what this emperor truly lacks is a soul.

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2018/03/07/Trudeau-New-Clothes/

you make the bill as simple as you can make it.

nothing else besides daca.

you reject all amendments.

you force an up or down vote.

and, you get the two thirds required in each house to tell the president to eat a shit sandwich.

capeche?

don't expect it.

an unwillingness or inability for congress to act can never be an excuse for the arbitrary use of executive power.

congress has to eat this. and, voters should be holding them accountable for their failures to get a popular bill passed.

and, that lottery is a dumb idea, anyways.

are you telling me that congress can't pull together a supermajority to support dreamers without funding a wall?

bullshit.

it's not the role of the president to pass decrees on immigration status.

only congress can fix this.

and, if the president is being an ass, you overrule him with a supermajority.

i repeat: daca must be resolved by congress, as that is their role in the american system.

chuck schumer is full of shit - and not remotely interested in solving the problem.

he'd lose way too many votes...

do a survey.

ask habitual marijuana users: do you smoke by yourself or with others?

be prepared to learn that almost all of them smoke alone, and prefer it that way - that they even use it as a way to escape being social. and, then put 2 +2 together around it.

if what you're thinking is..

if we make it so that marijuana users have to stay inside, then they'll stop having fun and stop doing it.

...then that's completely wrong, and based on a total misunderstanding of what marijuana is all about.

that might work for cocaine, or meth. but, marijuana users hate people, anyways, and would rather smoke alone, and pout by themselves - that's why they pick the stone, rather than the high.

what you will end up with is chronic, paranoid marijuana users stuck on disability for life.

but, if you encourage them to come outside and meet people and be more social, you might even help them break the habit a little.

potheads are not, never have been and never will be the archetypal cool kids.

potheads have always been and always will be the introverts, the ostracised and the socially inept. see, realizing that the data shows that marijuana doesn't create inept behaviour is only getting half of the picture: it misses that these things have become correlated in the popular (mis)conception for the precise reason that people that are already socially retarded are so heavily drawn to it.

so, part of a marijuana legalization strategy should be to stop people that are already losers from using the drug as an excuse to reinforce their anti-social behaviour.

in the end, your average pothead might not become a gregarious social butterfly. but, helping them connect with each other could at least minimize the arresting behavioural habits.

so, if marijuana doesn't belong inside peoples' homes, where does it belong?

i think there's two places where marijuana should be smoked:

1) outside, in dark alleyways.
2) at bars.

where it belongs is in the back patio at a dive bar, shared amongst patrons enjoying a beer. and, it should be available for purchase at said bar.

if people prefer to avoid alcohol, there are always coffee bars, as well.

but, like alcohol, there should be a focus on designated consumption sites and a policy to get it out of the home - partly because smoking alone, like drinking alone, is going to contribute to mental health problems, not help resolve them.

these are people that you want to encourage to go outside and meet friends, not encourage to stay inside and fester in a state of arrested development.

the thing i held on to for a few more years was civ2 on pc.....but i was done by about 16 or 17....

i never did the first person shooter thing, although i remember watching friends play goldeneye at parties.

i just never found the idea of killing things to be very appealing.

sorry.

i had a sega genesis when i was a kid. about 10-13 years old.

then i grew out of it.

that is all.

i would support an outright ban on first-person shooter games, regardless of whether or not it leads to gun violence, on the basis that it's destroying lives and wasting potential.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/trump-reopens-a-seemingly-settled-video-game-debate-1.3832555

the new (lack of a) tobacco reduction strategy is a concrete example of where this government is actually worse than the previous one.

i can't believe that the government put a policy of reducing the wage gap for cancer researchers in it's updated tobacco reduction strategy, which is no strategy at all, but the worst written policy document i've ever seen; this is not a professional report, but an undergraduate paper that any competent prof would grade with an F.

minus.

this is a government that is fundamentally unserious about anything.

and, i'd never thought i'd say it, but at least harper was serious.

no, changing tax rates doesn't affect people's behaviour.

so, tax cuts don't create jobs. and, they don't increase gdp, either. nor will tax increases reduce carbon emissions - or smokers.

the idea that taxes affect behaviour is just a bunch of right-wing propaganda.

we've made good progress in reducing the number of smokers, here. but, it wasn't due to taxation. it was due to a combination of restrictive policies that made it hard to smoke, a lot of public health information and a lot of social coercion that rejected smokers as untouchables. we made smoking socially unacceptable - that is what worked.

personally, i'm strongly in favour of utilizing peer pressure as an informal mechanism of social control to carry out social engineering goals - and getting smoking out of apartment buildings would be a desirable end that peer pressure could be effectively used as a means for.

we're going to have to replicate this with marijuana smokers - and, god forbid, crack smokers, too.

science always takes primacy.

sorry.

hey, i didn't make that up, it's just what the science has discovered.

if you are a palestinian today then you may have some genetic drift from the surrounding areas, but you are actually a descendant of the ancient jews, who were converted first to christianity by the romans and then to islam by the arabs.

the jews are not your cousins, or even your brothers, but your actual selves.

and, so this is the truth we must come to: some hebrews are jewish, and some hebrews are muslim, but they are all hebrews - and should live together under a pluralistic hebrew state, with equal rights for all.

see, the point you're all missing about palestinian origins is that the roman genocide actually worked.

the romans were quite good at genocide, actually. they successfully carried out several of them...and they had a particular hate on for semites of all types....

today, almost two thousand years later, the palestinians don't even know that they're hebrews. they think they're arabs. that's pretty impressive, isn't it?

wiped right off the map...

and, somewhere in hell, a roman legion is chuckling.

and, who do you think gave you those drugs in the first place?

huh?

if i could get away with it, i'd march down there, kick the door down, take their crack pipes away and kick them out into the street.

of course, i'd need back up.

the man won't allow it, though.

hey, where'd you go?

oh, there you are back there - hiding behind the man's legs.

safe there, huh?

and, now you're calling me a terrorist...not until critical mass....wait...patience...

but, you know that's what the man does, right?

the man exists to protect your property from anarchists like me, that don't acknowledge your contracts or deeds.

do i want to destroy your way of life?

you betcha!

"you mean you don't....accept....property rights...i can't...who ever heard of such a thing...?"

and, what makes me laugh is that the status quo will look at you in shock, right?

"this...this...revolutionary...wants...she wants to change social norms...i can't...even...."

yeah.

and, you're the person i'm launching the revolution against.

who did you think i was going after? the government is you.

maybe you saw yourself as something different. but, you're probably just a status quo neo-liberal like everybody else, lost in delusions of your own feigned uniqueness.

and, that's what i want to burn down: your delusions of free choice.

what i want is to make government at the centre of people's lives: we need government at work, government at school, government at home - government everywhere.

democracy everywhere!

ok, ok.

ideally, the tenants vote.

but, ideally, we have actual mobility, too.

i have a problem with telling poor people to choke.

hey, don't look at me like that.

i never claimed to be a libertarian, or to have any interest in "keeping government out of people's lives".

i'm an anarchist of the left. i think that we are the government, and the idea of "keeping government out of people's live" is incoherent on it's face - a contradiction in terms.

i would have liked to see something a little bit more proactive than a measly tax increase.

just more incompetence from this government...

https://ipolitics.ca/2018/02/27/liberals-hiking-tobacco-taxes-boosting-control-strategy/

but, i need to be clear: i'm right about this.

history will uphold this plight.

and, i intend to win, in the long run.

so, how am i feeling?

well, given that i'm caught up on sleep, it's not that strange that i'm having a long day. i'd better get some sleep in the next 12 hours, though, or i'm going to find myself back at the hospital.

and, i will keep going to the hospital until they give me the right answer.

i'm not high. not racing. not feeling palpitations. i'm getting a mild nose bleed, but it's dry in here, and i need to clean the remnant smoke off the walls and floors. it's suspicious, but it could be a coincidence. my headache never fully went away, but it's currently manageable.

i've patched up the worst area for now, and it does seem to be having an effect. and, i've got the windows wide open. but, the wind has not been blowing directly at me since the first onset of winter, and i'm above hot air rising, so i'm actually getting a lot of negative pressure. the forecast suggests that the wind might shift in my direction this morning.

thankfully, the landlord was here this morning to patch the hole in the bedroom. he's suggesting it may need two more days. but, my hands are tied until i can get in there.

see, i need to clean in here, but the space is packed full of stuff. i really need to be able to clean in the other room first and then slowly move things in, which will give me enough space to clean in the main room.

i've decided that i need to use a brute force approach, which means taping over every inch of the walls. it's going to look like a rubber room. but, that's what non-smokers are going to have to be doing to deal with this.

i am of course in support of marijuana legalization, at the least, but i would also support a law banning smoking inside of apartment buildings. as it is, property values for older buildings are going to crash when this becomes legal. we're going to see the creation of "pot houses" that nobody except pot heads want to live in; on the other hand, we're going to need to pay a premium to avoid living with potheads. it's going to be a factor in further class stratification. and, the people forced to live in these buildings due to low income are going to incur all kinds of unnecessary respiratory diseases that are going to bog down the medical system.

expect a lot of people in the hospital complaining about smoke inhalation over the next few years....

i'll eventually have pictures up, and i'd fully recommend that people emulate this approach, if they're in the same situation.

for now, like i say: i should be getting tired soon, and will have reason to be concerned if i don't. but, i'm otherwise feeling ok - besides the little bit of blood in my nose, and the mild lingering headache that i think should lift when i can finally do a good clean.

i almost fell over when i first heard this.

a familiar, comforting voice in a refreshingly new context.

best cure song in decades.

but, i mean....

i've been crystal clear that i reject the claim that i'm not working.

not only am i working, i'm working harder than you are, and i'm being more productive than you are, too - because, at the end of the day, nobody cares about that hole you get paid to dig.

you're just brainwashed...

sorry.

software should be free in both senses.

you would expect me to take a harshly realistic view on software piracy, right?

i do not and never will have the means to purchase audio software. so, i can steal it or just not use it at all. as such, i'm not actually cutting into anybody's profit margin, because i was never going to buy it, anyways.

if it was a guitar or a synthesizer or some other physical object, i'd buy it in a pawn shop. that's the better comparison; and, either way, the creators aren't getting paid.

that said, i'm an artist, and keenly aware of the need to convert my labour into food, or starve. but, i'd prefer to lean towards a ubi or gai than towards an enforcement of property rights. and, we can have this debate this decade, but it won't be long before property rights aren't a serious option, and programmers are uniting with artists in their requests to abolish the market.