but, this isn't a winning strategy, though. what it is - and it is this, transparently - is a cynical ploy to try and pry values voters away from the republican party. it's evolved clintonism. and, it keeps failing horribly.

with franken, in particular, it's so transparent that he actually maintains a majority of female support in minnesota, right now. i'm sure the propaganda eats into this, eventually. but, if the intent of the democrats' strategy is to appeal to female voters, and voters concerned about women in general, then this strategy has actually immediately backfired, at least amongst the first voters that examined the situation with any seriousness. this is the predictable actual outcome of clintonism, almost everywhere it's been applied.

but, these are democrats - the conservative party in the system. it was always a strange animal, this liberal democrat - never did make a lot of sense.

liberals in america are going to have to find a way to enfranchise themselves. if organized effectively, they could become an effective third party, with broad influence - by preventing either major party from winning office, and instead sending the issue to a senate that they may have some influence over. it's just the geographic block: the northern part of the midwest has strangely become the country's electoral battleground, but the truth is that this is because the region is so terribly disenfranchised. there is no obvious answer in either party as to how to remedy this. the great lakes are going to need a localized political movement, and it's likely to surprise people just how left-leaning that's likely to end up. i think there's good potential for organizing a third party in the midwest right now, anyways - minnesota, wisconsin, michigan, illinois, ohio, iowa, missouri. even uniting a small block of these states in a third party could cause havoc, with the otherwise locked map.

what if minnesota, michigan and wisconsin voted in a block for the green party, instead of ending up in a virtual tie? that would have prevented trump from getting to 270 electoral votes, and forced the senate to declare a president from the top three candidates. in 2016, the candidates were less than optimal, and so that choice seems less meaningful. but, now, imagine a future where a liberal bloc from the midwest has some power in the congress. they could potentially bring in a vice-president.

but, do i think al franken should unresign? no; they'll just keep throwing more stories at him. you'll note the accusations have stopped. he was just dragged out by his ear for running his mouth off, he wasn't really presented with a real choice. there was no other outcome.

i might have liked to see him fight it a little harder, but i wasn't expecting him to, either.

the democrats have defined themselves clearly, moving forwards. it's up to the rest of the country to determine if it wants to follow their lead or not.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/19/al-franken-unresigning-could-kill-democrats-2018-chances-commentary.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

but, it's about changing the definition of work, or really unchanging it - throughout the centuries, poets and musicians and gardeners have all considered themselves to have been doing work. when were these vocations deemed void, exactly?

we don't have to pull out the engels, here, and explain how the city became full of workers who had migrated in from the countryside, where their lives were far less ordered - about how the existence of the machines created the working class, which is now left abandoned with their withdraw. if you want to talk about morality, that is.

we just need to ask questions about what work is, about how it is defined, about how use is calculated and whatnot. this leads us to questions about markets, primarily. if a thing does not have a market value, is it void of value? so, is it only work if it produces market value, then? this has to be wrong. and, so, if we are going to organize our societies as markets, some counter-force needs to correct this obvious absurdity.

i like a guaranteed income because it's a blind arts grant. it comes with no obligations, no test of value and no requirements to check speech or content for alignment. it allows the artist to access a source of funds without any strings attached, and to then create at will - as much or as little as is felt appropriate.

but, let us have this debate about work. we need to get on the other side of this.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/dec/28/tory-mp-condemns-universal-basic-income-on-moral-grounds

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, so, we see the outcome of our religiously organized technocratic colonial outpost in the desert, our hopes for the modernization of the region through the proxy of western influence, here:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-42507968

the jews are going to destroy themselves, anyways, just wait it out. they always do. this religion of theirs is absolutely toxic. it puts useful bounds around their ambitions, but they're never a moment's away from absolute collapse into brutal theocracy. when it comes, they will squander their advantages - the technology will rot, and the people will be at these crumbling walls, howling for it to stop.

the turks don't still do this kind of thing, do they?

this saudi created mess in the middle east may end up with what the saudis really wanted, which was political maps redrawn to demonstrate actual influence. but, the map they imagined wasn't representative of actual influence. and, the map may be redrawn quite counter to their influences.

we're losing turkey at the worst time, right when the historic eastern mediterranean superstate is beginning to reconstruct itself. that was an alliance that the west should have tended closer to. but, i've written a few rants about the turks, and their rejection from europe really forces them to look to their southeast for cultural integration. europe is forcing turkey back into it's days of empire.

the existence of such an east mediterannean superstate is the historical norm. the phoenicians and greeks were initially very different people, but they were united under the control of the persian empire, and the eastern coast then hellenized rather willingly under the influence of alexander's descendants. from this point on, this region took on a fundamentally greek identity, including with the adoption of christianity, which is part of what allowed it to gain independence in the partition of the roman empire, as a greek state. this superstate was split into two by the advancing arab armies, not to be effectively reunited again until the turks recreated it in the form of the ottoman empire.

the saudis clearly had intended to dominate this region with religious warlords that were subservient to their commands, with no foresight as to the eventuality of revolt from such actors. but, they've been prevented from doing this by a coalition of russians and turks, operating in syria. they are going to get to redraw these maps, that do truly need to be redrawn.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the one thing that i want to add to this is that one of those upper level atmospheric effects that determines the location and duration of an outbreak of the polar vortex is how much sunlight is reaching the earth's surface. the current theory of ice ages, which is still young and will no doubt be much revised, argues that fluctuations in the earth's and sun's orbits can trigger the onset of ice ages. certainly, milder and hopefully less permanent fluctuations in the sun's strength are a dominant cause of the weather we experience in the populated regions of canada.

the weak solar cycle is almost certainly the dominant cause of the prolonged periods of exaggerated winter cold that we're receiving, even as the average temperatures keep climbing up.

here's an interesting idea: is there some force that would come and plunge us into an ice age, right when we're flooding the atmosphere with carbon? if you could imagine it: a higher consciousness in the universe, unleashing the cold almost as a means of self-defence. i admit i like the idea of planets as anthropomorphized objects; the ancients got that right. but, is the sun operating in conjunction with the other bodies, or is it a conspiracy of one? is this a universal force, or many forces in conflict? it's just a thought - imaginary. but, interesting, if you could conceptualize it. but, i want to think of it like running hot feet under cold water.

we can still have some hot summers here. maybe. but these cold winters seem like the norm, until the sun warms up.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/polar-vortex-demystified-bitter-cold-next-week-in-canada/75743/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this article goes on a bit of a rant that i don't think is justified by the comments.

listen, i think that what justin trudeau is saying is what everybody paying attention already knew was true: justin trudeau is a media personality, rather than a political personality. he is the human front on a bureaucratic operation that is a bridge between the liberal party and the civil service. and, that's exactly what i expected him to be when i voted for him as a lesser evil.

talk of ceos is strangely american. the prime minister, today, behaves almost more like a monarch. that is what justin trudeau is, the young dauphin coming into power.

actual decisions are made by the appropriate bodies at the appropriate levels.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/12/26/this-is-how-justin-trudeau-sees-his-job-according-to-ethics-report_a_23317053/

justin singh must cut his beard

but, isn't the lesson taught in christianity that if you try and live a good life and be a good person that you'll be betrayed by your friends and torn down in bloodlust by an angry lynch mob?

there's this story going around amongst jewish historians that maybe the entire history before the captivity was entirely fictional, and that the people that were moved into the levant were an entirely fabricated ethnicity - that the jewish race was a fabrication of the dying sumerian civilization under the direction of it's new iranian overlords, meant to colonize and replace an existing civilization with a colonial outpost. this would explain judaism's apparent connections to zoroastrianism.

and, what would that destroyed civilization be? it would have been phoenician. what happened, then, was that the persians came in, cleared the phoenicians out and brought in this imagined ethnicity, the jews - who were peoples indigenous to mesopotamia, following a newly invented ideology with a totally fabricated history.

but, some source would exist to describe this? well, perhaps some source did, perhaps many did. but, centuries later, the roman destruction of carthage was total - and such histories would have been destroyed in the process, if they existed. hey, that is true, isn't it?

it was the carthaginian connection that intrigued me as i was having a cigarette and wanted to get written down. i like it when disparate parts of history intersect like that, and it just made a connection in my head. hey, it's christmas.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i've actually long been swayed by the hypothesis that religion, as we understand it, is basically an elaborately distorted ufo cult. these stories of contacts with ancient beings in the sky may have an empirical basis, if you allow for contact with extra-terrestrial life. well, it's a naturalistic explanation, is it not? the sky is at the core of so much religion...

i don't claim to be able to rigorously demonstrate this, but i think it's probably actually true, nonetheless. it's kind of unfalsifiable, right? but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong - i'm post-godel, i'm sorry, it really doesn't. errr. bzzzztt. wrong.

it's certainly less convincing if it's unfalsifiable, i'll grant you that - it's not science. it's speculation. but, it might be science one day.

so, i don't find claims of entities in the sky to be particularly absurd or hard to believe - they've happened all throughout history, have they not?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

ok, i'm going to put away my skeptic hat for a moment and put on my marxist cape. 

i just think the marxist article of clothing should be a cape. it just makes sense, some how. i dunno. but it's obvious.

religion is supposed to be this thing that governments use to control masses of people into compliance with. so, it strikes me as kind of weird to speak of it in terms of resistance. now, i need to rip off my marxist cape because my paranoid anarchist heart wants to look for evidence of alliance with power structures, as that is, in truth, occam's razor. yet, the possibility of a simple slick preacher also always exists - and these aren't mutually exclusive.

at the least, any activist on the left should be particularly weary of any kind of religious movement trying to involve itself with politics. there is a 100% chance that they are trying to take over your movement for one nefarious aim or the other.

the problem that marx (where's my cape?...) saw with christianity is that it promises salvation in an afterlife, thereby leaving workers in delusional states of fantasies about life and death. i'm supposed to point out that marx saw this as an obstacle to movement building and leave it at that, but think about the psychology in what he's suggesting. think about how that breaks a human's soul into two, having them turn an active desire for death into a virtue. to convince humans that they should believe that all of the misery and all of the struggle is worth it because it will be paid off in an afterlife, which certainly doesn't exist. this is a truly dangerous cult.

i don't feel that buddhism escapes this general description of a pacifying force, but rather in a way just transcribes it. buddhism also teaches that life is meaningless, and that there is some preferable place in the hierarchy in the next life. this is incompatible with a revolutionary politic.

it would be nice if david frum were actually correct, though. it's the kind of thing you want to be true. even when you ignore the flaws in the analogy - one hopes that publishing media is a little different than testing scientific hypotheses, anyways. still. you'd like the media to in some sense be error-correcting, and to own up to itself when it's caught. 

but, that means catching errors and not catching lies.

this whole thing is such an absurd charade. and, maduro is starting to remind me of the bumblebee guy from the simpsons. 

it's one of those bewildering things you see from time to time in these places: the opposition stands down from the elections. and, you assign ulterior motives to such queer behaviour. yet, you miss the obvious: that the opposition stood down because it's backers didn't want it to win, or that the iraqi military stood down in iraq because they were ordered to allow isis to take up a position.

i've long been convinced that maduro is actually pretty buddy-buddy with the cia behind the scenes, he just needs america as an enemy to maintain control of the country. and, the americans seem eager to comply, as it gives them a bad guy of their own. if america wanted maduro gone, it would just cut off oil purchases for a week; he'd be gone. venezuela is, in truth, utterly economically reliant on the united states. that's going to come with a lot of clout in caracas, "domestic politics" whatever they may be.

the opposition was, in truth, no doubt ordered to stand down. but the reason underlying it is probably the most obvious one.

this is an informed speaker, but what she's describing is the reason that there isn't a way forward in two states, and i think she's stated clearly that she realizes that. israel is indeed very concerned about this demographic problem. and, regardless of what diplomats at the united nations want to imagine exists on maps, regardless, the need for a civil rights movement is critical to prevent upcoming abuses in the name of solving this problem. it's really critical that the palestinians have a path to israeli citizenship, as their only hope is to find a way to be protected under israeli law.

these nationalist visions need to be renounced to a romantic past, all around. palestine is beyond an existential point of crisis. but, here's the thing: the palestinians are mostly genetic hebrews, right? there should be a national reckoning in a people coming to terms with itself as two related wholes, and a chance for it to work these debates out in academia. 

the palestinian leadership needs to be arguing for integration right now, not separation. it is their only chance at survival at all; if they resist for too long, they will merely fade into nothingness.

i said all along that the way to beat the travel ban is to argue that it's ineffective in it's stated purpose, not that it discriminates due to religion. the president gets a lot of discretion; you have to basically prove he's acting irrationally, and so you must do so by taking his claim of needing the ban for national security seriously and then proceed to demonstrate that the ban does not in any way actually do this. they went after him with the wrong legal tactic last time and ultimately lost; this time, they're doing this right and should win.

they could stop the wall that way, too. again: if you want to challenge the president in court, you have to take what he says seriously to start off with. so, the wall is intended to stop migrants from entering without prior approval. a strong legal case can be made that this will not actually work, that it is in truth simply an irrational policy. the law can be struck down on review if you win this case. i'm not sure who gets standing in such a case, though.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-travel-ban-partially-lifted-1.4464042

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

this is consistent! sometimes, i wonder if this shadow government is actually a computer, because the surreality of the predictability defies common sense.

they take what is almost boolean logic past the point of human reason. is it game theory, then, perhaps?

if you want to understand what the shadow government is actually doing, it is easy - they leave a trail behind them. just look to where the establishment blames russia.

absolutely consistent; as though they want it documented, even.

https://www.rt.com/usa/413745-franken-resignation-russiagate-conspiracy/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i have to admit that i was in favour of stricter guidelines for large dogs, but i can accept the criticism that any government's attempts to legislate this by targetting pit bulls, specifically, is likely to be ineffective. if what the new city council is suggesting is that they aim to broaden the restrictions not just to pit bulls but to all large dogs, then i would openly support that amendment.

my pushback was against the idea of abolishing measures taken to ensure that more safety precautions are taken around these animals, as i do think that they are needed. but, if the idea is to broaden them, i am in full agreement.

i guess what the previous city council did was kind of bureaucratic; it recognized that a problem with dogs exists, it looked at a list of statistics and it took specific action against the leading cause. that must have been meant as a first step, though, in order to ease in broader action - or reverse course in a public backlash.

it really seems as though the criticism, then, was that the law wasn't comprehensive enough, as it only focused on a specific breed. if so, that's a fair criticism - and the previous city council should probably recognize it as such.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-pit-bull-ban-1.4458038

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i don't know if what's happening in the united states right now is a targeted purge or a structural coup, but i don't get the feeling that this is short term, and i'm not convinced it's going to be reversible.

america is shutting itself down. scrawl a note over the american flag on the moon: out of business.

i'm trying to think about when the last great collapse of liberalism was. i suppose it depends on how you define the current age: did we start in the renaissance? is that wave form what is coming to a close?

i think there's an argument that part of what created the middle ages was the technological development not in weaponry but in agriculture. it seems crude by today's standards. but, life required a lot of hard work, so there wasn't a lot of time to study. after all, antiquity is full of civilizations being slaughtered, and it just kept on. something else stepped in after the romans fell, and created a much deeper shift in how societies were organized. it wasn't until the technology became efficient enough to allow leisure that it did, and liberal thoughts could be once again entertained.

that's a bad precedent, for us. that process took a long time. but, i told you i just read that asimov text, right? i'm thinking more about inri067, spoke - my eulogy for the civil rights era and secular liberalism as we understand it.

what i'm searching for is a successor, but we're really at the end of this. we can't hand it back to a decayed europe, which in fact merely precedes us in corruption. china and russia and saudi arabia are empires. and, africa remains in disarray.

if there is hope, it is in south america, but it is absurd to suggest they could challenge america at any time in the near future. perhaps the better hope is that the people of the americas can co-operatively work to take back the government in the united states before it collapses.

if we're in a similar technological moment that produced the dark ages, it's not going to be because our lives are too labour-intensive, but because they are not labour intensive enough. some of us are perhaps likely to forget how to do anything at all, but i must push back against the standard dystopic view, as i think a subset of humans would take advantage of such freedom to become scholars and general patrons of the arts. the dark ages produced an aristocracy of management. the new illiberalism will no doubt be an aristocracy of knowledge.

and, freedom means different things to different people. so, the battle will remain the same: fight hierarchy wherever you see it.

but, what if the networks come down? if this witchcraft is destroyed?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

what i remember from the election was jill stein projecting the idea of being unsure which of the two is the lesser evil, which implied the suggestion that maybe it might be trump, but it was an attempt to put them on par with one another, and have voters question their calculus, rather any kind of endorsement of trump. phrased another way, it was a clear suggestion that hillary was at least as bad as trump.

her perspective has, i think, been demonstrated to be fairly reasonable by the unfolding of events in other places in the world, but i can understand how it may ring hollow for those almost solely focused on domestic american politics. arguing that trump may turn out to be a lesser evil in some ways is not an endorsement of him, but an indictment of clinton.

we're in quite a bit of trouble when foresight becomes conflated with treason.

http://www.newsweek.com/2017/09/08/jill-stein-interview-russia-trump-645722.html?utm_source=internal&utm_campaign=right&utm_medium=related2

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

but, why did trudeau go see the aga kahn?

see, when you talk of lobbyists, you usually refer to a system where for-profit entities bribe politicans to carry out favours for them, exclusively to make them more money. the aga kahn is relevant in context due to money that it is giving away. it's just an incorrect contextual analysis.

you have to wonder if, maybe, it wasn't trudeau trying to bribe the aga kahn, to get an audience in which to get some spiritual guidance. this guy is kind of a weido, i think, actually. he'll be talking to dead dogs in no time.

no, really - i think it was probably trudeau that was buying the audience, here.

and i'm just not swayed by the seriousness of the accusations.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

see, i don't doubt this at all. it was pretty obvious.

but, there's an added complication that she probably doesn't remember the worst of it.

i always found crystal castles frustrating, in that it demonstrated some potential for abstraction but never really explored it. it was clear that the intent was always profit above everything else; you can hear the disinterest in the 'art'.

but, you'll note that there is an accusation, here, followed by charges and an investigation. that's how these things need to operate.

http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/crystal-castles-songwriter-being-investigated-by-police-sex-crimes-unit

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the government is making a mistake in being meek about this aga khan non-issue. i know they're hoping it blows over, but that's old media thinking; what they're doing by not challenging it is making it seem more substantial than it is. people tend to interpret a humble argument as a sign that a more powerful argument doesn't exist.

democrats make this mistake all of the time, because their voting base is so much more conservative. liberals in canada, however, have not tended to make this mistake. one expects a more throaty argument from a liberal prime minister than this.

what they should do is change the law around private travel to include an exception for situations where the destination cannot be reached in any other manner, then throw it back at the conservatives when they vote against it, as it will make them seem unreasonable.

when you give the tory media in canada an inch, they take a mile. it's going to be framed terribly. and, due to the way that the government has mismanaged it, it actually might do them some serious damage, after all.

i'm curious as to who sophie brought to the island in march, though. the justin/sophie story is kind of unusual, to say the least. i've kind of suspected it as a political marriage for a while, now. his father's marriage was pretty arranged as well; it's going to be interesting to see if justin ages to look like his father, at all.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i want to repeat a point that i made several years ago about syria.

it's less that assad has to go, as an individual. it's more that syria needs a change in actual leadership - in military leadership. and, it's up to the russians, now, to ensure that this happens.

the russians know better than anybody else what it is to experience a serious existential crisis; they are certainly best positioned, of all the major powers, to understand the psychology of the assad regime. on one of the days i spent waiting for the isp, i read one of the foundation texts that i skipped as a child. it was the one where seldon was wrong. so, i have this psychohistory on my brain, and the recognition of it as psychobabble. but, if you leave the assad regime - the regime, not the figurehead - in place, it will necessarily retaliate, which means launching a counter-attack on the saudis.

the saudi regime needs to fall, but not like this - not at the cost of a major proxy war that will draw in the turks and who knows else - israel, america and maybe even china.

the russians, unfortunately, are relying on this regime. when i made those comments, and i realized even at the time that this responsibility is putin's, i did not realize the remaining extent of the cold war connections between the kremlin and the assad regime, nor how easy it would be to reactivate them. the russians, however, are not foreign to purges, not even in foreign countries.

the assad regime does, in fact, have to go to ensure a peace. the americans are right for the wrong reasons. but, it's not likely to.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

if we're going to leave this up to government, the government has to listen.

cbd levels on the marketing is certainly a good idea. some consumers will seek higher cbd levels for medicinal reasons, while seeking to minimize thc levels. it's rarely going to work the other way. so, this is a request from concerned citizens that is absolutely reasonable, and that i dare suggest a market mechanism would more effectively generate. if government is going to control this, it needs to make the extra efforts to be responsive to reasonable requests.

the way they're planning on selling it strikes me as some kind of surreal joke, as though these policy makers determined their concept of the marijuana industry from gangster rap videos. one government representative suggested it would look something like a jewellery store. gotta protect tha bling. and, they're going to pat you down like you're buying from the mafia, or some mexican drug cartel. who is it that often compared the government to the mafia? again, it's like they got their concept of buying from hollywood films.

it's strange how fiction may actually create reality, in this context. well, how would these bureaucrats know any better, really? they have no first hand information, no empirical basis to draw deductions from. all they have is the depiction that is handed to them. and, this depiction is ubiquitous - it is across the spectrum of hollywood. it is not in independent films, but these bureaucrats can't be bothered with those, either. when fiction becomes ubiquitous like this, and government controls the commerce associated with it, the propaganda cannot not become reality. so, the government will create what it understands: an experience like going to see a kingpin.

it's crazy. of course.

they have to listen better. that's how to interact on an empirical basis, in context.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/patty-hajdu-pot-regulation-1.4461879

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what am i doing this weekend?

well, i've got four days of cheap electricity, so i can work at a normal pace. i don't know what my electrical costs are going to be in this unit. i know that i'll get a credit applied eventually, but the process appears to be cumbersome and inefficient, so i don't know when. i tried to get them the information for mid-november, but they're telling me i need to wait two cycles, and not providing a coherent answer as to why. i got the thing escalated, at least. i don't know when to expect a response.

but, i'm conserving electricity in the mean time. my first bill should not be high, at least. the major cost is the fridge. i don't know after that. i need to get data before i can react to it.

i'm probably going to get some solar lamps and put them in the windows, then never turn the lights on. i have five giant windows in this apartment, six including the one in the bathroom. i really don't need lights at all. i'm going to need to check costs and crunch numbers to see if it makes sense, but it no doubt does. if they're around $20 each, it will make sense immediately. if they get to more than that i'll need to see...

i'm also considering getting a ups and using it as a battery, but that's going to again be determined by how much it costs and what my actual electrical costs end up being. what i could do with this is suck down electricity over night for use in the day, ensuring that i'm only paying off peak costs (except for the fridge and the cable modem), and i'm able to operate at will with the electrical.

the other thing i'm considering is just getting some solar panels and hooking them up to a battery. this would be intended for extraneous usage, like extra guitar effects or synthesizers. i'm just going to need to get an understanding of base usage, first.

the way this works is that they calculate the bill - and i have to pay something like $25/month just to use it - and then subtract $68 from the end of it. so, i'll get something like $40/month for free once it's set up. i actually don't expect my base usage to exceed this: fridge, other kitchen appliances, computers, tv, etc. but, if i decide that i want to spend all night every night for a month recording guitar parts through five processors, that's when it starts to add up - and where a solar source could be useful. like i say, i have these huge windows. but, i don't know where the technology is, and i don't know if i'll really need it.

see, the credit is cumulative. so, if it comes in at less than $68, i can transfer what's left to the next month. i don't actually expect this to be uncommon, especially if i get the solar lights up. that will mean i could see myself building credits - and that i can use those for my recording spurts.

right now, i really have no idea at all how this is going to play out.

but, i'm going to pick up where i left off, which is at compiling the blu-ray disc. i'm going to use it as an opportunity to double check all of the liner notes. that should be a day or two, at least...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

yeah, but now go find a video of a polar bear ripping the heart out of a seal's chest and tell me how you feel about it.

climate change is bad news and everything.

but, bears are monsters.

why can't we have solidarity with something other than apex carnivores? and, why does this, of all things, generate empathy.

fucking humans.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

deathtokoalas

c'mon.

senator gillibrand wants to run for president, and saw an easy way to get rid of a prime competitor. the truth is as simple - and as cynical - as that.

Aaron N

Democrats are so unbelievably weak, Republicans get away with murder all of the time and Democrats throw all of their people under the bus and run away from any type of criticism.

deathtokoalas

see, here's the truth about this: the democrats operate on the principle of every man, woman and dog for itself, while the republicans have retained this lingering concept of solidarity from their whig days. the american system is really absolutely bizarre, in terms of the spectrum. these ideas of liberalism and conservatism have been chopped up and distributed in ways that most of the world has a hard time making sense of. but, this is really a lot deeper and a lot more philosophical than is immediately obvious.

the democrats don't seem to care about due process, but they do seem to care about careerism. and, this is how you would expect a conservative party to approach the ideals of liberal individualism, isn't it? not thoreauvian, but randian. it's selfishness as a virtue. no solidarity, just social darwinism. and, so long as there's a level playing field, these warped concepts of neo-liberalism actually think that's ok - normal, even. natural.

and, even after everything else has been swapped out of the republican party, after abolitionists have been replaced with klan members, they retain this collectivist urge. they're a nihilist party, no doubt. they're what a collection of post-truth liberals would imagine that uneducated conservatives would want a conservative party to be: a warped projection of liberal elitism. and, of course, their voters are clueless. they don't know what i'm talking about. but, this hive mentality persists.

i'm a hard leftist. i don't like either of these parties, but i'm used to looking at the democrats as a lesser evil. regardless, i can see the truth of things: a democrat would throw you under the bus to prevent their expensive shoes from getting wet, while a republican would throw himself in front of it in order to advance the party's interests.

for one used to gathering in public to chants of "solidarity!", the juxtaposition is increasingly alarming.

hi.

so, the internet was hooked up late on the afternoon of the 21st. i
trust that the proper pro-rations will apply. i think this ought to be
straight forward. and, i'm happy to be back online and have things
back to normal.

but, i can't help but feel that a great deal of my time was wasted.

listen: i'm a highly patient individual and i'm highly adaptive to
situations. i could have and would have waited patiently until the
21st with nary a second thought, if that was the required action. and,
i would have been happy to see the tech when he finally arrived. but,
that's not what happened.

i called in in november to move the services and was told that they
could schedule me on the 1st of december, but it's often busy so if
they don't show up then i should wait on the 4th. so, i waited all day
on the 1st and all day on the 4th - a total of 18 hours. it later came
to my attention that cogeco had already informed your agent that they
would not be coming, but nobody relayed that information to me. so,
this 18 hours of waiting was preventable, and could have been
prevented by contacting me.

and, i would have been eminently reasonable had i been contacted and
asked to wait, as well.

a second install date was eventually arranged on the 12th. i expressed
repeatedly that i needed a technician to come in and crimp the ends
(the final process took mere minutes) and was told on the day before
the install that a technician would be there to do this. i waited
another 9 hours and did not see a tech, and was later told that none
was scheduled - that what was scheduled was a 'no truck' install, and
that a technician had indeed come, fiddled with the box and then left.
this was again preventable.

i was then told that the agent responsible for these lost 27 hours was
let go. i hope she finds a job that better suits her talents.

i could say something about my time being worth a dollar amount, and
attempt to charge you at a reasonable wage - at $10/hr (after taxes),
that would amount to $270, which would be nearly ten months of
service. but, i can see that this is too much.

i think that a more reasonable suggestion is to look at the three days
that were lost as events requiring some form of compensation, and i do
hope that i am effectively projecting that i aim to be reasonable. had
the cogeco agents not shown up due to any unforeseen event, from a
family emergency to an act of god, i could cite the fact of a
stochastic universe and wave it away as bad luck. but, your agents
were sitting on the correct information all three times.

there was no reason for me to wait on any of these days, as your
agents should have told me that nobody was scheduled.

my proposal is therefore this: that if each day spent waiting is a
separate event to require compensation, and i only purchase one thing
from you, then it follows that i ought to get three of the things that
i bought from you, which would work out to three months credit.

i live in a building with twenty other tenants, and they all saw me
sitting there for four days in december. i'm an honest person. and,
your self-interest is ultimately in damage control.

j

ps: jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

well, you also have to keep in mind that the word has changed meaning, as well.

dukakis became clinton became obama, and the term 'liberal' ended up merged with the concept of 'neo-liberal', and pulled to the right of the spectrum.

i use the term pretty classically, as though it belongs to the period when liberals and anarchists were interchangeable. i then extrapolate broad concepts from it. i'd rather vote for a socialist party than a liberal party.

but, that doesn't change the reality that, to a lot of people, 'very liberal' means you read ayn rand, work for the koch brothers and follow alan greenspan on twitter.

https://www.npr.org/2016/04/30/475794063/why-are-highly-educated-americans-getting-more-liberal

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i'm sorry, but what exactly is the reason being presented here for jumping her forward in the queue, other than that she's famous?

that's not a good reason. and, i hope that anybody that ends up affected by this - by losing access to an available liver, due to the queue jump - is able to properly explore their legal options.

in canada, you have to wait your turn, no matter how famous you are. or, that's what i thought, anyways.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/12/15/delilah-saunders-gets-her-liver-assessed-after-campaign-to-put-her-on-transplant-list_a_23309113/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

it's kind of a contradiction that we live under constant surveillance, and yet fear unfounded accusations. hard drive space is cheap enough nowadays that you may want to think of just streaming your existence. you can call this the open-source  approach.

personally?

if i was in minnesota, i would probably vote green out of principle, at least for the special election. i couldn't reward this obvious purge. and, it would sour me on the party, moving forwards.

i mean, i'm not in minnesota, so i don't know how real it is. but, as an already disgruntled liberal, it would be a potential push factor right out of alignment with this party, altogether. it's the kind of thing that might lose me for good.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

no, listen.

minnesota is, in fact, one of the most liberal states in the country.

but, what does that mean? it might not mean what you think it means.

it's true that a debate about due process isn't likely to get people to vote against their own health care. but, the republicans know they need to run a moderate. they can mix and match on this.

what the democrats are going to likely face is voter apathy - voters that realize what actually happened and stay home. yes, a lot of them will be white men. and, the republicans will take the seat due to low turnout.

wait for it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what happened to me?

well, i moved on the 1st, and my isp couldn't or wouldn't connect me until the 21st. i spent four full days waiting in my lobby before it got resolved. i spent a lot of days accomplishing little besides yelling at people on the phone. and, all i've really done besides that is clean in here and set the place up.

i can at least report that i've done a lot of thinking about what's going to happen, next.

i have a few remaining things to finish for period 2. it should be in a few days, i hope. then, i have to catch up on the alter-reality, and i'm aiming for a jan 13th date on that - we'll see. right now, i'm not expecting to upload any vlogs until july 1st, and i'm expecting the stagger to be a year, but i'm purposefully prioritizing this as least important, because it actually is. i need to get caught up in everything else, first, then fix that laptop, then get the vlogs edited...

so, i'm kind of just picking up where i left off.

the one thing i was following was this franken bit...

i tried to make the point clear enough, but let me repeat it: what happened to al franken has nothing to do with....what are they calling it? "sexual misconduct"? it's basically an accusation of deviance, or subversion , or something. "corrupting the youth". but, that's not what happened to al franken. what happened to al franken is that he ran his mouth off in the senate, and the bastards took him down for speaking truth to power. al franken was purged. and, the democrats didn't even give him the disrespect of putting him through an unfair mock trial.

so, yes: what the democrats did to al franken is truly a disgrace, but i'm not remotely surprised, because the democrats have always been the conservative party. i'm not sure if i explicitly predicted it, but i got pretty close; i predicted the resignation, at least.

what gets me about it is that the democrats then have the audacity to stand up and promote their behaviour as upholding a system of values. it is a system of values, i suppose, but it's a system of puritanical, right-wing and conservative values; these are not my values. i am a liberal. my values are not the fire and brimstone of retributive justice, but due process of law and the presumption of innocence. again: i'm not surprised that the democrats are not upholding my values, but i am a little surprised to see them upheld by right-wing demagogues that i don't usually have anything in common with.

but, i've been over this in this space. the democrats are and always have been the conservative party in the american political system. the republicans used to be the liberal party, but have become some kind of post-truth nihilist catastrophe. this has left a small number of liberals scattered across either party, and american liberals in a hopeless state of utter disenfranchisement. and, despite telling me what i want to hear, i know that the likes of tucker carlson are ultimately just disingenuously pushing buttons.

but, we can have this discussion of values, if you want, sure. i look at what the democrats did to al franken, and i see a conservative party obsessed with retribution that does not at all represent my values. then, i looked at the roy moore situation, and i see a liberal republican party that is willing to hold to the presumption of innocence in even the most extreme scenarios. i think roy moore probably deserves to be punished, and al fanken certainly doesn't - granted. but, it is the republicans that better reflect my liberal values, here - and the democrats that do not.

and, while it is true that the democrats were always the conservative party, they may want to think this through a little more carefully.

i expect the republicans to take al franken's seat and hold it for at least a generation.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

not only is buddhism not true, it's not even wrong, either.

no, i'm not wasting twenty minutes watching this....

this is a paid advertisement, from what i can gather. how much does the book cost, anyways?

barbara kay is a national embarrassment.

but, as a long time fan, do mr. waters' trotskyist views kind of overlap into some uncomfortable imagery sometimes? they kinda do, actually, yeah. but, here's the thing: these positions aren't mutually exclusive.

he's made some blatant mistakes in imagery in the past, and i've never seen him acknowledge it.

see, again, there's a kind of wilful ignorance at work, here.

the destruction of libya - for it was not even an invasion - was largely orchestrated by hillary clinton, on the urging of the saudi theocracy. it was a part of the flexing of saudi military power that took place after about 2011. and, it's obvious enough where the slaves are actually going.

the nato forces exist in africa to control resource extraction, and the primary competitor, today, is china.

this is just this the tip of it: they created this movement, for the purposes of the surveillance. this is why blm exists, in the first place. it's older than cointelpro, too, it goes back to bismarck. and, it's explored in an easy to understand way in 1984.

boo!