i'm getting my predictable attack of nausea.

we're going to have a VERY early spring, here.

do you really want to question my sanity?

is it not obvious that i belong on state aid?

i try to make it obvious...

and, i can make it that much more obvious, if you'd really like me to. really. there's a huge space for escalation.

and, to clarify: i'll be 36 years old on friday.

so, no: i'm not going back to school.

(the picture on the side as of the timestamp was taken in nov, 2016)

0% means 0%. it's not a discussion. and, i decided quite some time ago that chasing collectors around wasn't worth my time.

the interest on my loan exceeds my disability payments. 

i talked to them last in early 2016. i have no intention of contacting them again until 2021. and, when i do, it will be to discuss options for default.

there is simply not another way forwards.

there is no punitive measure that they can take that is meaningful. and there are no steps that i can take for repayment.

the correct lesson is that they should carry out greater due diligence; i should have never been given the loan, because i should have never been expected to be able to repay it.

that's correct: i am claiming that the responsibility for the default lies with the state.

and, i have better things to do than worry about it.

even if they were to take away my disability altogether, it wouldn't help because i would become ineligible for disability when i get evicted. and, then you've got another mentally ill homeless person and are no closer to recouping the loan. it would be pretty stupid.

i've filled out the forms, and while they understand that i am permanently disabled, and agree that i will never pay the loan, they claim that it cannot be forgiven because i am not *severely* permanently disabled. i can only respond by pointing out that this is severely stupid, and go do something else with my time.

i'm not joking. they agree that i will never pay back the loan, because i'm permanently disabled. explicitly. i have this in writing. but, despite agreeing that the loan will never be repaid, they won't forgive it because i'm not "severely" disabled. it is the most amazingly idiotic thing you could imagine.

or, maybe they're right: maybe i'll be able to pay them back in five years after all. they'll find out in five years. until then, i can't be bothered.

i'm on permanent disability; there is a 0% chance of loan repayment.

since i've moved to windsor, i've spent most of my time completing existing recordings. but, i have put aside a few demos for later, too. i'm just interested in sharing these, right now, so they'll be here for streaming, only. i initially had a soundcloud site for this, but i want to shut that down.

these tracks will eventually be moved out of this space, completed and placed on to singles, eps and lps for download.

thunderstorms in january are every bit as weird as snow in july.

it's a shame that that rss combiner doesn't want to work. i'm going to have to build my own shell, eventually.

for now, i need to pry myself away from this...

ok, ok.

careful with this, though. it's like michael stipe on bath salts. this can damage you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIIzxeBUqug

i think there's another reading of the shuffle out to the ambassadorships.

neither mccallum nor dion strike me as the type to work past retirement: they'll both be cashing in at 65. and, not a day later, either.

i mean, they'll be around. just not all day. and not every day.

mccallum will be past retirement in late 2019. dion will be a few months from it.

so, they'd probably both have left before or shortly after the next election.

they're also both in relatively safe seats. certainly, either by-election would be an upset if it went to another party.

we're not quite mid-mandate, but i suspect that the government would love to get a measure of the actual support on the ground. so, this is a way you can do that: you ask some people to step down a little early, and then you can run the by-election to figure out where you're sitting.

i'm not proposing that this is the only reason things happened. i'm proposing that it may be one of the reasons things happened.

to be clear.

there's nobody on the conservative side i'd vote for, or at least not at the prime ministerial level. the ndp don't have many promising options, either. in fact, if it's down to a local riding choice, i really couldn't imagine voting for cheryl hardcastle.

i'm hoping that the greens step up soon.

right now, i think there's a good chance i won't vote at all in 2019. and, while this riding is probably not in play, that's the liberals' worst nightmare.

i'm not exaggerating.

look up quotes about nafta by people like pierre trudeau, jean chretien, lloyd axworthy, allan rock, sheila copps...

these people had a very clear analysis of the agreement, and their statements show great foresight in how it would unfold. i'm hard-pressed to think of a better example of such clear foresight. it's truly impressive. and it's horrific that the party has apparently almost wholly adopted their opponent's position on the topic, along with all of their inaccuracies and even their historical baggage.

the liberals should be gloating, right now. they should be reminding people that they never fully supported free trade. they should be reminding everybody that they were right.

instead, they're pretending to represent the legacy of the disastrous mulroney government.

it's scandalous. truly.

and it's foolish.

if they hold to it, it will be their undoing.

this isn't like clinton. they don't need to protect a legacy. they were right all along, they're just too stupid to realize it. and so instead of capitalizing off of it, they're going to let it drag them down.

but, after correctly being skeptical about free trade for decades, now all of a sudden they seem to want to be the champions of this dying global order. where they were once correct to hold to their principles, now they seem to want to be the last in the class to learn the lesson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FEW5mh7iAI

it's actually very irritating to me.

this is the guy i voted for in the election:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/frank-schiller-is-liberal-candidate-in-windsor-tecumseh-1.3051691

and the reason i voted for him is that he was a very vocal opponent to nafta. he promised he'd work to renegotiate it.

he lost in this riding to the zombie ndp vote, which preferred a local councilor running a straight-from-head-office cookie-cutter campaign. the only independent position she seemed to hold was being anti-gmo.

i would normally lean ndp, but the difference in candidates was stark. he was very independent minded and said a lot of the things i was thinking. she just read memos from the ndp's politburo, except when she decided to be vocally opposed to science.

the liberals spent years and years campaigning against nafta, but i couldn't pull up any legacy of this in my mind. or at least nothing really explicit.

the guy i actually voted for would actually be exactly the right person to send to washington right now....

so, this cabinet shift...

substantively, what he's done is move what are probably his two most capable and knowledgeable mps out of cabinet roles and into the civil service. you could look at this either way.

see, in canada, most of the actual work is bureaucratic. that's the actual reason why it takes a few years for a new government to do anything. the ministers can change the direction of things, but they are expected to ultimately be figureheads and ultimately defer to the authority of the bureaucrats. we're getting to the point now where things should be starting to spin in a less conservative direction.

so, you could argue that putting these two capable ministers (mccallum and dion) in the civil service is a better use of their talents. we're not yet sure where dion is going, but sending mccallum to china is certainly a boost of confidence, if nothing else.

but, you could also argue that these two capable and knowledgeable ministers are looking for a way out of a government that is leaning further to the right than they'd like. i'm very surprised that dion would decide to leave his riding - he may be being pushed out. and, that's a very ominous signal that trudeau is planning on swinging hard to the right.

it's unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. they're going to have to learn the hard way that a world of open markets isn't the vision that canadians voted for, and isn't the vision that canadians want.

so, this actually doesn't appear to have anything to do with adjusting to trump at all. this appears to be about the trudeau government learning the wrong lessons from the election, and deciding to follow barack obama into the dustbin of history.

pity.

does free trade between canada and china make sense?

in a literal sense, not at all. an attempted free trade agreement with china - in literal terms - would create downward pressure on wages and living standards, because we cannot in good faith expect them to raise in a brutal dictatorship with minimal respect for human rights. free trade with the state-capitalist dictatorship in china is neither good nor bad but impossible.

this is different than a trade agreement with the united states, with europe, with australia or with japan.

but, a trade agreement with china that takes these concerns into consideration does make sense, so long as it explicitly ties the opening of markets to increasing labour standards.

my faith in the trudeau government's ability to put together a reasonable deal on this is both relatively high, in comparison to the other options, and pretty low, in absolute terms. this is an issue that needs to be tackled one way or another. we can't just decide to not deal with this. i'm likely to end up critical, perhaps extremely so, but i'd rather this guy is doing it than the other guy.

what i don't want to see is trudeau to come out swinging for some kind of dying neo-liberal order. that is tone deaf on every level - political suicide, and not in the national interest, either. it's not even reality any more, it's just delusional. magical thinking. there has to be some kind of serious push for increasing labour standards, and not as some kind of do-gooder progressivism but as hard-nosed economic realism. we'll get destroyed if we don't pay very close attention to this.

the neo-liberal order is dead. good riddance. let's adjust. we never liked it much, anyways.

i don't have any problem with trudeau going on a christmas vacation, and he can go wherever he'd like, but i am a little unhappy about the premise of going on a cross-country campaign when parliament is in session and he should be governing.

i don't care at all whether he comes to my town or not, and i'm not going to vote based on his travel itinerary. but, my patience is getting a little thin regarding the slow pace of legislation.

so, there is some basis to the criticism that he's not working hard enough. they're apparently missing the point.