farcical considering the source? sure.

but, it's fairly obvious that the right answer is that nobody thought it through, and somebody needs to point out that they need to think this through, lest they ruin international law without even realizing it.

this is beyond surreal. but get used to it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/world/middleeast/syria-united-protect-democracy-trump-lawsuit.html?_r=0

again, my self-interest is not in "job creation" (i don't want a job...), but in maximizing the tax base while minimizing the number of people on social assistance, as the services that exist become less and less effective as more and more people use them.

my self-interest is also in minimizing the power of socially conservative bodies, like organized religions, which also means fighting to reduce the number of adherents, as well as actively working to convert people away from their influence.

these are the normal, historical priorities of self-interested parties on the left.

wait. so, is trump's broken promise on nafta jared kushner's fault or justin trudeau's fault?

the way to protect against such a nefarious ploy is to always wear an aluminum hat.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4484760/North-Korea-preparing-EMP-strike-US.html

so, what's going on with me?

i've been focusing primarily on editing since about the 10th of april - so about a month. i've been to a lot of concerts in the last month. but, the life goal has been about editing.

i didn't want it to turn out like this, where i'd do no editing for months, and then spend a month editing. it will slow down dramatically in the next few days. but, i wanted to gather the material i needed for my court date, which is on thursday morning...

it's easy to criticize me for being slow about it, but it was actually a lot of work to edit two and half months of vlogging, watch those vlogs, upload them and cut out the parts that are relevant. i was cut up to the 28th of april - which was caught up.

it was a week ago now that my laptop told me that the fan wasn't running anymore. it didn't take long for me to realize that it was clogged with dust. it's a thing that happens. but, the design on the laptop requires disassembling the entire laptop and removing the motherboard and heatsink in order to clean the fan. fans are going to get dirty, that is normal; it is the design of the laptop that is the root cause of the problem i now have to deal with.

i can't run a laptop without a fan. so, i took it apart to clean it. it took me a few days to get some thermal paste for the heatsink, but when i finally put it back together this morning i got no power. no lights. nothing.

i would think that i should at least get an led beside the power for merely plugging it in, right? i wasn't even getting that. so, i reasoned that there's a break in the circuit, somewhere.

i don't have a multimeter, but i have a bus pirate that i bought a few years ago when i fucked up my recording pc by trying to flash it from inside windows (doh...) and a set of probes. so, i had to install it as a serial port on my 90s laptop in order to convert it into a voltmeter. it turns out the jack is drawing electricity normally, so i'm left to conclude that there's a short in the board.

but, i have a sign of life: the area of the motherboard closest to the plug is now warm. it was not previously. i'm going to put it back together and leave it plugged in, hoping that the current can re-establish itself.

i'm typing this on my backup laptop. i had to pull the hard drive out of my main laptop and put it in this one, and it seems to work fine, so if the board ends up lost it's really a minor annoyance. this machine only has two gigs of ram in it, and no built in microphone, but if the other machine is now parts i can at least salvage the ram.

i'm pissed off, but not at myself. i know how to open a laptop. i couldn't have done it better. it's a shoddy design to make it impossible to clean the fan without trashing it. but, they teach graduate courses on this - it's called forced obsolescence.

if it was the jack, i could have fixed it for a few dollars. but, the cost of replacing the system board makes the project a waste of time.

for now, it looks like i'm moving to the backup laptop. but, in the long run, i probably won't replace this machine at all, i'll probably just go back to the desktop.

i'm going to sleep shortly. but, when i wake up, i'll need to pick up where i left off.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/04/fran-m04.html

i don't think anybody will ever know what france would have been like under the presidency of marine le pen. my understanding is that the party behind her is as unhappy about her projections as she was about their past, and that she will probably be replaced - potentially by her much more racist niece - for the next election.

i suspect she would have been far more moderate than some had feared.

but, we'll never know.

what we know is that macron is going to amplify the embrace of neo-liberalism that put le pen into the second round, and carry on with the austerity that is fueling the rise of xenophobia in the country. nobody should expect him to be any less enthusiastic about bombing people in the middle east or the north of africa, or to ease the increasing police state crack down, either. he probably won't even lift the burka ban that has already been in place for many years - and i don't even think that anybody even expects him to.

the left would have been preferable, of course. but, unfortunately, i suspect that we will look back on this election in five years and lament that we did not give a more moderate nationalist voice a chance to undo the effects of corporatism and austerity, as we are fighting off actual nazis.

macron will be a disaster; i will repeat that i think le pen would have been the lesser evil.