this is from 1959.
the fact is that the factors underlying weakening in the polar vortex is something we understood before anybody even uttered the phrase "climate change".
we don't need new research to uncover something we've understood for decades. we just need to collect evidence and watch the theories we already have prove themselves - which is exactly what's happening.
the fundamental point is this: as the polar vortex is a solar phenomenon, you should consult solar scientists about how it works. and, when the solar scientists tell you "we don't need dubious speculations from people dabbling well outside their field about melting sea ice to understand how this works", that should be enough to put the issue to rest.
anthropogenic climate change is a real thing.
but, it has nothing to do with the polar vortex, which is controlled by the sun.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/JZ064i007p00749
Thursday, January 31, 2019
i need to be clear.
this isn't a situation where the original author came up with a bad mechanism that's been savaged by physicists.
absolutely no mechanism to describe this clearly physically impossible transfer of energy has been presented at all.
she has a correlation and a hunch. that's it. but, correlation is not causality.
and, we already have a decades old theory that perfectly describes what is actually happening - we don't need new research, we already understand this.
this isn't a situation where the original author came up with a bad mechanism that's been savaged by physicists.
absolutely no mechanism to describe this clearly physically impossible transfer of energy has been presented at all.
she has a correlation and a hunch. that's it. but, correlation is not causality.
and, we already have a decades old theory that perfectly describes what is actually happening - we don't need new research, we already understand this.
another example.
this article - apparently written by a science correspondent - has the temerity to link to a document that was not peer reviewed or even published in a journal, but sent to nature as a letter. this is worse than incompetent, but sneaky, as it brings in the authority of nature as a journal, while undermining it at the same time, as the article was not actually published by nature at all, and in fact was presumably rejected by it if it showed up in the letters section.
think of it like an op-ed.
and, the "journalist" then has the stupidity to claim that this widely rejected hypothesis is a "fact". wrong.
but, why does she sink to such an absurd low? because she's pushing an agenda, and can't find a decent source. if she could find a better source, she would have published it. one doesn't exist.
why is the cbc giving the denialist right this kind of fuel? they yell that this is a giant hoax, despite all evidence to the contrary - then the media gives them the evidence that they need to make a credible argument. it's madness.
grown-ups are able to understand that the world is complicated. we don't need to be force-fed lies in order to avoid being distracted. the actual fact is that we're undergoing a decline in tsi, and this decline is weakening the force that bottles up the polar winds, leading to extreme outbursts of cold in the northern hemisphere. and, so long as the sun's output remains weak, we should in fact expect this to continue - whether we reduce our carbon emissions or not.
the theory that this article - and so many others - are citing argues that melting polar ice is elevating energy from sea level into the troposphere. this is in contradiction to the laws of thermodynamics. worse, the author does not provide a mechanism, she cites some statistics and then waves her hands - it's magic. then, she wonders why nobody takes her seriously, except liberal journalists trying to argue that it's cold because of global warming, because they don't want to confuse people that have a grade ten science education as a part of their masters in comparative literature.
the correct theory talks about energy levels moving downwards into the atmosphere, in obeyance with the laws of thermodynamics. as the polar vortex happens in the atmosphere, the correct theory talks about things that affect the atmosphere - and melting sea ice is not one of them.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-polar-vortex-1.4998820
this article - apparently written by a science correspondent - has the temerity to link to a document that was not peer reviewed or even published in a journal, but sent to nature as a letter. this is worse than incompetent, but sneaky, as it brings in the authority of nature as a journal, while undermining it at the same time, as the article was not actually published by nature at all, and in fact was presumably rejected by it if it showed up in the letters section.
think of it like an op-ed.
and, the "journalist" then has the stupidity to claim that this widely rejected hypothesis is a "fact". wrong.
but, why does she sink to such an absurd low? because she's pushing an agenda, and can't find a decent source. if she could find a better source, she would have published it. one doesn't exist.
why is the cbc giving the denialist right this kind of fuel? they yell that this is a giant hoax, despite all evidence to the contrary - then the media gives them the evidence that they need to make a credible argument. it's madness.
grown-ups are able to understand that the world is complicated. we don't need to be force-fed lies in order to avoid being distracted. the actual fact is that we're undergoing a decline in tsi, and this decline is weakening the force that bottles up the polar winds, leading to extreme outbursts of cold in the northern hemisphere. and, so long as the sun's output remains weak, we should in fact expect this to continue - whether we reduce our carbon emissions or not.
the theory that this article - and so many others - are citing argues that melting polar ice is elevating energy from sea level into the troposphere. this is in contradiction to the laws of thermodynamics. worse, the author does not provide a mechanism, she cites some statistics and then waves her hands - it's magic. then, she wonders why nobody takes her seriously, except liberal journalists trying to argue that it's cold because of global warming, because they don't want to confuse people that have a grade ten science education as a part of their masters in comparative literature.
the correct theory talks about energy levels moving downwards into the atmosphere, in obeyance with the laws of thermodynamics. as the polar vortex happens in the atmosphere, the correct theory talks about things that affect the atmosphere - and melting sea ice is not one of them.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-polar-vortex-1.4998820
and, this focuses more explicitly on the effects in the northern hemisphere.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535
this is a little older, but it's maybe a little easier to read.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4758621/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4758621/
this is just one article, and it is exploring just one facet of a complicated thing.
if you really want to understand this, you shouldn't go sorting through periodicals, but should just pick up a textbook in meteorology that explains how the polar vortex is a solar phenomenon - it is essentially a swirling mass of cold air that is kept in check by solar radiation, and that both tightens up when radiation is increased and starts to break apart and expand when solar radiation decreases. as the earth moves around the sun in a roughly elliptical orbit, on an angle, that creates fluctuations in the amount of radiation hitting the earth, an expansion (and subsequent contraction) is something that happens every year, and we've known about it for decades. it's in the textbooks...you don't need need recent periodicals....it's well understood, already...
so, i'm not citing this - which is a recent paper from a very good source - to prove any specific point.
what i'm doing is trying to direct you to what the actual scientific community - not the liberal media - is considering right now to try and understand what is happening in the northern hemisphere, specifically.
this is a starting point for further research, not an authoritative end point.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13351-018-7101-2
if you really want to understand this, you shouldn't go sorting through periodicals, but should just pick up a textbook in meteorology that explains how the polar vortex is a solar phenomenon - it is essentially a swirling mass of cold air that is kept in check by solar radiation, and that both tightens up when radiation is increased and starts to break apart and expand when solar radiation decreases. as the earth moves around the sun in a roughly elliptical orbit, on an angle, that creates fluctuations in the amount of radiation hitting the earth, an expansion (and subsequent contraction) is something that happens every year, and we've known about it for decades. it's in the textbooks...you don't need need recent periodicals....it's well understood, already...
so, i'm not citing this - which is a recent paper from a very good source - to prove any specific point.
what i'm doing is trying to direct you to what the actual scientific community - not the liberal media - is considering right now to try and understand what is happening in the northern hemisphere, specifically.
this is a starting point for further research, not an authoritative end point.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13351-018-7101-2
the sad truth is that all of these people walking around saying "it's cold because of global warming", because they read a piece in the atlantic or the nation or something, are just as clueless as the people that still think iraq had weapons of mass destruction, because fox still won't drop the lie, years later.
it's the same repetition of lies pushed down from the top, and the same inability to think critically that allows people to fall for them.
these people are mirror reflections of each other - both convinced they know the truth, and both led astray by dishonest media.
it's the same repetition of lies pushed down from the top, and the same inability to think critically that allows people to fall for them.
these people are mirror reflections of each other - both convinced they know the truth, and both led astray by dishonest media.
see, this is the kind of thing i'm talking about.
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/how-frigid-polar-vortex-blasts-are-linked-to-global-warming-climate-change-connection-weather-environment/123443/
this idea is being presented here as though they're providing a science lesson, when they are in fact presenting what amounts to a fringe theory that has been widely ridiculed by physicists. the authors have not even presented a mechanism by which this "amplification" can occur, in contradiction to the basic laws of thermodynamics. it is a theory in the colloquial sense - a hunch, with little supporting data to back it up, and one that has been roundly denounced as incoherent, at that.
even the known climate change sites, like climate skeptic, tend to step away from this as bunk. the publications that are pushing it are not science journals, but liberal political sites like the nation that want to maintain a narrative - all weather on the planet has the same cause.
but, you don't have to choose between what we understand about the sun and what we understand about the greenhouse effect. both of these things are, in fact, happening at the same time. and, in this case, they're acting against each other.
i don't expect to win this argument, because i'm not having it with scientists. but, ask a physicist about "arctic amplification". you won't like their response.
what i'm more concerned about with this is the media. it was one thing when this was a new idea, and we could throw it out there for debate; but that's already happened, now, and it's been discarded as nonsense. yet, the liberal press continues to run with it, oblivious to what the science actually says about it, because it aligns with an ideological perspective. and, that is dangerous - because we've seen the consequences of it on the right.
there have been studies done on people that watch fox news that have concluded that they understand less about the world than people that don't watch the news at all, because all they're able to regurgitate is an ideology that's been pushed down to them. when the left starts pushing debunked science like "arctic amplification" in order to fit an ideological perspective, and oblivious to what the science actually says on the matter, it is essentially just repeating the fox news model. and, we're going to end up with the same problems on the left that exist on the right - if we don't already have them.
on top of that, you're essentially giving the right what it's asking for. climate change is real, and a serious problem that needs to be addressed. but, "arctic amplification" is exactly what the idiots in the right-wing media are accusing the left of - it's essentially a liberal hoax. by continuing to push bad science, you're converting a strawman argument into an actual truth.
we have centuries of data to use to understand how the sun affects the polar vortex. it's not a new theory, it's tested and understood science. and, we know that what we're seeing in the northern hemisphere is what we should expect from an extended solar minimum. there's nothing controversial here.
we just have to understand that the world is complicated, and that the things we experience have multiple complicated causes to them that often don't align well with the kinds of simplistic narratives pushed by the media.
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/how-frigid-polar-vortex-blasts-are-linked-to-global-warming-climate-change-connection-weather-environment/123443/
this idea is being presented here as though they're providing a science lesson, when they are in fact presenting what amounts to a fringe theory that has been widely ridiculed by physicists. the authors have not even presented a mechanism by which this "amplification" can occur, in contradiction to the basic laws of thermodynamics. it is a theory in the colloquial sense - a hunch, with little supporting data to back it up, and one that has been roundly denounced as incoherent, at that.
even the known climate change sites, like climate skeptic, tend to step away from this as bunk. the publications that are pushing it are not science journals, but liberal political sites like the nation that want to maintain a narrative - all weather on the planet has the same cause.
but, you don't have to choose between what we understand about the sun and what we understand about the greenhouse effect. both of these things are, in fact, happening at the same time. and, in this case, they're acting against each other.
i don't expect to win this argument, because i'm not having it with scientists. but, ask a physicist about "arctic amplification". you won't like their response.
what i'm more concerned about with this is the media. it was one thing when this was a new idea, and we could throw it out there for debate; but that's already happened, now, and it's been discarded as nonsense. yet, the liberal press continues to run with it, oblivious to what the science actually says about it, because it aligns with an ideological perspective. and, that is dangerous - because we've seen the consequences of it on the right.
there have been studies done on people that watch fox news that have concluded that they understand less about the world than people that don't watch the news at all, because all they're able to regurgitate is an ideology that's been pushed down to them. when the left starts pushing debunked science like "arctic amplification" in order to fit an ideological perspective, and oblivious to what the science actually says on the matter, it is essentially just repeating the fox news model. and, we're going to end up with the same problems on the left that exist on the right - if we don't already have them.
on top of that, you're essentially giving the right what it's asking for. climate change is real, and a serious problem that needs to be addressed. but, "arctic amplification" is exactly what the idiots in the right-wing media are accusing the left of - it's essentially a liberal hoax. by continuing to push bad science, you're converting a strawman argument into an actual truth.
we have centuries of data to use to understand how the sun affects the polar vortex. it's not a new theory, it's tested and understood science. and, we know that what we're seeing in the northern hemisphere is what we should expect from an extended solar minimum. there's nothing controversial here.
we just have to understand that the world is complicated, and that the things we experience have multiple complicated causes to them that often don't align well with the kinds of simplistic narratives pushed by the media.
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
i'm not going to repeat the same thing that i've posted about the weather 100 times already. yes, the oceans and atmosphere are warming due to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide. but, the polar vortex is a solar phenomenon, and these blasts of cold air are a consequence of decreasing solar output.
here on the canadian side of detroit, it's been a relatively mild winter - but was a very bleak fall. the temperature just dropped one day in mid october and never recovered, but it didn't get worse, either. so, we had three months of stasis in the period of the year that usually features the greatest amount of change. what's hitting us this week is exaggerated, but we're at looking at double digits and rain again by saturday, so if we end up with a total of four days of actual winter, no matter how extreme, that's not a bad outcome, overall.
for right now, i'm not even looking outside. i'm happy curled up in my blanket, thanks.
here on the canadian side of detroit, it's been a relatively mild winter - but was a very bleak fall. the temperature just dropped one day in mid october and never recovered, but it didn't get worse, either. so, we had three months of stasis in the period of the year that usually features the greatest amount of change. what's hitting us this week is exaggerated, but we're at looking at double digits and rain again by saturday, so if we end up with a total of four days of actual winter, no matter how extreme, that's not a bad outcome, overall.
for right now, i'm not even looking outside. i'm happy curled up in my blanket, thanks.
i'll take this as the mayor's coming out.
it's ok. nothing wrong with it.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/mbze4q/mayor-apologizes-for-wanting-to-sodomize-justin-trudeau-with-pipeline-pig
it's ok. nothing wrong with it.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/mbze4q/mayor-apologizes-for-wanting-to-sodomize-justin-trudeau-with-pipeline-pig
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
this ufo may be full of little green men, methinks.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/south-america/russian-passenger-jet-arrives-in-venezuela-rumours-swirl-20190130-p50uhc.html
https://www.smh.com.au/world/south-america/russian-passenger-jet-arrives-in-venezuela-rumours-swirl-20190130-p50uhc.html
except that we won't - we'll show up five minutes early, looking for brownie points, trying to "mend the relationship".
and, they'll toss us aside like the sycophants that we really are.
mccallum was perhaps the last true representative of the old guard in the liberal party, that argued for multilateralism and saw canada as a middle power that could act as an intermediary. his removal was actually deeply symbolic, which is what i was trying to get at. today, the liberals just want to be the 51st province, just like the conservatives - and he will no doubt be replaced by some american educated sinologist that upholds the cia-backed washington consensus.
we're a client state.
and, canadians need to wake up to this and push back on it.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/29/the-united-states-doesnt-have-your-back/
and, they'll toss us aside like the sycophants that we really are.
mccallum was perhaps the last true representative of the old guard in the liberal party, that argued for multilateralism and saw canada as a middle power that could act as an intermediary. his removal was actually deeply symbolic, which is what i was trying to get at. today, the liberals just want to be the 51st province, just like the conservatives - and he will no doubt be replaced by some american educated sinologist that upholds the cia-backed washington consensus.
we're a client state.
and, canadians need to wake up to this and push back on it.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/29/the-united-states-doesnt-have-your-back/
listen.
the way you have to understand the world right now, and this has actually been true for many years, is that you've got kasparov sitting in russia, and all these short-sighted capitalist idiots running amok with their heads cut off everywhere else, bumping into each other, setting off their guns, for their own self-interest.
it's sort of like one of those guys down in central park, that will play 30 games of chess at once and beat everybody.
i don't think that putin is a genius, it's more like idiocracy, in the sense that russia is the only traditional empire left standing. it's easy to win when nobody else plays.
what's killing america is it's entitlement, it's insistence on some concept of manifest destiny. it doesn't think it has to play. so, it's easy to beat.
i considered being quiet; i desperately want netanyahu removed. but, i decided that he probably can't stop it, anyways - and it's probably in everybody's interests that it's transparent.
iran's language is challenging, and it would help everybody if they'd just shut the fuck up. but, russia's interests are not altered by america's withdrawal, no matter how enticing the bear hug.
conversely, america might want to take note of what sane american commentators have been pointing out for decades - that israel is not a reliable ally in the middle east. did you see how quickly they bolted to putin at the smallest sign of moderation? what kind of ally is this?
the way you have to understand the world right now, and this has actually been true for many years, is that you've got kasparov sitting in russia, and all these short-sighted capitalist idiots running amok with their heads cut off everywhere else, bumping into each other, setting off their guns, for their own self-interest.
it's sort of like one of those guys down in central park, that will play 30 games of chess at once and beat everybody.
i don't think that putin is a genius, it's more like idiocracy, in the sense that russia is the only traditional empire left standing. it's easy to win when nobody else plays.
what's killing america is it's entitlement, it's insistence on some concept of manifest destiny. it doesn't think it has to play. so, it's easy to beat.
i considered being quiet; i desperately want netanyahu removed. but, i decided that he probably can't stop it, anyways - and it's probably in everybody's interests that it's transparent.
iran's language is challenging, and it would help everybody if they'd just shut the fuck up. but, russia's interests are not altered by america's withdrawal, no matter how enticing the bear hug.
conversely, america might want to take note of what sane american commentators have been pointing out for decades - that israel is not a reliable ally in the middle east. did you see how quickly they bolted to putin at the smallest sign of moderation? what kind of ally is this?
great!
i'm not a student and haven't been for a while, so i'll be keeping my distance this time. but, i need to point out that this isn't going to be as easy as it was in quebec.
organizers should be looking at the situation as an opportunity to build a movement. the reason the strikes were so large and successful in quebec is that this movement already existed due to years of organizing. there is no parallel movement in ontario.
that's fine. go out and build one. then there will be.
https://www.marxist.ca/socialist-fightback-student/1480-cfs-votes-for-ontario-student-strike-what-happens-now.html
i'm not a student and haven't been for a while, so i'll be keeping my distance this time. but, i need to point out that this isn't going to be as easy as it was in quebec.
organizers should be looking at the situation as an opportunity to build a movement. the reason the strikes were so large and successful in quebec is that this movement already existed due to years of organizing. there is no parallel movement in ontario.
that's fine. go out and build one. then there will be.
https://www.marxist.ca/socialist-fightback-student/1480-cfs-votes-for-ontario-student-strike-what-happens-now.html
there we go.
that's what i like to see.
maybe there's some hope for this province and this country, after all.
let's shut this province down until ford is defeated.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/01/27/hundreds-of-students-protest-doug-fords-osap-cuts-in-toronto_a_23654156/?ncid=other_topvideos_cp1pj3fgmfs&utm_campaign=top_videos
that's what i like to see.
maybe there's some hope for this province and this country, after all.
let's shut this province down until ford is defeated.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/01/27/hundreds-of-students-protest-doug-fords-osap-cuts-in-toronto_a_23654156/?ncid=other_topvideos_cp1pj3fgmfs&utm_campaign=top_videos
Monday, January 28, 2019
well, they're going after the oil in venezuela, and that's the sign i was looking for to suggest this is serious, not a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
did trump re-open the government to start a war?
you could maybe ask the question of why they didn't go after venezuela in the first place; it's clearly an easier target than iraq. but, when america inherited britain's policy on iraq, it also inherited britain's strategic perspective - and a war to steal oil from iraq is certainly the more rational option, from london.
the timing of this is all very suspect. and, frankly, they may regret getting what they wished for - they find that whatever comes next is far worse for their own interests. maduro is completely reliant on america for everything; you'd think they'd want to keep it that way. but, american policy in venezuela is 99% about the oil, so when the sanctions come down it means they're following through with it. i've been saying for years that if they wanted regime change, they'd target the oil - and here we go.
the intent is probably to produce a military revolt, which is more likely to lead to a junta than an election. this kid they've got working the streets is a useful idiot. and, then you get the guerilla warfare for the next 20 years, like in columbia.
it's not very smart, tactically. but, the president's poll numbers aren't very good...
this kind of thing litters roman history, and we see what happened in the end. solidarity with the campesinos. your grandchildren will reap the rewards of their arrogance.
did trump re-open the government to start a war?
you could maybe ask the question of why they didn't go after venezuela in the first place; it's clearly an easier target than iraq. but, when america inherited britain's policy on iraq, it also inherited britain's strategic perspective - and a war to steal oil from iraq is certainly the more rational option, from london.
the timing of this is all very suspect. and, frankly, they may regret getting what they wished for - they find that whatever comes next is far worse for their own interests. maduro is completely reliant on america for everything; you'd think they'd want to keep it that way. but, american policy in venezuela is 99% about the oil, so when the sanctions come down it means they're following through with it. i've been saying for years that if they wanted regime change, they'd target the oil - and here we go.
the intent is probably to produce a military revolt, which is more likely to lead to a junta than an election. this kid they've got working the streets is a useful idiot. and, then you get the guerilla warfare for the next 20 years, like in columbia.
it's not very smart, tactically. but, the president's poll numbers aren't very good...
this kind of thing litters roman history, and we see what happened in the end. solidarity with the campesinos. your grandchildren will reap the rewards of their arrogance.
and, i think i figured out how to recover my deleted email, too.
so, what i have is three giant pst files, although i think there's mostly overlap. when you clear the deleted items folder, the data stays in the pst file until you "compact " it, which is something i did not do. the one at 1.9 gb reads about 35,000 emails but there some to be a large amount of inaccessible emails; i know there's 60,000 inaccessible emails in the 1.4 gb one from analyzing it with a commercial software that i couldn't find a key for, and i can't read anything at all with this one in outlook. i also have a 2.4 gb past file that is full of already deleted items that cannot be accessed at all.
when i was trying to figure this out last week, the first thing i tried was to delete the index file using a hex editor, but i'm realizing i did it wrong. i actually deleted it outright; i should have zeroed it out. i guess that makes more sense, but you follow instructions when you're doing this kind of thing, and the hack said to delete it - so that's what i did. i've gone back and zeroed out the 1.4 one and it's picking up about 37,000 emails, which seems partial, but it's a start.
so, what i have is three giant pst files, although i think there's mostly overlap. when you clear the deleted items folder, the data stays in the pst file until you "compact " it, which is something i did not do. the one at 1.9 gb reads about 35,000 emails but there some to be a large amount of inaccessible emails; i know there's 60,000 inaccessible emails in the 1.4 gb one from analyzing it with a commercial software that i couldn't find a key for, and i can't read anything at all with this one in outlook. i also have a 2.4 gb past file that is full of already deleted items that cannot be accessed at all.
when i was trying to figure this out last week, the first thing i tried was to delete the index file using a hex editor, but i'm realizing i did it wrong. i actually deleted it outright; i should have zeroed it out. i guess that makes more sense, but you follow instructions when you're doing this kind of thing, and the hack said to delete it - so that's what i did. i've gone back and zeroed out the 1.4 one and it's picking up about 37,000 emails, which seems partial, but it's a start.
yeah, we're looking at actual winter here this week, and i don't want to think about going out in it.
i'm not going to actual file anything until i get a response from the investigation into the officer, anyways.
for right now, i'd rather be filing data.
so, i'll start making calls near the end of the week...
i'm not going to actual file anything until i get a response from the investigation into the officer, anyways.
for right now, i'd rather be filing data.
so, i'll start making calls near the end of the week...
well, i have some good news if you want to call it that - i'm back up on the laptop and ready to get back to what i was doing.
the last part of rebuilding the os was reconstructing all of the symbolic links in the user directories. i was getting some weird behaviour, like the start menu not acting right, so i did a clean install to one of the new disks i've had sitting, in order to get a listing of the symbolic links. them, i build them all up from scratch using the command line. not complicated, but time consuming; it is now done, and everything seems to be working correctly.
as mentioned, this mess at least gets all of the stray data from the pc ready to be filed, which i should be able to get back to shortly.
i also found another pst file - 2.5 gb of deleted data. my missing emails are no doubt in there, and i know they're recoverable, it's just a question of finding out how to do it without paying for it.
so, that was the day - copying data around and reconstructing symbolic links. it's done. and, i can start fresh in the morning.
the last part of rebuilding the os was reconstructing all of the symbolic links in the user directories. i was getting some weird behaviour, like the start menu not acting right, so i did a clean install to one of the new disks i've had sitting, in order to get a listing of the symbolic links. them, i build them all up from scratch using the command line. not complicated, but time consuming; it is now done, and everything seems to be working correctly.
as mentioned, this mess at least gets all of the stray data from the pc ready to be filed, which i should be able to get back to shortly.
i also found another pst file - 2.5 gb of deleted data. my missing emails are no doubt in there, and i know they're recoverable, it's just a question of finding out how to do it without paying for it.
so, that was the day - copying data around and reconstructing symbolic links. it's done. and, i can start fresh in the morning.
Sunday, January 27, 2019
i essentially can't know if this person was really afraid of me or not. the crown agreed that there was no objective basis for fear and dropped the case, but what little i know about this person suggests to me that she has some kind of mental illness, implying that she may have been experiencing real fear without any sort of rational basis.
i mean, it's entirely possible. people are afraid of all kinds of stupid things. i don't have to accuse her of dishonesty - she might be insane.
but, regardless, what she essentially did was conclude that, because i'm disabled, i must pose a threat to her. her fear was constructed solely on the basis of discrimination. the officer should have pointed out that i don't have any kind of criminal record, and there's consequently no grounds for arrest. instead, he played into her irrational prejudices.
i'm a feminist in the sense that i believe in equality across the genders, and to me that means that you don't get to define your experiences differently. a feminist may look at this and claim her experiences are being invalidated - i think the point is that you can't be validating experiences rooted in prejudice, and her experience absolutely needs to be not just invalidated but denounced as wrong.
the irony is that i wouldn't have had a case, otherwise. i was trolling her to get a response, and i got a little more than what i wanted.
i'll call to look into the recordings on monday.
i mean, it's entirely possible. people are afraid of all kinds of stupid things. i don't have to accuse her of dishonesty - she might be insane.
but, regardless, what she essentially did was conclude that, because i'm disabled, i must pose a threat to her. her fear was constructed solely on the basis of discrimination. the officer should have pointed out that i don't have any kind of criminal record, and there's consequently no grounds for arrest. instead, he played into her irrational prejudices.
i'm a feminist in the sense that i believe in equality across the genders, and to me that means that you don't get to define your experiences differently. a feminist may look at this and claim her experiences are being invalidated - i think the point is that you can't be validating experiences rooted in prejudice, and her experience absolutely needs to be not just invalidated but denounced as wrong.
the irony is that i wouldn't have had a case, otherwise. i was trolling her to get a response, and i got a little more than what i wanted.
i'll call to look into the recordings on monday.
just to clarify the point, in case it's not clear - but it should be. the thing is that people are dishonest, and i already know that i'm dealing with known liars.
back in september, i was arrested and charged with criminal harassment. the justice released me without meaningful conditions because she felt that the charges should not have been filed, but i was not able to get the charges dropped until november.
i have never met this person. i do not believe i know their real name(s). i have never been to this person's house, and do not know where they live - nor is there any reason to think i would want to go their house or work place. i have never seen a picture of this person, nor would i be able to identify them if i were to meet them. nor did i know the gender of the person i was communicating with, or their age.
the sole communication i've had with this person is in the form of responding to an ad for an apartment.
the charges claimed that my repeated attempts to apply for the ad constituted repeated unwanted communication. now, you can say what you want about repeatedly replying for an ad, but these communications were solely business-like in nature. as mentioned, i was communicating with what was a faceless advertisement with no information about the owner(s) of the property. i did know how many people i was communicating with or what their role in the business was. all communication was strictly related to the question of renting an apartment, or the legal consequences of discriminating against me on the basis of a disability.
to claim that this is "harassment" or "stalking" is merely to misunderstand what these terms mean. i acknowledge repeatedly applying for the ad, and quite aggressively. i reject that this constitutes stalking, in any way.
so, how did this happen?
well, i indicated to the property owner that i was going to file a discrimination suit. what she did was try to arrest me before i could get the suit filed. i will be filing the suit, and still have several months to do so, but i am waiting for a few things to work themselves out, first. as there was no evidence i posed any threat to her, the entire basis of her report was strictly discriminatory - i am suing her for filing a discriminatory false report to get me arrested, essentially.
however, i primarily blame the officer for the situation. crazy property owners exist, but they require enabling cops in order to be dangerous to the general public. i had had previous problems with the officer that arrested me, related to conflicts with smokers in the building that i lived in. the officer is a homophobe, a misogynist, a transphobe, a drug user and a smoker; he did not like me, and wanted to bring me in for daring to stand up for my rights as a non-smoker, and being openly queer in the process. the people in the building did not like me either for that reason, as it was a low income building full of drug addicts with right-wing social views, and he was essentially carrying through with their prejudices, however powerful his own may be.
i dealt with a handful of cops during this period, and only had problems with this specific one.
i am not under investigation of any crime, at this point. there was no evidence that i posed any threat to anybody, and the charges were consequently dropped.
however, i am awaiting the results of an investigation into the officer's conduct before i file for grievances under a constitutional challenge.
stalking is a serious crime. but, because it is a serious crime, police officers have a responsibility to be very careful in how they approach any potential stalking scenario. frivolous or trivial charges that are filed in order to inflate an officer's ego or carry out the whims of a wealthy landowner are unacceptable in any scenario, but are doubly unacceptable when it comes to charges such as this, as false charges of this nature both degrade the authority and integrity of law enforcement and have serious consequences for falsely accused parties.
to an extent, i walked into this. i fully understood that my behaviour was not illegal, and dared the cop to arrest me. he walked into it. and, now he's going to spend the rest of his life dealing with this - and i'm going to be seeking a large cash settlement for an arrest that shouldn't have happened, and the suffering i've incurred as a result of it.
as mentioned, i'm looking at three major lawsuits this year:
1) i will be suing the cops for breaching my constitutional rights in multiple ways and causing me all kinds of grief, including an infringement on my s. 6 rights to travel
2) i will be suing the person that filed false charges against me for discrimination in housing
3) i will be seeking information about my father's estate, in order to determine whether i have a worthwhile claim or not.
back in september, i was arrested and charged with criminal harassment. the justice released me without meaningful conditions because she felt that the charges should not have been filed, but i was not able to get the charges dropped until november.
i have never met this person. i do not believe i know their real name(s). i have never been to this person's house, and do not know where they live - nor is there any reason to think i would want to go their house or work place. i have never seen a picture of this person, nor would i be able to identify them if i were to meet them. nor did i know the gender of the person i was communicating with, or their age.
the sole communication i've had with this person is in the form of responding to an ad for an apartment.
the charges claimed that my repeated attempts to apply for the ad constituted repeated unwanted communication. now, you can say what you want about repeatedly replying for an ad, but these communications were solely business-like in nature. as mentioned, i was communicating with what was a faceless advertisement with no information about the owner(s) of the property. i did know how many people i was communicating with or what their role in the business was. all communication was strictly related to the question of renting an apartment, or the legal consequences of discriminating against me on the basis of a disability.
to claim that this is "harassment" or "stalking" is merely to misunderstand what these terms mean. i acknowledge repeatedly applying for the ad, and quite aggressively. i reject that this constitutes stalking, in any way.
so, how did this happen?
well, i indicated to the property owner that i was going to file a discrimination suit. what she did was try to arrest me before i could get the suit filed. i will be filing the suit, and still have several months to do so, but i am waiting for a few things to work themselves out, first. as there was no evidence i posed any threat to her, the entire basis of her report was strictly discriminatory - i am suing her for filing a discriminatory false report to get me arrested, essentially.
however, i primarily blame the officer for the situation. crazy property owners exist, but they require enabling cops in order to be dangerous to the general public. i had had previous problems with the officer that arrested me, related to conflicts with smokers in the building that i lived in. the officer is a homophobe, a misogynist, a transphobe, a drug user and a smoker; he did not like me, and wanted to bring me in for daring to stand up for my rights as a non-smoker, and being openly queer in the process. the people in the building did not like me either for that reason, as it was a low income building full of drug addicts with right-wing social views, and he was essentially carrying through with their prejudices, however powerful his own may be.
i dealt with a handful of cops during this period, and only had problems with this specific one.
i am not under investigation of any crime, at this point. there was no evidence that i posed any threat to anybody, and the charges were consequently dropped.
however, i am awaiting the results of an investigation into the officer's conduct before i file for grievances under a constitutional challenge.
stalking is a serious crime. but, because it is a serious crime, police officers have a responsibility to be very careful in how they approach any potential stalking scenario. frivolous or trivial charges that are filed in order to inflate an officer's ego or carry out the whims of a wealthy landowner are unacceptable in any scenario, but are doubly unacceptable when it comes to charges such as this, as false charges of this nature both degrade the authority and integrity of law enforcement and have serious consequences for falsely accused parties.
to an extent, i walked into this. i fully understood that my behaviour was not illegal, and dared the cop to arrest me. he walked into it. and, now he's going to spend the rest of his life dealing with this - and i'm going to be seeking a large cash settlement for an arrest that shouldn't have happened, and the suffering i've incurred as a result of it.
as mentioned, i'm looking at three major lawsuits this year:
1) i will be suing the cops for breaching my constitutional rights in multiple ways and causing me all kinds of grief, including an infringement on my s. 6 rights to travel
2) i will be suing the person that filed false charges against me for discrimination in housing
3) i will be seeking information about my father's estate, in order to determine whether i have a worthwhile claim or not.
Saturday, January 26, 2019
i had a few set backs, but the laptop is back up.
i initially reinstalled to get the bootmgr back up, but aborted it, thinking i wouldn't need to finish it. then, i formatted the partition and copied the data over, only to get a bootmgr error. so, i did a full reinstall, reformat and copy back and it's up and running, now.
i'm now copying data off of the pc and into the filing i was doing for the alter-reality, which was the next step, anyways.
i initially reinstalled to get the bootmgr back up, but aborted it, thinking i wouldn't need to finish it. then, i formatted the partition and copied the data over, only to get a bootmgr error. so, i did a full reinstall, reformat and copy back and it's up and running, now.
i'm now copying data off of the pc and into the filing i was doing for the alter-reality, which was the next step, anyways.
i don't know the details of this case.
but, mccallum is just about the smartest person the liberals have available to them, and what he was no doubt trying to get across was that canada has a responsibility to help her fight the extradition request, which he is at least right about. you could say he got fired, but it sounds to me like he was aiming for it.
i've been clear that i like the old liberals better, and there's a little bit of it hidden in here.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mccallum-out-ambassador-1.4994492
but, mccallum is just about the smartest person the liberals have available to them, and what he was no doubt trying to get across was that canada has a responsibility to help her fight the extradition request, which he is at least right about. you could say he got fired, but it sounds to me like he was aiming for it.
i've been clear that i like the old liberals better, and there's a little bit of it hidden in here.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mccallum-out-ambassador-1.4994492
i've actually never challenged the claim that trump is a racist, except the claim that he's an anti-semite, which i've found absurd all around. what i did point out is that clinton is equally racist, and that there is perhaps a better record in the public domain to demonstrate it.
i consequently don't react much to people yelling and screaming about trump being a racist, as though this is some kind of aberration or anomaly. with the exception of sanders, all of the major candidates in 2016 were clearly racists. any of the republicans were, would have been and still are racists. both of the clintons are brutal racists. the bushes are all racists. reagan was a racist. nixon was a terrible racist. even lbj was a known racist - as were the kennedy brothers, and fdr, too.
it's a racist society. what do you expect?
there's this kind of idea - and it's probably accurate - that you can't really end the war, you can just convert it into different forms. so, you can move the war around from place to place - from afghanistan to iraq to serbia and back to iraq again - but you can't extinguish it entirely. and, if you hold to this, you want to take a kind of harm reduction approach, in keeping the war as far away as possible.
this goes back to roman imperial strategy, and a recognition that the barbarians cannot be gotten rid of, but only controlled, distracted, redirected, confused. i've seen the argument made more than once that the fighting in syria and iraq was just necessary as a distraction for these jihadists; if the jihadists want to fight, and we can't convince them otherwise, let's have them fight in iraq, instead.
i've argued in this space that the russian strategy in syria follows from this, and in fact suggested or predicted it. there is essentially no way that fighting in ukraine can end well for the russians, so what they wanted to do was shift the conflict somewhere else, like syria. i argued that a successful russian counterattack in syria would force the americans out of ukraine - and it worked as i claimed it would. but, syria is still in russia's backyard.
for the americans to withdraw would be useful, if the goal is to focus on recreating a peaceful world order. but, for the americans to redeploy in another theatre with russian defenses would simply be to shift the war to a location more favourable to russian interests.
shifting the fighting in ukraine to syria was heraclean in scope, as it was - you almost expected putin to march the true cross back through moscow, or something. you'll note that the empire did not survive heracleus very long, but the turnaround was remarkable - that was a major russian victory, due to clearly superior tactical strategy.
but, for the russians to ultimately shift the fighting in ukraine to far-off venezuela would be a victory of unthought of proportions.
you should consequently expect the russians to staunchly double down in venezuela, as the more that it can distract america in it's own hemisphere, the more it's own security is assured. if the americans think they can just overthrow maduro, they have another thing coming - and any attempt is just an excuse for further russian deployment.
putin really made obama look like an idiot, over and over again, out thinking him in theatre after theatre. it's starting to look like he's doing the same thing to trump.
let's get the troops home and keep them here, and then focus on social planning as a means to improve the economy in the southern part of the hemisphere.
this goes back to roman imperial strategy, and a recognition that the barbarians cannot be gotten rid of, but only controlled, distracted, redirected, confused. i've seen the argument made more than once that the fighting in syria and iraq was just necessary as a distraction for these jihadists; if the jihadists want to fight, and we can't convince them otherwise, let's have them fight in iraq, instead.
i've argued in this space that the russian strategy in syria follows from this, and in fact suggested or predicted it. there is essentially no way that fighting in ukraine can end well for the russians, so what they wanted to do was shift the conflict somewhere else, like syria. i argued that a successful russian counterattack in syria would force the americans out of ukraine - and it worked as i claimed it would. but, syria is still in russia's backyard.
for the americans to withdraw would be useful, if the goal is to focus on recreating a peaceful world order. but, for the americans to redeploy in another theatre with russian defenses would simply be to shift the war to a location more favourable to russian interests.
shifting the fighting in ukraine to syria was heraclean in scope, as it was - you almost expected putin to march the true cross back through moscow, or something. you'll note that the empire did not survive heracleus very long, but the turnaround was remarkable - that was a major russian victory, due to clearly superior tactical strategy.
but, for the russians to ultimately shift the fighting in ukraine to far-off venezuela would be a victory of unthought of proportions.
you should consequently expect the russians to staunchly double down in venezuela, as the more that it can distract america in it's own hemisphere, the more it's own security is assured. if the americans think they can just overthrow maduro, they have another thing coming - and any attempt is just an excuse for further russian deployment.
putin really made obama look like an idiot, over and over again, out thinking him in theatre after theatre. it's starting to look like he's doing the same thing to trump.
let's get the troops home and keep them here, and then focus on social planning as a means to improve the economy in the southern part of the hemisphere.
fwiw, i'm sure the russians will be more than willing to shift the war from syria to venezuela, thereby exchanging an existential threat for an overseas adventure.
empires generally want the instability to exist in distant theatres, not in their own backyards.
i've been vocal about supporting the withdrawal from syria. but, if the idea is to withdraw from syria in order to deploy to latin america, this is madness on every level; if the choice is between syria and south america, they should send the troops back to syria.
empires generally want the instability to exist in distant theatres, not in their own backyards.
i've been vocal about supporting the withdrawal from syria. but, if the idea is to withdraw from syria in order to deploy to latin america, this is madness on every level; if the choice is between syria and south america, they should send the troops back to syria.
but, regarding tulsi gabbard being a hindu.
i don't know what that means, exactly. if you're from india, you generally define yourself regionally - you're a worshipper of a certain god or group of gods, because that's what the traditions in the area are. westerners can coherently call themselves buddhists, but in a sense that's exactly the point; buddhism is a kind of subset of hinduism that focuses on a specific thing, so we know what that means. without being able to reference a geographic area in india, gabbard's claim to being a hindu are hard to understand. does she worship any specific gods? actively?
does it mean she leaves milk and cookies for shiva on christmas eve?
does it mean she's an atheist and doesn't want to admit it?
does it mean she digs gandhi?
does it just mean she's a vegan, because she believes in reincarnation?
some of this is trivial, some of it is more important. and, i think she owes the public somewhat of a clarification on what it means when she calls herself a hindu if she's going to run for commander in chief, then let people figure out whether they're ok with it or not.
i would expect, however, that she's going to run into the usual accusations of appropriation, and she should push back on that point. i've made references to this repeatedly on this blog: white people have lost their indigenous beliefs almost totally to the influence of semitic religion, but if we were to reconstruct an indigenous european form of belief, it would actually be most similar to hinduism, which is also a syncretism of indo-european religion and indigenous dravidian religion, the difference being that, in india, the european religion took the dominant role. hinduism certainly has a powerful indigenous substrate, yes. but, it is the only active religion that maintains the superstrate of the indigenous european religions, and thus the religion that cultural conservatives ought to be urging white people to flock to.
our ancestors all spoke sanskrit - or something close to it.
so, there's no justification to attack her for appropriation or anything.
but, i'd still like her to clarify the point. if she carries on for a while, i'm sure she will.
i don't know what that means, exactly. if you're from india, you generally define yourself regionally - you're a worshipper of a certain god or group of gods, because that's what the traditions in the area are. westerners can coherently call themselves buddhists, but in a sense that's exactly the point; buddhism is a kind of subset of hinduism that focuses on a specific thing, so we know what that means. without being able to reference a geographic area in india, gabbard's claim to being a hindu are hard to understand. does she worship any specific gods? actively?
does it mean she leaves milk and cookies for shiva on christmas eve?
does it mean she's an atheist and doesn't want to admit it?
does it mean she digs gandhi?
does it just mean she's a vegan, because she believes in reincarnation?
some of this is trivial, some of it is more important. and, i think she owes the public somewhat of a clarification on what it means when she calls herself a hindu if she's going to run for commander in chief, then let people figure out whether they're ok with it or not.
i would expect, however, that she's going to run into the usual accusations of appropriation, and she should push back on that point. i've made references to this repeatedly on this blog: white people have lost their indigenous beliefs almost totally to the influence of semitic religion, but if we were to reconstruct an indigenous european form of belief, it would actually be most similar to hinduism, which is also a syncretism of indo-european religion and indigenous dravidian religion, the difference being that, in india, the european religion took the dominant role. hinduism certainly has a powerful indigenous substrate, yes. but, it is the only active religion that maintains the superstrate of the indigenous european religions, and thus the religion that cultural conservatives ought to be urging white people to flock to.
our ancestors all spoke sanskrit - or something close to it.
so, there's no justification to attack her for appropriation or anything.
but, i'd still like her to clarify the point. if she carries on for a while, i'm sure she will.
Friday, January 25, 2019
ok, so i'm officially uncomfortable with sanders' age. the question mark in 2016 was about two terms. i can't imagine him serving until 2024. so, if you're going to be voting for the vp, why not just do it directly?
and, i'm worried he's going to split the vote.
so, i want a younger candidate. but, who else is there?
i've already ruled out warren. biden is a non-starter. see, but the thing is that i know their politics, they're understood quantities. the others are less clear.
i'm willing to listen to kamala harris, but she doesn't strike me as being very "progressive". that's a first impression. i'll give her a chance.
i'm a little uneasy with tulsi gabbard's history regarding social issues - she has a history of running as a social conservative - and would be hard-pressed to actively support somebody with military credentials. i think that civilian control of the presidency is kind of paramount. i haven't ruled it out, but it's unlikely.
kristen gillebrandt's takedown of al franken was shameless, and she's consequently a non-starter, in my view.
i'v historically supported people like sanders, kucinich, nader....even jello biafra. that person is currently not on any radar i've seen....
and, i'm worried he's going to split the vote.
so, i want a younger candidate. but, who else is there?
i've already ruled out warren. biden is a non-starter. see, but the thing is that i know their politics, they're understood quantities. the others are less clear.
i'm willing to listen to kamala harris, but she doesn't strike me as being very "progressive". that's a first impression. i'll give her a chance.
i'm a little uneasy with tulsi gabbard's history regarding social issues - she has a history of running as a social conservative - and would be hard-pressed to actively support somebody with military credentials. i think that civilian control of the presidency is kind of paramount. i haven't ruled it out, but it's unlikely.
kristen gillebrandt's takedown of al franken was shameless, and she's consequently a non-starter, in my view.
i'v historically supported people like sanders, kucinich, nader....even jello biafra. that person is currently not on any radar i've seen....
in years past, this is the role that canada was known for.
one wonders if we're in a giant switcheroo with mexico, right now.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-mexico/mexico-says-willing-to-mediate-in-venezuela-political-crisis-idUSKCN1PJ1WV
one wonders if we're in a giant switcheroo with mexico, right now.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-mexico/mexico-says-willing-to-mediate-in-venezuela-political-crisis-idUSKCN1PJ1WV
stop.
look at a map of the old world. run a line through the 45th parallel. what colour are the people on top of it?
the luxuries of modern urban existence largely negate this. but, rural canada is about as attractive to your average brown person as siberia is.
if you want to people this region, you need to attract people that can actually thrive in it.
look at a map of the old world. run a line through the 45th parallel. what colour are the people on top of it?
the luxuries of modern urban existence largely negate this. but, rural canada is about as attractive to your average brown person as siberia is.
if you want to people this region, you need to attract people that can actually thrive in it.
this makes more sense, and aligns more with canada's historical immigration priorities of getting people on the ground to stop the americans from invading. it seems like they're listening. that's good.
the thing is that rural canada is a cold, dark place, full of dangerous animals, eight month winters, angry natives (still.) and minimal access to services. despite our large expanses of forests, we're one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and something like 80% of us live 100 km from the united states border. this is a 200 year old problem that we've had minimal successes in resolving.
the one thing that worked was trying to attract immigrants from similar geographic spaces, which is why we have these spaces in western canada with large ukrainian, finnish, russian and norwegian populations. there's no longer a czar to escape from. russian nationalism is at a historical peak.
the reality is that population density is kind of sparse at our parallel, and in our climate. maybe that might change, over time; for right now, rural canada is a hard sell.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/hussen-immigration-rural-pilot-1.4990875
the thing is that rural canada is a cold, dark place, full of dangerous animals, eight month winters, angry natives (still.) and minimal access to services. despite our large expanses of forests, we're one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and something like 80% of us live 100 km from the united states border. this is a 200 year old problem that we've had minimal successes in resolving.
the one thing that worked was trying to attract immigrants from similar geographic spaces, which is why we have these spaces in western canada with large ukrainian, finnish, russian and norwegian populations. there's no longer a czar to escape from. russian nationalism is at a historical peak.
the reality is that population density is kind of sparse at our parallel, and in our climate. maybe that might change, over time; for right now, rural canada is a hard sell.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/hussen-immigration-rural-pilot-1.4990875
the x7b error is something that came up a lot when i did vista support, and what i learned is that the training documents don't really reflect what you see in real life. what it means is that something is interfering with the boot process, but it could really be anything. the error codes refer to specific symptoms, but they say much less about actual causes. the actual truth of it is that there consequently isn't any way to really know what causes a x7b other than to look at the situation critically and take a bunch of educated guesses.
file system corruption was a good guess, because i think i rebooted during a chkdsk that i had forgotten i scheduled, and i've experienced some issues with the drive in the past. and, it did fix a couple of errors. if the laptop boots right up tonight, i may conclude that the chkdsk had some effect, or that the disk was otherwise corrupted in some way (i took the opportunity to reformat the drive, and that itself may have helped), but i'm broadly going to be left with a mystery.
and, the more mysterious it seems, the more that the boot sector virus idea opens itself up, as it would necessarily exist behind a wall of abstraction i can't get at. some kind of stuxnet-like worm could have jumped from the boot sector on the drive to the bios in the pc. and, you'll recall that my bios died on me, apparently randomly. but, a bios virus needs electricity to exist, and if one existed then whatever it was has been drained from the capacitors. the reformats also cleared out the boot sector on the drive, so i think i can state with some confidence that the disk is clear, at this point. is there still something hiding in the bios in the laptop? we'll find out. at the least, it doesn't seem interested in attacking my actual data.
but, i ruled out the boot sector as best as i could, using the tools that existed, as best as i could remember them - both the automated fix (which never works) and the command line tools. there was no sign of anything wrong at this stage.
the next thing to check is a "driver error", but that's an incredibly vague term that necessitates a huge amount of trial and error. i've seen x7bs connected to things like raid setups, sata drivers, video cards, chipsets - essentially anything at all that throws an error before windows loads is going to throw out an x7b. boot logging rarely works properly, and can lead to wrong answers if you take it too seriously. so, what you normally do in this kind of situation is try to figure out what changed and take a good guess that this is the cause. in this scenario, i was taking a hard drive out of a system that wouldn't boot and putting it into a known, working system where windows had access to all of the correct drivers. so, if it isn't booting due to a driver error, it has to be because the driver itself is corrupt or because something is corrupted in the registry - which could have been anything at all. and, the aborted chkdsk produced a potential cause.
so, i backed up the broken install, reinstalled to the questionable partition (to verify that a clean install was capable of booting out of the box - that i wasn't missing a driver, just in case i was wrong), then replaced chunks of the new install with the broken one, waiting for the x7b to come back. this allowed me to check for corruption in the actual drivers by copying them back; it continued to boot, indicating the drivers themselves were not compromised - i didn't have a broken driver, and the error must be in the registry.
normally, a tech agent would tell you to run a system file scan rather than backup, reformat and copy back to find the problem via trial and error. but, that wouldn't tell you what the problem is - and i wanted to know what was causing the issue. on top of that, an sfc would restore all of the system files i had altered or deleted, possibly to old versions from before an update. it's a brute force solution that might fix your computer quickly, but i would advise avoiding it, because it could cause further problems over time.
via a few sneaky tricks to get the right comparisons over trial and error, i was then able to determine that the issue was specifically in the system hive. but, that is narrowing the issue down to a wormhole in a haystack - i found the right file on the pc, only to have that file be a 30 mb database with thousands of entries, any one of which could be the problem. last known goods weren't working; both control sets seemed fucked. so, it's down to trial and error to pinpoint the problem, yet again. i was eventually able to find the problem in the services directory.
now, you can argue that this was obvious, and be right in some way, but miss the point altogether. it happens to be that the end fix was simple enough, and didn't require sorting through all of the more exotic registry keys. but, this is kind of just luck. if i had gone directly to the services key and checked trial and error, and found it was, say, a video card driver i needed to get vga, i would have then needed to check through all of the subkeys that the vga driver calls, which would have created a complicated tree. this is more of a question of approach than anything else. trying to pinpoint the cause using logic may have led me on a time consuming wild goose chase that would have ended with an offline driver install through importing registry keys - a crazily complicated thing to reverse engineer from scratch. approaching the issue with a gauche trial and error probably actually saved me a lot of time. call it the monte carlo approach to finding registry corruption. but, if you've studied search algorithms, you realize this - that a sequential or randomized algorithm can often find something much faster than a sophisticated data-driven model.
in the end, what i found out was that the registry wasn't corrupt at all - that nothing was broken and the computer was doing exactly what it was told to do. there was no way i could have guessed that, or at least not effectively. i mean, i could have set every single driver to ignore on a lark, but then i'd just have to work backwards, anyways. i wasn't looking for a corruption of data, i was looking for careless programming...
again: i still don't know why the laptop didn't boot. it's almost 7:00, almost time to find out. if it was a physical disk problem, or something in the boot sector, it's gone and i'll never know. if it's something else, i'll learn soon enough.
file system corruption was a good guess, because i think i rebooted during a chkdsk that i had forgotten i scheduled, and i've experienced some issues with the drive in the past. and, it did fix a couple of errors. if the laptop boots right up tonight, i may conclude that the chkdsk had some effect, or that the disk was otherwise corrupted in some way (i took the opportunity to reformat the drive, and that itself may have helped), but i'm broadly going to be left with a mystery.
and, the more mysterious it seems, the more that the boot sector virus idea opens itself up, as it would necessarily exist behind a wall of abstraction i can't get at. some kind of stuxnet-like worm could have jumped from the boot sector on the drive to the bios in the pc. and, you'll recall that my bios died on me, apparently randomly. but, a bios virus needs electricity to exist, and if one existed then whatever it was has been drained from the capacitors. the reformats also cleared out the boot sector on the drive, so i think i can state with some confidence that the disk is clear, at this point. is there still something hiding in the bios in the laptop? we'll find out. at the least, it doesn't seem interested in attacking my actual data.
but, i ruled out the boot sector as best as i could, using the tools that existed, as best as i could remember them - both the automated fix (which never works) and the command line tools. there was no sign of anything wrong at this stage.
the next thing to check is a "driver error", but that's an incredibly vague term that necessitates a huge amount of trial and error. i've seen x7bs connected to things like raid setups, sata drivers, video cards, chipsets - essentially anything at all that throws an error before windows loads is going to throw out an x7b. boot logging rarely works properly, and can lead to wrong answers if you take it too seriously. so, what you normally do in this kind of situation is try to figure out what changed and take a good guess that this is the cause. in this scenario, i was taking a hard drive out of a system that wouldn't boot and putting it into a known, working system where windows had access to all of the correct drivers. so, if it isn't booting due to a driver error, it has to be because the driver itself is corrupt or because something is corrupted in the registry - which could have been anything at all. and, the aborted chkdsk produced a potential cause.
so, i backed up the broken install, reinstalled to the questionable partition (to verify that a clean install was capable of booting out of the box - that i wasn't missing a driver, just in case i was wrong), then replaced chunks of the new install with the broken one, waiting for the x7b to come back. this allowed me to check for corruption in the actual drivers by copying them back; it continued to boot, indicating the drivers themselves were not compromised - i didn't have a broken driver, and the error must be in the registry.
normally, a tech agent would tell you to run a system file scan rather than backup, reformat and copy back to find the problem via trial and error. but, that wouldn't tell you what the problem is - and i wanted to know what was causing the issue. on top of that, an sfc would restore all of the system files i had altered or deleted, possibly to old versions from before an update. it's a brute force solution that might fix your computer quickly, but i would advise avoiding it, because it could cause further problems over time.
via a few sneaky tricks to get the right comparisons over trial and error, i was then able to determine that the issue was specifically in the system hive. but, that is narrowing the issue down to a wormhole in a haystack - i found the right file on the pc, only to have that file be a 30 mb database with thousands of entries, any one of which could be the problem. last known goods weren't working; both control sets seemed fucked. so, it's down to trial and error to pinpoint the problem, yet again. i was eventually able to find the problem in the services directory.
now, you can argue that this was obvious, and be right in some way, but miss the point altogether. it happens to be that the end fix was simple enough, and didn't require sorting through all of the more exotic registry keys. but, this is kind of just luck. if i had gone directly to the services key and checked trial and error, and found it was, say, a video card driver i needed to get vga, i would have then needed to check through all of the subkeys that the vga driver calls, which would have created a complicated tree. this is more of a question of approach than anything else. trying to pinpoint the cause using logic may have led me on a time consuming wild goose chase that would have ended with an offline driver install through importing registry keys - a crazily complicated thing to reverse engineer from scratch. approaching the issue with a gauche trial and error probably actually saved me a lot of time. call it the monte carlo approach to finding registry corruption. but, if you've studied search algorithms, you realize this - that a sequential or randomized algorithm can often find something much faster than a sophisticated data-driven model.
in the end, what i found out was that the registry wasn't corrupt at all - that nothing was broken and the computer was doing exactly what it was told to do. there was no way i could have guessed that, or at least not effectively. i mean, i could have set every single driver to ignore on a lark, but then i'd just have to work backwards, anyways. i wasn't looking for a corruption of data, i was looking for careless programming...
again: i still don't know why the laptop didn't boot. it's almost 7:00, almost time to find out. if it was a physical disk problem, or something in the boot sector, it's gone and i'll never know. if it's something else, i'll learn soon enough.
trump caved at the worst possible moment - when the backlash was at the highest point.
i mentioned that the backlash was obvious, but i maintain the view that it isn't sustainable. what i was getting across is that you should have expected the backlash to hit a peak and then fall quickly, at which point the democrats would be facing serious resistance. trump might not gain from it directly, but the democrats completely collapse when faced with apathy - and because trying to equate a border wall with white supremacism is stupid on a good day, it had no potential in the form of a popular struggle. primaries are starting, soon. democrats are going to want to talk about things that actually matter to them, like universal health care. support for immigration reform in a broader sense is a niche issue in a small geographic area that alienates potential democratic voters more than it revs them up.
but, now, he just looks like an idiot for wasting everybody's time, which is a kind of feedback cycle that the democrats can take advantage of in mocking him for the rest of the cycle.
i thought this guy was supposed to be an expert at negotiation?
i mentioned that the backlash was obvious, but i maintain the view that it isn't sustainable. what i was getting across is that you should have expected the backlash to hit a peak and then fall quickly, at which point the democrats would be facing serious resistance. trump might not gain from it directly, but the democrats completely collapse when faced with apathy - and because trying to equate a border wall with white supremacism is stupid on a good day, it had no potential in the form of a popular struggle. primaries are starting, soon. democrats are going to want to talk about things that actually matter to them, like universal health care. support for immigration reform in a broader sense is a niche issue in a small geographic area that alienates potential democratic voters more than it revs them up.
but, now, he just looks like an idiot for wasting everybody's time, which is a kind of feedback cycle that the democrats can take advantage of in mocking him for the rest of the cycle.
i thought this guy was supposed to be an expert at negotiation?
see, this is the stupid way to do this, because it buys right into the divide and conquer from the top - this is exactly what they want workers to do. competition just results in a race to the bottom, and the more that the unions push for this kind of thing, the worse off they'll be.
i know that canadian workers are angry, but boycotting their comrades in mexico doesn't make any sense. canadian workers are not in competition with mexican workers for jobs, they are in a class war with international finance that wants to maximize profits by slashing labour regulations. the solution is actually to stand in solidarity with mexican workers, and help them fight for comparable living standards, thereby taking away the utility of the mobility of capital.
it is the responsibility of labour activists and union leaders to teach socialism, not to give into fascism.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/oshawa-unifor-gm-plant-boycott-mexico-1.4992989?cmp=rss
i know that canadian workers are angry, but boycotting their comrades in mexico doesn't make any sense. canadian workers are not in competition with mexican workers for jobs, they are in a class war with international finance that wants to maximize profits by slashing labour regulations. the solution is actually to stand in solidarity with mexican workers, and help them fight for comparable living standards, thereby taking away the utility of the mobility of capital.
it is the responsibility of labour activists and union leaders to teach socialism, not to give into fascism.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/oshawa-unifor-gm-plant-boycott-mexico-1.4992989?cmp=rss
i was able to track the blue screen down to a device driver set to reboot upon fail, which i'm willing to claim is an error on the manufacturer level, although that might be my microsoft training speaking. it was a driver related to the motherboard.
the thing is that i've taken this hard drive out of the laptop and had it boot in the pc before, so there wasn't any reason to think this would happen. further, the issue was not related to a missing driver - windows was able to find my hardware and boot into it just fine. in a scenario where windows has all of the right drivers available to it, it should be able to find the right ones and correctly boot - and it did. so, you shouldn't have to worry about removing the wrong drivers, so long as the right ones are accessible - and, technically, i didn't have to do that, either. but, somehow, this driver - which is needed to boot the laptop - got set to "reboot on fail" rather than "ignore on fail", and it was blocking the boot.
what should have happened is that the boot process should have found this driver, said "we don't need this" and just tossed it aside, then found the right driver and booted - that was my assumption, and what a properly installed driver does in this scenario. but what actually happened is that the boot process found the driver, said "i can't use this", stopped looking for something it can use and tossed out a blue screen.
the answer was to change a specific value in the registry from 3 to 0. that's it. it boots on the pc, now.
it doesn't answer why the laptop wouldn't boot, though. i'll have to figure that out tonight.
i've filed the complaint with the privacy commissioner online, rather than mail it. so, that's done. and, i'll have to get on with the calls on monday.
the thing is that i've taken this hard drive out of the laptop and had it boot in the pc before, so there wasn't any reason to think this would happen. further, the issue was not related to a missing driver - windows was able to find my hardware and boot into it just fine. in a scenario where windows has all of the right drivers available to it, it should be able to find the right ones and correctly boot - and it did. so, you shouldn't have to worry about removing the wrong drivers, so long as the right ones are accessible - and, technically, i didn't have to do that, either. but, somehow, this driver - which is needed to boot the laptop - got set to "reboot on fail" rather than "ignore on fail", and it was blocking the boot.
what should have happened is that the boot process should have found this driver, said "we don't need this" and just tossed it aside, then found the right driver and booted - that was my assumption, and what a properly installed driver does in this scenario. but what actually happened is that the boot process found the driver, said "i can't use this", stopped looking for something it can use and tossed out a blue screen.
the answer was to change a specific value in the registry from 3 to 0. that's it. it boots on the pc, now.
it doesn't answer why the laptop wouldn't boot, though. i'll have to figure that out tonight.
i've filed the complaint with the privacy commissioner online, rather than mail it. so, that's done. and, i'll have to get on with the calls on monday.
trudeau was supposed to be putting a focus on rehabilitating canada's image abroad in the face of so many years of disastrous policy from stephen harper. and, he had a mandate to do this - it was a key issue in the election, a ballot issue, something that got people out to vote.
supporting the overthrow of a legitimately elected government in latin america - one that is in fact quite compliant - in order to wag the dog for an unpopular american president isn't exactly what people had in mind.
supporting the overthrow of a legitimately elected government in latin america - one that is in fact quite compliant - in order to wag the dog for an unpopular american president isn't exactly what people had in mind.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
good news with the laptop hard drive: i was able to get it to boot up into windows 7 from the pc. i'm probably not going to get back online until tomorrow or the next day, but i know how to reconstruct the machine from here.
i ended up flipping the process over, because i wanted to make sure there was an endpoint; instead of slowly inserting the working system hive into the broken one, hoping for it to eventually work, i copied over the system hive used by the setup disc, which got around the security descriptors and let me figure out where the error is. i quickly figured out that the 7xb error is actually being caused by a broken service, although i haven't figured out which one, yet. just realizing what was happening was good enough. so, i copied the broken system hive back into the config directory and imported the services hive that i copied from the fresh install, which brought me up to that chkdsk i had scheduled (the disk is fine). the thing is booting, but to a generic set of services; at least i know i can salvage it, though. the next thing to do will be to copy each service back into the registry until the blue screen comes back, fix the problem, and reimage the drive with the corruption reversed. the install should be exactly as i left it....
a corrupt service or driver shouldn't cause this kind of mess; windows is supposed to hold your last working configuration, but the error seems to have ended up in both control sets. very strange. but, the important thing is that i can salvage this.
and, i simply don't think that you're going to get this government to agree to tax imports, unilaterally. it's too globalist, in ideology - too neo-liberal.
so, we're kind of playing with fire.
to be clear: i don't think the thing is going to be powerful enough to reduce emissions, not even if it taxes imports. but, if it doesn't tax imports, it's really potentially somewhat harmful.
so, we're kind of playing with fire.
to be clear: i don't think the thing is going to be powerful enough to reduce emissions, not even if it taxes imports. but, if it doesn't tax imports, it's really potentially somewhat harmful.
this is a more responsible article (excluding the silly reference to "what economists say", as though economics is a science, as though it analyzes facts, and as though economists all agree with each other), but it's not addressing the point that i've referred to, and that the american economists i referenced yesterday were pointing out, about the importance of taxing imports.
this issue is less pronounced in alberta or bc because the economy isn't reliant on manufacturing. in ontario, manufacturing is the dominant part of the economy - behind only real estate, by gdp. so, let's consider a manufacturing plant in niagara falls that has branches on both sides of the border, for illustrative purposes - it doesn't have to actually exist in the real world, it can just exist in the imaginations of people in ivory towers.
what a carbon tax is going to do is force firms to make one of the four choices when faced with rising costs:
1) pass the costs on, which it will do if it can remain competitive (ie everybody else does it)
2) move production elsewhere, like to the plant across the river
3) innovate a solution to cut costs somehow, as though businesses aren't already faced with incentives to lower costs, and wouldn't already reduce production costs if they knew how, in the first place.
4) downsize somehow.
as (3) is in truth absurd, and (4) is in most cases alarmist and only realistic in situations where a firm is already dying anyways, the real options are between (1) and (2).
now, even if everybody else does (1), (2) remains an incentive, if possible. and, then, once a few firms start doing it, everybody else has to do it in order to compete. so, what you've really done is create an incentive to move manufacturing to the united states.
further, when a consumer walks into a market and looks at the difference in price, they're really not going to be incentivized to buy the less polluting product, at least not so long as imports are not being taxed; what they're going to be incentivized to buy is the product produced in a different country that isn't being taxed, which could very well be, maybe even probably be, the more polluting product.
the way it's designed, it's really just a tariff on ourselves.
now, this isn't happening in a vacuum. there are other factors to consider, including the tariffs that trump is insisting on. the carbon tax may not be powerful enough on it's own, or it might be the breaking point, or it might not make any difference at all. so, there's no guarantee it will cause a recession.
but, it is a recessionary policy.
and, in ontario, there is some potential for some harm from it - if we insist on refusing to tax imports. so long as we allow foreign polluters access to our markets tax-free, it's simply a tariff on ourselves.
https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/01/23/heres-how-trudeaus-carbon-price-will-actually-affect-the-economy-according-to-economists.html
this issue is less pronounced in alberta or bc because the economy isn't reliant on manufacturing. in ontario, manufacturing is the dominant part of the economy - behind only real estate, by gdp. so, let's consider a manufacturing plant in niagara falls that has branches on both sides of the border, for illustrative purposes - it doesn't have to actually exist in the real world, it can just exist in the imaginations of people in ivory towers.
what a carbon tax is going to do is force firms to make one of the four choices when faced with rising costs:
1) pass the costs on, which it will do if it can remain competitive (ie everybody else does it)
2) move production elsewhere, like to the plant across the river
3) innovate a solution to cut costs somehow, as though businesses aren't already faced with incentives to lower costs, and wouldn't already reduce production costs if they knew how, in the first place.
4) downsize somehow.
as (3) is in truth absurd, and (4) is in most cases alarmist and only realistic in situations where a firm is already dying anyways, the real options are between (1) and (2).
now, even if everybody else does (1), (2) remains an incentive, if possible. and, then, once a few firms start doing it, everybody else has to do it in order to compete. so, what you've really done is create an incentive to move manufacturing to the united states.
further, when a consumer walks into a market and looks at the difference in price, they're really not going to be incentivized to buy the less polluting product, at least not so long as imports are not being taxed; what they're going to be incentivized to buy is the product produced in a different country that isn't being taxed, which could very well be, maybe even probably be, the more polluting product.
the way it's designed, it's really just a tariff on ourselves.
now, this isn't happening in a vacuum. there are other factors to consider, including the tariffs that trump is insisting on. the carbon tax may not be powerful enough on it's own, or it might be the breaking point, or it might not make any difference at all. so, there's no guarantee it will cause a recession.
but, it is a recessionary policy.
and, in ontario, there is some potential for some harm from it - if we insist on refusing to tax imports. so long as we allow foreign polluters access to our markets tax-free, it's simply a tariff on ourselves.
https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/01/23/heres-how-trudeaus-carbon-price-will-actually-affect-the-economy-according-to-economists.html
the general american strategic policy objective is essentially never to install a bourgeois democracy in an area that it exploits, but always to instill a charismatic dictator that keeps the revolutionary elements of society in order, to keep the exploitation running smoothly.
as i said: what is happening in venezuela is rarely what it seems.
as i said: what is happening in venezuela is rarely what it seems.
despite, or even because of, these movements of people you're seeing in the streets - and they are bourgeois, that is middle class, in nature - what the united states wants in venezuela is a government that keeps the impoverished poor in order, not one that opens up opportunity for the educated to exploit them. and, they're going to be more than happy to let the maduros of the world call them imperialists and gringos, so long as the poor are kept in check, and the oil and food keeps flowing out of the colony, and into the empire.
so, there's this bourgeois analysis coming from the north arguing that the middle classes are being repressed and maduro needs to go to better open the country to exploitation. but, the americans don't want to empower the middle class in latin america, they want to keep the country under their control. and, in a society like venezuela where the poor greatly outnumber the middle class, transferring power to the bourgeoisie is just putting in place another working class uprising - it's not a sustainable outcome.
so, wherever you stand in the class war, the reality is that maduro is the preferable option, from the perspective of american imperialist ambition.
i really think this is just theatre.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/world/americas/venezuela-protests-guaido-maduro.html
so, there's this bourgeois analysis coming from the north arguing that the middle classes are being repressed and maduro needs to go to better open the country to exploitation. but, the americans don't want to empower the middle class in latin america, they want to keep the country under their control. and, in a society like venezuela where the poor greatly outnumber the middle class, transferring power to the bourgeoisie is just putting in place another working class uprising - it's not a sustainable outcome.
so, wherever you stand in the class war, the reality is that maduro is the preferable option, from the perspective of american imperialist ambition.
i really think this is just theatre.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/world/americas/venezuela-protests-guaido-maduro.html
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
very little is what it seems to be in venezuela, which is in truth just another american-dominated plantation. i don't think the americans actually want a change of government in the country.
whatever you think of the situation - and i would have difficulty taking a side here - the fact is that the current venezuelan election system has been monitored for years, and is freer and fairer than most nato countries. maduro is a dictator in the same way that iraq had weapons of mass destruction - it's an easily debunked lie. on the other hand, it is deeply irregular for the opposition leader to declare himself president like this, and whatever protests are happening are clearly not reflective of an actual mandate. the fact that he's openly calling for a military coup is really rather troubling.
but, this is nothing new.
whatever you think of the situation - and i would have difficulty taking a side here - the fact is that the current venezuelan election system has been monitored for years, and is freer and fairer than most nato countries. maduro is a dictator in the same way that iraq had weapons of mass destruction - it's an easily debunked lie. on the other hand, it is deeply irregular for the opposition leader to declare himself president like this, and whatever protests are happening are clearly not reflective of an actual mandate. the fact that he's openly calling for a military coup is really rather troubling.
but, this is nothing new.
i don't know where the idea that a trudeau government would support something like this is coming from, given that it's messaging has been neo-liberal and pro-market to the core.
i would rather expect the existing liberals to support some kind of market liberalization scheme that pushes that myth that increased competition will lower prices. they'd be more likely to run on cutting red tape, on decreasing regulations.
this is not a government that believes in these kinds of social systems, and without a strong ndp to push for them, i don't know how you even get a government of this type to mention something like this.
if the ndp were a more serious option, you might expect the liberals to come up with a more market-friendly alternative that sounds like pharmacare but isn't. with the ndp out of the picture to the point that the liberals think they can compete in saskatchewan on the strength of ndp defections, this kind of thing is a pipe dream in the minds of liberal activists - and, like talk of a federal gai, merely a scare tactic by the business press.
https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/trudeau-spreads-the-big-pharmacare-myth-that-scores-of-canadians-cant-afford-medicine
i would rather expect the existing liberals to support some kind of market liberalization scheme that pushes that myth that increased competition will lower prices. they'd be more likely to run on cutting red tape, on decreasing regulations.
this is not a government that believes in these kinds of social systems, and without a strong ndp to push for them, i don't know how you even get a government of this type to mention something like this.
if the ndp were a more serious option, you might expect the liberals to come up with a more market-friendly alternative that sounds like pharmacare but isn't. with the ndp out of the picture to the point that the liberals think they can compete in saskatchewan on the strength of ndp defections, this kind of thing is a pipe dream in the minds of liberal activists - and, like talk of a federal gai, merely a scare tactic by the business press.
https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/trudeau-spreads-the-big-pharmacare-myth-that-scores-of-canadians-cant-afford-medicine
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
that's right. mmt is an argument against austerity, but not an argument for socialism - although it may help put the conditions in place for the kind of evolution of capitalism into socialism that marx had in mind. in that sense, it's actually an argument for capitalism, but perhaps through the lens of historical materialism, if you want it to be.
wolff has historically been critical of keynesians for retarding socialism, but i think he's relying too much on marx' theory of politics and not enough on what is sometimes called "economic determinism". i think there's a good place for determinism, and don't see much evidence for successful proletariat revolutions.
but, that's a debate we can have on the left - so long as we agree that austerity is bollocks.
wolff has historically been critical of keynesians for retarding socialism, but i think he's relying too much on marx' theory of politics and not enough on what is sometimes called "economic determinism". i think there's a good place for determinism, and don't see much evidence for successful proletariat revolutions.
but, that's a debate we can have on the left - so long as we agree that austerity is bollocks.
i kind of think the premise is off-base. while it doesn't strike me as likely that she was removed for being too conservative, the idea that the she was some kind of radical just isn't upheld by evidence. her approach to the euthanasia bill did not go anywhere near far enough (and will no doubt be struck down as unconstitutional), she's brought in unconstitutional legislation around drunk driving and she actually even has had negative things to say about the un declaration. if i was going to write an essay, it wouldn't be about how she was removed for standing up for indigenous people, but about how she seemed broadly disinterested in being the token indian, the jimmy carl black of the liberal party.
i don't know why she got shuffled. but, the shuffle seemed to be more about scott brison, who is facing a kind of serious corruption scandal around a notorious old money shipping company in his riding. the machiavellian explanation that she got axed as a deflection tactic seems too easy. but, i suspect she may have put up a resistance to something, perhaps something related to the brison investigation, and got pushed out for a good italian willing to take orders.
so, honest injun? maybe.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-indigenous-bar-association-1.4988984
i don't know why she got shuffled. but, the shuffle seemed to be more about scott brison, who is facing a kind of serious corruption scandal around a notorious old money shipping company in his riding. the machiavellian explanation that she got axed as a deflection tactic seems too easy. but, i suspect she may have put up a resistance to something, perhaps something related to the brison investigation, and got pushed out for a good italian willing to take orders.
so, honest injun? maybe.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-indigenous-bar-association-1.4988984
again: i am seeking a prompt response, in reference to my s. 6
mobility rights. there is a serious problem in this country around the
amount of time it takes to undo the effects of a false arrest; my
prints should have been destroyed immediately upon the case being
dropped, and my request for my own record should have been responded
to within a few business days. it is absolutely preposterous that
innocent people have to go through such an absurd process to deal with
false accusations. every day that i'm denied this information is a day
that my mobility rights are being trampled, and the police force in
this country needs to take responsibility and be held accountable for
the consequences of it's behaviour in this respect - it cannot be
going around arresting people on false charges. this has consequences
on the lives of real people.
i'm fed up as it is and will be filing a s. 6 challenge in short order. this has to change on a systemic basis - the process needs to be sped up dramatically. this is simply unacceptable, as it is.
and, i will be filing a very sharply worded request with the privacy commissioner as early as thursday. that is your time left for a response - i need a response by thursday morning, or i'm putting through the process to get this in front of a judge. i'm not sitting around waiting for an answer.
the constitution is not a set of suggestions that is subject to the opinion of the officer class. this is not up to your discretion, and you don't have the authority to not like my attitude. there is a precedent in morgantaler that if a body is unable to provide for a timely response due to underfunding or institutional incompetence, and a constitutional right is being infringed upon as a consequence of it, then it's authority should be absolved altogether. your inaction is putting foundational legislation in jeopardy, and i'll be eager to tear it down to prove the point.
this system is corrupt to the core and has to change.
thursday morning, or i'm putting in place the process to gut the rcmp through the courts. and, i might even enjoy it.
j
i'm fed up as it is and will be filing a s. 6 challenge in short order. this has to change on a systemic basis - the process needs to be sped up dramatically. this is simply unacceptable, as it is.
and, i will be filing a very sharply worded request with the privacy commissioner as early as thursday. that is your time left for a response - i need a response by thursday morning, or i'm putting through the process to get this in front of a judge. i'm not sitting around waiting for an answer.
the constitution is not a set of suggestions that is subject to the opinion of the officer class. this is not up to your discretion, and you don't have the authority to not like my attitude. there is a precedent in morgantaler that if a body is unable to provide for a timely response due to underfunding or institutional incompetence, and a constitutional right is being infringed upon as a consequence of it, then it's authority should be absolved altogether. your inaction is putting foundational legislation in jeopardy, and i'll be eager to tear it down to prove the point.
this system is corrupt to the core and has to change.
thursday morning, or i'm putting in place the process to gut the rcmp through the courts. and, i might even enjoy it.
j
ok, i got the pc to boot by pushing through an extended cmos clear - i did the strip the thing down to just the board and let it sit in the clear position for several hours thing, and it came back up afterwards. so, i do still think it was the bios, but i didn't have to reprogram the board.
i'll get back to that tonight, and hopefully be back on track for tomorrow.
i'll get back to that tonight, and hopefully be back on track for tomorrow.
Monday, January 21, 2019
frankly, i would have accepted daca for the wall if i were nancy pelosi - that's something concrete and meaningful for something abstract and trivial. it's a gift; something for nothing.
and that's why i'm not nancy pelosi.
as it is, it's just another example of the democrats squandering an opportunity to actually pass daca in congress.
and that's why i'm not nancy pelosi.
as it is, it's just another example of the democrats squandering an opportunity to actually pass daca in congress.
latino porn, explicitly, please.
alpha mcmann v beta o'rourke should get a full section in, i hear.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/01/21/az-gop-legislator-introduces-bill-to-fund-border-wall-with-tax-on-internet-porn/
alpha mcmann v beta o'rourke should get a full section in, i hear.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/01/21/az-gop-legislator-introduces-bill-to-fund-border-wall-with-tax-on-internet-porn/
and, as a result of the differing history, black identity in canada often defines itself against black identity in the united states. a recent jamaican immigrant with a phd might actually find something insulting about the expectation of identifying with a slave revolt in the united states.
but, canadians quite often define themselves in opposition to america, right?
but, canadians quite often define themselves in opposition to america, right?
i need to be careful.
there are plenty of black people in canada. and, as dawkins says, we're all africans.
but, the vast majority - i believe over 90% - are recent immigrants from the carribbean, with the balance being from africa directly, since 1970. there were small communities of black loyalists in nova scotia and later on in alberta, but we're talking about very small groups of people. and while canada is famous for the underground railroad - of which i live on the terminus of - the fact is that very few of the freed slaves stayed in canada, with the overwhelmingly majority choosing to back migrate into the northern states. people missed their family, and no doubt felt out of place in what was then an almost entirely white culture, but the dominant reason in the literature is the weather. seriously.
slave descendant african-africans in canada are honestly a fraction of a percent of the population.
there are plenty of black people in canada. and, as dawkins says, we're all africans.
but, the vast majority - i believe over 90% - are recent immigrants from the carribbean, with the balance being from africa directly, since 1970. there were small communities of black loyalists in nova scotia and later on in alberta, but we're talking about very small groups of people. and while canada is famous for the underground railroad - of which i live on the terminus of - the fact is that very few of the freed slaves stayed in canada, with the overwhelmingly majority choosing to back migrate into the northern states. people missed their family, and no doubt felt out of place in what was then an almost entirely white culture, but the dominant reason in the literature is the weather. seriously.
slave descendant african-africans in canada are honestly a fraction of a percent of the population.
i think this analyzes the reality well, then produces the wrong solution.
i don't believe in markets; i don't think markets solve problems, i think markets make problems worse.
what i believe in is people. and, what that means in the existing paradigm is actually bigger and bigger government.
https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2018/07/18/agreed-carbon-pricing-isnt-working-now-what/
i don't believe in markets; i don't think markets solve problems, i think markets make problems worse.
what i believe in is people. and, what that means in the existing paradigm is actually bigger and bigger government.
https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2018/07/18/agreed-carbon-pricing-isnt-working-now-what/
when i voted for the greens provincially in this riding, it was a protest vote for the local candidate, who seems to be a little more of a left-leaning green. i did not bother to look into mike schreiner's politics, because i wasn't voting for mike schriener. but, i did take the time to look into the local candidate, because the green's have this split personality up in canada - you need to check to see if they're on the green left or are one of these "green capitalist" types.
i would not have voted for a "green capitalist", not even as a throwaway vote. faced with that choice, i would have just voted liberal.
i would not have voted for a "green capitalist", not even as a throwaway vote. faced with that choice, i would have just voted liberal.
bernie is wasting his time in south carolina, and kind of losing the plot, overall.
i have a 78 year-old grandmother who has gotten into the habit of asking the same question three or four times in a row, and showed no signs of dementia well into her 76th year.
i want to see a younger candidate that distances him or herself from the narrative in washington, and refocuses on things people actually care about. not russia. not border walls. not identity politics.
and, yes - they're going to have to find a way to split the vote in the south and sweep the upper midwest if they want to win the primary. the south is conservative; they will pick a conservative candidate. the potential leftist candidate has the choice between coming to terms with this and losing yet again.
i have a 78 year-old grandmother who has gotten into the habit of asking the same question three or four times in a row, and showed no signs of dementia well into her 76th year.
i want to see a younger candidate that distances him or herself from the narrative in washington, and refocuses on things people actually care about. not russia. not border walls. not identity politics.
and, yes - they're going to have to find a way to split the vote in the south and sweep the upper midwest if they want to win the primary. the south is conservative; they will pick a conservative candidate. the potential leftist candidate has the choice between coming to terms with this and losing yet again.
so, yes - we need serious climate change policies.
but, a carbon tax on exports and fuel is just a way to change the channel, and one that could potentially harm a manufacturing-based economy, while just increasing reliance on imports.
the unfortunate thing is that your average neo-liberal won't find much to criticize in a plan that is more or less designed to export jobs as a cheap pr stunt. if imports are cheaper, it's good for consumers, right?
but, a carbon tax on exports and fuel is just a way to change the channel, and one that could potentially harm a manufacturing-based economy, while just increasing reliance on imports.
the unfortunate thing is that your average neo-liberal won't find much to criticize in a plan that is more or less designed to export jobs as a cheap pr stunt. if imports are cheaper, it's good for consumers, right?
and, listen - you can cite a bunch of neo-liberal economists, but i'm just going to come back with some marxist analysis about how markets don't work, and i'm sure i can find a few working economists on the left that have ripped the thing down, although i haven't looked, because i haven't needed to....the argument is too elementary to bother seeking backup...
an argument from authority works when you're citing a field that operates in facts and data, which is not economics, and is especially not neo-liberal economics. economics is an ideologically driven profession that operates on deductive reasoning and, on the right, often via faith in free markets. bringing in some neo-liberal economist to preach the faith is just deflecting to another type of guru.
the reality is that you have to adhere to a belief system called "market fundamentalism" to swallow the koolaid on pigovian taxes, which mainstream economists are happy to do on a mass scale. the data isn't actually there - they are at best harmless, so long as they are not foolishly applied for political reasons, which is what is happening in canada.
i'm in favour of wealth redistribution, and i'll take the $20 check. we need serious climate change policies; i was initially agnostic on the thing, not seeing a reason to oppose it, but being wary of supporting it.
but, the feds really need to be looking at ways to tax imports, otherwise they're cutting off their nose to spite their face...
and, we see the result of this: that's a part of how we ended up with doug ford in the first place.
an argument from authority works when you're citing a field that operates in facts and data, which is not economics, and is especially not neo-liberal economics. economics is an ideologically driven profession that operates on deductive reasoning and, on the right, often via faith in free markets. bringing in some neo-liberal economist to preach the faith is just deflecting to another type of guru.
the reality is that you have to adhere to a belief system called "market fundamentalism" to swallow the koolaid on pigovian taxes, which mainstream economists are happy to do on a mass scale. the data isn't actually there - they are at best harmless, so long as they are not foolishly applied for political reasons, which is what is happening in canada.
i'm in favour of wealth redistribution, and i'll take the $20 check. we need serious climate change policies; i was initially agnostic on the thing, not seeing a reason to oppose it, but being wary of supporting it.
but, the feds really need to be looking at ways to tax imports, otherwise they're cutting off their nose to spite their face...
and, we see the result of this: that's a part of how we ended up with doug ford in the first place.
and, fwiw, mlk day does not exist in canada, and most canadians are only vaguely aware that it exists in the united states. this is not a shared holiday, because we don't have a shared history, in context - and the number of canadians of african-american descent is, in fact, statistically negligible.
so, the way this works is that the two bourgeois parties set up a false dichotomy to a serious problem that neither of them want to solve, then get you arguing about it instead of trying to solve the problem. the way to solve climate change is to introduce a tax, and if you oppose the tax then you work for the fuel industry - it's demagoguery on both sides, and indicative of an absolutely broken narrative around something that needs very serious solutions absolutely immediately.
what is being introduced into ontario is not a carbon tax, it's a gas tax. if it was a carbon tax, it would tax imports - and it's not doing that. rather, what it's doing is strictly taxing local production, which will give importers an absolute price advantage. it's a tariff on ourselves. and, if brought to it's logical conclusion, it is strictly recessionary in the sense that it will offshore certain types of production - which will then be presented as a victory, as canada's carbon footprint will decrease as the jobs leave the country.
now, a recessionary policy might not cause an actual recession, but it might. and, because ontario is reliant on manufacturing - unlike bc or alberta - there is a higher chance of it happening here than there.
the solution is a massive increase in green infrastructure using state expenditures.
but, you're just supposed to just pay the tax and think that your suffering is saving the world.
hi.
i think the problem is that my request is not being properly understood.
i understand what a criminal record check is, but it is not what i'm looking for. what i want to know is what the border officers in the united states have access to. i will repeat the circumstance.
in early september, i was arrested and charged on what were ridiculous charges that were dropped in november, before a trial date was even set. there is currently an ongoing opird investigation to investigate whether the officer may have acted in retaliation or malice, meaning the only relevant trial that is occurring is of the officer, but it is sufficient in context to recognize that the crown dropped the case. i was - i believe illegally - fingerprinted while i was in custody. i am seeking information about who can and cannot see that these prints exist.
i do not have a criminal record, and as such i know what a criminal record will produce. an occurrence of this sort would only show up on the deepest of vulnerable sector checks. but, the record check will not give me the information i am looking for, which is information about the existence of the prints. nor do the border guards in the united states do a criminal record check - what they check is the cpic database. as such, i do not care about a criminal record check and see little point in carrying through with one, what i care about is what it says in the version of the cpic database that is accessible to the border cops in the states.
i expect the prints to be destroyed, but there is a lengthy process involved. i have a nexus card, and am a frequent border crosser. i need to know what i am exposing myself to before i cross the border.
and, i will reiterate that i have not broken any laws, but am rather seeking that the officer be severely disciplined for his behaviour. i also feel that my s. 6 rights are being infringed upon by the general thrust of the circumstances, as i am fearful of attempting to cross the border until i know what the cops can see, due to no fault or behaviour of my own.
so, i think my request for a cpic readout is not only quite reasonable, but strictly within my constitutional rights - that i have a right to know what information a foreign government is able to access about me, more or less on request. but, all you've told me is that the results are "restricted".
this is creating more questions for me. why are the results restricted? i have no criminal record, no history of conflict with law enforcement and no reason to think there would be anything in the database at all. am i under investigation of committing a crime? because i don't remember committing one, and would be strongly taken aback by any suggestion that i have. i was only initially interested in the question of the prints, but now i want to know what is in the file, as there should not be anything in it at all, by my own calculations.
i cannot accept that the information is being withheld under s. 19 or s. 26. i am not asking about somebody else, and i am not seeking information provided by a provincial institution - or at least i don't think i am. i am asking for a readout of my own personal information, and i have a right to see it.
so, i am going to reiterate my request a second time - and hope i don't need to reiterate it a third time to the privacy commissioner, or a fourth time in a court of law.
1) my primary concern is in understanding what the border cops on the american side can see. the best way to do this would be to produce a total printout of the cpic results, and then draw attention to the parts that are accessible to the american border cops. do the american border cops have total access to the database, or partial access? i will also need this information before i can renew my nexus card.
2) i believe that this is set out in a memorandum of understanding, but i cannot find it. can you please produce the most recent memorandum of understanding that defines what the american border cops can and cannot see when they search the cpic database from their side?
3) because i cannot see my file, and it is *my* file, i would like to explicitly request the printout merely for the sake of requesting it. again: i am not looking for a vulnerable sector check. what i want is a printout of my entire file.
4) am i under investigation? please provide me with a detailed reason as to why this information is being "restricted", as the answers provided are incoherent and i can imagine no reason at all.
i thought that this would be a simple, routine request. but, denying me access has only made me more insistent to access it, and i'm willing to fight to get this information, which i'm clearly entitled to. we all have restrictions on our time. i would request that you refrain from wasting everybody's and just give me the printout.
j
i think the problem is that my request is not being properly understood.
i understand what a criminal record check is, but it is not what i'm looking for. what i want to know is what the border officers in the united states have access to. i will repeat the circumstance.
in early september, i was arrested and charged on what were ridiculous charges that were dropped in november, before a trial date was even set. there is currently an ongoing opird investigation to investigate whether the officer may have acted in retaliation or malice, meaning the only relevant trial that is occurring is of the officer, but it is sufficient in context to recognize that the crown dropped the case. i was - i believe illegally - fingerprinted while i was in custody. i am seeking information about who can and cannot see that these prints exist.
i do not have a criminal record, and as such i know what a criminal record will produce. an occurrence of this sort would only show up on the deepest of vulnerable sector checks. but, the record check will not give me the information i am looking for, which is information about the existence of the prints. nor do the border guards in the united states do a criminal record check - what they check is the cpic database. as such, i do not care about a criminal record check and see little point in carrying through with one, what i care about is what it says in the version of the cpic database that is accessible to the border cops in the states.
i expect the prints to be destroyed, but there is a lengthy process involved. i have a nexus card, and am a frequent border crosser. i need to know what i am exposing myself to before i cross the border.
and, i will reiterate that i have not broken any laws, but am rather seeking that the officer be severely disciplined for his behaviour. i also feel that my s. 6 rights are being infringed upon by the general thrust of the circumstances, as i am fearful of attempting to cross the border until i know what the cops can see, due to no fault or behaviour of my own.
so, i think my request for a cpic readout is not only quite reasonable, but strictly within my constitutional rights - that i have a right to know what information a foreign government is able to access about me, more or less on request. but, all you've told me is that the results are "restricted".
this is creating more questions for me. why are the results restricted? i have no criminal record, no history of conflict with law enforcement and no reason to think there would be anything in the database at all. am i under investigation of committing a crime? because i don't remember committing one, and would be strongly taken aback by any suggestion that i have. i was only initially interested in the question of the prints, but now i want to know what is in the file, as there should not be anything in it at all, by my own calculations.
i cannot accept that the information is being withheld under s. 19 or s. 26. i am not asking about somebody else, and i am not seeking information provided by a provincial institution - or at least i don't think i am. i am asking for a readout of my own personal information, and i have a right to see it.
so, i am going to reiterate my request a second time - and hope i don't need to reiterate it a third time to the privacy commissioner, or a fourth time in a court of law.
1) my primary concern is in understanding what the border cops on the american side can see. the best way to do this would be to produce a total printout of the cpic results, and then draw attention to the parts that are accessible to the american border cops. do the american border cops have total access to the database, or partial access? i will also need this information before i can renew my nexus card.
2) i believe that this is set out in a memorandum of understanding, but i cannot find it. can you please produce the most recent memorandum of understanding that defines what the american border cops can and cannot see when they search the cpic database from their side?
3) because i cannot see my file, and it is *my* file, i would like to explicitly request the printout merely for the sake of requesting it. again: i am not looking for a vulnerable sector check. what i want is a printout of my entire file.
4) am i under investigation? please provide me with a detailed reason as to why this information is being "restricted", as the answers provided are incoherent and i can imagine no reason at all.
i thought that this would be a simple, routine request. but, denying me access has only made me more insistent to access it, and i'm willing to fight to get this information, which i'm clearly entitled to. we all have restrictions on our time. i would request that you refrain from wasting everybody's and just give me the printout.
j
the only reason i think i'm smarter than you is that the system told me i was, over and over again.
and, maybe the system was wrong, granted - maybe these tests don't mean anything. maybe the better way to measure intelligence is by success in the market, in which case i'm an absolute retard. who knows. really.
all i can do is repeat the test results.
and, maybe the system was wrong, granted - maybe these tests don't mean anything. maybe the better way to measure intelligence is by success in the market, in which case i'm an absolute retard. who knows. really.
all i can do is repeat the test results.
listen, i never interpreted myself as the smart kid. i didn't want to go enriched classes; i preferred to hang out with the dumb kids. this isn't self-delusion - i would rather be stupid. in a backwards society, intelligence is actually a curse.
but, they kept doing these aptitude tests and i kept coming back in the 99th percentile. it started in grade school, carried on through high school and was most recently demonstrated through government employment tests. i scored in the 99th percentile on the gct-2, which is a kind of iq test for government hiring. i got something like 96% on a test with a 60% pass requirement. i destroy these things. routinely. consistently....
i went to an interview, and they were just astonished by the sight of me. most people that write these tests fail them outright. 75% is exceptional. they'd never heard of a 96%. they thought there was some kind of mistake. then, i showed up in like sneakers and a plaid shirt with shoulder length hair, and they basically told me to go back to school. well, they probably all got Cs, so that's not hard to grasp.
i'm not the kid that overreached, i'm the kid that underperformed. i didn't do my homework, i skipped a lot of classes; i generally didn't take it seriously. sometimes i was irresponsible, other times i was disinterested and still other times i was dealing with heavy real world shit like homelessness and just unable to focus. i really strongly disliked participating in class. what i think is more important to point out is that my heart wasn't in it, and for that reason i fully agree that i should have dropped out - not because i was unable to do it, but because i legitimately didn't want to.
and, my grades are actually reflective of that. i initially graduated with a B+; my marks went up when i went back, and my gpa is now a weak A. but, it's not a bunch of marks in the middle - it's a lot of extremes. it's strings of As followed by strings of Ds, and you can see my life experiences very clearly reflected in it, if you read the attached essay.
but, nobody wants to read the essay. and, i don't even care, really; what i care about is an end point of actual academic work, not some letters or numbers to get a job with. i'm all about the love of learning, and i'm only frustrated by my inconsistency in the doors it's closed.
but, they kept doing these aptitude tests and i kept coming back in the 99th percentile. it started in grade school, carried on through high school and was most recently demonstrated through government employment tests. i scored in the 99th percentile on the gct-2, which is a kind of iq test for government hiring. i got something like 96% on a test with a 60% pass requirement. i destroy these things. routinely. consistently....
i went to an interview, and they were just astonished by the sight of me. most people that write these tests fail them outright. 75% is exceptional. they'd never heard of a 96%. they thought there was some kind of mistake. then, i showed up in like sneakers and a plaid shirt with shoulder length hair, and they basically told me to go back to school. well, they probably all got Cs, so that's not hard to grasp.
i'm not the kid that overreached, i'm the kid that underperformed. i didn't do my homework, i skipped a lot of classes; i generally didn't take it seriously. sometimes i was irresponsible, other times i was disinterested and still other times i was dealing with heavy real world shit like homelessness and just unable to focus. i really strongly disliked participating in class. what i think is more important to point out is that my heart wasn't in it, and for that reason i fully agree that i should have dropped out - not because i was unable to do it, but because i legitimately didn't want to.
and, my grades are actually reflective of that. i initially graduated with a B+; my marks went up when i went back, and my gpa is now a weak A. but, it's not a bunch of marks in the middle - it's a lot of extremes. it's strings of As followed by strings of Ds, and you can see my life experiences very clearly reflected in it, if you read the attached essay.
but, nobody wants to read the essay. and, i don't even care, really; what i care about is an end point of actual academic work, not some letters or numbers to get a job with. i'm all about the love of learning, and i'm only frustrated by my inconsistency in the doors it's closed.
looking at the data very quickly and coming to a tentative conclusion, it may be less controversial to say that ottawa has the coldest winters of any capital city in the world (perhaps excluding the central asian ssrs, including mongolia). a cursory glance suggests that an ottawa january is 5-10 degrees colder, on average, than the baltic, north sea or iceland. but, these cities don't seem to get nearly as warm in the summer, for the same reason that they don't get very cold in the winter - the ocean currents regulate the climate.
again: i'm not confident in data from bad sources when it defines itself poorly and then contradicts itself. i don't believe that the average temperature in ottawa is higher than the average temperature in helsinki. at all. that makes no sense. but, if the numbers are closer than meteorological science suggests they should be, it would be because the hotter summers in ottawa are warping them, which may be particularly evident since 1998.
i don't remember the source of the source of the article i read that pointed out that ottawa is the world's coldest capital city, but i will point out that it was a very long time ago - around 1998 or 1999. i remember people not believing me, and posting a link in a discussion group to back it up. i remember the term "continuously inhabited". and i often cited the cia factbook for information of the sort in this period, if somebody wants to try the archives (that is a guess). that link does not currently appear to be near the top of the google search results, but the sources at the top of the results are really not very good - "worldatlas.com" provides no meaningful data, sources or figures and differs dramatically from the wiki page, which doesn't mean that i'm right so much as it suggests that there are different definitions floating around. "average temperature" is also somewhat of an unclear metric to begin with, and it is possible that you could come up with different rankings by altering the metric. average temperatures are also subject to change over time, as climate shifts and weather patterns evolve. you'd have to define what you mean very clearly. all i can see from a cursory search is that the different sites don't even agree on what the average temperature of ottawa even is - that the accuracy of the data being thrown around is by no means clear.
i will point out, however, that mongolia is not universally recognized as a country, and my source may not have recognized the former ssrs as independent countries, which they were not until 1991. if the source was the cia factbook, it may have been somewhat out of date, even at the time.
that said, ottawa has what is called a continental climate, which is very different from most of the cities on the european coast, which are moderated by the ocean streams. i suspect that a careful analysis of the data would present moscow as the only serious competitor, if we ignore the landlocked central asian ssrs that did not exist before 1991, which have the double whammy of near desertification.
i am not accepting the idea that the capitals of the baltic states, or even iceland, have colder average temperatures than ottawa. sorry.
i will point out, however, that mongolia is not universally recognized as a country, and my source may not have recognized the former ssrs as independent countries, which they were not until 1991. if the source was the cia factbook, it may have been somewhat out of date, even at the time.
that said, ottawa has what is called a continental climate, which is very different from most of the cities on the european coast, which are moderated by the ocean streams. i suspect that a careful analysis of the data would present moscow as the only serious competitor, if we ignore the landlocked central asian ssrs that did not exist before 1991, which have the double whammy of near desertification.
i am not accepting the idea that the capitals of the baltic states, or even iceland, have colder average temperatures than ottawa. sorry.
i'm under some kind of cyberattack, and i actually think it's the rcmp. i am not going to be able to do anything at all until i can get not just my laptop but now also my main desktop back on line. everything else is secondary - i have no existence, otherwise.
i'm typing on what i want to be a strictly mobile device. this laptop/tablet is not intended for daily use, and is not a solution to the problem.
on saturday afternoon, i checked my mail and got back my access to information request from the rcmp, which was a dvd with a large amount of information on it (you can tell from the burn size). the totality of the request was a 16 kb pdf file with the statement "restricted" - they are not releasing this information, and i do not know why. my best guess is that they there were (multiple) undercover officers at occupy ottawa, and i have a file on record because i participated in the protests, but i'm going to have to file an appeal to figure it out. i believe that this is a basic request that i should have been granted instant access to, but we live in a culture where people assume you have no rights unless you introduce yourself as a lawyer. i believe that the dvd had a boot sector virus on it, and it has taken out two of my machines. but, i think this is also a part of a broader attack that seems to focus on taking out my video cards. twice is a coincidence. three times is a pattern.
i don't want any software from adobe on my machine, as it is bloated spyware, so i open pdf documents in a virtual machine. i initially couldn't get the thing to read, so i tried a reboot - and the laptop never came back. after a few reboots, i decided the disk was suspect and tried to boot from my pc.
i'll remind you that the laptop i'm using has a blown lamp in the display monitor, so i have to send the information out through the video card. this is following a short in a newer laptop's system board, which i think was caused by an attack on my processor. the hard drive initially came from the newer laptop, which i am looking to refurbish, eventually. what that means is that i'm unable to see error messages coming from the bios in the system. but, my assumption was a drive error - because i've seen that happen before. on top of that, i then remembered that i had scheduled a chkdsk and thought that perhaps the reason the machine seemed slow to boot is that the chkdsk was running, which i had then terminated by rebooting. oops.
i got a x7b on reboot, which i decided was probably a boot sector problem caused by the aborted chkdsk. but, the chkdsk had minimal problems. the boot sector seemed fine. so, i copied everything off of the drive and reinstalled - which worked fine, indicating i wasn't having a hardware problem at all, something was corrupt inside of the install.
i was able to work the problem down to a corrupted system hive in the registry and was making good progress in fixing it. i shut the machine down to take a nap, and now it won't post. the laptop's hard drive was plugged in...
i can use this device for file transfer operations and internet access and i still have the bus pirate if i need to go in and flash over parallel. there were plenty of explanations for my laptop's hard drive getting funny. but, there is no rational explanation at all for what just happened to my main pc.
it's almost 7:00 am, which is when the hydro rates change. i'll have to start by stripping the pc down, taking out ram, etc. but, i won't be able to start until after 7:00 pm.
and i'm frankly very depressed and frustrated, so i'm planning to spend the next 12 hours sleeping.
i'm typing on what i want to be a strictly mobile device. this laptop/tablet is not intended for daily use, and is not a solution to the problem.
on saturday afternoon, i checked my mail and got back my access to information request from the rcmp, which was a dvd with a large amount of information on it (you can tell from the burn size). the totality of the request was a 16 kb pdf file with the statement "restricted" - they are not releasing this information, and i do not know why. my best guess is that they there were (multiple) undercover officers at occupy ottawa, and i have a file on record because i participated in the protests, but i'm going to have to file an appeal to figure it out. i believe that this is a basic request that i should have been granted instant access to, but we live in a culture where people assume you have no rights unless you introduce yourself as a lawyer. i believe that the dvd had a boot sector virus on it, and it has taken out two of my machines. but, i think this is also a part of a broader attack that seems to focus on taking out my video cards. twice is a coincidence. three times is a pattern.
i don't want any software from adobe on my machine, as it is bloated spyware, so i open pdf documents in a virtual machine. i initially couldn't get the thing to read, so i tried a reboot - and the laptop never came back. after a few reboots, i decided the disk was suspect and tried to boot from my pc.
i'll remind you that the laptop i'm using has a blown lamp in the display monitor, so i have to send the information out through the video card. this is following a short in a newer laptop's system board, which i think was caused by an attack on my processor. the hard drive initially came from the newer laptop, which i am looking to refurbish, eventually. what that means is that i'm unable to see error messages coming from the bios in the system. but, my assumption was a drive error - because i've seen that happen before. on top of that, i then remembered that i had scheduled a chkdsk and thought that perhaps the reason the machine seemed slow to boot is that the chkdsk was running, which i had then terminated by rebooting. oops.
i got a x7b on reboot, which i decided was probably a boot sector problem caused by the aborted chkdsk. but, the chkdsk had minimal problems. the boot sector seemed fine. so, i copied everything off of the drive and reinstalled - which worked fine, indicating i wasn't having a hardware problem at all, something was corrupt inside of the install.
i was able to work the problem down to a corrupted system hive in the registry and was making good progress in fixing it. i shut the machine down to take a nap, and now it won't post. the laptop's hard drive was plugged in...
i can use this device for file transfer operations and internet access and i still have the bus pirate if i need to go in and flash over parallel. there were plenty of explanations for my laptop's hard drive getting funny. but, there is no rational explanation at all for what just happened to my main pc.
it's almost 7:00 am, which is when the hydro rates change. i'll have to start by stripping the pc down, taking out ram, etc. but, i won't be able to start until after 7:00 pm.
and i'm frankly very depressed and frustrated, so i'm planning to spend the next 12 hours sleeping.
Saturday, January 19, 2019
maybe it's a good time to dust off my idea about how to fix the education system, which is...
more high school.
yes: i want four extra years of high school.
it's a different spin on what sanders was saying, if you actually listened to it, which is that we're up against what is really a failure of public policy. you can't get a job washing dishes without a college degree nowadays - unless you're an undocumented worker willing to work at half the legal wage. what sanders was really advocating for was an expansion of the public education system, just as what he's advocating for in healthcare is "medicare for all" - an expansion of an existing program.
i've been arguing this point for a really long time, though. sanders has a few decades on me, but he was a kind of distant novelty candidate for me until 2015, as he was for most of the left. you'd see him on left-wing talkshow once in a while as the oddball from vermont; he always made sense, but he wasn't projecting a clear platform like he has been since.
but, there's a social component of it, as well. four more years of high school would normalize a broader understanding of certain topics. the way they teach physics in high school is a disaster, and you don't really have the space to get as broad of a basic education as you should. i took eight oac classes - which was unusual - and i didn't have time to take law, economics, accounting, history or even geography. the eight were calculus, algebra, finite math, chemistry, biology, physics, english and computer science. is that really good enough for what we call "general education"?
so, four more years of high school would normalize a deeper understanding of some basic life skills; four years is really not enough, as evidenced by the number of people that are going to university. the assumption would then be that most people would enter the workforce after their eighth year of high school, rather than go to what would now be called post-tertiary education. only specialists would go to tertiary schooling. this would allow the universities to be more selective in admission, and more focused on research.
you could argue that you're expanding adolescence by four years, but i think that's a benefit - it's giving people more time to figure out what they want. if there's a root cause to the student loan crisis, it's in trying to force 18 year-olds to plan their lives out. that is what is crazy about the whole thing.
"and, then they expect you to pick a career...."
four more years of english would open up more space to focus on more classic literature. four more years of basic science would help us create better public policy, by being more science literate. four more years of arts would help us grow ourselves at an important period of our development. and, understanding how to program in multiple languages - as well as perhaps to speak a few - is something that everybody should know how to do.
you would fund these four more years of high school the same way you'd fund the four that exist right now. and, while that sounds expensive, it probably isn't, because you'd be transferring over so much of what we pay for tuition. the administrators would have to take a pay cut, certainly - they'd be paid like principals. many professors may even get a raise, to the level of high school teachers.
over time, the system will staff itself, emancipating the necessity of research professors to teach undergraduate level courses.
as mentioned, the trade-off would be very high requirements to get into what would be a much smaller university system that is strictly focused on higher level topics and research.
more high school.
yes: i want four extra years of high school.
it's a different spin on what sanders was saying, if you actually listened to it, which is that we're up against what is really a failure of public policy. you can't get a job washing dishes without a college degree nowadays - unless you're an undocumented worker willing to work at half the legal wage. what sanders was really advocating for was an expansion of the public education system, just as what he's advocating for in healthcare is "medicare for all" - an expansion of an existing program.
i've been arguing this point for a really long time, though. sanders has a few decades on me, but he was a kind of distant novelty candidate for me until 2015, as he was for most of the left. you'd see him on left-wing talkshow once in a while as the oddball from vermont; he always made sense, but he wasn't projecting a clear platform like he has been since.
but, there's a social component of it, as well. four more years of high school would normalize a broader understanding of certain topics. the way they teach physics in high school is a disaster, and you don't really have the space to get as broad of a basic education as you should. i took eight oac classes - which was unusual - and i didn't have time to take law, economics, accounting, history or even geography. the eight were calculus, algebra, finite math, chemistry, biology, physics, english and computer science. is that really good enough for what we call "general education"?
so, four more years of high school would normalize a deeper understanding of some basic life skills; four years is really not enough, as evidenced by the number of people that are going to university. the assumption would then be that most people would enter the workforce after their eighth year of high school, rather than go to what would now be called post-tertiary education. only specialists would go to tertiary schooling. this would allow the universities to be more selective in admission, and more focused on research.
you could argue that you're expanding adolescence by four years, but i think that's a benefit - it's giving people more time to figure out what they want. if there's a root cause to the student loan crisis, it's in trying to force 18 year-olds to plan their lives out. that is what is crazy about the whole thing.
"and, then they expect you to pick a career...."
four more years of english would open up more space to focus on more classic literature. four more years of basic science would help us create better public policy, by being more science literate. four more years of arts would help us grow ourselves at an important period of our development. and, understanding how to program in multiple languages - as well as perhaps to speak a few - is something that everybody should know how to do.
you would fund these four more years of high school the same way you'd fund the four that exist right now. and, while that sounds expensive, it probably isn't, because you'd be transferring over so much of what we pay for tuition. the administrators would have to take a pay cut, certainly - they'd be paid like principals. many professors may even get a raise, to the level of high school teachers.
over time, the system will staff itself, emancipating the necessity of research professors to teach undergraduate level courses.
as mentioned, the trade-off would be very high requirements to get into what would be a much smaller university system that is strictly focused on higher level topics and research.
“In 2012, the Quebec government decided to raise tuition rates. In
response, a quarter of a million students took to the streets to demand
change. The result was a halting of tuition increases,” reads the ‘Protest Against OSAP Changes’ event post.
“This year, The Ontario government has decided to target our right to
education through the recent OSAP reform. All students will be affected,
and now it is our time to tell the government that we will not sit in
peace.”
hrmmn.
i still have my red square somewhere, and memories of marching through gatineau.
that would be fun. i'd get into that.
hrmmn.
i still have my red square somewhere, and memories of marching through gatineau.
that would be fun. i'd get into that.
i mean, it's easy enough to point out that the tories do very badly with educated people, so that it's in their interest to reduce the level of education in society - they don't want an educated population, because they thrive on low information voters.
but, if that's the goal then you have to have some way to sustain it - you have to house and feed these people that you're trying to keep out of the education system. it's expensive, as a tactic.
if you take away the ability to advance, and then take away the social safety net, the result is going to be mass failure, and dramatically increased levels of extreme poverty.
worse, this is happening in a reality where unskilled labour is being squeezed out - where there are less opportunities every year.
as an anarchist, i welcome the recruits. this is revolutionary potential. keep it coming. but, from a ruling class perspective, this is utter stupidity.
but, if that's the goal then you have to have some way to sustain it - you have to house and feed these people that you're trying to keep out of the education system. it's expensive, as a tactic.
if you take away the ability to advance, and then take away the social safety net, the result is going to be mass failure, and dramatically increased levels of extreme poverty.
worse, this is happening in a reality where unskilled labour is being squeezed out - where there are less opportunities every year.
as an anarchist, i welcome the recruits. this is revolutionary potential. keep it coming. but, from a ruling class perspective, this is utter stupidity.
so, first you slash social assistance, and then you make it harder to go to school.
what exactly do they plan to do with people? send them to jail?
we're going to end up with masses of homeless people. that's the total consequence of these policies: the homeless population is going to shoot through the roof.
https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/2019/01/17/free-tuition-program-is-gone-tuition-reduced-and-student-fees-are-no-longer-mandatory-ford-government-announces.html
what exactly do they plan to do with people? send them to jail?
we're going to end up with masses of homeless people. that's the total consequence of these policies: the homeless population is going to shoot through the roof.
https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/2019/01/17/free-tuition-program-is-gone-tuition-reduced-and-student-fees-are-no-longer-mandatory-ford-government-announces.html
Friday, January 18, 2019
like, i don't want to frame the issue in the terms of whether canada is ready for jagmeet singh or not - as though having a prime minister with a magic beard is some kind of progress, rather than an unimaginable regression to the nineteenth century.
the more pertinent question is whether jagmeet singh is ready to more genuinely become a canadian or not.
and, right now, it seems as though he isn't.
the more pertinent question is whether jagmeet singh is ready to more genuinely become a canadian or not.
and, right now, it seems as though he isn't.
i'm just a little unclear as to what the liberals are projecting in bc.
they could just be trying to distance themselves from controversy, without really thinking it through; it could just be a rejection of bad pr, with little thought to the substance. ok.
they could even be throwing the riding, under the hopes that singh wins - but that would no doubt be a racially motivated calculation, as it's not hard to figure out that the reason he's tanking so spectacularly is that the broader left is a little uneasy with the premise of putting a sikh fundamentalist with a magic beard and a funny hat in charge of the country. quebec, in particular, always votes for the most quebecois candidate, and singh is really an also-ran under that metric. dion actually won seats in quebec; ignatieff was routed in the province, and it's not unimportant that he was seen as less quebecois than layton. a native quebecker of irish descent like mulcair was disadvantaged but competitive against trudeau; a sikh born in india and raised in ontario is lucky if he polls ahead of the conservatives, in the end. this is a reality in quebec: they vote for their own. and, as the liberals will need to dominate quebec to hold their majority, singh is kind of their ideal opponent.
that is to say nothing of the difficulties singh is going to face in the smaller cities in ontario that the ndp had been trending well in, or in the urban regions of alberta where a united left could potentially be competitive. singh is running in metro vancouver for a reason - it's about the only place he's not certain to get annihilated in, and about the only place the ndp has any chance of being competitive in in october.
they could get wiped right out...
but, let's ignore that for a second and take the situation at face value: that the statements were not reflective of "liberal values".
are the liberals rejecting identity politics? since when?
the statements come off as something from a bond villain, in a way, in the sense that they sound right out of the liberal war room. the idea that she'd do well with chinese voters is not something that was overlooked by liberal strategists, or something. it's kind of the point, actually. but, you're not supposed to come out and say it like that....
it's a head-scratching reaction, from a party that has recently built itself almost entirely around identity as a political strategy - there really isn't anything else to the "liberal brand" right now besides identity. so, are they broadcasting some kind of change in strategy away from identity politics with this?
or are they just clarifying that you're not supposed to talk about it?
they could just be trying to distance themselves from controversy, without really thinking it through; it could just be a rejection of bad pr, with little thought to the substance. ok.
they could even be throwing the riding, under the hopes that singh wins - but that would no doubt be a racially motivated calculation, as it's not hard to figure out that the reason he's tanking so spectacularly is that the broader left is a little uneasy with the premise of putting a sikh fundamentalist with a magic beard and a funny hat in charge of the country. quebec, in particular, always votes for the most quebecois candidate, and singh is really an also-ran under that metric. dion actually won seats in quebec; ignatieff was routed in the province, and it's not unimportant that he was seen as less quebecois than layton. a native quebecker of irish descent like mulcair was disadvantaged but competitive against trudeau; a sikh born in india and raised in ontario is lucky if he polls ahead of the conservatives, in the end. this is a reality in quebec: they vote for their own. and, as the liberals will need to dominate quebec to hold their majority, singh is kind of their ideal opponent.
that is to say nothing of the difficulties singh is going to face in the smaller cities in ontario that the ndp had been trending well in, or in the urban regions of alberta where a united left could potentially be competitive. singh is running in metro vancouver for a reason - it's about the only place he's not certain to get annihilated in, and about the only place the ndp has any chance of being competitive in in october.
they could get wiped right out...
but, let's ignore that for a second and take the situation at face value: that the statements were not reflective of "liberal values".
are the liberals rejecting identity politics? since when?
the statements come off as something from a bond villain, in a way, in the sense that they sound right out of the liberal war room. the idea that she'd do well with chinese voters is not something that was overlooked by liberal strategists, or something. it's kind of the point, actually. but, you're not supposed to come out and say it like that....
it's a head-scratching reaction, from a party that has recently built itself almost entirely around identity as a political strategy - there really isn't anything else to the "liberal brand" right now besides identity. so, are they broadcasting some kind of change in strategy away from identity politics with this?
or are they just clarifying that you're not supposed to talk about it?
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