if it wasn't for the fact that i have so much work to do, getting a job might not even be so terrible.

i truly didn't mind working in a call centre, walking distance from my apartment, for a shift or two a week. it's been a long time. and, i haven't done it since for the simple reason that i haven't had to...

but, the question i've always asked is this: what is the actual value of telling me to sit on a phone for 10 hours a week? why is that important? who cares?

listen, i'm not in the category of people that sits around on the couch all day watching oprah and smoking drugs. i work 20 hour days at no profit. i'm mostly straight edge. i spend so much time working, that i don't have time for friends or family.....or a job, for that matter.

the fact is that i'm a workaholic.

so, the question isn't whether i work or not - i'm the hardest working person you'll ever meet.

the question is whether the work i do has a market for it, and it clearly doesn't. but i don't care.

so, the only hard work you're going to incentivize from me is trying to figure out how to avoid wasting my time generating a profit for somebody else - because i have no interest in doing this.

and, trust me - i will do everything i possibly can to avoid being sent to do a job i don't care about.

the content of nafta should have always been a bilateral deal between the us and mexico, from the start.

we're better off reverting to the fta - that's what we always wanted in the first place.

we know what the truth is, already.

lisa thinks that jobs will create themselves.

it's magic!

but, perhaps it is better to play along.

if lisa is so certain that social assistance does so much to prevent people from working, then surely she has a job creation strategy, too.

we're waiting, lisa. what are you going to do to create jobs?

"well, maybe they're still impoverished and ignorant, but if we take away their guns then they can't hurt anybody, right? and, what else are we going to do? redistribute wealth? ahahaha! i would rather they all kill each other off than toss them a dime of my own inheritance. just take away their guns, and let them throw temper tantrums in their own filth."

i suspect the rural caucus is not amused right now.

when i was a kid, back in the day, the ndp i grew up with would have argued that the way to approach gun violence is to get to the root causes of social inequality and alienation by funding social programs that educate people and help get them out of poverty, not pass an authoritarian law that is just going to create a black market.

it's quite a bourgeois position to think you can solve the consequences of poverty by taking away affected people's guns. truly.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/08/02/jagmeet-singh-trudeau-handguns_a_23494782/

maybe the tories should commit to fighting emissions by announcing a plan to have their cabinet wear ear plugs.

it's a start, right?

fucking idiots...

nah.

i spent a while mentally calculating space, and even if i use one of the tiny bedrooms as an eat-in kitchen, and the living room as a studio, it's still a pinch.

this goofy rental company is never even close on it's square footage. it said 600 square feet; i'd guess it's closer to 400. the bedrooms were like 6x10. i'd be happy with 10x10.

i'm not convinced the place was non-smoking, either.

i would have lowballed closer to $700 than $750, but didn't, in the end.

who ought to pay for all of this?

the pothead.

clearly.

so, what is this costing the landlords?

$1350 for me
$?? for the paralegal
$?? for filing costs
$?? lost rent, because this unit is unrentable
===========
$5000?

are they going to go after the pothead?

i hope they do. but, they seem to think they're standing up for her rights.

i wanted that two bedroom for $750.

maybe i can talk somebody down to $750, instead.

see, i'm actually in a fairly strong position for the next few days.

i'm going to see something tonight that is available immediately. like, i could move tomorrow. this unit has been evacuated, and the owner is losing money from it sitting.

i, on the other hand, did not pay rent this month - or, i did, but it was wiped out by the order.

so, i have the leverage.

and, i'm considering coming in a little low, if i like it.

so, what does that mean for me, budget wise?

well, as of this moment, i have ~$2850 in the bank. another $650 is $3500.

so, subtracting my $1000 buffer out, i have $2500 to spend on the move - including last, but not first, which will come to me at the beginning of the month. if i work in the next $1150, that's more like $3500+, for moving costs, first & last.

if i find something in another city close to here - niagara, hamilton - for $650-700, that leaves me with close to $2000 to move there with. i should come out ahead on that. do i want to?

on the other hand, if i subtract out $300 from the $3500, i'm left with $3200 to apply. that needs to include first and last, and i was thinking it would make sense to apply some kind of concept of inflation, but that doesn't really add up - any increase in rent is going to also inflate, at a higher level, so, no matter how i look at it, it's eventually going to run out. i mean, that is obvious, but actually doing the math pulls out a trivial rent increase - $25-50 - as worth looking at.

so, i can't really look at this like that. i'm still basically looking at the same price range - which is around $700 preferably, and $800 max. if the payout was more in the $5000 range, i could look at something more expensive; it isn't.

it does open up a more serious ability to move....

order came in today.

$1350.

on the low end, but that's ok.

so, they owe me $650.

i rant like this when i'm stressed out.

i hope that the order is available to access by tomorrow.

to put it another way: i don't really see a difference between christians and muslims, and tend to look down on them in much the same way.

i think that's unusual, still.

people that have no problem criticizing christianity tend to get strangely silent on islam; people that criticize islam don't tend to bother with christianity, or even go so far as to identify as christians.

but, they're the exact fucking same kind of stupid, as far as i'm concerned.

if you are curious....

....and i think i've said this before....

my parents were not religious. my father was technically a catholic, but i never saw him go to church, once. my stepmother found religion late in life; he and i usually went for brunch on sunday mornings when she was at church. he wasn't a bad person, but all he really cared about was sports.

my stepmother was the perfect example of the statement: "only immoral people need to go to church". that woman is/was wicked to the core - the worst human being i've ever met, by a good margin.

my mother would have been raised anglican. she's an addict, so she's been through the 12 steps, and i guess it's left her as some kind of unread deist. i mean, she's not going to go spouting deist philosophy or anything. if anything, i'd be more likely to label her a laveyan satanist.

with the exception of a few outings with a stepfather around the age of ten, i did not go to sunday school as a child. i was not raised with religious values. i don't have catholic guilt, or much of any internalized rejection or rebellion - the only meaningful religious instruction i ever received was at school, and i was kind of taught not to take it seriously. i always took it as an anthropology course, really.

i don't have latent christian values or traditions. i don't celebrate easter or christmas, and never really did. i don't have memories of christian family rituals. i don't have obscure memories of protestant work ethics or values.

i was very honestly raised an atheist. at eight, nine years old i was staying up all night on saturday reading stephen king or isaac asimov novels, falling asleep when the sun came up and just sleeping in on sunday. a little older, and i was in the basement studio all night.

i consequently understand religion exclusively through a leftist historical filter - i have a purely marxist conception of religion, as it came to me largely through secular literature. religion was always a retarding force in society. it was religion that acted as a stop on scientific inquiry, and kept us ignorant and backwards. i've pointed out before that it's more asimov than dawkins, but i would have sounded very much like a little dawkins at as young as eight years old.

so, when i attack christians, i'm not attacking myself. i never was one. it's not some proof i'm not a racist, although i'm not a racist; christianity is as much the other as any other religion is, to me. nor is christianity very white, really - the indigenous religions of europe are mostly lost, but would have been rather tribal and animalistic. christianity was invented in the middle east and brought to europe by brown people, in the world's first example of colonialism.

the point is that i'm not exaggerating when i tell you i'm as harsh on christianity, if not harsher on christianity, as i am on other religions. people don't seem to expect that, for some reason. i don't really know why.

i just try to be as factual as possible in assigning effects to causes. we elected a government with strong fundamentalist christian voices in it, but it is due mostly to the increasing presence of islam - church attendance rates continue to dwindle, while muslims are taking over entire neighbourhoods.

my goal is simply to be as accurate as possible.

but, yes: you should expect a lot of attacks on christianity, so long as we have christians in office, and their policies sound fundamentalist in nature or scope.

she'll be clinging to this when she's 84.

elizabeth may will not step down.

she must be destroyed.

51%.

you want to get very scared when you get close to it.

here's your fucking mirror ball, coastal america.

proceed with caution.

your kids can experience teen pregnancy, too!

move to ontario - where we just voted to abolish sex ed!

"canada's so cool."

yeah.

we're so cool that we just elected a climate-change-denying, gay-bashing, services-cutting christian redneck in our biggest province, because he tricked clueless recent immigrants into voting for him with empty, mindless rhetoric that anybody born here on a day before yesterday could have seen through in a second.

really fucking cool.

best fucking country in the world.

you may have better things to say about tolerance than i do; i'm not exactly a fan.

but, whatever you think of tolerance, you have to understand that you're only a liberal society when liberals can generate 51% of the vote.

when liberals lose their majority in california or new york due to heavy migration from conservative societies, the society in california and/or new york will shift to the right, too.

that's what happened in ontario.

the conservatives did it on purpose. if you didn't know better, you might think the liberals did, too.

you don't think those corporate dems wouldn't like less hippies and more muslims voting in the primaries?

be careful.

and observe your own future if you don't wise up to the facts...

we were naive, and we're going to learn the hard way.

learn from us.

don't make the same mistakes.

and why?

because we let our standards down on immigration.

we've gone full retard.

legit.

again...

california.

new york.

illinois.

are you taking notes?

we're fucked. for years.

it could take a generation to undo what these idiots are going to do.

the new maps will have to be amended to include ontario as a part of jesusland.

it's not our fault...

we got flooded with refugees and religious immigrants, and they fucked it all up.

but, yeah.

my landlord is a lying scoundrel.

we'll work this out in my favour, eventually.

for now, don't listen to her....

yeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw!

HANG ON TO YOUR BIBLES, FOLKS. WE'RE TALKING A STEEP TURN TO THE PAST.

welcome to ontario: alabama north!

fuck.

but, jesus provides, right lisa?

the ndp elected a clown, and it has left them as an unserious option.

that's not even true; the ndp got co-opted by a clown, who is unlikely to even win a seat.

he could always shave his beard, you know...

until then, the liberals are going to have no serious pressure on their left, and slowly align with the conservatives, as they always do without leftward pressure.

the country is in a serious political crisis that we're not going to find a way out of until we can organize properly on the left, again. the right vehicle is probably the greens, but we have to find a way to forcefully destroy elizabeth may, first.

no, let's understand this properly.

what we're learning is that trudeau was as dumb as doug ford, all along.

hey, i've got a message for you, lisa:

automation is going to lead to mass structural unemployment.

were you planning on starving us off, instead?

“I think that when you’re encouraging people to accept money without strings attached, it really doesn’t send the message that I think our ministry and our government wants to send.”

because you're a dipshit calvinist lunatic that gets her understanding of the world from the back of a dark age mythological text?