i want to be clear about what's happening with this site.
they're now editing the archives as i'm building them, and i have to reiterate that i simply don't understand why this is being done, other than that somebody has some kind of childish obsession with asserting some kind of "power" or "control" over this site, and is psychologically incapable of growing up about it.
i was initially intending to post the archives that i am compiling here somewhere else with minimal edits; they have clearly figured that out and are merely taking advantage of it. that will no longer be possible, as a result of this. these archives will require heavy editing to remove the unwanted insertion (it's vandalism, really) of colloquial language, which is going to be a process of "destupidifying" them. i don't know why they want my writing to appeal to stupid people, but what i've noticed is a pattern of edits that includes a list of repeated acts of vandalism: the insertion of the words "like" and "got" (a bad habit that i don't have), repeated use of ellipsis in place of discourses, the removal of large words in favour of small words, the use of weaselly qualifiers such as "i think that", "it seems like", "for example" or "in my opinion" (something i despise), ebonics-y phrases such as "yeah, so, ", "sort of", "the deal with" or "what's up with" that i would never type or speak, txtspeak (which makes me want to hurt people), etc. the editor is also struggling, and frequently failing, to understand my somewhat idiosyncratic use of italics, which is meant to emphasize personalized verbal cues by transliterating them and does not follow any clear rule of grammar or logic. it would, logically, either need to be the case that somebody is trying to smear me in an attempt to present me as being of low intelligence or the case that somebody is trying to edit the blog to make it appeal to a low-information, low-intelligence and ultimately low-education audience. whatever the truth is, i am certain that this is not my writing style, and that what has been edited into the site in replace of my original writing is simply too embarrassing to allow to remain published. i cannot allow my name to be attached to writing of such low quality or stylistic nature, however disingenuously. these archives will require heavy alteration to simply be readable or presentable.
however, i am running out of time to exist within and these writings are not the focus of my art. trying to pull them together into something i can put away has long simply been a time consuming annoyance that is preventing me from finishing my actual art.
the first thing that i am doing is completely disassembling this site. this site is not being reposted somewhere else; this site is being taken down, and stored offline.
after the site has been completely taken down, i will need to start over in mid-2013 and retrace my steps by pulling everything together, specifically in finalizing published records (and checking for any required remastering) with finished liner note sets. i was actually pretty productive in completing inri000-inri074 over 2013-2017, but the process halted after i moved. i stopped in 2018 to finish liner notes for those records (which is what this mass of writing is) and got stuck running around in circles (something i refer to as recursion). the analysis i did for the 2016 election was meant to be a cursory dabble; if anything, i hoped to help people better understand what was happening, out of a sense of beneficial altruism. in hindsight, i strongly regret that i've drawn attention to myself in this manner, but i cannot allow the writing to be corrupted or destroyed. what i've learned is that information that challenges official narratives in this society is destroyed. free speech is actually a trap. if you feel you're being suppressed in your speech, it's because you're not really challenging anything, but are merely being annoying; truly challenging speech is covertly destroyed, along with all traces it ever existed. that's the mess i'm in here, as an artist; i committed the crime of having an independent political opinion. that is not allowed. now, my art has been vandalized by the government, in response.
i can't fight an invisible enemy. i have no tactic. i walked into the trap of assuming nobody would care what i post here and now have no recourse but to escape. i should not have posted anything to online hosting platforms in the first place, i should have written everything into air-gapped pcs offline and then only uploaded copies of those documents that are stored offline. if there's something that other people might potentially learn from my experience with this, it would be that you should write and store everything offline, and then only upload copies of those offline documents and, when you do, only upload them to servers that are neither corporate nor government. these actors will have you sign misleading agreements and then won't tell you they're breaking them, they'll just change the writing stored on their servers without so much as a warning email and without any trail to prove they did it.
i'm expecting that the next thing they'll do is deepfake my youtube videos and will consequently have me saying all kinds of things i never said, if they haven't already done it. understanding the nature of any editing that has already occurred will be a part of the upcoming process.
i don't know if they intend to put me on trial and try me with the manufactured evidence. as mentioned, i don't understand what their motive is.
as i go through the rebuild from 2013-2017, i will create the liner notes as was initially intended (by editing the existing files to my liking) and file the rest of the writing away for later completion and correction. the political archives intended for this space will not be reposted, at that time. unfortunately, i will not have time to do that; the writing has been far too vandalized, stylistically, to repost without substantive attention.
i will then complete building the music journal from 2018-2023. as i do that, i will put the political and other writings from that period aside for later finalization. the music journal will appear in the next batch of liner notes, which is inri075-inri100ish.
i will then get back to finishing the discography, as i complete material that was initially started between 2002-2013. i need this done by 2043 at the latest.
it will only be once i've finished all of the musical and other projects started between 2002-2013 that i will get back to completing and editing these archives, written from 2013-2022. i am currently on a thirty year lag, so that will date this process to 2043-2052.
i consider this regrettable, but i need to introduce the time lag in order to shake off the spooks. i have no way out; i need an exit strategy. i would presume they'll be dead by then. any edits they make to these archives as i am taking them down will not be posted anywhere until i get to a project completion schedule that starts in 2043. as it is, i can't speed up the process, and i am cognizant that they are merely taking advantage of it. the best thing i can do is broadcast that they're wasting their time; those edits will never be published.
i don't understand what is happening on the back end or why but i'm moving on from this and refocusing on what i actually care about, which is not politics but art.
14:28
thursday, december 1, 2022
tuesday, december 20, 2022yesterday was a pummeling trip to the far blood lab in difficultly windy conditions that left me exhausted after the 8 hour walk, but i had to get a blood rec ahead of an appointment today.
i have not taken an iron pill since last week - sunday, november 20th, 2022. yet, somehow my iron is high. my ferritin, on the other hand, is not. that result makes no sense.
my estrogen level is back to a closer to normal level, but is still lower than i'd like it to be. the testosterone is at least properly suppressed. that result makes no sense, either.
if i could explain the previous result due to the time scheduling, this result is more concerning and indicates that i need to increase my estrogen dosage for the reason that the generic pills are poorly absorbed.
i would like to increase the frequency of the dosage to every 10 hours instead of every 12 but the doctor is hesitant to over-prescribe past the treatment standards. the reality is that the treatment standards are designed for the brand name pills; they do not take into account the less effective delivery mechanism in the generics, or the effects of tolerance from long term consumption. the treatment standards should be calibrated to adjust for this; i'm just empirically demonstrating the truth of that theoretical deduction by acting as a test subject. i told them this was going to happen, but they didn't take the chemical difference in the delivery mechanism seriously.
the brand name estrace is not available in canada due to a patent issue in the united kingdom. i could buy it in michigan, but i can't cross the border due to the illogical vaccine mandate that is bafflingly still in place at the american border.
9:50
my rbc count is at 4.03, which is at the low end of female variation and not unusual for me as an individual, but is unexpected given the high iron. when the iron has been on the higher end, the rbc has been closer to 4.5.
i rarely eat meat and have not consumed any meat since last year. it's been close to or over 12 months. i didn't mark the calendar date.
9:56
the only thing that had to eat yesterday morning was one avocado, and i have not passed any bowel movement at all since rejecting the salad that i ate on tuesday night, which probably completely cleared me out. i have consumed nothing else besides eggs or quinoa since the start of last week.
9:57
i will need to continue monitoring the iron, but i'm going to stay off the iron pills entirely for the next month and re-evaluate at the next reading. that will help me control for the iron pills as a potential cause of the diarrhea.
9:59
my white blood cells are also borderline highish, indicating i likely have an infection of some sort. i'm going to interpret the results together as evidence that my immune system is working and that it might be succeeding in resolving a longstanding problem. that is, my iron might be finally recovering and consumption from my diet might be finally being absorbed, which makes the lower than desired estrogen level that much more concerning.
10:00
my estrogen should have been over 50 for this reading, as i had been on schedule consistently for weeks; it came in at 403. the clinical target - the number my doctor wants me at - is 450. i want to be closer to 700. cis-female levels fluctuate and 403 is not particularly low for a random estradiol reading for cis-women.
10:03
the rejected meal on tuesday night would have also ejected the estrogen i consumed with it, but the circulating estrogen builds in your system, so i was able to almost recover by the time of the blood test when i took more estrogen in the morning.
it's better than the last one, at least, but i've been angling for a dose increase for a while, and i now have the data required to make the argument.
10:04
quinoa is very high in iron, which was the intent of integrating it into my diet in the first place. i consume my quinoa with an orange for absorption, as well as a tablespoon of paprika (also for absorption, as well as vitamin a) and a tablespoon of cumin (also high in iron), a tablespoon of nutritional yeast, some store bought caesar for absorption and a sliver of cheddar cheese. it's a nice bowl of healthy rice. if my intestines are working properly, and my body is not rejecting anything, that should in theory be a very high iron and very high protein meal. if it's finally working, great, but the results are difficult to place in perspective.
10:07
the more likely explanation is that my serum iron was high due to ongoing hemolysis, and this is more consistent with the mild spike in reticulocytes this reading compared to previous ones, as well as the low rbc, although my low rbc is normal, given i have no testosterone.
10:08
my pth is up a little bit but still in the lower range (<5) that i want to keep it in. my vitamin d is down a little, but i've learned that vitamin d fluctuates. while this is expected given that it's been too cold to experience sunlight, and i have only been outside for a few hours, in total, since the start of november due to the bicycle being broken, i also expect that both of these readings will fluctuate and i can't really draw any conclusions from either, as snapshots. i need repeated tests to generate a trend, or no trend. i will need to complete the experiment before i can draw any conclusions as to the utility of vitamin d pills.
10:14
my vitamin d stores are going to go down in the winter and my pth is going to come up. the issue will reverse in the spring, when i start building stores again. the question is if the oral vitamin d pills actually help replenish stores used up in the winter or if i'm just putting strain on my kidneys.
10:22
it's most likely that the high circulating iron this reading is due to hemolysis from walking to the lab ("sports anemia"), but the fact that i had enough iron to lead to a spike is encouraging.
yeah.
it can't be the iron pills because i didn't consume any iron pills. i want to maintain high iron storage, so i should move to every second cycle as i'm deconstructing my diet.
10:24
the correct deduction is that my iron stores are finally recovering and that the digestion issues are consequently making themselves that much more apparent as a cause of the iron deficiencies, given that i'm now experiencing the hemolytic implications of over-exercise from the recovered stores.
10;25
i would like to increase my estrogen dosage, but i should otherwise be happy about these results.
10:26
the walk to the blood lab is roughly two hours. i was also out for a four hour walk the day previously.
the outcome is consistent; exercise makes me bleed, internally.
10:38
this is the positive outcome of the exercise, though:
cholesterol: 3.95
hdl: 1.91
ldl: 1.57
my hdl is usually higher than my ldl; it's rare when it isn't. my ldl is never over 2.0. that's exquisite cholesterol, and i know it and i'm proud of it given that i have two uncles that died due to high ldl, it probably would have killed my father if brain cancer didn't do it first and my mother also has poor cholesterol (although her diet is horrible. she exists strictly on the consumption of non-food).
10:39
i need to balance that out - exercising might make my organs bleed a little, but it sure keeps my cholesterol down, too.
if the right reading is that my stores have recovered, i shouldn't be concerned about it, i just need to ensure i'm consuming enough iron to compensate and that i'm figuring out what it is that i'm allergic to or is otherwise being rejected by my intestines to stop it from happening.
i'm not allergic to eggs (bread, margarine, garlic, cheese, yeast), i'm not allergic to quinoa (orange, cumin, paprika, yeast, caesar, cheese), i'm not allergic to cereal (all bran, vector, wheat bran, flax seed, paprika, yeast, soy milk), i'm not allergic to my fruit bowl (strawberry, banana, kiwi, avocado, raspberry, blueberry, cherry, blackberry, hemp seeds, sunflower seeds, paprika, yeast, ice cream) and if i restrict my diet to these things i'm not allergic to and consequently prevent the allergic reaction of violent diarrhea then the hemolysis from exercising leads to high rather than low iron, because when my blood cells explode they are well-armed rather than anemic.
10:41
i had eight eggs a day (four twice a day) for something like 10 out of the previous 14 days, and my cholesterol came in under 4.
eggs do not increase total cholesterol, and are in fact good regulators of hdl levels. that is thoroughly understood, at this point.
quinoa, on the other hand, may be a negative input in terms of cholesterol, but it's clearly not affecting me much.
11:01
if you have eggs and toast, the toast is worse for your heart than the eggs.
enjoy your eggs, but buy quality bread and avoid the butter.
11:03
i have received my dose increase - 5 per day is every ten hours, in a 31 day month and a bit more than that in 30 day months.
if i can pick this up tomorrow, it will also leave me with a surplus of around 350 pills. i will want to use the surplus to experiment with sublingual consumption, to evade processing by the liver. allowing oral estradiol to be regulated by the liver is beneficial, as it allows for circulation in the form of estrone, but sublingual consumption will create short term spikes that, if used tactically, can keep levels that much higher. i'll want to try that for a few months and see how i feel about it, afterwards.
15:32
this should finally get my estrogen consistently above 500 - probably closer to consistently above 700 - which has been something i've been trying to get prescribed to me for years.
15:33
how am i going to do this?
i've been moving to smaller meals, so i'm going to eat every 10 hours instead of every 12.
15:35
i'm trying to avoid hormone swings. that is intentional; i don't want injections for that reason, and i want my liver to continue to regulate it for that reason, as well. sufficient oral consumption creates stable, high estrogen, through cycling. it's just hard to actually keep it stable and high due to tolerance.
suicide rates are very high in transwomen and the hormone swings that occur as a consequence of withdrawal after injections may be a big part of the reason for that.
sublingual consumption is better absorbed and bypasses the liver, which means it's safer, but it has the potential to introduce hormone swings, which makes it more dangerous. oral consumption produces estrone cycling, which creates stability because it allows the estrogen to be re-used as it passes through the liver, which does not occur with sublingual consumption; sublingual is more like "getting high on estrogen" and comes with the consequent estrogen crash.
what i've long wanted to implement is a hybrid treatment approach; give me an effective base rate to ensure sufficient cycling, then let me top it up sublingually in such a way that just keeps it high. i couldn't talk them into it, until now.
15:42
i tend to look pretty good in the summer, but then have to cover up in the winter and it can be devastating to me to see the different reactions. it's a big part of the reason i don't go out in the winter. i'm hoping that the increase helps undo that.
15:43
the media is obsessed with kanye west being a nazi, all of a sudden.
there aren't many black nazis out there. kanye west might like hitler, but hitler would not like kanye west, except maybe as a leather bag - or a slave.
the label of "nazi" has been so watered down through frivolous use that it's entirely lost any meaning, and that is of more concern to me than some dumbass nigger that is clearly incapable of understanding what he's saying. we would no longer recognize nazism if we saw it.
17:33
the intellectually correct response to kanye west's glorification of hitler is to call him a dumbass nigger.
while somewhat redundant, that would be a correct use of the term.
17:35
maybe he can join the schwarzkommando.
there's a rocket with the number 00000 on it waiting especially for him.
17:37
how much do you think kim kardashian would pay for a leather hand bag made out of kanye west's dumb nigger ass, anyways?
18:14
"i didn't think hitler was racist. i just didn't know. i thought he just hated jews. that's not racist." - kanye west
19:21
we need a reworking of the venerable classic.
nazi niggers, nazi niggers, nazi niggers...fuck off!
19:22
i'm white. one would expect i would pronounce the 'r' in niggers.
19:29
friday, december 2, 2022
the court says it finds my argument difficult to follow.
legal documents are supposed to be complicated, though.
ugh.
4:07
18 is about average for me.
that was just one paragraph, and it was almost entirely written stream-of-consciousness. like, that was effortless. if i sit down and get technical, i will routinely write paragraphs with reading-ease scores in the 10-15 range.
i committed to trying to be less verbose.
4:12
apparently, according to widely googleable statistics, only 4-5% of people are educated enough to be able to read my effortlessly presented natural thoughts. almost nobody could read this blog regularly and consistently understand it.
it puts the general stupidity of humanity into perspective, and it's a reminder that a lot of lower level court functions are staffed by people that are not particularly well educated.
4:16
saturday, december 3, 2022
the russians are criticizing the west for not adhering to free market principles, as we attempt to fix a price on oil.
it's norway (and india) that wins here, in the long run. it is certainly a surreal reality, though.
europe is going to end up deindustrialized altogether, if this continues much longer. german industry continues to be ruthlessly targeted by america's military-intelligence-industrial complex, over 75 years after the end of world war two, and it's not entirely clear how long it will tolerate it.
for now, i hope all you evil ancaps know who your daddy is.
18:25
in the real world - not twitter escapism - incitement to violence is a legitimate reason to restrict speech if the premise is that it might actually lead to some kind of actual harm. in practice, however, this is almost impossible because it's almost impossible to actually say something that is actually objectively potentially legitimately harmful.
there's a very small amount of case law in canada that is explicitly about preventing attempts to stir up ethnic unrest to advance a political agenda. the political context is key. so, we have a law in canada that looks very embarrassing on first glance and has been made more visually embarrassing by the sitting government (which does not even pretend to have any respect for speech rights, but rather openly campaigns on abolishing freedom of expression) if you don't actually understand the context, which is that it's specifically designed to explicitly target political groups such as the nazi party of canada (which has not existed since 1978) from running for office, rather than to police shit posting on twitter or act as a censorship board for text publishing. this section of the code has been used a handful of times in questionable contexts that are ultimately only contentious to a free speech absolutist for the sake of it. the clear, settled law is that restrictions on speech are unconstitutional but might be permitted under an oakes test in the very limited context that doing so can prevent actual foreseeable harm. there was a case with a grade school teacher that was teaching kids the holocaust didn't happen (at an age where they might not know better or have developed the critical thinking skills to challenge it) and then later ran for office and a case with an actual nazi group publishing actual nazi literature that had actual intent to assume actual political power.
that said, i vehemently reject this section of the code and think it should be outright abolished as unconstitutional, a point the courts are a step less absolutist about than i am. the courts have rather decided to maintain the law and essentially neuter it by ensuring it only applies to the most extreme contexts that could be imagined or proposed. the leading case on speech rights in canada (which abolished a criminal code provision prohibiting the spread of fake news) explicitly states that hate speech is free speech (directly and apparently purposefully contradicting the popular slogan, which i believe the prime minister himself is on record uttering), but incitement to violence is not. you can unambiguously say whatever you want, to whoever you want, whether in public or not, but the line draws at incitement to violence, which is a crime whether that incitement is directed at some group or not. this is right out of mill. i don't know anybody that would argue that incitement to violence is permissible, in the context that that incitement is sincere and creating a real, foreseeable threat.
i don't think that this picture incites violence and i don't think kanye west is inciting anybody to violence in an objectively foreseeable manner:
so, are we learning that elon musk is a hypocrite, and that twitter is now run by a leviathan that will determine the enforcement of rules arbitrarily, on whatever personal whim?
not yet.
rather, i think it's obvious that kanye west wanted to be banned from twitter. the level of purposeful trolling was hard to miss. it may even be the case that kanye west asked to be banned, although that is pure supposition.
kanye west is doing the same thing that a number of fake punk musicians did in the late 70s, albeit with a lower level of artistry than was used by the fake punks, which is that he's disingenuously being an asshole to cynically generate a rebellious image because he thinks it will sell more records. kanye west is bad, he's bad - you know it. you know he's bad. come on.
really, really bad.
woohoo.
i'm expecting that musk's arbitrary invocation of unclear or random rules will be normalized, that he will quickly dispense with the rule of law and that twitter will soon be controlled by a dominating leviathan, which is exactly what the user base cried out for and demanded. however, this particular case is not a step in that direction; kanye west was trying to get banned to uphold an image, so he could walk out on stage with an announcement telling his audience he was banned on twitter. this is juvenile, but west is a children's entertainer and musk has apparently gone along with it.
if i were the ceo of twitter, i would refuse to give in and resolutely refrain from banning kanye west on request or agitation to do so. let him delete his own account.
i was once in a similar situation, when i was acting as the administrator of a zero-moderation room of the main occupy ottawa facebook group. the room was created by a small number of activists that were frustrated by attempts to use censorship to shut down debate and within a few weeks it became the only remaining group, as the moderated group quickly fell into disuse. that is, when presented with a choice between moderation and no moderation, nobody used the moderated group. a known local troll joined the no moderation group and started posting outrageously racist messages, which generated multiple requests to ban him for the reason that everybody knew he was trying to get banned and wasn't going to stop until he did. the context here was different - this was a group of leftwing activists, and his shitposting had no legitimate audience. he was being an asshole on purpose and trying to get banned, so i banned him. he then predictably went around and told everybody we didn't believe in free speech, and some of us really didn't, but he was laughed at when he tried to make the argument, as he legitimately set the situation up.
nobody has to go to kanye west's twitter feed, and he's not interfering with anybody's conversations or personal messaging by making a fool of himself in public. he poses no legitimate threat to anybody and there's no suggestion that he's ever going to. twitter should back off and let him make an ass of himself.
23:09
sunday, december 4, 2022
nobody old enough to vote listens to kanye west.
0:48
santa claus is a viking god named odin.
he has reindeer, named after the norse pantheon. he has elves, which are inherited directly from norse mythology.
he is not from the "north pole", he is from thule, which translates roughly to sweden.
the germanic peoples would have had a saturnalia-type festival around the solstice (called yule), and they clearly didn't want to give it up when they were christianized at knifepoint, so we inherited a syncretic religious festival, instead.
the fictional jesus was born in the levantine desert, and likely in july, based on the text's astrological references. we celebrate a norse festival that's been distorted by colonizing romans and jews.
4:23
i don't want to "put the christ back in christmas".
rather, i want people to realize that we celebrate a germanic ritual at the solstice, like our ancestors have for thousands of years, and reclaim it for what it is.
4:34
europe was never meaningfully christianized. there was an ecclesiastical layer of upper class italians and jews floating around the courts, but they never managed to actually convince the aristocracy of anything, and they certainly never converted the commoners.
the idea of a historical "christian europe" is a myth.
we've been half-pagan atheists the whole time.
4:42
when you write your letters to santa, write them using runes.
7:43
i don't actually disagree with the claim that biden cheated to win in 2020. the number of mail-in ballots was staggeringly high, and that's generally a sign of stolen elections. when election observers and experts decide that elections have been rigged out there in shit countries, that's frequently one of the arguments cited. as a mathematician with a lot of experience analyzing polling, i can tell you there were some pretty clear signals that biden cheated.
further, i was explicit in accusing biden of cheating in the primaries; the parade of withdrawals that then followed was also quite clearly organized. it exposed the system as a farce, to anybody with a pair of eyes and a set of ears.
however, i was also very vocal in pointing out that the 2016 election was blatantly obviously rigged by the pentagon in favour of trump, which they then blamed on russia after it became too apparent to deny. the pentagon could not tolerate the premise of a hillary clinton presidency, for the reason that it was clear she was for sale to foreign actors. trump, on the other hand, was an easily controllable moron that would do what he was told, like obama, and george w. bush (who also stole two elections, the first of which was openly broadcasted as an imminent coup months before it happened), which is what they like. in recent years, there have been two types of presidents: the easily controllable dunce (trump, obama, dubya, reagan, jfk) and the deep state insider that is already in the know (biden, daddy bush, ford, nixon, lbj). bill clinton was a noticeable anomaly in being an actual in charge president, and his pushy and uncontrollable wife that never listened to a word spoken to her by anybody in her life was an unacceptable aberration that had to be stopped at all costs. carter was also an anomaly, but he turned out to be of minimal concern to deep state actors. jfk had to be removed when he tried to assert control, which was justified because he was actually legitimately insane. i have made it clear that i am in strong support of the jfk assassination.
as both biden and trump cheated to try to win (which is normal), the outcome of 2020 election reduced to who was better at cheating, and the result is that trump is merely whining about getting beaten at his own game. trump is really doing exactly what a lot of fake leftists wanted gore to do after 2000, but which gore knew better than to do, as he realized the system is a farce to begin with.
much of what trump is claiming has an underlying veneer of truth to it, but it doesn't matter in the american election system, where rigged elections are commonplace, and it really never has. if jfk hadn't stolen the election from nixon, the pentagon (via whatever collusion from lbj) wouldn't have had to shoot him in the first place.
trump got outcheated and he should accept it and shut up and stop whining about it.
22:27
if you dramatically reduce oil supply to europe at the highest seasonal demand by imposing a price cap (and the russians predictably cut off supply), what happens to the price of oil in europe, and consequently globally, as a response?
then, what direction does the price of russian oil move in, as europe continues to get savaged as collateral?
oops.
this is what i've been saying for years: tariffs are hard. i don't oppose them, ideologically (i'm a vehemently anti-market anarcho-communist. local communities have every right to erect tariffs to protect themselves from outside influences, if it's an expression of the democratic will to do so.), but they usually backfire.
22:50
opec is also planning production cuts.
i would be prepared for a substantive spike in the price of oil, and for a substantive increase in inflation to follow.
22:52
you should hoard supplies.
22:56
a price cap on russian oil is the the kind of stupid idea that economists pull their hair out over when they listen to politicians talk about it.
there is no other way to describe it; as policy, this is dumb.
23:07
wednesday, december 7, 2022
0:15
peter is constantly pretending to be a superhero.
at least he's not trying to be nero.
that's the actual joke.
0:30
you may prefer this one, but the cardiacs tune is really more appropriate.
0:31
it was always bizarre that they put talkshow host on the rome and juliet soundtrack when exit music, apparently appropriately named, is the more appropriate tune.
i am a big fan of this song, as well, but i don't want to stray too far off topic.
0:33
deep cuts shakespeare playlist, right.
0:50
thursday, december 8, 2022
there are a small number of helpful changes to the law in the housing plan (the ability to build multi-unit complexes in residential spaces is a good step, even as it doesn't go far enough), but it is broadly a cynical corporate handout to ford's cronies, who are getting what they paid for. unfortunately, the bourgeois left opposition parties did not have actionable alternatives, although the green party (which is the party i endorsed in the 2022 ontario election, which i did not vote in) has an almost useful housing plan.
building more bourgeois subdivisions in the suburbs is not what the province needs, as it will neither reduce the cost of rent, nor will it reduce emissions. rather, what the province needs to do is enact mass eminent domain over all wasteful housing, bulldoze every single lot dwelling over the entire province down into the dirt whence it came and replace each and every one of them with 100 story skyscrapers that are designed to be sustainable and self-sufficient in terms of renewable energy and vegan food production. the idea of the mcmansion will not survive the oil crash, and should not survive the oil crash. the frivolous waste of collective wealth that goes into the housing status quo is truly disgusting; some aggressive land reform followed by a good round of socialism is the right way forward.
ontario is exceedingly large, but the inhabited regions are startlingly small. the truth is that that infrastructure is very poor, and the idea of building outside of toronto will not make sense until that issue is resolved. nobody wants to move to rural ontario to live out a pioneer fantasy in the 21st century.
the province needs to abolish all bourgeois housing as a frivolous waste of space, conduct aggressive socialist land reforms and build strictly upwards, instead.
5:17
after we've abandoned the concept of private property and all moved into apartments, we should then expand the greenbelt to reclaim large portions of the gta, and maybe even give some of it back to the people it was stolen from.
5:37
friday, december 9, 2022
why doesn't anybody talk about a sweltering, sand-swept christmas, with clear enough conditions to see the stars? the story provides an actual reason for the early stopover, leading to a birth in a barn.
jesus was born in a barn.
"fuck, did you have to smash everything up in here? what were you, born in a barn? jeezus."
"why, yes, kent, i was."
some king.
why aren't there donkeys? why aren't there obscured egyptian religious references to isis or inanna, in the syncretism?
the reason is that you're not celebrating an egyptian-jewish holiday. rather, you're celebrating yule. your white christmas is literally that - white.
it's long past time that we took the christ out of christmas, nailed it back up, drained it of blood for good, cremated it and then reclaimed our indigenous solstice celebrations for what they are. christmas is a middle eastern religious festival that has nothing to do with snow or reindeer or elves, and the fact that you've been confused into thinking it is is a reflection of the deep level of colonization that europe underwent during the dark ages.
you are celebrating a norse solstice festival. understand it. embrace it.
to start with, let's get the name right. let's literally take the christ out. you are celebrating some combination of yule and saturnalia. you are not celebrating "christmas". let's start by getting the language right.
1:31
saturday, december 10, 2022
alexander hamilton wouldn't know a cunning plan if it declared a duel against him, tricked him into shooting at a tree and then fatally shot him in the liver.
8:57
no.
the bastard is madison. strictly.
8:58
sunday, december 11, 2022
they'll just pay the fines.
7:53
and, don't think that the savaging of europe as collateral in the war against russia isn't something that's been continuous through democratic administrations, starting with clinton, either.
there's a pattern: europe does very poorly when democrats are in office.
i've heard rumours that merkel may be planning a return from elba, as well.
8:23
monday, december 12, 2022
as the conflict between the federal and provincial governments in relation to health care funding escalates, there's two things that are clarifying themselves:
1) the purpose of the canada health act, which was written by the elder trudeau, was to force the provinces to adhere to a public model. the federal government was supposed to provide funding strictly on the condition that the funds were used in a public system. it was a big stick approach - the federal government wants the public system, and the federal government will pay for the public system, but the funding will dry up if the provinces don't accept the model. what the younger trudeau is very obviously doing is flipping that over and instead withholding funding to create a crisis that will be used force down privatization on a population that doesn't want it, against all economic logic that clearly states the public model is more efficient, which is the direction the world has long been heading in. the younger trudeau has never indicated he had any intention of doing that anywhere, but his hidden agenda to privatize the health care system as a vendetta against his father is becoming abundantly clear. what has been clear for many years is that the younger trudeau is a randian-style free market fundamentalist that has a lot in common with paul ryan, which is something that his handlers have long been attempting to obscure. the trudeau government actually wants to volunteer for imf restructuring. for that reason, it's at least not surprising, even if it takes a lot of people by surprise. the federal government, under the control of a psychopath, is intentionally trying to bankrupt the health care system so that psychopath can carry out a personal vendetta against his dead father, who was probably not even his father.
2) a lot of the messaging from the liberal party around the funding makes it clear that they think the funding in question belongs to them - to their party - and not to the people of canada. they have explicitly repeatedly argued that they don't like the idea of the premiers using canada health transfer money as backdrop for public announcements, and instead think the money should be used to promote the liberal party. this is horribly twisted and cynical and selfish and evil all at the same time, in that it prioritizes a juvenile spat over funding announcements over people literally dying because they can't get to a surgery on time. there is a distinct level of blurry thinking in the liberal party regarding what the party is and what the government is, and where the line between them exists. canada health act transfers are a function of the government and have nothing to do with the party.
the liberals were at one point a kind of state socialist party; they were a member of the socialist international at one point, and i believe they retained membership longer than the ndp did. they took a hard turn to the right in the 90s and at this point are barely to the left of bolsanaro. yet, their canadian-born voting base, or what is left of it, remains exceedingly left wing.
if the ndp can get this narrative out, and all evidence suggests it is actually correct, it could potentially wipe the liberal party out of existence. given that they won't remove trudeau from power, wiping the liberals out of parliament altogether is the next best option.
the ndp needs to make sure that trudeau's hidden agenda to privatize health care is what the next election is about.
17:52
tuesday, december 13, 2022
the supposed constitutional crisis in alberta is in truth much ado about nothing; it's just a ploy to work up votes. danielle smith has no chance of advancing her arguments through the court system. this isn't going anywhere.
the constitutional division of powers clarifies that criminal law is a federal responsibility. there are no holes in this constitutional order to exploit, and no chance of advancing the argument. if alberta wants control over criminal law, it will need to withdraw from confederation.
that said, the mistake alberta is making is that they're trying to push for an american "state's rights" model in a canadian federation that actually has a strong precedent for local sovereignty (quebec). if they push a madisonian model, they will fail at every step; if they use quebec as precedent, and craft their argument to create a parallel level of sovereignty to quebec's, they could be successful in doing so.
the fundamental question this opens up is whether this is justified or not. quebec is the last political remnant of what was a substantive level of french colonization in north america and has it's own language, used to have it's own religion (today, quebeckers are as atheist as northern europeans), has it's own law code, etc. not one of those things applies to alberta, which was initially colonized directly by british crown corporations. if quebec has special rules because it is a special case, it is impossible to apply the argument to alberta.
yet, does that really matter? if we want to give alberta the sovereignty quebec has simply because it asked for it, there's not a good reason to deny it, either. however, that would fundamentally transform the nature of confederation and the inevitable conclusion is that ontario and british columbia will ask for the same level of sovereignty, which is when we get an actual crisis.
if alberta actually wants more sovereignty, let them play be the rules of the constitutional order they live under, rather than pretend they live in the country next door. this provocation will lead nowhere, but if it is repackaged to be coherent under canadian constitutional law, then it might, eventually.
11:31
with this new breakthrough of a positive energy balance, fusion should only be 30 years away.
14:38
wednesday, december 14, 2022
i went over this when the ruling was released. the problem with the supreme court ruling is that it is based on the assumption that alcohol is a milder intoxicant than psilocybin, which is just wrong. it also misunderstands what happens when you take mushrooms and alcohol together.
while it is legal and culturally accepted, alcohol has the potential to leave you in a far worse state than most illegal drugs. alcohol is not the weakest form of intoxication, it's actually one of the worst.
if you take mushrooms and alcohol together, you will certainly merely vomit up the mushrooms. ask anybody that's tried it. it's a 95%+ probability. then, you'll just not be on mushrooms at all. in the sense that they might interact, if you take weak alcohol (like, beer) well into the trip, the effect would be that the alcohol would just undo the mushroom trip, resulting in a numbed or exhausted state.
this is a list of popular or recreational drugs, in terms of potency, from weakest to strongest, in relation to their ability to render you incapable of controlling your own behaviour:
0) nitrous oxide. but, don't do this - you're giving yourself brain damage.
1) marijuana (illegal street level)
2) ecstacy (pure mdma, which is just a neurotransmitter)
3) marijuana (the legal store bought marijuana is more potent, because it's engineered to be a sedative or pain reliever. raw marijuana is classified as a hallucinogen and is actually more of a stimulant than a sedative. it should not make you tired, it should make you giggly and alert. this is called being "high".)
4) mushrooms (your body goes into shock when you take mushrooms, which is what causes the trip. reality may play tricks on you, but mushroom users know they're on drugs, unless they have an underlying condition preventing it.)
5) cocaine (cocaine can make you very angry and very paranoid, but it's otherwise just like drinking too much coffee. everybody has experienced that,)
================
6) alcohol is the first drug in the list that will actually black you out, and lead to you doing things you don't remember or can't control.
7) meth - which is what you usually actually get when you buy "e". meth psychosis can lasts for weeks after the high wears off and severely fuck with your ability to analyze reality.
8) ketamine - ketamine legitimately warps your understanding of physical reality.
9) lsd - lsd legitimately produces hallucinations, and legitimately distorts your ability to understand your surroundings or process information effectively.
10) heroin or other opiates. the "dreaming while awake" quality of opium, as well as it's long term addictive effects, remove users from any concept of reality around them.
while lsd is a powerful trip, you're far more likely to do something illegal when you're drunk than when you're on a handful of mushrooms and it is obvious from reading the facts in the specific case that the hockey player hat broke into the woman's house was merely very drunk.
8:47
i don't actually care about family reunification for asian immigrants, but i oppose the introduction of user fees into the health care system. the logic is no doubt that they didn't pay taxes; fine. it is true that this is a burden on the system, but if we have good immigrant selection then their kids should pay into the system, anyways. i don't really care about that. i'm far more concerned about them receiving priority status because they paid out of pocket, and the precedent it sets that anybody can just walk in to the country and pay their way to the front of the line.
unless you require immediate and emergency care, the only way to get health care in canada should be via public insurance. anything that weakens the monopoly weakens the universality of the system, and should be struck out of law for that reason.
8:52
this is disgusting.
i don't care about the deficit; sell the military to china to pay for it, i don't care. the most important function of the federal government's taxation is to fund social services, and healthcare is the most important social service. if the federal government is not funding health care, it is defaulting on it's most foundational obligation and should be removed from power at once.
how much more money will we waste on ukraine or africa while people are dying in canada? this is not the time to talk about fucking fiscal fucking conservatism. you can fuck off with your fiscal responsibility - the system needs a massive injection of cash, and it needed it years ago.
the reason we're having these problems in the first place is due to decades of underfunding by the federal government. it's a neat trick to underfund the system, watch it buckle and then withhold funds until it fixes itself. no - the fix is more money because the problem is a lack of funding.
the provinces should increase their demands to restore the 50% funding level immediately, and tell the federal government to figure out how to pay for it. cut handouts to ukraine. sell military assets. raise taxes. print it. whatever - i don't care. figure it out.
let's put the issue to the voters. it's of little ambiguity how they will react.
10:17
the broken health care system is 100% the fault of the federal government's refusal to fund it, going back many decades, now.
the provinces have no responsibility in the matter; they've done a valiant job of trying to cobble together a system without sufficient access to resources or funding that can only be fixed by massive injections of cash from the federal level.
voters will punish the liberals severely for their stupidity.
let's do it - let's get the election going.
10:25
nor do we need to waste resources on funding for "mental health" services, either. that's a lot of bullshit pseudo-science. we should cut funding for "mental health" and redirect it towards cancer surgery, instead.
we need money for core scientific purposes - we need real doctors, not psychologists. that fucking psychologist can't do a liver transplant. the truth is, he can't put two thoughts together coherently and can probably barely even fucking read.
10:37
we have serious health care concerns to deal with in a dramatically underfunded system, we don't need some dumbass aristocrat stepping in and deciding we need more psycho-analysis, instead.
the fucking idiot.
10:40
how do you apply your freudian analysis to stop the tumour from growing?
no - shut up. you're a moron.
10:42
canadians are rightfully fed up, and they know the federal government is at fault.
10:43
health care funding should be determined by medical experts at the provincial level, not by drama teacher aristocrats suffering from dunning-kruger effect delusions of grandeur. if those medical experts spend almost nothing on "mental health", it's because they don't prioritize it, and they're right not to. if you want them to have the luxury to spend money on frivolous bullshit, you'll have to give them more money, not less. it will be a long time before that's the case. right now, in trying to push this down, trudeau is just committing a massive blunder that is an egregious abuse of power.
10:49
for now, canadians should take note that the douchebag idiot prime minister is withholding health care funding because he thinks that his perception that his airheaded dumbass mother didn't get the treatment she deserved (which was a punch in the face.) is more important than treating actual diseases like cancer.
10:52
the only thing wrong with margaret trudeau was her low iq.
10:53
and, they say intelligence isn't genetic.
10:54
it's easy enough for trudeau to ape doug ford (aping the ape-man....) and demand for an increase in efficiencies rather than an increase in spending, which nobody voted for and which is likely to take most people by surprise (even if it shouldn't), and i'm mad and should be, and the self-righteous indignation is the right tactic, but some perusal of the facts is also helpful.
is canadian healthcare spending "out of control"?
in fact, it is not - we spend less per capita than almost any other oecd country.
the health care workers are telling us that they're under-funded. the evidence is pretty clear that that is actually true.
11:56
i have exactly zero patience for austerity or fiscal conservatism, especially in a reality where our federal government spends lavishly on itself and overseas, but the fact is that the premise is not grounded in reality.
the system isn't bloated and inefficient. we're not wasting money. we don't need to better target investment.
the system is lean, well tuned and as efficient as could be possible. it just lacks investment, by a federal government that won't adequately fund it.
11:58
thursday, december 15, 2022
it is true that china's occupation of tibet has required it to get it's hands dirty, and it is also true that china has taken advantage of the resources in the region, but the balance of the occupation is a net benefit for the tibetan people, who have been dragged out of the dark ages, albeit kicking and screaming. there is no place in the modern world for the kind of backwardsness that existed in tibet before the chinese moved in. the dalai lama should be executed in public in order to put an end to the barbaric, vicious feudal order that he represents.
there's an excellent essay by michael parenti that you can track down; his site is down, as he appears to be entering the end stages of his life. there's not an easy way to do what needed to be done in tibet, but the chinese have done it and i largely support it.
i would hope that the chinese would take the lessons they learned modernizing tibet and use it to make the process of modernizing xinjiang a little less violent, but the same basic truths about tibet hold in xinjiang, as the latter region is no less backwards.
0:06
the 2003 version of the parenti essay is here:
that version was criticized for not acknowledging china's capitalist reality, and adjusted to better reflect china as a capitalist state, in 2007:
parenti's now disappeared site is still accessible at the wayback machine at archive.org.
0:23
the last i heard, parenti's mental health was gone and, while still alive, he's largely no longer present.
0:24
remember: i largely support the reign of terror. i supported bombing isis, and have called for bombing the mormons in british columbia, or otherwise burning down and bulldozing their settlements. i don't believe in "religious freedom" (it's a contradiction in terms. religion is slavery.), nor do i think it's a human right; i'm an apologist for anti-religionist violence. religion is the single largest enemy of democracy.
yes - the only way to really get rid of religion is for the world to stop believing it, and you cant force it down. violence is largely a counter-productive means to abolish the virus of faith. i'm not idealistic about this; if i thought it would work, if i thought we could just kill them all, i would support it, but i know it won't work. it turns out that the best tactic for global atheism is poverty reduction, as wealth eliminates the hopelessness, poverty and ignorance that perpetuates religion. there are, however, specific groups that simply need to be beheaded and the dalai lama is one of them.
0:33
spending more money is the answer because the problem is that they haven't been spending enough money. the fundamental problem - the lack of funding - is the primary problem that needs to be addressed.
the provinces are not mismanaging the money and our health care "approach" has not failed. rather, the federal government has failed to fund the system, and that lack of funding has left the system on the brink of collapse.
this is not the time for the federal government to play political games to try to push through pet projects like funding for "home care" and "mental health". nor is it the time to agitate for an expansion to dental care or pharmacare. the core functioning of the health care system has collapsed due to decades of under funding by the federal government, and that core functioning needs to be addressed, first, by restoring that core funding. that is what needs to be done, at this time.
it is only after the core funding issues have been addressed that we can then revisit questions around expansion to superfluous services, at some later time, by some other government.
the federal government does not understand the problem, and it is not in it's jurisdiction to understand the problem. by withholding funds, the federal government has pushed their goals further away from them, they haven't brought themselves closer to them. the worse that the core funding problems are, due to under spending at the federal level, the less likely it is that the provinces will accept agreements for superfluous spending on pet projects set by the federal government, in order to advance their own federal egos. the more the federal government withholds funding, the less likely it is to achieve it's stated goals.
trudeau is the wrong person to enact "health care reform" (which is not what we need, and not what anybody voted for. the liberals ran on increasing funding, not on some bullshit "reform" process. the reform party is the other guys.) at the wrong time. these were discussions that existed in the 1980s, and what trudeau is trying to do is relitigate decisions his father made, that he felt poorly affected his mother. there's your bullshit freudian analysis. since then, the system has endured 30+ years of consistent spending cuts that have made discussions about these unneeded and superfluous services out of place because the core functioning of the system is in shatters.
if trudeau wanted to expand the system to include unneeded services near the end of his mandate, he should have immediately addressed the core funding issues at the start of his mandate, first. it is only after the core funding issues have been addressed that discussions around expanding the system to frivolous or superfluous spending concerns might be seriously entertained, in the context of a system that is otherwise functioning properly, in it's ability to deliver core health care functions. you have to build a foundation before you can build a balcony. as it is, he missed his opportunity, and now is obligated to simply restore the core funding that his predecessors removed and that he has refused to do his due diligence on. now, due to his inaction, discussions about expanding the core functioning of the system to include luxury services will have to wait until after the core functioning of the system has been restored. this will need to be done by some future government.
this is not a choice that the federal government can make. the government can't be wasting money on bullshit like bi-polar syndrome (a fake disease that doctors use to describe the antisocial behaviour of poorly parented asshole rich people and that has it's root causes in the dysfunctional nature of the upper class family) when people are dying from cancer while on waitlists for surgery. that would be mismanagement on an epic scale. it would be irresponsible for the provinces to spend the money that the federal government is obligated to give them on the things the federal government is demanding they spend it on, when the system needs an infusion of cash to restore it's core functioning capacity. the demands of the federal government are out of line, and especially so in a system that prioritizes care.
the federal government needs to understand that it's demands cannot be of high priority to a system that is buckling under a lack of funding and that, by withholding funding, it is only harming it's own bargaining positioning. due to a lack of existing funding, the system is not able to accommodate their requests at this time. the federal government needs to retreat to it's jurisdiction, write even larger checks than the province is demanding and agitate at the proper layer of government, which is the provincial layer.
the only outcome of an incompetent federal government demanding dental benefits when the system can't fund cancer surgery is inevitable collapse. the problem in front of us is underfunding, it will be solved by throwing money at it and what we therefore need is a massive injection of cash, immediately.
6:41
the lack of beds is a corollary of the overpopulation underlying the housing crisis: we have too many people and not enough infrastructure. importing more doctors is simply going to create more population pressures. rather, we need funding to train more medical professionals, locally, and we need to cut immigration to reduce overpopulation pressures on the system.
6:50
stop.
if we had enough beds before (and we did.) and now we don't, what happened?
what happened is that the number of people increased faster than the resources available to the system to create enough beds. in canada, all population growth is due to immigration, and our population growth due to immigration is actually quite substantive.
this is the same basic problem as we've seen throughout the country, on multiple issues: the federal government wants to maintain obscene immigration levels, and somehow doesn't understand that you have to build infrastructure to accommodate for it. they tout the benefits of immigration, but they don't understand the costs involved with immigration. they seem to think the hospitals, schools and houses will just build themselves.
7:17
the people are already here.
now, we need to pay for them - we need to build more houses, schools, hospitals, etc. that costs money. that money has to come from the federal level, as they caused the problem. there's no way around it.
7:18
however, the federal government really needs to revisit their math to integrate the infrastructure costs involved with immigration (something they're obviously not doing because they're not building the infrastructure) in order to recalculate a cost-benefit analysis to maintaining immigration at such a high level. this is the biggest problem that the country now faces: how do we find the funding to pay to maintain adequate service levels for this dramatic influx of people?
7:24
i'm going to guess that, if you really look into it, you'll learn that the federal government's immigration analysis comes from american data. moving to the united states is like moving into a jungle - you have to fend for yourself, entirely. that's just not how canada works, and american immigration data is entirely useless to canadian decision makers. yet, this government has a pattern of seeing itself as existing parallel to the united states and using american models and argumentation in canadian political contexts, rather than properly seeing canada as existing in opposition to the american elephant.
american immigration models don't need to calculate funding for healthcare because it's a market function. that's not true in canada.
7:30
the liberals have not been in the list of parties that i might consider voting for for many years, now.
i am not likely to vote in the next federal election, but my ballot choice will be between the ndp (who always win this riding) and the greens.
i strongly dislike brian masse, and mostly consider him to be a wasted seat in parliament. the only thing he's ever done is legalize sports gambling, which i don't really care about but would unquestionably vote against if it were put in front of me. that makes it extremely likely that i would vote for the greens.
11:29
friday, december 16, 2022
the liberal bill to try to force you to pay for sharing links is an escalation in the fake left's attack on free speech, in that it explicitly targets academic freedom. there are no fair use clauses in the legislation.
it is important that everybody with a brain stand in solidarity with each other to fight this absurd buffoonery until it is abolished outright by refusing to abide by it.
4:47
property rights are make believe nonsense that require extreme state violence in order to enforce.
just ignore the bill and dare the government to try to enforce it.
4:52
if the parliament of canada wants people to take it seriously, it should refrain from passing nonsense laws.
on the other hand, if the parliament chooses to pass nonsense laws, it should not expect people to follow them, or to respect the authority of the parliament that is passing them, and it is the subsequent prerogative of canadians to choose to ignore the existence and self-proclaimed authority of that parliament, and rather dare it to assert it's self-proclaimed authority by using barbarism and violence.
4:55
i would not expect this bill to survive a court challenge. this bill is clearly overly broad in it's contravention of s. 2b of the charter. i am actually surprised it was signed, as it's unconstitutionality is so overwhelmingly apparent that it should have been rejected at the signing stage.
for now, what it does is severely damage the credibility and authority of parliament and should simply be ignored by all.
5:09
ok. i'm ahead of myself. it hasn't gone to the senate, yet.
this is the rare example where the senate should block a bill as being unambiguously in contravention of the charter and i think there's a good chance that they might.
5:25
while there have been a few examples, the most famous example of the senate blocking a law for being obviously unconstitutional was when mulroney tried to put restrictions on abortion as a reaction to the morgentaler ruling, which, unlike roe. v. wade, actually dismantled abortion due to the then existing law being in contravention of an enumerated constitutional right (our s. 7 includes the right to security of the person, which was contravened due to the wait times introduced by the legislation). the canadian bill of rights has a clause asserting the right to self-ownership, and it was this clause that abortion legislation infringed upon. the mulroney government tried to ram through a replacement law, the senate identified it as still being blatantly unconstitutional and subsequently blocked it for that reason. this bill is just as obviously unconstitutional in it's utter ignorance of the supremacy of s. 2b, if not more so, and the senate's proper role is to identify it as such and send it back.
a fair use clause, at the minimum, would be required to ensure academic freedom is not harmed by the bill. as it is, right now, you would have to pay your sources if you wrote an essay and posted it to your website, or if you cited a news article in the course of an internet debate.
5:32
more broadly speaking, the reality is that facebook is a person under canadian law and, as such, has the right to free speech, under s. 2b. the court has ruled repeatedly that the imposition of fines is in contravention of free speech. this is not ambiguous; the law is ridiculous. a functioning senate would and hopefully will identify that and send it back.
5:36
if the government wants to pass a bail-out package for legacy media, let it do so, but i would oppose even doing that. good riddance to them.
democracy will be bettered by the abandonment of corporate media and it's replacement with a lively blogosphere. these attempts to save a dying medium are just retarding our progress and slowing us down.
5:38
there is also a legal question opened up regarding the longstanding treatment of facebook as private property, itself. the courts have refused to enforce s. 2b, which would prevent facebook or twitter from censoring users if it were enforced, under the argument that their servers are their private property and constitutional law therefore doesn't apply. logically, it would follow that the government would have no right to interfere with link sharing, either, as it would be outside of the reach of it's scope.
if we are to decide that the government can regulate link sharing, it would necessarily follow as a corollary that facebook can no longer arbitrarily censor users, as the rules of the commons would all of a sudden apply. yet, this is logically and legally incoherent.
far more likely is that the court will rule that sharing links on facebook is equivalent to posting a message on a post-it board in a private club, and the government has no authority to regulate it.
6:18
any traditional view of contract law would also interpret mandating a contract be signed to be legislated duress. normally, a contract of the sort would be null under law. so, how does a court react to legislated duress? has that ever even happened before?
6:59
my hair has been awful lately, and i'm struggling to figure out why.
i previously used the herbal essence "totally twisted", which i utilized as a detangler. i have unusually thin and unusually straight hair (i'm mostly swedish), which means it's unusually prone to getting knotted up. a product called "totally twisted" would have to be intended as a detangler, as no sane human being would want their hair to be twisted into knots, and it worked very well for that purpose for me for many years. it mysteriously began to disappear around 2018 and i ended up moving to a hydration product that i've found took far more effort to get the same outcome.
what i'm starting to realize is that the hydration product is a softer shampoo, so what has happened is that it hasn't removed as much dead hair as the detangler did. the result is that i've been walking around with an increasing amount of dead hair, and the dead hair is just knotting everything up. i've been unhappy with this and planning to switch products for a while.
a few weeks ago, i noticed the "totally twisted" back on the shelf so i purchased a large amount of it. i've only started switching over this week, and what i'm noticing is that i'm pulling out a large amount of clearly dead frizz, which is what is leading me to the conclusion about the hydration product, but i've just noticed something on the bottle:
defined curls for hair
i'm sure that wasn't there before, but is the brand name "totally twisted" supposed to be for people that have curly hair and want it, rather than people that have tangled hair and are trying to clean the shit out of it? how does that make sense? i mean, who would want curly hair in the first place, but if you're unlucky enough to have curly hair, who would call it "twisted"? talk about a marketing fail.
i'm consequently starting to wonder if maybe they changed the product, as well, and if the frizz might have something to do with using shampoo for thick or curly hair, when i have extremely thin and straight hair.
they're really all the same thing, right? they just smell different, right?
11:15
see, this video suggests that what i'm describing is what i would expect (who wants curly hair?), and that perhaps it's just overly frizzy because there's a build up of dead hair in it.
11:32
i have a large amount to use, so i have plenty of time to do the experiment.
11:33
the ingredients all seem to be the same.
i think i was just overdue to pull the dead hair out
11:45
while i have been vocal in pointing out that the structural bubble in the market created by easing has nowhere to go but explode in the presence of tightening, and continued delusions to the contrary are just putting off the inevitable, it is more likely that the sell-off happening this week is a consequence of small-scale investors needing to sell assets to buy christmas presents, in the face of everything getting more expensive.
when rates go up in a foolish attempt to fight inflation, the middle class gets reamed and needs to find a way to get money to fill the tree up, which requires them to sell whatever they have and don't need, like stocks. few families will tell their kids to suffer to get the inflation rate down, if they can sell something off, instead. from a behavioural perspective, these tactics have no chance of actually working in "cooling down the economy", but will rather lead to divestment and indebtedness.
that said, it would imply that the money is not going to be reinvested in the new year, and a good metric to determine just how much the rate hikes pushed individuals further into private debt will be how much money does get reinvested. if there is a bump after christmas, it would suggest that money is changing hands at christmas dinners, and getting invested, which is normal. if there is no bump, it would suggest that the rate hikes are just pushing everybody dramatically into debt.
the market has little to do with the economy, except that it's an indicator of general wealth and an indicator of indebtedness.
13:13
saturday, december 17, 2022
i have opposed vaccine mandates because the science never suggested they would actually work (and they haven't.), and i have opposed closing nightclubs or otherwise targeting gatherings by young people because the science was always clear that you wanted the virus to spread as quickly as possible in low risk demographics in order to minimize longer term spread, but i have also always supported explicitly targeting gatherings of older and vulnerable people, and have for that reason loudly supported shutting down churches, casinos, bingo halls, sports events, geriatric facilities, etc.
including s 2a in the constitution was a mistake and it should be removed from the document. having a religion is just like having any other worthless opinion, and the worthless opinion of any particular religion shouldn't be treated any differently than any other worthless opinion. the science supported closing churches, but did not support closing nightclubs; they got this part right, when they got so much else wrong.
this is the least contentious part of what happened and the ruling is not forceful enough in getting that point across.
5:11
my criticism of the government's response to covid has always been that it did not follow what the science actually recommended, but rather imagined a government policy called Science that had little do with real science but actually looked and sounded a lot like religion mixed with a collection of logical fallacies called "common sense".
5:21
i don't care what some dumbass christians think.
5:24
it is blatantly apparent that they need to build more hospitals, which will require a massive injection of cash from the federal government (who own the hospitals). instead, the retards running the federal government want to do a line-by-line audit to "find efficiencies" and otherwise try to "correct behaviour" because they can't come to terms with the reality in front of them, which is that they've increased immigration by 20000%, and the infrastructure development has not only not kept up, it's been halted. this is the obvious outcome of a poorly planned economy that has increased it's population faster than it has increased it's infrastructure.
15:31
another example of the utter stupidity of the immature clique of overgrown children running ottawa is their insistence on wanting to compete with washington, while somehow managing to decide that there aren't consequences resulting from that. there's a headline in the country's paper of record right now talking about how canada seeks "friendly competition" with the united states. what kind of utterly delusional absurdity is this? what nonsense? what idiocy? never could two words be so incorrectly placed together as "friendly competition", as though geopolitics is just a meaningless sport and what matters isn't if you win or lose, but if you had fun. you might expect such language to be deployed as satire or biting criticism, but these are the word choices of the liberal party, itself. it's just fucking croquet, right?
competition is war. one side wins and the other is annihilated. that is what competition means - it is defined as annihilating an opponent, or being annihilated by that opponent. competition is wasteful, and to be avoided by all rational actors, partly because an actor might lose. there is no such thing as "friendly competition". a declaration of competition is a declaration of war.
clinton and chretien used to bet on sports, but one gets the impression they were actually both into it; a friendly wager, in a legitimate sense, and not an empty show of statecraft or pomp. harper, for all his faults, has an education in economics and understood why "competition" is a horrible word to use with your allies, especially when one is a nuclear power with hegemonic military and economic control, at the least in the hemisphere. obama rightfully thought the naivete was hilarious, but perhaps under-calculated the threat, and that might in the long run be sign by most as a mistake. both trump and biden are on video looking at trudeau like he's some kind of retard, when he talks about competing with them, like he just walked in out of the 19th century and simply somehow doesn't know that that's a dog that won't hunt.
america does not engage in "friendly competition", for the obvious reason that it might lose, from time to time. the hegemon does not compete because the hegemon does not lose. the hegemon dominates it's subjects, preventing them from competing with it, and bludgeons it's competitors into the ground. that kind of talk is going to get canada bombed, and/or lead to regime change in ottawa.
i would actually like to see regime change in ottawa, but any discussion of competing with the americans needs to immediately cease. no, you can't compete with the hegemon for fun, you fucking idiots. the stupidity and naivete is utterly baffling.
18:28
canada must seek ways to assert it's independence from america without directly challenging it.
the liberals used to understand that. alas.
18:35
19:35
sunday, december 18, 2022
the fake left media is now attacking henry kissinger for being an idealistic, utopian leftist.
8:33
i've made my own views known; the only way for this war to end is for russia to construct and secure defensible borders somewhere in the stateless borderlands that make up the buffer region between itself and europe. as a geo-political entity, ukraine does not and never has existed.
the reason this is going to take a long time is not because it's hard - the outcome is both inevitable and obvious - but because the west does not want peace. the russians want security; the west wants a war to dismantle russia, which it currently thinks is weak. the west's self-interest, as it sees it, is to escalate the war to bleed the russians, to dismantle german industry by destroying the infrastructure (because it tried to compete with american industry), to generate arms sales to justify ever increasing pentagon budgets and to otherwise create ethnic divisions in the centre of russian civilization, to weaken it's core ability to exist, as a culture.
kissinger's error is that he thinks the west wants peace, or at the least thinks it is in the self-interest of the west to push for peace. he also thinks the previous status quo is largely salvageable. western military analysts disagree, and i think they're correct. it is in the west's self-interest to make this as hard for the russians as is possible, even if the ultimate outcome of a russian victory is not in ambiguity. if the russians are bled dry by this process, and the borderlands are reduced to a gigantic crater, it may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory, as the russians then lose the ability to defend themselves against a joint american attack on russia and china, from the east. the chinese may still win, but the reason the americans are targeting russia first is that they know they're the greater foe.
i have also argued that this is a mistake by the americans for the reason that the americans will not be able to defeat china without russian help, which today sounds absurd but was in the list of possibilities not very long ago. england has always required russian help to defeat it's rivals, and the inevitable war against china is no exception. russia has long been the source of mercenaries for the west, going back to antiquity. the americans think that neutralizing russia will make it easier to destroy china because it eliminates a key chinese ally in terms of access to raw resources, supplies and weapons manufacturing capability; rather, neutralizing russia eliminates the key ally america would require to defeat china, and instead guarantees chinese hegemony over the entirety of east asia for the next several decades. if russia does collapse, it is the chinese that take control of russian resources, which are in the east of the country, not some theoretical puppet government in kiev. the chinese are the great winners here, as they get the greatest spoils. large amounts of eastern russia are in regions previously ruled over or otherwise claimed by china, and there have been wars fought between russia and china over these regions in the recent past.
while kissinger's application of his own theory is flawed, the theory itself remains more relevant than ever; this war is about balancing power in a world order that is currently out of balance, and will not end until a proper balance is re-achieved, whether that is in the form of russia building defensible borders, the form of china expanding to the urals or, potentially, both.
the cause of this war is nato expansionism, and there could not have been any other potential outcome besides war from that clear provocation against russia. nato could not even have expanded into poland without the inevitability of war; the truth is that this war started 25 years ago, when nato declared war on russia by expanding an inch east of germany, it has just taken the russians a very long time to launch a counter-offensive. comparisons to world war one are not precise, but they are both apt and correct.
9:13
russia has long been the great decider of global conflicts. i'm not just talking about the world wars, or napoleonic france, this goes back thousands of years, to the varangian guard, the dominance of the goths in the roman military and the pivotal alliances with vaguely defined groups of western iranians (technically eastern iranian speakers, as this was back migration) that pop up through roman, greek, persian and west and east semitic periods of hegemony in the middle east. the single counter-example is the mongolian defeat, except that the russians eventually won that war, too, after a centuries long struggle. the correct lesson is not that you can beat the russians by invading from the east but that the russians don't give up easily.
the cold war was what it was, but those ideological pressures are now historical and what should be apparent to all, today, is that it is foolishness to align one's self against russia, for the reason that russia always wins. any rational actor wants russia on it's side. no sane entity would seek a conflict with russia.
further, the russians have an affinity with the english, themselves. they don't hate us; they actually admire us and want to be our friends. the chinese would be wise to be wary of a sino-russian alliance against the english, given the history of russia repeatedly aligning itself with england at crucial and decisive moments, but we're certainly doing everything we can to make enemies out of them, whether the russians want that role or not.
18:31
The English government presents, just now, a curious phenomenon. Seeing that the French and English nations are getting rid of the prejudices and false notions formerly entertained against each other, and which have cost them so much money, that government seems to be placarding its need of a foe; for unless it finds one somewhere, no pretext exists for the enormous revenue and taxation now deemed necessary.
Therefore it seeks in Russia the enemy it has lost in France, and appears to say to the universe, or to say to itself. "If nobody will be so kind as to become my foe, I shall need no more fleets nor armies, and shall be forced to reduce my taxes. The American war enabled me to double the taxes; the Dutch business to add more; the Nootka humbug gave me a pretext for raising three millions sterling more; but unless I can make an enemy of Russia the harvest from wars will end. I was the first to incite Turk against Russian, and now I hope to reap a fresh crop of taxes."
that quote is from thomas paine, 1792. he is correct, but he is also being short-sighted. england vilifies the russians when it does not matter, but then seeks to align itself with russia when it does matter for exactly the same reason it seeks to vilify it. paine could only see half of that, from 1792.
18:48
the court has spoken and the parliament has no right to interfere further.
medical practitioners should simply ignore any further delays and dare the criminal justice system to respond. the court has made it clear what the law is and what it will enforce and not enforce.
19:47
i would hope the ndp would reject the introduction of any such delay, but, due to it's roots as a "progressive" party rather than as a worker or socialist party, the ndp has an unfortunate conservative streak that makes it unreliable on issues concerning self-ownership.
19:49
this is encouraging, at the least.
19:52
unfortunately, the liberals might attempt to pass the bill with support from the conservatives, who are likely to support it, instead. it may be helpful for the left for the liberals and conservatives to drop the charade already and just merge. it has long been essentially impossible to ascertain any meaningful difference in policy between the liberals and conservatives; for the liberals to come out on an issue like this and align themselves with the far right would be telling, and really help in the left's messaging that the liberals are, in fact, an extreme right-wing party. what we've learned since 2015 is that we're not any better off with the liberals in power than we are with the conservatives in power.
19:54
if you don't have the right to kill yourself out of pure frivolity on the remotest whim imaginable, you don't have any rights at all. this is a basic test of self-ownership. any state-imposed restrictions - of any sort, at all. - on suicide are absurd and simply cannot exist in a free society. any state which seeks to impose any restrictions at all on suicide should simply be ignored, and any attempt to construct rules around who does and does not qualify for suicide merely damages the credibility and authority of the parliament, as it is attempting to construct rules around something that it has no business regulating.
20:00
a state where the government decides when and how you kill yourself is a state where the populace is reduced to slavery.
20:03
coyotes are opportunistic hunters, but they are also usually simply smaller than humans and would simply have a hard time actually killing one, unless it is very small or very weak. i believe this woman was killed by a pack of coyotes, which suggests inbreeding with wolves, as that is wolf behaviour. yet, this should really only be confusing to a christian or aristotlian that wants to decide that humans are superior to coyotes or something. this is hubris and nonsense - any coyote will always eat a human if it actually can, if it has the opportunity.
a functional, important question is if the woman may have been on her period. the smell of blood would have likely been enough to generate an attack, and while most people might be able to chase off one or two coyotes with a stick, few people could defend against a pack of them.
20:20
coyotes don't hunt in packs. if these canids were taking down moose in co-ordinated pack hunting, they are acting like wolves and should be called wolves. that might be the answer to the quandary: this wasn't a coyote attack, it was a wolf attack.
20:22
that is not as important as some would make it, though. the idea that coyotes don't see humans as prey is an aristotlian fallacy that needs to be discarded as a myth; the only reason that coyotes don't eat humans more often is that they broadly can't.
20:23
we may have a different evolutionary relationship with canids than we do with felids or ursids, in the sense that there is good evidence that we developed an early symbiotic relationship with canids, which is how we got to keeping wolves as pets, and then breeding them for low intelligence.
the correct evolutionary theory is probably that we evolved as a prey species for felids, particularly, which is something that continues today in india and africa. in america, a cougar or jaguar will happily eat you if it can; it's not afraid of you, and it doesn't need to be sick or experiencing low "natural prey" availability. these cats will hunt you. this idea that they don't see us as prey is nonsense; prey evasion was likely a dominant selective pressure on the evolution of our intelligence.
20:32
in addition to felid evasion, crocodile evasion was also likely a dominant selective pressure in east africa.
20:37
it's hard to state with certainty what is or is not correct, but this theory makes the most sense to me, both intuitively and in relation to the empirical evidence that i'm aware of:
the basic question you have to answer is why humans would hunt, given that we evolved to eat plants (as all primates have). a cat has to eat meat; it's an obligate carnivore and will die if it tries to strictly consume plant matter. that requirement to eat meat requires an incredible expenditure of resources, which any game theoretical model of evolution would recognize as irrational for a species to inflict upon itself by choice. our ancestors could eat fruit, so why would they choose not to?
there's two answers that make any sense. the first is that our ancestors started eating meat opportunistically, which most animals that we think of as herbivores will actually do. search youtube for cows or squirrels eating birds. it happens. yet, squirrels and cows don't hunt, so you still need a mechanism, and the only thing that makes any sense is self-defense. you could imagine how a pissed off proto-human might watch it's girlfriend get eaten by a lion, and decide to eat the lion in retaliation. i can accept the plausibility of these things happening as rare events, but i have difficulty accepting the premise that this might define a plausible evolutionary mechanism.
the second, which makes more sense to me, is that we started eating meat due to climate change. if the premise is that it is rational that we would strictly eat plants whenever we can because it requires the least amount of resource expenditure, what happens when we enter an ice age and we can no longer eat plants because there aren't any? that's a mechanism that truly forces us to hunt, or to die. that may be the missing link in tying the evolution of hunting to the development of fire.
21:03
i don't like the term "human nature", but all animals are lazy in the sense that we conserve resources as much as possible. hunting on a savannah is blatantly irrational, when you can just eat figs instead. however, hunting on a tundra becomes not just rational but necessary.
as the link points out, that observation is actually consistent with the evidence.
21:04
The direct cost of vaccine administration compared to the savings associated with averting missed work and treatment costs due to illness indicates an estimated net cost/benefit of –$0.4 billion to $2.1 billion.
that sounds like what i'd have guessed, which is that it didn't make any real economic difference.
the adjustment made to inflate the dollar total is laughable, and should merely be read as a bias on the dollar amount arrived at, which should consequently be adjusted downwards. i might rather introduce a statistical cost of inconvenience and suggest it cost canadians $30 billion in pain-in-the-ass annoyances that had no discernible economic benefit.
22:54
did they calculate the potential public savings associated with old people dying sooner that was lost due to vaccination?
22:56
monday, december 19, 2022
i've been doing a lot of things.
i had to explain to the court why my application for inherent jurisdiction actually had a purpose. the police board lost statutory jurisdiction because the officer resigned, so i applied for certiorari on the report by citing inherent jurisdiction. the court agreed they had jurisdiction, but couldn't ascertain a reason to pull a report on an officer that had resigned. my response was that the purpose of the exercise was to get a judicial reference on the legality of the arrest in the first place, and the involvement of the police board was actually unwanted, anyways. i'm still waiting for a response on that.
i had a lot of difficulty writing the response and in the process i have convinced myself that i'm under microwave attack. i have posted links here previously explaining how that would work. the attacker seems to be setting up in ram, because what was happening was that the response kept changing, like something out of 1984. there were key issues that i kept changing, and kept flipping back. i tried to move into a virtual machine on the recording machine and that worked until i went out; i then tried the typing machine and found the same problems. this left me with the conclusion that i could not finish the essay at home.
i ended up forced to go to the local university to type on their machines almost every day of the week starting on the 5th, meaning i lost the whole week. i then spent the entirety of last week doing grocery shopping and name change things and am now in for the rest of the month.
i am horribly frustrated by my lack of progress, but these are things that need to be done and they just keep piling up. as it is, i want to put everything aside from now until my birthday and just work on the music. i hope to get done at least one recording in that space, which is this one:
1:04
i have a process to unravel and that process is important to me but i'm fed up and i just want to work.
1:07
kyrsten sinema's decision to become an independent is a smart, effective move to maximize her own self-interest, both in washington and in relation to blocking a primary run against her. this will help her continue to act independently of the white house to advance issues that are important to her as an individual, rather than the interests of some political party. this is a model that more senators should follow.
11:29
taxing rich people is fun, but it doesn't actually matter in a modern economy. the government can, does and should just create whatever money it needs to spend. if she got something in return for blocking a tax increase, that's a fair trade-off on a priority that has no discernible public policy ramifications and fake leftists just use in order to get elected. if bernie sanders is going to attack rich people for no reason other than to get elected, why criticize kyrsten sinema for basically doing the same thing (in reverse), except actually getting a meaningful concession for it?
how many bills has bernie sanders passed in his 35 years in congress? how many has kyrsten sinema written in a half term? who has made a more meaningful contribution to the left?
increasing the federal minimum wage is a nice symbolic gesture, but a functional minimum wage is set at state or local levels. costs of living are not standard across the country, so this is not a proper action by the federal government, and setting a new york minimum wage in utah could actually just lead to damaging inflation. further, the left wants local activism around wage issues, it doesn't want the federal government to set a floor and the activists to go home.
the "green new deal" was utter bullshit, and i would have voted against it too, just to piss people off. the intent was to make it look like aoc and her clique of losers actually managed to accomplish something, which was a farce. they have not accomplished anything, and synema did the right thing in throwing it in their face to make them look like the opportunistic, cynical losers that they are.
the infrastructure bill was full of handouts to oil companies and ineffective tax cuts, which is why the price tag was so high. the bill was legitimately wasteful in the sense that it was a corporate handout to lobbyists. i wouldn't have voted for it without removing the corporate handouts and pork barrel spending in it, either.
abolishing the filibuster might seem like a good idea until the republicans have a slim majority in the senate. then? oops.
it is possible that she might piss me off, but she hasn't done anything i disagree with, yet. she has demonstrated herself as a pragmatist trying to pass actually meaningful activist legislation while pushing back on time-wasting, empty and purely symbolic fake leftism (which she has brilliantly managed to repeatedly exchange for meaningful concessions, thereby turning nothing into something) and attacking corporate handouts where they are actually damaging, and that is in fact a breath of fresh air in the face of so much fake leftism and right-wing "progressivism".
we need more senators like kyrsten sinema. she's doing this right.
12:03
the problem with trying to force consumers to reuse cloth bags for groceries is that carrying grocery items in bags is a broadly single-use application, for functional and hygienic reasons. this is trying to pound a square peg into a round hole.
large companies like walmart should look into the use of biodegradable plant-based plastics made of hemp or corn for this application, although i've noticed that the walmart near my house is just increasing the thickness of produce bags (which are not banned) and allowing customers to use thicker produce bags as grocery bags. what we want is bags that we can use once and throw away and that then properly decompose in the landfill, not reusable filthy cloth bags with food residue that are then left to build up bacteria in car trunks that are then brought into grocery stores to contaminate the food.
14:11
if i owned a grocery store, i would have a security guard at the front door preventing anybody from bringing cloth bags in.
this is a disgusting practice that should not be tolerated.
14:16
this is utterly ridiculous; it's the kind of backwards, corrupt despotism you expect from a third world country, like ukraine.
this is unacceptable, and ms. freeland must resign over it.
19:52
tuesday, december 20, 2022
it is not his job to improve the health care system, it is his responsibility to fund it. further, nobody asked him for his opinion and nobody cares what he thinks.
if he wants to improve the health care system, tell him to generate a mandate to do so by running for premier of ontario.
8:21
when he says what he wants is "home care", that is code for pushing down privatization from head office. what he's trying to ram down everybody's throats is a transfer out of a public model that provides care in hospitals and into a private model that provides care in homes, and what that is is a hidden agenda to privatize the system that amounts to a massive step backwards into the dark ages, when doctors used to make house calls.
maybe we can all have an inter-faith prayer circle for cancer patients, along with some blood-letting, while we're turning the clocks back.
"home care" is exactly what the system does not need. we do not need or want to take a step backwards into a bygone era where doctors made house calls. what the system needs is rapid modernization and far more public spaces in far more public hospitals.
8:26
we don't have enough doctors and nurses to run an efficient hospital network. shifting to an inefficient home-based network, where doctors and nurses need to waste time (and carbon) transiting back and forth between houses, is just going to dramatically increase wait times. while it comes off as incredible stupidity, what it actually is is greed and corruption. those nurses and doctors will work for private companies and be given private contracts.
8:28
the federal government has no authority to tie health care conditions to health act transfers.
what the provinces should do is sue the federal government in response to their "negotiating tactic", which is actually an unconstitutional abuse of power.
8:31
who regulates a home care service to make sure that public funds aren't going towards female genital mutilation, or otherwise ensure that they are not being deployed to facilitate pseudo-scientific, backwards and barbaric cultural practices? if you allow a market to operate in heath care, you allow for religion to crawl it's way back in to the system. the public hospital model ensures that common standards and sound science are being applied, and that specious religious superstitions are not permitted to masquerade as health care.
9:05
you can be certain that a systemic shift to "home care" would result in public dollars being spent on sending witch doctors out on house calls under the guise of something like "islamic healthcare", which would be an abhorrent outcome.
9:09
i am horribly frustrated by my lack of progress recently. i want to put everything aside for the next few weeks, from now until my birthday, and strictly get to work on finishing up some music. i hope to at the least finish the following record between now and then.
i have a process to follow and that process is important to me but i'm fed up by the delays and just want to get to work.
15:25
serbia needs to understand that, correctly or delusionally, it's existence is at least rationally seen as a threat to european security, given the potential of the war in ukraine expanding.
serbia is not a nato member. it's potential use as a russian military base in the center of the balkans is a threatening scenario. nato may, as a result, seek to occupy it by force.
this would indicate that we are on the brink of a much more serious war.
serbia would be advised not to fight, but to rather take it's concerns to the street.
18:37
serbia should take care not to fall into traps set by nato.
evacuating serbians from kosovo is a better idea than sending serbian troops south.
provocations will not help serbia. let nato fire the first shot.
18:38
serbia cannot fight a war against nato, but a popular movement in serbia against a nato occupation might spill over to neighbouring countries, and that will help serbia more than any attempt at direct conflict.
18:42
wednesday, december 21, 2022
But even if you have the contractors, there are supply chain issues, at least at the moment, constraining construction, and also boosting prices.
there needs to be a 5 year moratorium on immigration increases, then, until the supply side can catch up.
a planned economy would adjust to empirical facts in front of it, not insist on ideology over reason.
this is not rocket science: if we can't build the infrastructure, we can't have the immigration.
10:31
well, we can change the constitution if we'd like to, but it's a difficult and lengthy process that mr. trudeau would not have enough time left in office to see through, even if he had the competence to do so and the confidence of canadians to do it (neither of which are true). which is it - is there a pressing health care crisis that needs immediate reform, or are we to embark on a decade-long journey to amend the constitution? you can't have both. this is a fluff article that offers absolutely no constructive suggestions as to how to approach the division of powers in the constitution, other than abstractly suggesting it ought to change. unlike this article, the process of altering the division of powers in the constitution is not some esoteric, abstract consideration; it is concretely outlined exceedingly clearly in the document itself, and any actors seeking to do so will be obligated to follow those instructions.
i know that mr. trudeau, as a spoiled aristocrat, isn't used to being told there's a rule of law he has to follow. this is the primary argument i've put forward for the party to remove him from power, but it's also become clear enough that his bad attitude towards the rule of law (he thinks he's special and that the rules therefore don't apply to him) has thoroughly destroyed the party, which will need to clean house upon his imminent resignation. it's become a party of corrupt snowflakes that needs to be scraped off the windshield and shoveled into the ditch.
as a citizen of ontario, i actually don't like the idea of my health records being accessible by the federal government. i am never going to need to access my records in other provinces, and actually don't want them accessible from other provinces. i don't even like the idea of my health records being searchable from my local hospital. i have strong privacy concerns about my health data being sold to corporations (or perhaps stolen by them), being used for electioneering, being downloaded by hackers or being accessed by intelligence agencies. a centralized database sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. that's something the federal government appears to be oblivious to.
there is not some deep structural problem in our health care system that requires foundational reform, it is merely suffering from the era of austerity within the status quo of neo-liberalism, in that it has been underfunded for decades. the solution is really very simple: the federal government needs to restore funding to historical levels, and allow the provinces to do their job in rebuilding independent systems.
11:00
i support the constitution as it is and would vote against attempts to shift health care funding to federal jurisdiction. local governments are better suited to analyze the healthcare needs of local populations.
if we are to open up the constitution, perhaps we ought to add the canada health act itself to it with automatic adjustments for inflation and population growth, along with equalization, to ensure that the federal government can no longer politicize the funding model. that is the actual problem here, the federal government presenting a barrage of terrible ideas, in an attempt to politicize something they should just shut up and fund. if we're going to change these rules, i would rather take the opportunity to take the leverage away from the federal government to stop this bullshit from happening again. we're learning a flaw in the legislation; while it is potentially beneficial to give the federal government leverage when it is run by wise leaders, it is just as potentially devastating to invest that kind of power into the hands of abject buffoons.
11:16
if the federal government actually had good ideas about healthcare, right?
it doesn't - everything the federal government has suggested on this file to this point has been horrific and would make the problems we have worse, at the sole benefit of investors and private capital.
11:21
the broader lesson is the foundational point that the provinces are better informed than the federal government and that the constitution got the division of powers correctly.
11:23
if the subject of the next election is a stupid debate over whether canada is or is not broken, that would clearly demonstrate that canada is, in fact, broken.
it is the harper-trudeau neo-liberal consensus that has broken the country. the conservatives don't offer ideas that differ substantively from the liberals (in fact, the liberals have largely become harper conservatives, which is the problem) and would merely continue to break it.
11:47
11:50
this is probably the best thing he ever did, due to the substantive contribution from jim thirlwell. that said, i'm also a big fan of the post downward spiral string of experimental eps and remix discs, including the perfect drug. the instrumental version of the fragile released years after the fact was more what i would have wanted in 1999 (at the time, i actually burned a one cd version that mostly isolated the instrumental tracks in the collection and discarded most of the vocal tracks), but it was actually the defocus on the experimental remixes that is actually where i think he lost an edge that was maybe never his in the first place. the social network soundtrack, ghosts and year zero are high points, but i've only been able to get into bits and pieces of nin's post-1999 output. i know, though, that what i'm really missing is the contributions from coil & thirlwell, more than anything else, and that the actual truth is that reznor was never able to find deconstructionist experimental collaborators that could operate on that level of abstraction and/or decided he was no longer interested in it.
i actually rarely listened to the official records. it was fixed (halo 6), march of the pigs (halo 7), closer (halo 9), further down the spiral (halo 10) and the perfect drug (halo 11) that got most of my earplay. these are the remix records and ep singles that featured substantive contributions from an assortment of other artists, most prominently jim thirlwell and coil. put together, these are some of the most abstract and experimental recordings ever released, and i do realize in hindsight that it's perhaps something a little different than reznor is generally stereotyped as.
11:51
pierre polievre's campaign slogans?
covered with hope and vaseline
still cannot fix this broken machine
watching the world, it used to be mine
just watching it burn in my steady systematic decline
give it to me, i'll throw it away!
give it to me, i'll throw it away!
gonna smash myself to pieces
i don't know what else to do
i tried. i gave up.
12:43
the language polievre is using is appropriate, and we don't need allusions to plato's allegory of the cave, or quasi-nihilistic existentialist anarchist deconstructions to get to the point, even if it's fun.
he offers no solutions. he'll just make everything worse.
that doesn't mean you should support trudeau out of fear. his time is up - he needs to go.
12:48
the extended march of the pigs mix is something most people probably haven't heard.
14:17
i've decided to finish archiving (that is, downloading and deleting) the contents of this blog back to the start of 2021 before i get to a recording phase. the reason is that i (uncharacteristically) left a number of thoughts unfinished over 2021 and 2022 for the reason that i had consistent disruptions to my life that kept throwing me off. my notes are scattered across this space and it would be difficult to pick anything back up without being able to work my way through them, linearly. i ultimately need to finish an acoustic recording (inri075), which will require me to glue together an acoustic guitar, a bedroom demo (inri077) which is mostly done but needs to be put together, an elaborate symphonic work (inri078) from scratch, a number of remixes of period 2 pieces for inri082-inri085, some end of period 3.1 compilations (inri086-inri087 + inri089), final editing on two more large symphonic works (inri088 & inri091) and final editing on a ridiculous 2xlp in vocal and instrumental forms (inri092 and inri093).
in years past (1995-2010), i would either work on something until it was done or give up on it and put it aside for 20 years. in recent year (2010-2020), i have been far more directed and disciplined in actually taking things to their final completion. this recent scatter-brained lack of focus is uncharacteristic, but my life has been weird over the last few years, as well; hasn't everybody's life been weird over the last few years? i quit smoking cigarettes. while i'm sure it's helping my cells divide safely, i wasn't expecting it to have as much of a dominant effect on my metabolism, my alertness and my productivity as it has. i was a razor-focused young person before i started smoking, too. i think it's safe to say that the process has permanently altered my body chemistry and i'm never going to fully recover, and my best analysis is to present it as a reason not to start smoking.
in previous years, i have started smoking again to increase alertness and focus while i'm recording or writing or doing homework (which is why i started smoking, to stay awake long enough to do homework), but at this point that is truly out of the question. i can't even walk by somebody smoking on the street without physically feeling sick. i'm completely over it, but it's sure left a mess in it's wake.
all i can do is make a legitimate effort to refocus and try to stay focused.
that's what i'm doing right now, compiling posts back to the start of 2021 and pulling them down from the site. i was working on liner notes over the first half of 2020, before shifting into the diet research over the second half of 2020 and then trying repeatedly to refocus, starting in early 2021.
23:30
thursday, december 22, 2022
one of the things i keep noticing in these edits to my writing is that somebody wants to make me look like i'm a partisan conservative, and i don't quite grasp the purpose of that misrepresentation.
i am a communist. for that reason, i'm mostly dismissive of the ndp, viciously critical of the liberals and largely just ignore the conservatives.
i am also a libertarian and a sustainability advocate. that actually aligns me closest with the greens, generally, who tend to get my protest votes, when i actually cast them.
2:26
i don't eat fast food, or really eat in restaurants at all, but the one thing i will walk into a fast-food restaurant and buy is coffee, particularly if i'm walking somewhere and/or i'm stuck somewhere waiting for the rain to blow over. i will then bring the cup home with me and reuse it until it begins to fray. in fact, i live in a city that actually accepts fast food restaurant cups in it's red bin, which is unusual (this is also true in owen sound and in fredericton, but is not true in any large canadian city).
that leaves the lids as a remaining problem. if you look at the lids, they have numbers on them, and i have previously put them in the blue bin, but i was informed a few years ago that the city does not actually recycle them but just throws them out, for the reason that they are considered too flimsy to go through the machine. that is, the reason this city does not recycle coffee lids (which is a decision many cities make) is that they think that the possibility of it damaging the equipment isn't worth the return cost of the item. the lids have always been made of recyclable plastic, and have always been recyclable, but the city simply won't recycle them.
i actually don't blame this on industry and, broadly speaking, i don't think that the existence of plastic waste is due to bad decisions made by industry (who have been making recyclable packing the whole time) or by consumers (who are just given items, they don't have any decision-making power) so much as it is the result of government allowing capitalist market principles to guide recycling rather than take control over it and assert public policy regulatory directives using public funds and public oversight. we have a hands-off, pro-market approach to recycling that has led to a market failure in the ability to recover plastic from the environment and it is this market failure that is the reason that recycling is not succeeding in solving the problems it should be solving. the correct solution is to increase government intervention into the industry, in order to eliminate the market failure. if we left general waste collection up to the market, we'd have every other kind of garbage strewn across the street, as well.
there should be special machines for flimsy plastic like coffee lids and bottlecaps (which are the biggest plastic waste problem, and which none of the legislation addresses), those machines should be purchased with taxpayer money and the people working those machines should be given living wages as public sector union employees because the reason we are recycling should be in order to protect the planet, which is something that should be overseen as a government service, and not in order to generate a profit for shareholders in the context of a function of private industry. that is currently not the case; the reason we recycle, today, is to generate profit for investors, and not to protect the planet and that contradiction is the reason we have a market failure in recycling that has led to waste plastic everywhere. we will only correct this problem by eliminating the profit motive, which will require government to take over the recycling industry and operate it as a public service.
i have long assumed i will eventually find a recycler that will recycle bottle caps and coffee lids and have just put them aside into a giant box until i can locate it.
tim hortons' recent announcement that it is producing coffee lids that are "plastic-free" and "recyclable" is confusing to me for the reason that these things contradict each other. if the cups do not contain plastic, how are they to be recycled? they are supposedly made of "fibre". i presume that means they are a product of canada's large (and very polluting) paper industry. do they go in the red bin, then?
while making lids out of plants is a step in the right direction, the better raw material is hemp or corn (in fact, there is likely enough waste product from canada's legal marijuana industry to sustainably supply fibre to make enough coffee lids for the whole country) and the idea of biodegradable coffee lids made out of corn or hemp (or legal marijuana fibre) would be the preferable option in the list. it is likely, however, that the lids are actually compostable and that you need a special compost set-up to actually compost them. for most consumers, that would make the product no less wasteful than plastic, as it will not break down int the environment without the use of special chemicals that do not exist outside of a lab. worse, if i start collecting these "compostable" cups, i will not be able to eventually take them into a recycling facility that does accept them.
some clarification from head office would be helpful, in order to prevent recycling boxes from filling up with what is in truth not a decomposable nor a recyclable product.
12:01
i actually think canada should ban all american dairy products, outright, due to health concerns about how they use hormones in their factory farming.
at the least, the use of such hormones should be clearly labelled on any american imports.
as a consumer, i would never buy dairy that comes from the united states for that reason; i would overpay for canadian dairy to avoid those hormones out of health concerns, and also because i know the use of them is outright cruel to the cows.
18:33
look for this symbol on your dairy to ensure you're not supporting yankee farmers trying to push their way into our market and poison us with the byproducts of their cruelty:
18:44
as for this, i would encourage the russians to retaliate by taking control of the assets of wealthy canadians, including wealth connected to power corp and to the trudeau family.
18:48
tuesday, december 20, 2022
i am horribly frustrated by my lack of progress, recently. i want to put everything aside for the next few weeks, from now until my birthday, and strictly get to work on finishing up some music. i intend to at the least finish the following record between now and then.
i have a process to follow and that process is important to me but i'm fed up by the delays and just want to get to work.
wednesday, december 21, 2022
i have to finish archiving (that is, downloading and deleting) the contents of this blog back to the start of 2021 before i'm able to get back to work. the reason is that i (uncharacteristically) left a number of thoughts unfinished over 2021 and 2022 for the reason that i had consistent disruptions to my life that kept throwing me off. it would currently be almost impossible to pick anything back up without being able to work my way through my notes, which are scattered across this space, in a causal and linear way, which means i need to download everything first, take it apart and put it back together, first. i ultimately need to finish an acoustic recording (inri075), which will require me to glue together an acoustic guitar, a bedroom demo (inri077) which is mostly done but needs to be put together, an elaborate symphonic work (inri078) from scratch, a number of remixes of period 2 pieces for inri082-inri085, some end of period 3.1 compilations (inri086-inri087 + inri089), final editing on two more large symphonic works (inri088 & inri091) and final editing on a ridiculous 2xlp in vocal and instrumental forms (inri092 and inri093).
during previous years (1995-2010), i would have either worked on something until it was done or give up on it and put it aside for 20 years. more recently (2010-2020), i have been far more directed and disciplined in actually completing projects by taking them to their actual conclusion. this recent scatter-brained lack of focus is uncharacteristic, but my life has been weird over the last few years, as well; hasn't everybody's life been weird over the last few years? i quit smoking cigarettes. while i'm sure it's helping my cells divide more safely, i wasn't expecting it to have as much of a dominant effect on my metabolism, my alertness and my productivity as it has. i was a razor-focused young person before i started smoking, too. at this point, i have to conclude that the process has permanently altered my body chemistry and i'm never going to fully recover, and my best analysis is to present it as a reason not to start smoking.
in the past, i have started smoking again to increase alertness and focus while i'm recording or writing or doing homework (which is why i started smoking, to increase my focus and alertness while i was doing homework), but at this point that is truly out of the question. i can't even walk by somebody smoking on the street without physically feeling sick. i'm completely over it, but it's sure left a mess in it's wake.
all i can do is make a legitimate effort to refocus and then try to stay focused.
that's what i'm actually doing right now, is compiling posts back to the start of 2021, pulling them down from the site and then deleting them from the site. i spent the first half of 2020 working on liner notes, before i started working on the diet research over the second half of 2020 and eventually tried repeatedly to refocus on getting some work done, without succeeding, partially due to being repeatedly disrupted, starting in early 2021.
23:30
thursday, december 22, 2022
it's currently lightly raining here. it's actually relatively pleasant out, although i'm likely in for the next ten days or so.
the forecast looks very scary, but i've been assuming that the weather forecasters (who sell drama on tv and clicks on the internet, like the rest of the news media.) have been exaggerating it, and the forecasts have in fact eased up over the last 24 hours. it's going to legitimately be cold here for about 24 hours, starting early on friday morning, before easing up on saturday. as the cold is coming in during the afternoon, calculations will be strange but it is likely to stay above -5 until sunrise on friday and will peak very close to or just above -5 on both saturday and sunday, before warming up here again on monday. we'll be back to close to 10 degrees here by mid-week.
while it does look like we're going to get some fireworks, it's important to understand that the net interaction is a result of the unusual warmth and not of the cold. this isn't an unusual cold front this time of year, even if we don't see blasts of cold air like this very often anymore. an overnight low of -14 in late december is not strange weather, nor is the dusting of snow they're calling for. however, 100 km/hr winds are unusual and the reason we're going to get that kind of explosive system here at this time of year is because a relatively normal winter system is smashing into unusual lingering warmth, which is creating an effect that is similar to a tornado. that said, heavy winds during transitional moments in the winter are becoming normal here, as the warm air lingers longer into the year. periodic bursts of vicious wind activity from october to march may be the new normal in east-central canada, as a consequence of permanent climate change and broadly increasing warming.
i'd avoid going out for the next 48 hours or so, and i'd put away anything that might fly off, but this hissy fit will blow off fairly fast and if this is the worst we get then we're getting off easy.
22:51
friday, december 23, 2022
i was able to download all of september, but it took several days because it was almost 600 posts. there were as many posts in august, if i remember correctly. this is necessary.
i then noticed that i had to change settings in every one of my youtube videos, one by one, and i've spent the last several hours doing that. it could take a while. i don't want the "automatic places" feature enabled, ever, at all, on any video, so i have to open up thousands of videos one by one and turn it off in all of them one at a time. i've also been updating connections to my bandcamp site. son lux sent me a link to a soundtrack they did earlier this year, and in the process of listening to it i realized i have barely listened to anything at all in months. i have to ensure that i'm listening to new music, as that is a foundational part of being a musician. what actually happened was that i noticed that the stench of drugs coming down from the cops upstairs was correlated with putting headphones on and just stopped listening to music altogether so that the idiots would stop blowing drugs at me if i took away whatever childish association they were assuming existed between my music tastes and my non-existent drug habits. i just don't associate music with drugs; almost none of the musicians i listen to are drug users, and almost all of them are actually even very vocally opposed to drug use. the idea that musicians are all a bunch of junkies, or that your favourite records were all recorded in a drug-induced haze, is an unfortunate myth that is long past the point of needing to be thoroughly debunked. it does seem to have worked, whether it was coincidence or not, but i need to move on from that, now, and get back to work, in all contexts, which includes listening. at this point, i think they finally understand that i actually really don't do any drugs at all, and they do seem to be increasingly fucking off and leaving me alone.
i have now entirely disconnected from facebook and permanently intend to attend very few concerts for the reason that i'm now passed the age where it's acceptable to go to places full of 20 year-olds. there's a point where it's just pathetic, and i'm now discernibly passed it. if i'm going to go to concerts in the future, it's primarily going to be at places like the dso. i have the internet, though, whereas previous generations did not, and that should help me stay informed about what is happening in reality, which, as mentioned, is imperative, even if the result is that i just annoyingly dismiss everything. i've spent some time tracking down a few artists on bandcamp that i want to stay up to date with and will also be listening to year end lists as i continue with the archiving:
i have also created an np: page, as well. there's a link to it on the side.
youtube used to autogenerate a public rss feed of videos that you watched as you watched them, and i even had it directed to a facebook page, at one point. that feature is no longer available, unfortunately. yes, i want you to know what i'm listening to, partly because it keeps people engaged (my tastes are very abstract) and partly because it might help to shift the discourse around art in our society, which has been dead for years. pop music has always sucked (the number one song of 1966 wasn't by hendrix or the beatles but was a pro-vietnam war song called the ballad of the green berets, and what it was competing with was sugary pop songs and specious girl group bops. our concept of the 60s is in truth entirely revisionist, and was mostly constructed in the 90s.), but there used to be a counterculture and it's just entirely evaporated. this is just a list on the internet, but it could potentially help direct a discourse on the state of art in our society.
i'm not going to be doing reviews right now for the reason that nothing here is safe from unwanted government vandalism. i have yet to determine a hosting solution, but i may need to actually buy some server space somewhere. right now, i'm trying to get data down, not put data up.
23:08
saturday, december 24, 2022
note that i just had to correct a fair amount of vandalism to the above post. there is no logic to vandalizing a post of this nature, which threatens nobody, other than the logic of dominance and enforced submission. what this constant backend editing is about is control. my response is the same as it has been from the start: fuck off.
2:56
does ukraine know it's christmas time, at all?
they'd be chasing him and yoko out of the place.
(trick question)
6:50
john lennon would have certainly been banned from twitter by now. he'd have been bigger than trump.
yet, it's exceedingly surreal to imagine (ahem) the reaction this song would receive in ukraine, right now.
7:06
7:27
7:33
i remember when i saw pinkish black in detroit, i had a brief conversation with the keyboard player out in the back (i'be forgotten what we were doing in the smoking section), and it turns out we had a mutual internet friend named 'tenebrae', who i knew from the skinny puppy email list (the one i did the tribute record for). in fact, he was the moderator - the owner of the majordomo account - of the list. i believe it was at the university of texas, initially.
i brought it up to him on the facebook version of the off-topic version of that list. it turns out tenebrae knew the singer of the previous band, 'the great tyrant".
"yeah. i saw him sing in i don't know how many bands, back in the day. i haven't heard from him or seen him in a while, though. how is he doing?"
i suggested he ought to look into that.
pinkish black received a moderate level of notoriety for renaming themselves after the colour of their previous singer's brains, after they had been splattered over the wall by his own shotgun.
i never heard back from him on it. in fact, i don't think i heard from him again at all.
i'm remembering that as i'm sorting through bandcamp follows.
20:15
i'm used to mosh pits, but i could only imagine having to break through a klu klux klan picket line to get in to a concert.
you think they wouldn't actually have banned lennon?
he'd have been the first to get banned.
20:37
sunday, december 25, 2022
i don't remotely care about "suicide prevention", except in the sense of opposing it. the right to suicide on demand is an inalienable human right that exists as a consequence of the inarguable truth that we own ourselves without reservations, and therefore have unrestricted autonomy over our own bodies. any attempt to prevent suicide, however passive, is an affront on the foundational right to self-ownership, and i vehemently reject such oppressive and unjust behaviour on those grounds. take your "suicide prevention" and fuck off to some worthless church with it, i don't want to hear about it. keep it to your fucking self.
what i'm more interested in is discussing the growing and annoying tendency of search engines to insert themselves between users and their search results, which has been frustrating me when using google for years and is continually getting worse. i understand that some people like the ai, but i don't care what they think; as a user, what i want is to be able to use regular database search syntax to get literal results across the entire database along with the ability to sort those results in the way i want them sorted and it follows, as a corollary of that, that i want the ability to disable any attempts by any specific corporation to insert it's worthless opinion about my search results, which i'm not interested in, and didn't ask for, within my search results, themselves. as a user, i would consequently prefer to completely disable this "feature", as well as any other attempt by any other corporation to insert it's worthless opinion about my search terms (which i don't care about and am likely to take offense to) into my search results. for that reason, the correct policy is to make this worthless "feature" user-configurable so that it can be turned off on demand and then extend that functionality to disable any other attempts by any other specific interest groups, governments or corporate interests to shape, manipulate or alter the search results, which belong strictly to the individual initiating the search, which the search company has no right or prerogative to interfere with and which a government should be constitutionally restricted from interfering with.
to get to the latter outcome, i would support introducing an internet search bill of rights as a constitutional amendment. such a bill of rights would legislate into law the new reality that the act of conducting an internet search is a property right (i have to use the framework, if i'm introducing a bill of rights) that belongs strictly to the initiator of the search and that any attempts by governments, corporations or ngos to interfere with search results by removing hits or inserting the worthless opinions of corporations, governments or special interest groups about those search terms would be interfering with that new right to conduct a search on the internet and have those results returned without any sort of alteration, manipulation or interference. this is the inevitable long term result of a society built on internet search, but if google and bing continue to break their own core service, they're going to increasingly find users become increasingly frustrated and move to other search platforms that actually let them search the internet, in the medium term. a user configurable checkbox to just let me fucking search the fucking internet without fucking interference is so fucking obvious that nobody thought of it.
if i go to a search engine and search for hiv results, it is because i want hiv results; i don't want some do-gooding faithful "progressives" bothering me with their spambot christian bullshit. if you would rather have your phone think for you than think for yourself (why expend the energy?), it is your prerogative to initiate the choice to turn this and other features like it on, but i don't want the proselytization crammed down my throat by default and i don't want to be nudged into letting an ai system make decisions for me. fuck off.
10:51
it is ironic that they're the ones that are supposed to have faith in the contradiction in terms of "life after death" and i'm the one that understands that that's a mountain of garbage with dump trucks full of steaming bullshit piled on top of it. what i think i that you only live once and that a part of living for yourself is dying on your own terms. you'd think a christian with actual faith would agree with me (the idea that god would send you to purgatory for killing yourself makes god look like a fascistic piece of shit, so that shouldn't be taken seriously. any concept of god worth acknowledging would judge you on your merits, not on some stupid and arbitrary authoritarian dictate about not committing suicide, just to get it's own way, because it says so. your imaginary contrivance of some make-believe god can fuck off, too. regardless, christianity is incoherent in the absence of free will, because it is free will that allows you to decide if you're going to follow the arbitrary rules or not, which is what the religion is about. the counter-example is calvinism, but calvinism is logically incoherent; traditional christianity is certainly bafflingly stupid, but it is at least comprehensible.), but they're all a bunch of phonies and hypocrites.
11:07
monday, december 26, 2022
as i was updating youtube tags, the cover art for inri018 got flagged as "graphic violence" by the youtube algorithm. it is a still shot of a lion eating a human, which is a natural biological process (it is an apex predator eating a prey species) and in no way a promotion of or depiction of violence. this has been flagged several times before, and a human has always rejected the flag. put simply, the idea that there's anything violent about the image is complete nonsense, and every human that's looked at it up to this point has realized that fact.
i appealed it, expecting a human to correct the mistake (and it is a mistake) yet again. in the mean time, i uploaded a second version of exactly the same video, with the intention of changing the thumbnail when it was uploaded, but it was caught by the youtube algorithm. i also appealed it there.
within an hour, i received two responses. the first accepted the second appeal and reinstated the uploaded video, which was expected and is correct:
the second rejected the first appeal and disabled the existing video, which had been sitting on youtube for over a year, without incident, before i updated the tags. this is unexpected and incorrect.
these are exactly the same video, and the decisions were made within an hour of each other.
youtube's policies are clearly entirely arbitrary.
the video is here:
15:11
if that video is determined to be promoting "graphic violence", it would follow that every other video on youtube of lions eating any other prey species would need to be removed, along with any video of humans eating meat.
unfortunately, there is no way to appeal a stupid decision made by an idiot. however, i'm going to try to contact some people in the youtube legal department.
15:44
the (expensive) decision to put patriot missiles in ukraine is outrageous and only demonstrates that moscow was correct.
it is an escalation that speeds up the timeline of the inevitable russian victory.
lavrov is correct. this is ukraine's last chance to wake up, before it faces a full on and highly destructive attack. a weapon system of that type in the vicinity cannot be tolerated by moscow, and they will correctly react accordingly.
23:14
tuesday, december 27, 2022
what do the protests in iran, the bombings in kiev, the turkish incursions into syria, nato expansion, the continuing proxy war in syria and the terrorist attack in france have in common?
the americans don't intend to promote kiev or warsaw as alternatives to moscow, they intend to reconstruct the maximum extent of the ottoman empire in the balkans and black sea region, and run it as a puppet state from washington. with tensions rising in serbia to join the list of conflicts in the periphery of the former ottoman state, this longstanding (and consistently failed. it's the definition of insanity - they do this over and over and keep shooting themselves in the foot. it reflects a lack of perceived options around russian containment. i've posted the thomas paine quote about the english setting the turks and russians against each other many times.) tactic is just clarifying itself that much further. the longstanding english policy is to prop up the turks to contain the russians, everywhere - in central asia, in the caucasus, in the borderlands and in the balkans.
as stated before, i am a pan slavist and strongly support a unified slavic confederacy because it is the correct way to achieve a lasting peace in eastern europe.
yet, let us not underestimate imperial treachery, it's barbarian management strategy and the resulting outcome of divide and conquer that results from that barbarian management. the english very well know that for every force, there must exist a counterforce. the primary counterforce against ottoman expansion has historically been arabic imperialism, and the english have long balanced turkish and arabic imperialist ambitions, which has often left the turks isolated in function, even as they enjoyed unparalleled english support. i am as in opposition to the longstanding implementation of arabic imperialism in the middle east and northern africa as i am in favour of a unified pan-slavism, as the slavs are an indigenous people to their region and the arabs are blood-thirsty conquerors that have colonized large areas they should rightfully be expelled from, including the sumerian heartland of mesopotamia, which remains primarily ethnically and culturally caucasian to this day.
the counterforce to arabic imperialism is kurdish nationalism. as you read the news, you might ask yourself if the increasing importance of the kurdish question in multiple events in the centcom region is some combination of chance and confluence, or if it is indeed imperial treachery at play. a kurdish uprising, which i would support, would be the most effective way to balance both turkish colonialism and arabic imperialism, both of which i oppose. kurds ought to understand imperial treachery better than most and ought to know that the empire wants them just where they are, as a destabilizing force in the region. it is when turks or arabs get out of hand that a kurdish uprising becomes required, to rebalance power. the difference is that the kurds, like the slavs, are functionally indigenous to the region they inhabit (while technically iranians, they are the closest thing to a sumerian descendant group and their dominantly caucasian genes get that point across: this is what happened to the sumerians, after centuries of mixing with the persians and greeks that liberated them from semitic rule) and the arabs and turks are not.
continental drift is very slow and imperial treachery is prone to error.
15:58
this is very similar to many posts that i've made to this space over the years, and i do suspect the situation is going to get worse, as we're force fed a lot of nonsense in order to convince us to accept a wave of women that are pregnant with the children of the worst extremists the world has seen since nuremberg, and who themselves should be punished for their compliance in widespread crimes against humanity. this is how islam has always colonized the world around it.
the saudis have finally realized that they misjudged the population in syria and iraq, who were supposed to treat the terrorists like liberators, but instead ran to the safety of the secularist state. isis was a godsend to the military dictatorship in syria, who was otherwise losing power to democratic reforms being introduced by the younger assad. now, the russians are in charge, and assad has been reduced to a figurehead; he's an important figurehead, and the people of syria have unambiguously chosen him as a lesser evil to wahabbist extremism.
canada, on the other hand, is a paradise waiting to be conquered. unlike the syrian or iraqi governments, the canadian government is increasingly willing to accept islamic extremism as a part of the society's mosaic, which makes it an ideal place to colonize and conquer.
18:26
thursday, december 29, 2022
i'm noticing the "wavy jet stream" theory attributed to jennifer francis in the news again. this theory makes no physical sense (it literally contradicts the theory of thermodynamics in it's insistence on the direction of energy lifting upwards) and has always been considered fringe by actual scientists. unfortunately, the mainstream media decided it made sense to explain the pressing question that bothers all stupid people: if the globe is warming, why is it so cold? this is this century's version of the question of why monkeys still exist if we evolved from them, so it's not likely to go away and bad answers like those presented by jennifer francis are likely to continue to pile up. it is going to be cold from time to time; we don't need to use climate change to explain why it's cold, it's just something that happens due to natural variation.
what actually happened was something called a "greenland block", which is a normal weather phenomenon. nor was it particularly vicious, even if it seemed that way for the reason that it's been so warm. where i am, it abruptly shifted from being above average for weeks into being legitimately cold for about a day and then seasonal for a few days after that and now it's going to be substantively above average again for at least the next week. some forecasts are calling for it to peak over 15 degrees next week, which isn't supposed to happen here at all this time of year (although it increasingly does happen). what caused this entirely normal, if increasingly rare, weather event was something called the north atlantic oscillation (nao), which has been robustly correlated to the solar cycle. it is likely not a coincidence that it was the shortest day of the year that the atmosphere hiccuped on.
(unless it was haarp. obviously. perhaps the president wanted the colour of his lawn to match the colour of his hair for a few days.)
global warming is an increase in the earth's average temperature, which is caused by atmospheric and oceanic carbon trapping energy in the earth that would have otherwise dissipated into space. while some effects may be unpredictable, like the potential shut down of the gulf stream due to a decrease in the temperature gradient that propels it, this is nonetheless a largely monotonic function. global warming really means warming, almost distinctly.
however, global warming does not exist in a vacuum. the earth is still wobbling through space, the sun is still pulsating and gravity from distant bodies continues to create milankovitch effects that substantively change the earth's climate. when it gets cold like it did last week, it is actually generally properly explained using solar science, which is the force that is currently acting most prominently against the effects of carbon accumulation.
it was cold, and i''m sure it was unpleasant. personally, i haven't opened the door since the 16th, so i didn't have to suffer through it. however, it wasn't something that is unusual and it doesn't require a deeper explanation other than a reminder that the last week of december consists of the shortest days of the year (in the northern hemisphere), and that that lack of sunlight, which is constant in the northernmost lattudes, has consequences in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere.
2:39
politico's description of the contemporary republican party as working class, dismissive of "free markets" and contemptuous of religion sounds refreshingly socialist to this leftist that is many years broken away from the establishment fake left, and considers herself strictly disenfranchised.
if only it were actually true.
it is true that we are in realignment and it is true that the developing political alignment of liberal and democratic parties alike is most similar to what was historically called conservatism. there has never been a conservative party in the united states; the whigs, on the other hand, which were the historical precursors to the liberals, eventually became the republicans. the republicans certainly broke with liberalism some time well before the 1960s, but can anybody point me to an era where the democrats were not the country's conservative party, relative to the literal definition of actual conservatism? biden, obama, clinton, carter, lbj, jfk and truman were all clearly right-wing conservatives. fdr partially used liberalism to arrive at conservative outcomes and is the closest thing to a non-conservative democratic president, but the republican opposition during those years modulated between fascism and classical liberalism, and he was for that reason the more conservative choice, in context. democrats before fdr were largely jacksonian and sought to return to a simpler time of agrarianism; they were the farmer's party (the republicans were the party of industrialists) and the descendants of the slave owners that lost the civil war. from 1870-1930, that was the party system - the democrats were conservative farmers and the republicans were liberal industrialists. the point is that while this realignment in the united states is real in terms of voting coalitions, it is in many ways merely an undoing of fifty years worth of misleading propaganda about the democrats being a liberal party in the first place. in canada, we are seeing a more substantive spectrum shift as trudeau and freeland perceptibly position the liberal party substantively to the right of where it was in the middle part of the last century, in an intentional tactic to more closely align it with the longstanding conservatism of the democratic party. our oligarchy has had a recent policy of going out of it's way to align itself with ruling political interests in the united states in order to try to gain favours in backrooms, which has had a mixed track record.
it is not true that the republican party is walking into the vacuum opening up on the left or becoming a socialist party. rather, the republican party is increasingly shifting towards the extreme right and increasingly openly embracing fascism. canada's conservative party has largely avoided that up to this point, creating the situation that previously existed in the fraying american "washington consensus", when the two almost identical conservative parties were both interchangeable and, in truth, fully integrated. as the two-headed monster rips itself apart in washington, it has emerged anew in ottawa.
do not misunderstand me; as a socialist, i would actually prefer fascism over conservatism because fascism at the least supports centralized economies and, for that reason, i would without question support fascism as a lesser evil to conservatism. i have posted that statement about myself before. fascism is vicious, but it presents better economic and social theories than conservatism, which is just synonymous with failed ideas and systemic backwardsness. it's a decision over what pile of shit you thinks smells least bad, but we can't imagine options that don't exist. america will have fascism or it will have conservatism; those are the choices. i may only agree with 15% of what fascists say, but i don't agree with anything that conservatives say at all. conservatives are going to upset me and animate me to react far more than fascists are going to. there is no greater evil in this world than conservatism, which i am diametrically opposed to in every way. if it comes down to it, socialists should support fascists at every level in order to block actual conservatives from turning the clocks back to the dark ages. however bad the experience is, we will eventually emerge from a period of fascism and it may even have benefits, in terms of re-industrializing the economy in a sustainable fashion; a period of conservatism will inevitably leave us in literal physical ruins and may very well put an end to western civilization altogether.
at the immediate moment, ending nato's involvement in the existing retarded conflict over a country that is not an ally and that nobody cares about should be every sane person's number one priority, regardless of where they exist on the spectrum. ending nato involvement in ukraine should be a pan-ideological struggle that transcends political alignment, and leftists may consequently have to make difficult allies in order to ensure we don't end up in the nuclear catastrophe that the almost dead gerontocracy in washington is sleep-walking us into, in an epic fit of alzheimers induced zero fucks givenism.
what do they care? they have old scores to settle. defense stocks are up. they'll be dead soon, anyways.
19:49
congress should send the entire leadership in washington to the fletcher memorial home, pull funding like they did in vietnam and pass a resolution indicating they will hence forth focus on the issues of the future and not the prejudices of the past.
19:51
by "devastate", they mean "liberate from the effects of gentrification, reverse outrageous increases in the cost of living and return to the working class and the artists that previously made urban life vibrant, before the onset of financialization imported the plasticness of suburbia into urban existence".
the article is a little optimistic, unfortunately. these trends appear to have already reversed, as employers have begun demanding employees go back to work.
i would rather see the wealth flee to the hills because it would reduce the cost of rent. it is the absurd increase in the cost of living that has destroyed canada's once thriving art scene. you simply can't live here any more unless you inherit money, or work for a corporation. there's no way out. degentrification would be a godsend, but it's not likely to actually happen.
20:49
friday, december 30, 2022
as a canadian or an american, i have no place in interfering in a slavic civil war between kiev and moscow. i'm not a kneejerk anti-imperialist, but western involvement in ukraine can only be describe using that language. we have no business interfering in this war at all.
the reality is that these are russian speaking regions and that opinion polls going back many years are clear that the people living there want to be in the russian sphere. now, i understand that that means a lot of things that i don't like very much, but my opinion on this matter isn't important. i would have very strong disagreements with the people of crimea or donetsk on a wide range of social and economic concerns, but i should respect their right to self-autonomy, even if i disagree with their decisions, which for them means returning to russia. i might stand in ideological solidarity with what are minority socialist groups in the region, but not with guns and tanks, at least not until they have critical mass. those groups will need to build movements on the ground that do not currently exist, given the recent history of the region with an oppressive fake left. as it is, the armed opposition is very legitimately composed of fringe right-wing elements, along with some unclear level of direct involvement from nato forces. no leftist can or should stand with the people fighting on behalf of ukraine, on the ground.
you will hear some unfortunate and poorly informed perspectives from liberals, many trying to capitalize on the situation, but this is reflective of an honest leftist position:
1) this is not our war. stop funding it.
2) support the self-determination of the people on the ground through class struggle, not by sending weapons to imperialist puppet states that are largely acting against the will of their own population. this actually largely means supporting the russian territorial claims, because it is the legitimate will of the people in the area. the country is ideologically and culturally divided; the east and south seek to join russia and have and the northeast is ambiguous but the west of ukraine does not want to be a part of russia. russian attempts to annex regions that do not want to be a part of russia should be criticized, but the regions it has already annexed have done so in a display of autonomy that must be respected.
3) criticize russian behaviour for what it is, while being clear-eyed about the reasons for it. pretending that the invasion was not provoked is merely parroting western state propaganda and is not helpful.
2:32
i'm not presenting russia as a protagonist in a story. this is real life; real life is complicated. russia, like the west, is advancing it's self-interest in the region. a proper analysis of the situation should neither prioritize russia's self-interest nor the west's self-interest but the self-ownership and self-autonomy of the people who, like it or not, are clearly siding with russia.
2:45
my self-interest is avoiding a nuclear war, which means establishing a balance of power where the russians are no longer under threat of imminent attack. that necessarily requires nato pulling back substantively.
2:46
the historical boundary in the south is the danube and the russians will get there if they can. it is not clear what the opinion of the inhabitants in the south-west of ukraine is, but the region is russian speaking. there are a number of rivers between the danube and the dnieper. whether the historical border of the carpathians makes sense as a natural boundary or not is dependent on how far the russians can push their forces, and how willing the local population is to return to russia.
the historical boundary in the west was once the rhine but has more recently been the vistula. these regions are unambiguously not russian speaking, and russia will be making a mistake if it moves west of the dnieper, north of an unclear boundary. there is no clear western boundary point besides the river itself.
3:44
the refrain of "standing with ukraine" is void of actual meaning and should be avoided.
3:48
certainly, the loss of life in north-western ukraine is regrettable and i cannot say how much could have been avoided. the news reports that they're targeting playgrounds shouldn't be taken seriously, but the percentage of legitimate targets is an open question. nobody is sitting in the russian control room, wherever it is. however, the tactic of bombing out a defense shield with numbers isn't exotic; if ukraine has x number of missiles and russia has y, and it is thought that y >>x, then you deplete ukraine's missile stock by bombarding them. the intent is to dismantle the defenses. while the outcome is horrific, it's what happens when you get in a war and a reason not to get in a war in the first place. ukraine has seen this coming for years and merely provoked it. prominent western leaders have even remarked they were preparing for it.
3:55
i've spent the last few days updating youtube tags, but i've made a lot of progress, as well.
i'm actually going to unpublish large amounts of the vlog channel in the next few days. i don't know if they've been edited or not, but i've seen signals that they can actually do that, now. if the purpose of the vlogs was to act as marketing, that never worked; the commenting worked until i got shadow banned, but my vlogs were intentionally long and tedious because my art is long and tedious. i don't like people with short attention spans. i was never expecting a large audience, but it never took off at all.
i know i was shadow banned because my posts disappeared when i logged out. that wasn't something i guessed, it's something i tested. you can try it yourself; log into youtube, post somewhere, log out and see if you can see the post when you're no longer logged in. you might be surprised that you're not able to see it. then, log back in - it's back. if that is the case, you have been shadow banned because somebody doesn't like your politics, although they might pretend that they think you're a spammer.
the basic truth is that dismantling the blog eliminates the format for the vlog. the vlogs were supposed to be hosted here, within the journal archive. as they will no longer be, the vlogs will need to come up as iso downloads, instead. some of the video, the amount that is relevant to the music, will need to be worked into the aleph discs.
6:11
saturday, december 31, 2022
my chromebook is now on auto-refresh in an apparent attempt to prevent me from caching these posts.
it is abundantly clear that this is neither random nor amateur. i am obviously being targeted by professionals that work for google that are altering my writing to align it with whatever agenda they're enforcing, which appears to be pro-religionist, primarily.
0:35