Monday, January 21, 2019

frankly, i would have accepted daca for the wall if i were nancy pelosi - that's something concrete and meaningful for something abstract and trivial. it's a gift; something for nothing.

and that's why i'm not nancy pelosi.

as it is, it's just another example of the democrats squandering an opportunity to actually pass daca in congress.
latino porn, explicitly, please.

alpha mcmann v beta o'rourke should get a full section in, i hear.

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/01/21/az-gop-legislator-introduces-bill-to-fund-border-wall-with-tax-on-internet-porn/
https://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2018/11/16/statement-prime-minister-louis-riel-day
and, as a result of the differing history, black identity in canada often defines itself against black identity in the united states. a recent jamaican immigrant with a phd might actually find something insulting about the expectation of identifying with a slave revolt in the united states.

but, canadians quite often define themselves in opposition to america, right?
i need to be careful.

there are plenty of black people in canada. and, as dawkins says, we're all africans.

but, the vast majority - i believe over 90% - are recent immigrants from the carribbean, with the balance being from africa directly, since 1970. there were small communities of black loyalists in nova scotia and later on in alberta, but we're talking about very small groups of people. and while canada is famous for the underground railroad - of which i live on the terminus of - the fact is that very few of the freed slaves stayed in canada, with the overwhelmingly majority choosing to back migrate into the northern states. people missed their family, and no doubt felt out of place in what was then an almost entirely white culture, but the dominant reason in the literature is the weather. seriously.

slave descendant african-africans in canada are honestly a fraction of a percent of the population.
a proper stand in for mlk in canada would be somebody like louis riel.
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-taxing-carbon-good-idea.html
i think this analyzes the reality well, then produces the wrong solution.

i don't believe in markets; i don't think markets solve problems, i think markets make problems worse.

what i believe in is people. and, what that means in the existing paradigm is actually bigger and bigger government.

https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2018/07/18/agreed-carbon-pricing-isnt-working-now-what/
but, a carbon tax the way it's coming in is not a tax on everything - it exempts imports.

it's a solely a tax on domestic production, most notably on fuel, as well as on exports.

it would be a far better idea to make it a tax on everything....
i have never voted ndp at the provincial level, fwiw - and until last year had voted strictly for the liberals, in various ridings in ottawa. i skipped the previous election because i felt i didn't know the riding well enough.
when i voted for the greens provincially in this riding, it was a protest vote for the local candidate, who seems to be a little more of a left-leaning green. i did not bother to look into mike schreiner's politics, because i wasn't voting for mike schriener. but, i did take the time to look into the local candidate, because the green's have this split personality up in canada - you need to check to see if they're on the green left or are one of these "green capitalist" types.

i would not have voted for a "green capitalist", not even as a throwaway vote. faced with that choice, i would have just voted liberal.
bernie is wasting his time in south carolina, and kind of losing the plot, overall.

i have a 78 year-old grandmother who has gotten into the habit of asking the same question three or four times in a row, and showed no signs of dementia well into her 76th year.

i want to see a younger candidate that distances him or herself from the narrative in washington, and refocuses on things people actually care about. not russia. not border walls. not identity politics.

and, yes - they're going to have to find a way to split the vote in the south and sweep the upper midwest if they want to win the primary. the south is conservative; they will pick a conservative candidate. the potential leftist candidate has the choice between coming to terms with this and losing yet again.
you half expect him to start quoting ayn rand, or something.
he's some kind of eco-friendly rand paul.

yuck.
also: mike schreiner is demonstrating himself to be somewhat of a disappointing idiot.
so, yes - we need serious climate change policies.

but, a carbon tax on exports and fuel is just a way to change the channel, and one that could potentially harm a manufacturing-based economy, while just increasing reliance on imports.

the unfortunate thing is that your average neo-liberal won't find much to criticize in a plan that is more or less designed to export jobs as a cheap pr stunt. if imports are cheaper, it's good for consumers, right?
and, listen - you can cite a bunch of neo-liberal economists, but i'm just going to come back with some marxist analysis about how markets don't work, and i'm sure i can find a few working economists on the left that have ripped the thing down, although i haven't looked, because i haven't needed to....the argument is too elementary to bother seeking backup...

an argument from authority works when you're citing a field that operates in facts and data, which is not economics, and is especially not neo-liberal economics. economics is an ideologically driven profession that operates on deductive reasoning and, on the right, often via faith in free markets. bringing in some neo-liberal economist to preach the faith is just deflecting to another type of guru.

the reality is that you have to adhere to a belief system called "market fundamentalism" to swallow the koolaid on pigovian taxes, which mainstream economists are happy to do on a mass scale. the data isn't actually there - they are at best harmless, so long as they are not foolishly applied for political reasons, which is what is happening in canada.

i'm in favour of wealth redistribution, and i'll take the $20 check. we need serious climate change policies; i was initially agnostic on the thing, not seeing a reason to oppose it, but being wary of supporting it.

but, the feds really need to be looking at ways to tax imports, otherwise they're cutting off their nose to spite their face...

and, we see the result of this: that's a part of how we ended up with doug ford in the first place.
and, fwiw, mlk day does not exist in canada, and most canadians are only vaguely aware that it exists in the united states. this is not a shared holiday, because we don't have a shared history, in context - and the number of canadians of african-american descent is, in fact, statistically negligible.
so, the way this works is that the two bourgeois parties set up a false dichotomy to a serious problem that neither of them want to solve, then get you arguing about it instead of trying to solve the problem. the way to solve climate change is to introduce a tax, and if you oppose the tax then you work for the fuel industry - it's demagoguery on both sides, and indicative of an absolutely broken narrative around something that needs very serious solutions absolutely immediately.

what is being introduced into ontario is not a carbon tax, it's a gas tax. if it was a carbon tax, it would tax imports - and it's not doing that. rather, what it's doing is strictly taxing local production, which will give importers an absolute price advantage. it's a tariff on ourselves. and, if brought to it's logical conclusion, it is strictly recessionary in the sense that it will offshore certain types of production - which will then be presented as a victory, as canada's carbon footprint will decrease as the jobs leave the country.

now, a recessionary policy might not cause an actual recession, but it might. and, because ontario is reliant on manufacturing - unlike bc or alberta - there is a higher chance of it happening here than there.

the solution is a massive increase in green infrastructure using state expenditures.

but, you're just supposed to just pay the tax and think that your suffering is saving the world.

hi.

 i think the problem is that my request is not being properly understood.

 i understand what a criminal record check is, but it is not what i'm looking for. what i want to know is what the border officers in the united states have access to. i will repeat the circumstance.

in early september, i was arrested and charged on what were ridiculous charges that were dropped in november, before a trial date was even set. there is currently an ongoing opird investigation to investigate whether the officer may have acted in retaliation or malice, meaning the only relevant trial that is occurring is of the officer, but it is sufficient in context to recognize that the crown dropped the case. i was - i believe illegally - fingerprinted while i was in custody. i am seeking information about who can and cannot see that these prints exist.

i do not have a criminal record, and as such i know what a criminal record will produce. an occurrence of this sort would only show up on the deepest of vulnerable sector checks. but, the record check will not give me the information i am looking for, which is information about the existence of the prints. nor do the border guards in the united states do a criminal record check - what they check is the cpic database. as such, i do not care about a criminal record check and see little point in carrying through with one, what i care about is what it says in the version of the cpic database that is accessible to the border cops in the states.

i expect the prints to be destroyed, but there is a lengthy process involved. i have a nexus card, and am a frequent border crosser. i need to know what i am exposing myself to before i cross the border.

and, i will reiterate that i have not broken any laws, but am rather seeking that the officer be severely disciplined for his behaviour. i also feel that my s. 6 rights are being infringed upon by the general thrust of the circumstances, as i am fearful of attempting to cross the border until i know what the cops can see, due to no fault or behaviour of my own.

so, i think my request for a cpic readout is not only quite reasonable, but strictly within my constitutional rights - that i have a right to know what information a foreign government is able to access about me, more or less on request. but, all you've told me is that the results are "restricted".

this is creating more questions for me. why are the results restricted? i have no criminal record, no history of conflict with law enforcement and no reason to think there would be anything in the database at all. am i under investigation of committing a crime? because i don't remember committing one, and would be strongly taken aback by any suggestion that i have. i was only initially interested in the question of the prints, but now i want to know what is in the file, as there should not be anything in it at all, by my own calculations.

i cannot accept that the information is being withheld under s. 19 or s. 26. i am not asking about somebody else, and i am not seeking information provided by a provincial institution - or at least i don't think i am. i am asking for a readout of my own personal information, and i have a right to see it.

 so, i am going to reiterate my request a second time - and hope i don't need to reiterate it a third time to the privacy commissioner, or a fourth time in a court of law.

1) my primary concern is in understanding what the border cops on the american side can see. the best way to do this would be to produce a total printout of the cpic results, and then draw attention to the parts that are accessible to the american border cops. do the american border cops have total access to the database, or partial access? i will also need this information before i can renew my nexus card.

2) i believe that this is set out in a memorandum of understanding, but i cannot find it. can you please produce the most recent memorandum of understanding that defines what the american border cops can and cannot see when they search the cpic database from their side?

3) because i cannot see my file, and it is *my* file, i would like to explicitly request the printout merely for the sake of requesting it. again: i am not looking for a vulnerable sector check. what i want is a printout of my entire file.

4) am i under investigation? please provide me with a detailed reason as to why this information is being "restricted", as the answers provided are incoherent and i can imagine no reason at all.

i thought that this would be a simple, routine request. but, denying me access has only made me more insistent to access it, and i'm willing to fight to get this information, which i'm clearly entitled to. we all have restrictions on our time. i would request that you refrain from wasting everybody's and just give me the printout.

 j
the only reason i think i'm smarter than you is that the system told me i was, over and over again.

and, maybe the system was wrong, granted - maybe these tests don't mean anything. maybe the better way to measure intelligence is by success in the market, in which case i'm an absolute retard. who knows. really.

all i can do is repeat the test results.
listen, i never interpreted myself as the smart kid. i didn't want to go enriched classes; i preferred to hang out with the dumb kids. this isn't self-delusion - i would rather be stupid. in a backwards society, intelligence is actually a curse.

but, they kept doing these aptitude tests and i kept coming back in the 99th percentile. it started in grade school, carried on through high school and was most recently demonstrated through government employment tests. i scored in the 99th percentile on the gct-2, which is a kind of iq test for government hiring. i got something like 96% on a test with a 60% pass requirement. i destroy these things. routinely. consistently....

i went to an interview, and they were just astonished by the sight of me. most people that write these tests fail them outright. 75% is exceptional. they'd never heard of a 96%. they thought there was some kind of mistake. then, i showed up in like sneakers and a plaid shirt with shoulder length hair, and they basically told me to go back to school. well, they probably all got Cs, so that's not hard to grasp.

i'm not the kid that overreached, i'm the kid that underperformed. i didn't do my homework, i skipped a lot of classes; i generally didn't take it seriously. sometimes i was irresponsible, other times i was disinterested and still other times i was dealing with heavy real world shit like homelessness and just unable to focus. i really strongly disliked participating in class. what i think is more important to point out is that my heart wasn't in it, and for that reason i fully agree that i should have dropped out - not because i was unable to do it, but because i legitimately didn't want to.

and, my grades are actually reflective of that. i initially graduated with a B+; my marks went up when i went back, and my gpa is now a weak A. but, it's not a bunch of marks in the middle - it's a lot of extremes. it's strings of As followed by strings of Ds, and you can see my life experiences very clearly reflected in it, if you read the attached essay.

but, nobody wants to read the essay. and, i don't even care, really; what i care about is an end point of actual academic work, not some letters or numbers to get a job with. i'm all about the love of learning, and i'm only frustrated by my inconsistency in the doors it's closed.
but, i'll concede that i may have to change my statement to "ottawa used to be the coldest capital city in the world, before the recent effects of climate change led to an exaggerated effect of hotter and longer summers on it's continental climate."
looking at the data very quickly and coming to a tentative conclusion, it may be less controversial to say that ottawa has the coldest winters of any capital city in the world (perhaps excluding the central asian ssrs, including mongolia). a cursory glance suggests that an ottawa january is 5-10 degrees colder, on average, than the baltic, north sea or iceland. but, these cities don't seem to get nearly as warm in the summer, for the same reason that they don't get very cold in the winter - the ocean currents regulate the climate. 

again: i'm not confident in data from bad sources when it defines itself poorly and then contradicts itself. i don't believe that the average temperature in ottawa is higher than the average temperature in helsinki. at all. that makes no sense. but, if the numbers are closer than meteorological science suggests they should be, it would be because the hotter summers in ottawa are warping them, which may be particularly evident since 1998.
i don't remember the source of the source of the article i read that pointed out that ottawa is the world's coldest capital city, but i will point out that it was a very long time ago - around 1998 or 1999. i remember people not believing me, and posting a link in a discussion group to back it up. i remember the term "continuously inhabited". and i often cited the cia factbook for information of the sort in this period, if somebody wants to try the archives (that is a guess). that link does not currently appear to be near the top of the google search results, but the sources at the top of the results are really not very good - "worldatlas.com" provides no meaningful data, sources or figures and differs dramatically from the wiki page, which doesn't mean that i'm right so much as it suggests that there are different definitions floating around. "average temperature" is also somewhat of an unclear metric to begin with, and it is possible that you could come up with different rankings by altering the metric. average temperatures are also subject to change over time, as climate shifts and weather patterns evolve. you'd have to define what you mean very clearly. all i can see from a cursory search is that the different sites don't even agree on what the average temperature of ottawa even is - that the accuracy of the data being thrown around is by no means clear.

i will point out, however, that mongolia is not universally recognized as a country, and my source may not have recognized the former ssrs as independent countries, which they were not until 1991. if the source was the cia factbook, it may have been somewhat out of date, even at the time.

that said, ottawa has what is called a continental climate, which is very different from most of the cities on the european coast, which are moderated by the ocean streams. i suspect that a careful analysis of the data would present moscow as the only serious competitor, if we ignore the landlocked central asian ssrs that did not exist before 1991, which have the double whammy of near desertification.

i am not accepting the idea that the capitals of the baltic states, or even iceland, have colder average temperatures than ottawa. sorry.
i'm under some kind of cyberattack, and i actually think it's the rcmp. i am not going to be able to do anything at all until i can get not just my laptop but now also my main desktop back on line. everything else is secondary - i have no existence, otherwise.

i'm typing on what i want to be a strictly mobile device. this laptop/tablet is not intended for daily use, and is not a solution to the problem.

on saturday afternoon, i checked my mail and got back my access to information request from the rcmp, which was a dvd with a large amount of information on it (you can tell from the burn size). the totality of the request was a 16 kb pdf file with the statement "restricted" - they are not releasing this information, and i do not know why. my best guess is that they there were (multiple) undercover officers at occupy ottawa, and i have a file on record because i participated in the protests, but i'm going to have to file an appeal to figure it out. i believe that this is a basic request that i should have been granted instant access to, but we live in a culture where people assume you have no rights unless you introduce yourself as a lawyer. i believe that the dvd had a boot sector virus on it, and it has taken out two of my machines. but, i think this is also a part of a broader attack that seems to focus on taking out my video cards. twice is a coincidence. three times is a pattern.

i don't want any software from adobe on my machine, as it is bloated spyware, so i open pdf documents in a virtual machine. i initially couldn't get the thing to read, so i tried a reboot - and the laptop never came back. after a few reboots, i decided the disk was suspect and tried to boot from my pc.

i'll remind you that the laptop i'm using has a blown lamp in the display monitor, so i have to send the information out through the video card. this is following a short in a newer laptop's system board, which i think was caused by an attack on my processor. the hard drive initially came from the newer laptop, which i am looking to refurbish, eventually.  what that means is that i'm unable to see error messages coming from the bios in the system. but, my assumption was a drive error - because i've seen that happen before. on top of that, i then remembered that i had scheduled a chkdsk and thought that perhaps the reason the machine seemed slow to boot is that the chkdsk was running, which i had then terminated by rebooting. oops.

i got a x7b on reboot, which i decided was probably a boot sector problem caused by the aborted chkdsk. but, the chkdsk had minimal problems. the boot sector seemed fine. so, i copied everything off of the drive and reinstalled - which worked fine, indicating i wasn't having a hardware problem at all, something was corrupt inside of the install.

i was able to work the problem down to a corrupted system hive in the registry and was making good progress in fixing it. i shut the machine down to take a nap, and now it won't post. the laptop's hard drive was plugged in...

i can use this device for file transfer operations and internet access and i still have the bus pirate if i need to go in and flash over parallel. there were plenty of explanations for my laptop's hard drive getting funny. but, there is no rational explanation at all for what just happened to my main pc.

it's almost 7:00 am, which is when the hydro rates change. i'll have to start by stripping the pc down, taking out ram, etc. but, i won't be able to start until after 7:00 pm.

and i'm frankly very depressed and frustrated, so i'm planning to spend the next 12 hours sleeping.