the democrats seem to want to be the greater evil, all of a sudden, for some reason.

i don't get it.

but, so be it.

i don't know how we ended up in the surreal situation where senate democrats are more hawkish than the republican president, but i am in full support of disarmament (as i always have been), i have no interest in a war with russia and i do not believe that the democrats' shift towards the extreme right on this file is going to do anything besides accelerate their collapse in blue states.

every time i hear a democrat attack russia, i'm reminded of how much of a catastrophe clinton would have been on foreign policy if she had won.

the democrats should have an easy mid-term win in 2018, but they insist on running in favour of an insane conflict that nobody wants.

this can't happen.

especially not here.

it doesn't matter if it affects me or not, in the end.

my reaction is more as a trans-atheist activist than it is as somebody being denied housing.

again: i can't let this slide.

this needs to be cut out at the root.

i can take pictures.

film it.

maybe call the news?

one of these companies is advertising an open house on the weekend.

this is advertised on their website, on kijiji & elsewhere.

so, i sent a question about the open house, and they claimed there was no vacancy & consequently no open house.

i have screen shots of the ads. & i have emails claiming there's no vacancy & no open house.

so, when i show up there on the weekend, i'd better not find an open house.

if i do, i'll be launching litigation on monday.

islam is the new christianity.

i will be strongly proactive and exceedingly aggressive in fighting this.

i am an outspoken & unabashedly leftist indigenous queer person of colour on disability that has been speaking out against islam for years, under the concern that a society that normalizes islam would readily and perhaps even gleefully incinerate my rights, as it drags me out of my home and strings me up a tree.

and, i do believe that this is exactly what's happening with a number of these big rental companies.

i mean, i'm not sure what the precise reasoning is. is it my gender expression? my sexual orientation? the fact that i'm single? the fact that i'm an atheist? the fact that i'm disabled? my skin colour? my indigenous background? my politics? all of the above?

but, i don't have a choice but to prosecute anybody that is carrying out this kind of discrimination.

even if it does not directly harm me, monetarily.

even if the end result is that the company pays a fine rather than restitution.

this is exactly what i've been speaking out against, and i consequently must stand up for my rights.

i didn't want this fight, but i saw it coming, and i'm ready to fight it.

i repeat: liberals are supposed to hate the rentiers, to denounce them as idlers and thieves and insist they charge fair market prices.

today, they're just an accepted part of the bourgeoisie. granted..

...but, they were initially the singular problem identified by liberal economists, and attacked by liberal politicians. to a very large extent, the purpose of liberalism was initially to abolish the rentier class, who at the time were nearly exclusively tory.

that was the entire point of the theories devised by the likes of smith & ricardo: to abolish rentier capitalism.

it clearly hasn't worked so well. but it's useful to put what they intended to do in proper context.

so, there really shouldn't be anybody except tories arguing against going after people that are trying to inflate the rent; liberals are supposed to be virulently opposed to that.

what liberals and leftists are supposed to agree on is that the real public enemy is the rentiers.

property can be freedom, if you can find it, and it sustains - albeit at the expense of the freedom of others.

but, what i'm describing in both scenarios are examples where property is theft.

which is a reminder that property is an impossibility in a truly free society.

and, i do think that there's an issue in this city with chinese landlords refusing to rent to non-chinese people - as there is in pretty much all cities - and perhaps also, increasingly, with muslim landlords refusing to rent to non-muslims, which i would suspect is also pretty normal (even if the chinese dwarf the muslims in terms of populations, here, meaning it's much less visible, as of right now).

the chinese landlords just simply don't return my calls or messages.

these are difficult cases to prosecute on circumstantial evidence.

but, the only way that's going to stop is if people start suing them when they're sure of it.

a second factor that seems to be screwing up the market here is that a lot of the houses near the ambassador bridge seem to have been bought up by asians looking to rent furnished rooms to asian students.

and, they're explicit about it.

"looking for indian student to share room."

it's not like i want to share a room with an indian teenager for $200/month. that's not the point. the point is that the market has been flooded - there is currently a dramatic oversupply of furnished rooms for students. and, this is eating into the normal market.

again: these people will eventually give up. but, for now, a lot of them have 416 numbers, and seem to be operating with toronto mindsets and toronto prices. they're asking for too much money, trying to tap into a market for international students that largely doesn't exist.

the result is that we're going to have a lot of empty, furnished rooms in houses that would have held low income people up until a few months ago - and the city is continuing to broadcast a low income housing shortage.

there should be more strenuous rules around things like offering shared rooms, or converting apartments into rooming houses. or, at the least, they need to crack down on landlords that refuse to rent to non-students.

again: the market will eventually sort this out.

but, i now have 2.5 months.

so, when you see these cops in bc pushing around these indigenous groups for protesting these pipelines, this is legally not a lot different than israeli soldiers pushing around palestinian kids - it's an illegal occupation operating solely by physical force.

so, if the feds want to lay a pipeline from alberta to lake superior, they can use eminent domain (even in indigenous regions), run a bullshit consult process and be done with it, so long as they fight off the court challenge. they can do that because the area was ceded to the crown in the numbered treaties. these numbered treaties are contentious, but they do legally exist.

in british columbia, the land was never ceded to the crown, so eminent domain is illegal (although it does happen). the consultation process is not a rubber stamp, but a nation-to-nation dialogue about sovereign land rights. and, if the natives say "no", then the crown has no further authority - not under legislation, and not under a constitution that really shouldn't even be in force at all.

i'm taking things to extremes that they have yet to be taken to, but eventually must be taken to. and, i do suspect that it will be a resource conflict that eventually leads to constitutional collapse.

what legal basis does an unratified constitution have over an area that is being illegally occupied under international law?

we don't talk about this in canada. but, british columbia is really a special case.

a proper rule of law would immediately acknowledge that the tribes in british columbia should have full sovereignty. not even nisga'a sovereignty. absolute, full sovereignty.

they didn't sign anything. we didn't trick them into signing things, we didn't give them a bad deal - we just showed up and started building.

there is no legal reason why vancouver should be in canada.

it's a crisis waiting to happen.

i think i need a personal update.

i appear to have forgotten to mention that i finished rebuilding february, 2014 on the 10th; i think i thought i'd get through this fairly quickly, and not need to update. i guess i forget that i spent most of march with a broken recording machine. it was a heavy posting month. but it's done now...

how's the smoke? well, it has gotten dramatically better, but i wonder if the heat is a factor. the flip side of that is that the a/c might be off downstairs, which is a sign suggestive of the idea that she has left. that said, i've also been very ired this week for some reason, and my sweat smells alarmingly like marijuana. so, i don't know. it's weird all around, it really is.

i would expect that the posts will start to slow down again soon. i guess we'll have to see....

i'll need to stay in on monday because of the weird message about the electrical. i don't currently have any showings planned until saturday.

the constitution of canada itself, as it relates to british columbia, is actually only applicable on very shaky grounds, to begin with.

i would not expect the idea of a province of british columbia to exist long enough to make it to the next century.

this land does not belong to canada at all.

to put it simply, by what logic does the canadian government claim it has a right to build a pipeline through an area that never ceded it's sovereignty to it except the logic of sheer force overpowering legal and democratic legitimacy?

the only legal claim that canada has to british columbia is the 1763 proclamation.

british columbia is actually, legally speaking, a canadian military occupation of unceded territory.

http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2014/03/this-particular-group-is-not-signatory.html