovereignty. the liberals were actually largely responsible for the auto pact, and it was actually the elder trudeau that initiated nafta discussions, but the liberals have been out of power for the actual substantive negotiations over the fta, the nafta and the tpp. they campaigned hard against nafta. so, the united states is going to find itself face-to-face with a different animal, this time around. there are prominent old veterans of the 80s battles in the party that must know this is their only chance to fix what they see as catastrophic problems - and these voices should be supported.

what i'm getting at is that canada is the wildcard here and that the outcome is going to depend on what we want, which isn't yet clear. the liberals were always confusing on trade. they never had a united voice.

but, is trump fucking around on this? no - he wants an update. and, what he's going to push is going to look a lot like the tpp.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/17/private-sector-advisory-group-suggests-nafta-rewrite-based-on-tpp.html

do you think that trump pushing for patent rights for pharmaceuticals or breaking up supply management is any less ridiculous or standoffish than a chapter on indigenous rights?

are we to believe that trump thinks that trudeau wants an agreement that allows for a final abrogation of canadian sovereignty, or the final takeover of canada by american capital?

i tend to agree with coyne in roundabout ways - rarely at face, but it's because he tends to miss the obvious and get to substantive points in these roundabout ways, instead. and, coyne is right, in a sense, here: this is a ridiculous and mostly pr-driven response to an equally ridiculous set of demands. and, if anybody set this up to fail, it was trump.

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-is-the-liberals-nafta-wish-list-a-sign-they-are-setting-up-talks-up-to-fail/wcm/e977f815-7311-4598-ab21-77df1d955acf

that sounds close to right, to me.

but, is she just telling us what we want to hear?

if she is, she left out water and pharmaceuticals.

no, seriously: this is a good start. it's certainly a lot better than it could be. that said, the drug thing is really key for everybody, on both sides of the border and is probably what a poll is going to identify as the public's biggest concern, in canada. but, i'm just a nerd on the internet, i can't go through this point-by-point. but, i can call on people more qualified than i am (toby sanger? maude barlow?) to get to work on it.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nafta-canada-demands-list-1.4246498

tim kaine is going to run for president in 2020, whether you like it or not.

i'd take this a step further: these institutions should be secularized. why are tax funds going to catholic hospitals? but, they shouldn't be privatized or shut down, they should be converted into normal hospitals.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/assisted-dying-religion-ethics-accessibility-1.4244328

but, to be clear: it's not just that abolishing government means abolishing property.

it's that the reason you want to abolish government is that it's the only way to abolish property.

being an anarchist on the left consequently should really be thought of as the ideological position that attaining freedom means abolishing all property; abolishing the state is just a necessary, albeit not sufficient, step to the elimination of property.

i mean, you don't think property rights exist somewhere out there in the ether, do you?

a "property right" is a law passed by an oligarchy, and enforced with a gun. the term is older than orwell, but it's an incoherent contradiction in terms. proudhom deconstructed this well - for if you have property then you are infringing on the rights of others, and to uphold the rights of all is to abolish property. property rights are neither freedom nor theft but truly impossible, and the only outcome of a system built on property rights is an oppressive dystopia.

but, the basic point is that property can only exist in the presence of government. there really isn't a substantial difference between these concepts; government and property are largely the same thing. and, the so-called ancaps that wish to suggest otherwise are really just living in a fantasy reality.

an anarchist would not interpret regulatory bodies as "big government", because it would reject the underlying premise of property rights. the government does not exist to regulate the market, but to protect it from regulation. regulation - real regulation by democratic or scientific bodies, not captured industry bodies - is consequently a way to break through the statist system of property rights and assert control by the people over their own resources.

regarding meat....well, maybe we shouldn't really have slaughterhouses. but, if we're to have slaughterhouses, they should belong to the people, and not to corporations. what currently prevents the democratization of resources is the government, through it's enforcement of property rights. regulation is consequently not about the government "interfering" in the realm of "private production", but about the people abolishing the state's control over resources, through the tyranny of property.

what removing the government from the business of meat processing means is abolishing the property rights used by private corporations and setting up local councils that distribute the meat on a needs basis.

nonsense about "free markets" is exactly that.