maybe what we really need in order to get past the authoritarian left is a more labour activist focused kind of christianity, where it's all about the apostles overthrowing the despotic rule of the tyrannical jesus.

"who do you think you are? the son of god?"

cut out the middleman...

judas had the right idea. really.

crucify your boss.

Jesus Christ himself isn’t worth 500 times his median worker’s pay

that's not what judas said.

although, judas didn't actually get paid until he went full anarchist, did he? 500*0 = 0.

it's not that he's wrong. but, i don't know where he's going with this.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/disney-heiress-jesus-christ-himself-doesnt-deserve-this-much-money-2019-03-07

i'm not going to have time for geopolitics in the near future, but to tie up a few loose ends.

the amount of nonsense around venezuela right now is just...

so, the russians stepped in and that's the end of that. if only khruschev had the technology to get the bombs to cuba before anybody noticed, right? whatever you think of what they (the trump administration) were up to, the incompetence here is just baffling.

and, now trump has got this thing all wrong. what he needs to do is find a nice little island resort to invade. like grenada. or maybe the falklands. here's an interesting idea: why doesn't he just invade puerto rico?

the more i'm looking at what happened in the israeli election, the more i'm wondering if the coup wasn't to get rid of the new right party to ease a bit of pressure on netanyahu. as bad as netanyahu is, it's the parties to his right that are the bigger problem. the russians just want to stop the superfluous israeli attacks...

but, if the purpose of shifting the conflict from ukraine to syria was to give the russians some space, the american withdrawal and subsequent shift of the conflict from syria to venezuela largely neutralizes russian motives for further interference. if the americans are truly leaving, the russians may not find the goal of reestablishing syrian sovereignty to be all that pressing, any longer. so, you may instead see the russians succumb to some of their own corrupt instincts; s-400s for all. well, it might be good for deterrence. or, it might start an arms race...

we'll have to see how this pans out. but, the set of conflicts that has defined the last twenty years may be undergoing a transformation, and the next set of conflicts may not be clear, yet.

there are some people that you just can't fix, and just have to lock up.

so, if i don't believe in retribution, and i don't believe in deterrence, why would i put anybody in jail in the first place?

i mostly wouldn't.

i do think that there is a valid justification for incarceration, and that is to protect the community. the logic here is that the rights of the community to protect itself overpower the rights of the individual to freedom. now, this is subject to due process and habeas corpus and all that kind of stuff, but, at the end of day the only reason i'm going to support incarceration at all is if i think that this person being incarcerated poses a threat to the people around it. and, there are some twists to this. for example, i would interpret "not criminally responsible" as a life sentence, rather than an acquittal, because the issue isn't whether you disobeyed the king but whether you're a threat to reoffend. further, it would necessarily follow that detention facilities should function more like hospitals than jails, because the people being housed in them are there precisely because they can't be reintegrated due to some kind of mental incapacity. if there's any way out at all, the system should accommodate for it.

given that i would argue that the purpose of a jail is to prevent the people in it from further harming the community, i don't see any kind of moral problem with telling these people they can't vote; they're being held in quarantine, they're being cast out, they're there explicitly because they're being excluded.

and, the real exercise of democracy here is in the community exercising it's right to exclude those that might harm it.

bernie's old enough to make his own choices and choose his own battles. if he wants to go down in flames on this, it's his choice, but he's wrong and should step back from it.

so, i confirmed my appointment with the doctor's office. that's good to go. although i had to send them a fax...

i left a message with the oiprd indicating that if they're not going to communicate with me in an effective manner i'll just leapfrog them and go right to court. i'll give that a day or two.

and, the solicitor general's office is pretending that it lost my access to information request. they're claiming i should try again tomorrow. mmmhmmm. well, as mentioned, i want to file everything all at the same time...

i actually disagree with this, and i've stated why: voting is a function of citizenship, so the suspension of citizenship that occurs during incarceration should imply the suspension of the rights that flow from it, including but not limited to the right to vote.

there should be a ten thousand foot firewall that separates inmates from the public - they should not be affecting decisions that are made in the communities that they've been removed from in any way at all, whatsoever. but, they should also be reintegrated quickly upon release, if they are released.

however, it's a different issue in canada because the incarceration rate is that much lower. we have 20,000 prisoners out of a population of 30 million. america has 2 million prisoners in a population of 300 million. so, it's a factor of ten, once adjusted for proportion.

again: i'm not concerned about punishing people. i don't believe in punishment. my concern is that it is fundamentally undemocratic to allow people in a jail cell to swing elections in communities that they don't even live in. democracy is a living, breathing thing that you participate in in a tactile way. you meet people, you have debates and discussions face to face, you build coalitions, etc. you can't do that from behind bars, so you're devaluing the process by reducing it to a ballot.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-prisoners-voting-1.3202010

this is a completely preposterous comparison.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/bernie-sanders-felons-voting-medicare-for-all-cnntv/index.html

so, i was able to cut the august document down to 220 pages - 5 by 8 - by replacing the external files with links to the blog. there would have been 200 pages of windows scripts, otherwise, and that would have just been unreadable.

it's done, but i'm going to stop to eat before i run out of time on the off-rate electricity and finish it up afterwards.

that means the half-quarterly will be a nice little 450 page novel.

i'm going to guess that the politics side of it will add an extra 30-50 pages.

i suspect i may spend the rest of the week on the lawsuit. we'll see what happens when i start making calls. i have to pay bills today, too.

but, the document is done, and i'll be at least ready to move to q4/13 within hours.

i didn't get to the calls today like i wanted, but i'm on my last load of laundry and ready to get back to work.

i need to cross-reference everything before i publish. so, i'll start with the music journal, then rebuild the other three using it as a template.

first, i'll need to make sure i didn't miss anything by cross-referencing it with the master document. then, i'll need to make sure that the local document is the same as the online document. then, i can rebuild.

i don't want to present an eta - this hasn't worked well, and i'm going to be multitasking by checking show listings, which at times may take all of my attention - but i don't expect it to be a lengthy process, and there should be something up in a day or two.

it won't take a month to post the next entry. or, at least, it had better not...

if this works, it's likely that i'll never smoke anything at all ever again.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/19/cannabis-infused-beverages-to-launch-in-canada-by.aspx

i would rather drink the stuff, frankly.

i prefer to actually quarantine my smoking solely to bars.

i don't want it in the house.

i don't want it near the house.

i want to be clear about a point, if it wasn't: i don't smoke inside. ever. and, i never did.

in seven months, i have smoked precisely nothing inside of this basement. i smoked precisely nothing in the previous apartment. and, while i may have repurposed the back area into a smoking space in the last apartment, it was behind a door with heavy weatherproofing and very effectively isolated from the rest of the apartment. in the four and a half years i was there, i smoked precisely nothing inside of the apartment itself.

so, when i had my little binge last week, i took a walk whenever i had a smoke.

there's two reasons i do this.

1) i spend roughly 98% of my time sober. therefore, i don't want to be around drugs or cigarettes roughly 98% of the time. it follows that i wouldn't want to smoke in my apartment, for the reason that the residue it leaves behind is, in fact, absolutely fucking disgusting. by going outside to smoke - in fact taking a walk around the block - i'm able to keep all of the disgusting chemicals in marijuana and tobacco smoke outside of my living space, where i spend almost all of my time in a starkly sober state.
2) i'm asthmatic. second-hand smoke makes me hack like a cancer patient. it's unpleasant.

so, yes, i was smoking pot last week...

...outside.

and, in fact, down the street.

so, they converted.

it's not complicated.

let's be clear about this.

when the romans annexed (through a mix of conquest and other means) what was at the time the remnants of the conquests of alexander (a collection of loosely affiliated greek kingdoms), they set up two provinces around the dead sea, the first of which was named iudea after what they thought were the indigenous peoples of the region - a claim that we think today is probably false given that there is no archaeological evidence to support it, even if the ultimate origin of the israeli people remains somewhat unclear. i tend to lean towards a west asian hypothesis, which is actually their own origin myth in that they claim that abraham came from persia. they seem to essentially be a zoroastrian iranian nation that was absorbed by the local (west) semitic culture upon migration, but that refused to give up it's monotheism. judaism seems to be a syncretic mix of zoroastrianism and local canaanite lore. there does not even appear to be a kernel of truth in the exodus story - it appears to be entirely fabricated from whole cloth, a work of complete fiction, probably invented out of nothing at all, during the captivity. the romans also set up on arab province around the city of petra, on the red sea, but there would not have been arabs living on the coast of the mediterranean during this period, even if the province of arabia did briefly touch the sea west of gaza in modern day egypt. the arabs of this period were illiterate desert nomads that were frequently used as soldiers by the empires of the region, but lacked any centralized state of their own; this area would have been primarily greek-speaking and greek in culture, like the rest of the eastern part of the empire (including egypt and what we now call iraq). the province was really what is called a march, a concept that has created existing states like austria (literally translated to the eastern borderlands) and ukraine (also literally translated as border area). the romans had similar marches on the border areas with the germanic tribes. so, what the naming of the province really meant was "this is a buffer state between the empire of the civilized world and the desert barbarians outside of it".

so, during the roman period, the jews were inside the boundaries of the empire and the arabs were not; the jews had a province, and the arabs had a march.

as is widely known, the jews were a restive people that sought a nation state defined by their own laws and refused to submit to the roman emperor. their religion prophesied a warrior-king they called a messiah that would lead them to autonomy, so, with every potential rebel that appeared, the people saw some kind of divine revelation. so, the province of iudea was frequently in revolt. the romans found the jews to be a great annoyance, as they had little taxable wealth but were sitting on top of one of the most strategically important regions of land on the planet. as they could not grant autonomy in this region due to it's strategic importance, and the jews would not submit on account of their religious beliefs, it was eventually decided that they should just be destroyed altogether. in truth, the attempted genocide of the jews was one of many attempted genocides by the romans (the most famous being the carthaginian genocide), but also probably the least successful. the jews were said to be scattered (although it is understood today that many of them stayed) and the area was renamed from iudea to palestinia, after the historical tribe of philistines (who had long disappeared from history).

the philistines are mentioned in hebrew scripture as a race of giants, and actually explicitly referred to as originating from greece. while the bible is usually a questionable source, at best, we can actually corroborate this fairly well with the destruction horizon around 1200 bce. during this period, the entire eastern mediterranean, from greece all the way around to egypt, was invaded by a shady group of characters that we call sea peoples because they appear to have come from the sea. this invasion led to a widespread collapse of civilization and a lengthy dark age outside of egypt (which was transformed, but survived). when the dust settles, we have these people the egyptians called pelesets settled just outside of their borders, on the coast. it is widely accepted that these pelesets were a greek tribe that tried to invade egypt but were repelled, and that they are in fact the same people as the philistines, which is the etymological origin of the palestinians.

so, palestine is not a term that is historically connected to an indigenous group of arabs in the levant, which in truth never existed, but rather a term that is historically connected to a group of europeans that settled in the region roughly 3200 years ago. about 1800 years ago, the romans renamed the region after the philistines in an explicit attempt to destroy the semitic history of the region and europeanize it in a colonial roman image. so, your palestinians are both european in historical origin and resurrected from long historical death by different europeans in order to colonize the area. some indigenous group.

but, if the indigenous people of the region were neither jews nor arabs, who are they? it's maybe impossible to be specific beyond pointing to a concept of (north)west semitic as a cultural grouping, a group that is referred to in the very ancient world as canaanite and after the destruction horizon of 1200 as phoenician. these were important people, in world history. but, they were neither arabs nor jews, even if the jews were eventually absorbed by them after they invaded the region.

while there would no doubt have been some arab migration into the region in the upcoming centuries, the empire's borders held fairly firm for quite some time, well past the conversion of the region to christianity. palestine, jewish or not, remained inside the now christian empire, while the arabs remained outside of it. conflict in the region mostly took the form of civil wars around theological aspects of christianity, and the continuing thousand year war with the persians. an arab in the levant in this period would have probably been a mercenary in a roman legion, and not a roman citizen or inhabitant inside the empire.

it was the thousand year war with the persians that led to the decline of both empires by around the year 600. neither of them saw an arab uprising coming, and it's unclear if either could have stopped it.

as it is, while the dates around the arab conquests are blurry, and the invasion of the levant was not a singular event, it was certainly the case that the roman provinces of palestine were under the control of arab forces by the year 700. it was only after this point that you have a process called arabization take place, where the peoples that were conquered by the arabs became arabs in culture and language. there was romanization, hellenization and even iranization before this, so there is actually some historical process at play. the region would later undergo a turkicization, as well. arabization was successful throughout northern africa (including egypt) and parts of the middle east, but it was rejected in iran and asia minor, who insisted on maintaining their own culture. turkicization eventually succeeded in asia minor, where arabization failed.

while it was initially thought by modern scholars that arabization was a migration process - that is, that large amounts of arabs moved into the region and displaced the local inhabitants - this hypothesis failed to live up to much scrutiny. the historical records might have led somebody to believe that, but it just didn't add up when faced with any kind of scrutiny. how can a small amount of arab nomads repopulate not one but two empires? that's absurd on it's face. however, it wasn't until the advent of dna testing that the issue became an empirical question. who were the palestinians? were they arabs that invaded after the 7th century? were they greeks from antiquity? phoenicians?

and, we now have the science to state it.

the palestinians are the descendants of the jews that lived in the region in antiquity.

i have no way to reconstruct how i decided that it was monday yesterday, or how i decided it was sunday the day before, and need to let it go.

there's a vlog entry very early on the 27th. in the entry, i know it's saturday. but, i woke up thinking it was sunday.

i really think i must have confused myself in trying to catch up on the eating. i have absolutely no other explanation.

i could have cleaned today, rather than forced myself to go to sleep and wait until 7:00.

moving on...

it's actually a little unsettling. what? i kind of want to understand this.

monday seems to be somewhat of a black hole in that there are no posts here. but, posts were a little light all week on account of being stoned (contrary to popular perception, the volume here is not a consequence of drug use, unless you include coffee. marijuana tends to have a distinctly negative effect on my ability to type, write, order thoughts or really do anything creative at all. i don't do other drugs. the dip in volume is a normal consequence of smoking through a few grams and something you can pull out a clear pattern around, given how much is now here...you might even be able to deduce a period of marijuana use is taking place by observing a decrease in posts....), of being more interested in show listings and of being focused on the rebuild. it's unusual for me to skip a day on this blog, which is creating some pause for me, but occam's razor is that i was focused on something else, and the narrative i have is at least consistent with that.

i didn't lose a day, i skipped one. was it monday? or thursday? or some other day?

i came back from toronto with $10 worth of loonies in my pocket. i didn't want to buy a pack of cigarettes on 4/20 because i wasn't planning on smoking through what i had, and i had all this change, so i just went out and tried to buy a few "loosies". it would be useful if i could buy packs of 5s or maybe 10s for rolling purposes. as it happened, i very quickly found two cigarettes for $2, and that was actually enough for the night. i also spent $4 in change on doritos, so that's $6, but i remember being strangely unhungry when i went to eat them. i was then out again for a nice walk around brunch time on sunday morning, and was given two - for free - by a random dude in a car outside the timmy's. i spent the day working before stopping to eat the reheated nachos on sunday night and then am pretty sure i napped for a few hours. i don't think i was planning on smoking any more of it when i fell asleep, but then convinced myself otherwise when i woke up. well, it's a long weekend...

i was out again very early on monday - like 2:00 am-ish. i have a receipt from a circle k (still listed as a mac's by the bank) for mountain dew, and i would have gone to get mountain dew anyways because my throat hurt, but i was really out looking to bum a few smokes to roll with. i thought the circle k would be live enough, but learned it wasn't, so i took a walk down to the 24/7 mcdonald's instead and carried through with the transaction, for two more. that's $8. i took another nap in the afternoon, and then was back out for another walk in the afternoon, under the argument that the long weekend is still carrying on. i have a receipt for doritos from the afternoon, and think i bummed a smoke from a guy at a bus stop. he wouldn't take the change. i then tried to bum one from a guy outside the food basics, and he wouldn't take the change either.

there are a few posts to the music blog on monday night, but the next post to this blog is tuesday morning, and i have to assume i was just too hard at work to post, although i do think i started writing some posts and ended up deleting them. i also think it was on monday night that i took a quick walk to the store around the corner, and bought one from the guy that works there, on his way home. so, that's $9.

i gave out the last loonie - along with four quarters - for two more on tuesday morning. as it was now the fourth day of a long weekend, and there was only around a gram left, i decided to carry through until i either ran out of change or ran out of pot, and was at this point down to four quarters, so assumed it would be pretty quick. i went out a second time on tuesday afternoon, and while i managed to pick up a few cigarettes, i couldn't get anybody to take my change.

i'm sure i went for a walk to get my meds on the afternoon of wed the 24th - this is what my memory says, and i have receipts to prove it. i came back with three cigarettes; nobody took the quarters. this was enough to finish off the pot on wednesday night and thursday morning.

so, given that i started on saturday night and finished on thursday morning, that's around 4.5 days. 3.5/4.5 ~ 0.75, and i smoke quarter gram pinners because i have no tolerance, so i'm looking at three small joints a day over what amounted to five calendar days. i wasn't actually counting, but if you told me i got 15 joints out of that little container, i'd say that sounds right. sometimes, i would roll with half a cigarette and smoke the other half; other times, i'd roll both halves. i understand that this is very minimal consumption, but it's usually more than enough for me.

i had been eating doritos all week, and was consequently behind on my smoothies. so, i do distinctly recall waking up on thursday afternoon and deciding to catch up. further, i distinctly recall knowing it was thursday, because i counted back from the previous date. rather than have six smoothies, which would be absurd, and cost a lot of electricity, i put the equivalent of six smoothies in some tupperware containers and ate it with a spoon. this would be six bananas, six kiwis, 120 blueberries, 30 strawberries, six scoops of ice cream and roughly a box of vanilla soy milk. i then ended up very cold from the six scoops of ice cream and passed out...

the reason i'm sure that i knew it was thursday is that six smoothies would catch me up to wednesday, and i wanted to wait for the meal to carry on with thursday. and, i'm starting to understand this, i think - i got confused by my eating schedule.

and, i actually do have a recording from thursday afternoon that states it is thursday afternoon. i initially thought this recording was on friday by analyzing the dates on it, that i was stating it was thursday despite it actually being friday, but this appears to be a bad deduction - the recording was clearly actually on thursday. and the date on the device doesn't really appear to be reliable. ok. so, i'm pretty sure i haven't lost track of time yet, by thursday.

when i woke up on thursday night, i remember deciding to wait until i was caught up on the rebuild before i approached a meal. that didn't happen - i fell asleep at about 9:00 am on friday morning, without finishing the rebuild and without eating.

i woke up late in the afternoon, and sent an email to the oiprd, fully aware that it was friday afternoon. i did not stop to eat until late on friday night (eggs), but i still wasn't done the rebuild, yet. the next vlog entry states it is early on saturday morning, and  i do now think this was actually true. i would have then fallen asleep early on saturday morning, and woken up again on saturday afternoon. i had eggs a second time on sunday morning, after i finished the rebuild - but by this time i thought it was monday morning.

so, i seem to have mentally skipped forwards to sunday at some point on saturday afternoon, and didn't catch it until sunday night around 22:00. i still don't understand this, but i can at least localize it. let me check the footage again...

maybe i'm just moving so fast right now that time is slowing down.

i spent all day yesterday thinking it was sunday, too.

woah.

have you ever realized at 10:00 pm on monday night that it's actually not monday at all, but really sunday?

i don't actually think the science is predictive, at this point.

but, this is what they're releasing:
https://www.weather.gov/news/190504-sun-activity-in-solar-cycle

i've crossed over that bridge a thousand times in all kinds of states, on foot and on bike, and i've never seen it like that.

the fact is that we got a lot of snow this year and this is largely a consequence of runoff. the high amount of snow may have been partially a consequence of increasing amounts of precipitation, but the fact that it came down as snow, and then sat, isn't predictive of the long term effects of climate change in this particular region. if these increased amounts of precipitation increasingly fall as rain, or at least don't build up into piles of snow and then melt, the river may end up a little deeper year round but this kind of thing will end up avoided.

regardless, it's a reminder of just how much water runs through the valley, and how swamped the region is going to end up if faced with increasing amounts of torrential rain in the summer, which is the real concern. this region wasn't built with the expectation of weathering tropical storms....

getting out of ottawa may have been a better idea than i really realized.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/videos/gallery/too-much-water-is-slamming-ottawa-bridge-officials-close-it-down/sharevideo/6030811660001/most_popular

so, i'm going to get something to eat and get a start on the end of the month cleaning, even if i have to wait until tonight to vacuum and do laundary. i won't be back to cleaning this up until later tonight.

actually, i found the specific post from the end of august that i was looking for in a separate word document dated to sept 1 and have redated it appropriately.

that's a fluke, though.

there will be posts out of context, coming up.

http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/08/its-finally-time-to-step-away-from.html

i just also want to point something out about posts for september and maybe october and it's that gmail empties your recycle bin for you after a certain amount of time. i didn't realize that....

i did save a substantial number of occupy-related posts over 2011-2013, and they will come up in the alter-reality some time after 2031. but, archiving is so time consuming. i noticed that the files i wanted were saved in my email and decided they were safe there. they weren't....

so, i lost a substantial amount of my own posts to the various groups i was a part of, while maintaining a number of conversations about those posts.

i've decided to post these conversations out of context, rather than discard them, but unless i can find these posts somewhere (and i've already looked everywhere.) you're going to have to read between the lines regarding what they're actually about.

so, i've finished posting up until the end of august, 2013. i'm going to need to cross-reference it and recheck it, so the story will alter a little bit, but it's up in it's basic form. this was lengthier than i wanted it to be - 10 days instead of 3 - but i got a lot of listening done, too. i was slowed down by sorting through event listings. i was also slowed down by the pot, which i did in fact smoke through over last weekend, and into most of last week. if you noticed i picked up a bit on thursday, the reason is that i smoked through it.

well, i didn't start the 4/20 weekend until late on saturday night, and it was a four-day weekend, so i didn't feel bad about smoking through it up until the end of tuesday. but, then there wasn't much left, so i just finished it off on wednesday night and into thursday morning.

i wanted to let it wear off a little before i commented, and i'm feeling fine now. i'm not young any more, and i have a long history with marijuana, even if i prefer to avoid it completely for 28 days out of the average month. there's nothing confusing or contradictory about that, it's just called moderation - an idea that seems to have fallen by the way side, nowadays. so, i'm not a kid trying pot for the first time, and i'm not a heavy user, either - i'm a long time moderate to sporadic user that knows what i want out of it. i made sure i got a strain with no cbd because i didn't want the stuff to pass me out like a heroin addict, and, even with getting the strongest strain of thc i could find, i have to report that the government pot is pretty weak. it was acceptable for the first couple of joints, but it fell right off after a few grams. if i was a pothead, i'd quickly find myself smoking the stuff like it's tobacco.....except that i wouldn't actually do that. i'd find a stronger strain.

tolerance is a thing that happens when you smoke too much, and the right answer is to smoke less. but, the government drugs really had the tolerance come on faster than i've ever experienced. and, i have no tolerance. so, when my tolerance clicks in after only a few days, you know it's weak pot.

the simple answer is that they need to put some stronger strains on the market if they're serious about commanding it, but for right now, for me, it means that i'll need to ensure i'm spacing it out. i should be in london again in a few weeks, to file the paperwork, and i'm sure i'll pick a few more up.

i pared the music journal down to 230 pages, from 850, although the politics side will be more than that. that's actually about twice as long as the previous journal, indicating some consistency in terms of length. that said, i'm going to cut about 100 pages out of the pdfs because it's registry scripts - i'll link to the blogspot site, instead. but, the whole thing blows up in september...

i'm going to push through until the end of 2013 before i throw myself back into the alter-reality for the entire second half of 2013. so, i'm just going to continue on with what i'm doing for a few more weeks, at least.

i will make some calls on monday morning. drs. the report from the opird should be finished by now, so i'll need to call if i don't get a good response by noon-ish.

i understand that trudeau is a symptom and not a cause.

and, it is a sad thing that he's probably still the best option we have.

but, if he wants to graduate from dauphin to philosopher king, he needs a better set of tutors.

and, to answer a stupid question: anarchists place a massive focus on public education.

the actual idealization is that anarchists would be intelligent and educated enough to realize that you need to defer to expertise on a topic like this. you don't volunteer to be a surgeon; that's an abuse of the concept of voluntaryism. likewise, this is an engineering problem, and consequently requires engineers to solve. the idea is that the abolition of the state would actually remove the barriers that are preventing the society from carrying through with the rational action of electing an engineer to solve an engineering problem.

put another way, the athenians would have known better - they would have decided by popular decree to put a mathematician in charge. and, they would have. why isn't that obvious? why isn't that happening? because the state imposes cost restraints that a real democracy would have no concern about at all.

i mean, why do we pay taxes in the first place?

there may be other situations where a division of labour is unjust, sure. but, what anarchism means, in context, is getting the state out of the way so that actually rational decisions can be made, and an educated populace would clearly and quickly understand it's need to defer to expertise and it's need to place itself under a command.

anarchism is not the collapse of state institutions, or the abdication of state responsibilities to faith-based organizations - or, in ghastlier scenarios, to the market. it is abdication to the market that is when the affair becomes truly sordid. the abdication of state responsibilities to the church is also an abdication of democracy, as the church is less democratic than the state. and, the market is even less democratic than the church. but, democracy aside, the basic point of failure here is that a church is not an engineering firm; if the dark ages were defined by the slow dominance of the church over affairs that ought to be purely secular and ought to be defined in scientific terms, then thatcherism is in fact a road back to serfdom.

in order for a state to approximate this, it would have to begin with the good sense of an educated mob. but, it doesn't appear to have it.

we are living through the collapse of our civilization at the hands of thatcherism.

we have unqualified citizens out on the street trying to stop their homes from flooding, while stem graduates sit in their parents' basements because there aren't any job opportunities.

and, so few of us are cognizant of it.

well, at least the system hasn't completely collapsed - we're not entirely lost in a dark age, even if the prime minister seems to think we are.

what the prime minister should do in this situation is to tell citizens to remain calm and to request that people steer clear of the area in order to ensure that they are not interfering with the work of professionals, that is soldiers and engineers, who have the situation under control.

what the prime minister should not do is take his fucking kids down to play on the beach, in an airheaded attempt to teach them about the social values underlying thatcherism, namely that the state is abdicating it's responsibilities to the church.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/canadian-forces-to-focus-on-constance-bay-britannia-and-morin-road-areas-military-working-at-sandbagging

this should be the responsibility of professionals in the army, not of volunteers in the community.

trudeau's example is consequently wrongheaded, regardless of the sincerity of his intent - it's the wrong thing for him to do, in the position of authority that he's in; what he's trying to present as a responsible gesture is in truth an irresponsible abdication of his own responsibilities, and he's no doubt completely clueless about it. but, it's wrong-headed in exactly the way that neo-liberalism always is - it cuts out the functions of government, it discards the reasons we need some approximation for the state, while leaving the systems of dominance and control and tyranny and corruption in place.

if he wants to lead by example, he should restore funding to disaster management in order to kickstart a rebuilding of our collapsing civilization, not help carry forward the disastrous legacy of neo-liberalism to the next generation.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2019/04/27/flood-weary-communities-in-ontario-quebec-brace-for-more-rain/

biden might actually be the most self-centered, conceited, in-it-for-himself candidate in american history.

he has zero policy agenda.

he just wants to be president.

i warned you about biden.

but, listen. biden has been clear enough that he's operating solely out of careerism. joe isn't even running for wall street; joe is running solely for joe, for his resume, for his legacy.

i guess you can't fault him, if he wants it.

but, you should frankly be ashamed of yourself for sending him money - or for casting a ballot for him. he represents nobody and nothing. he has no policy vision. so, why are you sending him money? and, why are you supporting his candidacy?

he doesn't care about you. why do you care about him?

he waited until the last minute and then raised a lot of money on the first day. that suggests he's not going to fade, that he does have a substantive base - or at least substantive enough of one to compete in a crowded field.

now that he's in, bernie's tactic needs to be to try to prevent as many people from dropping as possible. when booker gives up, joe gets a bump. when harris realizes that the rest of the country isn't actually very much like california after all, it's joe that gets the bump. even warren supporters are saying something by supporting her, namely that they won't back a leftist candidate.

so, joe has a process here: he's the center of gravity. he's got to try and build up as much jomentum as possible, as he runs through the space-time of the primary field. history may not be on his side, but time is.

there's a point where the field narrows, the situation flips and you get a stop biden movement in the same way that you had a stop clinton movement. but, that's a reaction - a reaction to a biden victory.

biden is a huge problem for bernie.

again: it's not about budget deficits, it never is, but is rather a reflection of the endless stupidity of their voting base.

take that, trees. ford showed ya.

yes, they're that fucking stupid.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2019/04/25/even-the-trees-fall-to-the-ford-governments-budget-axe.html

i want to clarify what i was saying about this.

suppose you're in jail over a triviality, either to fund the prison-industrial complex or just because you're black. what good is a vote to you? it's farcical. and, how does one react to a system that will take away all of your rights, except the right to vote? the argument is that voting is fundamental, inherent to the individual; i might rather argue that allowing prisoners to vote from inside a cell actually devalues voting. you wouldn't even have to be free to vote, anymore. the cynic in me may argue that it's an accurate accounting of the value of a vote, but i think we ought to strive for a more meaningful concept of democracy than that. voting is something that should flow from some concept of privilege in society, even if that privilege is something as basic as near-universal citizenship status, and not merely from birthright.

so, i don't support the measure, for reasons i've attempted to make clear.

that said, i have no interest in the kind of childish gotcha-reaction being pushed by the christian right, that wants to turn the issue into some kind of "moral" quandary that is about listening to "bad" people talk, or something. if the debate is to be reduced to whether the restriction of voting rights is an acceptable "punishment" for any sort of crime, then i'm going to cut you off before you start because i fully reject the premise underlying retribution, as a means of so-called justice. retribution is a religious idea that has no place in a scientific society.

as jurisdiction is a human construct, there are ways to get around the jurisdictional issues. sure.

i don't like the idea of voting via absentee ballot from jail, as these people are in no way a part of the communities that they're trying to vote in. that might seem trivial if you're in a big city, like new york or los angeles. but, the reality is that the inmate vote, as large as it is in america, has the legitimate potential to swing smaller races for city offices, or things like school board races where the total votes cast may only be in the dozens. if the intent is to strengthen democracy, i might again question if it's thought through well - i don't think that the premise of a mayoral race in small town america being swung from the county jail is something that would strengthen democracy in america, but rather something that would devalue it.

a better idea may be to consider the inmate population in the context of redistricting. if a county jail has a large enough of a population to justify a seat in the state or federal legislature, maybe you just give them one. this would prevent them from voting in their communities while they are displaced from them - which i will reiterate that i don't like on grounds that it would put the administration of democracy into disrepute, rather than on appeals to retribution.

but, however you fix the jurisdictional problems, you're still left with the absurdity of voting from a jail cell, and the devaluation of democracy that is attached to the premise of doing so - as well as the futility of the process, as very little that occurs outside of the jail will have much of an effect on what occurs within it.

if somebody wanted to stand up for the rights of prisoners, they would be better off supporting their rights to unionize, to strike and to generally act in protest at their own conditions, and this is something i would have more support for. prisoners will not have their living conditions bettered by pressure from the outside, they will need to organize and fight to win their own struggle, on their own terms. the ability to take part in a democracy from inside the institution would be immeasurably more valuable than the ability to take part in a democracy that exists outside of it.

of course, allowing prisoners to vote from prison would also be an open door for voter fraud. you'd have all kinds of dead people voting in no time, as well as people voting from prison that have already been released. and, it would be the democrats that would do this, not the republicans.

if i was an american, i wouldn't consider this a ballot issue. if this is your best reason to vote against bernie sanders, you maybe shouldn't vote at all. but, i think he's wrong on this point and should revisit it.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/440736-graham-says-senate-should-vote-on-sanders-prisoner-voting-idea

9/11700 = 7.69 x 10^-4. that is 0.076% of the budget deficit.

when your calculator resorts to scientific notation to get a percentage, it is not a substantial cost reduction. this is a fraction of any kind of error on the budget, and is quite obviously not being done to save money. rather, it's an example of capitalism at work - the government is eliminating a public service in order to line the pockets of it's buddies in the private sector. it's just good old corruption.

i live on the border, and i can't afford to buy insurance. nor am i going to allow that to affect my travel plans. so, i will now have no choice but to travel without insurance, and i guess we'll just need to create an international incident, if i get hit by a car while i'm out.

don't buy into the false narrative about budget cuts; this is privatization by stealth, and it's representative of how this government is going to operate, in general.

in canada, we have little ability to oppose a sitting government on an issue like this. but, the opposition should take it as an invitation to involve itself in the private insurance industry, when it rewins the government. if they want to open this can up, the opposition should take advantage of it in the long run in erecting a pretext for further meddling, when it reverses it.

and, yes, you should expect the next government to reverse this, because it's just flat out stupid.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-ohip-out-of-country-emergency-coverage-1.5109027

i guess the engineers will have a lot of work to do.

it's like reading about roman citizens in the dark age, who were prevented from reading their own language by the tyranny of the church, who demanded they live like children in febrile servitude, and eventually forgot their own civilization, having to relearn it from translations into other languages. in canada, we are experiencing lost knowledge, how about that. hooray for neo-liberalism.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-poor-flood-risk-maps-or-none-at-all-are-keeping-canadian-communities/

the recent ipcc reports have been clear that mitigation and adaptation ought to be a part of the strategies taken by policy institutions to reduce the effects of climate change. some warming has already occurred, and some more is inevitable even under the best case scenarios, and there is no evidence we are anywhere near any best case scenario. governments need to react to science to prepare for the future, and all evidence right now suggests we are heading into a rapidly warming future; of course, it needs to present adaptation strategies. in context, that's it's job.

however, adaptation policies shouldn't ever be seen as a replacement for emissions reductions legislation; pointing to the inevitability of substantive change in the recent future doesn't negate the requirement to minimize it, but in fact should draw attention to the importance of doing so. no species has an infinite ability to adapt. i worry that the government may be pivoting out of a file it's really made a mess of, and was maybe never as committed to as they advertised they were. the carbon tax didn't work as a license to pollute; maybe, "it's evolution, baby!" will give them the sideways glances that they seek. i've been arguing that the government needs to find a way to counteract the cynicism in order to survive; meanwhile, they're actually broadcasting that they're considering running on it.

there's little question that many municipalities in canada are going to require some engineering help in controlling the water surrounding their communities, and that most solutions will need to be paid for with state funds. if we're talking about reality, it is that the state needs to adopt a development stance in order to adapt, which means prioritizing the flow of public funds to mass infrastructure projects. talking about adapting is empty rhetoric, if there's no actual action being taken. adapting is expensive, hard work.

so, yes - flooding is the new normal. yes - we need to adapt to that. but, we shouldn't let the acknowledgement of this truth cloud us to the continuing need to get emissions under control.

i just want to clarify that my comments around sanders accepting pension funds were specifically related to social security, and were explicitly a reference to the solvency of the system. social security should be means tested - perhaps only weakly, but at least partially. it is arguably the case that sanders would be outside of any reasonable cutoff in terms of eligibility for social security, rules i do not know the details of.

further, the comments were generated by explicit references to sanders accepting "social security payments", a term that may or may not have been intended to be interpreted literally, and yet which i did interpret literally, as exactly that. i apologize if i was led to sloppy conclusions by sloppy journalism, if it is indeed the case that i was.

a private pension is a different concern than social security. i don't think that private pensions should be means-tested, i think that the decision is contractual, and to be arrived at either by direct negotiation or, more realistically, through collective bargaining. the fact that the private institution is a government body may bring up a set of interesting questions, but the government body is still a private institution, and these were consequently not the concerns i had in mind.

i will agree that, if pressed on the point, sanders may want to consider donating some money to snow removal in burlington or something. but, my thoughts were on a very different line of thinking than rep. khanna's.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/23/sen-bernie-sanders-gets-mayoral-pension-while-running-for-president.html

i went in here a few times to get poutine.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/vibe-lounge-leslie-mwakio-food-licence-1.3887890

what an article like this obscures is that there's recently been a lot of genetic introgression from wolf dna into the coyote population, leading some experts to speak of a hybridization event; in any case, the rural coyotes around the gta are bigger, meaner and more aggressive than the coyotes of previous generations. stated simply, they're evolving.

there's a underlying pretext in the article that the son was in some danger, and that would no doubt be cautioned against by coyote experts, who would point to statistics indicating the rarity of the attacks, but this is ignoring the recent introgression. these animals are clearly more aggressive.

we have this cultural attachment to "nature" as this eternal, constant thing that we should avoid interfering with, so that it may continue on in stasis. but, this is a dramatic misconception of reality. while we are trying so hard to avoid disturbing it, like it's some divine quantum interaction that we can suspend indefinitely by ignoring, life around us continues to evolve.

coywolves are something we ought to take very seriously, even if the correct thing to say right now is that the situation requires further study before acting upon.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/coyote-co-existence-policies-mean-pets-are-never-safe-dog-cat-safety

you know, given the size of the incarceration rate in the united states, allowing prisoners to vote could seriously swing a few elections. there are some difficulties, though.

let's say you commit a crime in new york city, and get sent to a penitentiary upstate. you would still be in the same state, even if municipal elections are a somewhat tricky jurisdictional concern. but, let us suppose that you have a residence in california, you are arrested in new jersey for a crime you committed in new york, and are sent to a locked down correctional facility in new hampshire. where do you vote?

the jurisdiction is important, as there would be some likelihood of the inmates of a large jail assuming political control over rural counties, should the number of inmates outnumber the number of residents in the region - a scenario that nobody would find acceptable. and, what if the result of some controversial referendum is close enough that the number of inmates voting is an effective swing? what if a referendum on gun control is successively blocked by the margin of the inmate population?

i believe in a concept of citizenship. while it is best to maximize the scope of voting rights, it should always be done with an eye towards the parallel expansion of citizenship obligations. incarceration is the temporary cessation of both your rights and your obligations as a citizen, and there is consequently some ground for restricting the franchise to those who are actively incarcerated. i would rather meet the debate at the door and instead propose that any restrictions on voting rights due to prior convictions should be entirely abolished.

if one is concerned about voting rights for the incarcerated, it would perhaps be more productive to pursue policies designed to reduce the size of the prison population than an expansion of the vote to the incarcerated population.

a vote from behind bars is always going to be an act of absurdity.

was the christchurch shooter even a christian? regardless, what would some christians in sri lanka have to do with him? it's an infidel response, and reflective of the dangerous tribalism of religious affiliation. but, it's another example of why i'm not interested in interfering - let them kill each other off.

anyways, i'm through the first two days of august. i should be in windsor by the 5th, and then i lose internet access for a month, although i had a laptop at the time and was typing late nights at the timmy's....

should i put that in the travel blog? i'm thinking about it; i'll take a look at it. i think a lot of it is kind of reflective writing that could fit the travel blog theme. i was certainly typing in a public place, at least. there's going to at least be a mention of the trip in, which featured a man named don complaining for hours about the dangers of windmills. this guy, who had been dating my mother off and on for years, also made an overt sexual pass at me right in front of her, and i felt her see it. a child, when in close proximity to it's mother, knows innately when she's viciously angry. i did about the only thing i could do in the context of being driven 800 km from home with all of my belongings by a guy that's now openly grabbing my thigh, which was to completely ignore it. but, she cut off all contact with him as soon as she got home. i don't think i mention that context in the conversation. but, i made a snide comment about it as soon as i got into windsor, and that might be a decent transition into further travel blog entries for the month. i'll see how it reads.

i mean, i don't want to mislabel my father's cd collection. it wasn't a vault of unreleased recordings by unknown artists, or full of special collection editions, or out of print copies, or anything like that. it was really a string of common label 90s reprints of 60s and 70s classics, even if some of it went unnoticed at the time. the closest thing it came to indie rock nerdery was some less popular eg records releases, stuff with holdsworth and bruford on it, and even that was all virgin records imprints. it was really nothing to fight over in terms of rarity or market value.

it was rather defined by his own interests as a very amateur drummer, so amateur that it only existed abstractly in his mind during any period i knew him, although there was a rumour that he played when he was younger. he often had a drum kit around, and i frequently took advantage of it; i never saw him actually play the instrument. but, the fact that he interpreted music through the drumming meant that his tastes were skewed to artists with strong drumming, and his collection was in fact centered around specific drummers he took a liking to: phil collins, bill bruford, terry bozio, keith moon and later on mike portnoy and mike mangini. as a guitarist and keyboardist, i found myself analyzing it by a different set of criteria, but that collection of drummers (as well as others) was certainly involved with the creation of some substantial music over that period, so there was a strong cross-section to draw from.

but, the truth is that it was mostly a collection of "common titles", and that was exactly what i was looking for. it was these physical copies of these classic recordings, as common stock as they may be, that i discovered on the wall in the past - records like animals, the lamb lies down on broadway, sgt peppers, the dark side of the moon, etc. platinum recordings. common titles; sure. exactly.

so, just to be clear - this library i had in front of me wasn't some plethora of obscurities. it was just the classics. and, that's my point.

to be clear, when my sister said she took the discs she wanted, i would presume she meant some vocal jazz like billie holiday, and maybe some 60s pop like joni mitchell or bob dylan. or maybe the doors. i don't expect that she'd have had any interest in the psychedelic or progressive sequence in the collection, in pretty much any way. not even the floyd. like, she's the kind of person that thinks the beatles lost it after help.

so, i wasn't concerned about her taking the discs i wanted - to the extent that she knew them at all, she didn't like them much. and, she may have even been honest in deducing that there wasn't anything i wanted, simply because she knew so little of it.

"in the court of the crimson king. hrmmn. never heard of it. j wouldn't want that."

i actually wasn't concerned about d taking the stuff i wanted, either. his was the opposite situation: he already had all of the stuff i was looking for. he didn't need another copy of dark side or sgt peppers or selling england.. or whatever else.

as pointed out, i actually found most of it. despite what they said, it wasn't picked over, it was sold. the only thing i couldn't find was the zappa...and it is probably because it was given away or lent out early....

the emails and pictures are fully pasted into the master document, which has now bloated to 750 pages - 8x11 - for the month, but includes some duplicates and what is probably hundreds of pages of superfluous email trails. i'm sure that i pasted entire email conversations in over and over, and i will need to clean that up as i edit it through. regardless, it seems like quite a substantial amount of data.

i'm going to stop to eat, and copy the messenger data over when i'm done.

so, i'm about halfway through copying the emails and photos into the master document, and it seems like this is going to be a lengthy digest after all, meaning the quarterly, itself a half quarter for now with a long wait period for resolution with the first half, in fact the entire alter-reality, is going to be pushing the length of a full novel. how about that for unexpected.

the emails drastically curtail in september. i think. but, i've still got some story to tell for august...

there was no traveling, and not much youtube activity, although i did set up the studio, which is key to the music journal narrative, actually. so, it's not just all personal narrative, there's actually some substantive music journal entries. ok. i think i may have done some writing at the end of the month, as well. so, it should be a more balanced entry, actually, even if the personal narrative remains weighty.

i meant to post this the other day.

if my idea about the multidimensionality of string theory being a crude model for the expansion of space time in all directions is correct, you may want to actually look towards very high number of dimensions in your string theory - infinite numbers of dimensions, even, as you'd be getting a better approximation of the expanding space-time as the number of dimensions approaches infinity. i'm sure that most logic would have suggested the number of dimensions should be minimized, up to this point. it's some math to play with, anyways.

i think that it's well understood that there were substantial western assets on the ground in the islamic state, and they're likely to be recycled back to the front.

it doesn't matter: you still have to fight it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/kosovo-isis-fighters-families-syria-return-1.5105732

there's now a link to a consolidated rss feed, the 6 blogs + 4 youtube sites, which is the best i can do. i will update this link as it improves itself.

but, i cannot get rss feeds from bandcamp, noise trade, patreon or facebook, unfortunately. in a sense, that is irrelevant, as i should cross-reference everything to the blogs; this feed will give you everything, and double or triple a lot of it.

http://www.rssmix.com/u/8317252/rss.xml

unlike notley, trudeau actually has a realistic chance to win the upcoming election.

you'd have to think that there are still a sizeable number of people apprehensive about the conservative party, which was thrown out of power in a coalition intent on removing it, specifically; notley won against a split majority. the conservatives are still a minority nationwide, arguably even a weak one. the fundamental position of strength is on the liberals' sides, in terms of pure numbers. the hard question all of these people are having to face is if it's a better strategy to support the party, or try and work against it, but it's ultimately a meaningless question, because you have to unite in the end, anyways, to actually accomplish anything; if the liberals can build any kind of coalition around anything at all, they should have the pure numbers to win everywhere, decisively, so tactics towards unity should be aggressively deployed by anybody looking to do anything, and it follows that a liberal win becomes eminently plausible, which is believable because the liberals have held government for a disproportionate period of time over the last 100+ years. stated differently, this is a constant in canadian politics: the liberals always have an excellent chance of forming government.

unfortunately, the liberal party dismantled a large amount of that coalition when they came to power. it appears to be trying to reach deep into ethnic communities to make up the difference in voters, but i think it's a numerical miscalculation to conclude that this is even plausible. the uniform spread of something like election reform can't be replaced by a couple of localized sikh communities, even if the political financing involved in the latter is much greater. it seems to have been quite foolish to entirely throw these issues away, given the strategic value they had in the previous election.

it's just probably not going to be very hard to come up with a good reason why these ignored liberal left voters should cast a skeptical vote, even if they have to do a little bit better than basing a campaign around the negation of godwin's law.

so, of course the liberals can win the election. they just need to figure out how, first.

so, i'm caught up with the  reviews and ready to get to the august rebuild.

i'm sure you caught the date.

i'm going to go for a walk.

these analyses of the alberta election that are claiming that notley was done in by negative campaigning are completely off-base.

to begin with, she had little chance of getting more than 40%. the idea that the election was really in play is not a serious premise, so this idea that she didn't do what was necessary to convince people to vote for her is delusional. she had no chance of winning the election by running on the economy, because there simply weren't enough votes in play for her to do so, and because her own base doesn't care about such things. she was simply never going to convince a substantial number of conservatives to vote for her, no matter what she did, and no matter how bad the other candidate was.

i misread the data, granted. but, it doesn't really change the necessary tactic. as she could at best get a plurality (she had no chance at a majority), and the opposition was no longer split, she had to figure out how to do two things:

1) maximize her own turnout.
2) minimize her opponent's turnout.

"appeal to your opponent's base" was not an option, here.

the truth is that she failed at both tasks, but the approach she took to try to minimize her opponent's turnout was the correct one. if anything, she should have been more aggressive about it. the greater failure is that she governed in opposition to her own base, and that should cost her her party's leadership. i look forward to her being fired by her own people, and her replacement realigning itself with the federal and bc wings.

but, in politics, sometimes failure doesn't occur because you did something wrong.

sometimes, you fail because there's simply no path.

there's nothing she could have done differently; she had little chance, at all.

i also attended a yamantaka // sonic titan show on monday night, before i left for toronto early on tuesday morning. i knew this was coming, but didn't want to commit until the last minute, because i didn't want to put missing the bus in question, and i knew it would be a long day. in the end, i decided i wasn't sleeping anyways, so i'd might as well go.

also, i hadn't been to a show in windsor in a long time and have reason to think i might not be to another one here in a long time, as well. there's just not much happening in the city that i'd be interested in...

...and, i needed the fresh air....

i decided to try an experiment with my new drink on the way in. i had already determined, through careful measurement, that the volume of a pill bottle (that is, the area of the circular opening of the cylinder as a cross-section of the imaginary plane that intersects the cylinder orthogonally, multiplied by the length of the cylinder itself) is roughly the amount of vodka required to emulate a mix of my now unavailable rock star vodka, and that simply dumping a pill bottle of vodka into an empty bottle of mountain dew, and then filling that bottle up with mountain dew, would be an easy way to rebuild the drink. while my sense of smell has it's limitations, i was not able to sense the slightest indication of the alcoholic nature of the drink, nor was i able to remotely taste the alcohol in it. success...

the walk was a little longer than intended, and i wasn't sure i was going to get in. the initial request was in fact denied, so i took a walk around the corner to think it through and came back with a compromise:

i know you're sold out, but i'm here, and i was actually just looking to see the first band, anyways. so, would it be possible to let me in for the first set, and then we can figure out who is staying and who is leaving?

"yeah, that works, just find me after the first set."

i'm not sneaky, i'm just rational. honest.

in fact, i wasn't sure if i was going to stay for the whole show or not; it was an honest claim of intent, due to the scheduling concerns around the bus ride out. i think i had decided that it was going to depend on whether i found some drugs or not, and of course i did, and rather fast.

it's legal, but you can't buy it anywhere.

"yeah. never stopped me before."

i had seen yamantaka // sonic titan previously, at zaphod's in ottawa, back in early 2012. i remember the show being kind of intense in a noisy kind of way, even while delving into this kind of japanese opera that just came off as kind of strange. i remember not fully understanding it, and not being particularly driven to; it was a strange cultural synthesis in the sense that it was a japanese noise rock band (something i thought i understood.), albeit from canada, that came off as more traditionally japanese than any japanese noise rock band i'd ever heard before, and i was really willing to just leave it at that. i've missed them several times since, but never at this small venue here in windsor, which is itself a draw when it gets the right acts in.

listening to the new(est) record a few times before the show led me to the conclusion that they'd toned their sound down a lot, and by incorporating a kind of syrupy pop layer that, to be consistent, almost sounded k-pop or j-pop in origin. but, the band the new record reminded me most of was actually ghost, in it's combination of prog-metal type guitar riffs with keith emerson style organ masturbating and sappy pop hooks, right down to the face-painting. i might normally write something like this off as silly, but i decided on this night that it was good enough for the walk...

it's a small venue, capacity less than 100, so you literally can't be more than ten feet from the stage. as such, an aspect of the show was the rawness of it. i must say that i wasn't expecting to get the full vocal treatment with the handheld drum and the whole bit, but that the first singer (they have two singers.) really managed to fill the room up with her voice, including for the tracks that i am presuming are traditional japanese chants, but could be easily mistaken for native american singing. the show was otherwise a competent working through a sampling of the slicker, glossier and proggier side of their discography.

i needed to get out of the house, and it was worth it....

i will eventually upload the last track they did, which was a cover, but there's a recent set here, for now:

as expected, i was allowed to stay for the second set.

i had seen the acid mothers temple before as well, and i'm really not much of a fan, although i do have a fond memory of the show as i got to watch a band i'd never heard of, mammatus, completely blow them off the stage. so, i remember that acid mothers show in ottawa as the night i found mammatus. if i weren't for the mammatus set, though, i would not remember the night so well, as the acid mothers were just kind of prodding and largely boring, terms i would use to describe them in general.

i will acknowledge that they were in truth better on this night than they were on that night in ottawa, more than ten years ago, and that a lot of it had to do with their drummer doing this kind of keith moon routine, where he demonstrated his displeasure with the mopiness of the singer by descending into these cacophonous outbursts, and then got visibly scolded and even drowned out by the guitarist for it. while i think that the routine was actually real - that there is a legitimate conflict over musical direction between the singer and the drummer - it could have just as well have been an act, and considering how frequently this band cites legacy rock cliches, nobody would have questioned it, either. as it was, intentional or not, i got the reference and a bit of a kick out of it on that level. but, the basic boringness of the act remains clear, and had the drummer not repeatedly misbehaved, i would have walked away from it without much to say.

this appears to be the set from the same show as above:

the walk home was pleasant, and while i told myself i'd get everything ready before i napped, i had to succumb to the intoxicants and get some rest. but, this was actually useful to me, as it ensured i got some actual sleep before i went into toronto.

so, where am i posting these concert reviews to? and where am i not posting them?

i used to have two blogs - one for the music journal & one for politics, which was also a general blog. i always intended to introduce a third one for music reviews. the travel blog was never planned, but is an idea i will probably stick with for some time; it's a reasonable subset, and i like the premise. i can build a nice history up around this. & it might even get me out of the house a bit more...

but, the breakdown that existed was kind of insufficient to get a proper partition, and things ended up kind of weird. now that i have four blogs instead of two, let's think this through better.

1) concert reviews should appear at the travel blog when they involve traveling, and not otherwise. i think that's clear enough.
2) concert reviews should always appear at the review site because they're reviews. so, this isn't complicated, yet.
3) the idea of having concert reviews at the music journal is that a concert is always an influential experience, even if it's less than inspiring. i'm going to hold to this.
4) i did not previously post reviews to the general blog, but i think i'm going to be more explicit about the general blog being general, and start doing so.

so, the la dispute review will actually appear at all four blogs, whereas the yamantaka review (to be written shortly) will not appear at the travel blog, but will appear at the other four.

as i close these blogs, i will be juggling the information around accordingly.

so, i wanted to get something done last night, but it was instead another ten hours of sleep after a very short day, which is continually frustrating.

i hate sleeping...

i'm awake now, anyways, so let's see if i can get started on this or not.

"oh, the comments on youtube are just terrible"

i just want to point to this as another exhibit of the root cause of why this government is probably going to fall in some way in october, be it halfway to minority or all the way out the door, and that reason being that it's a government composed of people that live an arm's distance from everybody else.

the government has a message about the carbon tax, and it wants to get past the media filters and directly to young people, so it does up a little video to talk directly to voters. then, it posts it on the internet.

great, right - it's using modern technology to get through the media, and that's the smart thing to do, clearly.

...except they posted it on twitter. and, probably from an iphone, too.

https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=11&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjm1Z2y4d7hAhUmTd8KHQWbDjkQwqsBMAp6BAhNEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FJustinTrudeau%2Fstatus%2F1119006107622674432&usg=AOvVaw1X-jVb12wBhvIxTBwu4gZ0

i apologize for the google link, but i actually have a *twitter* line in my ad-blocking software to stop the embeds from showing up in newsfeeds. that is, i've purposefully blocked my browser from accessing the link to the video, as spam.

most people aren't going to go to such lengths to take twitter out of their lives, but my inability to even hit the link is indicative of the poor tactic being employed, here, which is itself a reflection of the bubble that the government exists within.

the reason they posted it to twitter is, of course, because they all use twitter, and that's obvious enough from observing them. they're the kinds of people that are glued to the twitter feeds on their (i)phones 24/7, and that are surrounded by other people that are glued to the twitter feeds on their (i)phones 24/7. in the absence of a representative sample, such uniformity of behaviour might actually appear normal to somebody that is behind this obfuscating veil of twitter-tinted sunglasses. but, a cursory analysis using things like statistics and market research would quickly collapse the bubble, were it to be actually carried out - pretty much the only people that use twitter are upper class liberals, that is people that act and think just like the people in the pmo. call it a circle jerk or a chant in the choir; you'd probably pick the latter, if you use twitter, even if the former is more widely stated.

and, if you were to ask them "why didn't you post it to youtube or facebook?", you might even get back some kind of snobbish response about youtube users being inferior to twitter users.

and, that's why they're going to lose.

i think the evidence would suggest that the child's work was in fact rather pathetic.

and, i might expand on the point by suggesting that the idea of firing or disciplining the teacher for pointing it out is also deeply pathetic.

we would be left with the conclusion that the people of pennsylvania are, all around, fairly pathetic - they send their kids to school unprepared and ignorant, then try to fire the teachers when they get evaluated. it's pretty sad, indeed.

but, we can leave pennsylvania in a state of blissful ignorance if it insists.

those jobs will just go to china, instead - where they actually teach their kids math.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/petition-calls-for-removal-of-secondgrade-teacher-after-note-reading-absolutely-pathetic-on-students-work-goes-viral-011213250.html

well, i got the review done, but then i crashed for another 13 hours.

let's see if i can resurrect myself...

i wanted to make some calls today, but i forgot it was a christian holiday, so i'll have to wait until monday. this is really the only way i interact with religion, nowadays - the annoyance of things being closed on weekdays.

and, the tradition of cross-posting heresy to all of my social media sites on good friday:

so, call me an arian. whatever.

i have no plans this weekend. but, i haven't eaten since tuesday morning, and need to at least catch up on the smoothies.

i expect to be back to the next archive by the end of the night.

i almost never vomit, actually. but, i was feeling it all morning; it was inevitable, and probably not entirely caused by the vodka, but also contributed to by my diet and the travelling and even the coffee. it could have happened hours earlier, really. as it is, it was the tums that triggered it.

i often bring antacids with me when i'm drinking, because the things we drink alcohol with are so inherently acidic. how many of us assume that that stomach ache you get after your third drink is because you've had too much alcohol? in fact, it's probably acid reflux, because you've consumed a litre of carbonated pop or whatever else in the process. maybe you want to take it as a cue to quit drinking, or maybe you don't - maybe you just want to pop a few grams of calcium to balance it out, and keep going. i find the latter usually works just fine...

so, i didn't think much about it when i started to feel it in my gut - i just got some tums at the corner store, scarfed them down and went back to browsing in the coffee shop. it was a little before 18:00, when i had to run outside...

i didn't take it seriously, at first. i put a shot in my coffee on the way in, but it was a tall cup, tall enough that i could have put in two. further, it took me five hours to drink it. so, i was only on my third drink in 10 hours. sure, i just had a big cup of coffee; sure, i hadn't eaten since early in the morning. but, i wasn't going to puke on three drinks in 10 hours was i? that would be lame.

so, i just sat outside the shop for a minute and waited. it's not going to happen...

...but, yes. it is going to happen.

i made it just past the band's vans for the first iteration, which was unfortunately directly on the sidewalk. well, i wasn't taking the situation seriously. i was able to get across the street into an alleyway for round two, to the concerns of some onlookers that were smoking something in the back.

"i'm alright. just a little too much vodka. nothing serious. i'll be fine in a few minutes. sorry for freaking you out."

this was met with some visually cautious skepticism, but at least the concern faded to indifference.

but, was it really too much vodka? i've never had difficulty with such little vodka, before. while i'll acknowledge that i hadn't had any alcohol at all since last may, it still seems like an absurdly low tolerance level. so, i'm going to reject the claim that i drank too much, and rather assert quite sternly that i wasn't even drunk. rather, i suspect that the coffee and the extra strength tums may have created an acid-base reaction that actually stimulated vomiting as a pressure release; this was more like a volcanic eruption in a grade school science fair project than alcohol poisoning.

i needed a third round before i was done and able to walk off.

"i'm fine. really. i'm sorry."

that was apparently more convincing, as i got a laugh and a wave.

the reality is that i wasn't feeling drunk before i puked, and i wasn't feeling drunk after i puked, either; the nausea faded a little, if not totally, but it didn't really make much of a difference at all, in terms of how i was feeling.

i made a choice, however, to stand outside, just in case - and to put my coffee away. it was about an hour's wait until doors.

there were some kids lined up early, so i just got in line behind them and waited.

"my friend is convinced he's in a coma and everything is just a dream."
"that's so ridiculously stupid, really. obviously false."
"i agree, but, like, how do you prove to him that it's wrong?"
"actually, maybe you can't do that, can you?"

*ahem*

that's right, kids. what you'd say is that that's not even wrong, that you could never disprove it and that it is therefore worthless as a hypothesis.

"makes sense."

the fact is that i've been to lots of shows with knapsacks, and nobody has ever given me a hard time about it before, so i couldn't imagine anybody giving me a hard time about it here. i expected there would be some kind of mosh pit, but moshing (or really dancing at all) to la dispute is like dancing at a funeral - it's inappropriate, in context. they're technically a hardcore band still, but they've always leaned towards beatnik poetry, and they're coming up on a flip over the cusp, to the point that i do suspect that there will be a time in a few years when the shows are almost entirely abandoned by hardcore fans. i didn't expect that to be true of this show, but my intent was to stand a little further back, out of the pit, while sipping on a beer and listening to the lyrics.

this isn't a rejection of the pit, it's just that la dispute is not really body music, it's more of an intellectual kind of thing, something that might even be better experienced at a seated venue than a general admission punk show. if you're showing up to a la dispute concert looking to dance it up and have a good time, you're kind of missing the plot.

so, in my mind, it wouldn't be much of a problem if i brought my bag in, considering i was going to be standing in the back, anyways. but, i wasn't able to get the point across to security, who just insisted they were sold out. well, they couldn't be that sold out; surely, they're not being reasonable. but, i simply wasn't getting in with the bag, so i had to relent and leave it at coat check, along with everything in it. they insisted it was safe...

so, i get in and learn it's $9 for a beer at the opera house in toronto. it was at least a big beer, but i only got one...

the place was about half full for the first act, called slow mass, which didn't make much of an impression on me. what they sound like is a parody of mopey 90s alt rock, without even the minimal amounts of tension that you got out of a genre that was intended to town done. there were some unnecessary outbursts of noise by the drummer and guitarist, but it just kind of added to the buttoned up feel of the show by telling the audience that the band itself recognizes that they are actually boring, and are even bored with being boring. while the self-awareness is perhaps a positive step, i don't have much else to say about this, other than to point out that this is indiscernible from any of the other thousand bands that have sounded exactly like this over the last forty years.

i let them finish, downed my beer and then went to retrieve my marijuana from my bag, which i had absent-mindedly left in there when i was unexpectedly coat-checked. i wasn't sure if it would be a hassle or not...

"sorry, there's just too many bags."

and, there were, indeed, a lot of bags.

"listen, i could understand if there was a long line-up here and i was in your way, but it looks like the place has mostly filled up, and you're just kind of sitting around, so..."
"were you in recently or near the start?"
"i was one of the first people in."
"so, i'm going to have to sort through this to the bottom. there's no way."
"well, you're going to have to do this eventually, right?"
"what?"
"well, i'm going to eventually pick the bag up."
"but, that's only if you're here at the start of the line."
"i need to catch a bus out."
"so, i'll have to do it anyways. ugh. fine. i'm making you pay to recheck it, though: $4."

it was a good night for logic in toronto, at least.

i've rolled up a lot of marijuana in a lot of toilet stalls in a lot of cities, but this was the first time it was actually legal.....

a few minutes later, and i'm overhearing some lesbians talk to each other, as they're standing a few feet in front of me.

"my grandmother thinks we're all monsters. like, she seriously thinks we're evil. it's crazy. i love my grandmother and everything, but it kind of scares me. so, i'm just never telling her. ever. we're just not having this talk. she'll die thinking i'm straight."

i had to interject.

until she starts bothering you about having kids, then you're going to have to bring it up.

laughs from the crowd, as always.

"she already bugs me."

it's just going to get worse.

"well, it's not like i don't plan to have kids. i'll have kids, just not with a dude."

you're still going to have to bring it up.

"well..."

listen, studies have been done on this. your grandmother is an individual, but homophobic people often find themselves with a change of opinion when they are confronted with queer family members, as it presents them with a reality rather than an abstraction. i mean, she's going to go to some church or something..

"mosque."

right. whatever. so, she's going to go to that mosque, and they're going to say all kinds of hateful, damaging things about queer people as though they're some distant other, as though they don't actually exist as human beings, but then she's going to go home and see somebody she loves, and she's going to have to make a choice to trust these words that are thrown at her abstractly by this stranger on a podium, or a person in front of her that she know and loves and trusts.

"i'm not telling her."

that bad, huh?

a passing homeless person then interrupted the conversation with a request for change, of which neither of us had any. but, the other lesbian was upset about it.

"i wish i had some change. i once gave somebody $20."

the male member of the group that included the two lesbians is upset about this.

"you gave him $20?"
"i'm a generous person."
"but, they're all drug addicts. it's really hard to be homeless in canada, you know."

ugh. not on my sidewalk.

poverty does exist, you know. i mean, it might be true that there's a high percentage of drug addicts in the homeless population, but you can't just jump to the conclusion that if you're homeless then you're a drug addict. that would just be wrong.

(some applause on the street)

but, he didn't want a debate; he went inside, and i followed not far behind him.

the fiasco with the bag, and subsequent detour rolling and smoking, meant i actually missed most of the second band's set. the place also filled up to the brim in the time i was gone, forcing me to watch from the landing, which was actually the plan anyways, but perhaps not in the space i ended up in. gouge away are named after a pixies track, and sounded like it. the following audiotree set has some generic pixies-type tracks and some noisier hardcore; the bit of the set that i caught was in the generic pixies-type track style, and didn't appeal much to me. in fact, i decided to find somewhere to sit and take a rest...

i went directly back to the floor when the set was done, trying to measure the size of the crowd and how to set up and came to the conclusion that the place was packed as tight as possible; they weren't exaggerating about the place being sold out, and there really wasn't room to stand with a bag. that said, leaving my bag in coat check didn't all of a sudden make me want to go into the pit - i was still hoping to hang back a little and just watch. but there was barely even anywhere to stand. so, i decided i'd wait the pit out a little and then try and work my way in.

they started off with some less intense tracks, so i couldn't really get a feel on the size of the pit, or what was going to happen when they clicked in. if i could get some separation so that i could stand on the edge of the pit, it could work, but there just didn't look like there was much space. i was hoping to wait a little longer, wait for them to tire themselves out, so i could move up. but, the opposite happened: i saw the train of frat boys walk by me from the back a few songs in, and realized i was going to need to hang back.

if i had a chance to escape the back at that point, it closed pretty quickly, as this annoying teenage girl decided she was going to dance in front of me all night. i've been through this before; the girl wants to dance, but she doesn't want to get molested at the punk show, so she parks herself directly on top of the obvious fag, after testing it first to make sure it's safe. it's then my instant responsibility to make sure she's safe until she walks off, whether i asked for it or not and she inevitably gets pissy when i don't react, which is really quite the contradiction. if you check my reviews, you'll see me point to this happening repeatedly, and pretty much always at punk shows. in general, i can handle this - i can even enjoy dancing, and often do - but the lack of space on this floor, combined with the nature of the music, just made the scenario comical. even if there was space to dance, i would not have wanted to on this night - i wanted to watch the band. a lot of these lyrics are really quite morbid. and, this girl wanted to dance too - bumping into me repeatedly, flipping her hair around and just generally trying to get me grooving. nope...

in order to get by her, i would have had to shove her out of the way, and i wasn't going to do that. i didn't see any obvious space, anyway, as the pit seemed to take up most of the floor, and nothing was opening up. so, i spent most of the concert trying to dodge tassled hair flying into my face from this hyperactive kid that was hopping all over me, apparently desiring some kind of response.

if they had played for another hour, i would have moved up. alas...

and, what of these moshers? is it not somewhat perverse to mosh to la dispute? if anything, they ate it up. it was lines like "we buried our son today!" that got the pit in motion. i'm not going to pretend i understand that, but so be it. i'd rather be a little bit more sombre about such things and watch quietly from the side...

how was the show, though?

this is the third time i saw la dispute, but the second time was an acoustic set in detroit. the first time i saw them was with touche amore & balance & composure at maverick's in ottawa in 2011, and what i remember about the show is that the songs were unrecognizable when compared to the recordings. at the time, i decided that i hadn't listened to the material that much, and i was just not following it because i didn't know it. but, the same thing happened in toronto, on this night - i could sort of make out the songs, but not really. i mean, some of them were clear, but some of them seemed radically different and hard to follow.

i'm left to wonder if the band radically rearranges it's studio material for performance - or perhaps radically rearranges it's live material in studio - and if there's an entirely parallel discography that i'm not aware of. the other option is that the sound tech is terrible, but this seems unlikely, given that i experienced the same thing in two different bars, in two different cities and separated by 7.5 years.

a quick run through the setlist suggests that it may have mostly been tracks from rooms of the house that were rearranged, and i guess i can get my head around that, even if it threw me for a bit of a loop. there's some bands you go to see just expecting something new, and there's some that you go to see with the discography burned directly into your cortex, and la dispute are really in the latter category.

i don't want to play the show down; i enjoyed the components that i recognized, even as i was spitting the hair out of my mouth and craning my neck around to get a view. but, there were tracks i only half-recognized, and it left me wondering what was really going on.

i can't currently find a recent show on youtube and don't want to post an old one, so we'll leave this space open until one appears.

(insert youtube link)

i wasn't first in line, but i was near the front of the line, and the coat check had it ready for me.

"see, this is actually better, right? 'cause the line moves faster."
"oh, shut up."
"ok. have a good night.."

i had to step into the bathroom for a few minutes, again.

i was out before 11:30, so i just walked back to the greyhound. the subways were all closed, unfortunately, so no late night sub on the bus. it was a short wait, meaning i have a working model, even if this is not a frequent trip.

the migraine and the rain started almost immediately, and almost simultaneously, leaving me crunched up in pain and kind of freaked out, at the same time. i tried to sleep the migraine off, but it wouldn't come. the rain was so heavy that you could barely see the streetlamps, making it hard to tell where i actually was. yet, the driver of this express bus was not interested in slowing down, regardless of visibility, of the slippery roads or of the potholes that the bus was ripping through. but, it actually seemed like a short ride, somehow. and, i was in windsor and off the bus in no time - and home by around 6:30 in the morning.

so, would i do that again? yeah, for the right act. i just wish the weather was a little nicer.