note to moderator: i don't want to be moderated. i want complete free speech. that is why i'm taking my blog down, i don't want to adhere to your "community standards", i want to post somewhere else. that said, i'm currently being harassed by some childish dykes that are mad at me because i'm not a lesbian. they should choose not to read my blog if they don't like it, rather than continue to annoy me for rejecting them.
i am republishing everything temporarily in order to use mirroring software to pull it down. i expect this post to be taken down within 24-48 hours. i would request you refrain from unwanted moderation in that time frame, so i can take my site down from here and upload somewhere that cares more about speech rights and less about conservative value systems.
saturday, october 1, 2022
the new italian prime minister is not a fascist and comparisons to mussolini are not grounded in reality. she will not make the trains run on time. what she is is a conservative, which is certainly not "better" than a fascist on some imaginary contrived moral plane (if anything, it's infinitely worse), but is something that mussolini truly was not. comparisons to scalia are far more accurate.
the trains are now more likely to be privatized and left to the decay and inefficiency of the market. your train stop will likely be relocated to a more profitable location, if you are even able to afford to take the train at all, after the government cuts your wages and the privatization of the rail triples the cost of riding it. the new private owners are also likely to try to reduce wages, and the resulting labour unrest could potentially stop the trains altogether.
i would unquestionably greatly prefer fascism to conservatism. it's not even close; there's no competition. actual conservatism is the worst possible ideology in the list by a substantive margin and the one i'm furthest away from on the spectrum. i could at least tolerate fascists, from a purely economic standpoint; i have absolutely no common ground with conservatives, at all, in regards to any potential issue, whatsoever. i could not even stand to breathe the same air as them, unless compelled to by a monopoly on violence. i'm not trying to soften this woman's image, i'm simply trying to insert a dose of reality; calling her a conservative instead of a fascist isn't intended to somehow make her "better" as a human being, as the truth is that it actually makes her far, far more contemptible as a politician and far, far worse as a human being. do not confuse me as somebody that is soft on conservatism; i have absolutely no tolerance for conservatives, and especially have absolutely no tolerance for religious conservatives, remotely, at all. i am simply stating the blunt truth that the rhetoric in the media regarding the rise of fascism in italy is not correct, and is in truth irresponsible.
she's really just a dirty, disgusting, contemptible, authoritarian, backwards, revolting, piece of shit catholic, which means she's a vicious hypocrite and a worthless phoney. she will likely end up neutralized in a corruption scandal within a few months.
in the mean time, i would advise trying to manipulate her by appealing to her enforced deference to guilt. that's how the church brainwashes people into being meek and easily controllable, so trying to co-opt her by hacking into her programming is an advisable tactic.
this is likely the most efficient path for the opposition in italy to follow to overthrow the tyranny of the papal yoke and return to the freedom of secular rule: exploit the weakness inherent in the brainwashed enforcement of catholic guilt to trick them into destroying themselves. a jonestown massacre in the papal see would be a godsend, truly.
in windsor, on @ 2:23
the optimistic analysis is that the germans will just build more windmills. this is a hard problem because their industry needs something more stable. let's not lose track of what really just happened: america just bombed out it's competitors in germany. that is the actual point of the attack; the actual winners are ford and gm.
the next thing that's going to happen is that joe manchin is going to show up in germany with coal contracts to sign, and europe will be violently coerced by american capital to return to it's proper place in the system that was designed by american mercantilists after world war two: a captive market for american exports. you vill eat ze corn, and you vill like it.
(update: blinken has called the attack an "opportunity". wow.)
naturally, the germans do not want to be a captured market, but how they get out of this mess is harder to project. they're stuck. they've got poles and balts blocking them from access to russian markets in the east, and american mercantilists blockading the coast to their west, trying to capture them and turn them into their slaves. their friends to their north just defected. and, who exactly wants to talk about a german-italian alliance, right now?
the old german-turk alliance is at least somewhere for the germans to look towards, but the ottomans no longer exist. looking to the middle east for energy imports is something the germans may try (and have tried), but it will eliminate their competitive advantage, which is the actual point.
one might expect me to be primarily concerned about how this affects the climate, but this was gas intended to be burned, anyways (it's not, say, permafrost melting), so the question as to where or how it gets emitted is....yes, methane is worse than carbon dioxide, but this gas was all going to be released, regardless. yes, any push factors on the germans to transition off of carbon are a theoretical positive, but that is an analysis that exists outside of reality.
i mentioned previously that the major energy agreement that was recently signed between germany and canada was going to piss off the white house. indeed. the germans do not want to be reduced to american slaves and forced into purchasing this dirty american coal and gas that is being exported to them at the tip of a missile, they want to transition to a renewable energy source and were looking for any way at all to escape from the mercantilist economic arrangements being violently set in place by these brutally oppressive american bullying tactics. yet, that germany just signed an agreement to import wind energy converted into hydrogen off the coast of newfoundland that is supposedly going to use technology that does not yet exist indicates that there is a severe lack of viable options to get out of this viciously enforced economic slavery put in place by the unscrupulous american hegemon. we see germany's punishment for daring to assert it's independence. what punishment will canada now receive for foolishly trying to compete with the emperor?
i always go back to the obvious answer, which bourgeois politicians do not like because it doesn't create a product to sell at inflated prices for the benefit of the investor class that lobbies and/or literally is the party in power: europe should have a self-contained, integrated hydro-electric generation and transmission system. i know that most of the rivers that flow through europe are slow moving, but surely the europeans can find a way to work together in order to figure out how to design an efficient, renewable and integrated grid based on the rivers and the resources they do have. the alternative is a grim future as a dumping ground for american exports, and in truth looks a lot like what latin america (who is emancipating itself from this arrangement via a closer relationship with china) has been for decades. european economic and military independence is now more vital, as a strategic existential necessity, than ever before.
that point aside, this is otherwise the kind of thing that the trotskyists excel at analyzing.
we're back in the united states soviet republic. europe doesn't know how lucky it is.
6:42
i initially wanted to avoid posting this song because there's a high probability that it will be misunderstood. yet, it's just too tempting. i'm consequently going to post it with a little bit of context.
one of the artistic rivalries that defined the 1960s (while i'm not a competitive person, i do grasp the importance of rivalry in the history of art), was the one between paul mccartney and brian wilson. to his credit or discredit, depending on how you interpret the record (i'm not a fan, myself), mccartney may very well have been britain's biggest pet sounds fan, during the time in which lennon was borderline obsessed with frank zappa. the observation of the beatles' good taste is of the utmost historical importance, given where they found themselves, in terms of having a platform, both politically and artistically. mccartney has stated on multiple occasions that sgt peppers was written as a reaction to pet sounds; wilson's reaction was that he couldn't possibly compete, and he was right.
while the wikipedia site suggests that the song is a parody of back in the usa and california girls, and there may be some truth to this (especially the latter), i think it is more worthwhile to point to the earlier beach boys song, surfin' usa, which can be easily heard as "servin' usa" and interpreted as a pro-draft song. the pun, here, and i think it was intentional, is that mccartney is backin' the ussr, in response to wilson servin' usa.
mccartney has not been as clear about his politics as lennon, who was an obvious anarcho-communist in the mould of oscar wilde, or others like roger waters (who at one point identified as a trotskyist; you'd have to ask him if that's still the case). the only political position that we can unambiguously attribute to mccartney is that he does not like war, but who does? yet, this track is a pretty blatant statement as to which side of the cold war that sir paul was actually on, whether he ever spoke about it publicly, or not.
posting the track in reference to the recent referenda in "novorussiya" is consequently of some value but is also somewhat perilous and must be done with sufficient caution; the track is actually drawing a parallel between the us and the ussr, and was intended to be both cynical and ironic. it is cheeky, silly and tongue-in-cheek; i am attempting to dissuade you from taking it too seriously.
i do nonetheless hope that there were some people in the oblasts that had the levity to find some old vinyl and give the white album a spin, as putin was speaking on the television overhead.
while russia is the clear victim in the attack on the nord stream pipeline, which is a de facto declaration of war against russia, and also a declaration of war against germany, there is a secondary benefactor, in addition to the united states. as we live in a global capitalist economy, which is something that also applies to russia, this is an issue that is of almost sole importance to the interests of capital and the discourse is consequently framed strictly in the language of capital and therefore becomes entirely about the accumulation of surplus value. we can ask "who benefits?", but we can also ask "who even cares?" and the answer to that is investors primarily, and environmentalists secondarily. the framing of the issue in western media is reflective of it being an issue of concern primarily to investors, which includes the biden family, in the west.
it may be helpful to analyze the situation from a non-capitalist or (non-mercantilist) perspective instead and in the process reintroduce a concept of geopolitics, in intellectually reconstructing a world where nation states are once again competing for resources to advance their own interests. that idea is no longer coherent in the really existing hegemonic form of monopolistic state capitalism (mercantilism), as defined by various orwellian "free trade" agreements, and as enforced by american violence, because the defining assumption, as warped as it is, is that the world only has one super power. in a world where history has ended, there are no longer nation states competing for resources, but merely an empire (centred in washington) that allocates everything on the basis of imperial desire. client states, including those in moscow and beijing, are to do what they're told - or else. while the discourse in the rest of the world has been to challenge the premise that such an arrangement ever existed (and obama, to his credit, realized that such thinking was insane), the sitting emperor has fully embraced it, in an apparent collapse into utter madness that informed observers, in truth, saw coming from a great distance. let us think past such absurdities to reassert a concept of reality into the discourse and to succeed in understanding the conflict from the viewpoints of other cultures.
something i brought up at the start of this mess is that stalin would have sent putin to siberia to work in the mines for even suggesting that russia should sell it's natural gas to the despised germans. the idea of selling off your strategic resources to your opponents to accumulate surplus value would only make sense to a capitalist; every other economic system in world history would denounce that idea as incomprehensibly insane. what is more valuable, energy or money? how can money ever be as valuable as energy? no - in truth, no amount of money can ever properly compensate for the value of energy, and that truth is too obvious to even need an argument. the premise is thoroughly bonkers; it's a suspension of reason, followed by the substitution of that suspended reason with the worst kind of greed. it is worth noting that any german weapons that have been sent to ukraine were up to this point manufactured with inexpensive russian gas, meaning that a substantive part of the reason that russia has been slowed down in accomplishing it's objectives is that it is increasing the manufacturing capacity of it's opponent by selling cheap energy to their military and financial backers. the sole benefit to russia in the pipeline attack is that it will hobble the german defence industry, a point i've seen made by nobody, and which nonetheless does not remove ukraine from the list of suspects, as ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated poor decision making throughout this process (and then been repeatedly saved from it by much more competent nato decision makers). i see no evidence that ukrainian politicians understand the contradiction in celebrating the pipeline explosion, and yet asking germany to send them more tanks, or have yet to grasp the implications that taking away access to economical energy sources from german industry will have on germany's ability to contribute to the war effort.
this is where the fact that china is a completely alien civilization to the west becomes important in terms of understanding what is happening. while the indigenous peoples of the americas were certainly their own civilization before they were wiped out in the 15th and 16th centuries, there are today only three substantive non-grecian civilizations still standing on earth: the norse, the chinese and subsaharan africa, which is not a cohesive civilizational force at this time (and never has been). all of the other civilizations and cultures on the periphery of europe - the areas colonized by islam under arabic imperialism, india, iran, turkey, russia - are in truth a part of the west, in any comprehensible sense. you could not coherently define the west without having it include these peripheral cultures; you must take a broad view of the west, or decide it doesn't exist at all. it's a definitional problem; as the standard definition of western culture is that it is grecian in foundation and encompasses the world left to us by the greeks (in europe, via the renaissance and the enlightenment), it consequently must include all of the regions conquered by alexander and all of the contiguous regions conquered and colonized by the various successor churches to grecian christianity, of which islam is properly defined as one. if you do not like this broad scope of western civilization, you must adjust your boundary conditions, and you may find this to be a difficult task. i cannot come up with a preferable definition of the west than it being what was left to us by the greeks, but would invite you to try, if you think that you can. i will no doubt bring you back to the standard definition through discourse, if requested, and i may try to do so gently, at first, and then heap scorn and contempt upon you in the most vicious terms imaginable, if you choose to resist. this is a massive, contiguous geographic space that includes almost all of the old world, and the truth is that this contiguous and integrated area moved to capitalism together, from it's actual origins in the islamic empires, and their conquered and viciously subjugated indian territories.
as large as this region is, it does not include china and it has never included china. tucked away on the other side of the plateau, china has evolved in almost complete isolation from the west, partially by the intentional decision of it's own ruling class. there have been attempts by barbarian groups to the north of china to conquer the west, but the west has, in truth, never come close to conquering or colonizing china. china is unique in the world in that it simply cannot be understood by deferring to greek or canaanite philosophy, science or mythology; china erects itself strictly upon it's own foundations. there is no other substantive civilization on earth which exists outside of the west in this manner.
the requirement to analyze how china interprets the geopolitics of natural resources then becomes apparent, and such an analysis must be conducted on china's own terms. this is important to get your head around, because even if the chinese were not responsible for this particular attack, this issue will arise again in the future, repeatedly, as competition for dwindling natural resources from disparate perspectives increasingly leads to violence and other forms of conflict.
from the chinese perspective, the issue is not about accumulating surplus value extracted from the export of strategic resources, but rather about maximizing their own control over those strategic resources for their personal use in their own economy and for the benefit of the people in their own society. to china, natural gas is a valuable, finite resource that they seek to maximize control over for their own benefit; any gas sent to germany is gas that is not sent to china, and china consequently benefits from the destruction of the pipeline because the absence of the relevant infrastructure reduces the flow of gas to their opponents, and therefore maximizes their own access to it. this is a reversal of the logic used by controlled western media sources, but it is also a more rational economic perspective, and one that analysts need to learn as these conflicts become more frequent. that america is no longer concerned about it's own access to strategic resources, but rather just wants to sell it's strategic resources to captured markets, is in truth a reflection of it's decline as an economic power. this is a very strange economic reality: the world's most powerful military is forcibly trying to sell it's economy's own strategic resources to it's subjugated clients. this is extractive colonialism gone haywire, to the point that it's become cannibalistic. we used to force them to buy our corn, which made them reliant on us to eat and forced them into a state of compliance; now we're forcing them to buy oil and guns, which gives them the tools they need to defend themselves from our violence and puts in motion the process of revolutionary overthrow. some people have called this "blowback", but nobody has ever applied that idea to europe. the truth is that the situation has never been this absurd. they said that capitalism wouldn't undo itself?
china also applies this very different strategic perspective in it's approach towards manipulating the supply of oil, minerals and other natural and economic resources; it wants to take ownership of these resources and keep them for itself in order to develop it's own economy and build it's own society, not convert them into commodities to sell to it's enemies in order to collect piles and piles of surplus value. stalin would certainly have some grounds to rebuke putin for his foolishness; putin might have stockpiled energy for future russian use, but he instead sent that energy to his historical enemies and contemporary opponents in exchange for greenbacks, stockpiled those greenbacks in american banks and then got angry when those american banks wouldn't let him convert those greenbacks to rubles. what a buffoon!
trying to figure out how china might have pulled this off is another question, but they do certainly have far more advanced technology than the russians and their functional capabilities are at least close to those of the russians, if they have yet to eclipse them, outright.
if evidence of a chinese sub in the vicinity can be found, some request for an explanation as to the purpose of that sub's mission should be sent to beijing. i do not suspect that such a sub was in the vicinity, and i do not think the chinese are responsible. yet, they may nonetheless find themselves as the primary benefactor, as they become the sole buyer of cheap, russian gas, and joe manchin finds himself frustrated by germany's disinterest in buying expensive, dirty coal from west virginia as a replacement. that fact should not escape analysts: the actual beneficiary is the chinese. again...
all your pipelines belong to china, now.
2:45
it's starting to appear as though elizabeth truss (i think that's a more appropriate name, as it's more upper class) may represent the party system going full circle in britain, in somewhat of an ironic manner.
she was recently made fun of for her anti-monarchist stance as a child, and i felt it worthwhile to point out that she had it right then and has it wrong now. what the media analysis of her shift in positions regarding the monarchy strongly stressed was that elizabeth truss is a self-identified member of the upper class, that she became a conservative because she identified with the conservatives on a class basis and that her politics are ultimately a kind of identity politics regarding her class awareness. that is, elizabeth truss is an old high tory in the true sense of the term - she identifies as upper crust and sees her role in government as to advance the interests of that upper crust; the parliament is merely a tool to legislate her class interests above the law.
her tax cut package was consequently a predictable piece of legislation, as the sole reason that she's in government is strictly to advance the interests of the upper class, which she became a tory in order to do. to elizabeth truss, who comes from a liberal family, that is what tories exist to do: advance the interests of the upper class. the influence of her parents may be more deeply rooted than she even realizes.
this concept of the conservative party is, in truth, an anachronism constructed as a bourgeois liberal strawman, so to observe it from somebody raised as a liberal is rather telling. in recent years, certainly, the tories have built a base in former labour strongholds by pushing low information politics to lower information voters, while the recent descendants of the upper class have found themselves more frequently aligning with the labour party, as they have reacted against the effects of decades of thatcherian budget cuts and enforced marketization, which has affected them more than anybody else.
if elizabeth truss truly wants to be a member of the upper class, she ought to join the labour party.
6:23
i took a look at this.
1) online polling does not have a margin of error because it does not use sampling. instead, it tries to build a statistically representative sample of the population, by selecting volunteers.
2) by definition, this is not polling.
3) then, the company emails the same people repeatedly and asks them similar questions. this then takes the idea out of the realm of polling altogether.
4) in truth, what ipsos is doing is determining the effectiveness and the persuasiveness of conservative media. it's a dry run on election messaging, and intended to send information back to the party, so they can better hone their advertising.
as stated previously, it's not surprising to see this kind of thing start happening within a few weeks of pierre poutine taking control of the conservative party. mr. poutine is as deep dish as they get.
this headline - that the conservatives are now ahead - was in truth bought and paid for by the conservative party, and it was in truth sold to them that way by ipsos, which is not a reputable polling firm.
all that aside, we can still pull out a few things of interest from the exceedingly warped results by looking through the charts. the basic conclusions that can be drawn from perusing through the flawed public data are in truth not very surprising.
1) if you look at the raw data, the conservatives are at about the same place as they were three months - in fact three years - ago. the conservatives have actually been winning the popular vote in canada for years, now. trudeau is not popular here and has not been popular here for a long time.
2) however, the liberals are bleeding up to 50% of their support to the "none of the above" category.
3) canadians don't know anything about pierre polievre at this time and have yet to form an opinion about him.
the results of this study, as useless as the study may be, present a picture of a canada that is fed up with it's options, entirely, and is looking to burn the parliament down at the first opportunity. the truckers seem to have had the right idea.
"none of the above" is clearly the preferred option on a wide variety of trust issues:
statement
trudeau
polievre
singh
blanchet
none of the above
has the right temperament and maturity to be pm
26%
23%
17%
5%
29%
will respect our traditions and institutions
24%
22%
15%
5%
33%
has the best plan for canada
21%
24%
15%
3%
37%
get things done
21%
24%
15%
4%
36%
wants to lead canada for the right reasons
21%
25%
21%
3%
31%
whose values represent my own
19%
22%
18%
5%
36%
has the best plan for the economy
18%
26%
12%
3%
41%
will heal our divisions and bring canadians closer together
17%
20%
17%
2%
44%
you’d want to have a beer or coffee with
17%
17%
19%
4%
42%
has the best plan for healthcare
17%
19%
19%
4%
41%
gives me hope about the future
17%
22%
18%
4%
39%
cares about the average canadian
17%
22%
22%
3%
36%
fight for the middle class
17%
23%
21%
4%
35%
you can trust
16%
19%
18%
4%
43%
means what they say
16%
22%
17%
6%
40%
provide open, responsible, and ethical government
16%
22%
19%
2%
40%
understands the day-to-day issues people like me deal with
16%
22%
19%
5%
39%
canadians are not usually this cynical. this is a grumpy electorate that wants to blow up the spectrum, and doesn't have a way out. in situations like this, it is parties like the greens and the people's party that see boosts in vote counts, but only bernier is currently positioned to actually capitalize off of this.
while you should take the results of this unscientific study with a hefty grain of salt, what the results suggest, however tentatively, is that we would see exceedingly low turnout if an election were held tomorrow. the person in the strongest position right now is bernier, and it is increasingly looking as though canada may be in for the kind of cynical collapse of the traditional party system that we've seen recently in countries like france. the collapse of the spectrum in quebec may be a taste of things to come in the next several federal elections.
i could not vote for any of the parties right now. i am an educated, engaged, high information voter and i could only destroy my ballot; i want to blow up the whole spectrum like we did in 1993 and start over again. this exceedingly unscientific non-poll at the least captures my own feelings, and for that reason is at the least believable as a snapshot of public opinion. while the apathy may lift when the next election approaches, everybody should be concerned about these numbers, as they suggest the populace is gearing up for a reckoning.
my position is that the team should decide to hold a vote. the rules of the vote should be determined by the team, as the only legitimacy of the vote stems from the decision by the team to hold one in the first place. any dissenting opinions of parents or administrators are irrelevant, as they are not members of the team; conversely, as a member of the team, the player should certainly be allowed to vote. whether this player is allowed in the locker room after the vote should then be dependent on the outcome of the vote of the player's teammates. if the team votes to include the player, it indicates they feel comfortable in the player's presence; if the team votes to exclude the player, the player should react accordingly and adjust. the player should be concerned about the perspectives of it's teammates.
i do not think that the tyranny of the majority should overpower individual rights, but it is imperative to recognize that we are not talking about something that is important, here. this is voluntary, extra-curricular activity that is unambiguously an utter waste of time. nobody has a right to be on the volleyball team; it is the right to assembly (or association) that is the correctly referred to rights concept, here. in virtually all existing democratic societies, any group has the constitutional right to decide it's own membership, and nobody has a right to force it's way into that group, if they are not wanted in it. group membership is a privilege, not a right.
while any player would ideally be accepted on the team solely on the basis of their demonstrable and potential contributions to it, i couldn't imagine wanting to play on a team that didn't want me on it, and i would be concerned about anybody trying to force themself into a space they're not wanted in. if the team doesn't want the player on it, the player should be compelled to accept the rejection and move on.
when discussing the rights of transgendered people, it is of the utmost importance to discern what is actually a right and what is not. nobody has a right to be on the volleyball team, and telling somebody they're not wanted on the team consequently isn't a substantive infringement of their rights, even if it is very mean, if it happens to be that it is actually true. my greater concern, as a trans person, is the realization that being reasonable and attentive to the concerns of others is more likely to win us allies than being belligerent and aggressive about things that actually require a large amount of subtlety. we're talking about the comfort level of teenage girls undressing in front of and amongst each other, here; that's not something to be addressed by means of yelling at one another, and attempts to assert rights to such a space without deferring to the perspectives of others are inevitably correctly seen as ham-fisted, or worse.
i'd suspect that most team members are going to primarily be concerned about what the player brings to the team, not about what's in the team member's pants. if the member contributes to the team, that will be valued. so, put the issue to a vote and see what happens.
it's important to make sure the players are voting and not their parents, so the vote should be held in the locker room and be secret ballot. otherwise, the team should set the conditions and the rules of the vote and everybody involved should respect the outcome.
12:08
i've brought this issue up before - in any situation where women congregate in locker rooms, some percentage of them are going to be gay, and you should not underestimate the prevalence of bisexual feelings in otherwise heterosexual-identifying women. in the case of sports teams, an even higher percentage of the females will have homoerotic tendencies, or be downright gay. i'm guessing, but you might be looking at 40-60% of the women in the room being queer, in some abstraction. further, these women know their peers are gay.
it follows that the sole condition of discomfort due to perceived sexual attraction is applied entirely trivially, in context. there's a 100% chance that there's at least five lesbians in any female sport's team's locker room, and it is absolutely certain that they're checking out the straight females every time they're in there. that's a fact. conversely, and i don't want to be overly presumptuous, but chances are pretty high that this trans female is mostly or strictly into guys. i can also speak from experience in pointing out that ciswomen are always more interested in me than i am in them, without exception.
there may be good reasons for this complaint, or there may not be; it may be a concern shared by most of the team, or it might only be a handful of team members that are reacting outside of the views of the team and without justification, or may even be reacting to their own attraction, and struggling with their own sexuality. these are teenagers, remember. whatever the truth is, reducing it to the simple base observation of the existence of sex organs doesn't capture the situation well, and is really not going to be the overriding issue. that is almost certainly missing whatever the actual point is.
if you want to ban the trans females because you think they're checking you out, you'll have to ban the queer women, too; the argument for banning the queer women is, in truth, far stronger, as you know that they're queer. you don't know that about the trans females. in the process, you're trying to create a projected, imaginary heteronormative space that simply doesn't exist in reality and simply never has existed in reality, and the actual value of such a thing consequently needs to be called into question.
i have never tried to join a women's sports team and have never changed in a female locker room. i have never joined a men's sports team, either; i'm not into sports. i have, however, been pulled into female washrooms and female locker rooms many times throughout my life, starting at a young age, initially well before i went into transition (at other times, as an older person already into transition, it has been because somebody wanted to have sex with me in the washroom or locker room, and the implication was that they had previously had sex with other females in that setting). there was a girl in the third grade that was convinced i should use the girls' washroom on the basis of my wonderful eyelashes (i was born with it.) and used to pull me by my arms into the girls' washroom, despite repeated scolding from teachers, years before i was even cognizant of my own transfemale gender identity. she told me i was a girl and should be in the girls' bathroom; i never presented the idea to her or tried to go in there on my own. what i'm getting at is that you cannot deduce or generalize, you have to ask the girls on the team, directly, what they think about this specific situation. you simply cannot know what they think about this specific case without asking them.
these are all issues that are of importance to discuss, but only before the vote. in the end, it doesn't matter why the team votes the way it does, and the outcome should be respected absolutely, no matter what the reasons are.
12:18
monday, october 3, 2022
the landslide vote outcome in quebec, and this is a landslide in the most extreme terms possible, is a complete and absolute denunciation of dominique anglade by quebeckers, in no uncertain terms.
if she manages to win her own riding, she needs to immediately resign and the liberals need to aggressively recalibrate.
quebeckers have spoken, and the political class needs to listen.
21:25
is there a distortion in the vote outcome?
well, it depends on what your definition of representation is.
23:23
there are three separate questions to analyze in order to understand what representation means, in a riding system.
1) do distinct regions have accurate local representation?
2) are votes being split in a systematic manner, giving one party an advantage because it represents a larger tent that is still a minority, in absolute terms?
3) does the outcome of the seating in the legislature reflect the gross voting numbers of citizens in the province?
23:28
in quebec, which is a diverse province that has multiple isolated geographic spaces that are dominated, respectively, by francophones, by inuit groups, by great lakes indigenous groups, by anglophones and by "visible minorities", it is the first metric that is most important. you want to ensure that all of these diverse groups have local representation first and foremost, and there is really not a distortion in the results on that basis.
the second metric doesn't really apply, either. there was a legitimate problem in canada at the federal level in the 00s, where the conservative party would get 35% of the vote and the fake left opposition parties would get 65% of the vote together, split four ways. this allowed the truly minority conservative party to govern with false majorities over the bourgeois left opposition, which had a real majority, and was an actually substantive and very real problem for that reason.
the right-wing populist caq only received 42%ish of the vote, but the conservatives (to their right) received an additional 13%, which adds up to 55%. the fake left parties (the qs and pq) got about 30%, together, leaving the liberals (who, in quebec, and also in bc, are a bourgeois right-wing party) with about 15%. you could argue that the liberals are right-wing and that the right got 70% of the vote, or you could argue the liberals are moderates and the right only got 55%. regardless, the right won a clear majority, here; this is not the false minority government and then false majority government that harper had for years in the 00s.
the third metric is worth pointing out, but it would be the least important metric, in context, and is even coherently explained away by this simply being a weird election. you want to design your system so it is as representative as it can be, but that doesn't mean that you can design a system that can be perfectly representative in all scenarios. there simply isn't a voting system that is capable of making sense of the mess that quebeckers produced in this cycle, and the problem should be directed back at the voters for not organizing in an effective manner. the pq were dominated by the qs, but they need to work their issues out, because neither will be successful while they are in competition with each other and that is a mistake made by the voters, not a distortion in the system. the reality is that the conservatives did not win any seats because they were not able to demonstrate a majority in any specific riding. i don't see anything particularly concerning about that and i actually think it's a little bit cynical for a conservative party to pretend that it doesn't understand the riding system.
the liberals, on the other hand, do have a measurably inflated seat count, but they represent minority ridings and those ridings should have distinct representation, even if the result is mildly inflated. it may be true that they only got 15% of the vote, and that is much less than their seat count would justify on an absolute proportional basis, but it is also true that they got absolute majorities in many of the ridings that they won. as it is the first metric that is of the greatest importance, there is no substantive distortion in this outcome.
23:46
how would the outcome differ in other voting systems? would other voting systems have produced a substantively different result?
if they used a ranked ballot voting system, which is the system i prefer, neither the conservatives nor the pq would have won any more seats. in theory, ranked ballots might have helped the caq defeat the liberals in certain ridings where the conservative + caq vote was majoritarian but the liberal vote was higher than the caq vote, but there were not any ridings where that was actually true. the situation we saw at the federal level in the harper years, where some ridings had combined liberal and qs vote totals that were higher than the caq vote but where the caq still won the riding, did not actually happen anywhere at all, either. the reality is that the outcome would not have been substantively different because the geographic breakdown, which has the caq winning outright majorities in francophone regions and the qs and liberals together winning outright majorities in multicultural regions, would not be meaningfully altered by the use of ranked ballots.
if they used proportional representation, it's clear enough that the caq would form a stable majority coalition with the conservatives, which would actually pull the caq to the right. that would be a worse outcome than a caq majority, but not a substantively different one.
23:48
the fundamental event that defined the election is that the liberals caved roughly half of their support to the conservatives, and that it didn't lose them as many seats as it should have. that is a distorted outcome. gabriel nadeau-dubois should be the rightful opposition leader. however, the actual outcome in terms of substantive policy differences is negligible, as the liberals and qs are largely going to vote in a bloc, anyways.
23:51
i am consequently going to decide that the outcome was not distorted, and that none of the proposed alternative voting systems would have resulted in a substantively different outcome, anyways. i will agree that the electorate was weird, and that the election was consequently weird due to the weirdness of the electorate, but what that means is that there isn't a system that could calculate the votes that quebeckers cast into an optimal outcome.
there's too many parties in quebec.
23:53
tuesday, october 4, 2022
there are four large urban regions in quebec: montreal, sherbrooke, quebec city and hull (the city in quebec directly across the river from ottawa). these are the types of ridings where you expect to see the minority right win due to vote splits on the majority left, in canada. quebec city is a conservative city, which is unusual in eastern north america, but the qs actually won a few seats there, due to the smaller riding sizes at the provincial level. the liberals won all of their seats in montreal, which is one of the most liberal cities in the world, except for one seat in the northeastern part of ottawa.
the only riding i can find where the caq won due to vote splitting between the liberals and qs is the riding of hull. most ridings had dominant majorities moving in one direction or the other, with the rural francophone regions voting overwhelmingly for the caq and the urban multicultural ridings voting overwhelmingly for the liberals and/or qs, together. the caq won a few seats in the suburbs of montreal, but the reason for it was a substantive shift from the liberals to the conservatives, which gave the conservatives + caq an outright majority. this is perhaps misleading, but it's a real victory for the right, nonetheless.
while the conservatives might now argue for the next four years that they got ripped off, the reality is that they would have just ended up in coalition with the caq, anyways. nor is there a potential fake left coalition within these results that could have toppled the theoretical caq-conservative government.
the inflation is strictly in the liberals relative to the qs, but they're going to have to work together, regardless.
0:39
many years ago, billy corgan explained that the smashing pumpkins would eventually turn into something he called "cyber metal", and he pointed to his work on the ransom soundtrack as an explanation of what that meant. then, they didn't do that after all.
i'm really not very excited by this track; it's prodding, overly simplistic and really just pretty stupid. it sounds like a depeche mode song remixed by an 80s hair metal band like extreme, which is a layer of abstraction below where you expect the smashing pumpkins, even at their worst. in headier times, you might have suggested that this was filler, but old smashing pumpkins fans know that corgan doesn't respect the intelligence of his listeners very much. this is simple enough that we can understand it; that's why it's the single.
on some level, it actually does make some sense, as this is the kind of music you expect to be booming out of the sedan of a 45 year old father of three going through a midlife crisis, as he rocks down the road on his way to renewing his mortgage (fucking rate hikes. yeah, there's your angst - fuck the banks.). it has that balls out, testosterone-heavy boneheadedness that older men are uniquely interested in, as the only reason they cling to their rock listening habits at their age is to compensate for their sexual inadequacies. this won't remind them of the girl that they dated when mellon collie was released, but it might help them delude themselves into thinking that they've still got it, like kevin spacey in american beauty.
i never wanted that from the smashing pumpkins, and i suspect few people would have expected that outcome from the band, standing in the mid-90s, when they were carving out a unique space in the mainstream rock spectrum as an esoteric neo-psychedelic band with heavy dream pop and shoegaze influences. corgan was a talented guitarist, but he really wasn't very convincing as a metalhead, and that was actually refreshing; it was kind of the point. i think i expected that the foofighters would end up like that, and of course they did. i expected corgan would turn out more like bowie or maybe even gabriel than ozzy, but alas. it's impossible to even tell what's fake and what's real, at this point, so there's no point in trying to figure it out. if the choice is between electro pop and cyber metal, i want to vote for psychedelic dream 'gaze.
there is apparently a 3xcd set coming, and it has been described as something closer to where my tastes are than anything they've done in a very long time. i'll have to wait for that to be released before i comment further. i'm a little bit worried that it's going to be written mostly by his 80s metal fiend guitar tech peon, which is defeating the point, although it makes you wonder who actually wrote those classic records, and if their absence is actually the missing secret sauce. like, did butch vig actually write siamese dream with his bandmates in garbage, or what?
right now, i'm not impressed by this, but i think i get it, and the appropriate response is fuck you, too, billy.
i called the caq right-wing populists. how accurate is that?
it is difficult to place the caq on the political spectrum. populist is certainly the right terminology to use, but trying to place them on the right or left is confusing.
for example, they want a greater place for the private sector in health care (which is considered to be an exceedingly right-wing position in canada), but they also support socialized child care, via state subsidies. so, does that make them pro-business, or anti-market, or both? they are skeptical of immigration and have banned religious symbols, but the reasoning is broadly in line with the secular left (remember when liberals wanted to ban the ten commandments in schools?) and not with anything you'd hear from the insular right about christian or white supremacist identity politics; as they're banning the display of religious iconography (including both crosses and hijabs) in public sector employment, which is something i support, they're also expanding day care infrastructure to encourage more women, including more minority women, to go to work. so, is that left or right? in fact, that is clearly left-wing, but i digress. the reality is that they would neither align with the identity politics of the contemporary progressive fake left, nor with the family first ideology of the contemporary religious right, but with what is considered by contemporary elites to be a largely outdated (but still immensely popular) concept of the secular left, complete with advocating for a mixed economy. for a supposedly right-wing party, they are also unusually concerned with queer rights, which is something that reflects the overwhelmingly secular culture in quebec.
pointing to the influence of a uniform quebecois cultural consensus is really the right way to describe the caq; they are neither left-wing nor right-wing, but reflective of consensus quebecois cultural values, which are a mix of secular and economic liberalism and soft democratic socialism, with just a twinge of linguistic (rather than economic or ethnic) nationalism. the correct term is clearly populism, but it is neither correctly constructed in the context of the contemporary populist right nor in the context of the historical populist movement (which i claim was a conservative movement, as well, in opposition to many historians). they are, bluntly, quebecois populists, and they are properly defined strictly in the context of representing and advancing what are populist and consensus quebecois cultural values.
it is worth pointing out that the ndp were once described as "prairie populists", which meant that they represented white (mostly germanic) mid-western plains settler-colonialist cultural values, which were also a mix of left and right in their synthesis of economic socialism imported from working class european movements (like wheat boards and obamacare style health insurance pools. canada's healthcare system was implemented by the liberal party and based on the nhs, from britain, not the obamacare-like system designed in town halls in saskatchewan.) with social and religious conservatism, mostly of protestant and specifically lutheran origin (tommy douglas was notoriously anti-queer and anti-semitic, and the ndp was involved in the then-contemporary progressive eugenics movement on the fake left of the time). the pq itself was a kind of quebecois populist party as well, and the truth is that attempting to discern actual policy differences between the supposedly right-wing caq and the supposedly left-wing pq doesn't produce any really glaring or obvious results. if the pq were commonly described as democratic socialists, it's really not entirely clear how the caq is substantively different from them, outside of particular pro-business rhetoric that has found little actual implementation. the premier, mr. legault, was even previously a pq cabinet minister. while i haven't yet heard anybody come out and say it, it wouldn't be entirely incorrect to suggest that the caq has merely replaced the pq, without any substantive shift in actual policy, which reframes the question: were the pq left-wing or right-wing?
it would actually be easy to call them liberals in the 20th century sense of the term. after world war one, the liberals dominated in quebec because the tories tried to send quebeckers off to europe as cannon fodder, and quebeckers would have nothing of it. in an act of heroism, laurier split the liberal party in half to oppose the barbarism of world war one, and the liberals remained in control of quebec (at the federal level) for the next 50 years, which had a dramatic effect on the culture (and was no doubt the cause of the quiet revolution). legault is probably closer to wilfred laurier on the spectrum than anybody that's been in power in canada for quite a few many years; he's broadly pro-market, supports a mixed economy and supports a secular society based on liberal values (including the restriction of any religiously motivated use of power, a position in quebec that is distinctly quiet revolution). that the caq is so popular right now is partly due to the fact that the contemporary fake left has abandoned the kind of liberalism that remains popular in most of north america, in favour of a moderate conservatism rooted in burkean identity politics, which has had absolutely zero traction in overwhelmingly secularly liberal francophone quebec.
the point i was making that required using the term "right-wing populist" was that the conservative party of quebec - which, unlike the caq, is actually a conservative party in the modern sense of the term - would have certainly propped up the caq, if the other option was a qs/liberal coalition, and i consequently needed some way to describe the caq as different than the conservative party. the fact that quebec developed a conservative party essentially from scratch while the caq was governing says quite a bit about how ideological conservatives in quebec, of which there are few, view the caq. that fact alone should make it clear that the caq isn't quite what you'd expect from a "conservative party" and that such language must be applied with great caution.
so, i used the term, but i didn't really like using it, and i feel the need to clarify; while certainly a populist party, the caq has both left wing and right wing tendencies that have been combined in such a way to reflect consensus positions within quebecois culture, rather than to adhere to anglocentric political ideologies.
6:26
note: nothing written here is safe. this site is being constantly edited by canadian intelligence agencies, due to an absurd obsession with manipulating a projection of my opinion, for some unknown reason. i wonder if the canadian government may be trying to insert itself between my writing and specific, influential readers, in an attempt to replace my opinions with ones that advance it's own interests. i am speculating; i do not know why they care what i think, but their persistent, annoying interference means that i am forced to constantly re-edit these posts, which is why i'm taking the site down.
the point that i'm articulating is that if the russians think they can withdraw from the oblasts that did not just vote to rejoin russia in order to defend an imaginary border across the oblasts that did just vote to rejoin russia, they are mistaken. this historical process has been put in motion and must now be brought to it's logical conclusion in the construction of defensible borders. they have to finish what they started; they don't have the option to stop halfway through. this war will only end with the construction of defensible borders between russia and the west, wherever those defensible borders may be, for the reason that russia will need to actually defend that border from actual nato aggression, wherever it ends up, in order to actually end the war. if nato does not eventually find itself up against a border it can no longer breach, it will never stop, not even if they end up fighting in the urals. russia must now literally defend itself in order to stop the nato advance; that was the strategic objective, and they don't have a way out without achieving it. they should have taken their own analysis of the situation more seriously.
the language regarding borders is being constantly altered, in order to prevent me from typing an acknowledgement of the new borders into my blog. this is utterly juvenile, but nothing better could be expected from the government of canada, which is frequently utterly juvenile in it's behaviour on the world stage.
it is now becoming clear that what the russians are doing is withdrawing from areas that are outside of the borders of the referenda that were held, which are clearly valid in the sense of reflecting overwhelming popular opinion on the ground, even if the conditions they were held in were impossible. writing them off as a "sham" shows the world how much of a farce that democracy is in the west; when a vote that contradicts their geopolitical dictates is presented to them, they throw it away, and instead construct a schizophrenic conspiracy theory around it. the conspiratorial logic presented by every nato member to write off the results of the referenda, in lockstep, is baffling, albeit consistent. they don't actually care what people want. what the movement by the russians indicates is that they have decided where to partition the country, at least for now, and that the answer is along the borders defined by the referendum lines. i have been asking this question for a while: will the russians make the correct decision as to where to partition the country, or will they push past historical russian territory and into historical polish territory? the russians are correct to point out that ukraine is a nonsensical entity with no historical basis and no ethnic definition, but that does not mean that all of ukraine is historically russian, or that all of ukraine seeks to be readmitted back into russia. this movement towards consolidation is a positive signal from moscow in the sense that it suggests that they want to close this process down, but the borders they have constructed are not sustainable and the war cannot end with an assertion of the status quo. if the concern was previously that the russians would push too far into poland to end the war, what is unfolding is that they are not pushing far enough into historically russian territory to end it, instead.
my self-interest is not with any side in the conflict, but with the development of historical process, in full generality. i have no solidarity with ukraine; i do not think ukraine should exist at all. my support for russia is in the sense of being a pan-slavist, which is a historical position, and not a statement of support for the sitting russian government. i stand in solidarity with the existence of a greater slavia and stand against attempts to partition that greater slavia into trivial principalities defined by the development of recent dialects, which are no basis for ethnic nationalism (which i oppose, anyways). the now historical border between russia and ukraine was defined as an administrative, provincial boundary within a federation (the ukrainian province of the ussr) and was not a permanent or sustainable border between blocs of countries or between independent nations. like other arbitrary historical boundaries drawn on to maps by generals and outsiders (sykes-picot, durand, etc), the now dissolved previous border was a geopolitical myth that had to be redefined in order to better reflect actual ethnic and linguistic divisions in the region, if the desired outcome is peace and stability. you can't just run a fence through a field and call it a border. the russians have been on the right side of history in this process, in their actions to construct sustainable, meaningful borders in place of the nonsensical ones that previously existed, as an outgrowth of a political entity that is no longer extant. my solidarity is with the construction of historically, politically and linguistically sustainable borders in the region that allow for the maintenance of stability within a long term peace, and with entities that are advancing a historical process to arrive at that long term peace and stability.
the borders constructed around these four oblasts in ukraine do not resolve the issue and do not create stability, they merely define the terms of the next war, if the russians can even get the ukrainians to agree to a cease fire - or can prevent nato from being officially involved in the next round. this is the latest assertion of uncharacteristic strategic foolishness on behalf of russia, even if the message is encouraging in the abstract. the russians are supposed to be the rational actors, and they are simply not behaving like it, when faced with a conflict on their own border.
to begin with, the russians east of the dnieper have made it clear that they reject ukrainian rule to the point that they are willing to fight to overthrow it. it is impossible for ukraine to have peace in the region, which means the russians are necessarily a party to the conflict. second of all, the borders of donetsk and luhansk cannot be defended, which was the point of the exercise in the first place. the russians cannot end this by just deciding upon a new indefensible border in place of the old indefensible border and washing their hands of it - they must, at the least, advance to the natural defence of the dnieper and complete the historical process that they've put in motion. that is the minimal strategic necessity to end the conflict and is probably in itself insufficient to end the unrest. so long as the political borders on the map do not align with the demographic realities, and the ukrainians and russians continue to bicker over dialects and denominations, there will continue to be conflict. underlying the trivialities is a deeper if no less trivial level of contempt that goes back to cold war identity politics.
any withdrawal to behind the borders that now define the russian federation is consequently necessarily temporary, whether the russians like it or not; any meaningful, historical, defensible border must be further to the west than the one being defined by the referendums. however, that does seem to be the reasoning underlying the withdrawal from kharkov and from mykolaiv and recognizing that point is helpful in understanding what is happening, in contrast to the belligerent western propaganda about chest-beating ukrainians stomping their way eastwards - these regions have not voted to rejoin russia, and are now outside the limes. they will need to wait for the next round.
by the time the next round occurs, the conditions will be changed and, if fighting erupts again, it may be the last war the world knows.
the russians fell for a trap and then wasted too much time fighting disconnected nazi thugs in meaningless, pyrrhic victories instead of moving quickly to construct substantive borders, which was the defensible military logic of the operation. in a fit of arrogance, they assumed the west would not interfere and they would consequently have infinite time to complete the process. this just gave nato time to plan and launch an aggressive counter-attack that has brought nato troops directly to the russian border. now, they must advance to the dnieper immediately and construct permanent, defensible borders along the river, or there will be no possible outcome besides nuclear war.
19:13
wednesday, october 5, 2022
i'm going to wait until the effects of ian pass through here next week before i comment further on the weather. we had two late season hurricanes come through here that took the exact path that pushes the cold air down from the north as they move through the atlantic, but even so, it hasn't had a large statistical effect, and i'm going to need to challenge the 17 or 18 degree readings, which is something i've been doing all year. it looks like we're going to have one or two days over a two week period that are unambiguously below the 20 degree mark and a series of days where the official reading at the airport was around 18.5, meaning it was no doubt above 20 in the rest of the city (because the readings at the airport are consistently a few degrees lower than readings in the rest of the city). if you tell me the reading at the airport is 17.7, the reading on the board is probably around 21 or 22 and it's the reading on the board that seems correct, not the reading at the airport. i haven't been out much since the middle of september so i didn't go by the board to check.
the bottom line is that i don't have a reliable reading, and i'm again left wondering if my blog is being monitored by people that really shouldn't be concerned with my viewpoints. i've mentioned previously that the climate posts are one of the things being targeted. it's bizarre to me that my blog would be being targeted by climate change denialists working for some kind of intelligence network, but here we are.
i'll need to re-evaluate once ian passes. i suspect a warmer pattern will return, but that was exactly the kind of event required to cool the ground down and the damage may have been done.
if the weather does cave in next week, it won't matter, but if the period we're in turns out to be a temporary dip before a lengthy rebound, i have to point to the consistent unreliability of the data at the windsor airport, and wonder if somebody is even setting the situation up. if that's the case, i'm simply left baffled at the absurdity.
as mentioned, i think the best approach is to wait it out and react afterwards.
0:50
friday, october 7, 2022
i don't exactly want to get into a debate about "men's rights activism" - for what it's worth, my position is that any halfways coherent feminist would be fully in support of the men's rights agenda - but i am interested in analyzing the discourse from a distance, as an observer
i identify as female and use female pronouns - i don't identify as somewhere in between - but i was born as a male and spent the first roughly 20 years of my life seen as a weird, oddly effeminate guy that was hard to figure out, and had something not quite right about him. nobody i knew was surprised (some people indicated that it made things make sense to them, whereas others asked me why it took so long to acknowledge something about myself that everybody around me interpreted as obvious), but that doesn't undo those 20 years of experience existing in the male club, however tentatively or suspiciously or uncomfortably. what i'm getting at is that there are few people that can analyze the situation from a distance, without feeling any real attachment to the identity politics of either sex.
what i want to point out is that, while i don't see anything particularly misogynist about a group that wants to advance a concept of male identity or is in favour of male independence, ms. freeland is about the worst person possible to try to start a fight with mra activists in public and in representation of anybody except herself, because she perfectly personifies every single caricature of pseudo-feminist women (i would not actually describe ms. freeland as a feminist in any substantive way, as she doesn't seem to "get it") they could possibly come up with. if the satirical caricature of the angry pseudo-feminist woman is the ugly old hag that is bitter because she can't get laid and can't find anybody to pay for her kids, what exactly is ms. freeland, if not that caricature, exactly? any mra would be ecstatic at the premise of having this horribly ugly, bitter old woman bitching at them about not wanting to take care of her kids. it's the greatest punchline ever written.
in a broader sense, what ms. freeland has slowly demonstrated about herself is that she's the most conservative type of second-wave feminist possible, a position which is currently incredibly unpopular and especially so amongst women under 40. her arguments sound incredibly out of touch with the constituency she is supposed to represent, which is the campus region of downtown toronto; if she showed up to a campus event and started talking like that, she's the one that would be chased out of the room as a bernier supporter.
i could understand the kind of language freeland is using coming from a right-wing family-first type muslim or christian group that is criticizing the demise of the family or something, but it is bizarre and alienating coming from somebody that's supposed to be a contemporary liberal. surely, ms. freeland believes that men have the right to autonomy and freedom, just as women do. there's a difference between hypocrisy and incoherence.
but, let ms. freeland go after the mra's. they'll love it.
1:43
"men going their own way? no wonder i can't find a man!"
*cackle*
1:50
breaking news: ms. freeland is sponsoring a bill to ban "men going their own way" as a terrorist group, along with subsequent legislation to force them to sign up for dating services, instead.
1:51
i spent the last couple of days getting some exercise (it won't be the last warm day here, but there will be few days over 25 until next year.) and finishing remnant monthly grocery shopping, and started to realize the nature of the inflation being experienced right now on the way home last night.
i started the day yesterday with the need to finish some extra shopping and enjoy the weather at the same time, so i decided i would go on the 60 km loop, and take a turn south to the tecumseh mall, where i'd usually take a turn north through an urban park, then take a route home parallel to tecumseh in place of the one i normally would. i wanted to stop at the giant tiger to get some bread, specifically
wednesday was a gorgeous, hot and sunny day and i did manage to complete the biking route in time to get through the clearing and to the mall before dark, when it quickly cooled down. it felt to me like a normal late august night, in contrast to the scorching hot weather we've been experiencing lately, where it hasn't been cooling down at night. i caught a 25 on the board, which i think was about right, although i should point out that it wasn't the hottest part of the day. i do carry a sweater in my bag at this time of the year, in case the temperature rapidly drops and i did need to put it on on the way home.
giant tiger has the best price on this bread, but was out of stock; the walmart has usually been out of stock recently but on this day had stock and had the second best price, so i got the bread, along with a large amount of cleaning items. i checked the price of grapefruit juice when i was there: 2 for $8.
the ride back was slower than i wanted, so i didn't get to the food basics before they closed (i barely got to the freshco). it was a legitimately nice night; the problem was that my bag was so heavy, including some orange juice purchased at the zehr's, that i was barely up to stay upright on the bicycle with it. i actually literally fell off the bike at one point due to gravity pulling my back down, when i had to stop to get around a curb. the freshco (where i purchased eggs and kale) does not carry the tropicana brand of grapefruit juice, so i went back to the superstore to get the grapefruit juice i saw on sale the other day for $3.50, and the all bran that i saw there for $4.00. they did not have all bran, but i did get two containers of grapefruit juice.
the last time i was out previously was on the afternoon of the 30th, when i had to go out to get my health card renewed to meet a deadline set by the government of ontario, got annoyed by the fact that the library was closed (why, exactly? should the librarians stay home and cry?), managed to print the items at the university of windsor library, mailed my name change package back to thunder bay and did the primary grocery shopping for the month, before i had to stop early, with an intent to finish it on saturday (which did not happen because i had to wait until the afternoon to get my dryer swapped out, and i ran out of time for the day after that. i wish he would have come in the morning.). this was where i noticed that the price at the superstore was $3.50, but i did not have space to carry it home in my bag because i bought too ,any other things. the price at the food basics on the 30th was $4.88.
as the superstore did not have any all bran, and everything is closed in windsor after 23:00, i reasoned that perhaps the shopper's may have the same sale price as the superstore, given that they are owned by the same company. the price of all bran here as $7.20 - almost twice the price in the store down the street owned by the same company. the cost of grapefruit juice in this store was $6.99, when it was on sale at the store down the street for $3.50, owned by the same company.
i should mention that i have checked several stores over the last few days for all bran, and the prices have varied from $4.99 to $7.20. the normal price is $3.99. that's a 25-80% increase, and a 55% range. all bran is a mass manufactured item, and all of the stores in the city get it from the same distributor. that kind of fluctuation in prices would suggest that the prices on the shelves are being driven by something other than production costs.
what are the different prices for tropicana grapefruit juice in windsor, ontario this week?
this range - 3.50 to 6.99 - is larger than the all bran, but it is harder to determine the normal price for this product, which often demonstrates large variability. the prices higher than $6.00 are certainly unusual. i tend to aim for the under $3.00 range, but i bought them at $3.50. i wanted three, but they only had two.
when i got home, i decided to plan to get to the other superstore in the morning, when i sat down and really comprehended the nature of the situation: these prices are not based on anything, and the situation is about to get worse. the higher prices get phased into the higher scale stores first, but there is no discernible reason why somebody would see the point of paying twice as much for the same mass manufactured product just because it's in the higher end store. i bicycle around everywhere; i go to discount stores, i go to fancy bourgeois stores and i go to stores in between, and the sale prices can often be unexpected in ways that aren't dependent on the neighbourhood. that is really the difference: the fancier stores are close to fancier houses. it's about class. they broadly stock the same products, and the fancy stores even sometimes have sale prices that are better than the discount stores. in some sense, it's sort of a trick; it's mostly about class consciousness, and the economics generally don't follow. for something like tropicana grapefruit juice and all bran cereal, i would get on my fancy bicycle and go to the wrong side of the tracks to save myself some money, if i realized that kind of differential. regardless, i'm taking it as a warning - those higher prices are coming to the discount store any day now. it may take some time, but the prices will balance out; the zehr's price is a taste of the future.
the prices of other items like eggs at the zehr's also spooked me. these are staple food items, and they are becoming flat out unaffordable.
as stated repeatedly, the empirical evidence is clear that rate hikes do not have anything to do with inflation (until they create a severe recession. thenyou get price cuts. eventually.). we may not have had an inflation problem before, but the bank has now created one by broadcasting expectations of inflation. i know that the bank doesn't see it that way, but the bank is wrong; the message that the rate hikes send is that inflation is serious, which gives sellers an excuse to keep hiking prices, whether the former is actually true or not. consumers - including me - now expect inflation, and that's the bank's fault, strictly.
i decided it was worth my time to go out this morning and do a pre-emptive grocery run. the logic is that the government is giving me $200 to fight inflation, so i'm going to spend it now to get as many items as i can, while i still can, before things get out of control. you can still find sale prices, for the short term; i need to get in before inflation hits and the situation becomes dramatic.
i wanted to get out relatively early in the morning, so i took a shower 2::00 and wanted to get a little sleep after 4:00, so i could be up relatively early. unfortunately, i woke up bout 4:30 coughing and hacking and had to get up to clean and run the hot water instead. the thing i smelled when i woke up was the smell of cigar smoke, and it was strong enough that i was coughing out piles of yellow crap. once the air was again breathable, i decided to pick up on the nap, but it was too late; i was wide awake. instead, i made some quinoa and tried again, and this time was able to sleep.
...until 14:30. ugh. that ruled out the grocery run, or at least initially. they were calling for rain in the evening, so i had to make sure i got everything done before it got too late.
thursday was not as sunny as wednesday, unfortunately. the cold front came in too early, blocking off my access to sunlight and plowing me over with a cold northwesternly wind. nonetheless, the temperature did make it into the mid 20s today, and it was over 25 when i left, even if i missed most of it. it was closer to 21, and spitting, when i got home. the ride would have consequently been better if it was a few hours earlier. alas.
while it was sunny on wednesday and cooled down fast, it wasn't quite as hot on thursday but stayed warm until 22:00, when temperature dropped almost 5 degrees within a few minutes. the result was that i ended up with more time to do the shopping than i thought, and i actually got everything done after all, after losing the start of the day, surprisingly.
>i can't buy fresh fruit ahead, but i bought piles of things likes cereal (i found my all bran for $4.00 at the no frills and bought twice as much), cheese (i spent november and december money, ahead, as it was on sale), eggs (i purchased 6 extra 18 egg cartons at a price i fear may be the lowest i'll see again in years), hot sauce (three large containers at normal price), coffee (3 cartons at normal price), margarine (4 tubs on sale), yeast (4 at the lowest price i could find), toilet paper (2 more on sale) and a large amount of cleaning supplies. together with my bulk barn backups, this should last me until early in the spring, for almost all of the items i buy that can keep for more than a few weeks. i was already stocked up on soy milk.
the price of the grapefruit juice this evening at the food basics was $2.98, which just contributes to the clarity that the prices are not rooted in anything expect supply and demand at the store.
so, i don't know when that $200 is going to get here, but it will come to me in the form of a refund on the balance i just paid forward before the inflation hit. now, as inflation creates havoc, i will be sheltered from it.
for a while.
i need to present a strategy to other consumers. i have been arguing for some time that if we stick together and refuse to pay high prices - which i have. i got everything on sale, while i still can. - that prices will be pushed down due to simple supply and demand. the signals i'm seeing (and that we're all seeing) are that the grocery industry is going to be stubborn about this and make a fight out of it because it sees an opportunity to structurally adjust the industry's profit margin. we cannot let that happen, and just accepting government checks is no tactic, it's an act of pacification. if everybody does what i just did, which is stock up on supplies now, the items will simply sit on the shelves, once the inevitable price hikes occurs. a sudden decrease in sales will put the industry in shock and force them to adjust to their artificial inflation scheme.
be careful. i'm calling for a grocery run now, before inflation gets too bad, but do not panic. we want them to panic, not us - look for sale prices, or normal prices, and only buy items that are not marked up. the government is giving you money, soon. fill your fridges up before they send it to you, to both avoid the inflation that will follow and to reverse the signal being send to resellers.
the idea is that i will need to frequently overwrite the document, so i won't post updates here every time.
10:03
this is an interesting case study.
strictly ideologically speaking, the expectation would be that the conservatives would support the theocracy in iran, while the liberals would be in complete solidarity with any movement towards secularism in iran. in canada, the lines actually started to blur a little later than in most places; trudeau is in truth the first liberal prime minister we've had that would question the traditional political spectrum on this matter, whereas it was stephen harper that first started to steer the conservatives away from a base that was, until relatively recently, almost solely fixated on banning abortion, as a singular issue.
the truth is that both parties are focused solely on winning votes from the iranian diaspora, and it is for that reason that the conservatives, who are better connected with ethnic communities in canada than the liberals are, and who in fact usually win these demographics outright, got out ahead on this, while the liberals misread it.
for a brief moment, it seemed like the liberals were going to embrace the regime in iran for the sake of "promoting diversity", while the conservatives stood up for secular liberalism and human rights. nobody should be confused by the conservatives, who will no doubt be viciously authoritarian should they win, as they always are. yet, that it took a popular movement in canada to stop the liberal party from throwing human rights under the bus in the name of diversity should be concerning to everybody, as well.
the media is doing it's part here in trying to convert an anti-hijab movement into a movement about cutting hair, which is an act of submission. more recently, i've noticed the press is no longer posting pictures of this unfortunate child with makeup on, in a clear desire to avoid offending conservative muslims, who the liberal party should not be attempting to court. should the conservative party choose not to represent conservative muslims, let them remain disenfranchised.
the bright side of this is the iranian-canadian community asserting itself as in favour of liberal values, to the point that it is forcing the liberal party to retreat to it's historical positions, in order to avoid losing them. that point was by no means obvious, and something i've been concerned about for a while (not specifically with regards to iranians). it's an encouraging turn, to see.
reference:
"stung by criticism, trudeau government changes course on iran", cbc news, oct 8, 2022
10:47
20:38
breaking news: chrystia freeland is set to introduce a bill to ban the white album for being racist, and place sanctions on paul mccartney for supporting the russians. further, trudeau is set to introduce a bill to seize the montreal bed-in location via eminent domain and turn it into a mosque.
we'll keep you up to date on these developments as they come in.
21:48
if that album wasn't white, it wouldn't have sold any copies at all.
i haven't had sex in almost 20 years, and i'm not ashamed or embarassed - or angry - about that. the first couple of years (after the summer of 2005) were due to cocooning after getting out of an abusive relationship. this lasted something like 30 months. however, i then made a conscious, purposeful, clear decision around 2007 or 2008 - i don't remember exactly when - to not have sex again until after i was post-op, that is until i completed a vaginoplasty. this is not something that was decided upon lightly or haphazardly; i have a clear recollection of sitting in bed and making that decision after carefully analyzing reality and determining what was in my self-interest, and i have held strictly to it, since. it was a serious, life-changing decision. since then, i have turned lots and lots of people down, and the reason is that i'm simply not into the perfromative act of sex with a penis. i think it's perverse, primitive, barbaric, animalistic and disgusting behaviour that is unbecoming of a human being. i will have nothing to do with it. yet, my physiology remains what it is.
none of the literature i've seen on the topic from any angle addresses the proposal that a subset of trans people simply consider the act of taking on the role of a sexual actor in their biologically determined sex to be unenjoyable. that idea doesn't seem to have crossed anybody's minds. i'm a timid, antisocial, disinterested person. sex, to me, is something like killing a bear and boasting about it; it's ridiculous, stupid behaviour reserved strictly for primitive idiots.
engging in sexual intercourse is simply uncivilized behaviour.
i had no sex life and almost no sexual awareness as a teenager. i was aware of who the girls that thought i was cute were, but i did not respond to them and could not have understood how to respond to them. the truith is that i found it annoying - they would start breathing when they talked to me, and behaving in weird ways that made it impossible to communicate with them like human beings. like, i "got" it but my reaction was not interest but, rather, "you're an idiot. get away from me.". i began to aggressively look down on girls that experienced attraction to me as being beneath wasting my time with, because they lost the ability to coherently complete a sentence and just turned into babbling idiots when they started to talk to me. in hindsight, the truth is that i never really went through puberty, and i wasn't experiencing the same hormones that they were so i just interpreted them as stupid. i actually made it a point to avoid any girls that i thought were interested in me, to the point of refusing to speak to them at all. if i saw a girl i knew had a crush on me walking towards me to talk to me, i would get up and walk away to avoid having to talk with them. i was less annoyed by girls that were less attracted to me.
i realized very young that i was more "like a girl", but i was aware of my physiology and interpreted it as variation. the idea of being a boy that was "like a girl" didn't really bother me, as a child. boys and girls are actually the same, anyways, right? there were lots of girls that were more like boys. it just didn't strike me as something that needed to be addressed. this was the late 80s. i started to get flummoxed by it in my late teens, but didn't really know how to react. i mean, what's the nex step, as a young teen, once you grasp the point that you're transgendered? this was still an obscure concept in the early 90s, and i neither realized on my own that my gender could be altered, nor did anybody ever suggest it to me, as a possibility. i just internalized it. starting at about the age of 13, i realized i was probably gay, but i didn't take any steps to identify that way or to seek out other gay men. in the very late 90s, which is when i was a teenager and avoiding girls at high school, i began to identify as a gay male in chat rooms on the internet, but i did not tell anybody about this at that time, either. i simply remained a disinterested, aloof virgin until my early 20s, when i made a decision to transition. what i told people about was my gender identity, not my sexual orientation; i made no declaration of my sexual orientation at the time of declaring my gender identity. it wasn't my sexual orientation that i was concerned with!
while people that knew me well realized i wasn't a very masculine or dominant person, and that point was brought up to me years later, along with an acknowledgement that i demonstrated no sexual interst in anybody as a young person (nobody remembers me identifying the cute or hot one in a group, which is unusual behaviour for any young male of any sexual orientation. boys like to point and ogle. i never did that.), i was not generally interpreted as a homosexual male, and i have never had a sexual relationship with a male. at this point, i would consider the idea awkward and weird, in a pre-vaginplasty state. despite identifying as one in private in high school, i feel i can state with confidence at this point that i am clearly not a homosexual male.
i was neither accepted nor rejected by members of either sex, because i didn't participate in any sort of procurement process. i had little interest in or understanding of the social hierarchy in the school, and preferred to spend time away from other people in hidden enclaves than try to compete with others for social standing. i had few to no freinds. i did not go to high school dances. i did not attend prom. i did not join any school clubs or teams and i did not play any sports, nor was i aware of who the students in the school that were interested in sports were. i remember who the smart kids were, and i remember who some of the musicians were (there were very few musicians at the school i went to), but i don't remember who the athletes were, and i don't think i was aware of who they were, in the first place. i would not have had the slightest interest. i frequently skipped classes to record music in my basement by myself, instead. i broadly didn't care about the other students, one way or another, and was mostly focused on tactics to find ways to avoid them as much as possible. i would have spent the time that other students spent socializing by myself listening to music, reading or recording - and those places were entirely where my head was at. i never gave the social hierarchy at my school, or where i was in it, a passing thought. i don't think i was actually at the bottom of it at all, though. the truth is that the cool kids never really bothered me; it was the dumb bully outcasts that used to pick on me, because they saw me as an easy target because i was always by myself. as mentioned, there were lots of girls that wanted to talk to me, the majority of whom were relatively conventionally attractive, but i did not have any interest in talking to them and rather went out of my way to avoid them.
so, this was my actual reality as a young person: i was a socially disinterested recluse that wanted to avoid the people around me as much as possible. i didn't exactly hate everybody, so much as i felt disdain and contempt towards them, and that feeling extended towards virtually everybody, regardless of characteristics. my disinterest in sex as an adult would have been deducible from observing me at that age, given my disinterest in humans and my disinterest in any sort of social interaction with humans as a child, as a teenager and as a young person.
i went to university for 13 years and did not build a single meaningful relationship with a single human being during that period. i did not have sexual relationships with students. i did not have platonic relationships with students. i did not build friendships or acquintances with students - and have neither maintained a single friendship from that period, nor even had any friendships to maintain. there is not a single person in any of my classes that i ever could have described as a friend, at any point over those 13 years. i did not even consider it of importance to learn the names of the students in my classes; there are students that i went to 30+ different classes with, and that i recognized on sight, but that i never said a word to and never learned the names of. i was simply not interested in talking to them. i wasn't interested in talking to anybody. i did not converse with the students or teachers in my classes beyond the basic requirements of communication for the purposes of completing the courses. i never added a single person i met at university to my facebook page, nor would i have been able to identify anybody that i might have been able to search for, as i didn't even know anybody's names.
i have had one relationship, and we met while working together in a coffee shop. i was not able to avoid this person, in the context of the work relationship. this person aggressively courted me while working under very close conditions and i agreed to spend time with her in response. it turns out that this person was very abusive towards me; it also turns out that she misinterpreted my character rather dramatically. i don't think she would understand her behaviour as abusive, and i don't think the society would denote it as abusive, at this time; however, it would be considered abusive by society if the gender roles were reversed, and a reasonable analysis would understand that the gender roles were reversed. this is the only scenario where i have had sex with anybody. it is not likely that i would develop an interest in any other human being again, short of being locked in a closet with them for hours at a time while on hormone therapy (which is literally what happened with this person). this is nobody's fault, and i have never been angry about it, although i have sometimes experienced feelings of sadness or disappointment around it. had i not been locked in a closet with this person, i might have never lost my virginity, and i'd probably not be particularly upset about it.
while i have worked some jobs since then, none emulated the conditions that led to that situation and i have not built relationships with co-workers since. i have not had any job at all since i went back to school in 2009.
this is the context of my decision to move towards abstinence, rougly fifteen years ago. if i had been able to move quickly to a vaginoplasty, the outcome might have been different; i admit this. there is some possibility that i might have transitioned quickly into having a female sex life, in place of the male sex life i thoroughly rejected. as it is, i did not have a vaginoplasty, and i have not been interested in a sex life since, for that reason.
it would have been after a few years - 2010ish - that i started to realize the positive effects of asbstinence on my mental health. i didn't sign up to be a monk, and i have at no point ever believed in god, but i started to enjoy the monk-like existence of a fully abstinent lifestyle, without ever attaching it to any religious concept. i have long been on the punk rock side of the rock culture divide and began to attach it to an idea of being "straight-edge", although i've always utilized a selective definition of the straight-edge ideology. the difference between myself and a practitioner of religious abstinence is that i'm not denying myself pleasure, so much as that i'm enthusastically embracing a lifestyle free of sexual distraction. i'm not telling myself "no", and really wanting to; i legitimately do not want to. i eventually began to see my productivity increase and found myself broadly happier, once the issue was simply ejected as disinteresting and meaningless.
i found myself living a happy and meaningful existence after that, until around 2017, when the tesoterone suppressors started to wear off. at that point, after many years of total abstinence and total testosterone suppression, there was no possibility that i was going to embrace any sort of sexuality at all, and i found myself thrown into a difficult period where i was struggling with depression. after a long struggle with the medical bureaucracy, i finally had my testicles removed in the summer of 2021 and things have been getting better since.
today, i see myself as a sort of a eunuch. i identify and present as female, but i have no actual discernible sexuality. my life is devoted to my various artistic endeavours - my music, my writing, my vlogging, etc. there is simply no room for sex in my life, and i have no interest in making room for sex in my life.
i continue to hate pretty much everybody, and i have never developed any remote interest in humanity, or in developing social skills that would help me to survive in society. i was able to get on permanent disability and am fully aware that i'll live a happier and fuller live by myself and locked away from human contact. this disdain and contempt towards the world is rooted in a rejection of the economic basis for society, and has nothing to do with my purposeful decision to emancipate myself from sexuality.
freud was an idiot huckster and has been thoroughly debunked as such; people that continue to cite freud in the 21st century and continue to think that sexuality is at the core of human behaviour should not be taken seriously, they should be removed from the room. i have always sought to avoid any sort of sex, in a society that is obssessed with it, and which i reject for that reason (amongst others). i have no lingering frustrations about the matter, except the lingering frustration that i cannot escape sex entirely, no matyter what steps i take to do so.
i reject claims that embracing sexuality is normal or healthy. society would be better off if more people followed my example, but it must be voluntary. i find myself struggling against a society trying to enforce sexuality on me, when i do not want any sexuality, at all. it's not a question of healthiness so much as it's a question of control, as capitalism uses sexuality as a tool to maximize extraction and that is the real basis of the sexual openness in the society we live in. encouraging hedonism is a means of encouraging capitalistic excess. true sexual freedom is not an enslavement to hedonistic desires, but an emancipation from them; attaining real freedom is not the process of discarding humanity to become animals, but the process of breaking the chains of animalistic urges and becoming fully in control, fully human and fully civilized. engagement in sexual hedonism ought to be understood as being beneath the establishment of human dignty.
as the saying goes: in our society, freedom is slavery.
these are just my opinions and i only seek to enforce them on myself. i support the right to hedonism, just as i support the right to abstinence, and only the individual has any grounds to determine their sexuality, and how they are to participate (or not participate) in sexual activity.
please take care to note what my actual opinions and thoughts are on the topic, if you are to discxuss them. please refrain from inserting your own viewpoints in place of my own, if you seek to cite my perspectives on the matter.
21:21
i remember being a young person during the dubya era, and aligning with the democrats for the reason that they were the side of the spectrum that was challenging the lies being pushed by cnn, and originating in the white house. i did not like or trust either party, but it seemed obvious to me which one had a tentative grasp on truth, and which one was simply lying.
this is dangerous, because the biden administration's claims, as parroted by mainstream media, are not remotely credible. nobody believes them. if tucker carlson is the only person willing to state the obvious, he becomes the bearer of truth.
the last thing the world needs is for young people to decide that tucker carlson is the only honest voice in media. yet, right now, that would be a reasonable deduction.
nobody expects reliable reporting from cnn or from the new york times. however, watching the left side of the media echo chamber fall in line like this is exceedingly concerning. if the fake left media will not report the facts, young people will be left with nowhere to turn but tucker carlson, as everybody else is clearly full of shit.
the dangerousness of this particular lie is that it is not remotely believable. nobody believes the idea that russia bombed out their own pipeline. nobody. the media is merely discrediting itself in advancing the idea.
have been posting everything here as a single stream for a long time, now. that was never the intent of this sub-blog; this sub-blog was intended specifically to house commentary on news articles, current events and political activism and was intended specifically to quarantine that section of my writing. i have used my politics to draw attention to my art, but i also realize that they are not the same thing, and that an interest in my art does not necessitate an interest in my politics. some people might rather that i just shut up and play guitar.
the shift to offline writing will allow me to re-order the blogs by category, as i repost them in linear compilations. in the process, i am going to refocus this blog on it's initial intent. i'm also going to create two new sub-blogs, on the side:
1) the koala central command will be taking control of a complete stream that contains all posts.
2) a serious blog will now exist for posts on academic topics. that does not mean i'm going to post sources, but there is a difference between critiquing a toronto star article and posting an analysis of archaic era greek archaeology.
the other blogs will remain:
- this one, strictly for news commentary
- deathtokoalas, for media analysis
- the travel blog, for adventures
- diet blog, for diet write-ups
+
- music journal, for music notes
- j's journal + alter-reality for writings from my child and teenaged perspectives
- releases timeline + inri records blogs
if you want the full stream, head over to the koala central command, which has succeeded in piecing it together via their intelligence networks, which must be toilet paper rolls strung on strings through eucalyptus trees. just don't tell them where i'm hiding.
3:59
i will post daily archives in time so they are searchable, but i just can't do it right now. the contents will be edited.
i'm confident i will outlive joe biden outright and will outlast justin trudeau, politically. i'll take it from there.
i can't imagine that the interest that eliteshave in this blog will outlive whatever ego is currently driving it.
4:32
i don't care much about hockey culture in canada; i don't have any kids, and i never learned to skate. i did not play hockey as a child.
however, it should be clear to everybody that any cultural artefacts that arrive in the hockey rink are arriving there from home. this doesn't have anything to do with hockey, in itself, it has to do with the underlying religious heteropatriarchy that lingers in society. blaming the issue on the hockey organization is wrong-headed, when the issue is really tied to the toxicity of the concept of the family. toxic masculinity is something that is taught to boys by fathers, and taking the hockey game out of the process won't solve anything, it will just shift the problem to something else. the same problem exists in the boy scouts, the military, baseball, hunting, fishing, summer camps (i went to a christian summer camp a few times, and the toxic masculinity was outrageous), islam, christianity and any other organization where boys look to men as role models - because it's the men and male culture, as inculcated primarily by religious institutions, that are at the root of the problem. so, attacking hockey, specifically, as a bad apple, when the issue is the society in general, doesn't make any sense.
if this doesn't make any sense, then what is actually going on?
the canadian elite does not like hockey and has done everything it can for decades to try to extricate hockey from the core of canadian identity. hockey is not just the national sport, it is the closest thing that canada has to a national religion; canadians do not wake up early to go to church, they wake up early to go to hockey. for many, many, many canadians, hockey occupies the space that religion occupies for people from other cultures, or for people coming to canada from other cultures, and who are confused to see the lack of religiosity here, and the centrality of hockey in the lives if canadians, in replacement of religion. that's not hyperbole - it's actually true. the canadian elite would like to rebrand the country as a conservative culture with a specific religious identity at it's centre. hockey is in competition with that rebranding, so the political and corporate elite are mounting a full-frontal attack on it to try to neutralize it, in order to replace it. it's consistent with a variety of other things happening concurrently.
if you care about hockey (i do not.), you might want to take note of that.
as it is, there's lots of other things to do on sunday morning. like sleep in. don't let them coerce you into being religious, especially given that religion is the actual root of the problem, in the first place.
6:05
>did you think trudeau was trying to score political points by attacking hockey?
wake up.
6:27
what exactly did ukraine think was going to happen after they tried to take out that bridge?
no sympathy.
no solidarity.
6:49
narrative update for aug 4th-15th: proof of concept on linuxbook install, a lot more bicycling and first realization that i cannot post here anymore
as i am realzing that this post is being edited as i am writing it, it will not be posted to the blog until it is corrected offline, sometime between now and the end of october. the absurdity of the obsession with controlling my writing is baffling, stupid and juvenile. i do not feel intimidated, i feel embarrassed for the person wasting their time on it and annoyed by the need to adjust. you're a retard. go figure out something worthwhile to do with your life, you fucking loser.
if there were specific moments to take note of during the bicycle rides over the last two weeks of july, they are escaping me at this time. on some days, i may have particularly enjoyed the heat; on others, i may have found myself annoyed and frustrated by the wind. i may have bicycled a little further on some days, or taken detours on others. these weren't really intended to be exciting events so much as they were intended for the pragmatic purpose of upkeeping my health, and really as an extension of the simple necessity of carrying through with grocery shopping on the way home. nonetheless, i wish i wouldn't have gotten so bogged down in fixing the corruption introduced into the writing from the unwanted editing over the backend, and had rather written up narrative posts in real-time, so that i would have a better record of them, in the form of retellings of events closer to the date. as it is, i should probably take a blurry recollection of the rides as evidence that nothing particularly exciting happened during them.
there are very few posts over the day of the 4th because i had my single usb to ethernet cable plugged into the other machine, in order to download and install arch remotely. i have to say that i don't like this approach much, given the situation that i'm in, but it at least worked for the purposes of demonstrating that i can actually install linux to the chromebook. the instructions that i followed were slightly flawed in the sense that they did not instruct me to flas the bios; that only had to be done once, but, once it was done, i was able to easily boot into the arch install. i was worried that it might be more challenging than it was.
while the install went smoothly, i don't think i installed the network correctly, and think that is the reason the network wouldn't come up when it booted into xfce. as the install was network-based, i'd have to connect to the network to install the network, which is clearly impossible. while i could instead donwload the network and install it via usb, i decided i should just do it again and that i should take notes the second time, for the eventual write-up post. unfortunately, this never happened, because i got lost correcting posts from the summer that were corrupted by the unwanted editor after i left them on the google servers.
after skipping the 4th due to sleeping, i went back out for four successive rides over the very hot weekend of aug 5-8. i was only in to sleep and eat over these days. but i posted something like the following when i got back on aug 7th, which i then subnsequently had to heavily correct due to corruption on the backend (the corrections in this post are dated to sept 30th):
sunday, august 7, 2022
i'm working on a narrative update parallel to writing the linuxbook walkthrough, which has me rereading the blog starting from the phone update on may 24, and realizing that i'm going to need to rewrite quite a lot of this, so i could potentially take a while.
in the mean time, i want to point out that i caught a 37 degree reading when i was biking yesterday. that would not have included humidity, but it would have included direct sunlight. this was not anywhere close to downtown, but was rather about 20 km away from downtown, in a suburban area. the official reading yesterday was only 30 degrees, which is a comfortable but not a hot temperature reading; 37, on the other hand, is certainly a hot day, by any standards.
while some variation in a city is normal, the location of the reading at the windsor airport is repeatedly not remotely reflective of the actual temperatures being felt in the city of windsor itself and, while i've repeatedly suggested this isn't a mistake, i need to nonetheless aggressively suggest that the thermometer be relocated so that it's picking up a more accurate reading. if this is being done intentionally, it is utterly irresponsible and needs to immediately stop; if this is not being done intentionally but is merely the result of human error, the point needs to be gotten across that a more than five degree mistake, in context, could have a tragic result. telling people that it's 30 degrees out when it's actually above 35 degrees out could cause them to make very bad decisions that could lead to hospitalization or death.
i greatly enjoy the 40+ degree humidity, but even i was feeling it yesterday. it might have actually been high 40s with the humidex. the difference between planning for 42 and 49 degrees in humidity could be fatal if people are misled by it.
to be clear, my singular concern here is in advancing my own self-interest - i like the heat. i want you to tell me when it's hot outside so i know when to plan to go out and play, and i don't want to be misled into thinking it's cooler than it is, as i might stay inside, instead; i will miss the opportunity to bike through beautiful, hot days if the forecast lowballs the heat, which is a terrible outcome for me, as a strictly self-interested individual. now, i'm wondering if i missed some beautiful, hot biking days because the inaccurate forecast said it was only 26 or 27, which would quite rightfully and entirely logically lead me to decide it's not hot enough and i should wait for a warmer day, when it was actually 32 or 33 and i therefore should have gone out to enjoy it. as annoyed as i have every right to be about such things, that's a trivial concern in comparison to a 70 year old that needs to pick a day to get groceries and goes for a walk in what they think is 30 degree weather, only to find out the hard way that it's actually 40 degree weather.
if this is purposeful manipulation, it's irresponsible and needs to stop. if it's an accidentally consistently bad reading due to a poorly placed thermometer, it needs to be corrected before somebody gets killed.
for most of windsor yesterday, and i rode through a fair amount of it in the late afternoon, the 37 degree reading was more accurate than the 30 degree reading.
7:53
july 25th-aug 3rd: lost in doctrine of discovery writeup. no ride on 30th, 31st, 1st or 2nd. ride on 3rd.
aug 4th-aug 6th: linuxbook install succeeded. rides on 5th, 6th, 7th. i tried to pivot back to writing on the 8th, but realized the depth of the corruption and realized i needed to pivot.
---
monday, august 8, 2022
it wasn't quite as hot yesterday, but in a lot of ways it was the same day. i got in late after doing some grocery shopping.
i'm a huge fan of this weather and wish it lasted all year. as it is, i'm making sure that i get a lot of bicycling done so that i'm not wasting it.
it's going to rain today and cool down a little after that, so i'm going to be in for at least a few days. i'm going to try to get most of the write-up done for the linuxbook build.
6:51
===
aug 8th-after sorting through posts in the rebuild, i realized the depth of the corruption and the need to get out of recursion, by going back to early 2021 and moving forwards from there.
===
tuesday, august 9, 2022
hey, my odsp got renewed.
if it turns out to be the case, it's entirely subconscious, and i'd never be able to isolate the variable; correlation is not causation, and it could merely be coincidence. yet, i suspect there's going to be some underlying stress release attached to this.
i don't know if my existing living arrangement is stable or not. i think the property owner is...the reality is that i'm usually home and i pay my rent on time. the place is clean. i'm not loud. if anything, i'm frequently yelling at him to clean and renovate. he doesn't seem to be religious. however, he's hinted at maybe needing more space. i suspect that that might be a projection that doesn't actually happen, but i don't think he's setting me up for an eviction to renovate. he seems pretty labour-averse, actually.
the government has decreased the frequency of review, so this could be good for 10 years or more.
1:49
====
----
aug 15th-
i came in on aug 15th and i got distracted by the ultrasound. i was working on a update post to explain how to install arch linux to a chromebook that required re-building everything from june 24th forwards, some time before that (last edit dated to aug 6th), but got distracted by the need to correct a number of apparent unwanted edits, including those related to the celiac writeup and those related to the vavilov post. on aug 22nd/23rd, i wrote up most of my motion record, but needed to get to the court house to get a document before i could finish it. i couldn’t get out until late on the 23rd or the 24th and consequently didn’t get the document, but i was able to finally pick up the document on the 25th. i then slept all day on the 26th and got lost editing and ranting on the 27th and 28th (i also went for a bike ride on the 28th) before getting to the motion record early on the 29th. i wasn’t able to finish the motion record before i had to take a nap and then go out to get a blood test on the 29th, and wanted to get out early on the 30th to buy some fruit, but instead was stuck inside because of the rain.
sept 23, 2022
while i'm annoyed by the unwanted editor's insistence on editing my posts, they are mostly interested in politics. i am moving to offline writing, strictly, but i would at the least like to maintain a personal narrative in real time, and the more appropriate place to do that is over here.
if the unwanted editor interferes, i'll have to take this down, too.
let's give it a try.
1:52
i'm very far behind on the narrative updates, and i don't want to get lost in them. the last narrative update was july 23rd.
july 23rd-25th: first attempt at linuxbook install, led to bricking of machine. stayed in because it was ridiculously windy and because i'd been out every day that week.
july 25th-29th: distracted by need to update notice of appeal to include court justice name, finally served on the 29th. went for rides on 27th, 28th & 29th.
july 25th-aug 3rd: lost in doctrine of discovery writeup. no ride on 30th, 31st, 1st or 2nd. ride on 3rd.
aug 4th-aug 6th: linuxbook install succeeded. rides on 5th, 6th, 7th. i tried to pivot back to writing on the 8th, but realized the depth of the corruption and realized i needed to pivot.
these frequent bike rides would continue through august and september. the end result is that my productivity was fairly low over the summer, but i'm glad i got the exercise in, regardless. the monthlies will continue over the winter.
---
sunday, august 7, 2022
i'm working on some catchup as i do an update post up to the end of the linux install on the laptop.
i want to point out that i caught a 37 degree reading when i was biking yesterday. that would have not included humidity, but the reading was in the direct sunlight. this was not anywhere close to downtown, but was rather about 20 km away from downtown, in a suburban area. the official reading yesterday was 30 degrees.
while some variation in a city is normal, the location of the reading at the airport is really not reflective of the temperatures being felt here and, while i've repeatedly suggested this isn't a mistake, i need to strongly suggest that the thermometer be relocated so that it's picking up a more accurate reading. if i'm wrong and it's an honest error, a more than five degree mistake could have a tragic result. telling people it's 30 degrees when it's actually above 35 degrees could cause them to make bad decisions.
i love the 40+ degree humidity, but even i was feeling it yesterday. it might have actually been high 40s with the humidex. the difference between planning for 42 and 49 degrees in humidity could be fatal if people are misled by it.
my primary concern here is actually advancing my own self-interest - i like the heat. i want you to tell me when it's hot so i can go out and play, and i don't want to be misled into thinking it's cooler than it is, as i might stay inside, instead; i will miss the opportunity to bike through beautiful, hot days if the forecast lowballs the heat. that's a trivial concern in comparison to a 70 year old that needs to pick a day to get groceries and goes for a walk in what they think is 30 degree weather, only to find out the hard way that it's actually 40 degree weather.
if this is purposeful manipulation, it's irresponsible and needs to stop. if it's an accidentally consistently bad reading due to a poorly placed thermometer, it needs to be corrected before somebody gets killed.
for most of windsor yesterday, and i rode through a fair amount of it in the late afternoon, the 37 degree reading was more correct than the 30 degree reading.
7:53
monday, august 8, 2022
it wasn't quite as hot yesterday, but in a lot of ways it was the same day. i got in late after doing some grocery shopping.
i'm a huge fan of this weather and wish it lasted all year. as it is, i'm making sure that i get a lot of bicycling done so that i'm not wasting it.
it's going to rain today and cool down a little after that, so i'm going to be in for at least a few days. i'm going to try to get most of the write-up done for the linuxbook build.
6:51
===
aug 8th-after sorting through posts in the rebuild, i realized the depth of the corruption and the need to get out of recursion, by going back to early 2021 and moving forwards from there.
===
tuesday, august 9, 2022
hey, my odsp got renewed.
if it turns out to be the case, it's entirely subconscious, and i'd never be able to isolate the variable; correlation is not causation, and it could merely be coincidence. yet, i suspect there's going to be some underlying stress release attached to this.
i don't know if my existing living arrangement is stable or not. i think the property owner is...the reality is that i'm usually home and i pay my rent on time. the place is clean. i'm not loud. if anything, i'm frequently yelling at him to clean and renovate. he doesn't seem to be religious. however, he's hinted at maybe needing more space. i suspect that that might be a projection that doesn't actually happen, but i don't think he's setting me up for an eviction to renovate. he seems pretty labour-averse, actually.
the government has decreased the frequency of review, so this could be good for 10 years or more.
1:49
====
----
aug 15th-
i came in on aug 15th and i got distracted by the ultrasound. i was working on a update post to explain how to install arch linux to a chromebook that required re-building everything from june 24th forwards, some time before that (last edit dated to aug 6th), but got distracted by the need to correct a number of apparent unwanted edits, including those related to the celiac writeup and those related to the vavilov post. on aug 22nd/23rd, i wrote up most of my motion record, but needed to get to the court house to get a document before i could finish it. i couldn’t get out until late on the 23rd or the 24th and consequently didn’t get the document, but i was able to finally pick up the document on the 25th. i then slept all day on the 26th and got lost editing and ranting on the 27th and 28th (i also went for a bike ride on the 28th) before getting to the motion record early on the 29th. i wasn’t able to finish the motion record before i had to take a nap and then go out to get a blood test on the 29th, and wanted to get out early on the 30th to buy some fruit, but instead was stuck inside because of the rain.
31st: got out late to get pills.
1st, 2nd, worked on motion record. 2nd: served motion record, biking on 2nd, 3rd.
4t-8th couldn't get out to file affidavit, partly due to migraines
9th: afidavit. 9/10 biking.
11-14: in, archiving.
15-17: thurs fri sat: wanted to get out to bike, but couldn't
18-21: sun, mon, tues, wed: biking. name change info on sunday, spent week figuring that out.
thurs 22nd:
fri 23rd
sat 24rh
sun 25th
mon 26th: archiving january
tues 27th: today
main focus since early september has been in building a narrative/archive.
i need to build a temporary september archive.
monday, october 10, 2022
i have been posting everything here as a single stream for a long time, now. that was never the intent of this sub-blog; this sub-blog was intended specifically to house commentary on news articles, current events and political activism and was intended specifically to quarantine that section of my writing. i have used my politics to draw attention to my art, but i also realize that they are not the same thing, and that an interest in my art does not necessitate an interest in my politics. some people might rather that i just shut up and play guitar.
the shift to offline writing will allow me to re-order the blogs by category, as i repost them in linear compilations. in the process, i am going to refocus this blog on it's initial intent. i'm also going to create two new sub-blogs, on the side:
1) the koala central command will be taking control of a complete stream that contains all posts.
2) a serious blog will now exist for posts on academic topics. that does not mean i'm going to post sources, but there is a difference between critiquing a toronto star article and posting an analysis of archaic era greek archaeology.
the other blogs will remain:
- this one, strictly for news commentary
- deathtokoalas, for media analysis
- the travel blog, for adventures
- diet blog, for diet write-ups
+
- music journal, for music notes
- j's journal + alter-reality for writings from my child and teenaged perspectives
- releases timeline + inri records blogs
if you want the full stream, head over to the koala central command, which has succeeded in piecing it together via their intelligence networks, which must be toilet paper rolls strung on strings through eucalyptus trees. just don't tell them where i'm hiding.
3:59
i will post daily archives in time so they are searchable, but i just can't do it right now. the contents will be edited.
i'm confident i will outlive joe biden outright and will outlast justin trudeau, politically. i'll take it from there.
i can't imagine that interest in this blog will outlive whatever ego is currently driving it.
4:32
wednesday, october 12, 2022
i think i've accidentally figured out that eating calcium carbonate pills periodically might slow down digestion enough to increase iron absorption, which is the opposite of what i read about calcium and iron.
something i am eating is not reacting well and i will need to experiment with my diet over the next few weeks to figure out what it is.
but, the no name tums have actually fixed the problem. oddly. this is the opposite of what i would have thought.
i used to eat tums like candy years ago, because i drank huge amounts of pop. i've eased up on that a lot, but i still drink a lot of coffee. maybe i should be a little more reactive to my gut, when i'm drinking the coffee.
it won't help me identify the root cause, but it might mask it.
13:29
the fall has that awful burning smell of things literally dying. i'm always baffled by people who claim they like the colours of the fall, as it's about the most shallow and stupid analysis of the situation possible.
look. everything is dying. isn't it pretty?
it's pretty depressing is what it is,
i hate the autumn and i don't go out in it - it smells terrible, it's way too cold and it's full of death, everywhere. you'd have to be a sadist and a freak to enjoy that. at least everything is already dead by mid-winter, and the stench of everything dying mostly blows out, but there's nothing to actually do in the winter, in canada, except sit inside and wait for it to pass. it gets so cold here for half of the year that all you can do outside of your house is get groceries, and then go back home. i'm consequently now shutting down until the spring; i've got six months in front of me of sitting inside and wishing i live in a habitable country.
i think we'll get a few more nice days, and i'll no doubt to do some bicycling, but that horrid stench of everything dying is likely to ruin them. once it starts to rot and decay, it's over for the year and there's nothing to do but wait until the spring.
i've had my typing machine on hold because i've been building a narrative and not actually wanting to. so, instead, i've been archiving (you'll note posts are mostly gone back to november of last year, now), and redesigning the new posting strategy. i'm going to be in for a while now, so i wan to focus on really making the typing machine usable. i didn't buy it to take up space on my night table. that means building a rough install script, as the cops seem to be excited about it (my loose ethernet cable, which is intended to go into the linuxbook and not the typing machine, is always moved when i come back from somewhere. i have no idea what nonsense they're imagining.). they probably think that's how i'm communicating with putin.
i'll admit that the lack of internet access in the space is unusual, given the number of computers, but i've explained the point, repeatedly - that machine is intended to be as air gapped as much as i can make it, excluding the mind control rays over microwave to hack me via usb. i can't block that. alas.
(i think they are doing that. remember the interference? i naively thought it was radio stations, or power lines.)
i have another round of legal things coming up, and i'll discuss that in the narrative. i'm trying to avoid recursing, but i'm back in it and i have to push through this end loop and bust through. it's the last thing for a while, or seems to be; i keep saying that. the recursion is relentless. it's like causality: everytime you think you've found a way out, you're pulled back in. i was probably recursing before i even realized it. we're all truly lost in recursion, aren't we?
a few things are culminating right now that are making me realize that the political moment calls for civil libertarianism as the unifying movement on the ground. i've long been a civil libertarian, and i'm not shy about it, but civil libertarians often have problematic economic positions. being a libertarian socialist is somewhat frustrating, in terms of finding groups to work with.
the biggest issue facing us right now, in the west, is a pervasive cultural loss of individual rights. it may have started with the ruling class, but they've altered the culture and now we have fascism closing in from every direction. anarchists argue that socialism is the best way to advance civil rights, but these arguments need to be considered secondary, when we find those rights being taken away. alliances on civil libertarian grounds that advance liberal rights theories in the context of state scularism are more important right now and need to be the focus of the moment, by anybody outside of the progressive/conservative coalition that wants to usher in an era of authoritarianism.
so, i'm looking at danielle smith and francois legault and not liking either of them, but realizing they are the correct answers to the political moment, in that they are both civil rights activists, and are both civil rights activists in the correct concept of the term, even as they are somewhat opposites of each other. i don't agree with either of them on much of anything else, but that's the issue that needs advancement, at the moment - and, in both cases, on the terms they're advancing them in. we need freedom from religion as much as we need
i don't expect this to be permanent, but i'm realizing the need to cede ground to my opponents, in the political moment.
21:55
the tone of this article is entirely absurd, and i wouldn't expect saudi-us relations to alter much any time soon. the americans have generally supported the saudis' ambition to return to regional power status as the head of a kind of arab league empire, which has historical precedent, and to act as a counterforce to the turks and the iranians. the imperial self-interest is to set the barbarians against each other, via divide and conquer, which is a delicate process that requires maintaining reliable barbarian client states. if there's a comparison between mbs and putin, it is that both are dumbards that the western media instead wants to present as evil geniuses, against all evidence to the contrary; underlying this is the construction of a pretext for future western sanctions, but that converts mbs into an erdogan-like annoyance, rather than an actual threat to washington. we have learned the depth of cia infiltration into western media recently, and it is deeper than anybody previously realized. if mbs is being vilified, it is to present a pretext for something that is in the planning stages.
the saudis are not the russians. most likely is that washington will simply have mbs replaced, and i'd encourage them to do that quickly. as stated previously, my perception is that mbs has a developmental disability, that he's somewhere on the autism spectrum. he's not capable of doing the job given to him. getting him out of there sooner than later can minimize any harm he will do to himself, his own country, the region and the world.
it's tempting to argue that the saudis may be intending to compete with sco economic expansion to their opponent in the region, which is iran. the saudis should be rightfully concerned about full iranian membership in the sco, as it puts them on the outside of a major economic block that they can neither counter by joining europe nor by consolidation in the arab league. developing sco hegemony in asia, with iran as a member, isolates the saudis and, by extension, isolates the arab league. the saudis are losing influence in central asia to this new asian superpower, as their pakistani clients tilt away from them, as well. presenting itself as an alternative or competitor to iran, in some contexts, could in theory help alleviate some of that isolation by interfering with continuing iranian integration into the sco sphere. the saudis should want to maintain some gloss of competitiveness between themselves and the iranians, for sco interest, in order to avoid forfeiting wide swaths of policy influence to iranian decision makers. in that context, washington may decide that the saudis are no longer useful, and seek to disintegrate the state, which is not any sort of legitimate country, but really just a mafia crime family that cannot exist in power without us backing. if the marines flew out of saudi arabia, the saudi crime family's delusions of grandeur would collapse in a week. there are no issues of democratic legitimacy in removing mbs, either - it's not like they're undoing an election. mbs is a pentagon-backed dictator in an american client state, and he can and will be replaced at washington's pleasure. mbs may be too stupid to understand that, but the rest of the family understands it. the saudis would consequently have reason to present themselves as a counterforce to iran both in and out of the sco in order to maintain their usefulness to washington.
such an analysis is too sophisticated for mbs, who has likely simply calculated that higher oil prices will make him more wealthy. assigning complicated geostrategic decision making to mbs is a miscalculation; it's likely as simple as that biden asked him to do something that would cost him money, and putin wants to do something that will make him money. so, this week, until he's distracted by some shiny object somewhere else, mbs will side with the guy that wants to make him the richest. it is really that simple, really that base, really that gauche. he's reflective of his culture's historical rulers, in that sense - he's driven strictly by accumulation. this is the actual reason that arabs are so hopeless, and have been so hopeless for their entire history; every arab empire that has ever existed has existed solely as a revenue generating scheme, and instantly dissolves when the ponzi scheme collapses.
given that washington should want to maintain an arab state in the region as a client and regional power, i think that mbs' days are numbered, and that that is really what the article is about. the government in egypt is pretty vicious, but an arab superstate centered in cairo, and that has some concept of modernity baked into it, makes far more sense in today's world, as a long term and stable american client state.
in the medium term, i would expect the sco to strictly advance iranian interests at the exclusion of saudi interests, and for the saudis to be happy enough with their higher revenues - until washington has had enough and steps in.
i've long been worried that we're going to have to fight a war against the saudis, but that analysis underestimated their incompetence. they don't want power, they want decadence, and that always leads to collapse.
not selling them weapons is not a very bright strategy, either. america wants to maintain a strong client state in the region. that's the point.
rather, these uppity saudis simply need to be put back in their place with a good old fashioned coup. the best place to organize such a thing is from egypt.
6:49
she's fundamentally correct, and the responses demonstrate her point.
the idea that choice is of any meaning in discrimination is the kind of language you expect from the far right. that is of no relevance, whatsoever; there is no legal basis anywhere for that argument, it comes from anti-queer literature written by the extreme christian right, which argued that being gay isn't like being black because black people don't have a choice and gay people do. i mean, it's not their fault that they're black - they didn't choose that. so, blacks may be inferior, but black people deserve some compassion, because it's not their fault. queers, on the other hand, are just sinners - they made the choice to turn away from god.
(and, then, you had people show up and say "no, being gay isn't a choice, so being gay really is like being black. nyah. ftw.". they even made up some bullshit about science supporting it, despite science saying no such thing.)
that's the argument you're invoking, here, and it's not a legal one, it comes from the shadiest places on the internet. it's, like, 4chan logic.
i think gender identity is a choice, and we're the only group i can think of that comes close to the level of discrimination experienced by unvaccinated people in canada. the society is going to have to change how it views vaccination, and we're going to need a civil rights movement to change attitudes.
it's not surprising to hear john horgan's comments, either. progressives are always on the wrong side of civil rights advances, because they fundamentally don't believe in them. civil rights are advanced by liberals and libertarians (which is what smith is), and generally opposed by progressives and conservatives.
it is true that the idea of a choice was sort of beaten around in the judicial precedent for analogous grounds, but it was listed as one of many considerations, and not as a binary test. i actually think that this specific language in that particular ruling was unfortunately racist and any subsequent rulings should remove that from the list of considerations.
regardless, the idea of looking at somebody and saying "i can discriminate against you for this because you made a choice to do it", is not coherent in the context of canadian law. that would only make sense to a jew or a muslim or a christian, and our laws are not biblical in origin, they're roman. the ruling on analogous grounds mentions that inherent or unchangeable characteristics is one of the considerations (along with minority status and lack of political power, amongst other things) in defining analogous grounds, but that in no way suggests that something that isn't an unchangeable characteristic therefore can be discriminated against because it's not unchangeable, or that this does or ought to form the basis of decision-making around the topic, and you'll find almost nobody outside of a calvinist church that would argue that point seriously. most analogous grounds designations have not been about unchangeable characteristics (the issue in the cited precedent was marital status, which is clearly changeable, and clearly a choice, although i suppose there is an unfortunate minority that is unmarried against their will). of the four analogous grounds determined in canada, none of them are unchangeable, and the only one of the four that is tentatively not a choice is sexual orientation (a claim that is scientifically wrong. sexual orientation is fluid, and we can choose to fuck however we want.). there is certainly no legislation anywhere that says anything like that.
i have previously argued in this space that vaccination status would probably qualify as an analogous ground, but it would depend on the nature of the case, and the viewpoints of the justice. that has yet to be put before the court. the justice would certainly consider whether vaccination status is unchangeable as a part of it's analysis, but the ruling would not reject the argument on the grounds that it is a choice, if it is to be correct.
there is certainly nothing preventing the premier of alberta from entering vaccination status as an enumerated ground, and blurry thinking about analogous grounds, in that context, is that much less appropriate. enumerated grounds are decided upon arbitrarily. religion is an example of an enumerated ground that would clearly be considered a choice, and i actually do happen to think it should be removed from the list because having a religion isn't different than having an arbitrary opinion, but i digress.
8:42
one recently added enumerated ground in canada is having a suspended criminal record. we still have mens rea in canada, so that was clearly a choice.
9:12
the fact is that the vaccines don't work, so trying to figure out who is spreading the disease and who isn't based on vaccination status is not rational, it's a crude form of stereotyping. unvaccinated people with underlying conditions may be putting themselves at higher risk, but unvaccinated people are no more likely to spread the virus than vaccinated people are, which is the public health issue being analyzed. that's what the science says, and what the court would need to rule on. there is simply no rational basis for discriminatory treatment.
9:13
this is the picture i wanted to see, to understand the russian perspective:
this is russian media, so crimea was already a part of russia. you'll note the grey line denoting the new russian border.
that border is delusional - ukraine will not acknowledge it, and russia cannot defend it. that will only ever exist on paper, one way or another.
that, however, is what the new border actually is.
10:25
there must be a shadow minister for silly walks in there.
the emergencies act does not exist to "restore order". only a fascist would use that language, in context, and mr. trudeau should be held in contempt of parliament for that response.
the proper outcome is indeed an election.
11:37
3 For the purposes of this Act, a national emergency is an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that
(a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or
(b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada
and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.
a breakdown in public order is not a national emergency, and el douche needs to be taken to task by the media for suggesting that it is.
11:40
we are about to be treated to a master theatrical performance by el douche, here. don't let him bullshit you.
11:42
so, i go to news site nowadays and they increasingly have paywalls. i can neutralize them by disabling javascript, which also disables the ads. that doesn't seem like a winning strategy, to me.
there is no possibility that i'm going to pay to read the news, but i actually wish that more bloggers came up on google news searches, anyways.
it would be helpful if google could provide an option to remove sites with paywalls from it's search engine.
11:51
dear mainstream media journalist,
the reason i don't want to pay you for your articles is that they're not worth anything.
you're welcome.
jessica
12:17
i want to be able to go to google's news search and have it search for blogs, as well. there's no reason why an opinion piece at the globe and mail is of greater importance than an opinion piece at a blog, besides convention. that convention needs to change, and the tools need to change to adjust to it.
legacy media needs to get out of the way, especially if it is insisting on pay walls. that is not the future of the internet, and they're just accelerating their own demise in enforcing it.
12:20
that this was discontinued is frustrating.
they need to bring this back, and integrate it into the news search, so that people have the opportunity to search for free blogs instead of pay sites, as they search for news.
there is a 0% chance that i'm going to pay to read the news on the internet.
you can give up on that model. that will not happen.
12:24
we should hardly pay a moment's notice to analyses by the fucking imf.
inflation is not caused by spending. rate hikes will not impact inflation. stimulus is required to prevent a recession. yet, the bank is intentionally creating a recession by pushing ineffectual rate hikes.
my advice to the government right now is that it should engage in massive keynesian stimulus spending to prevent the recession the bank is intentionally creating.
the house of commons is the democratically representative body in this country, not the bank of canada. if the house wants to prevent a recession, the bank needs to fall in line. if i was the prime minister, i would be leading that fight, not arguing that the bank is out of my control.
do we want an artificial recession created by foolish central bank policies?
can we have a referendum on that?
12:43
if we're to have a fourth branch of government in a central bank, we need to revise the constitution and create a system of checks and balances, and a proper separation of powers. until such a time, the bank needs to be brought back under democratic accountability.
12:45
mr. polievre and i have almost diametrically opposite views on what the central bank should do, and how the government should respond to the economy, at the moment. however, we agree that the bank should not be acting outside of democratic oversight, and that it needs to be brought back under the control of the house.
12:47
i'm going to start making it a habit to take a calcium antacid between my coffee and my food, to act as a buffer. i may have actually gotten this backwards; i've been focusing on the idea that my gastrin was low, and i was barely absorbing nutrients as a result of that. i've actually made it a habit to get acidic food into my diet (which was already high in citrus fruits and capsicum products) to help with absorption, which is usually correct. i may have overdone it, which is causing things to move through my system too quickly, which may actually be a longstanding problem. this might be being misinterpreted as some crohn's type reaction, when the reality is that my body is constantly trying to flush out the food i'm eating because it's consistently too acidic. i was also trying to force my body to "cleanse" itself, which may be mostly silly, but has a reasonable premise underlying it.
if i place a calcium antacid after the food and before the coffee to act as a buffer, i might be able to slow it down a little (which is what is happening), thereby giving me the benefit of the increased acidity without suffering the consequences. i mean, i'm going to keep at it because it's working; i stumbled on this, it wasn't intentional. if it works in the long run, great.
i'm probably better off just taking calcium pills, if it sustains itself.
i don't think it's as good of an idea to try to tone down the acid, instead, as i know my pancreas is underactive. that will probably just not resolve anything.
hey, it's worth a try.
13:44
the concept of "moderate islam" has been much maligned in the west, which is not due to a lack of desire for such a thing to exist but due to a lack of empirical evidence that such a thing as a "moderate muslim" actually does exist anywhere in the world. the eastern mediterranean was the origin point of many christian heresies in the late byzantine period, perhaps even including islam itself, and islam has at times permitted enough discourse for branches to arise within it, but contemporary islam is in a phase in which dissent simply does not exist and is simply not tolerated when it arises.
for that reason, i approach news of clerical revolt within iran with both skepticism and optimism. while it is clearly not necessary to be particularly moderate in order to be concerned about the police murdering little girls by beating them to death, clerical revolt is virtually unheard of in contemporary islam, let alone in contemporary iran.
if the revolutionary fervour has entered the mosque, it is a matter of time before the regime falls. yet, this comes with a double-edged sword, as a religious uprising threatens to take the form of a reactionary and counter-revolutionary "awakening", which is what happened in iran in the first place.
i would hope that iranians on the ground have the presence of mind to recognize the opportunity presented by dissenting clerics, without being co-opted by them. my solidarity is with the secular left.
14:49
friday, october 14, 2022
i just passed my caesar hard as a rock for the first time since i brought in the habaneros, and it smelled like somebody smashed a lysol truck into a mexican restaurant. this was a movement a mile long and a foot thick, i tell you. it's flowing in there, that's for sure, it's just more hot and sour than a sichuan soup stand.
the calcium pills were the difference, i'm sure of it. i think it's less that i'm calcium deficient and more that i need to slow that toxic, radioactive sludge down a little.
the science is absolutely clear that you want to avoid taking any sort of vitamin or mineral pills as a replacement for sufficient nutritional dietary intake, unless you can empirically demonstrate some kind of disorder leading to a clear nutritional deficiency that you need to compensate for. your body absorbs most nutrients better in or with food. if you pay attention to your diet, you shouldn't need to take any supplements at all, and all that any supplements you do take will do is put strain on your kidneys. i've consequently consistently argued against taking supplements, in favour of eating healthy food.
yet, i am currently taking quite a few supplements.
- 125 mg of vitamin c every six hours (0:00, 6:00, 12:00, 18:00)
- 1000 iu of vitamin d with meals (twice daily) (2000 iu total)
- 4 mg of estrogen with meals (twice daily) (8 mg total)
- 50 mg of cyproterone acetate with meals (twice daily) (100 mg total)
- 100 mg of prometrium with meals (twice daily) (200 mg total)
- 1000 mg of calcium carbonate (400 mg of elemental calcium) after meals and before coffee (twice daily) (800 mg of elemental calcium total) <-----will increase if i move to calcium pills
- 300 mg of ferrous fumarate still, for now, with 250 mg of vitamin c, at the end of every second day, between meals
the hormones are permanent. the c is actually for my gums and is likely permanent. the d is as part of an experiment to get my pth down, and i will need to continue to take readings through the winter to determine if my success in suppressing my pth was from supplementation or sunlight. this is likely longterm to permanent, depending on the results. if my pth rebounds over the winter, i'll know it was the sunlight and stop taking the pills in order to reduce the strain on my kidneys; if my pth stays low, i'll know the pills are at least helping in keeping my pth down, and keep taking the pills. both outcomes might suggest i may have an absorption problem (this would be the first direct evidence of that. my vitamin a came in high and the proxies for k were normal. i have not tested vitamin e, but am led to believe that a vitamin e blood test is not helpful, and would point more towards a liver problem if it came in low.), although the first would suggest it's worse, so i'll have to wait to see the outcome. the iron is to stabilize my ferritin and i want to reduce or eliminate it, but my ferritin has stubbornly refused to stay high, prolonging the supplementation. the calcium is to act as an antacid to slow down digestion and counteract the acidic foods in my diet, which are intended to increase absorption. i'm sure it will also help ensure my calcium levels remain sufficient, but that's not the actual point.
nutritional yeast, which i take with every meal, is also effectively a b1, b2, b3, b6, b9 & b12 complex vitamin (in addition to a good protein source) and it has increased my b12 dramatically. i assume my b levels are sufficient. there is magnesium in the c, d and calcium pills and phosphorus in the d pill, but amounts are not specified. repeated blood tests last year indicated no sign of common mineral deficiencies.
i take a tablespoon or two of paprika in every meal, which is high in plant-based vitamin a, including lutein. if you're going to take an a pill, you should make sure it has retinol and carotenoids. i have instead loaded my diet with plants high in carotenoids and rely on dairy and eggs for retinol. i want to see the d results before i decide if a pills might be helpful.
my b5 is taken mostly via fortification, although it was one of the reasons i added avocados, as well. i should have sufficient biotin (b7) and inositol (b8) from dietary sources like citrus fruits, but i'll be double checking that. i have put a specific focus on betaine (b15) and choline (b16) in my diet, as well. i eat beets & quinoa for the betaine, specifically.
i have been contemplating e pills for a long time, but i want to wait for the experiment with the d to finish, first. i used to take very high amounts of e with a post-menopause pill, but the product was discontinued. what i've wondered for a while is if i had built my stores up and then let them come down. your body is going to regulate e internally, so e pills will increase your stores rather than your circulation; that is why a blood test isn't helpful, unless your liver isn't functioning. in fact, the same is true for d, which is why i'm testing for pth. it would make more sense to find a proxy for e that is comparable to pth for d.
if you're concerned about your d, don't test it directly. test for pth, instead.
i actually need to be careful with the k due to the estrogen. k is something i won't take in pill form, but i get a lot of k from the greens in my diet. i also get a lot of aspirin (vitamin s) from the berries.
i will need to look at the minerals again, but i may be concerned about a deficit of iodine, given the lack of salt in my diet. i've been keeping an eye on my tsh. i have tested for sufficient zinc and copper levels and strongly suggest you avoid zinc supplementation unless you have a good reason for it, but i also realize that i'm relying on fortification for my own zinc consumption, because i don't eat meat. vegans, specifically, are a group that may want to look at zinc supplements; i eat dairy and eggs, and will also eat a burger, occasionally. i do not currently have a good reason to supplement with zinc, but i may find one.
i'm not retreating from my previous position - you should get your nutrients from food, not pills - but i have a clinical iron deficiency that justifies iron supplementation, at least for now, and it is almost impossible to get enough d from food unless it is fortified, which is something that my government has recently loosened regulations around. even so, the d is an experiment; i'm not convinced that your body really absorbs d pills, even if you bombard your stomach with it. i think my pth mostly went down due to sunlight, and that my pth will bounce back in the winter, but we'll see what the results say. the calcium is not intended as a supplement.
the only vitamin i'm taking as an explicit, intentional supplement is the c, which i'm doing to try to maintain constant saturation and not as a dietary replacement - my diet is loaded with c, on top of it.
i am willing to modify my supplement intake based on perceived need as a response to empirical evidence, but i don't recommend emulating that, unless you have specific, individual, empirical results that justify it.
1:35
there's an intriguing narrative going around and i want to clarify my own position on the matter.
i would support anti-hijab protests because i stand with women seeking to emancipate themselves from the slavery of religion, in this case the slavery of islam. i would not support women that are fighting to wear hijabs, as they are struggling against their own freedom, in doing so.
that is not hypocrisy, that is a consistent, anti-hijab and anti-religion position. i would rather consider it hypocritical to be pro-hijab in one situation and anti-hijab in another.
i fundamentally reject the premise that women would choose to wear a hijab and i reject the idea that these are symmetric choices. rejecting the hijab is a revolutionary position; accepting the hijab is a reactionary, conservative position. i stand with revolutionaries and stand against reactionaries.
i reject the characterization of the women fighting in iran as "muslim women". what these women are doing is rejecting islam, and i stand with them in their apostasy. i stand with them because they are apostates; i would have no solidarity with them, if they were to be described as muslims. my solidarity is with atheism and against religion, everywhere, at all times
it follows that i support the protests in iran and i also support the government in india, which is a consistent position, and not a hypocritical one.
i hope that clarifies the point.
21:43
it would not be necessary to pass a law banning hijabs in a society where religion is stripped of all coercive power.
no woman would choose that, free of all coercion to do so.
21:49
saturday, october 15, 2022
the western media is grappling (or pretending to grapple) with the purpose of the air strikes in ukraine, going so far as to label them a pointless temper tantrum.
certainly, there are some hawks in russia that want to punish ukraine for their recent terrorist attack on the bridge across to crimea, but the russian military already knew that kiev is not a rational actor (they have stated as much) and must consequently have known that that sort of approach wouldn't work in altering their behaviour or coercing them into acting in a more rational or self-interested manner. this is one of the things that criminal justice systems analyze in considering how to punish mentally retarded criminals - are they capable of understanding their mistakes and responding to incentives, or is punishment essentially a waste of time on a mind that lacks the ability to respond to treatment? the russians know that the ukrainians are too stupid to understand what is in their own self-interest, and are instead operating on childish concepts of defiance, in their elevation of brawn over brain. like most barbarians, they can neither be intimidated nor reasoned with because they're too stupid to react to evidence. it follows that that would be an exceedingly minor consideration in understanding the tactic.
the purpose of a missile barrage like this, in conjunction with the consolidation of the new russian border around the four democratically admitted oblasts, is to burn out the ukrainian defense systems, or at least get a better understanding of what kind of aerial defences that the west has already moved into ukraine and is there, today, on the ground. that the russians need to test the ukrainian defences in this manner, rather than rely on intelligence, is a consequence of the fundamental miscalculation made by the russians at the start of this process; they clearly deeply underestimated the level of nato machinery that had already been moved into ukraine, and the already substantial extent of nato integration into the ukrainian military before the war, in preparation for the war of aggression that nato was planning to carry out against moscow. the russians should have at the least realized that the nazi ukrainian militias were cia battalions, organized under operation gladio, and the suggestion between the lines is that they did, but they just as clearly didn't realize the extent of it. the russians knew something was coming, and reacted to it; biden's baiting tactic makes it clear that the russians did not know the tip of it, and the americans knew that the russians didn't know the tip of it. the result is that biden tricked putin into walking into a trap (that trap being a ukraine that was already effectively defended by nato, under the pretext that a pre-emptive russian intervention could prevent that outcome); that trap must have actually been set in motion by trump (or trump's advisers), and biden must have been following through with an existing tactic. biden could not have had time to do this from scratch. trump is himself playing dumb on this, and very coyly. it seems obvious that this was planned in conjunction with the fake withdrawal from afghanistan.
now, the russians are realizing that they need more troops to occupy the annexed part of the country, which must have always been obvious. i remember pointing that out at the start, myself - ukraine is a lot smaller than russia on a map, but it's total population is not much smaller. the hard part, in the end, is trying to occupy ukraine, because the population densities of the countries are not comparable. those troops will need air cover, and the russians need to know what sort of air defense systems exist in ukraine, and how much of it they can take out.
the calculation is that russia can waste more missiles than ukraine can, in a barrage that reduces ukrainian defensive capabilities more than it does russian offensive capabilities. you'll note that the germans, americans and french have ordered new air defence systems to be sent to ukraine, in response. we'll have to see if that calculation by the russians turns out to be correct or not, or if the russians have at the least learned what air defences are actually in ukraine, in contrast to the systems they thought were in ukraine.
it is not likely that putin intends these 300,000 troops to be an invasion force; rather, they are being sent to defend the new borders from ukrainian attacks. unfortunately for the russians, they seem not to understand their own analysis; they can't defend this border. that was the point. remember?
the ukrainians are not rational, so the inevitable projection is a long, world war one style trench war with deep casualties on both sides, as the ukrainians send their idiots to die as cannon fodder, and the russians foolishly try to defend themselves in an open field, instead of building the defensible borders that they were supposed to be doing this in order to build in the first place. at least the russians get to fight this pointless existential war outside russia, now, instead of on it's borders. it doesn't really help much, though.
the upside is that we will get a new generation of cynical russian authors, baffled by the stupidity of the continued futile struggle for russian existence. the volume of water in the glass is 50% of it's total capacity.
the only way out of this is for the russians to quickly advance to the dnieper, but they don't seem to understand that. they seem to see themselves as an inherently superior force that will inevitably defeat the puny ukrainians with sheer growling will power. there must be a russian intelligentsia somewhere back there that understands they're fighting the americans directly, that that framing is not in line with reality and that the russians need to start taking the situation seriously, and needed to start taking the situation seriously a long time ago. i see little to no evidence that they're being listened to.
5:30
there's an incredibly specious article at the toronto star about inflation in switzerland that ties it to various policies by the swiss central bank and attempts to suggest canada can learn something from swiss central bank policy. this article makes no attempt to draw any sort of causal connection between swiss banking policy and the inflation rate in switzerland. i'm certainly not questioning the facts presented, but there is simply no argument that the things that the swiss central bank did might have led to the inflation situation; maybe the bank's policies produced the outcome, and maybe they didn't. that is not discussed.
there is no credible economic theory anywhere that connects central bank policy to inflation. that cannot even be debunked; it doesn't even exist. it follows that the economist that wrote the article is merely advancing his own views as to what the central bank should do, and speciously pointing to switzerland to advance the argument. such poor argumentation should not be actively countered, so i am not including a link to it here, and would rather call on the star to unpublish it.
this is an interesting observation regarding low inflation in switzerland, though:
i have long advocated for a return to publicly owned hydro generation in ontario, and for us to return to hydro power as the centre of our energy production strategy.
maybe we can learn something from the swiss, after all.
9:56
ian has now passed, but there's a third hurricane, now, in the pacific, and we'll have to deal with round three of cold snaps.
well, this is why it's cold in canada. right? the truth is that this isn't unusual, and the truth is that it's still very warm in the atlantic. this is why we call it "climate change" - the cold snap here in the east is the result of warm ocean waters, in both oceans, in succession.
the long range suggests the lingering heat will be difficult to blow out entirely and that it will warm up after the third hurricane passes, but after three plunges, we're left with the need to rebuild warmth and it's getting late in the year for that. we've also essentially lost october, which is the last possible summer month. we can occasionally have nice novembers, but they aren't summer.
when i was out for the ride on tuesday - and we got to 25 here on tuesday - i could feel the hot atlantic air trying to blow back in from the south. it's not that the fundamental situation of the climate here now being dominated by hot atlantic air has changed, it is that the jet stream is being mangled thousands of kilometres away and that that atlantic air is losing a fight. the heat wants to push back in, but it just can't, it's just getting blown over. there was a wind warning here, in the other direction, the next day, with nearly hurricane force gusts resulting from the air masses pushing back and forth on each other.
so, the warm air will push back. this isn't the end, we will still have some nice days. it's just getting too late in the year for more summer. the days are too short, the shadows are too long, etc.
it's less that i misread the situation of atlantic heat dominating the entire year, and more that some other things happened, partially as a result of that atlantic heat, and those other things overpowered the local reality. that is life in a dynamic system, and why we can't predict the weather months in advance.
the flip side is this: if we were due for a cold snap, it will pass next week, and we may end up with a very extended, pleasant fall rather than a very late and ridiculously long summer. instead of 20 degree days from may into november followed by a fast fall off, we could have 15 degree days until new year's. you can decide what you'd rather.
the reasons for the analysis haven't changed, and the pattern will reform, it will just be a little weakened. and, we've lost the month to bad weather. alas.
13:26
this theory was actually never taken seriously by actual climatologists, it was just pushed by idiots in the media because it was useful as push back in the great lightweight "if it's global warming, why is it so cold?" debate.
it is an idea that is physically incoherent, and i spent several years yelling about it.
ms. francis herself has stepped back from the theory. the jet stream being discussed is actually a very well understood effect of solar cycles, and the person to look up to understand that is mike lockwood. mr. lockwood's theory is what is driving my analysis, not ms. francis'.
i would actually support a tobin tax on credit cards, and suggest using the money to fund subsidized housing.
14:53
pakistan certainly has nuclear weapons, and the government is certainly unstable. those were not debatable comments from mr. biden, they are statements of fact. a better criticism is that they lacked depth; what biden was getting at was chinese support for pakistani militants, in their military alliance against the indians, which is certainly of real concern for global stability. yet, there are four (five, including the united states) nuclear powers in the region, and while pakistan may be the least stable government, and are perhaps the most contemptible, they are not uniquely the cause of any problems.
the americans have long been in competition with the chinese for influence over pakistan, and would like to use pakistan as a base to destablize xinjiang. biden's comments may indicate some frustration in the pakistani position. however, they are not controversial.
15:12
sunday, october 16, 2022
i'm definitely sticking with the calcium just before the post-meal coffees. that is definitely working as suspected.
what i want to check for now that it's hardened back up (after softening up due to the hot peppers, which i let go because i wanted the process to carry through. i was going to deconstruct the diet piece by piece starting next month before i accidentally found the calcium trick. now, i might not need to.) is pigmentation. it is clear that there are no blockages. in fact, the harder stool should get all the fibre in my diet to function properly and actually clear out the intestines. the post-salad stools should have a reddish hue (due to the capsicum), while the post-eggs stools should have more of a yellowish hue (due to the yeast). the thing i'm looking for is very dark brown or black.
i have never seen that; i've seen some goopy dark green due to the iron pills, but nothing that looks like dried blood. i was initially concerned about a dark hue of red, but decided (uneasily) that it must be beeturia.
the other thing i need to check for is how i feel after slowing down digestion. i should be more alert, in theory.
i have not yet noticed any bloating; if anything, it's reduced the bloating from the iron pills.
5:46
the stock market analysts are really hopelessly clueless. they keep trying to understand the market in terms of quaint, irrelevant things like profit reports and searching for a bottom that reflects a relatively strong underlying economy. the result is that they don't understand; the truth is that that has nothing to do with anything.
has anybody reflected on the absurdity of the dow jones hitting 35,000? what would cause such nonsense, anyways?
the fed has been pumping money into the economy almost non-stop since 2008. that is nearly 15 years of almost constant quantitative easing, and it all ended up parked in the market, where it created a ridiculous bubble. this bubble isn't the result of investor error like past bubbles have been, and the economy isn't on the brink of collapse due to bad behaviour, as previously. what's happened is a different mentality at the fed, which is seeking to deflate a bubble they spent 15 years inflating, on purpose.
money is literally being taken out of the market and destroyed at massive rates. that is what is actually happening. that is why the market is crashing. jerome powell is intentionally crashing the market.
there is no bottom to this market - it's in free fall.
it will certainly get to under 15,000....unless the fed reverses course.
17:30
this government has been very weird. it aggressively campaigned against time of use, and now wants to amplify it. at least it learned the benefit of the program; that's some progress.
i would certainly take advantage of a lower overnight rate, so long as it doesn't come with a higher daytime rate.
turns out that xi jinping is a uniter, not a divider.
5:06
i am deeply embarrassed by the western media's continued refusal to take a clear stand against religious coercion by the fundamentalist government in iran, in a clear fear of offending conservative muslims in the west.
here is another example: i've seen several papers point to pictures of women with hijabs protesting with women without hijabs as supposed evidence that the protests are not inherently anti-muslim. one picture has a sign held up by a woman with a hijab on one side and a woman without one on the other, which is presented as evidence that pro-hijab and anti-hijab women are working together to argue for veiling choice.
this is a bizarrely clueless analysis that demonstrates a clear pro-muslim bias in the media - media like the cbc, the bbc or the washington post. it is of course against the law to not wear a hijab in public in iran, under threat of severe consequence, which is the point: several young women have been beaten and killed* recently for showing their hair. that some women feel they have so little to lose in their reduction to sexual slavery by the mullahs that they might defy these rules speaks volumes, but that doesn't change the fact that the system is being enforced by extreme violence, and upheld by incredible levels of fear. it is far more likely that the veiled women at the marches are as anti-hijab as the women with the veils off of them, and that they are simply afraid of being killed if they take their veils off. that is the point.
it's easy to accuse the media of a westernized filter, in the sense of them just not realizing that women in iran don't have the basic freedom to take a scarf off. it's a mind fuck, to a westerner - that's incomprehensible. in some other context, it might be reasonable to suggest that the absurdity of the situation just never crossed their mind; in this particular context, that's not believable. rather, it's relatively obvious that the narrative is being intentionally skewed to take the edge off the protests and make coverage of them more palatable to a conservative, muslim readership.
when teenagers in iran are more liberal about women's rights than the mainstream media in the west is, it indicates that there's a serious problem developing, here, at home.
* i haven't heard any stories about rape. yet.
6:47
i would in truth argue that iran is historically most correctly seen as a part of europe, and that it's advent as an islamic country under muslim occupation due to the expansion of arabic colonialism is a recent invention that will be short-lived in the broader scope of history. i would say the same thing about turkey, and broadly say the same thing about syria, as it pertains to the mediterranean coast. i have stood with secularists in syria and turkey, as well. i have broadly supported the secularist (and socialist) kurds in iraq, albeit critically.
the historically semitic, arabic and jewish/islamic region of the middle east is relatively small in area. it certainly includes the arabian desert, as well as israel and jordan, but only the southern part of iraq would be included, and only tentatively at that. the best science suggests that semitic speakers entered the region from northern africa several thousand years ago and displaced an indigenous population that was related to modern armenians and georgians. the ancient cities of iraq were not built by semites. iran does not consider itself an arab country, and has been struggling to assert it's independence from imperial arabic influence for almost 1500 years. the indigenous religion of iran is a sister religion to hinduism, and must have entered the region with northern migrants about 3500 years ago.
ethnic iranians are most closely related to russians, not to arabs.
there is a largely rejected etymological analysis that ireland and iran share the same indo-european linguistic root. the reason that this connection had been recently rejected is out of fear of it generating racist aryan race theories, but the reality is that the shared etymology is unquestionably actually true. recent genetic work has entirely upheld the work of marija gimbutas, and we have to acknowledge what the actual facts are. the irony is that the only people that actually question this theory at this point are indian nationalists, on mostly racist grounds (they simply refuse to accept the idea that their culture, religion and language almost entirely came from northern europe in the relatively recent past, despite the overwhelming facts that demonstrate the truth of it). the reality is that the aryan dispersion hypothesis is as empirically demonstrated as any theory in science that you'll find anywhere - it's a fact. that makes iran an intrinsic component of europe, and one that has only recently (and probably temporarily) been conquered by semitic arabs, and (largely) forcibly converted to islam. the idea of liberating iran from muslim rule should be seen in broadly the same way that it was once viewed in eastern europe; what the people on the ground are telling us, and have been telling us for centuries, is that they need our help.
there is absolutely no history of any sort of semitic settlement in iran before the year 700 ce; the reality is that the iranian people have been struggling against arab imperialism ever since. it was the devastatingly destructive, genocidal mongol invasion that had a much larger demographic influence than arabic colonialism, which is very similar to what happened in russia. the iranians have never accepted arabic rule, and have only accepted islam in a very modified (and many would say heretical) form that strongly integrates their indigenous religious perspectives.
these are not viewpoints being assigned to iranians by outsiders, these are viewpoints that you will hear from iranians, who see themselves as a colonized people, suffering under the oppressive influence of muslim colonialism and arabic imperialism. you will hear the same things in afghanistan and india, if you listen to the people on the ground, rather than their rulers, who have been funded and installed by foreigners for centuries.
it is not likely that zoroastrianism will see a serious revival in iran any time soon. yet, the iranian people have fought a very hard and very long struggle to remain a part of the secular west, and my solidarity is with those that continue that struggle, as they have been fighting it for centuries. people arguing otherwise are simply ignorant of the history. what you are seeing in iran must be properly framed in that context, not sanitized to avoid offending imperialist conservative muslims, who must instead be aggressively argued with and defeated in the public square.
14:11
if iranian women were permitted to take off all of that extra clothing for a few minutes, a shocking fact would assert itself: they look like eastern european women.
15:00
sweden is a nato country, now.
so, the first thing that needs to be done is to rig an election in favour of thatcherian economic reforms.
enjoy your market liberalism, sweden.
16:51
the only difference between the republicans and the democrats at the moment, in terms of foreign policy, is competency.
i remember watching the utter buffoon chris hedges gloating on some "progressive" shit show when trump lost, and laughing at him when he explained that the world was now safe from war for another four years, but we should all be on the lookout for the next republican leader, which he feared might usher in what he referred to as "competent fascism".
no, you idiot.
the competent fascists are the democrats, and if you didn't realize that then, you should certainly realize it now. biden has done everything that the fake left warned us trump would do, while trump was clearly trying to do the opposite (and mostly failing).
if you thought trump was the most dangerous person in world history, what exactly is your opinion of biden? or are you blind to the reality in front of you?
19:21
donald trump would be hard-pressed to spell, define or otherwise articulate a description of fascism.
biden, on the other hand, is the most advanced fascist leader the world has ever known.
19:23
it makes you wonder. hedges is an extreme counter-example - he got thrown out of the us propaganda network, and got a job working for the russians, instead. maybe he's a quintuple agent, and secretly working for the albanians. i think it's clear enough he's not cia.
a lot of the other analysts on the fake left were so uniquely and exactly clueless about biden, that they fit directly into the cia projection tactic; either they fell for it, wholly, or they're on the payroll, themselves.
19:27
albania says it's a nato ally, now.
right. pfft.
never trust the albanians.
19:29
burn your bastille down, iran.
burn it good.
20:17
tuesday, october 18, 2022
this is reality in iran.
when you see pictures of women on tv without face or hair coverings, you need to mentally comprehend the consequences that come with a revolutionary act of this extremity, in a country run by an extremely conservative (and exceedingly unrepresentative) government. there is no constitutional right to expression in iran, like there is in the west.
this woman just came within a hair of a bronze medal, and she will not be welcomed home with a parade or any sort of acknowledgement, but will be transferred to a facility where she will be beaten and probably raped repeatedly in order to instil a concept of submission to male dominance within her, so that she knows her proper place in society. she is a slave, and she needs to be taught to understand it.
when you see pictures of women on tv or on the internet with face coverings at protests, it is also important to understand the level of implied violence leading to the coercion to veil. the fear instilled in these women by the state to repress their sexuality is real because the consequences of ignoring the barbaric islamic laws are real. there is not a real choice.
this barbarism is not unique to islam, it is a characteristic of all religions. however, islam is the only extant religion in the world with any serious power, and it must be singled out for that reason.
in iran, the beatings are done by the state, in an example of what is really a state funded social service.
in canada, such beatings and rapings are done by husbands and fathers, instead.
don't delude yourself or be tricked into thinking that religion is a choice. religion is barbarism; religion is violence; religion is slavery.
7:20
real conservatives don't need the government to rape their daughters for them, they can do it themselves.
7:27
what am i doing?
i came in on the 11th after the 50 k ride on the last 25 degree day here and wanted to get the typing machine set up before i did anything else. i had been typing on the recording machine, and i wanted to stop doing that; that's why i bought the typing machine, which just had to be properly set up. unfortunately, because i'm being constantly spied on by stupid cops that think i'm a russian spy, i can't just install to the machine, as they'll install software as soon as i'm gone that is intended to spy on me but doesn't work properly and will just break the machine, requiring me to reinstall as soon as i get home. there's no way out of that, which is what i've learned - they have to learn everything the hard way, so i'll need to let them observe me not sending emails to putin before they accept the obvious reality. i have to set up an algorithm that constantly undoes their idiocy, if i want to be able to actually use the computer, as they don't want to accept or understand that it's air gapped. i don't know how i got into this situation, but i have learned that i have to work around it. i will need to have that set up before i can do some legal stuff, which i want to have done before the end of the week, when it warms up. it looks like we'll get back to the mid-20s again here over the weekend, once the jetstream is finished with it's stupid temper tantrum.
in order to finish that process, i had to get through a mountain of filing and organizing, which i'm getting to the end of. i have unfortunately been a little more sleepy than i'd like this weekend, which is normal for me around this time of year. that's what i've been doing all week.
the next step will be to reinstall and build up the basics of an install script that cleans the machine up, and then get to some legal stuff. i'm unfortunately going to need to launch three lawsuits against the police this week, as their report was not only insufficient but was actually defamatory. that means it's time to finally launch the constitutional challenge for arbitrary detention (which is something that the report does acknowledge occurred. in it's awkward attempt to justify the illegal arrest, the report claims i was arrested without an intent to charge me. while this is almost certainly bullshit, it gives me the opening i need to sue the windsor police for arbitrary detention, while i'm appealing the report, and suing the oiprd for defamation.) against the city. these are going to be the first lawsuits i'll be filing in search of monetary compensation for the rights infringement against me that happened. i can then get back to what i was doing, which was trying to build a narrative sketch from late july without falling into recursion, archiving back to the point where i stopped the diet updates and shifting into the new posting format.
the result of this taking longer than i'd like, along with the added dimension to the legal stuff, is that i may not get to the new posting format until november and that the one-post-at-a-time thing may linger on for a while longer. that's not ideal, but so be it.
14:00
i'm wanting to buy 4th external drive for the machine, though, because the vlog archive is getting a little full (it's on a 2tb drive. how big can i get for under $100?) and realizing that the internet is loaded with external drive scams, at reputable sites like walmart and amazon.
you can for real go to walmart.com or aliexpress.com and buy a fake 30 tb ssd drive, which is baffling.
15:46
i just wanted to know what a reasonable size is for an external drive nowadays. 5 tb? 10 5tb? i started seeing ads for 16 or 32 tb drives for $20 and it seemed a little too cheap too fast, but it's hard to put your filters down. i'm pretty technologically inclined, and i had to look it up to be sure about it.
actual 30 tb drives are the size of desktop towers and cost $10,000.
usb keys are currently running at 1 tb, max.
i think i'm looking for a deal on a 5 tb drive, which is the question i needed answered.
15:50
this $130 16 tb ssd listed on amazon prime is a total scam.
it's probably something like a 60 gb usb key with hacked firmware.
the bullshit is all over the internet, and at sellers you expect to be reputable. this is a fiasco.
16:21
there is no possibility that the item is a 16 tb thumb drive because that product does not exist.
16:27
i guess they've got distributors in china that don't know what to do with excess small sd and usb cards. fuck, just sell them as what the are, for cheap. i just bought seven 16 gb usb keys from china for a few dollars each, and they're incredibly useful to me as what they are, as they allow me to have plug and play partitions. that is partly what i was filing. so, now i've got a usb key with all my web site data, a usb key with all my legal work, a usb key isolated for library printing, a fat32 usb key for scanning documents and flashing bioses, a couple for bootable disks, etc. each of these partitions can be moved from computer to computer at will, copied, backed up, etc. if i want, i can plug eight of them in at a time through a hub, and i've got these dedicated partitions that act as extensions of the machine.
the premise that you can't sell a 60 gb ssd card is flawed. people are going to use them for cameras, for mp3 players, for phones, etc. it's a marketable product, you just have to adjust the price.
16:43
i recently purchased two inverters from china that i'm sure were both broken and gave up after try #2. they were both listed for under $10, so it's not like i lost a mortgage, but it's the principle of it. i'm unlikely to find a ccfl inverter anywhere in north america, at any price, but i'm sure i bought inverters from broken laptops that were disassembled, both marketed as new, unopened products (what i was hoping was that i found a surplus distributor, because that's my only option for a part that is thoroughly discontinued). the first one had the coils falling off. somebody at amazon needs to take that listing down, but somebody in china needs to clean the operation up, because they're getting a very bad reputation, here. they will try to sell you any piece of garbage they can find, and they'll tell you it's working - then laugh at you when you buy it for a dollar.
16:45
as it is, i think my best choice is the most obvious one, but i'll have to wait until the end of the month. the 5 tb drives are affordable, but the climate money is going to be a little less than i need for it, and i spent a lot of money stocking up on non-perishables and cleaning supplies for the next six to eight months, before inflation hits, for real.
16:57
joe biden is almost 80 years old. he has little left to look forward to in life, and doesn't seem to have the levity to realize it.
i have a suggestion for dhimmi joe.
joe.
why don't you take advantage of the uniqueness of your position, at your age, and simply level with americans about gas prices, rather than coming up with transparent schemes that will get you nowhere?
oil is a finite resource, and prices are not going to come down. the world is burning down, due not just to climate change but due to wars over energy use. americans need to understand that they have to change, and they need and deserve leadership willing to lead on the issue.
ol' man joe should be sitting down in front of the camera and delivering a prime time speech to americans about the necessity of carbon transition. he is uniquely capable of this, because what does he have to lose?
17:30
wednesday, october 19, 2022
it's funny how my court documents keep randomly disappearing. really. this time, they just disappeared in the middle of filing on a usb key. that has alerted me to a potential problem that i should be aware of; i need to ensure that i can recover data from these mobile usb key partitions.
if you're going to use usb keys as primary storage on a windows machine, you want to do this, first:
16, 32 or 64 gb might be small by today's standards, but these are workable partitions for specific data uses and that should really be standardized. usb keys aren't like floppy drives anymore (two of my four pcs still have floppy drives, and i had to use a floppy disk to reflash a board as recently as 2014. you can't do that with a usb key.), and most people know not to use them outside of the house. if you want to transfer files to your friend, you email them a link in the cloud, or you zap it from your phone to some device over wifi. usb keys are for personal storage, today - or for quarantined external use. i have a dedicated key i use for printing, and is the only one i plug into public computers. you shouldn't have to tell windows to install an undeletion layer, anymore - it should put a recycle bin on any ntfs drive you plug into it, by default, unless you turn it off. as it is, it's an easy enough fix, and i've added it to my install script.
the last time this happened, i picked it up with a chkdsk. it just tossed it back up in the found.000 folder, and that was that. that did not work this time, which indicates that the connection wasn't severed like it was previously. what happened, then? i can at least explain a short in the usb bus. if that isn't the explanation, what is?
i usually use this standalone freeware utility for data recovery, but it wasn't successful this time:
i had a moment back in the spring when i accidentally deleted all of my virtual machines all at once after clicking the wrong button and had to scramble to find an undelete function. restoration did not work then because the files were all larger than the ntfs limit, but this utility worked:
i have since created a fat-32 utility key for situations like this, and others, with both of those programs on it, and i was able to pull it out for this purpose. it does seem likely that i'm going to be able to recover the directory tree, which is what i lost in the filing. i could go find the files somewhere else, but it would be very time consuming to do so.
i cannot explain what happened; the folder just imploded, it just disappeared. it now appears to be in a recycle bin that did not exist. it's quite odd. i'm left to remember the sophisticated network bios virus that was targeting my windows 7 partition table and in the end succeeded in frying two windows 7 laptop boards. what is the point of this?
that's going to slow me down that much more, but these are important considerations to analyze in determining the best way to work directly from external storage. i didn't back the folder up because i was organizing it; the plan was to back it up immediately afterwards.
the folders that keep disappearing are curiously exactly the ones that document my concerns about the arrest being orchestrated, immediately after it happened. i suppose it could be a coincidence that this folder keeps disappearing.
again: i wish i had some deeper concept of what is actually going on. i can vaguely piece it together, but there's no way i'm going to really grasp it until somebody explains it to me, and it's going to leave me baffled by the stupidity of it. is this not absurd enough? i'm yelling at some fascist deep state entity that i only vaguely understand the existence of, and essentially mumbling to the wall. at some point, isn't it obvious that you should write me a check for the grievance of dealing with years worth of absurd nonsense, and leave me alone?
0:04
q: how many cops does it take to spy on a nerd?
a: five. one to watch the nerd, and four to constantly look up the words the nerd types in the dictionary.
0:26
the utility recovered the files, but not the directory structure, which is what i want.
ugh.
i'll need to look for another utility.
0:32
i spoke too soon. the second utility recovered a large amount of files, but it's actually not clear what they are, as they have a lot of random names.
i was able to use a program called recuva, installed in a virtual machine on the production pc, to pull out the directory structure, but not to recover the files. the program claims that the files could not be recovered because they were overwritten by files that were written before the missing files disappeared, which is clearly wrong.
there's two possibilities, and i'm withholding judgement.
1) i somehow accidentally deleted the files in some process that i don't understand and the files were then overwritten in the chkdsk. that doesn't seem correct; that seems backwards.
2) the only other explanation is that the files were somehow deleted by microwave over usb, and then the deep state hacker that hacked my usb key over microwave (put your tinfoil hats on. this is real stuff.) tried to actually wipe it out by copying something over it.
i fully agree that this is insane.
i have no other explanation. however, i might have a backup.
regardless, i was able to rebuild the logic of the tree as i was sorting through the busted partition table, and i should be able to rebuild it. i'm nonetheless going to do this the slow and thorough way, because i'm then going to put the files aside.
this has been going on for years, now. i'm a rational and relatively technical person; i'm pointing to ridiculous hacking tactics because i do understand that the other options are unlikely. you don't have to tell me this is insane, i agree with you. now what?
1:35
i wouldn't argue that ukraine are the bad guys so much as i'd argue that they're certainly just bad guys all around and are consequently definitely not the good guys, and i don't think that's a debatable position. that the actual ukrainians on the ground actually fighting have been nazi militias is not within the realm of debate, it is an indisputable fact. if you want me to try to determine who is morally superior in a conflict between pseudo-stalinists and pseudo-nazis, i'm going to tentatively side with the stalinists, as i always have, but it's not with much resolve.
i don't concern myself much with morality when analyzing geopolitics, but there is no good guy in this fight, they're both essentially the same. ukraine is a brutally repressive society with no concept of rights or freedoms, because they're indistinguishable from the russians. ukraine is not a democracy, and the suggestion that they are is ridiculous; ukraine is a failed state that has been floundering under a series of brutal dictators since 1991.
as the russians will be quick to point out, this conflict started with ethnic unrest in the east of the country, which was fueled by maidan militia members being sent out to die. what a twisted joke that was, in the end.
i'm closer to holding the second viewpoint, but i would present a much more aggressive articulation of it: i do not think that supporting ukraine is not in canada's interest, i think that actively supporting russia is in canada's interest, as we share a long border with a country that we should be trying to build active trade networks with. european stability is in canada's interest; war in eastern europe is not in canada's interest. the way to achieve a lasting peace in the region is for the russians to construct meaningful borders that they can defend, given that the nato-russian relationship will inevitably be defined by chauvinism and competition. continued nato expansion necessarily leads to war, and that is not in canada's interest.
yet, we need to ask "who is canada?", here as well. is canada a diverse, self-governing nation that seeks to assert itself in a peaceful world, or is it a dying petrostate, flailing against it's own irrelevance? is canada composed of citizens that want to sing and dance and live and breathe, or is it composed of weapons manufacturers that want to drive stock markets? that is the real question: what is canada? we cannot determine what our self-interest is, until we understand who we are.
my self-interest is supporting the fastest path to a sustainable peace, and i believe that the way to do that is to get out of their way. i do not think that putin is like hitler, and i do not think that is appeasement. rather, i think putin is fairly similar to churchill, and that he is trying to save a historical entity that needs to change, and will change in a short amount of time. the russians have a serious likeability problem in their own neighbourhood and they will need to address that. on some other issue he might be wrong and might need to be countered, but on the issue of russia needing defensible borders on it's western front, putin is correct, and it is our belligerence that is to blame for the situation. history will understand that, even as it criticizes putin for poor execution of a necessary and overdue defensive operation.
what's happening in ukraine today is the consequence of a historical process, namely of nato expansion into the vacuum left open by the collapse of the soviet union. it is not the fault of any one person, or any group of people, or of any side or of any country, and picking sides and pointing fingers will merely create more violence. an adult should be trying to end the cycle of violence, not trying to decide who is the most morally self-righteous team to cheer for.
so, i'll take responsibility.
it's my fault.
blame it on me.
now, stop fucking fighting.
here's an old tune from a better canada, from a better time.
2:48
the most important lesson from russian history 101 is that the russians must defend their western border. stalin saw hitler coming, and he was right to militarize. nobody saw napoleon coming, and the russians are lucky that he was dumb enough to march his troops into the snow. the russians cannot be faulted for understanding their own history.
3:02
i'm not a fan of pet sounds, but some of my favourite records were heavily influenced by pet sounds.
8:58
i don't want media talking heads or political propagandists to read my blog.
you somehow started to key in on me when i was posting on youtube to promote my music and you've become obsessed with me. this obsession is unrequited.
i'm trying to blow you off.
get the point.
go away.
11:00
11:37
the purpose of the petroleum reserve was to ensure a supply of oil in an emergency, not to act as a slush fund for a corrupt president. global oil reserves are dwindling, which is why the price is going up. it's going to be very difficult to fill that reserve back up.
biden seems to have no grasp on reality.
given the reality of inflation, an absolute (relative than relative) price of oil under $75 is unlikely to ever happen again.
maybe biden would like to hold off on buying cigarettes until they go back under $5/carton, too.
"back in my day, a glass of beer was no more than a quarter dollar."
11:59
the 24 year-old woman raped the girl, and the 43 year-old man helped hide the body?
is that a correct translation, or does the staff at ctv need some help with it's french?
there's a talking point headline about putin declaring martial law in the annexed regions of "new russia" this morning.
i am going to oppose martial law in all instances. what the article doesn't mention is that ukraine (all of it. even the west of it.) has been under martial law since february. nor could the annexed regions be considered areas of free expression or movement at the moment, regardless - there's soldiers everywhere guarding checkpoints and checking documents, and lingering fighting between militias and soldiers popping up in random places. the formality is likely primarily intended to allow for supplies to enter the region from russia.
war is a shitty situation. yet, the only purpose of the article is to skew your perception by framing the russians as uniquely authoritarian, when the reality on the ground is that the entire geographic space has been a warzone for months, and there is actually currently a conscription order in ukraine that bans men from escaping (something that is a far deeper rights restriction than the mobilization in russia).
what i'm trying to get across is that they're functionally identical societies and governments, because they're the same fucking people. if you are upset about the russians declaring martial law in a war zone (?), you'd have to be equally or more upset about zelensky having declared martial law in february, if you are to be logical in your analysis. the media won't let you make that equivocation, because it will skew the facts to warp your perception.
russia bad, ukraine good.
13:10
i didn't update my blood results this month.
this is the issue i'm still focusing on:
iron - 16 (lowish normal)
transferrin - 2.08 (lowish normal)
tibc - 0.52 (lowish normal) <------ weird
transferrin sat - 0.31 (midrange normal)
ferritin - 61, which is down a little
i have consumed less iron pills in recent months. it hasn't crashed, at least.
the lowish iron with lowish tibc once again strongly points to hemolysis. my tibc has progressively come way, way down; that has been roughly linear, while the rest of it has fluctuated.
my pth shot up to 5.6, which is the highest since the spring and is suggestive of the increased vitamin d saturation being from sun rather than pills, but i'm going to finish the experiment. the truth is that i'm probably not absorbing the vitamin d much at all, but i'm skeptical that much of anybody does. the reality is that there is no sufficient natural dietary source of vitamin d, so how were people getting it before they started consuming supplements, or fortified foods? the answer is that they weren't. humans simply need sunlight to absorb calcium.
however, my calcitonin is at 1.0, which is the highest i've ever seen it in months of testing, which just demonstrates the need to finish the experiment. if taking vitamin d pills can at least get my bone hormones regulating normally, maybe it's worth it. my tsh was at .89, fwiw, which is not unusual. i've never seen my tsh above 1.35.
everything else looks good, but i don't know what to do about the fact that i have multiple weird markers for hemolysis and can't get a doctor to take it seriously.
16:34
normally, if you have low iron in your blood, you have high tibc because your transferrin is unbounded. if you have low transferrin and low iron at the same time, it would suggest that you're actually transferrin deficient. logically, anyways.
a google search suggests this happens in advanced anemia, when it starts to damage your kidneys.
17:00
i can't vote in the united states, but i certainly would not be very excited about voting for a president that is obsessed with increasing oil production.
that is an entirely backwards policy.
17:30
thursday, october 20, 2022
elizabeth, we barely knew ye.
at least she got rid of that wretched old queen.
13:25
nononono, don't be silly.
qed.
13:29
i actually suspect this might be a difficult process for the tories, who may now have no discernible tactic.
at all.
13:30
i actually think that the cia made the right decision in assassinating jfk, as the man was an unstable and incompetent imbecile that behaved neurotically on repeated occasions and nearly blew up the world several times. he was psychologically unfit to be president, and legitimately had to be removed from power before his actions caused a nuclear war. if the evidence, in the end, proves it was lbj that did it, there is a strong argument that he was invoking section 4 of the 25th amendment of the constitution in the only way he could have.
jfk's most longstanding contribution to american history was an escalation in the vietnam war, but that's only because he failed to overturn brown v board, in his attempt to build alliances with racist democrats in the south. it's a sad irony of history that jfk gets credit for lbj's accomplishments, and it's long past time that that was corrected. the actual most dangerous person in world history was john f. kennedy, who is singularly responsible for the escalation of the vietnam war and acted like a juvenile retard in nearly ending it all in the cuban missile crisis.
the only mistake the cia made in taking out jfk was waiting too long; they should have taken him out before 1961.
i also think that the cia should have assassinated george w. bush and i am still weighing out whether they should assassinate biden. i don't have perfect information, but i am leaning towards it. the complication is that the cia is now equally at fault, so the system of checks and balances has broken down; the cia cannot assassinate itself, which means america has become a ticking global time bomb. the jfk assassination may have been the last time that the american intelligence apparatus was actually functioning properly. together, these are the three most dangerous and most incompetent american leaders of the last century.
17:48
just how mentally unfit for office was jfk?
i think the right argument is to look at his behaviour, but he was clinically diagnosed, while in office. this is not empty supposition.
there is some evidence that he was smoking marijuana and taking lsd. that might be an exaggeration, but the reality is that he was on large amounts of drugs during his time in office, in an attempt to control his symptoms. his irrational behaviour during the cuban missile crisis reflects his heavy drug use while in office.
you don't usually want to argue for assassinating people with psychological disorders, but there are extenuating scenarios.
if i was in the situation lbj was in, i would have probably assassinated jfk. i think that would have been the right decision to make, even if i suffered consequences for it. if it turns out that that is actually true, lbj should be seen as a hero, not a villain.
19:04
The medical records reveal that Kennedy variously took codeine, Demerol and methadone for pain; Ritalin, a stimulant; meprobamate andlibrium for anxiety; barbiturates for sleep;
i sometimes forget that the american media sanitizes the event using underwhelming terms like "blockade" to distort what actually happened. growing up in canada, i wasn't subject to that kind of distortion. yes, the event was taught in grade school, but from a neutral perspective. my teachers made it a point to explicitly refer to, explain, dismantle and counter the american propaganda around the event; i'd imagine that is unusual in an american high school. as a canadian, i learned about the broader geopolitical situation in grade 8 history class, without having to endure the jingoism and machismo that americans have forced down their throat about it. i didn't have to unlearn anything.
what kennedy did was more than merely "blockade" cuba. kennedy ordered the soviets not to move any further hardware into their sovereign ally, cuba, under threat of unilateral attack. what kennedy did was belligerently threaten khruschev with nuclear war if the russians merely moved equipment into an ally, something the americans had already done in turkey. what the russians were trying to do was return to an acceptable balance of power, where neither side had an advantage, to re-establish mutually assured destruction. in short, the russian behaviour was a rational reaction to an american provocation, and kennedy's response was tantamount to a school yard temper tantrum, when he didn't get the result he wanted from that provocation (which was submission).
in fact, kennedy had a death wish; he was constantly provoking the russians. he had an obsession with studying hitler's world war two tactics, and it's hard to conclude that there wasn't an intent to learn something from it.
i was not alive at the time, but, as a canadian, it would have been in my self-interest to re-establish mad and take away the strategic advantage the americans had in having their missiles positioned in turkey. even better than that, the most rational course of action would have been to withdraw the missiles from turkey, if kennedy could not accept the missiles in cuba; conversely, if kennedy insisted on maintaining missiles in turkey, it is only reasonable to accept that the russians wold need to place missiles in cuba, as a reaction. you can't have it both ways and if kennedy was rational, he would have understood that, instantly; he was not, and instead insisted on maintaining a strategic american nuclear advantage, to the extent of threatening a nuclear war over it. what kennedy's behaviour truly reflects is a deep level of entitlement instilled due to an upper class upbringing; he expected to be able to place his missiles in turkey, and further expected the russians to accept it without responding, which is just absurd. it's insane.
thankfully, khruschev realized he was dealing with an idiot, and reacted like an adult. you need to let kids scream their tantrums out, granted - unless the children have nuclear weapons (or are the child character from firestarter). when the kid finds a rifle, you let them have the candy, until you can take away the rifle. it is worth noting that the turkish missiles were removed by later presidents in a series of disarmament treaties, once america secured more mature leadership that was able to analyze the situation in a less juvenile manner.
i've long been utterly baffled by the seeming inability of americans to see the absurdity of kennedy's behaviour. it's more than propaganda, it indicates a certain chauvinism and irrationality inherent in the culture. worse, the media has been insistent for 60 years on framing an event that clearly broadcast the president's unfit mental state as an example of wise leadership. at some point, a re-evaluation rooted in logic rather than belligerence is going to need to happen.
in the long run, kennedy will not be treated kindly by history. he was a dangerous buffoon, and the cuban missile crisis is exhibit A in demonstrating the point.
20:05
the comments by this lower court judge are unfortunate and idiotic. there is a requirement in case law that threats must be believable, and this protester did not meet that very high bar. this is an example of protected speech; the judge is incorrect.
it is unfortunate that the protester plead guilty. he would have a strong case on appeal, as the conviction would absolutely certainly be overturned. the crown would have no chance to convict this person, had they not plead guilty. as it is, this sets a dangerous precedent that unleashes a chilling effect on free speech. thankfully, because it's at a lower court, it will have no real effect on future cases.
was this individual coerced into making a guilty plea under duress by duty counsel?
the only threat i see here to democracy is a creeping fascism in the judiciary due to poor judge selection, and a crybaby, aristocrat prime minister that doesn't believe in human rights.
the existing precedent requiring that threats be believable has not been overturned by this lower court ruling. future lower court justices will still be required to refer to the existing precedent, and the high bar it sets, or be overturned on appeal, should they refuse to do so.
this is merely an example of somebody getting atrociously bad legal advice, and a devastatingly poor outcome happening as a result of it.
22:35
i'm more concerned about the extremely conservative viewpoints expressed by the justice than i am about the existing precedent being altered. certainly, the justice should have deferred to case law and rejected the guilty plea, but i nonetheless have confidence that the existing precedent will be upheld in the higher courts, if challenged, although i might also encourage somebody to push the point, to make sure of it. viewpoints like those expressed by the justice have no place in a free and democratic society; this is a ruling you'd expect in a backwards country like iran, not something you'd expect from the legal system in a western democracy.
22:35
it makes you wonder what kind of political interference may have gone into it, as well.
we need to get ayatollah trudeau out of power asap.
22:44
so, is free expression illegal in canada, now?
no, even if this justice would like to outlaw it.
however, rights are something that you need to exercise, or you will lose them. confidence in the existing precedent should not be too badly shaken, but complacency is a bad idea. there is a lot of pressure coming from the political right at the moment to try to restrict speech rights. i would encourage protesters in ontario to gather with signs similar to the ones the protester held up, and then challenge the issue in higher courts, in order to clarify the legitimacy of the existing precedent, in the specific context.
22:52
i looked it up to be sure and the longstanding precedent from r v. clemente [1994] was recently upheld in r v. musara [2022] at the ontario superior court.
The actus reus is made out if a reasonable person aware of the circumstances in which the words were uttered would have perceived them to be a threat of death or bodily harm. It is not required that the intended recipient of the threat be made aware of it, or they were intimidated by it or took it seriously. The mens rea is made out if the accused intended the words uttered or conveyed to intimidate or be taken seriously. It is not necessary to prove an intent that the words be conveyed to the subject of the threat or that the accused intended to carry out the threat: R. v. McRae, 2013 SCC 68, [2013] 2 S.C.R. 931. Words spoken in jest or in such a manner that they could not be taken seriously, cannot lead a reasonable person to conclude that the words conveyed a threat: R. v. Clemente, 1994 CanLII 49 (SCC), [1994] 2 S.C.R. 758.
holding up a sign with a noose at a protest is not a serious threat and there is no possibility that a higher court would rule that it is.
23:10
there's been a lot of really horrific rulings in lower courts recently that have demonstrated the flaws inherent to political appointments to the court.
that is my reaction to this ruling and others similar to it in lower courts, recently: the credibility of the legal system is currently fraying.
23:12
this isn't a game. this isn't a technicality.
uttering a threat isn't about harming somebody's reputation, or making them feel uncomfortable, or causing an inconvenience, or embarrassing somebody in a photo op. the case law is as it is for a reason, and it's not determined by a computer crunching an algorithm; the crown needs to convince a live, human judge that the threat is believable, or it's not punishable in canada, nor should it be. the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the seriousness of the threat needs to be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt to prove guilt.
signs held up at these protests are outside of the purview of the case law. nor does a lower court judge have any mandate or any jurisdiction to "send a message to protesters". this is not the role of the judiciary in a free society. the judge is simply completely fucking wrong, and in fact is completely fucking out of line. let me send a message back to the justice: fuck you, and fuck off. your job is to interpret case law, and you have utterly failed in your task, in this case. the court is not your blog; you are out of order. yet, who talked the protester into pleading guilty in a situation where the crown had no chance of conviction, in the first place?
23:20
as more politically motivated cases work their way through the courts in canada, the outside world needs to begin to question the independence and the competency of our judiciary. this particular case may be a triviality, but it's reflective of a larger and growing problem. every time a case like this appears, where the justice is operating entirely outside of any direction provided by case law and is instead just stating their personal opinion, the question needs to be asked, louder and louder: does canada still have a functioning, independent judiciary, or are we collapsing back into the arbitrariness of an aristocratic or feudal judiciary?
23:26
friday, october 21, 2022
i cannot find a case in canlii where r v. clemente is used to prosecute any protester, anywhere. this appears to be unique, which is that much more concerning, as it was brought in without a trial.
i need to reiterate that this ruling does not adjust the precedent and would certainly be overturned if the sap that plead guilty would have had the good sense to fight it. was he promised a deal, only to have the judge shit all over it? that might be grounds for appeal, itself.
we can't have a 30 year-old precedent over-turned on a false guilty plea due to bad advice or duress in the court of justice. that's absurd. i want this fought, somehow, damnit.
the liberal party of canada is famous for campaigning in the centre and governing on the right. nobody in canada thinks of the liberals as left-wing. nor do i consider these protesters to be right-wingers by any conventional standards. i am characterizing this as a right-wing attack on free speech because that is what it actually is; i've chosen that language carefully.
however, the historical argument on the real left for "supporting speech rights for right-wing protesters" is that the government is going to use those precedents to attack us, in the end. the state builds the precedent up by attacking nazis (and, this person was not a nazi.), and then ignores the nazis and instead uses it to stamp out the left. this is a bigger concern in canada than most places, as we have a lot of protest movements around indigenous and environmental rights concerns that the liberals would like to mow down, amongst other things.
so, the fact that the precedent is not overturned notwithstanding, let us imagine a future where this justice's interpretation of s. 264.1 might be applied more generally, such as to abortion or anti-pipeline protesters, and let us frame the context in a post-morgentaler reality, for effect.
if you hold up a sign that signs "my body, my choice", or that has a clothes hangar on it, is that not uttering a threat to the unborn? if we apply the logic used in this ruling, we'd have to charge abortion protesters with uttering threats. if you hold up a picture of a forest on fire at a climate protest, that would also constitute uttering a threat.
what i'm trying to get across is an old argument, which is that real leftists continually find themselves supporting speech rights for the right because they can think through the consequences. you might not like this protester, and that's ok. however, if you let them take away his rights on flimsy grounds like this, you might wake up to find out that your own rights are now also gone.
when they came for the anti-vaxxers, i said nothing...
1:29
workers of the world, unite! you have nothing to lose but your chains! <----banned. uttering threats against the bourgeoisie.
1:51
speech rights are under attack! what do we do? stand up, fight back! <-----banned. promoting violence.
1:57
the people united can never be defeated. <-----banned. threatening the status quo.
2:02
fight for socialist revolution?
that's pretty threatening, to any capitalist. throw the fucker in jail.
2:03
children taking charge?
we need action?
if the ocean dies, we all die?
this is clearly threatening language, especially if you're an oil executive. better round these kids up, and give them a good beating with clubs while we're at it, to send them a message.
2:08
system change, not climate change, huh?
clearly threatening language.
2:14
she clearly needs a good beating, to send her a message.
2:18
these criminals should clearly be sent to jail for threatening to decapitate donald trump and light his severed head on fire.
2:36
i think my point is clear enough.
the justice may frankly be too stupid to understand the consequences of his ruling, but it all sounds fine and nice, regardless - until you apply it in reality. it's fun to take away the rights of the people you don't agree with, why waste time with intellectual consistency? would the justice apply the ruling equally, and send these anti-trump protesters to jail? no, of course not. yet, some other judge would, and the cops would certainly love to give the system the chance. what i'm doing here is required to get ideas across to regular plebs, but this kind of analysis shouldn't be necessary to wake a judge up; the judge is tasked with this kind of analysis, and has simply failed in his function. this is what the ruling should have looked like.
i am consequently going to call on justice craig parry to immediately resign, for authoring the worst ruling i have ever seen. mr. parry should acknowledge his own incompetence and step down.
2:47
there's a famous quote that guides me on this issue.
Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.
that is not apocryphal.
there is a video here:
3:00
the most important ballot issue facing americans right now needs to be ending the stupid war in eastern europe, which is going to mean withdrawing funding for it and letting the russians rebuild their civilization without western interference. this is a role reversal for the parties, but it's not the first time it's happened.
the democrats are currently the party of military contracts and war industry financing, and the republicans are the party opposing that. opposition to war is a primary ballot issue for a lot of voters, and i would include myself in that list. i have voted against war my whole life, and i'm not going to reverse positions, now.
i'm somewhat skeptical, granted, but i'll need to react to evidence and, right now, this would be one of the biggest ballot issues in front of me. we have no business in ukraine and need out asap.
democratic representatives that are bought and paid for by defense industry corporations (adam schiff is one of the worst and most prominent) can be expected to vote in a certain manner, but it will be interesting to see how the fake left reacts. how does a bernie sanders or an aoc react to a proposal like this?
if i was one of them, and i found myself with a tie-breaking vote, i would see no reason to support the biden administration, given it's deceptive treatment of me in the past. conversely, if they align with the war industry, it will be a strong message regarding where they actual stand on the spectrum, which is in truth on the far right.
if you look at a map, the absurdity of this fake country called azerbaijan becomes rather apparent. that enclave separated from the rest of the country shouldn't exist and can't exist, in the long run. it's already caused a lot of problems and can do nothing but cause more problems, should it continue to exist.
armenia, which speaks a language that is thought to be genealogically related to greek but is also oddly a satem branch of indo-european, has historically been a client state of greater iran. the theory is that armenia was a part of the broader greco-hittite cultural sphere before it became satem by using persian currency, during the achaemenid period. achaemenid rule actually continued in this region into the roman era (look up mithradates eupater); the region was greco-persian after alexander, which left it as a boundary region for the full extent of the thousand year roman-persian war. more recently, armenia has been left stranded as one of the few remaining christian/byzantine enclaves in the middle east, and for that reason, like other christian areas under muslim imperial rule, has come under russian protection - or suffered grave consequences, while forced to fend for itself. it has also been periodically conquered and colonized by imperialist muslims, who have repeatedly failed at assimilating it. putin seems to be disinterested in armenia for apparent ethnic reasons, which has opened up a space for the french to claim it as a christian enclave, in some kind of crusader-type logic. to the extent that armenia is a christian enclave, it is clearly eastern rite, and would not accept the authority of france or italy. the absence of a strong orthodox presence in constantinople leaves armenia orphaned, and only the russians, as the inheritor of byzantium, can truly protect it in a coherent manner; if the russians have abandoned armenia, they will be left to suffer terrible consequences. eu interference in armenia will not be accepted by the armenian people.
the easiest way to solve this border conflict annoyance from escalating is for iran to annex the small amount of azerbaijan that is separated from the larger part, which is something i proposed several months ago. that would maintain the corridor the article talks about, but it would also sweep the rug out from under the azeri-armenian conflict that is occurring in the region by taking away the point of contention. the region is historically and ethnically iranian (kurds and persians are both iranians, and those of us that support a secular revolution in iran generally see a strong place for the kurds in tehran) and should have been transferred to iran in the first place, on the collapse of the soviet union.
if the azeris want to bully the smaller armenians around, they will have little argument to make, should the bigger iranians then come in and start pushing the smaller azeris around. nonetheless, if the azeris then want to pick a fight with the iranians, they can weigh that out, and consequently weigh out whether erdogan will support such a war. the azeris would require turkish support in a conflict with iran.
one would hope that iran would respect the armenian border, even if they consider the azeri border to be a false construction.
i'm exceedingly critical of the theocratic iranian state and would like to see the government fall, but iran is an ancient world power that will continue to exist; if the iranians can do this quickly and painlessly, it will help resolve tensions, rather than escalate them. yet, if they fail, it could open up a second front in what is spiralling out into a world war. the french are focused on armenia because they don't really understand armenia well; nato's geo-strategic interests, and the american military focus, has actually been on the azeris, through the turkish proxy. azerbaijan is a likely candidate for eventual nato expansion; armenia is a member of the csto.
the russians claim that the drones that they're using aren't iranian at all, which puts the situation into some context. media reports in the west have been trying to smear the iranians as a party to the conflict in novorussiya, and the only possible reason is that the pentagon is planning a strike. the turks are in a logical mess, and could very well collapse any day now from the contradictions of it, but they are supposed to be acting as a conduit for nato support for the azeris. the iranians are supposed to be aligned with the russians, who are supposed to be aligned with the armenians. georgia exists between russia and armenia and will certainly be drawn into any conflict.
if you're an armenian archduke, please avoid public appearances until further notice.
it is a better idea to have iran quickly swallow azerbaijan back up than have it sit there and eventually be occupied by nato troops, leading to an inevitable massive war. nato has no place in the caspian, but it will walk in, if allowed to. this conflict only ends once the integrating asian superstate finds a way to consolidate itself, which means taking control of azerbaijan (which is a major transit point), one way or another.
if we want to fight over greece or something, that makes some sense; azerbaijan is way too far into historically iranian territory, and the best outcome is for the iranians to just seize control with as little violence as possible.
18:05
this silliness about history being over is done away with, now. borders are being redrawn. the focus needs to be mitigating destruction and death.
18:08
i don't generally consider gun control to be a ballot issue; i have a tendency to oppose rules, but i don't like guns very much, so these are not rules i'm very upset about. i have never been in the same room as a gun of any type, to my knowledge.
the science does not uphold the idea that gun control is effective in reducing crime, nor are such discussions really to be taken seriously, which ought to shift the discourse around gun control to the elimination of political dissent, except that such discussions are absurdly naive. no serious revolutionary group is going to be very concerned about gun control legislation, nor is access to firearms of the same value to revolutionaries that it was in the 18th century. as a revolutionary, i hardly think i'm going to win a shooting war against the canadian military, and would rather make it abundantly clear to my fellow revolutionaries that such proposed tactics are retarded. i fully expect that the state realizes this; the premise of an anarchist group storming parliament with hunting rifles is not a serious concern, and does not require state action to prevent.
if gun control is not about reducing crime and is not about suppressing dissent, what is the actual point? the opposition is correct to look at these proposals and say "this is unnecessary", but that's just exactly it, it's just empty politics. there is no value to the legislation at all, so it's not even worth anybody's time to oppose it. it's just something for the liberals to talk about during the next election.
...except that the pmo is using the delay in advancing the legislation as a flimsy excuse to subvert the democratic process in pushing through legislation in the form of regulatory orders-in-council, which is an unprecedented abuse of power. regulations and legislation are not the same thing, and no prime minister should be attempting to undermine the democratic process in passing regulations in place of legislation. the prime minister is not the king; he serves at the discretion and amusement of parliament, and is subject to parliamentary oversight. that the issue in question is about gun rights is ironic, but the authoritarianism and fascism to be resisted here is in the use of an order-in-council in replace of legislation. that should not be normalized, as it does away with the democratic process. it's just the latest example of the prime minister's openly fascistic and undemocratic behaviour.
i'm really not concerned about the legislation, one way or another, but we clearly need to reform the regulatory process to prevent this kind of abuse of power. that is my concern about this drama, unfolding around bill c-21.
the process may be lengthy, but the prime minister needs to sit down and shut up and wait for it to finish. his impatience ought to be of no relevance; his decision to abuse this power and act like a despot must be met by a movement to take it away from him.
19:00
i would argue that the privy council should be abolished. outright. there is no need to replace the function - it's a superfluous body. parliament should be supreme.
however, i acknowledge that that position may be too radical for most canadians.
we need to debate the topic, clearly; we can't keep electing prime minsters that think they can act like kings, and go out of their way to avoid the parliament.
19:12
the liberals do not currently even have a majority government. they should not be passing any regulations or orders in council, at all, let alone regulations that were previously introduced as legislation.
19:20
a more moderate approach may be to launch a systematic review of enabling legislation, in order to remove and abolish the authority of ministers to make decisions independent of parliament.
19:28
likewise, the claim that the country needs to be "fiscally responsible" because of a recession (???) is entirely incoherent, and certainly economically illiterate. governments are supposed to spend more during a recession, not less, and i can assure you that we will, even if the conservatives manage to get into power in the next few months. fiscal responsibility is what causes recessions.
however, trudeau thinks his voters want him to be "fiscally responsible", because they're all old men that used to vote for paul martin. on that point, he's probably correct.
the end result is that his words have no policy implications, and not much should be thought of them.
22:00
the data from last month was distorted by doug ford's gas tax cut, but the data for this month is in and inflation has actually gone up. like, total cpi. that's worse than the united states, which is already in recession (we have narrowly avoided a technical recession, but the economy has nonetheless been halted for months). the rate hikes have done nothing, except shoot ourselves in the face.
the correct response by the government, given that it cannot fire the idiot bank of canada leadership, ought to be to increase spending. no, that won't create inflation - that is not an actual economic theory, it's political propaganda invented from whole cloth by ronald reagan (milton friedman said something very, very different). you'll note that reagan actually ran massive deficits from keynesian war spending, but i digress.
we're already in recession, it's just a question of how bad it gets. unfortunately, the government is fiddling while the economy burns, rather than releasing required stimulus.
22:11
saturday, october 22, 2022
the barenaked ladies were a one-hit wonder?
that's a strange claim. did you mean this one?
i was in elementary school when that record was released, but it was very popular, and it produced a string of high charting singles over 1992-1993, in a period when i was young enough to care about such things:
be my yoko ono:
enid was a number one hit, i believe:
grade 9:
brian wilson:
that was certainly my favourite record of 1992, at the age of 11. it remains highly formative, and something i go back to from time to time.
their original claim to fame was a video of a bruce cockburn song filmed in a phone booth in toronto (operated by muchmusic tv) called "speaker's corner"
that video was so well received, it got heavy play on muchmusic and launched their career.
i did try out the next record, maybe you should drive, but i found it lacked the quirkiness. it wasn't any fun. it is true that my tastes changed a lot between 1992 and 1994, as well.
i have not kept up with their material and am not very aware of what they've done since, but they were a fixture on canadian radio for several years in the 1990s. suggesting that their only hit was "if i had a million dollars" would be empirically wrong, and any canadian alive at the time would tell you that.
it's a weird thing to hear.
1:34
the original classic cockburn tune of course had a very different thematic context.
2:10
the ubiquity of the barenaked ladies in canada from about 1990-1994 means that they were a major influence on virtually every canadian indie rock band that formed after 1995, because they were unavoidable. even if you hated them, that hate would have still influenced you. that observation is not frivolous, either - the instrumentation choices, for example, show up across canadian rock music for decades afterwards.
2:12
(note: if you were at this page between when it was posted this morning around 4:00 am and when i woke up around 9:30 am, all times est, it was edited by the canadian government (currently under the control of the canadian liberal party) to make it more in line with the liberal party's governing policies. i am very, very far to the left of the canadian liberal party on the political spectrum and i do not support and have never supported the sitting liberal government in canada, which i consider to be an extreme right-wing government. i consider justin trudeau to be a fascist dictator in the process of seizing absolute power; we have a race against time to stop him from crowning himself king. i consider the ndp to be a moderate conservative party. i would not support any of the parties in the british spectrum, either. this is an intellectually distant, scholarly analysis from a canadian anarcho-communist that is intended to increase understanding of current events for purely altruistic reasons, it is not a piece of political propaganda designed to alter opinions for some undefined self-interested political reason. as of around 11:00 am, est, i have updated it with corrections. it is likely to be altered again. when posts of this sort are targeted by the state for alteration in order to be placed in line with their official propaganda, it is not because the arguments presented in them are incorrect, but because i am explaining something that they don't want to be understood; evidence of alteration is evidence that i'm correct.)
what exactly happened to elizabeth truss? it was all over so fast.
the narrative is that she tried to push a tax cut package through, and the market had a hysterical overreaction, under baseless and economically illiterate fears that it would be inflationary. this is entirely incoherent psychobabble. no, tax cuts don't cause inflation, that's retarded; nor would investors, who benefit from tax cuts for the upper class, be likely to react against their self-interest in such an irrational and foolish manner. that narrative has no connection to reality.
it's certainly going to be a long time before we know what actually happened, but my perception is that her tax policy was seen as counteracting the war effort, which is a dangerous and frightening signal as to how our ruling class perceives the nature of the conflicts unfolding in eastern europe, and perhaps also in east asia.
first, let me clearly explain what truss actually did, for those that don't entirely understand.
the messaging being broadcast was that tax cuts for the upper class would spur the economy, which is the correct approach in the current context of imminent or already existing recession, but only if the tax cuts are targeted towards a specific subset of middle income earners, in order to act as keynesian stimulus, rather than towards the upper class, where such policies are ineffective. whether the stock market reacts like retards in response or not, we are in fact in a recessionary period and keynesian economic stimulus is in fact the correct response; if the prime minister implements the correct policy, and the market goes full retard in response, it is the market that is responsible for the consequences of it's own stupidity and the prime minister should consequently be shielded from criticism for making the non-mistake of implementing the correct policy. in that scenario, you dig in and let investors have their juvenile temper tantrum; it will not take long before they clean up their own mess. this is a general truth: if the market decides to be retarded in response to the pmo implementing a correct policy, it is the market that needs to take responsibility for the consequences of it's retarded behaviour, not the pmo for carrying through with the correct policy. the government cannot be coerced into behaving foolishly on the demand of market ignorance; the government sets tax policy, not the market. unfortunately, the tax cuts introduced by the prime minister were geared at the wrong income bracket to be effective as keynesian stimulus, as the upper class doesn't increase spending when given more money to spend for the reason that it already has more than enough money, and therefore giving it more money to spend doesn't alter how it decides to spend. nor are tax cuts geared towards the poorest helpful to the economy, as it doesn't get spent usefully (it pays down debt, or is wasted on beer and popcorn). economically useful tax cuts in an economic downturn are geared towards middle income earners, in a limited income range that will actually spend money when it is given to them for that purpose.
no, giving people money to spend isn't inflationary, and there isn't a theory that says it is. there is no such thing as government debt; that is a misleading abuse of language. however, whether wealth is centralized or distributed is an important consideration, in context. i'll get to that.
now, that aside, this isn't the logic used by truss, anyways. truss may have presented keynesian arguments about stimulus spending in an economic downturn to justify her tax cuts (which were not thatcherian or neo-liberal in function, at all. biden clearly didn't understand the words he was using, but that's normal.), but the truth is that it was just a handout to her class interests. truss very likely reasoned that a tax cut for those experiencing the effects of the interest rate hikes (property owners) would offset the effects of those interest rate hikes, thereby undoing the bank's policy, which is pulling wealth out of the economy and back into the state, and using inflation as a bullshit, transparent excuse to do so. she was very likely strictly concerned about the bank account balances of people in her social strata, rather than malevolently out to undo the bank's policies, but the outcome is the same, regardless of her intent.
what the tax policy under discussion did was effectively transfer wealth from the state to the market for imminent destruction, at a time when the bank is trying to destroy paper wealth, while it monopolizes real wealth. while this might offset the negative effects of the bank's wealth destroying policies on individuals in private markets, it does so at the expense of destroying state assets, instead, which are pulled away from the state and sacrificed to save the individual wealth of the individual being protected. the result is a cannibalistic policy, where the state ends up destroying the country's real wealth, when what the bank is trying to do is abolish the country's paper wealth, in order to monopolize the real wealth.
this language looks insane, and it is in every scenario except the one we're in, which is the one where our deep state is preparing us for a world war. underneath the heaping piles of propaganda and bullshit, what the state is actually doing is seizing absolute control over all of society's wealth so it can spend it on war. via the monetary machinations being set in motion, all wealth will be expropriated by the state and used for war.
exactly what happened to create a melt down in the market might not be totally clear, but it indicates the level of control that can be dialed into trading on demand, if desired. what we really learned this month is that there is enough market wealth centralized in britain in enough powerful hands that the pentagon can break the market by phoning instructions in.
truss herself may not fully understand what happened, but it was clearly decided that she could not continue. she may have never been in the loop, so she may have not needed to have been cut out from it.
as a citizen that does not want war, the signal i'm getting, and it is one of many, is that the issue is not up for debate: we will have war and we will have recession and austerity to pay for it. i can criticize what the bank is doing on academic grounds, but i'm missing the point; the state is centralizing resources, in preparation for a major war which our young people and working class will be conscripted to die in in order to advance the economic interests of the ruling class. the propaganda presented in the media to justify these insane banking decisions doesn't make any sense because it isn't really supposed to, it's just a lot of distractions, smoke, mirrors and bullshit.
3:43
i might actually advise that elon musk consider physically relocating himself somewhere outside of continental north america.
14:32
it's not about his politics, that's just an excuse.
what they really want is to steal his money.
14:43
sunday, october 23, 2022
monday, october 24, 2022
To shore up their fiscal credentials in time for a duel with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, would Trudeau’s Liberals be willing to take the risk of calling a possible NDP bluff about plunging the country into yet another general election by introducing shades of austerity in the spring budget?
ms. hebert is analyzing the issue properly, but she has the idea backwards. i am somebody that has often voted liberal historically because i prefer their economic approach, which is that of a mixed economy keynesian party, over the economic ideas presented by the ndp, which have often been populist and/or incoherent.
what i'm getting at is that if the liberals want to ensure their "fiscal credentials" going into a recession, they need to get across the idea that they understand that you have to spend money in a recession. going into an election with the messaging that they need fiscal restraint in a recession is going to undermine their dominant historical argument, which is that they better understand how to manage the economy than the other parties. if you're a conservative, you're going to vote conservative; everybody else is going to decide the liberals have lost their mind, and vote ndp instead.
canadians understand that you don't want austerity going into a recession, that recessions require increases in spending, not decreases in spending. canadians are not advocates of the chicago school and do not follow poor readings of the writings of milton friedman, regarding pseudo-intellectual causes of inflation. if that is mr. polievre's messaging, the liberals would do well to get out of the way and let him make a fool of himself.
conversely, the ndp should be jumping for joy at the news that the liberals want to argue for austerity going into an election that is happening as the country enters into a recession. that position is going to win the ndp scores of baffled liberal voters, who expect a keynesian policy from a keynesian party, and would have just voted for the conservatives in the first place, if that was what they were.
13:48
tuesday, october 25, 2022
i agree with them and would strongly support them voting with republicans to block war funding.
14:18
the outrageously undemocratic coup that just happened in the united kingdom should be viewed skeptically by advocates of democracy. while the process clearly indicates massive democratic backsliding in the united kingdom, the truth is that it is not outside of the traditions of the house of commons for parties to elect their leaders without consulting their voters. rishi sunak is no benjamin disraeli, but the manner in which he was installed would have made sense to disraeli, even if it seems bizarre to most of us.
what is important now is that the united kingdom has an election, at once, with as minimal delays as are possible, to avoid collapsing into despotism and backwardsness.
fwiw, i would give mr. sunak a roughly 10% chance of winning an election in the uk, and those are not odds that will better in time. the united kingdom has a more complicated ethnic history than most places in europe (it has been repeatedly settled and colonized by distant and obscure picts, lingering celts, expelled romans, despised franks and many waves of dominant north germans (angles, saxons, danes, norse). england is a melting pot of languages and cultures. some claim english is even a pidgin.), but it is not a colony and it has grounds to expect to be led by it's own, rather than by outsiders. this is different than a country like canada or the united states, which welcomes waves of immigrants from wherever it can get them because it is an extractive colonial state with no inherent ethnic basis or connection to the land. to use 19th century language, the united kingdom is a nation-state; the united states is not. if the tories are wiped out in the next election, nobody should blame the english for it.
keir starmer is no saviour for the uk or for the left, but his chances of being the next prime minister are now astronomical, and an election must be held as soon as possible.
21:47
wednesday, october 26, 2022
if you haven't actually watched the video, you should. it's like a clip from the godfather.
china has no substantive history of democratic or council-democracy type governance, it is a society that has really always had an emperor, and suffered under periodic phases of warring tribalism when there is not one. in the context of chinese history, this is not particularly unusual. however, it is important to understand what china is as the war picks up; china is an empire, and it is shifting into direct fascism.
i found some evidence of extreme alteration - a post that was modified to suggest i thought the assad government is illegitimate. this is strictly false. i stand in full solidarity with the extremely popular and legitimately democratically elected assad government and by extension with the syrian people in their struggle against the barbarism of islamic extremism. the assad government is the fully legitimate government in syria, and the saudi-backed rebel groups are an illegitimate joke.
this was never a safe place to leave my thoughts, and i was naive to think it was.
it must all come down, immediately.
16:05
i have now unpublished this blog and will unpublish the others shortly. i didn't want to have to do this, but i clearly didn't have any other option. leaving posts on the internet for the government to edit at will was foolish.
the posts are not deleted. they will be republished, once they've been reformatted to be read linearly (like a book) and re-edited to remove as much corruption as i can remove. this is going to be a lengthy process.
i need to make a salad, but a reflective post will appear in this space, soon.
18:32
the syrian government is by far the most liberal government in the middle east, and that includes israel. i could criticize some of their policies, certainly, but they are the best model in the region at this point, given erdogan's dramatic steps backwards in turkey.
the reality is that they are a secular and quasi-socialist government, and stand alone in the region, in that sense. that is why they are being targeted by religious extremists, who have no support in the syrian populace.
19:22
i do support some sort of kurdish autonomy, but not over the currently arab areas that they have recently conquered. it should be remembered that the kurds were primary participants in and benefactors of the armenian genocide and that the regions the kurds currently occupy were largely historically armenian or assyrian, which were both primarily christian groups. the turks really didn't get what they intended; they replaced armenians with kurds. mosul is built on top of the ancient assyrian centre of ninevah, but there are no assyrians there anymore, not since 1915. we can't bring the assyrians or armenians back, but the kurds will need to return the areas they conquered to syrian control, whatever that means in specificity.
19:56
thursday, october 27, 2022
(obviously, the idiots will try to edit this post, as well. i'll check back periodically to try to fix it.)
many years ago, now - in the last years of the first decade of the current century - i set up a facebook page as a place i could post analysis and criticism of news articles to. i chose the name dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja for that facebook page, to mirror a pseudonym i had been using to post to the comments section at cbc. it did not take long for the page to fill up with hundreds, if not thousands, of links, which left me struggling to organize it. worse, facebook then eliminated the timeline feature from the site, which made hosting a page of that nature on facebook to be untenable. yet, i continued to post there until the end of 2015, when i decided to take all of my facebook posts down with the intent of posting them to a web page in archive form, and used the event of quitting smoking as a process in which to do so.
this was supposed to be a short term project; i was supposed to finish the archiving within a few months, quit smoking and then get on with finishing my discography. while i succeeded in quitting smoking over that period, i have yet to seriously get back to recording. this is disturbing to me, because that is now a long time ago.
at the end of 2016, i started posting material that i would have previously posted to the aforementioned facebook site to google+, which was intended to be temporary. this google+ page was cross-listed to a youtube profile called deathtokoalas which posted analysis and review of pop culture media, and hosted my own art, which is primarily original music. my pop media analysis generated large amounts of clicks due to it's ironic and sarcastic nature, and i believe that this is where i first generated attention from intelligence agencies and political operatives, who tied my growing popularity as a media analyst to a potential audience for my political analysis (despite the reality that they had nothing to do with each other). they may have consequently become confused about what was generating interest; that doesn't make what has happened any less concerning.
i created this blog in it's current incarnation at the start of 2017 and intended for it to be a permanent place to hold a 50+ year blog, running from 1996, and then 1989, until whenever i die. the archive section on the side allowed for access to posts in a way that was similar to the timeline that had been discontinued, and was more or less exactly what i wanted to replace the timeline feature. the blog itself would be sectioned up and entered into my discography in the form of liner notes, or could be read as a series of short novellas, on it's own. while i have since gone through a number of detours, trying to find a way to manage this mass of writing has taken up most of my time since 2017. in grappling with a logical way to process this writing, i have repeatedly found myself trapped in series of temporal loops that i refer to as "recursion". after succeeding in archiving almost all of my posts from 2005-2015 over 2016 and 2017, i was able to build the skeletons of several archives over 2018 and get some liner notes published in 2019 and 2020, before getting lost in various trivial research projects over 2020 and 2021. i have been trying repeatedly to get back to work since early 2021 and have not been able to, as every time i am on the brink of it, i realize that the writing is being manipulated, and i get stuck in some process to try to recover it. while i have generated a huge amount of writing since 2017, and especially since 2020, i feel like i've largely wasted my time fighting battles with intelligence operatives that i don't care about winning, and need to find an exit strategy, immediately.
i made a decision to incrementally take this blog down a few weeks ago, by slowly converting it into a series of monthly archives. today, i accidentally found a post that was edited to reverse the political position expressed in the original post (a pro-assad post was edited to make it look anti-assad), and i decided i had to take all of the posts down, immediately. i don't know how bad it is.
i have always had two distinct online identities, one for political activism and one for music composition. like most artists, i do not consider my art to exist in a vacuum; in many ways, my art is about politics. yet, i am an artist, and not a politician, and when i engage in politics, i do so from the perspective of an artist or an activist and not from the perspective of a politician. i seek to analyze and comment from a distance; i do not seek to participate in events, take control over people or wield any sort of power. the world of politics is dirty, corrupt and disgusting to me.
my intent in posting comments on popular media youtube videos was to draw attention to my art, which was moderately successful, as visits to my bandcamp site rose dramatically; in the process, i have attracted the attention of intelligence agencies to my politics, which was not my intent. rather than succeed in using social media to build a platform and audience for my art, i have simply found myself under incredible levels of state surveillance for my politics, and have been shut down and out of the system as a result of it. my youtube posts (which were mostly non-political) have been shadow-banned, for the apparent crime of generating too many likes. state agents seek to pick fights with me in an attempt to make me look "uncool", in a clear inversion of my intent and purpose in posting (i'm certainly not "cool"! the character of deathtokoalas played the role of the aloof nerd that made fun of everything popular, which made it the precise opposite character of the "cool kid". deathtokoalas is beyond cool; she looks down on being cool, and mocks coolness as vapidity and stupidity. deathtokoalas spits in the face of the cool people and tells them to die because they're cool. i've had to play along because it actually plays into the purposeful uncoolness of the character, as the idiots think that they're winning by making me look unpopular, because they bafflingly think i was trying to be cool, when i was in fact trying to be uncool or anti-cool. they don't get it. yet, it's become tiring, because i know it's not real.). more recently, i've become aware of the contents of this blog being altered to properly align with the propaganda i'm using the space to deconstruct, as though somebody decided that it would be more useful to take control of the site than shut it down. i cannot allow for that.
i have struggled to understand the nature of the situation, because i have been led to believe that western governments do not interfere with artists in this manner. in hindsight, that was naive. this site is intended to connect with fans of my art who might be interested in my perspectives, but has instead been interpreted as some kind of propaganda outlet or counter-culture reference site, and attacked as though it is being run by an enemy of the state. i cannot plead not guilty, but i am baffled at being perceived of as a serious threat; i'm just a loser blogger, who gives a fuck? as mentioned, i have been led to believe that western governments would not bother an artist in this manner and have been proven wrong in that belief. at this point, western intelligence no longer respects or acknowledges any sort of difference between art and propaganda, which is arguably an outrageous breach of free speech and is arguably a realistic analysis of agitprop and culture jamming, and i do acknowledge dabbling in both spaces in my art, which is unquestionably inherently political in construction. i ultimately really don't understand why this is seen as important, in a culture that would have historically just ignored me. yet, it's clear enough that i'm not getting anywhere in arguing for free expression in art with these people.
the frustrating thing is that i'm not able to prove any sort of editing, which makes the situation that much more frightening. am i losing my mind, or is this really happening? i have recently begun to suspect that the posts at blogger are synced to the email notifications on the backend, meaning that changing the posts automatically changes the emails. this is insane, but it seems to be true. i've been struggling with this for quite some time now, and i've just come to a point where i've decided that proving it to myself doesn't matter any more. in the long run, i will need somewhere safe to store my data, and the blogger servers at google are just simply not it; if the canadian government is not already altering it today, the saudi government might do so tomorrow, and the cia might step in the day after that. it's just, structurally, a bad solution. leaving your writing on the internet is an invitation for it to be co-opted.
i suppose i didn't have the foresight to realize the size of this archive, but, in hindsight, i should have. i should have made a better choice in 2017 and avoided a lot of wasted time. alas.
now what?
if i've been trying to get out of recursion for years, what i have done has just smashed it up, and without even so much as a machine gun etiquette. i don't know exactly how i approach this now, but all of these subtle considerations about wanting to build this or that, without wanting to repeat myself, have now just imploded; everything has been taken down completely, and i'm left with a single narrative to rebuild.
the logical thing for me to do is to start in 2013 and repost the entire blog from scratch in journal form, once it's been corrected, but i'm worried about timeframes. like, do you realize how long that's going to take? that's another two years of working strictly on compiling old writing, when i want to be recording.
worse, i've learned that i'm not going to shake whatever is trailing me. these are serious spooks that are obsessed with me, due to an apparent misprojection of my audience. there was a time five or six years ago when i had a substantive and growing audience as a music and youtube critic, but the system shut me down under an apparent fear that i was building a political audience. i never had a political audience then, and i certainly do not have one, now. as far as i can tell, the only people reading this blog are the spooks.
i'm left with the need to blow the whole thing up for both reasons: (1) i can't shake the spooks and (2) i'm running out of time to finish the music, which is the actual point.
when i came in on the 12th after a bike ride, i decided to spend a few days getting my writing machine installed correctly so that i could get a process running. just when i was finishing that up, the usb key that i keep legal documents on imploded, and i sat down to organize tens of thousands of emails over two massive archives, to rebuild the folder from source, comprehensively, and make these documents easy to find again, if required. before i started that, i was pulling posts down from blogger and archiving them in html files, with the intent of recursing back to the start of 2021, when i put the diet blog aside. i was going to somehow do ten things at once, when i've barely been able to do one for years.
so much has happened since the end of 2015 that i feel justified in starting over again from scratch, but what that means in functionality is picking up again in 2013 and running through the journals, but only to the extent of finishing the music journal component. if my goal is to get on a 20 year time frame, and i want to shake the spooks off, i will need to leave the other journals for release dates starting in 2033, at the latest; i will need to complete all of the music from 1996-2013 (including the liner notes with components written over 2013-2022) before i can publish the political journals for 2013 onwards, as projects dated to 2013 onwards. i hope that's understood - that it could be 20 years before this is republished.
i want to keep these blogs up because i like the idea of a search functionality across the entirety of the writing and that is not presented by posting to sporadic pdf and html documents. if it was a cute idea to have it presented in blog form in 2017, the unworkableness of that approach is now overwhelming; you can't read the blog that way. however, i am going to need to go dormant on the political analysis until i blow the spooks off, and i will need to ensure that i have the data stored somewhere other than here, while i do that. all evidence suggests this could take a very long time, because i can't get my harmlessness across. these spooks are serious, but they're also dumb as fuck. you'd have to be fucking retarded, but here we are.
i may tweak my plan as i unfold it. i will certainly be typing many things somewhere in this down period. however, i simply cannot post here for now - my posts will be edited. and, i have to put this down, stop running around in circles fighting over the control of it and get back to actual work.
i would apologize to an audience, but i know there isn't one. my audience, insofar as it exists, wants me to shut up and finish the music.
once i get everything taken down and archived into html files, i will shift into building the music journals, specifically, from 2013-2018, which will leave me with usable liner notes for inri000-inri074, which will let me close the aleph discs. i will try to get back to finishing inri075-inri095 as i finish the journals from 2018-2022, and then kick back into the discography when it lines itself back up. any projects worked on from 2013-2022, like the diet blog or the pandemic notes, will need to be pushed forward in sequence, to after i finish my demos from 2004-2013. in other words, these writing projects will become the works i'm leaving unfinished in the current period, to be finished 20 years from now (as i work on material from 20 years ago, instead). there's no other way to do this.
i will also need to get caught up in the alter-reality and will try to do a month-per-week posting schedule when i do get back to it. this will happen in parallel.
any political commentary that i do for now on will be typed into a word document or an html document and archived for future purposes, entirely.
please do keep an eye on this space, if you legitimately are interested in it and are not a spook. i will try to find some way to keep it moving, until i can fill it back in as a searchable archive.
this certainly sucks. however, i needed to smash everything up, and finding a post edited to reverse the original meaning of the original post has given me what i needed to do it. this will be good, in the long run.
1:59
stat holidays should be strictly non-religious in a secular society.
rather than make diwali a holiday, we should cancel christmas and easter and replace them with non-religious solstice-centred stat holidays on dec 21st and mar 21st, respectively.
diwali is a harvest festival, and is really just the indian equivalent of samhain. i would agree that we should have a single, non-sectarian harvest festival at the end of october that is designed to replace and do away with the various religious traditions, not that we need more and more holidays for more and more superstitions.
in the united states, and to a lesser extent in canada, the harvest festival stat holiday that diwali is equivalent to is thanksgiving, but that is not secular enough either and should be abolished along with christmas.
diwali and samhain are essentially the same thing; what the hindus are doing is celebrating hallowe'en and there's really not any discernible reason to approach them differently than we approached irish immigrants, which is to allow them to have their traditions without codifying them, except that we're long overdue to secularize the calendar, anyways.
samhain is a stat holiday in ireland.
the right approach is secularization, and not multiculturalism. we can't have a stat holiday for every festival from every superstition, it's not logistically workable. we already have a harvest festival holiday, but we could perhaps rebrand it so it is more inclusive and less racist and move it down the calendar, slightly, to better align with changes in the harvest due to climate change.
if the state does not intervene, will the supposedly serious, but in truth laughable, superstitious festival of diwali eventually be reduced to the camp and silliness of hallowe'en in the west, which is primarily a children's event?
that's the ideal, yes.
13:39
it is absurd to watch millions of people perform superstitious rituals that are as juvenile and backwards as diwali in the 21st century. interference is not likely to help. however, we certainly shouldn't be encouraging or codifying such ignorant nonsense.
13:44
i have a strong and unshakeable faith that, in time, and with sufficient education, people will stop the silliness on their own, if allowed to step away from it, without coercion. the state's proper role is to not interfere with that modernization process; it certainly shouldn't be trying to cultivate or save traditional belief systems, as they are being thrown away.
13:46
there is no future in diwali - it will be left behind.
but, secularization of the calendar is long overdue, anyways.
13:49
no.
by the end of the century, africa will be an uninhabitable wasteland full of starvation and disease, which is kind of not that different than it is now.
west africa will experience severe desertification and extreme depopulation, in the midst of devastating wars for dwindling resources.
this is the best example of the fallacy of infinite growth that i've ever seen.
africa would do itself some good to try to get it's population under control with the introduction of abortion and contraception, lest it find itself at a fast approaching and quickly lowering carrying capacity that leads to imminent disaster from overpopulation.
14:50
it's outrageous, but it's not surprising. the carbon tax has become a way to subsidize high emitters for the cost of oil by taxing consumers, thereby further increasing profits during a period of greed fueled inflation, instead of an incentive to reduce emissions. that is just about the most regressive and horrific form of taxation i could imagine.
the better approach was always to pass binding emissions targets and put people in jail for refusing to abide by them.
the tories are polling so badly, it opens an intriguing question: might the liberals return to power in britain?
17:57
the media coverage is quite odd.
democrats are leading senate races in pennsylvania, in arizona and in georgia. nevada, ohio, wisconsin and north carolina are in play. that would put the democrats in a fairly strong position to prevent manchin from cock blocking further legislation, but it's not clear that biden wants that to happen.
the models for the house are projecting a very close outcome. it is by no means clear that the republicans will win the house, and i'm noticing that there are a lot of seats for play in soft republican ridings in plains state areas, where abortion may be a substantive ballot issue, as we recently saw in kansas.
the 538 model, for example gives the republicans an 80% chance of winning the most seats. that means that 1 out of every 5 simulations leads to a democratic victory, and it also includes outcomes within 5 seats, which is the most likely outcome.
i think that the democrats will win seats in the senate and that the outcome in the house will be so close as to be a functional tie, where neither side has a clear majority.
18:49
it's not clear to me why anybody would think that gas prices, inflation or the president's approval rating would be ballot issues in congressional elections. none of these issues are up to congress to determine.
the two biggest ballot issues, for me, are withdrawing funding for the war in europe and codifying abortion rights. those are both congressional issues. climate change remains a pressing issue, as the president has yet to propose a coherent climate change policy.
i have, oddly, not been able to find any polling on ballot concerns, but voting against the president for congress because oil prices are high is retarded.
the term "the economy" is not very informative, but usually means employment or taxes. given that it is only being presented by republicans, it might not mean anything specific at all.
given that the issues identified by democratic voters are healthcare, the supreme court and abortion, it seems clear that codifying abortion is the major ballot issue this cycle, not inflation or gas prices.
19:35
it's not that i don't think inflation is a serious issue, it's that it's not remotely clear what voters expect government to do about it, except send out checks, which the republicans are actually more in favour of, but which would almost certainly not happen federally. a republican led house or senate would have absolutely no ability to reverse high inflation, whatsoever.
republicans are trained to respond that they vote republican because of "the economy", but they can't explain what that actually means. that that is the response in every election doesn't reflect anything more than the effect of partisan republican advertising tactics.
19:42
i just want to clarify what singh's position is.
singh is actually tearing down a strawman, but let's understand it. the argument by the bank is not actually that rate hikes will "stop inflation", whatever that is even supposed to mean. the argument by the bank, if the bank were a textbook, is supposed to be that it's trying to prevent an inflationary spiral. the logic is that if prices go up then wages go up, which pushes up prices again and etc. the rate hike is supposed to break that cycle, according to the textbook. so, singh is saying "this doesn't make sense because there is no spiral to break", and he's quite correct in a sort of abstract way that almost nobody is going to understand.
in fact, the bank has been candid that it realizes that the inflation is mostly being driven by expectation and media conditioning and is consequently trying to psych out sellers into not taking advantage of the expectation for inflation by broadcasting that it is "serious". this is in itself just nonsense, anyways: rate hikes happen after periods of inflation because they are intended to ensure investors don't lose money relative to inflation. if we have general inflation without rate hikes, investors will lose money on their investments.
nonetheless, singh's argument is tactical in it's naivete and advancing it does force the bank to respond to the theory that is supposed to be guiding it. singh is correct that the bank would not be pushing rate hikes in the current moment if it were really concerned with breaking the spiral, which is what it's supposed to be concerned about. this simple point has evaded everybody for the reason that everybody knows it's bullshit, but it remains the case that it's the argument they're supposed to be having and it will be interesting to hear any responses.
in a situation where prices are increasing and wages are not, the market should actually fix the problem on it's own, if left alone, unless the causes of the inflation are irresolvable, which is actually the case. if we are to deal with structural and permanent inflation, the government's policy really should be to increase wages to offset it, not to try to break a spiral that doesn't exist. that would mean increasing the minimum wage, and avoiding rate hikes until those minimum wage hikes can be tested to see if they produce a spiral or not.
jumping directly to rate hikes when wages are stagnant is, in truth, bad economics, if we are to actually take the theory seriously, which nobody except mr. singh is doing.
and, now they're changing their argument, as well.
now, we need higher interest rates to increase the value of the dollar, which is what is causing inflation. right. or, do investors just want a stronger dollar?
a low dollar may make some imported goods more expensive, but it is good for exports and creates jobs. it also acts as a tariff to protect the local economy, and that is a very good thing, not something to try to fix. canada cannot compete with the american dollar in terms of currency reserves, so it wants to maximize the positive effects of a low dollar to make it more economically competitive, instead.
you should expect this shifting narrative (remember when it was about housing prices?) to continue, and for it to continue to reflect the interests of investors underneath whatever bullshit excuse is being used, rather than the interests of workers.
i need to make a point clear to the fucker at the mixing desk, which may or may not be the same person as the unwanted editor: i am now rebuilding the discography in a systematic manner by retracing my steps from 2013, which means i am going to undo everything that you have done. i will not refrain from remixing parts from scratch, if i feel that i have to in order to correct any unwanted decisions.
i don't care how that makes you feel.
please permanently destroy all unauthorized editing now, in order to minimize the amount of work that i have to do in fixing any unwanted corruption in my sound art.
22:37
i have posted a skeleton of my release dates here.
that is likely it for a while.
23:45
friday, october 28, 2022
what are the russians doing in kherson?
i've repeatedly suggested that they need to build defences on the dnieper as phase one, at least, if not as the extent of the operation. the dnieper is the only conceivable natural defense in the region and the only thing approaching the border that the russians are trying to build. reports of ukrainian advances towards kherson seem to be being greatly exaggerated by our belligerent western media, but i need to again remind everybody that the point of all of this is that the front is indefensible. it is unlikely that the ukrainians are much of a threat to the russian positions, but they could essentially set up camp there and be an annoyance for the next ten years.
i have heard rumours in the russian media that the russians are going to destroy kherson, which is a city they built, and rebuild it on the other side of the dnieper, instead. that seems a little bit extreme, but something along those lines does appear to be what they're up to. it's not clear if they are going to feel the need to actually destroy the remaining city, or just leave it abandoned.
the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are voluntarily leaving indicates that they do in fact want to be russians.
the next logical step would be to advance north up the river, destroying infrastructure connecting the two spheres of the country, and splitting the country in half, as they go, until they get somewhere close to kiev. this will leave ukrainian forces stranded on the east bank, where they will eventually be annihilated. how to go about approaching the second half of the country will then need to be evaluated, and i might strongly suggest they stop at that point, as they are then entering into historical poland and historical austria.
a change of government in kiev will then be helpful to the russians.
the russians very clearly did not want to take this approach, but it's the only option left to them. the dnieper is a natural barrier that will slow down advancing forces from the west, at the least. it's as much as they can hope for.
0:57
this is from late august, 2014.
however, it's been ruined by the fucking editors. ugh.
the gag was that she was emaciated due to obviously having an eating disorder. the word has been mostly edited out to be more politically correct, which fucking disgusts me. i'll have to fix it to be more offensive than it was in the first place, later.
====
deathtokoalas i thought she did acoustic music?
and, surely, she can afford to eat?
this actually could be a fairly interesting pop song, but that hook is just mercilessly drilled in without much development....
i know, i know. i'm asking a lot. i'm just used to my big band pop more in the over-the-top style of peter gabriel or bjork.
no, honestly.
somebody tell taylor to get this into the hands of an over-the-top remixer. fuck, i'll do it.
that's a serious offer.
Lily N My daughter is as skinny as Taylor and trust me.. she eats.. tons. Not everyone has the same body type. No matter the age, some people are just thin or other sizes.
deathtokoalas i'm extremely thin myself, but there's a point where you're dealing with body types and a point where you're starving yourself.
i'm not really interested in criticizing the woman. that's not my point. the makeup is masking it a bit, but the reality is that she looks emaciated.
James M Ever heard of fast metabolism???
deathtokoalas sure. i have one myself. however, that's a level of thin that transcends a fast metabolism.
sportagus3 I'm sorry I didn't realize that you oversee Taylor's diet. How are you going to automatically know what she eats just by looking at her. I'm a thin person too that eats a bunch of food. It's not that uncommon...
deathtokoalas well, obviously i have no idea what she eats - i'm just pointing out that she looks emaciated.
eating disorders are relatively common. by denying the obvious, you're not helping.
Janah Does it really matter what she eats? Should we care? Shouldn't we just pay attention to he music and not her body size?
MrDarcyBabie I thought she looks a lot skinnier in this..don't want any hate I'm just giving my opinion.
deathtokoalas well, there's a lot of literature that suggests that these kinds of images are the cause of eating disorders. i can't think of any way to break the cycle other than to point it out. loudly. and repeatedly.
wait wait wait. i think i get it.
taylor is a celebrity, and you right fucked americans worship your celebrities as superior beings.
so, she can't have an eating disorder. that would suggestion an imperfection within perfection, which is a contradiction in terms. qed.
right?
fools...
it's in front of your faces, and the more you deny it, the more you perpetuate the cycle.
taylor needs help, not denial.
Pandaboy90 So cute you care
Meghan S its called keeping fit....
deathtokoalas no. that's beyond a fitness regimen. her bones are jutting out of her neck and shoulders....
(deleted response)
when your bones are sticking out, that means you're emaciated. you could even use that as a working definition of emaciated, although it's not quite technical enough for more general use.
there's a lot of reasons you shouldn't eat burgers.
you shouldn't stand up for your emaciation, you should realize you have a sickness that will likely cut your life short rather substantially and is deeply fucking you up on a hormonal level, which may have very negative effects on your ability to breed, amongst other things.
(deleted response)
emaciation is not "just skinny".
see, this is why we need to have a discussion on the topic. media portrayals of women have created an entire culture of people that think bones sticking out of their skin is a natural consequence of high metabolism, part of being "fit" or "just being skinny". it's been completely normalized.
i also want to point out that informing an obese person of their obesity and trying to convince them to take steps to better their health is in no way rude, it's putting the pressure on them that they need to change their diet and habits.
cassie jenkins true but don't make fun of her
deathtokoalas if i'm going to make fun of somebody, it's almost always going to be related to their intelligence and absolutely never going to be connected to their physical appearance.
i actually think this is the first taylor swift song i've ever heard. i don't have the slightest idea of whether she's worth making fun of or not.
i was really attracted to the horns, and think the track needs a remix to make it a bit more interesting. pop music has been so boring for so long now, it was just nice to hear a glimpse of something a bit more developed. but this has a long ways to go before it gets there.
(deleted response)
yes, i realize that obese people know they're obese, but the strongest and most preferable form of group coercion for the common good (which includes minimizing waste of health care resources) is peer pressure. peer pressure is preferable because it is a positive type of coercion and isn't hierarchical (and consequently isn't bullying). this is what is called an anarchist approach to social control.
the other two solutions are the authoritarian approach of refusing them treatment (i don't like that one) and pretending that resources aren't finite (this is the existing status quo of delusional liberal capitalism that you're all taking for granted, the one that assumes unending growth curves and infinite resources and assigns access in a hierarchy based on wealth).
cassie jenkins that's ok you don't have to i'm just saying i do .
deathtokoalas well, if it makes you feel better about yourself....
i mean, at the end of the day, making fun of people to make themselves feel better is the only thing that bullies have.
it's sort of cruel to take that away from them.
5:06
i've been critical of the direction of the court recently, but this is some hope that it is still functioning properly as a parliamentary oversight body.
if the crime justified a life sentence, the parliament and courts would indicate as much. the entire concept of a government list for any reason is incoherent in a free and democratic society.
this registry should really be abolished outright, along with all other government lists of citizens, for any reason.
let's clue into reality: the fact that people are deciding to not wear masks indicates that they don't care what happens to covid patients. that's the harsh truth. deal with it.
we don't fucking care anymore.
so, the alternative is to let them die, and that's really where i'm at, right now.
it's the responsibility of the vulnerable to avoid situations where they will get sick, not the responsibility of society to indefinitely inconvenience itself for the benefit of the weak. spock said it correctly:
the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
we've done all we can. if they continue to put themselves at risk, they'll need to suffer the consequences of it.
non-covid related surgeries and routine procedures need to be put at the higher priority, and covid patients need to be put at the bottom of the list. if they die in droves in the parking lot, so be it; they've had time to adjust and have chosen not to. it's time to move on.
the thing that's going to come back up is the alter-reality, starting in late 1989 - the journal site on the side. if i can get into the initially intended schedule, i should click back in to posting political analysis dated to 1997 some time around 2027 or so.
as mentioned, i'm going to try to get pdf documents of analysis of recent events up in the mean time, but i don't know how.
22:14
i need to shake the spooks off.
that's fine, i'll focus on older stuff for a while, instead.
22:15
saturday, october 29, 2022
the british are indeed the most likely suspect in the recent string of terror attacks in russia, a point i've brought up here previously, and they are behaving in this openly sophomoric manner because they don't take the russians seriously.
the russians will need to reciprocate to send the proper message.
perhaps a hole in the channel tunnel would get the message across.
13:54
get brexit done, vlad.
14:16
it's actually smiley dmitry back there pushing buttons, from what i understand.
hey, if the bombs are going to fall, let the button be pushed with a maniacal grin. smiley dmitry has perhaps found his destiny.
13:54
what is this?
dmitry of doom!
i guess it's a sign of the times.
14:34
sunday, october 30, 2022
the 2015 jcpa nuclear deal involving iran was an agreement between the united states and russia to let russia take the lead in regulating iran's nuclear power program and disposing of iran's nuclear waste. the deal was spun very differently in the west, as obama needed a way to save face for his tactical error of placing sanctions on the russians while he was trying to avoid the collapse of the sanctions regime on iran, as a consequence of a chinese desire to cut the price of oil. after obama's tactical mistake of placing sanctions on russia, the russians lifted sanctions on iran (which caused everybody else to follow) and then moved s-400 missile defense systems into iran. iran also joined the sco. iran was hence "lost", and responsibility for oversight shifted to the east.
the primary outcome of the deal, from an american perspective, was a decrease in the price of oil. should sanctions return, the price of oil would skyrocket.
trump's decision to end the deal was reflective of his lack of understanding of world affairs, but it had little practical consequence.
iran's nuclear ambitions (or lack thereof) are no longer america's concern. a strike on iran, today, would start a world war.
17:02
was the attack on nancy pelosi justified due to her political values, and particularly her decades worth of belligerent pro-war rhetoric?
i don't find myself particularly empathetic, regardless.
21:22
perhaps the lesson for ms. pelosi is that she has evaded consequences for far too long.
21:25
she has acted with impunity for decades.
i'm not exactly condoning it, but it's about time somebody got her.
21:26
there is something correct about the outcome; there's something just about it.
21:27
also, john fetterman might be the most unattractive human being i've ever seen.
it's too late now, but he really needs to do away with the facial hair. gross.
21:47
if he somehow loses to dr. oz - a ridiculous candidate - some serious self-reflection on how mr. fetterman presents himself in public needs to be undertaken, if he decides he wishes to have a career in politics.
he does not present himself as a serious person, which is frustrating given the unseriousness of his opponent.
21:55
pennsylvanians will be forgiven for deciding that neither option is a serious candidate, in an election where the democrats really had to do the absolute bare minimum to win.
21:57
monday, october 31, 2022
some time ago, i suggested that the new normal in this part of canada would be 20+ degree days all the way through september, october and into november, when the decrease in sunlight would overpower lingering heat moving in from the atlantic. that would be a substantive break from historical norms, which rapidly drop the temperature starting in mid september. it is also a functional change in climate, leading to the region being dominated by local atlantic ocean temperatures, rather than west-to-east systems moving in from the pacific. i have argued that the models need to be altered to account for this change in the climate.
i have also been guided by a broad historical trend towards polar vortex depth being driven by the solar cycle, which is a magnetic effect and not due to fluctuations in solar irradiance (or, not directly). the reference is to mike lockwood. this would be in contradiction to the traditional la nina forecast, which predicted a cooler than average year.
such a prediction many months out may seem bold and foolish, but i am not predicting the weather, i am explaining changes in the climate. i am admittedly flamboyant and consider it a positive quality; my argument was intentionally outlandish, in an attempt to get a point across. pitting lockwood against la nina effectively gets the point across: the la nina forecast was for the old climate. while nether forecast was perfect, we broadly had a warm year here, and there's little question i beat the forecast.
while i have experienced some unfortunate fluctuations in weather starting in late september that threw the outlook off somewhat, i feel it's important to point out a few things, as we move into november:
1) after a few colder periods in between unusually hot april and march days, we did actually have an unbroken string of 20+ degrees until sept 22nd and it was actually a record, here. this was the first year on record that windsor had 20+ degree days for every single day of summer, as well as for more than a month previous to it.
2) the warm air has indeed proven difficult to dislodge. while we had a few cold snaps in october, we have also had several week long returns to 20+ degrees and have even gotten very close to 25 degrees on multiple occasions.
3) as we enter novermber, we are looking at yet another warm snap that will get us very close to 20 degrees continually until around or after the 10th.
i am posting this update here as a placeholder; i will revisit the issue when we truly pass into the cooler season, which is a date that is currently unclear. if the result of the hyperactive temperatures in october is that the atmosphere balanced itself out at a higher than normal temperature, we could be in for an extended period of pleasant weather deep into december, as the atlantic continues to moderate the temperature. it's the wavy, transitional period that usually gets us stuck; we seem to have ended up south of the jet stream, this year, and it could very well all but abolish winter. that is unclear, at this point. i don't feel comfortable extending my analysis past mid-november, because it's based on solar models, but the result of it could be a startling lack of cold. what is clear is that i'll have to wait a little longer to do the write-up.
nonetheless, while i was technically off (we have certainly had days that were unambiguously less than a reasonably margin of error below 20 degrees), i think i really got the idea right - it is the local pattern that has dominated, and it has continued to return, repeatedly, when distant events have altered it. this local pattern kept temperatures well above 20 for a record period, and repeatedly returned temperatures to well above 20 when it returned, after a small number of displacements late in the year.
this is a long term forecast, and it will return for the next several years. even though i feel i demonstrated the value of the analysis, i got unlucky very late in the year, this year; i might get luckier next year.
for now, the open question is how long we can stay above 15 degrees for, and i would strongly suspect it will be until the days get longer again, at which point it becomes hard to seriously contemplate how winter can happen.
last year, i forecast 0 subzero days and actually got startling close. i believe the coldest day was -8 and there were only a couple of days colder than -5. i do think i exaggerated the point slightly and am going to instead suggest 0 days colder than -5, for now. the longterm absence of subzero temperatures in detroit may have to wait until the next solar cycle.
4:32
i have long argued for a constitutional amendment to correct this absurdity. it is encouraging to see some movement at the state level, at least.
not only should slavery be banned in prisons, but paid prison labour itself should also be banned. allowing the state to sell prison labour of any sort presents an incentive for unnecessary incarceration and ultimately takes paying jobs out of the economy. these jobs should be returned to the economy, along with many of the people being incarcerated unnecessarily.
that the major opponent is california does not surprise me. california was also the strongest supporter of eugenics laws.
what's developing is that the psychological profile of the typical qanon attacker - a psyop that appears to have developed out of the anonymous psyop - is that of a manchurian candidate.
11:49
i am baffled.
now that i'm deleting posts from the blogger server, i'm finally noticing differences between blog posts and email archives, for the first time.
i've either broken the sync by deleting the posts on the blogger server, which is returning the emails to the original posts, or somebody has read my blog and decided that what they were doing was insane, and has undone it. this suggests that the original posts still exist.
if that is the case, i need to plead with google to restore the original posts to my gmail. you can make it look like nothing happened; that's fine.
either way, there is some chance that i might be able to reconstruct the original posts, after all, without having to rewrite everything.
18:00
i would strongly oppose yet another american occupation of haiti, and am appalled by the suggestion that canada ought to be dispatched to do washington's dirty work for it.
the last thing that the haitian people need is more colonialism. let them rebuild on their own.
canada's role should be to provide humanitarian assistance, if it is requested by a legitimate democratic government, and to otherwise not involve itself in the affairs of sovereign countries in the western hemisphere. we should seek to be a good neighbour, not a colonial overlord.
they should be making a little more than minimum wage, which is in the $15-20/hr range. that would be in the following range:
15*8*5*52 = 31200
20*8*5*52 = 41600
actual salaries are in the $50,000-$100,000 range, in ontario. that is, in some cases, twice as much as they ought to be paid.
if individual teachers are unable to live the lifestyles they would like to live on the salaries they deserve, they should go back to school to get better educations in order to find better jobs. teaching young children is what flunkies and losers end up doing, and their salaries should reflect as much. being a school teacher is not a respectable profession and we should stop pretending that it is.
elementary school teachers are really just overpaid babysitters; i can't come up with a single discernible reason why a grade one teacher should be paid twice as much as the after school caregiver, or even any reason why they should be paid more than the after school caregiver, at all. the truth is that this is true for the lower grades in high school, as well. perhaps grade 11 and 12 teachers should be paid a little more, but there is absolutely no discernible reason whatsoever that the vast majority of school teachers should make a cent more than the after school babysitter does.
your average teacher should be paid enough that they are able to live comfortably in a small apartment close to the school they teach at, they shouldn't be living in mcmansions in the suburbs.
16:56
i tend not to have much support for public sector unions.
leftists have long had an uncomfortable relationship with unions. their necessity, particularly in the private sector, is unquestionable, but the evidence - and i'm going to cite malatesta for best articulating this - is overwhelmingly that they hinder socialism more than advance it, by nature of becoming bourgeois institutions that oppose collectivizing ownership and instead support maintaining the status quo of capitalist exploitation. workers that join unions all of a sudden find themselves invested in the profit-making function of the corporation, which make it impossible to advance a proletariat revolution. these debates, however, are only relevant to the private sector.
in the public sector, unions don't just act as bourgeois institutions that hinder socialism, but are actively and aggressively seeking to redistribute public wealth into private hands. this is the literal opposite of socialism.
16:58
collective bargaining rights for pubic sector unions are consequently a contradiction in terms, as they just become a mafia tactic for workers paid with tax money to use to extract concessions from society. this is an undoing of socialism; it's the exact opposite of what socialism is supposed to be about.
in a truly democratic society, it would actually be the legislature that would determine public sector salaries, preferably by direct democracy. that would actually be the technically correct left-wing position, not collective bargaining, which would be a transitory process used strictly in the private sector, before the collectivization of property shifts the issue to the legislature. in a fully socialist society, all salaries would be determined by public consensus, and anti-social workers that resist and demand more than they need in return for the contribution of what they are able would be denounced for their bourgeois greed of public resources and deported for their lack of solidarity.
17:12
that said, the necessity of maintaining collective bargaining rights in the private sector requires the left to oppose the weakening of collective bargaining rights in the public sector, even if we don't really support the latter function for collective bargaining.
17:13
as an actual leftist, my position on the labour conflict developing between the ford government and public sector teachers is consequently somewhat complicated:
1) i would support society enforcing lower wages on teachers, who are currently far too bourgeois for their own good, and get paid way more than they deserve to be paid or need to comfortably survive.
2) i do not actually support collective bargaining for public sector workers. public sector salaries should be set by the legislature, as a reflection of the democratic will.
3) however, the importance of collective bargaining for private sector workers is too fundamental to allow collective bargaining rights to be rolled back, in any way and any attempts to roll back collective bargaining rights must consequently be opposed.
17:17
slightly overpaid teachers may be an acceptable trade-off for the maintenance of collective bargaining rights, but the situation is currently out of balance. at the present time, i would support a government seeking to impose deep pay cuts - i would support 30% to 50% pay cuts - on absurdly overpaid teachers as the primary public interest priority.
17:18
when we talk about workers, wages and inflation, the missing concept is frequently profit. if a corporation is making record profits due to inflation, then workers should absolutely work together to demand higher salaries. after all, they did all of the work. this is the fundamental context and definition of socialism.
this framing makes no sense when you talk about teachers' salaries. inflation may be increasing, but the government does not make profits, it collects taxes. when teachers get together and demand higher salaries to offset inflation, they are actually demanding that the government tax other people to ensure that their specific workers don't lose money relative to inflation. generally speaking, real & adjusted government revenues actually decrease in inflationary periods (although that isn't true, at the moment, due to the inflation being energy-dependant.).
i can't support one group of workers demanding that the government increase their specific salaries by taxing some other group of workers under the threat of implied violence; that's not socialism, it's barbarism.
17:49
i would actually very strongly support just deporting the remaining tatars in crimea back to siberia, which is where they actually came from.
the western media narrative that tatars/mongolians are indigenous to the crimean peninsula is so ignorantly incorrect as to be deeply offensive to anybody with a basic understanding of the history of the region.
the indigenous people of the region are the slavs, who have lived there for thousands of years, although they have endured multiple occupations, including an exceedingly devastating and openly genocidal mongolian occupation, of which the tatars are an anachronism and remnant of.
23:02
the deportation of the tatars back to where they came from (siberia) was something stalin did correctly.
unfortunately, he didn't finish the job.
23:04
that said, it is quite fitting to have america literally pick up where the mongols left off in eastern europe.
23:09
arguing that the tatars are indigenous to crimea is something like arguing that the french are indigenous to montreal. it's an almost perfect comparison.
perhaps one day the mohawks will rise up and take back their island, and if they choose to deport the french out in chains, who could blame them?
23:19
the mongolian occupation of eastern europe started in 1236 and lasted until the mid 15th century, when the slavs began a long process of expelling the mongols from the occupied slavic homeland. the mongolian occupation of crimea, of which the crimean tatars descend, actually occurred in the midst of this process of slavic self-liberation, in the 15th century. the russian annexation of crimea in 1783 was one of the last steps in the expulsion of the occupying mongols from the indigenous slavic homeland.
23:28
in the process of occupying the slavic homeland, mongolians carried out decades worth of horrible acts of genocide and domination, which included widespread rape of the indigenous slavic population. it was necessary to undo those acts of genocide by occupying mongolians against the indigenous slavic population when the area was finally liberated by slavic forces after centuries of struggle and then resettled by indigenous slavic peoples, which included deporting the invaders back to where they came from.
23:34
the trick that the western media does - and i've been exceedingly critical of wikipedia on this point - is that they start history in the 15th century. this is essentially the same warped concept of history that you hear from palestinian activists, and is intended to skew the narrative by just erasing any history that occurred before a politically advantageous cut-off point. the fact that slavs had lived in the region for roughly 6000 years before the brutally destructive mongolian invasion and occupation is just deleted from the article; history starts when the mongolians appeared. in fact, history very nearly ended when the mongolians appeared! the issue in crimea was far more "live" than the issue in the levant, however, in that the struggle never entered a dormant phase; the slavs never accepted mongolian rule, and the conflict that came to an end in 1783 is in a very real sense the same conflict that started in 1236. mongolians tried to conquer eastern europe in the 13th century and were initially successful but were slowly driven out over the next 600 years, culminating in slavs retaking control over crimea. jews cannot say that about the levant, even if their claim to it is every bit as legitimate.
23:40
the reason the media is doing this is that they're setting up a return to the mujahideen movement that the cia designed during the reagan administration, and which fell apart after the collapse of the soviet union. nato's goal is to destabilize the region with pentagon-backed muslim extremists, and the intended ultimate benefactor is the turks.
23:49
i saw a recent interview with erdogan; when asked if crimea should be returned to ukraine, he demurred, saying instead that crimea should be returned to turkey. this was not mere flappy-lipped rhetoric. it indicates the west's plan for the region.
23:50
i am a slavophile and pan-slavist. i can't accept a western foreign policy that is designed to emulate the political vision of genghis khan for eastern europe.
23:54
wednesday, november 2, 2022
they do the same thing in xinjiang, by calling the turks there "indigenous". in fact, the turkish people that live there today and are predominantly muslim entered the region in the 16th century, during a downpoint of chinese control over the region. ethnic han chinese have been the dominant population in western china for most of the last two thousand years. the people the chinese conquered to take control over the region were a buddhist, indo-european group that western scholarship refers to as "tocharians" and are known for their irish-like physical appearance, as the easternmost historical extent of the descendants of the proto-indo-european ancestral culture.
0:17
it is important to have fully informed historical narratives. you can advance any bullshit argument you want, if you cherry pick the right entry point. should britain be returned to italian control? should we start history during the middle of world war two, and decide that germans are indigenous to north africa? it is bullshit 101.
i can't be the lone voice, here, it's too transparent.
if you're going to do an historical analysis, it is imperative that it be encompassing, and not be chosen to exclude parts of history you don't like, because it's not consistent with your argument or it's perceived as too distant for your liking. what's happening with crimea right now is perhaps an extreme example, and my basic point is really just to do the actual research, and put it in proper context, and not be led by your nose by bad historians and cia operatives trying to frame a war in specific terms.
0:19
do two wrongs make a right?
i don't care what is "wrong" and what is "right". this isn't some stupid, self-righteous moral bullshit, it's a pragmatic analysis from an objective perspective.
the slavs were fighting to expel invaders from their land and were required to do some nasty things to do it, and re-establish control over their land. it doesn't matter if it was wrong or right, what matters is that they succeeded, in the end.
there are almost no tatars in crimea left to deport, and there hasn't been in decades. yet, that is exactly why the media needs to pretend that there is, and why erdogan is insistent on the point.
1:38
i've actually been exceedingly clear that the singular, sole reason i was posting at youtube many eons ago now was to act as a promotion layer for my bandcamp site.
that has now been accepted, for some reason that is not clear to me. many other motives have been assigned to me, instead. they are all incorrect.
i have volunteered the correct answer repeatedly, and the idiots simply refuse to get it.
the site has taken steps to prevent that process from working, and yet now thinks i want to continue to post there, for some reason. i don't think it's a coincidence that i'm getting more comments at youtube, now that i've taken these posts down. my best guess is that they think they can convince me of large amounts of stupidity, now that i'm not spending time here.
in fact, i'm going to be spending all of my time here, until i'm able to archive the site and i'm not remotely interested in wasting my time with stupid arguments at youtube, if it's not actually functioning as promotion for my art.
psychologists are worse than stupid - they intentionally reject evidence. it's insane. i'm not wasting my time.
3:40
i am finally done organizing the first of two email archives and am just about finished archiving october, 2021. i was hoping to get some legal writing done this week but was not able to; that will need to be my focus in the upcoming days, instead.
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