as i've stated many times, the correct way to listen to my records is with a pair of high quality phones, and free of outside distractions.

i'm not an 'entertainer' and i've never wanted to be one, either.

i wouldn't have the slightest idea how to put together a concert, and i'd probably never get over the stage fright. the few times i've been on stage, i've tended to face away from the crowd. have you ever seen footage of robert fripp? i'm boring like that.

i don't have "charisma".

i don't enjoy being the centre of attention.

i'm a studio musician - a producer, a behind-the-scenes type. and, if i was ever going to play in a band, it would be in a supporting role, like a bassist or a keyboard player.

i've never imagined that i'm ever going to perform any of this material. it's always been intended as purely recorded music...

that said, there was a period when i considered going to a production school. i'm not sure if i regret not going, or not. i think i would have run into the same basic problem, in the end - i wouldn't have been interested in making other people's music, and i'd just have ended up with a lot of skills i was able to teach myself, anyways. i'd almost certainly be where i am today, anyways.

i don't have a barrier preventing me from dealing with people, so much as i have an actual disinterest in dealing with people - i don't want some cure to make me more social, i want supports to allow me to exist in my vacuum.

erin weir's responsibility is to his constituents, not to the ndp politburo. so, if his constituents oppose a carbon tax, as they no doubt do, he has the responsibility to reflect that.

throwing him out of the party for his politics is one thing; making up some flimsy nonsense about sexual harassment is another.

three consequences:

1) it's just more evidence that this party has become very shady.
2) this is a reminder of what proportional representation would look like: you follow the orders at headquarters, and your constituents' voices don't matter.
3) the conservatives probably win the seat in the next election.

when people in your party dissent, you engage with them, you don't muzzle them and then purge them.

horrific mismanagement.

horrifically stupid mismanagement.

typical tory media idiocy - designed to emotionally manipulate you, rather than get to the facts of the situation.

yes, it's expensive.

but, the testing that's put in place isn't just designed to determine efficacy, it is also designed to determine safety, as well. we don't just not know that these drugs will help her; we don't know that they won't hurt her, either.

no doctor should be approving a drug that hasn't yet been deemed safe, or hasn't yet been deemed effective. and, this is really the point of failure, here: doctors pushing untested medication, and unrealistic expectations around that untested medication.

science is a slow, difficult process. but, the more important question isn't around coverage, it's around approval - and we simply can't be approving untested drugs until we're sure that they're safe.

wynne should not worry about this kind of anti-intellectualism in her own base. but, it's the kind of thing that destroys the ndp...

http://torontosun.com/news/provincial/braun-victoria-begs-for-her-life

judges really need to have a basic science education.

well...

i was looking forward to the rain to get the woman next door off the porch.

but, it seems like that was all the woman downstairs needed to stay inside to blaze.

she coughed less when she went outside, too. now she's hacking again. secondhand smoke is terrible for you.

there's no future here. i'm going to have to start looking on monday.

maybe sending parents to the weed store to get "medicine" for their kids will snap some sense into them, and have them better understand what they're actually doing to their kids.

marijuana needs to be subject to the same testing requirements as any other drug.

it's weird how we assign these magic properties to marijuana, isn't it?

if i told you that dandelion tea cured epilepsy, and shrugged when asked for evidence, you'd write me off as a snake oil salesperson and tell me to take a hike.

yet, we have these drastically different standards when we talk about marijuana - we're willing to assign it any magical property we can imagine, based on no evidence at all. and, normally intelligent people fall for it.

but, there isn't any convincing science that demonstrates that marijuana has any effect on epilepsy, and that's the point. so, yes, they should go to the dispensary - and if they find that egregious then they should have the facts better explained to them.

these "doctors" should hand in their licenses - because this isn't an opinion, or a place where we are to be discussing opinions. if a doctor is to prescribe a medication, that medication needs clinical trials to demonstrate the value of doing so; otherwise, they are behaving negligently.

the correct legal term for the opinion that marijuana is a medicine is called negligence.

anybody convinced otherwise should get the trials running.

i'm skeptical, to say the least.

http://nationalpost.com/cannabis/medical-marijuana-producers-push-for-legitimacy-as-legalization-approaches

am i going to waste my time commenting on the question of whether or not slavery is a choice?

well, what does that mean, exactly? does it mean that 51% of people made it a choice? does it mean that they made the choice free of duress? is this collective or individual?

and, i think that the difficulty of trying to figure out what the fuck it even means to ask whether slavery was a choice or not is indicative of the lack of thought put into the statement. that said, it also opens up a lot of space for careful thinking.

it's really not as insane as it appears on first glance; when they sent white people here, they often came under a concept of 'indentured servitude', which wasn't very different than slavery and was in fact some kind of a choice - perhaps not always a really free choice, but a choice between one kind of hardship and another. a serf tied to the land would have seen indentured servitude as an escape mechanism.

given that comparable systems of feudalism and slavery did exist in africa, i think the kneejerk reaction is actually fairly historically ignorant. it seems to be rooted in the idea that white people showed up in africa with fishing nets and just rounded up all the noble savages like they were bananas; this is of course patently absurd. this does nothing to deny the brutality of the whole thing, and the fact that so many people died in transit is worth pointing out. but, the buying and selling of humans in africa generally happened with some kind of negotiation process around people that were already enslaved. how many africans sold themselves into slavery in africa, with the understanding of what that meant in africa, only to be sold to american or arabic slave traders, and transited to strange lands against their will, for purposes they didn't initially agree to? then, where does that idea of choice become meaningful?

we could ignore the initial capture and talk instead about descendants, but this doesn't make the question any less complex. would a house servant be considered to have made a choice to be a slave if he rejected a slave revolt in the plantation? that's a category error, at least - these are not the same things. and, if the slaves of one master revolted due to severe mistreatment, and the slaves of another didn't due to more tolerable conditions, does that mean the slaves that did not revolt made a choice to accept the condition they did not make the choice to be born into? at what level does the question of free will becoming meaningful?

i don't think kanye has thought much about this.

and, that's unfortunate.

he's somebody that should have.

do you want my honest opinion? i think kanye should enrol at a university, take some history courses and get back to the world when he's better informed. and, i don't state that in a sardonic tone. he has an obligation to educate himself, if he's going to open his mouth and speak to the audience that he has.