i am republishing everything temporarily in order to use mirroring software to pull it down. i expect this post to be taken down within 24-48 hours. i would request you refrain from unwanted moderation in that time frame, so i can take my site down from here and upload somewhere that cares more about speech rights and less about conservative value systems.
thursday, september 1, 2022
i've changed the settings on the blog so that it only displays one post per page. for now, it will front post the "the internet is changing" post, which will eventually be backposted to the aug 30th digest. the reason i'm doing this is to ensure that the page is more navigable, in the context of the shift to a digest system. right now, it will seem "broken"; once the new format works it's way in, this will create a more readable, linear blog that is organized in daily digests that can be more easily navigated using the links in the blogger interface.
suppose that the front page has the digest for sept 20th, 2022. if you click "previous posts", which i suspect nobody does, it will go directly to the digest for sept 19th. if you do it again, it will display the digest for sept 18th. etc. this will undo the backwards posting problem that is endemic to social media, which has long bothered me (see my twitter page for a satire).
in windsor, on @ 2:08
i need to temporarily break my silence.
i do hope that gorbachev's funeral is open casket.
3:44
it turns out that the downside of the scotch bonnets is that my hands are left viciously burning for hours after handling them.
i don't want to waste large amounts of plastic repeatedly discarding gloves for the single use of handling hot peppers. i've been going commando on them. we'll see what else i can think of. i suppose i always have a few plastic bags on their way to the recycle drying in the sink. i could just reuse the same one over and over and put it in the freezer. yeah, that sounds like an easy answer, actually.
like, i want to wash my face right now, and i can't. i can barely even type. yet, i'm not tired. so, what to do, exactly?
9:33
another frequent unwanted edit that i'm seeing as i archive posts here for better data integrity in storage is the replacement of assyria with babylon. i am sure i wouldn't make that mistake, as i understand the words i'm using (and the editor obviously doesn't, but is rather being driven by fuzzy, racist ideas of semitic supremacy through the perverse filter of ethnic nationalism).
the semitic babylonians had a different culture and religion than the non-semitic (and apparently caucasian) sumerians, and they clearly had a different language and were clearly of a different race, but they largely built their society on top of the existing sumerian one. while there are definite destruction horizons in both the archaeological record and the historical record (as we can reconstuct it from discarded cuneiform tablets), babylonian culture was largely developed out of continuity from sumerian culture, so there is a definite process of succession. i'm very clear to point that out and speak of it in those terms, particularly in regards to the astronomy, which is about the only thing i actually care about in regards to sumeria or babylonia.
the assyrians were half-literate barbarians that took over some cities in the north by the force of violence and created a brutal, draconian dictatorship responsible for immense destruction and widespread genocide. while the babylonians carried forward and further developed sumerian civilization, the assyrians eventually entirely destroyed what remained of it thousands of years later and substituted a wide-ranging dark age in it's place. the destruction of babylon by assyria was probably worse, in terms of data loss, than the destruction of baghdad by the mongols and is the reason we know so little about the sumerians beyond what we can reconstruct through fragments of clay found in abandoned 3000 year old buildings.
while the assyrians and babylonians were both semitic peoples, and that may be all that matters to the editor, you really can't substitute one for the other. one was an advanced civilization built on top of the alpha cradle of civilization, while the other was a barbaric monstrosity that ultimately completely destroyed it. the compare and contrast essay needs to be about the contrast.
the editor refers to babylon in a vague, colloquial sense that implies a strictly judaic religious context. this isn't somebody with much understanding of secular history or the science of archaeology, but somebody that gets their naive "understanding" of history entirely from religious mythology. all the editor understands about babylon is what is written about it by the cultural conservatives that wrote the hebrew bible.
by switching to offline writing for data storage, i hope i can get around this unwanted editing to the point that i can actually prove it's happening. as stated repeatedly, all i can find is consistency in the emails, which are supposed to act as data redundancy, even when it comes to posts that i'm certain were edited. i've demonstrated to myself that this is happening by tricking the system, but it doesn't let me prove it (yet.), as it is self-correcting in my own editing to create a false, projected reality of manipulated stasis. worse, it's driving me bonkers trying to prove my writing is being altered, and being unable to do so. i'm either correct, or i've lost my mind; the fact that i'm lucid suggests the former.
i'm going to catch them soon enough, if they continue to do this. it will be easy enough to run the two sources through a diffchecker, but i can't do that when everything is online and nothing is certain, as a consequence of it; i can neither have confidence in the integrity of the emails, nor in the integrity of the blog posts, as accurate alpha sources. proving that unwanted editing is happening requires having a source i can trust the integrity of, and that has to be an archive that is kept air-gapped.
for now, note yet another example of clear manipulation in the editor's confused use of assyria and babylonia as interchangeable terms, due to ignorance resulting from the racism that results from the supremacy inherent to ethnic nationalism.
10:21
glasnost.
11:38
11:51
i would support the existence of the climate police. that sounds like a great idea, if you ask me.
i mean, you're serious about this, or you're not. the reality is that pollution is a crime against humanity and there should be an enforcement mechanism to enforce that reality. a climate police would be a proportionate, reasonable response to the challenge we face; conversely, tax cuts for the rich to try to influence their behaviour followed by slaps on the wrist for non-compliance is not a proportionate or reasonable response, and is not taking the situation nearly seriously enough.
when somebody proposes a solution that might actually work, the government feels the need to debunk the idea. it's reflective of where we actually are as a society on this, and what the set of likely outcomes actually is.
if we're going to have police, this is exactly what they should be doing. instead, we send people out with guns to enforce property rights that allow people to pollute. we'll get what we deserve for it, in the end.
reference:
"environment canada says online reports of 'climate police' are false", cbc news, sept 1, 2022
19:29
an ye harm none, do what ye will
ok.
not only does pollution not harm none, but pollution harms all. it is not a lesser crime deserving of a lesser punishment, or merely a behavioural problem worthy of scolding, as one does a child; it is the worst type of crime that is deserving of the most severe penalties, and the most egregious form of anti-social behaviour, indicative of a severe deficit of basic decency and a depravity of character of the most irredeemable quality.
climate police are a wonderful idea. let's do it right away.
20:07
i don't think that it's likely that kiev will succeed in taking control of territory from the russians (at this point, nothing can be verified, as neither side is reliable. as was the case in syria, the most reliable source appears to be the british government, which is not very helpful.), but i think that it is likely that the destruction of infrastructure around the dnieper (a massive river that splits ukraine in half) by kiev will have the outcome of partitioning the country in half. the media coverage is suggesting that this is a defensive act, intended to prevent russia from being able to move supplies from the eastern side of the river to the western side of the river, and this is a valid analysis. ukraine is half forest and half steppe, but it has several very substantive rivers flowing through it, and being able to control those rivers is key to controlling the country (something i pointed out months ago). the corollary of that, however, is that it also means that kiev would have no serious chance of moving supplies to the eastern side of the river, either, and consequently no chance of a successful counter-attack (if such an idea ought to be taken seriously, anyways). it's clear enough at this point that the destruction of infrastructure is an intentional tactic, indicating one of two possibilities:
(1) kiev is walking into the vacuum created by russian indecisiveness and unilaterally partitioning the country into east and west (this division is historical) or
(2) while kiev might succeed in preventing further russian advances for at least a little while by destroying the region's infrastructure, it will do so at the unintentional permanent loss of the eastern and southern half of the country, which it will now not have the infrastructure in place to retake (if such a thing was ever likely in the first place). this would be a short term pyrrhic victory at the long term loss of an unintentional partition of the country.
these options are not mutually exclusive. i would suspect that they realize that what they're doing is going to partition the country, and potentially for a very long period, and that they don't like that outcome and will seek to undo it, but are doing it because they realize it's their last chance to prevent a full scale invasion of the whole country. it's also a scorched earth policy, in function and intent.
what can moscow do?
moscow has, for obvious reasons, been attempting to avoid inflicting the kind of damage in ukraine that kiev has been inflicting since they got those yankee rockets. moscow is not invading ukraine to topple a foe or control a small area of resources like the united states did in afghanistan or iraq; russia is intending on assimilating as much of the region back into russia as it can, and has rightfully been arguing that the area is historically russian, and consequently a kind of lost territory, an argument that only pertains to some abstraction of the country's east and south, although exact boundary lines are not entirely clear. however, if kiev decides to essentially resort to terrorism by destroying all of the infrastructure across the dnieper in an attempt to forcefully partition the state as a defensive manoeuvre (at least in the short run), russia is left with the need to reciprocate, or face troops and resources cut off on the other side of the dnieper. they could destroy the infrastructure over the bug, then, but how helpful that would be is not clear, and it may leave them with the same pyrrhic outcome.
looking at a map, kiev may very well succeed in defending itself by bombing out all of the bridges over the dnieper, at least for a while, and then moscow would be left with no real alternative but to invade from a different direction.
if the ukrainians insist on resorting to this tactic, then, perhaps the russians should help them and bomb out the bridges across the river all the way north to belarus. this would have the effect of making it impossible for ukraine to resupply it's own troops in the northeast, leaving stranded divisions in territory contiguous to russia, and facilitate the russian advance to the dnieper across the northeast of the country. the situation would then need to be re-evaluated, once that is finished.
21:28
so, this is day one of the new digest format. i hope my intent is a little more clear. i have this stored in both doc and html format in a secret location, which will make it easier to print to pdf in a 5x8" format for journal publication, or viewed on a pc or laptop. throw your phone in the garbage.
what am i doing with the posts that i don't trust the integrity of?
first, i'm taking it all down. then, i'm copying it over to the secret location. after that, i'll need to inspect it, probably rewrite the bulk of it and eventually repost it. it will come up in a 5x8" printable format as i repost it.
this process won't be very fast, and the last few months of posts might consequently be offline for a long time.
it is worth noting, though, that i'll now be updating all of the blogs together, as digests.
23:43
friday, september 2, 2022
so, that's now updated for the day.
today's digests include one 2-3 page post for the following blogs:
1) the dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja politics/general blog, which has recently been the only blog i've been posting to. almost everything gets posted to that blog, with the exception of very targeted posts to the music blogs. this is listed as "rants" in the list on the side of the page.
2) the deathtokoalas "music review" blog, as it is listed on the side. this is a general cultural commentary blog that also features some sporadic commentary on lighter news sources. i included the posts on climate change and the historical analysis for the reason that these topics frequently overlap with cultural discussions from well known authors (although the post in question does not), and that qualifies as cultural commentary. my decision tree on this is rather complicated and there's consequently going to be a lot of inconsistency around it. the only post i removed from this digest was the analysis of the recent ukrainian tactic of destroying infrastructure around the dnieper as a scorched earth policy to attempt to slow the russian advance into the rest of ukraine. this blog would generally exclude specifically political commentary or analysis, like statistical analysis of polling results, which was the real basis of separating it out, as i wanted my political and cultural commentaries split into different streams. in better times, it was directed at actual music reviews. i don't really know how much of an interest i have in that, moving forwards, but i have always had a sort of a hitchensian gossip streak and this blog will at the least allow for that.
3) the peculiar adventures of j, or the travel blog, as it is listed on the side, which was supposed to be the blog i used to narrate events in real-time from my fake account while i was out with my chromebook in order to quarantine my main account from insecure networks, but has instead become a general geography blog since i had to move to the chromebook for general network access, which led to me merging the two accounts. the scope of the blog has had to increase to be self-contained, but the idea is that this blog recollects events that occur somewhere outside of my apartment, in the real world, from a first-person perspective. it isn't always, but it's supposed to be a little more narrative based. all posts posted to the general blog today were also posted to the travel blog, which may seem weird, but it just happened to be that all of the posts on this day fit into one of the categories that this blog touches upon. on other days, posting to this blog may be quite light.
i will not normally describe the contents of digest updates in detail, but this is a good opportunity to repost what the purpose of the various blogs is. i'm in the process of finally reconstructing my typing station, so it is time to get back to normal posting schedules at all of the various blogs. this systems collapse has been lengthy and deep, but i am rectifying it, even as i'm convinced i'm still under extreme surveillance, despite not understanding why.
there are a number of blogs that were not updated today:
- the inri records blog is intended to mirror my music archive at bandcamp. this has been left stranded for a while now, but i should be back to it shortly.
- the current music blog is a music journal that is maintained in order to document my recording process for future generations and is consequently only active when i am actually recording. i'll be back to this soon. i hope.
- j's journal is the blog written from my perspective when i was a young child as a vehicle to explain influences on my musical development, while growing up. i will need to get back to writing this very shortly. i have just realized that the formatting on it has annoyingly broken for a second time, so i'll need to fix that, first. the first time, i just needed to clear cookies, so maybe it's not so bad.
- the alter-reality is the journal written from my perspective as a teenager, which is when my recording career first began. i will need to finish the childhood journal before i get back to that.
- the music timeline was created in order to replace my facebook music page, because i actually liked the timeline feature which got buried and destroyed by successive facebook updates, and remains a work in progress.
4) as of right now, i have added a new blog on the side called the "diet blog". today's digest only includes one post to this new blog, about scotch bonnet peppers. this blog will eventually be constructed to include all of the posts that have been posted to the general blog about my diet, starting at the end of 2020. i may or may not decide to backdate this blog, but the intent is that it starts in late 2020 and runs until i have attained dietary perfection.
i served a document this morning and will need to get to the court house today to swear an affidavit for it. i will otherwise be continuing the archiving process overnight.
3:03
i didn't even know that blogger had a feed until now. i don't expect i'll use it, but it's helpful to know it's there. i've lost all interest in reading feeds.
i don't know why anybody would post to facebook or twitter at this point when they could post to blogger instead, if what they want is a place to archive posts and debate ideas (i have comments turned off here because i attract the worst kinds of trolls, but i actively encourage you to start a debate with me over email, with the expectation that i will post the result here at the conclusion of the discourse). i mean, i understand why people would use facebook as an instant messaging service, but i don't understand why anybody would actually post a message to facebook at this point and i don't understand the attraction to twitter at all.
the larger user base is a benefit, no doubt, but the reality is that there are many sites with large user bases today and no one site has the monopoly on a large user base that some once feared that facebook might end up with. user bases and active user bases are not the same thing, and active user bases will fluctuate over time. this sounds obvious, but a new site can build both users and active users if it has features that active users find attractive - that's been thoroughly demonstrated, and the fear of inertia once held by many has really been thoroughly debunked as unfounded. you need a catch, granted - we don't need 27 different facebooks and sites will fail if they just redesign facebook - but that has been less difficult to actualize than was once thought. the argument that you need to go to where the users are due to fear that they won't migrate made sense a few years ago when people were still a little less active online, but it's been demonstrated at this point that people will use multiple platforms simultaneously, so there's certainly room for many platforms in the world without the need for them to engage in direct competition. what competition means in social networking is still somewhat unclear. you don't have to delete your facebook page to start a blog, nor are people as siphoned off by sitewalls as it was once feared they might be. i'm stating that i don't know why anybody would use facebook as a blog when they could have an actual blog instead, but what i'm really getting across is that there's no actual competition, as you really can't use facebook as a blog. so, why isn't blogger full of traffic, then?
i state this while i'm typing into a word processor to avoid censorship, but i'm a unique case; i wouldn't expect this is a widespread activity on behalf of google or is happening to very many other people, and i'd suspect that facebook and microsoft are under the same coercive pressures that google is to ensure that the scrubbing is comprehensive. facebook is so locked down, i can't even post there; it's like trying to have a debate in a fucking church. youtube won't let you post the word gorilla. i've long considered google the least likely suspect for destructive censorship, but i have to acknowledge that this couldn't be happening if they weren't allowing it to happen, even if it's being pushed down on them from a government, rather than a decision made internally. there is a substantive difference between how google and facebook approach the issue in their legal documents, and i don't think that's for show, i think it reflects different organizational priorities. the reality is that they've been far less aggressive than other platforms when it comes to enforcing destructive censorship, but it's not possible that what i'm sure is happening could be actually happening without cooperation from the server admins. for example, it's not possible to explain how email in my inbox is being edited in place, otherwise.
google has just not been good at social networking, and it's never been entirely clear why. the product has always been dramatically superior. maybe they're just not seen as 'cool', but if that's the case, they should embrace it. there's always going to be a market for people that want to type essays somewhere, rather than people that want to watch cat videos, even if it's inherently smaller. i can't build a site like this on facebook.
i'm no fan of elon musk, but i sympathized with his logic in trying to buy twitter, even if i don't think twitter is the right platform for what he was trying to protect. twitter was intended to be a site to transmit succinctly phrased statements that are valuable for mere moments, running from stupid catchphrases and slogans to carefully worded business english. it's great for, like, stock trading, or as an emergency notification system, but it's garbage for actual discourse. the town square musk was imagining is certainly not and certainly never will be twitter but it does exist, it is blogger.
unfortunately, like our actual town squares, blogger is mostly empty and void of substantive discourse. it's here if we want to use it, but perhaps the truth is that we don't. regardless, it should be maintained, like our empty town squares are, and perhaps mr. musk may want to inquire as to what google intends to do with blogger, moving forwards.
the site may not have the largest user base, but the users it does have are unlikely to migrate any time soon and it will always attract people that want to actually type, in the deficit of other places to do so.
3:33
maybe he should abolish the house of commons and replace it with a twitter account. this is the obvious deduction from the tyranny of business normality enforced by twitter: if you can't fit the legislation in a tweet, it's clearly too complicated and needs to be shortened up. stop wasting your time with elaborate thoughts - subsume yourself within the succinctness of the despotic brevity of the ubiquitous tweet. submit.
wait, though. isn't that what the last president tried to do?
reference:
"pierre polievre promises new law against government jargon", ctv news, sept 1, 2022
3:49
"gummamint's for regular talkin', not for fancy talkin'"
3:55
should i repost these archives so they're available in degraded quality while i'm fixing them?
i want to take the posts down for at least a few weeks in order to get the point across: this writing belongs to me. i need to assert control over it. from what i can gather by sorting through it, i will likely have to re-write large amounts of what i'm taking down, and rather substantively. it will be helpful to the messaging i'm trying to convey to get it all offline completely and post it two or three weeks (or later) after i've done so, in order to create a separation between the corruption and the correction.
the unwanted editor is a hard-headed idiot. they're not going to learn anything by me being nice to them, they're just going to take advantage of it. i need to shut the whole thing down to try to chase them off.
ultimately, i don't understand why they don't just fuck off, and am convinced that i'm going to need to bore the fuck out of them in order to convince them to get lost.
6:35
i have to remind myself that biden's rhetoric regarding trump is being driven by polling rather than logic.
but, he sure does sound like a fucking idiot.
wow.
6:39
no, i'm not like john galt
you fucking idiots.
(link was to ayn randy by the ssris)
i feel more like winston smith.
6:54
july 8, 2020
there's a fiscal update today and it's going to be very scary and everything, but something that hasn't been reported on is that the government created this debt by printing money through the bank of canada rather than by borrowing it on the market from private banks. in printing this money interest-free, the government did the right thing in picking the more responsible way for governments to pump money into the economy; the result is internal national debt and not private or external debt, so the primary longterm issue surrounding this debt, namely interest payments, is of a very different nature than the type of debt we're used to talking about.
normally, when the government borrows money, it does so by taking a private loan out from a private bank, which many people (myself included.) think is sort of insane. they just borrow money on the market like everybody else, and then have to pay interest on the amount borrowed from the bank to the bank. there is some shoddily written theory underlying this to poorly justify it, but it's obvious that the truth is just that the bankers run the world and have designed the system so that they can get their pound of flesh.
that's not what this debt is. instead, the government printed bonds and then printed money at the central bank, interest free, to buy those bonds. in a modern economy, buying up bonds with printed money is what the government does when it seeks to expand the money supply, not what it does when it seeks to go into debt; this would have been less unusual before the nixon shock, but this is an unusual step to take in the post bretton woods system, where debt is supposed to be privately held. what it indicates is the severity of the situation, and how the pandemic is different than a budget deficit.
the bank of canada is in complete control of this debt, because it's entirely of it's own creation; they're in debt to themselves. they could, in the end, just destroy the bonds, which would undo the expansion of the money supply. more likely is that the bonds will be sold to mutual funds, meaning that this is likely to work out to a strict expansion of the money supply, as the assets just get shifted to the markets, albeit in slow motion. the bank of canada will then recover the debt it incurred to buy the bonds when it sells the bonds, and we just end up with more money in circulation, in the long run. money creation of this sort is broadly inconsequential, and largely good for the economy, as it's just fiscal stimulus.
as mentioned, taking on this kind of debt is unusual in the really existing system of global capitalism, for shaky economic reasons that have really just been speciously upheld by the media-academic complex to ensure that the bankers get their cut. frankly, in terms of actual economic outcomes, the most lasting effect is likely to be a decreased level of competitiveness for the canadian dollar; actual inflation in the price of goods doesn't seem to ever happen from macreoeconomic effects. that's an entirely debunked pseudo-academic non-theory with absolutely no empirical and absolutely no theoretical basis. it's a total mythology derived from absolutely nothing.
yes, these numbers are going to be scary and, in response, you're going to see certain segments of the elite attempt to exploit and capitalize off of the crisis as they argue for the need to implement budget austerity and sell-off publicly owned resources to the private sector in order to implement a shock doctrine of structural readjustment programs, like the imf just woke up from a wet dream. this is coming. it's the reason why i was so apprehensive about creating so much debt, as i didn't want it to lead to a backdoor for the imf into the country.
however, the government actually created this debt responsibly. this debt is not real, it's just a slow motion expansion of the money supply. there is no justification for the imf to stomp it's way in here and start smashing skulls and bludgeoning everything.
that said, certain metrics doneed to be kept within certain limits in order to keep the imf away and it is imperative that everybody realizes that and seeks to hold the government to reasonable budget restraints that mostly have to do with debt-gdp ratios. this doesn't apply to the united states, but canada has bondholders out there, and those bankers need their flesh.
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/07/theres-fiscal-update-today-and-its.html
13:18
the bank is trying to pretend it didn't print any money.
the bank did print money - it printed money to buy bonds. they gave that money a special name, but that's not important. they could have just printed and destroyed regular money and it wouldn't have had a different outcome.
the difference is not about inflation, it's about debt.
13:29
to be clear: i reject the in truth entirely specious hypothesis that printing money causes inflation. the current inflation is being caused by increasing scarcity in oil and we should all get used to it until we move to a better energy source. i'm not going after the bank on this; i support the policy of easing and think they were doing spectacularly well, until some idiot conservatives showed up and started yelling nonsense, which distracted them and led to them making the mistake of hiking rates. what i oppose is the recent evidence-free reaction to an inflation that is clearly not the consequence of monetary policy; i oppose the rate hikes and i oppose the tightening.
i'm just trying to assert some honesty around the bank's claims. it was certainly not a cause of inflation, but, yes, they printed a ton of money in the pandemic, and they are not being honest in denying it. if you don't know better than to trust a banker, right?
13:37
i've now got the august posts entirely down and have left them here in this temporary html document, for now:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1laqSzwgba_3g7qYgbZYKvAPSeyckjwu8/view?usp=sharing
the data in that archive will be subject to heavy modification and will eventually be posted back to the blog in the form of daily digests. i'm refraining from reposting the temporary posts in order to embarrass, annoy and frustrate the unwanted editor. i suppose you can fuck with that throwaway html document all you want. please do.
appropriate archives will soon exist for july, june and possibly may. this will be required to build the linuxbook post, which will have posts dated as far back to june. in the long run, this will be the algorithm used to take down and replace each month, going back to 2013, as is required.
23:04
i wanted to get out today, swear an affidavit and take the 50k ride, but i didn't get to sleep until late in the afternoon because it took longer to get the august posts archived than i thought it would and i had to reserve the document because court staff misunderstood the direction provided to it and i decided it was easier to just put the attorney general's address on the document rather than argue about originating processes. this was pointless, ultimately, and it meant i lost the key part of the day, which forced me to lose the rest of it.
i at least do have all august posts taken down, now, and can get to removing july posts for the night.
23:33
sept 3, 2022
the language i am using in regards to shock doctrines and imf structural adjustment plans comes from the alter-globalization movement of the 1990s. if you are too young to remember this, i would suggest beginning with the writings of naomi klein, specifically her book the shock doctrine.
i have indicated repeatedly that i am concerned that the bourgeois right may be trying to actively bring back religion via targeted immigration, and i cite engels when i bring up that concern. i repeatedly point out that the bourgeois left is not interfering in this demographic shift being pushed by the bourgeois right, when they really should be. i have been articulating this concern for well over ten years and am only vaguely familiar with contemporary ideas on the right-wing fringe that may sound similar but are actually the literal opposite.
i don’t know anything about the world economic forum, or understand the lineage of the neo-bircherism that is currently re-establishing itself around the wef on the contemporary right, but the idea that it is some kind of secret government does not strike me as plausible. at the least the idea that the united nations was a secret communist cabal made some kind of sense; the wef does not appear to have any sort of political mandate, and has no power to do anything, whatsoever. that said, global capitalism was built in masonic lodges, and the idea of secret cliques of capitalist elites is well-grounded in history, but as a secret club where contracts are signed, and not as a shadow government. i do know a little about the history of the illuminati – or of the papal straw man called the illuminati – and i think it is helpful to point to it to develop a hypothesis.
the illuminati was a pro-democracy, enlightenment movement in europe that predictably found itself in conflict with the catholic church, which started printing all kinds of propaganda about it. while the illuminati was never anything more than a couple of guys (the founder, adam weishaupt, actually died under house arrest, after having been forced to confess, inquisition-style), and has long since ceased to exist, the propaganda about it remains in circulation. what the handful of dissidents in the illuminati wanted was what we today call liberal democracy, and for that projection they were viciously attacked as satanic deviants by the church, the way they had previously attacked pagans, atheists and scientists. the basic messaging from the church was that if you want democracy then you’re a satanist and you’re going to hell. this incredibly successful counter-enlightenment, reactionary movement generated by the church created a folk mythology that exists to this day.
following the logic in engels, it stands to reason that the elite learned something, in this exercise – that it can attack it’s opponents using the most absurd nonsense, and that the proletariat is often frequently easily deceived. engels wrote widely on this; his history of christianity is the short version.
it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the neo-bircherite wef “theory” was invented by clandestine capitalist control systems, like those overseen by the cia, and designed as a decoy away from the oncoming capitalist shock, and that it may even be written into it. if the wef has a role, here, it may be to act as a place where the elite can get together and plan tactics, and that is the role of secret societies that is well-grounded in history. it is likely not a coincidence that these ideas tend to appear as decoys right when capital is getting ready to launch it’s next attack in the class war.
while i am an anarchist and not a communist, i am basically in favour of a one-world communist global government, so long as it allows for strong local jurisdiction. i oppose the existence of countries and i reject all concepts of ethnicity, religion, identity and nationalism. my enemy is capitalism, not communism; the bad guys are the imf trying to force neo-liberal privatization schemes, not the wef trying to abolish private property. i strongly oppose private property. proudhon was right: property is impossible. private property, as we understand it, is theft.
unlike the wef, the imf is a government body that does have real power, and when it comes into a jurisdiction and begins to enforce readjustment, the results are intentionally catastrophic. i don’t even know what the wef even does, but canada should be constantly vigilant about preventing the imf from interfering in the country and coercing it to sell off our resources to foreign capital. while it has been slow to enforce itself, i do believe that structural adjustment, budget austerity and mass privatization is going to be at the centre of the bourgeois political agenda in canada in the upcoming months and years, and they are going to use the debt created during the pandemic as an excuse to facilitate a massive shift in the economy. this is already beginning to happen in healthcare.
if you want to understand this better, read klein; read the shock doctrine.
i have made myself clear on the matter and am not interested in debating against strawmen in regards to it. i am on the exact, diametric opposite side of the political spectrum, and the writings here present the exact, diametric opposite hypothesis.
13:09
sept 4, 2022
i've decided not to post digests for a few days in order to give the system a time out.
the ukrainians just took out a second bridge over the dnieper...
6:20
i have had noticeably longer days and noticeably less sleep the last two weeks or so, which is the specific thing that was pissing me off, so i do think i've tripped something over. i strongly suspect this is a consequence of the return of total tesosterone elimination, which is the thing i started seriously struggling with in mid 2020; i think the reason i was tired, and i had suspected this before, is that my body was dealing with trying to metabolize this testosterone, which i strongly suspect was entering my body via a process of being drugged. they seem to have put something in my food when i was out. the idiots trying to drug me may have thought they were re-establishing some kind of natural order or something, but the actual reality is that my testosterone was initially being suppressed hormonally and now cannot be produced because i don't have testicles, so introducing testosterone into my system in not re-establishing any sort of balance but introducing a drug that my body then has to metabolize, neutralize and eliminate. in the additional presence of massive amounts of estrogen, not only is that not re-establishing any sort of order, but it's actually putting immense strain on my kidneys to eliminate the testosterone as a drug. it makes sense that i would be tired.
i would suspect that the idea that testosterone actually makes genetic men more alert is an easily arrived at false conclusion. that woud not actually be the role of testosterone. testosterone would control aggressiveness to a certain extent, but not awakeness or alertness, and the effect of testosterone would be more likely to stimulate tiredness, after it is withdrawn and after the effects stimulate the burning of energy. increasesed awakeness would be closer to the role of adrenaline, although the condition of awakeness is more directly tied to an absence of adenosine. so, can you take an adenosine suppressor as a stimluant? yes - it's called caffeine.
for me, in context, with my body chemistry, because i can't produce any sort of testosterone in serious amounts, i would just need to clear the testosterone the way i'd need to clear any other sort of drug, and, if it weren't for the suppressors and the estrogen in my system, i'd simply be getting high on testosterone, and then need to recover from it afterwards. if the intent was shock therapy - which is what i think - that makes zeor biological sense.
the weather has also changed, and i have been uspsecting that this is also a majoer factor.
it's getting better. let's hope it sustains itself.
there's also the issue of minimizing the second hand smoke, which i also think has been getting better.
6:52
so, i got out for the ride saturday evening after missing friday's run due to the need to reserve the document. saturday itself was largely lost, as i spent all night updating the digests for the
wait. the date on my desktop is suddenly set to nov, 2022.
explain
- cloud storage
5:44 on 5th
slept too much on 5th
i will be focusing strictly on archiving, instead.
2:00
the ukrainians just took out a second bridge over the dnieper...
6:20
i have had noticeably longer days and noticeably less sleep the last two weeks or so, which is the specific thing that was pissing me off, so i do think i've tripped something over. i strongly suspect this is a consequence of the return of total tesosterone elimination, which is the thing i started seriously struggling with in mid 2020; i think the reason i was tired, and i had suspected this before, is that my body was dealing with trying to metabolize this testosterone, which i strongly suspect was entering my body via a process of being drugged. they seem to have put something in my food when i was out. the idiots trying to drug me may have thought they were re-establishing some kind of natural order or something, but the actual reality is that my testosterone was initially being suppressed hormonally and now cannot be produced because i don't have testicles, so introducing testosterone into my system in not re-establishing any sort of balance but introducing a drug that my body then has to metabolize, neutralize and eliminate. in the additional presence of massive amounts of estrogen, not only is that not re-establishing any sort of order, but it's actually putting immense strain on my kidneys to eliminate the testosterone as a drug. it makes sense that i would be tired.
i would suspect that the idea that testosterone actually makes genetic men more alert is an easily arrived at false conclusion. that woud not actually be the role of testosterone. testosterone would control aggressiveness to a certain extent, but not awakeness or alertness, and the effect of testosterone would be more likely to stimulate tiredness, after it is withdrawn and after the effects stimulate the burning of energy. increasesed awakeness would be closer to the role of adrenaline, although the condition of awakeness is more directly tied to an absence of adenosine. so, can you take an adenosine suppressor as a stimluant? yes - it's called caffeine.
for me, in context, with my body chemistry, because i can't produce any sort of testosterone in serious amounts, i would just need to clear the testosterone the way i'd need to clear any other sort of drug, and, if it weren't for the suppressors and the estrogen in my system, i'd simply be getting high on testosterone, and then need to recover from it afterwards. if the intent was shock therapy - which is what i think - that makes zeor biological sense.
the weather has also changed, and i have been uspsecting that this is also a majoer factor.
it's getting better. let's hope it sustains itself.
there's also the issue of minimizing the second hand smoke, which i also think has been getting better.
6:52
so, i got out for the ride saturday evening after missing friday's run due to the need to reserve the document. saturday itself was largely lost, as i spent all night updating the digests for the
wait. the date on my desktop is suddenly set to nov, 2022.
explain
- cloud storage
5:44 on 5th
slept too much on 5th
sept 5, 2022
this sequence of posts was dramatically edited, which helps me to further understand who it is that the unwanted editor is as it presents a context around the ukrainian conflict that isn't obvious unless you have a deep understanding of history.
the issues that seem to be frequently altered have to do with:
1) canadian politics, and anything that might be seen as a political liability to justin trudeau (who i think is a fascist, and frequently criticize as a fascist from a far-left perspective) specifically.
2) anything that is critical of islam, which i consider to be a form of fascism, as well.
3) now, anything that presents a version of russian history that differs from that which is officially prescribed by the state department, and parroted by canadian officials in what has become a standard cock-sucking exercise.
these things are not unrelated. when ukrainian history is being targeted in essentially the same way as spanish history, it tips you off as to who is responsible and what their motives are.
i have rewritten the posts and am reposting them temporarily to the front page. i may need to do this repeatedly with subsequent posts. yet, it is not clear what the point is, as those posts will no doubt also be edited.
as is the case with multiple other clearly heavily edited posts (and in this case the edits are so heavy-handed that they actually reverse the meaning i conveyed in the original post. one example is the * in the first post, which was changed to say "not officially communists", under an apparent misreading of the post by the editor(s). the * primarily referred to china, which actually is officially communist, although the truth is that it is a hyper-capitalist state of the worst variety, in actuality. as the editor is editing it from a russophobic perspective, they misread it to refer to russia, or at the least assigned the reference to russia greater importance, despite the intent of the * being primarily in reference to china. this would be a rather transparent attempt to smear me as a conservative, which is something i've become somewhat concerned about as the dominant form of editing seems to be coming from a canadian government that is both disinterested in the concept of truth and has a history, at this point, of carrying out tyrannical and despotic attacks against it's opponents that pay no deference to concepts of constitutional or human rights. as an anarchist, i reject the premise that china is a communist country and reject the premise that the soviet union was a communist country, let alone dispense with the absurd conspiracy theory that russia is still secretly a communist country. i do not bother with calling them "state capitalists", either. the soviet union was being guided through the capitalist phase, at best, and was a thoroughly capitalist economy from the start to the end; china is the most capitalist state on the planet, and has been for decades. i specifically recall the * being intended to clarify that the use of the word communist, in context, was ironic, so the content of the * was terse - "not really" is what i think was initially there. once again, we learn that the editor doesn't understand what they're editing and that is once again a clear tip-off as to the existence of the edit. like, this isn't a word choice. this is a change of meaning.), the gmail archive dated to the posting date aligns with the post i just took down. in this case, i know that is wrong because i recall rewriting the posts several times, myself. the unwanted editor simply replaced the contents of the gmail archive with the version of the post they posted in replace of my original post, without concerning themselves with a narrative they weren't aware of. there's some chance that it's an ai script running, rather than a person, and that certain events trigger the script.
the gmail archives are intended for redundancy. there was a time when they weren't being sent at all, and i became very frustrated by that as i didn't understand why it was happening. so, i started posting "post not archived" posts. what i thought was that they were trying to shut down an email list that didn't actually exist. now, it seems obvious that they were attempting to eliminate a source of redundancy because they were intending to alter the posts in the long run. in the end, they decided to alter my gmail, instead, so that it looks like the posts are being archived for redundancy, like i want, but in truth the backup just gets overwritten in sync with the edits.
as stated previously, this is clearly very deep. if i thought i was initially dealing with a naive hacker, and then thought the government was hacking my account watergate-style, it's now entirely clear that google is under the direction of some government, either canada's or the united states'. as this article was written in britain, the uk government might also be involved. the brits have historically aligned with the turks against the russians as a part of their longstanding russian containment policy and that point s very important in understanding what is actually going on. it's not clear why i would post here, moving forwards, at all, anymore.
i cannot stand by the integrity of any of these posts, at the moment.
i don't know what the next step is, but i am going to need to take everything down from here, i think.
if this site is really being monitored as closely as it is obvious it is being monitored, the editor(s) know(s) that i am a canadian of mixed heritage - primarily scandianvian and celtic (with a little jew) on my mother's side and a mix of french, italian, slavic, jewish and indigenous canadian on my father's side. my r1b mutation is from the iron age and indicates ultimate halstatt celtic paternal ancestry. when blonde, i look pretty swedish. i could pass for russian, but i'm not; there's some polish or ukrainian jew back there of unclear origin. my father's grandfather was a supposed francophone named stanislaw and his ancestry may not have been what is recorded in the church records; my dna picked up slav and jew, albeit separately.
i identify as an atheist canadian. i speak english pretty well and my french is barely usable. i can read french better than i can speak it. i do not speak any other languages.
what i am is somebody that is critical of my own government and skeptical of any sort of nationalism. i do not need to be working for a foreign government to be critical of my own government, but i will not call myself a patriot, as many of those critical of the west's involvement in iraq did. i am a radical anarchist that rejects all concepts of nationalism, including softer forms labelled as patriotism. calling me a traitor would miss the point, as i would not align with russian nationalism, either. i simply denounce the state, in all it's forms and abstractions; i fight for my class and not for my country. ask what your country has ever done for you, and denounce your country when you truly understand the answer. these words are being discarded by the unwanted editor(s), but i will continue to produce them until the editing stops.
these are not the original posts, but they are edits of the posts that existed, re-altered to convey the message i was initially intending to convey.
====
july 18, 2022
it really is interesting to me how much of an effort is being put into controlling the historical narrative around russian history online.
this article is a fluff piece. it's special interest; it's intended strictly for you to sympathize with the subject. it provides no useful information about anything, whatsoever. i read it to the end looking for some specific examples of how ukrainian history is different than russian history, and it didn't provide any. it just reassured us of the claim, in the most vague vagueness possible, and suggested anybody suggesting otherwise is just lying.
so, this is propaganda.
this issue of supposed ukrainian identity is of paramount importance to some shady somebodies somewhere trying to control the flow of information. i've been following this for a while, and the story that western intelligence agencies are pushing is that slavs are not indigenous to the geographic space we currently label ukraine but are rather invaders to the region, which is actually indigenously turkic & muslim. they're trying to draw parallels, ultimately, with the uygurs in xinjiang (which are not indigenous to the region, either, but invaded in the 11th century). the narrative is ultimately going to be that we have to go to asia to protect the wretched, indigenous muslims (who are not indigenous) from being oppressed by the evil communists* (who are indigenous).
the question to be analyzed is "what is a ukrainian?", and you're instantly faced to deal with the fact that this is not an ethnonym. the people that inhabit the geographical space we currently call ukraine have historically called themselves russians. ukraine translates to "march" or "borderland", much as austria means "land to the east" and only derives meaning in relation to charlemagne's position, west of it. the indigenous people of the region were celts, who had long since been romanized, then overrun by huns and avars. eventually, the german bavarians settled here and the area was just the eastern borderlands to them, as well. so, everybody calls the area "the eastern march" because the region had been depopulated and repopulated repeatedly in the dark ages, and there was no longer any indigenous group living in the region to name it after, although you can impress your friends by explaining that the romans called the region noricum, as that was the name of the indigenous celtic confederation in the region, at the time. to the romans, the region was also the limit of their world to the north, rather than to their east, as the roman east bordered persia.
there was no such thing as a "ukrainian" until the poles created the term in the 16th century, near the end of the war against the mongols (and then the turks) to liberate the region, which had been depopulated and repopulated (as austria had been). there was no ethnonym to attach to the region, as there was no ethnic group indigenous to the region that lived there. that is why we used to call it the ukraine - the borderland. they don't like that anymore, though. ukrainians were the russians on the borderlands between poland and the various turkic speaking muslims, and the ukrainians were ukrainians because they were russians trying to re-establish control over their ancestral homelands by fighting a war to expel the usurping turks from them. further, they called themselves russians, too. the term then passed into russian, which used it in the same way as the poles had, as the russians led the process of indigenous slavic liberation and self-representation in eastern europe from muslim and turkic colonialism and domination, almost all the way to the liberation of constantinople. while the slavs are not indigenous to greece, the greek religion has been in exile in russia for hundreds of years, and a russian liberation of constantinople on behalf of the greeks would be a historically legitimate act of benevolence.
so, then when did the language of ukrainian separate from russian? the answer is some time in the 17th or 18th centuries. it is not possible to identify an exact moment in time where the languages split apart, as the allopatric evolution leading to linguistic separation is a gradual process; the important thing to realize is that this is a relatively recent event, which some deny ever meanngfully happened at all. at the time, people in the region around kiev would have called themselves russians and would have told people they spoke russian, although they would have also specified that they're in the borderlands between the indigenous slavic and colonial turkic spheres of control. moscow then slowly started taking over the region soon afterwards, and had largely conquered it by the time of the french revolution.
so, what is this separate ukrainian history being spoken of? it's not remotely clear. i can concede that the vast russian-speaking regions had east and west components, which were split in the mongol invasion and reunified in the 18th century, but these east and west slavic regions had the same ethnic identity, spoke the same language and belonged to the same religion, up to a geographic split in dialect that occurred at roughly the same time as reunification. today, some linguists still refer to ukrainian as a mere dialect of russian. historical conflicts in the region would be more about power struggles between warlords, or occasionally about ideology (especially during the russian revolution), and less about cultural identity.
my understanding is that the vast majority of ukrainians identify as being ethnic russians, with the caveat being that there is a portion of ukraine in the west that was historically a part of austria, is primarily catholic and identifies as being a part of poland. this small part of ukraine has a different identity and a different culture, and it brings us back to the definition of ukraine as the polish borderlands. but, this region does not even extend as far as the dnieper.
what the western intelligence agencies want to interject is something different altogether - that indigenous ukrainian identity is turkic and that the slavs are late invaders to the area, a position that is so wrong as to be viciously offensive. but, this is what they actually mean when they talk of a separate ukrainian identity: they speak of cossacks and tatars, and present these people as the real ukrainians, who are the real owners of the land. even the poles are likely to reject that (and, try running that by the nazis fighting on the ground...), but it seems fundamental to the unravelling of russian history being pushed by the cia, which wants russia to cease to exist at all, to the point that it is actively trying to write russia out of history, altogether.
i understand that few will pull so much out of a fluff piece of this sort, which is designed strictly to generate sympathy for what it is portraying as victims of a russian invasion. but, you're being conditioned, and i think i can see where it's going.
the general tactic is to align with muslim groups across the steppes of asia to destabilize russian and chinese control over the region. this goes back to the cia funding for the mujahideen in afghanistan, and what i think is a trick withdrawal from afghanistan to prop up the taliban in order to allow the country to act as a staging ground for islamic militants encroaching into western china. so, we're back to the late cold war reaganite tactic of propping up muslim fundamentalists in eurasia to weaken the communists*. the cia has to rewrite the history to make it make sense, and convince us go along with it.
the sad truth is that the ukrainians themselves - the east slavic speaking ruthenians around the dnieper - are the great losers, here. their supposed protectors want to hand over their lands to their historic enemies. it's similar to what we did to the kurds. if the west gets it's way in the region, there will neither be a ukraine nor a russia, but an imperial turkish outpost in kiev and a kazakh occupation of moscow.
if ukrainians figure that out, this is over - they will switch sides, immediately.
*not really
6:33
i'm going to post this article, and the propagandists will change it. note today's date, and seek the older version of it, dated to today's date.
it's helpful as a starting point, but let me expand on it a little.
the geographic space that we currently call ukraine has historically been an uninhabited wasteland because it was a horse and caravan highway for migrating barbarians, massacring and plundering (and raping.) from one side of the steppe to the other. while the steppes were being used for this purpose, the slavs had little choice but to hide in the forests to the north, where the horse-mounted savages couldn't oppress them. the slavs, however, have recognized this region as belonging to them the whole time, going back millennia, as they were the only group in the region that wasn't migratory. the reality is that the slavs are the direct ancestors of the proto-indo-europeans, who lived in this region as far back as 7000 years ago, and probably first inhabited the region after the last glacial maximum. their connection to the land is truly ancient.
it was some time before the back-migration of the scythians (about 3000 years ago) back into the steppes that the slavs had to escape into the forest, and they were not able to find a way back out. they did not develop an advanced civilization; they remained stuck in the bronze age. this constant parade of horse mounted barbarians up and down through these wild fields with the perpetual intent to burn everything down, from the danube to the edges of china, is the dominant reason why slavic civilization took so long to establish itself.
a central narrative in russian history is that the defeat and expulsion of the mongols (tatars, turks) allowed the slavs the ability to finally protect themselves from these barbaric savages to their east, and finally develop the region into settled cities. this russian defence of the region is consequently paramount to any civilization in the region at all.
so, this term ukraine comes out of the fact that nobody lived in these areas at all for millennia until the russians were able to secure it from the constant influx of barbarians from the east. it follows that some deeper ethnonym is not forthcoming - this was an uninhabited wasteland before the russians were able to secure and develop it.
7:11
up until roughly the year 1500, when the russians overwhelmed the steppe barbarians with the use of more advanced technology, all attempts to set up any sort of settlement in the south of the geographic area that we currently call ukraine ended in destruction. the vikings were the only power to try (twice - don't forget the goths), and their settlements were overrun and destroyed, both times. you could set up a city here, the water was plentiful and the land was fertile, but some horde of barbarians from the east would just burn it down and enslave everybody. eventually, there were enough examples that nobody even tried.
there were simply nothing there - there couldn't be.
the area was indefensible - a term russians continue to use to describe the security situation in the region. the existence of any sort of civilization here was truly precipitated directly on the ability of the russians to protect the region from the barbarians to the east.
7:20
===========
this is a screenshot of the gmail archive:
there is no possibility that i actually typed that.
1) the quip primarily referred to china
2) the implication is that i think the russians are secretly communists, an idea i consider to be contemptibly stupid.
22:09
sept 6, 2022
these articles are unambiguously, clearly directed at bourgeois liberal voters in an attempt to generate sympathy for the disabled from them, and they're really not very helpful to disabled people that need solidarity from the working class, not sympathy from the rich.
a good example is a statement like this:
”You can’t just go to the grocery store and buy whatever you want. You have to do a lot of planning in advance looking at prices and if you have multiple grocery stores within walking distance to compare prices and shop at multiple locations.”
if you're fabulously rich, the idea of not being able to go to the store to buy whatever you want may seem bizarre to you, but if you're a member of the working class, that's a normal constant to existence.
as a member of the working class, i'm reading this article and am actually feeling a lack of empathy for myself as i'm doing so, as it attempts to point to normal realities of day to day life as somehow being unique to disabled people, in an attempt to generate special sympathy for them. i can tell you that i knew a lot of kids growing up that had parents that had difficulty putting food on the table and had to do quite a bit of shopping to feed their kids, in two-income households. the difference between me and the guy down the street that has a mortgage on his house is accumulation, not material existence - we both have to shop to find food to eat and we both struggle with bills every day, he just has twice as many bills and pays out three times as much on them. frankly, i don't want the house or the car, in exchange for signing up for wage slavery.
inflation affects everybody and poverty is a constant of capitalism; everybody has difficulty finding enough food to eat in the existing economic system, as plentiful as the food is, and as much waste as we generate. there are almost no exceptions to this. as a disabled person, i read this and i want tell these rich pieces of shit to shut the fuck up as they are not helping build empathy at all, but are rather building up resentment. this is a big problem on the bourgeois left, which wants to moralize everything rather than deal with the actual economic issues, and in the process consistently makes everything worse.
i don't want do-gooding bourgeois liberals to decide that being poor is a moral problem that do-gooding people need to fix by praying or something, i want to build working class solidarity to seize and redistribute their assets, then send them to the gallows. what a bunch of useful idiots. do they think we're in the same class and are on the same side? what an absurd joke.
the disabled are on one side of the class war and do-gooding bourgeois liberals are on the other side of it. it would help everybody to remember that, rather than to get lost in stupid burkean ideas about class harmony.
$200/month for one person is not so bad, given that many families have to feed 4 or 5 people on $600/month. i've never been hungry on disability.
what i've had difficulties with is housing stability and that is what the system should be focusing on. but, what we really need is working class solidarity, not handouts by do-gooding bourgeois liberals, and the latter impedes the ability to build the former.
reference:
"ontario mpps go on 'social assistance diet' to show why odsp needs to be increased", cp24, sept 6, 2022
19:17
an experiment spending $47/week on groceries ignores the fact that most people buy things in bulk. a box of vector cereal runs $7-9, but lasts 3-4 months, and is a good source of protein and vitamins. i buy sunflower seeds and hemp seeds in bulk at the bulk barn for pennies on the gram, and the containers last for months at a time. so, i cycle through products every several months. my grocery bills are not close to being the same month over month and i'd suspect few people's are.
- it will take me longer than two weeks to get through a $4.00 package of scotch bonnets, which is also used in the other salad.
- one habanero (accounted)- 1 tbsp of hemp seeds, 1 tbsp cumin, 1 tbsp cayenne, 1 tbsp sunflower seeds, 1 tbsp of oregano, 1 tbsp basil, 1 tbsp thyme, 1 tbsp paprika, 1 tbsp mustard seed. it would be hard to measure this out for two weeks. if it's $0.50/day, say $3.50.
- i want small oranges for about $0.50 each. so, $3.50.- 50 g of broccoli is about $0.50. so, $3.50.- a small beet is about $0.30. so, $2.10.
spices: same as before, so say $3.50.
- mangoes can ve found for $1.00 each- one package of guava is usually about $3.99- i buy frozen or fresh raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, cherries and peaches depending on if they're on sale
- cereal with soy: ~$10 + $10 on soy = $20
- one container of 0% yogurt ($3.00)- 7 scoops of ice cream is about a quarter to a fifth of a tun and is consequently around $1
you would need to save a little to buy in, or find some other source of income to stock up, and there's two problems with that:
1) yes, a lot of disabled people lack the ability to do that kind of planning, which points to the systemic problem of expecting people to care for themselves that are incapable of really doing so, then getting frustrated when they mismanage resources they should have never been expected to manage in the first place and
2) while i do believe i got a backdated advance many years ago, i doubt that is common, and most people just end up in situations where saving is almost impossible.
if these do-gooding bourgeois liberals are going to this, they need to do it for six months, not two weeks. two weeks is a stupid stunt. if they do it for months, they won't just learn what it's like to be disabled, they'll learn what being working class is about.
19:33
it would be very helpful if the ndp would take some time to learn a little about the working class, if they seek to represent it in parliament.
19:35
i'll tell you what they're going to do.
they're going to take that $50, they're going to go to the frozen food aisle, they're going to buy a couple of pre-made pizzas and they're going to eat a half a pizza every afternoon. then, they're going to end up overweight and diabetic and malnourished, just like the disabled people they're trying to build sympathy for.
tells you something about them.
19:54
i'm not advocating for food stamps. however, a large percentage of disabled people cannot be responsibly just handed a a check and told to go spend it. like children, many will go to the fast food aisle and spend it on candy, then complain they don't have enough.
some greater focus on planning is required.
but, the primary issue facing the disabled today is housing, not food. don't let them confuse you and don't let them change the topic.
19:57
moralizing everything might work in building larger choirs to sing together in your church group, but it merely pays lip service to the need to solve problems. it is a tactic that lacks any sort of theory and lacks any sort of praxis, but rather accomplishes nothing besides generating an industry for do-gooding bourgeois liberalism to finance itself with.
it's a way to sell books.
20:14
a large percentage of the disabled people in question are unambiguously, obviously and without any remote question as to otherwise brutal, vicious victims of neglect as much as they are anything else and do have the ability to be taught to do simple things, even if they don't have the ability to figure it out themselves. these people have simply never been taught what and how to eat, and why some foods are healthy and others should be avoided.
in all possible scenarios, it is obviously and without any remote ambiguity otherwise clearly as simple as setting up community science courses in nutrition and basic budgeting to help people learn how to shop better.
21:03
you can't buy caviar, granted, but i know without any remote, faint semblance of doubt that it isn't at all difficult for a single person to eat well on $200/month, not even with the current inflation.
the $500 for rent, however, is completely, unworkably, impossible.
21:05
sept 7 2022
this is just a reminder that my favourite radiohead record is the bends and that i think everything after amnesiac sucks.
radiohead were an interesting rock band in the 90s, but they became unlistenably boring when they changed their direction towards pretentious loser rock.
i saw radiohead in ottawa in 1997. it was in the smaller arena in town, but it was an arena show. they would not have been able to play the larger stadium in ottawa, at the time.
generally, i prefer to attend concerts with less than 5,000 people at them and usually prefer to attend concerts with (much) less than 1,000 people. many of the shows i've been to have had less than 100 people at them. i have not been to a large concert since the mid 00s. i think the last large concert i saw was the white stripes in ottawa in 2007.
i was not remotely interested in the popular rock, techno, pop or hiphop music of the 00s or of the 2010s. i mostly spent the 00s listening to abstract post rock, whereas i found myself primarily interested in a specific strain of punk rock through much of the 2010s. i would have difficulty following a conversation about popular festival music post-2000. i would hold to the argument that the music that became popular around the turn of the century lacked creativity, lacked political awareness, lacked thematic unity, lacked memorability and became overwhelmingly focused on the production of music as a form of income. while this last part was not unique to the music of the post-2000 period, it was no longer seen as something to avoid, but rather embraced and upheld as an ideal. i found that attitude contemptible and boring and had no interest in interacting with it at all. yet, it was pretty ubiquitous. as a consequence of the lack of artistic quality in the popular rock, techno and pop produced since the year 2000, i have not spent time interacting with it.
it is possible that i am simply a little older, although i'll remind you that i turned 20 in 2001, so my contempt for mainstream music wasn't due to my age, at the time. perhaps i felt, acted and thought like an older person, and perhaps i adopted the attitudes of the older people around me. i don't think that's true, either, as i despise the popular music of the 70s and 80s, as well. i would not have been found at popular festivals from 1975 to 1985 either, and you would have seen me strictly at what were called college rock festivals after about 1985.
i actually think that i just don't like popular music very much and that the short periods of 1966-1970 and 1990-1995, where popular music was more artistic and more real, were a short exception to a more general rule.
i may like popular music again at some time in the future, but i'd consider that unlikely. rather, i have long focused on more obscure art forms and expect to continue to. i do remain excited about the possibilities of combining technology with western classical forms.
i actually think david bowie's best work was in the 90s and his worst work was in the mid 70s.
0:46
if you gave me exactly $100 for two weeks and told me no pantry items, what would i spend it on?
i currently spend a little more than that because i'd rather eat well than watch tv. that is a real choice for me. others might need to buy medications or spend money on physio or whatever else. so, i'm going to cut my actual diet down a little by throwing away some of the extras to get me under $100.
i'm going to use my alternating two-day schedule, meaning i'll need 7 days for each meal.
eggs
- this is supper for day two. i eat four eggs at a time, so one 18 pack would be 4.5 meals and two would be 9 meals. the price of eggs fluctuates dramatically, but i tend to get them for around $5.50. so, it's $11.00 for two weeks of eggs. you could potentially save a dollar or two by getting one 18 and one 12, instead, if it's just strictly for the week (you wouldn't do that in real life). or, you could go down to 3 or 2 eggs.
- i would get a loaf of bread. you can usually get them 2 for $5 but you only need 14 slices here so let's say $2.50. you could also buy less fancy bread than i do and save a few cents.
- you can usually still find a brick of medium cheddar cheese for around $5.00, on sale. the trick is to buy a lot of them when they're on sale. i go through roughly one brick per week, total, including other meals. so, that's $10.
- a container of olive oil margarine usually last about two weeks and mine costs $4.00. it is fortified with d & e.
- i'd get a big jug of orange juice for $4.50 which should be fine for the two weeks.
- i'd spent about $1.00 on garlic.
- i'd get a bag of nutritional yeast for $8.00. two weeks is about right for the lifetime of this item. i'll use it for the other meals, too.
======================================================
$19 for eggs + $10 for cheese + $8 yeast + $4 margarine = $41.
that meal is high in vitamins, protein and minerals. eggs are actually very good for your heart, as they increase good cholesterol. mine is excellent.
caesar salad:
- this is lunch for day two.
- two bouquets or bunches of kale is about $6, total. that's more than enough for 7 meals.
- i'd spent about $1.00 on garlic.
- a lime is usually $0.50-ish. so, that's about $3.50.
====================================
$10.50 for salad + $4.00 for habaneros
that by itself is not the worst thing you can eat as kale is very healthy, but i would also add cheese and yeast for b vitamins in the homemade sauce. a caesar must have a sauce; you can buy it, but you shouldn't.
spices in the sauce, which are difficult to budget like this:
- one lime (accounted)
- i go through a big container of hot sauce in a month, so two weeks is roughly one of the $3.50 bottles.
- margarine (accounted)
- cheese (acccounted)
- nutritional yeast (accounted)
- one cup of soy milk per day adds up to 2 containers, for $6, with a little left over.
- one container of probiotic yogurt is about $3.00
========================================================
$9.00 for the base of the sauce + $3.50 for hot sauce
so, that's $23 for the caesar, in total, including the habaneros. however, you wouldn't buy the spices or the habaneros every two weeks, you'd stagger them.
in total, 23 + 41 = $64.
quinoa salad
- this is supper for day one.
- a cup of quinoa costs about $0.50, so you're looking at about $3.50. this will fluctuate.
- ~$3.50 for tomatoes.
- ~$7 for red peppers.
- a half bag of carrots is about $1.50.
- $1 for garlic.
========================================
$16.50
sauce: hot sauce (accounted), cheese (accounted), yeast (accounted)
19 (eggs) + 19.50 (caesar) + 16.50 (quinoa) + 25.50 (cheese & yeast & margarine & hot sauce) = 80.50.
breakfast:
- breakfast on day one.
- one bag of frozen strawberries costs ~$3.99
- 7 bananas is about $2.50
- one clamshell of kiwis is $4.00
- small avocados are about $.75 each and i have two per day. 14*3/4 = $10.5
- also includes yeast, paprika & sunflower seeds.
==============================
$21
that comes up to $101.50. it does not include coffee or toiletries. you don't need the garlic, if you want to get exact budget numbers; you can get to $98.50 if you subtract $3 in garlic. maybe you can get smaller tomatoes or bananas or find red peppers on sale. and, maybe you can then get beets or broccoli, too. conversely, you could eat a little less cheese to open up some space, but you need some fat in your diet for absorption and should be careful not to discard it entirely. the healthiest spices to splurge on if you find yourself with a good deal and a few extra dollars are hemp seeds, sunflower seeds and paprika. you should certainly pick hemp seeds over hot sauce, a decision i made poorly, here, but would make again.
meat is bad for you and worse for the planet. eating twice a day is better for you than eating three times a day (if you assume each meal contains the same amount of calories), especially if you're immobile due to being disabled. i eat roughly every 12 hours, or try to. whether you're in a wheelchair or an office chair, you likely don't need more than that. you should maybe eat three times if you're a field or construction worker. so, my meal plan goes breakfast, early supper, brunch, late supper.
most people would agree that this is a pretty good meal plan, regardless of financial restrictions, but how much does my actual diet cost, when broken down this way?
eggs: $19 + $4.00 for grapefruit juice, on sale. so, $23. diff: $4.
yeast & cheese & hot sauce & margarine + $4 for caesar: $25.50 + 4 = 29.50. diff: $4.
caesar: $19.50 + $7.5 for spices. so, $27. diff: $7.50.
quinoa: $16.50 + $9.10 for broccoli, beets & oranges + $3.50 for spices = $29.10. diff: $12.60.
breakfast: 21 + $7 (mango) + $4 (guava) + $2 (fr. raspberries) + $2 (fr. blueberries) + ~$15 on extras like blackberries, cherries, peaches, red bananas, lychees, goji, etc + ~$20 total for cereal + $5.00 for yogurt & ice cream = $78. diff: $57.
coffee: $20
=================
23 + 27 + 29.10 + 78 + 29.50 + 20= $206.60
if you forget the coffee, that's $186.60. the luxurious fruit bowl is likely going to come down a little for the winter, reducing the cost to close to $150. as mentioned, i'd rather spend the money on food than cable, but i have that choice at the moment and i have quite a bit of space to adjust.
4:15
as is clear, i've recently been thinking a lot about the nature of this blog.
i like having a blog. there's no question. i enjoy typing, and while i realize that my time is not always best spent doing so, i also realize i need the stress release of letting go of my thoughts. what i don't enjoy doing is having to re-alter and re-edit posts in the space over and over again because it's been commandeered by a government obsessed with online censorship, to the point that it feels like it needs to control the flow of information critical of it. over the last few months, i've begun to realize the sophistication of what i'm up against, and i've spoken of catching the censors in the act, but in a sense i think i'm giving them what i want but playing with them rather than walking away.
i didn't intend to attract the kind of attention i've attracted with this site. i'm a musician that likes to write, and my art has a political component, but i'm not a politician. i have no aspirations in politics. i have no desire to capitalize on this space at all. i was simply attempting to draw attention to my bandcamp site.
so, i feel it is best to give the space a time out, in order to give the system behind it a time out.
i will not stop typing my thoughts into the computer; this is second nature to me. however, i think it is best that i keep my blog posts offline until the sitting liberal government is removed from power. i do not expect that this obsession with my writing will survive this government, as i'm frankly not interesting enough for it to do so.
i have spoken repeatedly about how i've gotten lost in recursions around typing and retyping posts, and how i need to start at the beginning to actually finish my thoughts, rather than keep repeatedly picking up somewhere in the middle and falling in on myself, yet again. i am reformatting this site from scratch to have an offline-first presentation. as such, it makes sense for me to take the site back to 2013 and rebuild it, from scratch, in a forwards fashion. there's not another way to actually do this.
does that mean the last several years have been wasted? i don't want to say that - i have a lot more posts, now. however, i now need to rewind myself back to before this site existed at all, as i dismantle it and rebuild it in the context of completing the journal writing process. this i what i put down in 2020 and what i now need to sort of start over again with.
i will not be deleting this site and something will reappear here once the liberals have been replaced. i just actually don't want this attention, and i feel the only thing i can do to prove it is to be quiet, for a while.
i will keep the articles up. i will find a way to get monthly archives up somewhere that isn't here, not for now.
it's going to take quite a while to get the posts down and a lot longer to get them back up again. i suspect that the state will be less interested in trying to take control of my personal narrative as i rebuild posts from 1989-2015, at least for now. i can only hope this gives me back my artistic control over my own art. i don't know what happens next if it doesn't.
so, this isn't the end of this site, but it's the end of a conflict i don't want amidst a power struggle i know i can't win. the site will be made ready to rebuild quickly at the right time, which will occur in the future. i will be waiting. however, whatever's going on has to stop. this isn't a game i want to play.
so, i quit.
for now.
i'll fix the door later.
7:30
pop was actually a really good record, although few people really understood the satire, or were much interested in it, at least.
it should be noted by history that radiohead basically copied u2 and then got all of the acclaim for it, while u2 was forced to retreat back to a style of power pop that they had previously derided.
it will be interesting to note if the historians get this right or not.
8:18
i should have seen this coming and i should have given up earlier.
or, maybe the story is worth the frustration, in the end.
protect the knowledge.
it's not safe.
9:03
if i was a capitalist, i'd be concerned about property rights - you type your product into the network, and it disappears down a tube somewhere.
i'm not.
i'm concerned about personality rights. i'm concerned about speech rights. and, i'm concerned about getting framed, in the context of a state that no longer respects the concept of speech rights.
the government could post something to your blog, totally fabricated. you couldn't disprove it.
9:10
the idea that the bank of canada's decision to hike interest rakes has been made independently of political pressures and is rather being driven by a naive application of the objective science of economic theory, conjured without ideological bias from the depths of academia, and purely in order to control inflation for the public good, is an absurd joke.
in some other scenario, there might be a debate around the issue. in this scenario, the bank's actions have no basis in economic theory. they are a wholly ideological and frankly very vulgar political reaction, driven entirely by political agitation from the opposition party. the bank's rate hikes have had no effect on inflation and will have no effect on inflation in the near future.
the lesson is that an independent bank of canada allows the opposition to set policy, rather than the government. the status quo allows the sitting government to evade responsibility for setting damaging policy that benefits their donors but is neither driven by logic nor by data. if a judicial review could be carried out on the matter by a good prosecutor, it would convincingly prove that there is no logical connection between the bank's actions and it's stated policy objectives, because the reality is that there isn't.
there was a report at the cbc recently about record increases in credit card debt. that is a predictable outcome of interest rate hikes, and it is on top of a canadian public that already had unsustainable levels of personal debt. when the personal debt bubble bursts, we will find ourselves in a deep and structural recession and will have the bank of canada to blame for it, as it will have created that recession by foolishly caving to political pressure to speciously raise interest rates to reduce the price of imported commodities, in the face of all academic economic theory that denies any logic in such policy.
we need to discard with this sick charade of central bank independence and get the bank of canada back under the control of the parliament of canada so that we can hold politicians accountable for monetary policy when it is being carried out independently of theory or reason. the interest rate hikes are just a cash grab by the banking class, who are taking advantage of the war in eastern europe to increase profits; it's disaster capitalism at it's worst.
"independent governing bodies" do not shield decision makers from political pressures, as the rate hikes demonstrate, but rather protect them from political accountability, as they make corrupt or just bad decisions on behalf of lobbyists or class interests. the facade of political independence is really just the absence of democratic accountability; this facade needs to be shattered, and we need to take back democratic control over a wide array of independent bodies by placing them back under the control of the legislature. this is not an issue restricted to the bank; the bank is just one example of a relatively recent governing policy throughout government to move to these unaccountable "independent" bodies, a broader policy that needs to be systematically undone.
"independent body" is just a synonym for "unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic decision maker". it is functionally equivalent to what the latin americans call a junta, which is a historically relevant observation, in the context of the importation of neo-liberalism. i've tried to draw some attention to it here, but this orwellian language of "independent bodies" has long evaded a long overdue criticism.
16:45
stiglitz thinks boosting rates might increase inflation, and that makes some sense - if it costs more to borrow, those costs get passed on. this is the dreaded spiral that rate hikes are supposed to stop. i suppose ol' joe is a little skeptical of that:
i would think the specificity of the issue is rate-dependent and sector-dependent. an across the board rate hike will likely create inflationary spirals in some sectors, while preventing them in others.
his basic point - that rate hikes don't create cheaper oil - is the point i'm also making and is the crux of why the policy doesn't make sense. further, he's correct that the economy needs to invest heavily in creating cheaper energy inputs in order to actually address inflation, which really means investing in carbon transition. making it harder to borrow money will make it harder to transition and consequently make it harder to address the real problems underlying the actual inflationary pressures.
i've been critical of the "inflation reduction act" as a handout to the oil industry, but it does have some tax cuts that might help spur transition, in theory, even if i don't think any of it will actually work. what the bank is doing in boosting rates is acting in complete opposition to the intent of the legislature and the executive in the ira, and that doesn't make any sense. that's reflective of a broken system of government that has ceased to operate correctly and needs to be dismantled and fixed. any tax incentives created by the legislation will pale in comparison to the disincentives produced by the rate hikes. three branches of government is enough; no country need a fourth. central banking policy should be crafted in consultation with the rest of government to ensure that objectives are met together, not created independent of it in a way that creates anarchy in policy and undoes the intent of the democratically enacted legislation. again, we have a crisis of democracy, in that the bank is acting against the democratic mandate of the people, and that cannot be justified, but must rather be abolished.
18:47
and, as always, the european aristocracy pays for their wars by increasing taxes on the people:
20:13
no, i didn't write an essay that utilized transmarginal inhibition to explain the sudden unpopularity of the teenage mutant ninja turtles in the early 1990s. i just stated it without elaboration.
it is up to you to do that, young ones.
20:53
this might seem hilarious, but it's actually relatively serious, in the sense of it being an escalation in the delusions of grandeur that the saudi monarchy has been demonstrating for quite a while, now.
they have a lot of money. in today's world, that means they can buy a lot of influence, which means that they have a lot of power.
i don't expect that netflix will comply with the demand. i am concerned that the saudis may decide that, because they are the rightful emperors of the world, and their religion is the only valid law, and they are tasked with enforcing that religion, that they therefore have the legal authority to enforce their rules, and not just within their feudal state (which cannot exist at all in today's world, and yet somehow does) but in totality, everywhere.
netflix should take this threat very seriously and ensure that it's employees are appropriately protected.
while this might merely be bravado, this is the kind of state-sanctioned attack from the saudis on the west that is imminent, and the question as to how far it escalates remains open. world wars have been started over less than this.
the saudis have also bought massive amounts of weapons with their money, and all indications are that they intend to use those weapons, at least in their direct neigbourhood.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/saudi-arabia-and-gulf-neighbors-threaten-netflix-over-content-that-violates-islamic-values.html
23:26
sept 8, 2022
my understanding is that, of the 6 turbines of concern to the situation around the nord stream pipeline, five are currently in canada and one is in germany. if somebody would like to clarify that, send me an email.
i don't know if the russians are able to build their own turbines or not. it does not sound like a technically challenging problem. surely, there are turbines in russia that can be used. is it not russian technology?
nor do i know if it is possible to verify russia's claim of a leak in the line, and it's insistence on a fire hazard at the plant.
yet, the fact of the matter, as far as i can gather it, is that putin's claim that the turbines have yet to be returned is correct. if russia is waiting for the turbines, those turbines are legitimately not available to it.
the idea that russia would cut off gas to germany does not make sense to me, as it is not in their self-interest to do so. nor is it in germany's self-interest to cut off it's energy supplies. the germans may be manipulating the media for their own benefit, as they hope and plan for their port facilities to be completed before winter.
environmentalists should take note that importing gas from the united states or canada is far more dangerous and polluting than sending it under the baltic sea, even if the ideal is to eliminate gas use altogether.
the media coverage consequently appears to primarily be western propaganda, designed to blame a short term supply issue while they switch suppliers on russia when the actual issue appears to be that the germans won't return the turbine, as they await the switchover.
0:08
so, i've got the june and july archives pulled down and archived off site, which gievs me the raw data i need to build the chromebook post, which is what i wanted to do.
i need some kind of temporary archive, as well.
9:14
i should note that the error at the journal site waa a local display issue. it launches fine when i set the display to 100% instead of 90%. phew.
9:59
if i were in the house of commons, i would abstain on any votes regarding allegiance to the new monarch.
i don't want his kids to take his place, either.
if we're going to change everything anyways, can we take the opportunity to move beyond the monarchy? i'd rather they put laurier on the bills.
17:52
and, does england itself want to return to the danelaw?
17:59
she was right then.
unfortunately, she's a tory now.
there aren't really liberals and tories in britain anymore, though, and the tories seem to be becoming more and more liberal, as labour swings harder and harder to the right. for the tories to oppose the monarchy would be the irreversible transformation of the party system in britain, wihch was founded on the premise of the tories as the party of the aristocracy and the liberals (or whigs) as the party in opposition to the landed interests, which largely meant they represented the bourgeoisie, or middle class.
the fundamental question is whether there still is an aristocracy in britain, or whether the only real remaining political division is between the bourgoisie and the working class. if so, perhaps it is time for the parliament to put an end to the monarchy once and for all.
18:08
she does go on:
18:15
there's something rotten in london, indeed.
england has a good chance to freshen the place up and should seize upon the historical moment.
18:24
i'll coin it: charles the turd.
hey, i'm from quebec.
18:27
i'm going to introduce a different twist on this.
i'm going to call for charles to abdicate.
i think he secretly agrees with the criticism.
18:51
the ndp are insisting that budget support is explicitly reliant on sending $650 checks for dental to people making over $70,000/yr that don't have dental insurance. there's no typos, there. that is, by any definition, a handout for the wealthy. i don't generally vote against tax cuts for the rich, but a policy like that is going to swing liberal votes to the conservatives, without question.
the average salary in canada, statistically, is slightly less than $50,000/yr. 70k is wealthy - there's no way to frame it otherwise.
i would also like to see how many people making over $70,000/yr don't have dental insurance in canada. that's $30/hr; it's twice the minimum wage in ontario. are there even fifteen people in canada that would benefit from that? so, what cross are they dying on, here?
rather, the messaging from the ndp must be that they're trying to force an election, then. i mean, either that, or they're explicitly tying their electoral strategy to government handouts for the upper middle class out of desperation and the realization that they no longer represent working people, and have no chance at generating support from them. the liberals might have no way out of this and consequently shouldn't walk into a trap. that would set up a likely snap election in the late fall.
i don't expect a change in the balance of power to result from such an election, but it would likely be the end of jagmeet singh, and maybe that's the actual point.
there was also supposed to be an announcement today regarding an increase to the gst credit but it was cancelled due to the queen finally dying. i want to summarize my position on this:
1) i have insisted from the start that the inflation we're seeing is mostly price gouging, but partly being driven by inflation in the cost of oil. i have rejected the narrative of monetary policy causing inflation.
2) as such, i have rejected the claim by the finance minister that sending out rebate checks would cause more inflation.
3) however, as i've argued that the inflation is being caused by the price of oil, and i'm in support of carbon taxation, i have opposed further rebates on the grounds that we have a rebate in place called a carbon tax.
4) as more data has come out, and the amount of gouging by oil companies (who are posting record profits) has become more clear, i've gradually shifted my position to supporting an increased carbon rebate. this would explicitly tie rebates to lower carbon consumption, and tell people that are over-using carbon that they need to burn less fuel if they want to benefit from the rebate. however, this would essentially just be a mean-tested rebate tied to a statement about carbon consumption and would not functionally differ from an across-the-board rebate check.
5) i have opposed rate hikes by the bank to reverse inflation because the policy being pushed by the bank is economically illiterate. i have argued that what a rate hike will actually do is create a recession, while failing to prevent inflation. we should expect stagflation as a consequence of the rate hikes.
6) as yet more data has come out, and it's become more and more clear that we are in fact entering into what is likely to be a very deep recession as a result of mismanagement by the bank in their insistence on these foolish rate hikes, i've begun to argue for targeted stimulus checks to heat the economy back up. this is the reason i supported biden's student loan relief.
when you have many events happening at once, the question as to what to call things begins to blur into the question as to what things actually are. if you throw a rock through a window, you can call it a lot of things: air conditioning, vandalism, renovation, stimulus for the window replacement industry, etc. regardless, the result of the action is that there's a broken window that somebody needs to fix and what you call that broken window matters less than what it is. so, i can tell you that i oppose inflation rebates, but support carbon rebates and stimulus checks and write you long essays explaining why, but at the end of the process i'm telling you whether i do or do not support sending out what are all essentially the same checks and just labelling that support or lack of support differently. this would be less confusing if all of these events weren't happening simultaneously, but here we are.
i actually don't think that the gst rebates are the best way to send out stimulus right now because it's actually not the people on the very lowest end of the income spectrum that are being affected by the inflation that's happening. i've posted here more than a few times that i actually haven't seen much inflation in healthy food. my rent might go up by 2.5% next year, and i'm concerned about that, but i haven't got the form yet and it's worth pointing out that a 2.5% increase on a smallish number is less than a 2.5% increase on a large number. i won't like it, but i could manage that. i don't drive and most poor people don't drive either. interest rates are of no concern to me.
the people being hurt most by the current inflation are people that are paying interest rates on mortgages, people that are paying market rents in cities, people that drive a lot and people that buy luxury items. i don't think these people deserve a rebate to offset inflation in the price of carbon, but i would support a targeted stimulus check directed at them in order to heat the economy back up, to counterbalance the foolish rate hike. while a better statistical analysis would be helpful, the income range best targeted here is actually in the higher than 50K range, probably about 50-150K, and these are people that don't get gst rebates.
the best way to do this is via a one time increase in the carbon rebate, whereas a stimulus check directed strictly at poor people via the gst rebate really isn't going to help anything, from any of these perspectives. i mean, i'll take it. but, it's not sound policy.
23:04
get off your fucking cross, mr. singh.
or, don't.
maybe we'll miss you, if you choose not to. maybe we won't.
23:34
sept 9, 2022
do not be confused by the fact that i'm still posting here. this is very temporary, and the situation is on the brink of turning over entirely. i now have the june-aug archives taken down to rebuild them, and ultimately to build the linuxbook update post, which is what is required to actually get the linuxbook working. i'm merely continuing to type posts here as i set up the september archive - this will vanish within hours.
i'm left with the need to devise a way to post information in real-time, if it's decided that this is still worthwhile.
i've repeatedly stated that i don't like the idea of charging people to read a blog as the internet is supposed to be built on the premise of the free flow of information. as both a consumer and a creator, i would very quickly lose interest in the internet if it were to be reduced to a virtual marketplace, which is what all of the big companies are trying to do to it. i've pointed out that windows 11 is a lot like this chromebook, and i guess it's ultimately all built on the iphone format. it's kind of funny that apple gets the reputation for being the more progressive entity, when they're responsible for ruining the entire concept of an operating system, at this point.
i'm lucky - i'm disabled. i've won a fair number of lawsuits recently, as well. i'm certainly far from wealthy, but i've found ways to get a few extra dollars on a regular basis, and i have very few needs that are not being met. while i don't like the idea of charging to read a blog, and i do have a stable source of income that means i don't need to resort to that in order to survive, i do have a donate button up on the side. the actual reality is that nobody's ever used it.
the nature of the readership of this blog has never been clear to me. i am certainly getting a fair amount of hits here, and from a large part of the world, but nobody ever contacts me anymore and i'm left wondering if i'm talking to people or robots. that is, i don't know how much of the traffic is real and how much is ad servers. worse, i don't know how much of it is people coming here specifically to get offended, who can promptly go fuck off.
there is without question some subset of state actors, intelligence agencies and law enforcement that is reading the site and i'd suspect they have better reader statistics than i do. it's an open question to me as to whether they come here because they have better and more useful metrics and realize i'm more important than i think i am or because they're too incompetent to look at those metrics to realize that nobody else reads the site except the intelligence agencies, themselves, that are harassing me.
using the paypal button on the side would consequently help me understand the number of actual people that are actively reading the site. i know that readership is non-zero; donations are zero. sales at bandcamp have also flatlined in recent years.
it's easy enough to tell me that nobody's going to pay for something they get for free, and while that may be true, i don't think that's a good reason to put up a paywall, given that i want the internet to be free. as stated, i'm lucky enough to have a stable source of income that pay bills and rent. i'm not starving and i'm not homeless, even if i'm poor, and prefer to live the lifestyle of a poor person. it keeps me in shape. it keeps life real. yet, i live in ubiquitous capitalism, as well, and i need to have a way to get paid for what is a substantive amount of labour, should the market (which i despise) decide it is worth compensating me for it. i'm trying to balance survival with resistance to capitalism from such an extreme perspective that i actually oppose the entire premise of market exchange, and i'm going to be forced into some level of hypocrisy by necessity, but i'm legitimately doing the best to balance these concerns that i can. i want this to be available for free, but i want to make sure you have the ability to send me generous gifts, as you see fit to, as well. this is acceptable to me, in the sense that it aligns with my own politics, and that's what's important to me; you can critique it as you deem worthy to, that's ok.
while the archives will always be free, the fact that i have to fight with the state to organize the site means that updates from this point on are not going to be in real-time. they can't be; i just can't guarantee data integrity. i've recently been posting off-site temporary html files as monthly archives that you have to download and launch. that is going to come up for may, april and every other month going back to 2013, but it is not going to be what the september archive looks like. the september archive will be uploaded in pdf, doc and html or mhtml format. i may also upload it in some other formats that i know a little less about right now like epub, which i believe is not very different than html5. i'll figure that out soon. some version of this will be free and some will be downloadable for a fee at an ebook purchasing site. given how small ebooks are, i might just set up my own store at the inri records site and sent it all out in a package. however i do it, these compilations are going to be in the form of one month at a time, and only available at the end of the month.
a lot of what i do is analysis of current events. do you want to wait until the end of october, or mid-november even, to read my analysis of events that occurred in october? that's the format that is developing, given that i can't even trust the ability to post daily digests here, or at least not for now.
so, would you pay a nominal fee for a subscription service that gives you access to real-time posts over email, given that you know the archive is coming up on the site, eventually, for free? you'd have to give me your email address. mine is at the contact link at the side. let me know.
if you don't think you would, you will have to get used to an end-of-the-month posting schedule in the form of a short novel every month, as i don't know how else to evade state censorship, for now.
note that the integrity of this post itself is impossible to maintain and i will likely need to edit it to undo the censors. in fact, i already have.
1:15
if you have interest in a real-time subscription service, send me an email and/or donate how much you would pay for it using the paypal donate button. you don't have to use your real email address. i'm not interested in collecting data about you and will be doing this without the utility of some centralized server somewhere; it will be a simple bcc list that actually won't utilize the blogger interface but will rather send the file directly in email. it is somewhat like substack, but without the centralization and connectivity of substack (and without the bourgeois layer of substack. i can do this myself.). i have a dozen addresses forwarding to my primary address and it isn't even obvious to me which one is my real address anymore; if you don't have spam or public-facing addresses, too, you really should. this will transfer over one way or another in october or november, either to a hybrid real-time subscription service with eventual monthly archives posted for free with optional paid downloads in different formats or to a purely monthly update schedule strictly for free, depending on interest, until i try again after the government in canada has changed hands. i don't know how to ensure the integrity of the data by merely posting it here, given the obviousness of inescapable continued state censorship. i'm trying to frustrate something, and i don't know if what i'm trying to frustrate is an algorithm or a person, or even a collection of people.
for now, i'm very carefully sorting through the september posts for signs of tampering and as a result am a few days behind schedule. while i don't want to leave data on the blog for free-for-all editing by the state, i feel comfortable leaving a temporary printout to pdf offsite, instead:
a direct link has been posted to the side.
as of right now, that file contains a pdf printout of the html version of the combined digests that were previously posted here and then taken down. links should be active if they link to the internet. they will not be active if they link to local documents in my command and control centre because you don't have the local documents; they would be if you did (they work on one of my computers, so long as the relevant data sources are connected to it). this is temporary, so i don't care. the print-to-pdf process via edge in windows 10 builds a hardcoded link to a local file, but the link in the html document is relative to the directory structure. so, you get a link to nowhere because the file isn't in the directory that the link is written relative to. the html files are being built for the front-end to the series of period bluray discs, or digital isos, which are a series of combined html5 digital media presentations that will include all music, all video and all writing. due to the reliance on mathml, you will need firefox for this. sorry. i will update it over the upcoming days to include digests for subsequent days in september until i'm caught up. i'll be constantly overwriting that file.
the trick in posting that document is that the typesetting is intricate enough to frustrate any state censors, and the location offsite creates an extra layer of bureaucracy for them, in terms of what it is that they do and don't have access to. they can't just download that and edit it and reupload it, it's going to take some time to reverse-engineer it. it's hardly an insurmountable problem, but it's enough to slow them down a little and make them question the use of their time and resources. it's a pain in the ass for them.
this is the kind of tactic that i'm shifting to in order to frustrate and potentially break the ai, if it is an ai, or to create extra expenditures and annoyances if i'm dealing with actual people. is monitoring this site and censoring the data on it for the benefit of maintaining the political image of the sitting prime minister worth google's time and resources? they are a private company. they may be compelled to submit to censorship requests by the canadian government, but the harder i make it, the more push back they'll create.
all evidence i've seen suggests to me that google - if not facebook and not microsoft - is actually on my side in the matter. i'm going to try to make it easier for them to stand up for me by ensuring that bothering me creates exorbitant expenses, is time consuming on their behalf and is annoying for them to chase me around, regarding.
8:23
30,000 jobs lost in the construction industry is an expected consequence of rate hikes, and it certainly does not suggest that the rate hikes are going to reduce housing costs.
11:18
the media is talking in surprised, alarmist tones about 4% interest rates.
this isn't about inflation, it's just an excuse.
i would expect this to go on for months and for rates to get close to 10%, or even above it.
12:03
the rate hikes might create a recession, but who's economy is that?
rentiers don't care about "the economy". they care about rent.
12:08
we're still waiting on august inflation numbers in north america, but inflation in august was higher in europe than it was in june - it was 12% in the netherlands. this is despite aggressive rate hikes.
the idea that you can decide that rate hikes are working, despite no theory that suggests they ought to, based on a single data point is the definition of bad analysis. you need three data points. at least.
july was a blip.
inflation will continue until we seriously transition from carbon.
12:15
the actual cause of the dip in inflation in july was the release of oil from the petroleum reserves, which was irresponsible and will not affect the economic realities underlying the problem. if the european numbers are any indication, it won't even flip the trend over.
it is very likely that august numbers will be higher than june numbers, despite the release of the reserves.
12:20
sept 10, 2022
summer is winding down. i got some exercise yesterday afternoon in what was a truly gorgeous day, so i'm going to leave things a little unorganized until i settle back in tonight or tomorrow. with the summer winding down, these bike rides will become less frequent.
i'm getting conflicting reports regarding what this gst rebate increase is and want to wait until i get an official announcement before i analyze it as effective or not. the government is presenting it as an inflation rebate, which i don't like; i'd rather they call it a carbon rebate increase, given that what we're calling inflation and reacting to incorrectly is in truth a structural adjustment in the cost of oil. but, the policy will likely be best analyzed as neither of these things, but rather as keynesian stimulus spending, and in the end i will probably accept it for that reason, while potentially criticizing where it's being targeted.
unfortunately, i'm not sure how it's being targeted and it doesn't seem like there's good information out there.
most sources suggest the gst rebate is being doubled for the next six months and that some people already have evidence of the deposit in progress. i have no such payment in progress. as most people don't get gst rebates, let me explain what that would mean, literally, if it is true. what happens is that the cra automatically calculates a gst amount if you file your taxes - if you don't file, you don't get the rebate - and then gives it to you in four equal instalments, separated by three months. you get one quarter of the amount in july, october, january and april, each. if this amount were to be doubled for the next six months, that would amount to double of the quarter payouts in october and january, which would be a 50% increase, over all. for me, that would amount to a little less than $200, total, as i get a little less than $100 every four months.
while i would not complain about an extra $200, and that would certainly exceed the amount i've paid in inflation on food over the last year by probably a factor of four, i have reservations about the effectiveness and fuctionality of such a public policy. i've been attempting to very clearly get across that inflation rebates and carbon tax rebates should be deeply linked, conceptually, as the inflation is going to be felt primarily by those that have steeper carbon footprints, due to the cost of oil being really the singular driver of this inflation. almost nobody that receives the gst rebate has costs that are being specifically targeted by this oil-based inflation, and few people that receive the gst rebate are likely to be driven by incentives to burn less carbon because they would already burn very little in the first place. this policy consequently doesn't really work as a carbon reduction incentive or as an inflation rebate. what i'm likely to do with that $100 is spend it on entertainment, which currently means applying it to the electronic purchases i've been building over the last few years. given that it is october, some may use it to stock up on winter goods, and if it works out that way, it's at least a helpful rebate for people that need it (in some years i might, but i don't this year). most will, in truth, spend it on beer and pot, i mean popcorn. so, then is it useful as stimulus? i would suspect that if we were to do a sector-by-sector analysis, the marijuana and alcohol industries would be of least concern in the upcoming recession. often, alcohol is one of the few growth industries in a recession; i would suspect that the alcohol industry's primary concern right now is whether or not the marijuana business eats substantively into sales in this recession. this is actually a serious inquiry, as this will be the first recession with legal marijuana.
so, if that were it - an extra $200 for gst rebate recipients - i would say "thank you" for the money but attack the policy as a wasteful expenditure that is better spent on home renovations intended to reduce energy costs. the savings from reduced energy waste in home heating over the winter in the face of serious inflation in the price of energy will be more useful than that $200, and those renovations are a structural benefit that will last years, rather than $200/head flushed down the drain into the great brahman of gdp, and trickled down into some investor's portfolio.
and, the bank of canada, which is wrong and which is pushing wrongheaded policies, is rightly going to have a few choice words about a policy intended to undo the effect of their rate hikes.
however, some sources are suggesting that people that don't get gst rebates are also getting deposits from the cra, and this is the part i want to understand before i make a decision. strangely, one source claimed that one person that does not receive gst rebates received a check for $234, which was less than the gst rebate. that doesn't make sense in either way, as nobody would get a $234 gst rebate. if such a policy were actually real, however, i would support it with far greater enthusiasm as stimulus, as what we need to help the economy is targeted stimulus directed at middle class earners, not at gst rebate recipients.
when you're poor, $200 in two $100 instalments is a pretty substantive rebate, and i certainly couldn't refuse it, i must instead indicate gratitude for it. but, it is a pithy payout driven by noblesse oblige, a perspective that mr. singh and mr. trudeau seem to have in common, and not a coherent economic policy i can support on actual merits. if that amount increases for middle wage earners, however, then we have a real keynesian stimulus plan, and that's actually exactly what the economy needs right now, whether the bank can pull it's head out of it's ass for long enough to realise it or not.
so, i want to call on the government to explain itself in regards to this, please.
2:01
if you happen to be a gst rebate recipient, you should be like the squirrel and spend the money on acorns, rather than on whiskey. that's not what the government is thinking, but take advantage of it.
2:22
sept 11, 2022
i was in the midst of my 50k ride through a school zone suburban area when some douchebag in a muscle car zoomed by me at 120 km/hr, no doubt ejaculating everywhere and nearly blinding himself in the process. the combustion engine in these devices is disgusting enough, you don't need to go slaughtering children while you're at it.
i did what i always do when losers like that buzz by me - i yelled at the worthless piece of shit to slow the fuck down. then, at that exact moment, not two but three undercover cops in unmarked parked cars ahead of me let their sirens off and chased the fucker down the street, pulling him over and blocking him from exiting the situation on three sides (the fourth being the curb). as i was riding by, i yelled "good! slow down!".
now, sure - it's great that they ticketed the idiot, and hopefully it's enough that he loses his license, too. sports cars should be entirely banned from existing in any manner at all, for the pollution they create if not for the inherent and irresolvable problems regarding safety issues. muscle cars are a lot like automatic rifles in terms of their utter lack of actual utility in society, except that i'd actually support banning the cars and am largely apathetic about the guns. if somebody wants me to vote for them, they should present a ban on these legacy automobiles, which should be taken off the road and impounded. there should also be an upper speed limit placed on new cars built, as well as a law ensuring that acceleration from 0-50 cannot exceed a reasonable limit. there's no good reason to drive a car like this at all, let alone speed with one through a school zone; the cars are entirely irredeemable and utterly disgusting, and the people that drive them are worse than the cars.
yet, why were there three undercover cops sitting on the sleepy suburban road i was riding through?
2:53
the state should offer owners of all muscle cars it seizes free penal implants as replacement compensation for their loss.
5:45
(millions of women are now scrambling to buy muscle cars as gifts for their husbands)
5:52
i'm in the middle of cleaning and need to let something dry for a few minutes, so i'm going to extrapolate a little on why i find the ndp's approach to the carbon/inflation situation - the ndp specifically - frustrating. we used to have a broader ideological spectrum in canada, but these are debates that have largely receded, as the three bourgeois parties converge on issues, economically.
the reality is that all three of the major parties are articulating a right-wing economic framework in supporting what were called "boutique tax credits" during the harper years to adjust to inflation, rather than proposing substantive, systemic reforms. to put the situation in perspective, i'm going to get a bigger increase in support from doug ford over the next six months. 60*6 = 360. i'll get a less than $200 from the 50% increase in the gst. ford's adjustment of 5% is also going to be roughly what inflation balances out to, over the year. while we can all be surprised by this, it's really only surprising relative to the free-market liberalism embraced by the conservatives during the harris years. conservatives in canada have generally supported social systems; in fact, conservatives in canada have generally supported publicly owned resources, and that's the actual reason we at one point had so many of them. it's important to apply these terms of liberal and conservative more literally in attempts to understand canadian history than you would in analyzing in american political history over the same period. in ontario, specifically, the conservative party was largely skeptical of free markets, from the 19th century right into the early 1990s, when it aligned with reaganomics in an attempt to profit from privatizing the canadian hydro-electric grid.
in a very real sense, ford is stepping away from the recent move towards market liberalism and re-aligning the conservatives with actual conservatism, something i think is being missed by many voices.
10:37
piere polievre is not a serious candidate for prime minister, but we haven't had a serious candidate since stephane dion stepped down.
he will do well in conservative strongholds, but recent immigrants won't vote for him because they don't like effeminate nerds. he doesn't have the raw masculinity that modern conservatism requires to build a winning coalition. he will not do well in quebec.
we are likely to have an election soon, and i would expect little change in the status quo as polievre simply doesn't change the electoral math.
in order to win, conservatives need to find a way to better appeal to immigrants in ontario, and polievre does not have that skill set.
18:09
pierre polievre is a faggot.
that's how he will be perceived by the demographics he needs to swing.
18:10
there is something unusual but correct about this.
19:24
sept 12, 2022
i went out for a bike ride on the weekend and came back to discover that the typing machine has clearly had some cops modifying it in an attempt to slave it to a network. this police harassment is clearly continuing, unfortunately.
i will have to format and reinstall, just to be safe. the typing machine near my bed is airgapped and does not connect to the internet. it is a waste of your time to try to slave it to a network, as it does not connect to the internet at all. fuck off.
4:48
what is my actual income, and my actual budget?
monthly income:
odsp: $1169, + $58 scheduled increase = $1227
ontario trillium: $67
=========================
1294
the last time i worked, i worked a part time call centre job for $13/hr. my rent was $800 at the time (for a large one bedroom apartment at 266 bronson. you can check the cost of that now. the units have been renovated substantively, but the rent is more than twice that), all inclusive, and i was paying about $100 for cable and cell service (a flip phone) combined. i have never paid for any sort of television. i considered that enough income to live happily - and i smoked, at the time. as now, i spent most of my time reading. writing and recording, back then. i just had to pay the rent and buy groceries, and i found the $400 i had for disposable income after rent and bills was more than sufficient.
today, groceries and rent are both more expensive, and i've had to adjust in terms of living arrangements, but what are my actual costs?
rent: $750 + hydro
internet: $40.
cell, tv: $0
hydro: $0 after oesp (in fact, i have a large balance in my favour at enwin)
so, my bills are now about $100 less than they were then, meaning i have about $100 more than i did when i was working 30 hours a week, and was a smoker.
that reminds me - another way to help people on odsp is to get them to stop fucking smoking. i strongly suspect that if you do the research, you'll find out that the actual primary cause of the poverty they're experiencing is frequently the cost of cigarettes, and that it is likely not uncommon for odsp recipients to spend more on cigarettes than on food.
but, that means i have $500 for disposable income now, when before i had $400, and i'm now not spending a cent of that on cigarettes. whereas i previously lived in a big one bedroom apartment in a prime area of downtown ottawa, i now live in a basement apartment split into three sections in a working class part of windsor, ontario. while the layout of where i am now is awkward, which makes the place seem more cramped than it should, the square footage is actually comparable; it's about 50 square feet smaller, where i am now, and the question of usable space is really negligible. it wasn't so bad when the border was open, but windsor is a lot less exciting than ottawa. so, what i've lost out on is location, although that didn't matter to me much before the border issues.
has the price of groceries gone up over the last 20 years? sure. at the time, i frequently relied on leftover food given to me by my father, or on trips to the local restaurants to get fed. this was actually a consequence of my father's more "normal" wasteful canadian lifestyle, and the fact that he knew i found it frustrating. he would always have some leftovers from some meal he bought somewhere, or some meal he made himself, that he'd have just thrown out, which i would yell at him for doing. so, he said "fine, i'll give you the food, if you'll stop nagging me". it's consequently hard for me to really present a proper baseline, because i was constantly being bombarded with food, and my appetite was frequently suppressed, anyways. i would often go a day or two without eating, wake up after an evening nap at 2:00 am, realize i'm hungry, go to the gas station to get junk food and then be given another pile of leftovers in the afternoon. like, he'd drop by explicitly for that reason (a good theory is he was trying to get out of the house to get away from my stepmother, who he actually really didn't get along well with very well, for a few minutes), often on minutes notice. that aside, my income is comparable, although i've had to adjust my living arrangements substantively, and i was working above the minimum wage, at the time. it is reasonable to present the money saved from not smoking as balancing out the money lost to inflation, at least.
but, that $1300/month is not my total income.
i also get $400/yr on gst rebates, which comes in $100 checks, quarterly. so, it's about $33/month. the money from gst is longstanding, but as of last year, i'm now also getting $400/yr from the carbon rebate. so, that's $66/month on top of the $1294, which comes to about $1360. this is after taxes, remember, because i don't pay taxes.
it follows that the amount i actually have to spend on groceries per month is 1360-790 = $560. this is not the $200 amount you see in the newspaper. do i need an extra $33/month for the next six months, which is what doubling the gst would actual do? i'll take it, but i don't need it, no. nor is it really going to make much of a difference to me.
the reason i find the ndp's position on this annoying is that it is the harperite "boutique tax credit" position, where the poor are getting a tax credit for being poor, that the left used to deride as a waste of time in favour of systemic solutions that address root causes. even five years ago, any ndp supporter in the country would have ridiculed the idea of sending out $200 checks to the lowest income earners as a solution to poverty; it's harperism, it's not serious left-wing policy. it is true that there are massive, substantive issues affecting poor people in the country, including heating costs and housing stability. $200/head isn't going to alleviate poverty in canada, but it could be much better spent if applied towards a systemic solution, than distributed as a tax cut, like conservatives insist on doing.
i do not think that poor people can spend the money better than government can; i think that collectivizing the state's resources is preferable to individualizing them, and the money could be far better spend on social services by government than by individuals, after being distributed as tax cuts.
9:43
this was predictable - i predicted it - and it demonstrates the bad logic in the bank's analysis.
in boosting rates, the bank is trying to reduce spending in the economy by giving people less money to spend by taking more away. then, the thinking goes, supply will recover as demand falters.
this makes no sense in context, at any point of the argument:
1) demand is not actually that high, but high oil prices and halted supply chains have gummed everything up.
2) supply has bottlenecks. supply can't just recover, it's being hampered by the bottlenecks. reducing demand consequently won't allow for supply to recover, even if the scheme somehow works, against all logic and evidence, in reducing demand.
3) the wealthy have access to credit, anyways. if you give them less money to spend by increasing interest rates on their mortgages, they won't spend less, they'll just borrow more to compensate for it.
so, you've got people - smart people, with good educations and good jobs, which is actually the point; they don't want to let their quality of life fall. - taking out loans at 20% interest so they can pay their mortgage at 4% (base. +.) interest and still have money to spend.
that doesn't make any sense to do. how do they think they're going to pay for that?
the correct answer is that they don't remotely think it through, which is why these policies always fail - they assume homo economicus, and it backfires every time. the reality is that we have better models of human behaviour and we should be using them, by now. it's long, long overdue that we throw away these theories of rational human behaviour and stop getting frustrated by them. they don't work because the underlying assumption of human nature that they are built on - that we are rational - is wrong. we know that, but we refuse to learn it.
i predicted the increase in credit card debt because i realized that wealthy people with access to credit will not carefully plan ahead like thrifty conservatives (does anybody even have a kitchen table anymore? even when i was a kid, the table in the kitchen was just full of dust and flyers. i ate on the couch, and usually by myself.), but will rather make impulsive decisions to maximize their short-term interests, even if it harms them in the long run.
governments can be expected to plan in the long run because it's their job, but that's just not how individual humans evolved to make decisions and it's consequently just not how individual humans act when faced with the need to solve problems.
so, now what?
well, the bank hiked rates to get people to spend less, whether it made any sense or not. instead, people - predictably - took out more private debt to maintain high levels of spending. now, spending is still high (meaning the bank didn't get what it wanted) and we have a massive increase in private debt, which is a horrible (and predictable) outcome that could lead to a massive recession.
the next thing that happens is that people start defaulting on things. some will declare bankruptcy. others will keep spending, while finding ways to juggle high private debt payments. after your credit card maxes out, you go to money mart to pay off your credit card, like a drug addict does - although what you're actually addicted to is gasoline and bad food. people will start selling things, like second cars, or stocks, to spur continued lifestyle spending. some may try to downgrade to less expensive houses to avoid losing disposable income, and find themselves struggling against low absolute supply of housing and without a way out when the bank comes to foreclose on their house.
the assumption that people will adjust reasonably by simply spending less money in the economy and planning accordingly for the future is the one thing that obviously won't happen.
if the bank keeps hiking rates at this speed, you're going to see mass havoc start to assert itself, as mounting high-interest private debt makes people desperate and plunges them into poverty. you can blame them for making bad choices, but the bank should have seen that coming, instead of speciously assuming they'd be rational. that's called due diligence.
rather, the bank has signalled it is going to double down and continue to aggressively hike rates; the expectation from this policy should be that it's going to economically ruin people, who are going to continue to make bad decisions to maintain their lifestyles and in the process lose everything. this is going to reach crisis proportions, and it could reach them very fast.
the governments at various levels should be preparing themselves for the need to deal with domestic crises, increases in violent crime (both property crimes and domestic crimes, as families begin to disintegrate, as the facade of wealth fades away), increased drug & alcohol abuse and an increase in general homelessness as a result of people being unable to pay rent or mortgage payments due to the seizure of their assets by private debt collectors. the stock market might crash, and that will be the signal that people are panicking.
meanwhile, spending will remain high, as it continues to be fuelled by mounting private debt collected by those that can handle it. it looks like we'll have to do the experiment, here, and learn the hard way, but this had better be the last fucking time we fuck this up.
reference:
"Statistics Canada says household debt ratio up in second quarter", ctv news, sept 12, 2022
10:41
the forecast high today in windsor is above 20 and there are no sub-20 degree days in the forecast. i haven't drawn attention to this yet because there is no sign of a cool down. we could meet the technical definition of a heat wave this upcoming weekend in windsor, with three days above 30 degrees.
while we had a number of 30+ degree days in windsot in both april and may, which is unusual, we did have a more seasonal snap in mid may. our last sub-20 degree was may 22nd.
i have made claims about the summer heat in windsor lasting until mid-november this year and the factors are in place for it - very late summer extreme heat driven mostly by sunlight (as opposed to humidity), excess latent heat in the ground and excess heat in the surrounding bodies of water. the forecast here is not just for batches of unseasonable warmth in late afternoon, or for wandering weather systems to bring humid air north, but for an unbroken stretch of mid-summer heat to last until the end of september, at the earliest. at this rate, we're going to require two or three cold snaps just to get back to room temperature from latent heat on a cloudy day, and there's no indication of any such thing happening, whatsoever. the only dips in temperature we've seen at all since september 1st have been due to cyclones in the pacific, otherwise we'd have an unbroken string of 25+ degree days all month.
not 20+.
25+.
so, at some point the summer will end - that's a pretty good prediction that is likely to pan out. as of right now, there's no indication of such a thing asserting itself, and it is rather the case that it's going to take a few tries for fall to even wash away the 25+ degree heat.
things could change quickly, granted. weather is dynamic. but, my understanding is that the heat this year is being driven by the pounding sun, and that it will become harder and harder to blow out as it lasts longer and longer
if the consistent 25+ degree weather lingers into mid or even late october, we could have 20+ degree days straight into december, and that would be alarming. that is still tentative, but plausible. i do feel comfortable suggesting that november in windsor will be dominated by days in the mid to high teens, at least, and that we might not get our first sub 10 degree days until mid december. then, it becomes difficult to understand how a real winter can happen, even if we get some cold air blowing in for a few hours at a time in january and february. the ground will simply be too warm.
not many factors carry over from one season to another, but one that does is a warm ground. if the ground stays hot late into the fall, and doesn't really cool down over the winter, it will lead to an early spring.
that said, i also need to point to something even more alarmist: windsor has been dominated by cloud this year. i've noticed it a lot as i'm biking because i frequently wish the sun would come out, and it might be a part of the reason that i'm fighting with the official temperature readings at the airport. the board in tecumseh said 36 on friday evening and 35 a little earlier in the day on saturday; the official temperature readings were much lower than that (although still in the very high 20s), and the difference might be the amount of sun, although i remain concerned about the petro-state shifting to denialism and think there are plenty of signals of it. it felt more like mid 30s, especially in the sun, which was bright this weekend - it was truly beautiful on friday, if a little cloudier on saturday. it has not been humid here this year. so, we've been dealing with nearly unbroken unseasonal heat in windsor since april despite the clouds. that is, the sun is shining through the clouds to warm the ground up, and the heat is then getting trapped in the atmosphere. if it's less cloudy next year, it's going to be that much hotter, and it may start to tip into future years by warming the ground up so much that it lingers most of the year.
i can't and won't predict the cloud cover next year, although i'll also point out that the cloud cover must be due to increasing evaporation (it has also been very dry here. that is, it's cloudy, but it doesn't rain), from increased sunlight to the west of here. i'm watching those dying american rivers float by overhead. i suppose the sun might come out again if the rivers dry up completely, but chances are that the clouds will be back again next year. we'll have to see.
12:03
cancer is, in theory, a curable disease, if you could rewrite the dna to behave. it's a computer science problem with a theoretical answer, that can then be implemented using crispr.
it sounds utopian, but i'm going to give biden a rare level of solidarity on this.
for once, he's right - fuck cancer.
let's do this.
14:41
i haven't seen a single commentator suggest that mike pence might run for president in 2024.
the idea of president mike pence scares the fuck out of me. democrats should be exceedingly concerned about him making public appearances, with the apparent intent to run.
15:05
sept 13, 2022
i just want to point out that while many of the pictures of amita kuttner on the internet appear relatively effeminate, recent pictures make it clear that amita is making a valiant and largely successful attempt to present as elon musk. while slips of the tongue ought to be approached with patience rather than condemnation - some level of adherence to empirical reality is necessarily balanced by deference to preferred pronouns and suggestions otherwise are not helpful in generating understanding and acceptance - the issue is past the point of ambiguity. amita appears pretty manly nowadays.
i would suspect that amita is the least offended of everybody.
given that there is no future in the ndp, which must be on the brink of finally merging with the liberals in these constant negotiations to prevent elections, i had high hopes for the green party to arise as a new left, but it has been destroyed by the pettiness of identity politics, and there seems to be no end. this is a broader death knell of the contemporary fake left. what is frustrating is that the greens were supposed to have the libertarian framework required to avoid it; instead, they've abandoned their party framework to adopt the zetgeist of contemporary fake leftism.
a green libertarian left remains the best way to revolutionize society at this time, and we will not get there with the bourgeois parties, which want to solve complex issues with piddling tax cuts. yet, the party is about to implode and maybe the best thing to do is start over, and let the fake left join the ndp-liberal merger in the process. there's no future in bourgeois environmentalism, so it's best to let them go.
3:05
the algorithm i need to use to get windows 10 reinstalled on this machine, for now, as i'm evaluating it, is as follows:
that broken grey average line should really be sloping downwards in mid september, as it falls exceedingly fast. sept 1 is supposed to be late summer and oct 1 is supposed to be early fall. so, it's a steep 5 degree fall. i don't like the way the data is presented in terms of averages denoted with straight lines without slopes. any way you look at it, that's a projected heat wave in southern ontario.
- i have to install windows 7 (pro) from physical disc in a typical format/reinstall
- i have to upgrade windows 10 from iso inside windows 7.
i should eventually be able to boot from a windows 10 disc once i've got it reduced in size, but i've been thinking it's easier to do it like this than play with a bootable usb. microsoft annoyingly made the iso size larger than 4.7 gb.
windows will make you activate windows 7 before you can upgrade to windows 10, unless you have a full windows 10 key. i have a full windows 8 key that i haven't tried yet but my windows 10 key is an oem key with the lenovo. so, i have to actually activate the windows 7 install first with a student key i got from carleton, then install windows 10 using the activated windows 10 key, then change the key afterwards. it's a little awkward, but it's of little concern to me so long as it works - i can type in a few commands, that's fine. for now, i'm still evaluating windows 10. hey, i don't think operating systems are things you buy brand new, i think you wait until they're stable and end of life. the only reasons i'm putting 10 on here in the first place - which i've avoided due to concerns about the store being too integrated, which i think now are a tad overblown. the fear was that windows was going to become the app store and you have to pay a monthly fee for word processing. that didn't happen, you can still install old software and run it locally. - are that i don't have a volume license key for 7 (meaning i can't reuse the two keys i have, the pro key from school and the home key from the broken laptop) and that it came with it, so why not?
i had previously activated the 7 key many times on several computers, including the new one, so i thought it wasn't activating because i'd worn it out. yes, microsoft will get suspicious if you try to activate too frequently on computers that are too different. so, i tried to activate by phone, and it didn't work either. was there a typo? is that 6 a G?
i tried with the home version and i got the same error when i tried to activate online but i was able to activate by phone. so, i tried to activate the pro key by phone and was told it wasn't valid. i know this key is valid, and it has activated many, many, many times.
the error i was getting suggested it couldn't find the website it was looking for. the iso i have is from 2009, and it wouldn't matter if i ran the updates as soon as i installed it, and let it activate as i was doing so, but what that means is i was trying to activate a pre sp1 windows 7 in 2022. i guess time snuck up on me a little.
why did it work last month, then? i reasoned that i must have reinstalled from the 2014 iso on the drive, which i have put aside for building a custom image (like i do for xp, which i can install on any machine without needing to activate). so, i reinstalled from iso, installed the network drivers, typed the key in, activated and it worked. the key must only work for windows 7 sp1, and i guess i just never realized it, because i never tried to activate before upgrading to sp1.
in fact, i might have found a way to get a license key for 7 on airgapped computers, which will be the case for the 64 bit recording machine, at the least. you just need to activate it by phone. i mean, i knew you could activate by phone, but i didn't realize you could reuse the activation key. i have the activation key for the home premium key put aside, now. i'm going to try to activate over phone for the pro key and, if it works, it will eliminate a major hassle in building a 7 image on an airgapped machine, as i won't need to connect or call in to activate.
i'm then going to rewind, put the 2009 version of windows 7 back on from physical disc and see if i can update to 10 using the 8 key. i won't need that 8 key for anything else.
this is annoying, but it is also helpful, as it will allow me to understand how to do this quickly if i need to do it again. that's what i've been doing since yesterday morning.
i need to take a closer look at my lab results from the end of august. they seemed to suggest my protein intake was too high and my iron was stable, but i didn't look at it closely. my psa was statistically 0. did i mention they didn't find any cancer when they took the testicles out? that's of some utility.
i though i got the motion record filed on sept 9, but it was dated to sept 2, so i also need to look through the rules carefully to make sure i understand the dates. if i understand correctly, i now need to wait for the justice to grant or deny leave, but i want to double check.
hopefully, i'll have the typing machine back up in a few hours, and be back to typing shortly after that. the main direction right now is building the linux book post, which explains how to convert an expired dell 3120 chromebook (4 gbs of ram, dual core processor - a nice little laptop) into a cheap, solid linuxbook, in my case as a gateway for the typing machine.
6:32
that worked. great.
windows 7 is still usable online, although i don't know for how much longer. you can't update it anymore. if you intend to maintain 7 machines for offline use, you should get this code now, so you don't have to rely on microsoft allowing you to activate them into the future.
i''m going to see if i can get offline keys for xp64 and vista while i'm at it, while i still can.
7:11
right now, i use the xp32 volume license on the 32-bit production machine and the 90s laptop, although there is also an old typing machine version on the windows 98 pc, which is back to running windows 98 (which doesn't need to be activated). i have dos 6.2 on floppies, but it's not installed anywhere. my first computer had windows 3.1, and my earliest recording was done on windows 95, but i don't have copies of those operating systems, and there wouldn't be any utility in installing them, anyways. 98 has utility for old drivers, but you don't need 95 and 98; 98 is the final version of 95, one is enough. i also have the xp vlk in use in a handful of virtual machines, and that's another reason to want to have a volume license key for windows 7, moving forwards - it would be good for virtual machines.
i downloaded the xp64 key from school for intended use with the production machine, but the 64-bit drivers for a lot of my equipment were slow to come into existence due to lazy developers and i never actually upgraded. it made more sense to stick with a 32-bit os than to buy new 64-bit devices. i have always intended to dual boot into 64-bit xp on the production machine when i needed to get around the ram limit, but i've never actually come up against the ram limit. i do believe there are now 64-bit drivers for the equipment in question, but i have the 64-bit machine for that, now. i have kept the 32-bit machine time-capsuled as it is specifically because it is 32-bit. i don't want to ever connect this computer to the internet again, so i would have activated the 64-bit os over phone. getting the code now is helpful.
the first laptop i had came with vista, so i have that key from there. this is the laptop i want to convert into an effects unit and has the screen that won't come on and that i remain convinced is an inverter problem. i've bought two bad inverters now, so i'm waiting on troubleshooting that locally. it's not a priority. it was running the 7 pro i downloaded from school, but i will use vista for this, eventually. having the code will prevent me from having to connect to activate, as well.
i got the code from the home 7 that came with the other laptop, and the last thing to deal with is 10, which i'm still seeing the value in updating on reinstall before i unplug it.
microsoft will no doubt eventually tell you that you can't even activate xp, so do this now if you want to keep it, for whatever reason.
7:30
so, i need to be granted leave first. then, i have to file the notice within 10 days, the transcripts and perfection within 30 days of the notice and the oral arguments 30 days after that. i will no doubt file everything within 10 days on being granted leave. but, i have to wait, now.
8:50
the motion record that i filed last week was fairly comprehensive.
i would consider it likely that the judge will immediately send the case back to poa court without requesting further arguments.
what i wanted to be sure of is that i need to wait, and that's correct.
it's likely that i'll hear a response by the end of the week or early next week.
8:55
we'll have to see how warm it actually gets, but this is quite the heat wave here for this time of year:
the reason that this is notable is the consistency of the heat this year. it's been hot every day for months, and that consistent heat is now stretching well beyond it's expected end.
the 21st is the day where night becomes longer than day, in theory. the beaming heat will be forced to let up, and there eventually becomes a point at this latitude where it just gets cold because it gets dark. unavoidably. but, here in the southernest part of ontario, it could take quite a while to cool down this year, and you are likely looking forward to a fall that starts rather than ends in november, and a winter that has trouble getting started at all.
if the 25+ degree weather lingers into the end of september, and we get another heat wave in early october, the substantive latent heat from months of beaming sun will necessarily need to take some time to dissipate and seasonal dips in the jet stream (also driven by the sun, remember) will require multiple attempts to "take". that's not a brilliant prediction, it's just basic physics.
9:30
this is a changing statistic to take note of.
what do you think happened after 2007 to make vehicular deaths more rare?
the theory is apparently less drinking and driving. makes some sense.
9:43
some context on the increase in deaths by guns in the above chart:
Suicides account for 54% of deaths related to firearms, while 43% were homicides.
9:47
it's not taking the vista key. it's probably because it's oem.
if i get that machine to work again, i may want to create a 7 image using the offline activation method i just stumbled on, anyways. the only point of using vista is that you have to activate the key and i only have so many keys.
that's not important right now.
let me try xp64.
11:21
i never did my diet update this month.
first, i want to repost this, from aug 31st, so i can remind myself:
ok.
so, i came in on aug 15th and i got distracted by the ultrasound. i was working on a update post to explain how to install arch linux to a chromebook that required re-building everything from june 24th one, some time before that (last edit dated to aug 6th), but got distracted by the need to correct a number of apparent unwanted edits, including those related to the celiac writeup and those related to the vavilov post. on aug 22nd/23rd, i wrote up most of my motion record, but needed to get to the court house to get a document before i could finish it. i couldn’t get out until late on the 23rd or the 24th and consequently didn’t get the document, but i was able to finally pick up the document on the 25th. i then slept all day on the 26th and got lost editing and ranting on the 27th and 28th (i also went for a bike ride on the 28th) before getting to the motion record early on the 29th. i wasn’t able to finish the motion record before i had to take a nap and then go out to get a blood test on the 29th, and wanted to get out early on the 30th to buy some fruit, but instead was stuck inside because of the rain.
so, i ultimately need to go back to the 24th and push forwards in order to finish the linux chromebook update. i also want to move forward from the end of the food blog, and i can pick up the celiac narrative from there. however, i have to finish the vavilov update first.
if i’m rebuilding this into pdf documents and i need to build the linux chromebook first, i need to reconstruct from june 1st, and build the chromebook post as i go.
yes, i’m recursing.
there’s no answer but to let it finish.
====
i went out late on the 31st to get my pills, then tried to serve the motion record on the 31st, the 1st and the 2nd as i was pulling down posts for august. i didn't get out for a late ride on the 2nd. i tried to move to a daily digest system on the 1st and 2nd but was not confident in the integrity of the posts and took it down. i did get out for a ride on the 3rd after struggling with the unwanted editor on the morning of the 3rd and decided it was a little too late in the day (as the sun is coming down earlier now) and i should try to get out earlier, instead. when i woke up on the 4th, after i came in, i realized the date in the bios in my production machine had changed. and struggled with that. i then finished getting the august archive down on the 5th, the july archive down on the 7th and the june archive down on the 8th before going out for rides on the 9th (after getting the affidavit signed) and the 10th. i spent the 11th cleaning and the 12th and 13th reinstalling, as i try to get back to reposting. i did get a draft for the first two days in september uploaded and now need to check if it's been edited.
---
this is the updated chart that i never posted:
| 2021 | 2022 | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| m | a | m | j | j | a | s | o | n | d | j | f | m | a | m | j | j | a | s | o | n | d | |
| cholesterol | 3.93 | - | - | - | 3.99 | 3.8 | 4.15 | 4.01/ 3.83 | 4.14/ 4.02 | 4.14/ 3.67 | 3.54/3.8 | 3.78/3.68 | 3.42 | 3.6 | 3.49 | 3.56 | ||||||
| triglycerides | .87 | - | - | - | .95 | .89 | 1.41 | 1.05/ 0.94 | 1.09/ 1.32 | 1.86/ 0.73 | 2.26/0.75 | 0.69/1.02 | 0.42 | 0.82 | .7 | .75 | ||||||
| hdl | 1.69 | - | - | - | 1.84 | 1.59 | 1.73 | 1.42/ 1.55 | 1.37/ 1.42 | 1.51/ 1.74 | 1.75/1.72 | 1.74/1.69 | 1.55 | 1.58 | 1.55 | 1.63 | ||||||
| ldl | 1.85 | - | - | - | 1.72 | 1.81 | 1.78 | 2.11/ 1.85 | 2.28/ 2.00 | 1.79/ 1.6 | <0.8/1.75 | 1.73/1.52 | 1.68 | 1.65 | 1.62 | 1.59 | ||||||
| non-hdl | 2.24 | - | - | - | 2.15 | 2.21 | 2.42 | 2.59/ 2.28 | 2.77/ 2.60 | 2.63/ 1.93 | 1.79/2.09 | 2.04/1.99 | 1.87 | 2.02 | 1.94 | 1.93 | ||||||
| wbc | 8.7/ 8.4 | 9.9/ 9.0 | - | - | ? | 7.0 | 7.6 | 6.9/ 6.9 | 7.8 | 11.3/ 8.2 | 6.7/6.4 | 7.4/7.1 | 5.3 | 6.4 | 9.5/7.0/ 6.7 | 6.1 | 5.3 | |||||
| rbc 4: yellow 4.2: normal | 3.97/ 4.25 | 4.11/ 4.38 | - | - | 4.17 | 4.12 | 4.33 | 4.47/ 4.2 | 4.28 | 4.55/ 4.19 | 4.3/4.22 | 4.42/4.26 | 4.4 | 4.13 | 4.26/ 4.31/4.24 | 4.02 | 4.26 | |||||
| hemoglobin 120: normal | 132/ 140 | 133/ 142 | - | - | 139 | 136 | 141 | 138/ 138 | 139 | 144/ 131 | 141/133 | 140/136 | 145 | 132 | 135/ 139/140 | 132 | 137 | |||||
| hematocrit normal: 0.36 | .382/ .404 | .394/ .424 | - | - | .405 | .398 | .418 | .417/ .402 | .405 | .431/ .393 | .409/.396 | .417/.404 | .412 | .392 | .407/.408 /.401 | .382 | .397 | |||||
| mcv normal: 100 | 96.1/ 95.1 | 95.8/ 97.0 | - | - | 97 | 96.8 | 96.6 | 93/ 95.7 | 94.6 | 94.7 /94 | 95/94 | 94/95 | 93.7 | 95 | 95.5/ 94.8/95 | 95 | 93 | |||||
| mch | 33.1/ 32.9 | 32.4/ 32.5 | - | - | 33.3 | 33.2 | 32.7 | 30.9/ 32.8 | 32.5 | 31.8/ 31.3 | 32.7/31.5 | 31.7/32 | 32.9 | 32.0 | 31.7/ 32.2/33 | 32.8 | 32.2 | |||||
| mchc | 345/ 346 | 338/ 335 | - | - | ? | 343 | 338 | 331/ 343 | 344 | 335/ 333 | 344/336 | 336/337 | 352 | 337 | 332/ 339/349 | 346 | 345 | |||||
| rdw | 13.3/ 13.5 | 13.0/ 13.1 | - | - | ? | 13 | 12.3 | 11.7/ 12.9 | 12.6 | 13.4/ 12.0 | 13.2/11.7 | 11.7/13 | 12.8 | 11.9 | 12.8/ 13.2/11.9 | 11.7 | 11.7 | |||||
| platelet | 199/ 187 | 171/ 171 | - | - | ? | 175 | 167 | 168/ 150 | 155 | 188/ 185 | 159/184 | 187/175 | 166 | 181 | 176/173/ 183 | 167 | 176 | |||||
| reticulocytes | - | -/42 | - | - | 53 | 56 | 46 | 35 | 33 | 33 | 39 | 41 | 43 | 49 | 58/55 | 47 | 47 | |||||
| vitamin d | 87 | - | - | - | 109 | 72 | 64 | 72/ 83 | 78 | 64/71 | 61/74 | 74/80 | 102 | 77 | 111 | 80 | 83.4 | |||||
| estradiol | 363/ 388 | - | - | - | - | 563 | 443 | 432 | 777 | 343 | 578 | 416 | 307 | 691 | 380 | 444 | 452 | |||||
| testosterone | 0.9 | - | - | - | - | - | <0.4 | <0.4 | <0.4 | <0.4 | <0.4 | <0.4 | 1.4 | <.4 | <0.4 | <.4 | <.4 | |||||
| progesterone | 1.9 | - | - | - | - | - | <0.5 | 0.7 | 0.5 | 0.9 | <0.5 | 3.7 | 62.5 | 21 | 24.4 | 17.3 | 11.5 | |||||
| fsh | <0.2 | - | - | - | - | - | 0.2 | 0.1 | <0.1 | - | <0.1 | 0.1 | 0.5 | 0.2 | 0.2 | 0.1 | .1 | |||||
| lh | <0.2 | - | - | - | - | - | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | - | 0.1 | <0.1 | <0.2 | 0.1 | <0.2 | <0.1 | <.1 | |||||
| ferritin | 12/9 | 6/17 | 21 | - | 29 | 43 | 28 | 40 | 42 | 59 | 33 | 28 | 59 | 64 | 48/66 | 70 | 67 | |||||
| tibc | - | 69.5 | - | - | 65.7 | 62.9 | 64.7 | 58.9 | 58.2 | 63.2 | 57.4 | 58.7 | 57.9 | 53.2 | 63.9/63 | 56 | 55 | |||||
| iron | - | 9.6 | - | - | 22.7 | 37.3 | 19.3 | 28.3 | 37.3 | 32.5 | 13.1 | 14.8 | 28.2 | 17.2 | 45.5/35 | 25 | 20 | |||||
| iron sat | - | 0.14 | - | - | 0.35 | 0.59 | 0.3 | .48 | 0.64 | 0.51 | 0.23 | 0.25 | 0.49 | 0.32 | 0.71/0.56 | .45 | .36 | |||||
| transferrin | - | - | - | - | - | - | 2.59 | 2.29 | 2.38 | 2.49 | 2.31 | 2.39 | 2.42 | ? | 2.51 | 2.23 | 2.18 | |||||
| pth | - | - | - | 5.5 | - | 6.2 | 5.9 | 6.2 | 5.5 | 8.0 | 6.3 | 5.7 | 6.9 | 6.4 | 4.7 | 3.7 | 4.1 | |||||
| tsh | 0.92 | - | - | - | - | 0.94 | 1.22 | 1.67 | 1.48 | 1.07 | 1.39 | 0.97 | 1.26 | 0.92 | 1.05 | 0.44 | .67 | |||||
| calcitonin | - | - | - | <0.6 | - | - | - | - | 0.6 | - | 0.8 | - | 0.7 | 0.6 | 0.6 | <.6 | .6 | |||||
| alp | 61 | - | - | 63 | 59 | 50 | 60 | 59 /55 | 47 | 50 | 60 | 58 | 55 | 67 | 47 | 51 | 50 | |||||
this month, i had some glucose tests done and they're borderline.
urine:
ph: 5.0 <---low
protein: 0.3 <---hi
mucus: positive <----abnormal
glucose, blood, ketones, nitrites, leukocytes, rbc, wbc, skin cells, casts, crystals : negative <--normal
albumin: 104 mg/L <---very high
creatinine: 31.7 mmol.L <----very high
ratio: 3.3 <----as they are both very high, the ratio is only a little high
psa: 0.008
glucose fasting: 5.3 <---highest normal (same as last year)
hba1c fasting 5.1 <---highest normal (same as last year)
i would like those numbers to be less than 5.0, which is what i said last year.
these tests suggest my kidneys are aching. however, i had the test done on the afternoon of the 29th, after eating a cereal and fruit bowl 10 hours earlier, having had an iron pill about 13 hours earlier and having done the 50k ride about 20 hours earlier. the results, together, indicate physical exertion in every way. i didn't feel exhausted, but my blood was clearly exhausted. that said, i'm going to call him back to ask about the kidneys and ask about the specific hemoglobin mutation test i had misinterpreted, previously.
i took a little less iron over august for the reason that i ate a little less, in total. it's still heading in the right direction, despite that. it had flatlined in the high 60s, and i seem to have had a hemolysis event last month that collapsed it into the 40s before it recovered.
bone markers are great. hormones are good, although my progesterone has come down again. i wish i understood that. i changed pills and it spiked, then it came back down. it's weird. is it going to keep falling? i want to keep it over 20, at least, minimum.
that's the first time my hdl has been higher than my ldl in a while, and it's on a proper 10 hour fast (for the glucose), so that's a good sign.
it's easy to argue that i just worked too hard on the bike, but i'm going to follow up with it.
13:03
a stat holiday for the queen of england's funeral in canada on six days notice is a retarded proposal.
i would encourage canadian businesses to actively ignore any such absurd declaration as meaningless and stay open, if they choose to.
throw the notice in the sea.
15:22
i will receive $700 from this proposal, which is a nearly 7% increase in my total income, and literally offsets inflation and then some. i could hardly oppose that.
but, it does not make any economic sense as stimulus, which is what we need right now - it's an act of charity that will be irrelevant within a few months. this isn't government policy, it's philanthropy by a couple of chivalrous white knights that are abusing the purpose of government.
the billions of dollars being sent to low income individuals here in the form of tax credits to spend in the economy, something conservative politicians frequently present as platform items if elected, is the opposite of what economists argue for in terms of effective stimulus and the billions being allocated for this purpose would have certainly been more efficiently managed and allocated by a centralized committee than by low income renters running amok in a free market.
in ontario, most of the people receiving this benefit will be covered by rent control laws. if they were not, creating a $500 check and sending it out to people would be an example of a policy that actually is inflationary, even if general spending is not. it's when you target spending like this that you tell rentiers that they can increase the rent. thankfully, the laws in most of canada will prevent that from happening, but a check like this should, in theory, just increase the rent.
that money would consequently be far more effectively spent on centralized planning for subsidized housing than on harperite boutique tax credits. that trudeau doesn't understand that isn't surprising, given that the liberals are now the stupid party. but, to see the ndp take credit for a neo-liberal housing policy is disheartening.
reference:
15:52
you could say that this policy is economically illiterate.
that would be a correct, if terse and facile, analysis.
16:00
if you don't like harper, you can always vote for harper.
16:15
i've made some bad decisions at night clubs and woken up in awkward places after unknown events occurred.
going for a run in a local park is not a bad decision.
reference:
"'the fault doesn't lie with us': women shouldn't bear burden of preventing attacks, says runner", cbc news, sept 12, 2022
21:57
closing schools on short notice while keeping businesses open is a policy that creates unnecessary hardship on working parents, and the death of the queen is not a good reason for this.
i would call on all provinces in canada to reconsider the decision to close schools on short notice. this is absurdity.
23:12
if support for the monarchy is rightfully at historic lows already, cancelling schools on short notice, taking away a day of people's income, etc should have the effect of acting as a tipping point, and maybe that's helpful.
if this is the kind of inconvenience that having a monarchy produces, let's do away with it at once. they're calling for a day of mourning over a stupid old bat from a different country that most people in canada have no ancestral connection to and will never go to dying at 96, one that outlived her welcome decades ago, and nobody ever cared about in the first place. a day of mourning for what, exactly? the immense expenditures she extracted from the working public to pay for a long life of empty luxury, for no discernible reason? let's have a day of rage for the anachronistic continued existence of useless aristocrats feeding at the public trough in the 21st century, instead. they should turn her into bacon and feed her to the homeless.
the feds will need to send out the inflation checks just to cover lost wages from a hastily declared holiday that nobody wants.
23:51
sept 14, 2022
mourning the queen?
how about a good morning in england, instead.
0:13
there is a future in england; there is a future for you. they would do well to grasp it.
goddamn the queen.
0:17
you know she's going to hell, right?
0:20
we've lost the plot on economic stimulus. when the government gives you money today, it's not to benefit the economy, but to reward you for being moral. we've collapsed into a form of economic calvinism. it's going to lead to catastrophe if it's not corrected. pointing that out won't prevent the catastrophe, which is in truth likely unavoidable.
while the economy spurns and sputters, governments will act as grade school teachers, handing out stickers to the good kids and sending the bad kids to sit in the hall. cities will burn, people will starve, and the state will content itself with checking to see who is naughty and who is nice.
the disturbing reality is that jagmeet singh and justin trudeau's position on inflation stimulus is the same as ron desantis', and they sound eerily similar when they talk.
if you needed that mirror.
4:39
i don't see any hypocrisy in taking the money and criticizing the policy. my poverty is largely by choice and independent of economic decisions made by the government.
in the long run, this $700 hinders more than helps, and i realize that.
4:44
it took a few tries to get the settings on the ssd drive correct (i had to boot using the vista disc, run diskpart and use the "clean" command), but i was able to get xp64 installed on the typing machine (a quadcore running at 3.2 ghz with 8 gb of ram), activate it by phone and get the activation code put away. i hope that works in the future, if i want to install it as a primary or secondary os on the aging p5b. it's likely the only usable way to upgrade the machine to get the most out of it.
in the process, i learned that i'm able to output at a higher resolution on this machine than windows 7 and 10 allow for, and i'll need to figure out how to change the resolution when i get back up in windows 10. the inability to increase the resolution is something i haven't likes about windows 10 as i've been doing this experiment, but i haven't been sure what the cause is. higher resolution options just don't appear in the drop down. it's probably the graphics card driver, so i will probably need to use a generic one, instead. a high resolution so i can fit more on the screen is important to me; flashy "hd" graphics are of no interest to me. so, downgrading the driver to get a higher resolution is not a trade-off but simply an upgrade in functionality for me.
the resolution i'd prefer is 1366x768, but the operating system doesn't present that as an option, even with updated drivers. xp64 let me use that resolution with generic windows drivers. so it's not the hardware - i can clearly get display at that resolution - it's a block in software, somewhere. i wonder if the newer operating system forces output to the quality level on the monitor, requiring some kind of forcing to get it out higher. if so, the answer may be to downgrade the output to vga and specifically tell the os to forget about "hd". i'm using a physical vga output, anyways.
fwiw, a 1920x1080 resolution would be too small for me. i want to have more room on the screen, but i want the characters to be large enough to read them. 1366x768 is the preferable middle point for somebody interested strictly in reading and that doesn't care at all about watching videos.
the only other thing i'm not liking about windows 10 as i do this experiment is that the search function in windows 10 is terrible. you can get around it by using commands in the search box, but i don't know why they eliminated the intuitive search gui in windows xp. windows 7 requires some effort to get a good search running, but you can do it; the functionality is just taken out of windows 10. finding some add-on for searching is going to be required. i simply can't accept the reduced default functionality for practical use, it's just not good enough.
i can guess that the logic is that naive users want a simpler gui and more advanced users know how to type in commands, but the search syntax is cumbersome and the point of windows is that it has intuitive guis. windows. guis. get it? that was revolutionary at one point, even if they stole the idea from ibm. if i wanted to write a script to run a search, i'd use unix, or just downgrade to dos; the point of windows is to not have to run commands. i'm a nerd, sure, but i still prefer mice to keyboards. that is likely a gen x thing. the boomers are typers and millennials were raised on touch screens, but us gen xers remain insistent on our mice, which will be pried from our cold, dead hands. i am currently typing on a chromebook with a touchpad that has a mouse connected via usb, instead. i don't even have a touchscreen in the house, except for a zoji smart phone that i haven't turned on in years because i want to compile my own version of android for it, first. i don't need it now and really prefer the cisco voip phone; i realize i will probably not have a choice, at some point, and will need to get used to it. it is a good phone, but i don't want stock spyware os on it.
the other hypothesis is that they might have split desktop search off into a separate program for development, marketing, spying or sales reasons; they might have intentionally left the integrated search lacking in functionality in order to force you to download a separate search tool as a program, instead. if that's the case, the motive would no doubt be surveillance for the purpose of generating data to sell to advertisers (read that user agreement carefully). i know that microsoft had a separate desktop search program at one point, but i've up this point avoided third party search programs because they're full of spyware, which is really the actual point of getting you to download something that every previous version of windows had as a core feature. some simple freeware search program with an intuitive gui surely exists, right? search should really be a core part of the operating system, but if it's easily resolved then that's fine.
the next thing i need to do is install the pre-sp1 version of windows 7 and see if i can upgrade directly using the 8 key.
6:03
i'm still thinking pre-airgap era on this.
it would be nice to find a system internals search gui, sure. however, air gapping the machine means it doesn't matter if the third party microsoft search program (whatever it's called. i need to look this up.) is designed to collect data or not.
7:11
what i'm looking for actually seems to have been discontinued. it was a part of the windows live platform. they seem to have broken it up into what is now bing (internet search) and microsoft search (which is a corporate level service designed to search computers on an intranet). so, microsoft has a tool that allows you to search windows computers from a remote location, but it's only available for corporate deployment behind a firewall. apparently.
the desktop search download i'm imagining was discontinued over 10 years ago.
the only option is third party. hrmm. maybe i'll stick with the awkward commands for now, then.
7:26
the comparable google desktop search was also discontinued ten years ago.
one wonders if some lawyers stepped in and said "this is crazy, shut it down".
it doesn't help me solve my problem.
7:28
what i'm looking for is more advanced search features in a simple gui, like "search by date" or "search by type". i don't want to need to type in a paragraph long command to search for a specific file type modified within a specific date range. microsoft has bafflingly removed the gui for that, and, for myself, that is a major disincentive in using newer versions of windows.
7:32
to be clear: the other option is linux.
there is not a third option.
but, i want to keep windows on the typing machine because i'm very comfortable in word 2003, and it creates less of a hassle for conversion.
7:41
ok.
supposedly, a gui pop ups when you type in "modified", preventing you from needing to type in the whole command. that wasn't what happened last time, but i'll try it again.
7:44
as there is no discernible economic theory that suggests that the price of imported commodities is affected by interest rate hikes, and european data showed an increase in inflation over the period in question, i actually expected inflation in august to be higher than it was in june, so this is slightly better than i expected.
this is more what i was expecting:
Core CPI, which strips out the more volatile categories like food and gasoline, measured 6.3% in August, up from 6.2% in July.
based on that metric, i was right: inflation was higher in august than july. however, i don't want to be disingenuous or manipulate damned lies into statistics to prove a point. the numbers are close enough that the right answer is that there was no measurable change in inflation this month, relative to any reasonable concept of error, rather than that it was up or down. adjustments might make the difference larger or might even change the ordering.
right now, i don't see any economic reason to expect that inflation will decrease in september, either. generally, the price of energy increases in the fall. to the extent that the situation in eastern europe is driving the situation, it's only getting to get worse, and the rate hikes will have no effect on it.
thankfully, north america imports almost no food from eastern europe. i do wonder if the cost of my serbian frozen strawberries might go up, but i can deal with that.
the headlines are claiming surprise, but the surprise is not rooted in any discernible theory except for asimovian psychohistory. even the bank itself has admitted that there is no logic in the rate hikes and it is really just trying to psych people out. i'm not surprised that that didn't work at all.
can we officially declare stagflation yet or do you want a few more months of declining gdp, job losses and stable to increasing inflation, first?
8:02
the rate hikes will be remembered as the mistake of the century.
the remaining question is how bad it gets before they figure it out.
8:06
“Headline inflation has peaked but.."
there is no discernible reason to think that, whatsoever. that is an utterly specious assumption.
8:12
this is an anecdote, but inflation in food in windsor has definitely increased in september, particularly for perishable items. i had to do some shopping to find a normal bread price (at the giant tiger, eventually) and, in the process, i was baffled by the price of eggs, which was, in some stores, twice what i would have paid last year. that is right: 100% inflation in the price of eggs since last year, in some stores. conversely, cheese, raspberries and red peppers were on sale in several stores.
the obvious deduction is that stores are trying to hike up prices on perishables, which is usually a sneaky tactic, as it allows them to price gouge for a few days and then put a sale sticker on normal prices for most of the item's shelf life. if you don't fall for the initial trick hike, you pay the same amount, after you wait a day or two for the price to return to normal, but the window in the pricing then shifts upwards - what was previously considered a normal price becomes thought of as a sale price, and you become conditioned to accepting a higher price, in the long run, but only if you let them condition you.
we need to continue to stand in solidarity with each other against capital on this and just simply refuse to pay inflated prices. you probably don't like bicycling 30 or 40 km a day to search for sale prices; i take it as an incentive to burn some calories, so i can tell you that you'll find the lower prices if you look, which indicates that the inflation is mostly price gouging. by refusing to pay inflated prices on perishable items, we can force grocers to return prices to normal and take the loss themselves, rather than passing it on to consumers. we just need to be strict about it. we just need to never give in.
those raspberries were on sale because they were put on the shelves at inflated prices that the market rejected as too high. all food rots, especially in the unseasonable heat. don't pay the inflated prices - make the grocers return the price to normal to clear the items. we will win, every time, if we stick together and refuse to give in.
8:29
the windows 8.1 key was not accepted by the windows 10 installer, which is curious to me. these are not oem keys, but they are possibly student keys, so they might only be activatable on install. that's what the empirical evidence suggests, anyways. the 10 installer doesn't seem to care how you activated, so i could probably install 8.1 first, activate it, and then install windows 10, but that hardly seems worthwhile (especially given that windows installers are image based nowadays anyways) unless i need to be using two 10 installs at the same time, which seems unlikely any time soon. i have never installed windows 8 and am not sure what i would do with an 8.1 key, otherwise. my understanding is that the major releases of windows at this point remain 3.1, 98, xp, 7 and 10, with 8 and 11 being designed for non-desktop systems. 8 was meant specifically for tablets and 8.1 was a kind of pre-10 move back to the desktop, the same way that vista is best seen today as pre-7, so you don't really gain anything with 8.1. the value of an 8.1 key is consequently likely just in getting 10 installed on something, and it should take it, if i can activate it first. for now, this process works just fine:
- install 7 from physical media. my 7 key doesn't work with this version, oddly, nor does the offline activation key work. it's written on the disc, though.
- upgrade to sp1, one way or another (i'm doing so by just reinstalling from the newer iso on my drive)
- activate online with the activation key, which did work.
- upgrade to 10
- temporarily allow the machine online to use windows update
- disable network access in the bios
- delete the windows 7 files on the drive when you're done
i realized the other day when observing evidence of tampering that there were some ownership issues regarding the services and i'll have to see if those resolve on reinstall or if they are perhaps a relic of the install process.
this is temporary. i will eventually have a permanent install media for windows 10, once i decide what i do and don't want to keep and i'll just be able to format and reinstall. i'm sure that will happen well before 2025. right now, all i'm installing is some word processing software, but the need to install windows three times is certainly a little annoying.
i was able to change the resolution to 1366x768 using the default windows vga drivers in windows 7, so if i cannot get that resolution in windows 10 it will be a driver glitch and i'll want to see if i can downgrade to vga.
11:28
i'm going to take the opportunity this afternoon to finish transferring various files that are currently stored on various media back to their proper place on the secondary hard drive in the typing machine. i haven't had a bootable windows typing machine since late 2020, when i took the compaq offline and moved to the chromebook for internet, under a realization that i was under some kind of cyberattack by somebody assuming i was using a slavable windows machine. they couldn't get the chromebook, and it wouldn't matter if they did because i just reset it whenever i went out. so, the chromebook has been ideal for internet for that reason. what i realized the other day is that the cops are still trying to slave the machine, which i have no intention of putting back online. this process should clear up a large amount of space on the production machine, as i've had all kinds of files in temporary storage on it.
i should hopefully get back to typing tonight, and the first thing i'll have to do is make sure that the previously uploaded document hasn't been tampered with, as i try to built the temporary september archive up to the point where i can type directly into it and replace it every few hours even, potentially.
when i want to post something in real time, i'll be posting it there, rather than here. the link is on the side.
11:36
i do realize that pdf is a file format that is native to unix-like operating systems and that editing the uploaded file is not all that hard, but it's about frustrating them. blogger doesn't have a change log, which is a major problem with it. google drive will allow me to track version edits, by design. i'm sure there's some way to break that on the back end, but i'm going to make them work for it.
likewise, saving files locally in word 2003 introduces a frustrating layer for anybody trying to edit the files, for example while i'm sleeping. it's not insurmountable. it's sure annoying, though, and the extra layers of complexity make slip-ups more likely.
11:45
this is going to be interesting, because it's going to split the liberals in half. while i don't think that polievre is a serious candidate, i do suspect that a fair number of prominent liberals - including but not limited to chrystia freeland and tiff macklem - may find themselves more in agreement with polievre than trudeau on monetary policy. we've seen this happen in the british system before, where the right-wing of the liberal party suddenly crosses the floor to join the conservatives, as a bloc.
i think polievre is a buffoon and that his economic ideas are retarded, so i will do what i can to criticize them as they come up, from as much of an academic left perspective as i can credibly represent.
reference:
"pierre poilievre says he’ll ‘fight Justin Trudeau’s inflation’ — but with one less quebec mp", toronto star, sept 3, 2022
12:03
given the message from the feds about rate hikes, if i saw the inflation numbers, i'd decide to divest, too.
we're now at the point where tough talk from the fed about rate hikes not only isn't going to stop inflation but is certainly going to hurt the markets.
you might want to sell now.
12:07
something i want to point out though is that the queen's use of head scarves has never really been explained. like, is this just a fashion item, or is there some significance to this?
she almost always has something on her head, if you look at pictures. it was the case for decades.
i'm curious because the fact is that the queen spent a lot of time with world leaders for a supposed powerless dignitary. paul mccartney once claimed she didn't have a lot to say, and i've always wondered if that was actually a facade. she clearly had something to say on those long horse rides with reagan, for example.
so, were those head scarves of some significance that isn't fully clear yet, in terms of policy in britain? if so, will the new king carry that on, or do away with it?
if there is any substantive policy implications of the queen dying, i suspect that the head scarves hold the key to understanding it.
whatever the truth, charles cannot hold to the pretence that he's just a vapid, silly rich lady with nothing to say, if he shows up to frequent long meetings with elected leaders. those will either need to stop, or some explanation for them will need to be forthcoming.
12:28
nobody has the slightest idea about what the queen thought about anything at all, or if she even thought about anything at all.
yet, it seems unlikely that she would just show up at the white house for weeks at a time to hang out. don't you think?
some process of history is necessary here, is it not?
12:56
"she made excellent scones."
she very well might have. yet, i somehow think there's more to it than that.
13:29
did they bring out the fog machine for her to make her feel at home, or what?
i doubt there's a brit in the world that goes to california for the fog.
she was there repeatedly, for weeks. why, exactly?
this is pretty horrific.
13:37
after covid, you'd think the focus of any reasonable government would be to ensure that there's greater oversight over private sector abuses in long term care facilities. instead, the government is trying to privatize the sector to create a profitable industry out of the need to warehouse old bodies.
the vast majority of these people are too frail to do anything at all and substantial numbers of them have been abandoned by their family. they've become slabs of meat to assign contracts to, to extract rent from.
it's disgusting.
this was predictable, because we set up a system that expected poorer young people to volunteer to care for their much wealthier elders, rather than design the system so they could pay for themselves. all that ended up doing in the end was leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. future systems should be designed to ensure that the elderly pay for their own care, rather than leave that care in the hands of the disinterested young.
reference:
"ontario seniors to pay $400/day to stay in hospital instead of moving to ltc", ctv news, sept 14, 2022
18:18
in ontario, the conservative party's singular purpose seems to be to privatize public industries.
every time they get elected, that's their actual goal, and the only thing they ever "accomplish". it's not hyperbole; it's s political party that exists for the sole purpose of converting public assets into private ones.
18:29
sept 15, 2022
this is what is called a distributed denial of service - or ddos - attack, and while it is certainly annoying, and there are legitimate grounds to question it's legality, it does not fit the definition of criminal harassment.
that can get you ten years.
being annoying is not illegal in canada and should not be illegal in any system calling itself a liberal democracy. there should be no legal punishment for being an annoyance, although concepts of free association certainly apply, and the annoyer may quickly find themselves socially ostracized should they continue to be annoying; if they do not find themselves ostracized, perhaps there is some value in their critique, and they are not merely being annoying, after all. legally speaking, that question can be of no consequence. in canada, you can not criminally charge somebody with annoying you, nor can you bring charges against somebody for being annoying in any other democratic country in the western hemisphere. those of us concerned with the sanctity of free expression must make it a priority to prevent the attempted criminalization of annoyance being perpetuated by the contemporary fake left. harassment is an attempt to instil fear through intimidation, and that is not what this is, at all. yet, this is more than a mere annoyance. i usually comment on these issues in order to identify some hard-headed, ideological idiot that doesn't understand what harassment is and is just a target of legitimate expression that they should listen to, but this is a situation where the individual is truly being attacked in a way that ought to be criminalized. it's one thing to yell something at an mp while they're walking by, which is just an exercise of the inalienable right to free speech, and it's another to organize a ddos attack on them, which is something far more sinister.
it would be up to the house of commons to define a category of repeated contact that is more than mere annoyance but less serious than harassment and allow the courts to interpret it, if it thinks it has a mandate to do so. i would probably oppose such a law on constitutional rights grounds, but they'd have to show it to me for me to know; right now, it doesn't exist. in context, the more appropriate existing law is mischief, and there is even a specific provision in the code that can be and has been used for ddos attacks:
Mischief
430 (1) Every one commits mischief who wilfully
(a) destroys or damages property;
(b) renders property dangerous, useless, inoperative or ineffective;
(c) obstructs, interrupts or interferes with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property; or
(d) obstructs, interrupts or interferes with any person in the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property.
Mischief in relation to computer data
(1.1) Everyone commits mischief who wilfully
(a) destroys or alters computer data;
(b) renders computer data meaningless, useless or ineffective;
(c) obstructs, interrupts or interferes with the lawful use of computer data; or
(d) obstructs, interrupts or interferes with a person in the lawful use of computer data or denies access to computer data to a person who is entitled to access to it.
while rayes is not a victim of harassment, he is arguably a victim of mischief and the polievre team could and perhaps should be rightfully charged with mischief under this section of the code.
is this what the new conservative party wants to be? it seems a little unconservative, but it's hardly a swing to the left. rather, this is an abrogation of the rule of law in favour of an embrace of fascism, and if i wanted that then i'd just vote for trudeau. at least the liberals have a halfways decent grasp on monetary theory.
reference:
"quebec mp who left conservatives says his office is being swamped by harassing callers", cbc news, sept 14, 2022
2:15
here's an interesting question, though - is pierre poutine using his old call centre buddies to create this army of brownshirts to launch this ddos, via robocalls?
i choose my words carefully.
4:21
perhaps the sleazebag is up to his cheesy old tricks, as he attempts to take control of the gravy train in ottawa.
4:24
it should set off alarm bells that there's a case of apparent robocalls within a week of pierre poutine taking control of the conservative party.
4:24
he got away with it the first time.
criminals are dumb. they repeat the same crimes over and over again.
maybe they can get him, this time.
4:26
lock the fucker up.
4:34
when i was a student in ottawa many years ago, i worked as a phone agent for holinshed research, which was one of the firms at the centre of the robocall scandal. their office was on elgin street, in one of the large towers. i kept a hold of that job for a while, under the hope that i might have a lead into the analysis end, to get some experience. over time, it became clear that the business was fairly shady and that they didn't let anybody into the operation for good reason.
when they started off, it was mostly to do overflow for ekos, but they slowly took on more and more political contracts, so that they were working almost entirely for the conservative party. the nature of these contracts was never made clear to the phone agents, who may have sounded like robots but were not robots; in hindsight, this operation went on for several years, and it is unlikely that much of it was legitimate. the robocall scandal was really just the tip of something much deeper.
for example, i remember calling into helena guergis' riding on behalf of ms. guergis, which i found strange, and calling the same houses over and over again. everybody in the room - including the floor managers - was frustrated by this, as residents of the riding were yelling at us and hanging up, and the only explanation of it was that there wasn't enough sample, due to poor planning by the brothers that ran the company. i knew who she was; almost none of the other employees did. in hindsight, it's clear that the purpose of the contract was to call conservative party members on behalf of ms. guergis with the intent of pissing them off and the contract was no doubt paid for directly by the conservative party.
we worked the day of the 2011 election and were told we were being contracted by the government to help people find their polling stations. in hindsight, it's clear that we were directing people to the wrong polling places. this was a live agent operation; we may have sounded like robots sometimes, but we were not robots. we had no idea what we were doing.
my speculation is consequently not entirely without expertise as i was one of the phone agents employed by the company that was contracted by the conservatives; while i am certainly being intentionally provocative, i also suspect i'm absolutely correct and that the vast majority of people calling mr. rayes are being paid to do it, if they haven't been replaced by an ai system by now. it's exactly the kind of contract given to holinshed in the 00s, and that i called out on for years.
6:31
i don't want to suggest that the dental plan being presented by the federal government is completely useless. there is a gap due to oversight, but this isn't the right way to fill it, and the liberals are right to approach it as a temporary tax cut rather than as a federal program.
the gap is mostly fast food workers, and other workers in jobs around minimum wage, that have young children. this is mostly going to be young single mothers. their kids should certainly get dental insurance - no argument. in ontario, poor people get free dental for kids and everybody has a dental plan at work, except fast food workers. that's an oversimplification that is basically true. the one hole that needs to be plugged is these young, single mothers working in low wage industries that probably have a lot of issues to deal with, broadly.
why don't fast food workers qualify as poor in ontario?
the answer is minimum wage hikes relative to old legislation, which was an oversight by the previous government. when the legislation was written, it actually would have covered young single mothers working as servers or cashiers or baristas, but then their wages went up and they're no longer covered. oops. the wynne government should have realized that and fixed it, but they missed it. the cut off is around $25,000/yr, net, for one child, which is about $12/hr after taxes. after many years of minimum wage increases in ontario, a full time minimum wage earner in ontario would make about $100 too much to qualify, in 2022, based on naive math. that's an oversight. you'd be better off cutting shifts to get under the limit, or having another kid to boost the limit.
the right thing to do is to adjust the existing provincial legislation for inflation, not create an unconstitutional federal dental plan. if the healthy smiles program no longer covers kids with parents who make minimum wage, it's no longer doing what it was written to do. the demand to create a dental plan at the federal level makes jagmeet singh look like an ignorant retard with no understanding of how the system works (which isn't true.), and the liberals are doing about the only thing they can do to drag him along.
the liberals will not be creating a federal dental insurance plan, and you should not rely on this temporary and unconstitutional tax cut being presented as policy for dental work for your kids. it is irresponsible to tell young, poor parents to rely on a transient policy of this nature. the next government will not follow through on this. you should take advantage of it while you can and be ready for a short period of application.
10:28
the data that the ndp and the pbo are throwing around is actually out of date and is misleading because it doesn't consider age as a factor. the main statistic seems to come from a 1996 census report.
data on dental insurance for children under 12 is going to be hard to find because you can't ask them directly. this is data collected by survey, and you can't survey kids on their parents' insurance. i found this chart from 2005, which is just for ontario, and starts at age 12, but it gets the point across:
 |
as would be expected, kids are the most insured group, while seniors are the least insured. however, the chart is out of date because the ford government introduced free coverage for seniors. seniors should now have 100% coverage. it is also before the 2016 combination of a number of programs into the healthy smiles program and may reflect decreased coverage due to cuts by the harris government, which were since reversed.
there is an update from 2013-2014 here that has similar numbers:
this chart states that over 90% of kids aged 12-17 saw a dentist in 2018, canada-wide, so coverage under 12 would have to be comparable or higher. no major legislative changes have been made to coverage for kids in ontario since.
the gap would be expected to be about 10-15% of the under-12 population, and it would be almost exclusively kids with working parents that work at or near the minimum wage.
i don't want to trivialize the announcement, i just want to put it in perspective. we don't have universal dental in canada, but coverage is broadly pretty high, and the public systems that do exist target the demographics that need it most. there is some percentage of adults that don't want to pay for dental and don't have it for that reason, while the remaining gap is an oversight that should be corrected by the proper provincial legislation.
full coverage is the desired outcome, and nothing less should be acceptable, but the way the ndp is trying to force the liberals to do it at the federal level is the wrong approach, constitutionally, and it will neither succeed nor persist. if you're serious about the issue, you'll realize that.
12:17
i'm trying to understand what's going on in ukraine and it's not entirely clear. western media is, of course, not reliable.
it seems like there was a numerically substantive sneak attack from the northwest on the suburbs around the kharkov region, and the russians have rationally pulled back somewhat, temporarily. the maps you're seeing on cnn seem to be rather optimistic, but there was certainly a very large offensive, and the russians definitely didn't see it coming. the only reasonable response to a massive sneak attack is to pull back to stronger fortifications and regroup to decide on a further course of action.
i would be hesitant to assign a concept of "momentum" in what is not reasonably labelled a "struggle". the russians have avoided simply levelling the place because they want to take it in tact. that doesn't suggest that there's any uncertainty as to the outcome of the conflict.
if i were a citizen in kiev, i would actually be concerned that the russians might take this kind of insolence as a breaking point in their patience, and that is indeed the beginning of what we're seeing, in response: air strikes. the russians have massive air superiority, but they haven't demonstrated it, they've restricted themselves to launching missiles from a distance. russian analysts have been surprised at the restraint shown by the russians up to this point, who are not known for proportionate applications of force, but rather have a reputation for just destroying everything. that restraint and patience may be at a breaking point.
that said, the russians clearly need a broader change in strategy. if they thought that they could slowly root out pockets of nazi resistance in a systematic, controlled manner, they clearly underestimated the tenacity of the nazis on the ground. this is clearly taking far longer than intended, so the russians need to make a choice as to whether they want to massively escalate or build fortifications and hold the line. remember: the point of this exercise is that the front is strategically indefensible, from the russian position. the result is that they have to escalate, that they have to lose their patience.
they should have bombed those bridges out, clearly.
the fact that the nazi resistance on the ground is so much stronger than anticipated brings up the other consideration that the russians need to evaluate: how many people in this large invasion force are ukrainians, and how many are soldiers from other countries, like canada? the size and sudden appearance of such a force is strongly suggestive that it is not actually ukrainian at all. while the russians will rightfully see this as an extreme existential threat, the existence of actual nato forces in eastern ukraine may be a part of the calculus of the pause. if nato decides to occupy kharkov by force whether the russians like it or not, russia needs to at the least stop to recalibrate.
if this force is really as big as is being suggested, i would strongly suspect it is largely composed of canadian forces, and i would condemn my government for such irresponsible behaviour, but it at the least explains what just happened. i could not fault the russians for responding with massive airstrikes, and would rather expect it. this is a dieppe in slow motion as a result of our own foolishness.
some time is going to be required to fully understand what just occurred, but this is my suspicion: a mostly canadian force just pushed towards kharkov in a sneak attack in a reckless act by my government that i fully condemn, and the russians had to pull back to regroup. if true, the russians are likely to react with extreme escalations and the outcome will be catastrophic, but justified by their need to defend themselves.
what do the people on the ground think? that is the important issue in terms of holding and integrating the space, and all evidence suggests the people in this part of the country are and have been pro-russian.
the western media is looking for signs of liberation, and all it can find is ghost towns and people cowering in basements. it posits that they're hiding from the vanquished russians. they may want to give that hypothesis a second thought; they may be hiding from what they think are nazi invaders, and they are half-right to see them that way.
whatever the nature of what just happened is, the russians clearly need to change tactics from a slow motion anti-terrorist mission to a serious invade and occupy operation. we'll see what they come up with.
13:18
the trostkyists tend to be right about this kind of shit.
14:00
sept 16, 2022
will anti-monarchist parents not be provided with an opt-out waiver?
i wouldn't go so far as to pull my kids out of class, but i'd certainly want the option for them to leave the room when the monarchy is being discussed. i wouldn't want them exposed to the kind of degenerate, feudalistic bullshit being discussed by the minister.
i would call on teachers to ensure that the discussion encompasses an analysis of the dead queen's substantive shortcomings as a human being, as well as the substantive financial cost imposed by the monarchy on british society. some discussion of the degenerate behaviour by members of the royal family, including but not limited to the degenerate behaviour of andrew, charles and diana, is also relevant.
reference:
"ontario education minister directs schools to celebrate, memorialize the queen", cbc news, sept 15, 2022
0:48
i was able to get windows 10 to behave on the display settings, but it's throwing weird stack errors that are preventing me from modifying specific settings, so i'm going to have to reinstall again. i'm wondering if the cops are actually intervening in the update process.
another bizarrely removed option that i can't tolerate is the inability to set all folder view settings to the same thing. i fucking hate tiling. i want a simple file list with specific details applied to all folders the same way, the way it was in windows 95, so i don't have to spend an hour scrolling through a large file list because windows wants to show me a fucking picture for every fucking file. i don't know who decided that was a good idea, but it's not - i want a file name to open a file so i know what it is, not a fucking picture to reflect upon it, or something. there is apparently a registry hack to fix this, but i haven't tried it yet because i'm going to reinstall. why would they take that out? that's absurd.
the integration of chrome into windows 10 on top of office 2003 is a major incentive to using it because it allows me to print to pdf directly with integrated links, which was a problem i was having with windows 7 when i was doing the journals. this is enough to want to hold to it, at least in a virtual machine. yet, the actual reason i installed windows 10 instead of windows 7 was for licensing issues that i've since resolved, and i'm left wondering if it's worth it.
i'm still filing data from the other computers back into the typing machine and i'm going to keep at that for the night, before i have to reinstall again and keep an eye on a few things while i'm at it. if i can figure out what's causing the stack errors, fine. if i can't, i'll have to go back to 7 as i can't be prevented from modifying basic settings by a stack overflow, that's like having your machine taken over by a virus, which might be actually be the reality of what's happening, although, if it is, what this virus is is law enforcement.
i do not have the training, the ability, the interest or the time to troubleshoot stack errors on a stock windows 10 install. if it's not an easy fix, i'll have to go back to 7 and experiment with 10 in a virtual machine, instead. if i do that, i'll be installing from a base 7 image (and i suppose i'll want to reburn the updated vanilla disc, with as many final updates as i can get) and i won't need to connect to windows update, at all.
on some level, i suppose i should have known better, given the extent of the surveillance that's happening. i guess i'm naive. but, if this is the result of the experiment, the necessary adjustments are clear.
i wish i understood why i'm of such interest to these shady actors. i consider myself a relatively boring artist-nerd that just wants to work on compiling existing art and creating new art, and i don't understand why i'm being forced to fight with stupid government agents trying to control me. what is the benefit of trying to control me? do you somehow think that's going to work? if it does, what do you gain from it? i don't get it. fuck off.
do you hate art? is it not valuable to you, in your empty existence of meaningless accumulation?
this could take a few more days, and i don't like it, but i haven't enjoyed any of the annoyances of the last several years, and i just have to find ways to block them, as best as i can. i don't have the slightest interest in fighting them, and i know that's what they want; i won't give it to them. on some abstract level, the difference between an anarchist and a marxist is the chauvinism of conflict. marxists want to take control of the class struggle and assert the dominance of one class over another, to the point of building a theory of history around it. anarchists think this is just a perpetuation of the status quo and just want out of the fucking rat race, and some place away from society to exist in, some place with like-minded people that they can get away from this capitalist fascism and design a democratic society with. we don't want to waste our short, meaningless lives on accumulation or on fighting over property.
if what i've learned is that the cops are slaving the machine via the update process, i'll have to avoid the update process and stick with 7 in a virtual machine, for now, instead. it should be the same process to install.
1:11
yes, i woke up a little before midnight. my sleeping schedule is sporadic and can change dramatically, week over week, but my circadian rhythm is such that i tend to get sleepy in the late afternoon and wake up in the late evening. 15:00-21:00, or even 14:00-20:00, is a relatively normal sleeping time for me.
i think i started sleeping in the afternoon to avoid eating with my family, in my late teens. i could effectively do away with all human contact for weeks at a time by sleeping in the afternoon and waking up at night.
the result is that i'm effectively nocturnal.
2:42
i was initially put off by the copy operations in windows 10, but this is something i can get used to, and it might actually be a little better. i still use xp, remember, so i'm used to having to create new folders for duplicate files if i just want to dump files somewhere and copy them later. the ability of windows 7 to create duplicate files in the same folder was very useful to me. it took a second to figure it out, but you can still do that on windows 10; the gui actually lets you see which files have the same date and size all at once, which might be useful. so, that's a change i can work with.
the gui isn't showing up on the search when the syntax is entered as directed, so if i can't find a front end, that might be decisive.
these are usability concerns, and they demonstrate the crux of the criticism i've had of windows updates for years - i've been pointing out for years that microsoft is obsessed with how windows looks rather than how it works and this is the reason i haven't had any interest in 8 or 10 up to this time. there's been no discernible increase in functionality in years.
to summarize, so far:
things i like that i actually care about:
- pdf integration
- it's faster on the same hardware than the previous version of windows, which is unusual
- these are both consequences of the overhaul of the explorer gui with a chromium gui, meaning windows is now in some ways a unix-like os like the rest of them, and is many ways similar to a chromebook.
things i don't like that i care deeply about:
- the search function has lost functionality [can i find a third party front end?]
- you can't turn off folder customization [there's a registry hack]
- disabling services must be done in the registry (in the long run, i'll just remove them from the install disc, so this is a short term annoyance)
- it seems to be strangely buggy doing basic tasks, which i haven't seen in a windows os since me, but am not clear about the cause of - i might be getting hacked by the state.
4:35
on reflection, it really doesn't make sense for me to think i can connect to windows update in the face of this kind of surveillance.
i'm making a definite decision to get an updated vanilla 7 iso created and play with 10 in the virtual machine for a while.
this is horribly frustrating, but it's how it is.
4:53
the price decrease seems to be pandemic related, as it preceded the rate hike. it doesn't make sense for the banks to hike rates when prices are rising, but it makes great sense for them to hike rates once prices have peaked, and a correction is imminent.
i think everybody can agree that the market was out of control and needed to come down, but that was happening without any help from the bank, as people settled into a new post-covid normal. what the banks did was anticipate when the peak had happened, and then took advantage of it by hiking rates on the way down. this can perhaps accelerate a cut, but it's not likely to actually cause it. the factors that determine what a person is willing to pay for a mortgage don't actually have anything to do with whether they can afford it or not.
however, nothing being done changes the basic supply problem that had prices high to begin with and any correction will be short-lived.
i'd expect prices to start going back up again within a few months, continued rate hikes or not.
reference:
"canadian households have lost billions in real estate cool-down", cbc news, sept 16, 2022
9:53
i would rather see them spend $250 million on targeted stimulus for inflation relief (primarily directed at middle rather than low income earners) and billions on home heating changeover instead, but ok.
reference:
"ottawa announces up to $250m to help canadians transition to greener home-heating options", global news, sept 15, 2022
10:03
i just remain baffled that people continue to think that the central bank exists for any other reason than to maximize profits for bankers. the level of naivete is just incredible.
there is a secondary reason, and it's to prevent manipulation by foreign governments or non-state actors. we have a central bank to stop criminals like george soros from committing massive acts of theft that defraud taxpayers of billions, as also happened in the panic of 1907 when jp morgan had to step in as a lender of last resort. the government decided it should be doing that rather than letting jp morgan do it, lest jp morgan not just become more powerful than the government but actual become the government itself. that's secondary, though - the main purpose of the central bank is to maximize banking revenue.
the idea that the bank exists to control inflation is just ridiculous, although it will certainly react to inflation to maximize profit for bankers, shareholders, bondholders and other members of the investment class. this is why you see rates come up after inflation, as it allows the investment class to not lose income relative to inflation (as their income is the interest paid on whatever loan). if rates didn't come up, the investment class would lose money due to inflation, and you don't think they're going to allow for that, do you?
bankers need a raise too, you know.
12:03
then, they tell you it's to "control inflation". they print it in the papers, even.
it's an absurd joke.
it's just a corollary of an economic system where investors legislate themselves above the rule of law - when inflation goes up, they increase the rent.
12:15
then, i wonder why the fuckers are spying on me, right?
12:17
everything you think you know is true is false.
12:19
the may archive is on the side.
18:42
sept 17, 2022
it turns out that there's a relatively easy way to get the folder view settings to behave. it's unnecessarily obtuse, given that you need to repeat the process for every drive, but it is a functional enough workaround, nonetheless.
- go to the root directory
- ctrl-a all of the folders
- right-click
- pick properties
- go to customize
- pick general and make sure that you have the check box selected to ensure that it applies to subfolders
this is annoying, but at least it works, and i'm sure i can fix it in the registry.
so, that's one less annoyance, but i still think the right approach for now is to break it in a virtual machine before i install it. if they're going to make these kinds of things difficult, i'm going to have to script fixes for them.
1:43
what am i doing?
i wanted to go back to may to rebuild the linuxbook post, but it's throwing me back into recursion. i've made several posts to this space, now, explaining that i must get out of recursion. this has to halt.
if i'm going back to rebuild, i need to start at an earlier point and move forward linearly with the intent of it being final, or i'm just going to keep going around in circles, as i waste more valuable time. that means i need confidence in data integrity, which is the most difficult point for me, right now. the music sounds wrong. the writing is edited. who is the retard doing this, and why? how do i convince them to go burn themselves alive somewhere and leave me the fuck alone?
i want pictures to know they're dead, or it didn't happen.
if i go back to may and rebuild, i'll then have to go back to december and then back to last summer and etc until i'm back in 2013. this is the algorithm i'm presenting to myself, and while it does end in theory, it's proven impossible to actually carry through with, because i can't keep up with linear time. maybe it made some sense five years ago, but it doesn't make sense, now, five years later.
i need to devise a faster plan that allows me to get back to actual recording that cuts a lot of the steps out. it's been years, now and i can't out of this cycle of fixing and redesigning things in order to actually compose. i've certainly improved my studio, but i haven't actually used it
i'm not a spontaneous person, and i don't value spontaneity. like, at all. i think improv sucks, broadly. there's a few counter-examples, but i'm not the kind of musician just wants to sit down in front of some gear and fuck around, nor do i listen to much music that's created that way. i want to compose in a scorewriter and then go about creating very structured, designed pieces from those pre-written parts. what i've been working on since 2013 is finishing a large pile of parts i wrote in this manner from 1996-2013. i stopped in early 2003, and have slowly gotten through most of the rest of 2003, since.
i'm neuroticizing too much on the structure; i'm letting myself get lost in the need for a perfectly logical iteration through the remaining material, and i'm simply putting too much focus on the perfectionism of it, at the expense of it not completing at all.
that doesn't mean i should or want to embrace spontaneity. spontaneity is just another term for not thinking before you act, and that doesn't create substantive art, it creates emotional trash that is worthless in a few weeks. fuck spontaneity. but, i need to reprioritize, so that i'm actually getting things done now, rather than creating the perfect conditions to get everything done, eventually. from the individual's perspective, time is finite. i'm going to run out of it; that's not if, it's when. if this perfect algorithm takes another ten years to complete, the design might be perfect, but the results might never exist.
my last serious recording phase ended at the end of 2017. i've stated repeatedly that i haven't been wasting my time, since - i have thousands of pages of writing, i have some new equipment, i have a revamped framework and i'm raring and ready to go. the groundwork i have laid over the last few years will bear fruit in the form of substantive output in the terms i want it in, but i have to actually make the art. that is, of course, the point.
so, what am i doing?
well, when did i stop? the answer is that i stopped at the start of 2018, and i got back to it when i put the diet down. so, that means that if i want to do this once - rather than recurse - i will need to go back to the start of 2021 to rebuild. 2013-2021 is now a part of the journaling process and will need to be updated relevant to that context.
that said, as i'm moving to offline editing and storage, it makes sense to take it all down now and put it back up, after.
i spent a good part of 2018 building this blog up by copying data into it from other sources. unfortunately, i'm going to be spending the next several weeks taking information down from here and storing it offline, for the purpose of editing and compiling it.
i don't know how bad it is, but there's no value in leaving it up here, at this time.
3:58
so, for my own records.
1) i need to take everything down. everything. it will all be retained in temporary archives hosted at google drive, with links at the end of the month.
2) those files will be slowly edited to remove corruption and reposted in a series of linear, readable digests, probably not directly here, but somewhere for free and somewhere with a price. i like the tree format here, and i like the search function, but i fully understand that the data is being edited by google on the direction of the canadian government, and perhaps also in collusion with some other collection of governments or authoritarian religious bodies. i can only guess based on what i'm seeing. there will be two processes at work with this, one attached to a journaling process (1989-2021) and one attached to getting back to functionally recording (2003--->).
3) starting in october or september, depending on how i'm able to get things in order, mew journals will appear at drive, strictly in linear formats - pdf, doc, (m)html and some other ebook formats, maybe. i don't have an ebook device and don't see the utility of one but i want to maximize file conversion appropriateness. it's a question of how difficult it is.
this is a process that was ongoing, anyways, even if it's not obvious.
what i'm doing is removing the facebook-style backwards posting format, as i'm not running an archive for a newsfeed (and that is what that format is intended for).
step one is getting everything down from all of the blogs, in preparation for reposting it all somewhere else. i will need to consolidate lots of data as i do this, and the vigorous diff checking involved might very well pick up some corruption.
i will be multitasking by redesigning the windows 7 machine while i'm at it.
i don't know how long this will take, but i seem to be able to get through one month per day, roughly.
9:16
i don't know how much of my old writing i'll be able to locate, or what i would think of the debates i had with people at alt.music.nin in 1997. i suspect it's out there somewhere.
probably the earliest writings i have archived here are from facebook posts after about 2008. i was using facebook from about 2008-2014. i posted a large amount of content on a large number of news boards from about 2006-2010ish, when i set up the precursor to this blog as a facebook site. there is somewhat of a gap in posting from about 2002-2006, when i disengaged from debates, which is sort of what i'm in now, too. writing in that period would be focused on my carleton web page, and was not directed at current events. i was active in the email music list circuit from about 1997-2002.
- from 1997-2002, i need to find posts made to usenet and to email lists, first at majordomo and then at sites maintained by yahoo and google. i used to have detailed email archives, but they disappeared when i got my p3bf back from storage in 2013, something i find very curious. i have almost none of this. if you have email archives from one of the lists inri was on in that period, please contact me and send them to me. i will make an attempt to hide the identity of others; i only care about archiving my own writing.
- from 2002-2006, there is mostly a lull, although i did a lot of writing at my carleton web site. there would have been almost nothing at all from early 2003 to late 2004, as i didn't even have stable internet access.
- from 2006-2010ish, i did a lot of commenting on news articles at various news sites. my posts were frequently massively upvoted, and often contradicted the intended messaging (by the then harper government), so the conservative broadcasting corporation (the cbc) started censoring me. nowadays, those comment sections are run by political parties and controlled by bots. it's not just locked down, it's completely controlled to manipulate popular opinion; it's a waste of time. up until roughly 2010, though, one could go to the cbc front page and post all kinds of communist propaganda directly to it. i'm only being slightly sarcastic. it was great. you could even have lengthy debates with government psych ops, and frustrate the fuck out of them. it helped me understand the state's intent, at the least. i have a large amount of this archived, although the cbc has repeatedly purged this data in intentional attempts to erase it, and what i don't have is likely gone forever.
- it was due to censorship at the cbc (as well as realizing that these debates were worth keeping and not safe at the cbc) that i started posting to facebook, instead. posts to facebook ran about 2008-2014, but picked up after about 2010. after 2014, i could no longer tolerate the user interface at facebook and moved to google+ and youtube instead.
- i started posting to youtube heavily in 2014 and, after frequently getting massively upvoted yet again, found myself interacting with and getting into lengthy debates with another group of psych ops, this time mostly american psych ops. there are detailed, lengthy debates on youtube from about 2014-2016, when i realized they'd shadow banned me for undoing the programming. i started using google+ as a blog in 2015 in addition to youtube comments (google+ had a feed for youtube comments, which i exploited) and stopped in 2016 when i started to suspect manipulation. youtube has been clear that they intended their comment system to be a feedback mechanism for uploaders, and not a forum for debate. i'm a revolutionary anarchist agitator - i don't have problems co-opting capitalist systems and using them to spread leftist agitprop. they shut me down, though. foiled again.
- i moved to the blogger platform at the start of 2017, and began a process of consolidating everything to it. the logic was that they wouldn't shadow ban the blog. i've been posting here now, exclusively, for the last five and a half years. this has at least centralized the process, but now they're actually rewriting my posts on me rather than censoring or shadow-banning me, and that's kind of game over for the hosting mechanism. i also really need to get beyond the feed interface.
i never intended to have thousands of pages worth of writing in a newsfeed format and, if i had known i was going to, i would not have allowed such a large archive to build up in this unworkable format.
blogger is just the latest in the list of platforms i'm feeling the need to get off, as the internet evolves, and i evolve with it. the archive will continue to follow me, and will continue to expand as it does so; the last change in hosting massively centralized years of writing into a searchable database, and the next change will present it all in a much more readable, archivable format. my facebook page is on the brink of final death, but i do expect to keep these blogs up indefinitely to allow for searches to be conducted across the entire archive. it's just going to have to come up in daily digests, instead. the lesson i'm learning is that i should have moved to a primarily offline storage solution years ago.
editing is a normal process in writing, so i was probably going to rephrase a large amount of this as i store it, anyways. now, i have to; that's the real difference.
10:21
it's up to the future to measure the value of these writings, but the nature of writing has always changed. what i'm doing is converting a facebook feed into a book, and it's yet to be seen how valid such an idea is. it may be visionary, in actuality. the reality is that this is how people read, nowadays. it's not a really big change, in truth.
the more substantive difference is my reversal of the burden of proof on sourcing. sourcing used to be hard, because libraries were physical things that you had to go to. today, sourcing is easy because everything is connected to a search engine. in my view, that shifts the burden of proof to the reader, which is where it truly always was in the first place, if not explicitly. i think it's your job to verify what you read, not my job to prove it to you. if i want to make specific arguments that rely on data, i usually post a link to the data, but i think the idea of sourcing opinions is obsolete.
you can agree with me by following my example, or reject it by holding to convention, but i don't care much for tradition and won't concern myself much with the viewpoints of others. i think the future of writing is to de-emphasize explicit sourcing of the opinions of others in favour of an emphasis on original views, even if those views aren't strictly unique. it's really up to you to decide if i'm correct or not, but it won't have any influence on me, regardless.
10:43
i make this shit, but i don't eat it, and it's not my place to post self-reviews of the cook. that's up to the universe to figure out, not me.
10:44
this may seem like an impossible thing to read, and it sort of is, sure. i decided quite some time ago that i would be splitting the archives up into topical posting formats. the fact that i have all of these different blogs is jut a start to this.
i'm not going to create a karen blog, and the pandemic posts will be presented strictly in the form of a linear narrative via pdf, but there are many, many more substories coming, some of which will generate new blogs, and that will be easier to digest and more self-contained as readable entities.
for example, i'm considering a strictly historical blog, but i'm weighing it against the need for this blog to be academically as wide as possible in scope.
11:08
yeah, i'm pulling down the april posts, and what i should do for now is just go back to a basic windows 7 on that machine with 10 in the vm and wait until i get to april in the rebuild (starting in early 2021) before i build the final windows 7 images.
for now, i just need a basic windows 7 image, and i think i'm comfortable doing that, i f i can find the right tool. i think i can use actual microsoft software to do this with windows 10, although i've never done that before.
11:29
ontario needs to prepare for a large population of unwanted, homeless seniors as a consequence of ford's policy to evict the elderly from publicly funded hospitals to private facilities in an apparent attempt to create a for-profit industry out of exploiting the substantive wealth of the oldest generation when they are at their most vulnerable position.
the fact is that nobody is going to pay the private costs for a large percentage of these people.
they're going to end up on the street.
12:12
the reason they're in the hospital is that somebody dropped them off there because nobody wanted to pay for them to go to a for-profit facility, or because nobody in their family could pay for them.
shipping them off to a for-profit facility is just shipping them on to the streets.
12:15
if these people had families that were able or interested in taking care of them, they wouldn't be in the hospital.
12:17
there's this persistent concept in conservative political ideology that governments should do less things and families should do more things, and it has trouble grasping the fact that the family is an outdated concept that is tied to the historical economic system called feudalism and largely ceased to exist with the abolition of that economic system. people, today, in a modern economy, expect the state to do things for that very reason, that families are no longer seen as important by a vast majority of the members of society, who have replaced the organization of the family, as it existed in feudal times, with the organization of the society, as it exists in a socialized economy. in a modern economy, there is no such thing as the family; there is only the society.
people aren't going to volunteer to walk into that vacuum, as the economic arrangement that necessitated it no longer exists. it's simply not in our self-interests any more.
there's decades of evidence at this point. when they shut down the psychiatric facilities, families didn't volunteer, we just ended up with a giant population of homeless mental patients. the same thing is going to happen, here; government is going to decide that families should take care of their elderly rather than the state, and children are going to drop their elderly parents off in the woods to be eaten by bears, instead, because they don't have the slightest interest and don't give the slightest fuck.
they won't learn - they'll just hold to their anachronisms, as they watch the streets fill up with elderly people that are rejected and discarded by their families.
12:19
my father is dead, but i don't want to take care of my mother, if or when she reaches that age. nor am i going to. she's going to end up on the street, if the hospital won't take her in.
i don't think that families have the burden of responsibility in the matter and reject the ideology that they do; i think this is why we have governments, and that governments will accept the responsibility, or suffer the embarrassment that follows from the consequence.
12:23
if you want to be a christian, whatever, just keep it away from me.
but, don't expect me to be one.
i won't meet your expectations.
13:21
we will not return to the primacy of the family; we will not revert to feudalism. i mean, we can't; the economy of feudalistic arrangement is long gone. you can't expect a socialist economy to spontaneously accept feudalistic social arrangements, it's absurd. caring for the elderly is the role of government in a modern socialist economy, and if the government won't accept the role, the result is that the seniors will starve on the streets.
13:22
i would like to agitate in the opposite direction - i want to do away with the family, altogether, by abolishing state control over marriage and treating all taxation decisions and concepts of property ownership as strictly individualistic. parents have no rights over their children and children have no obligations to their parents; all individuals have rights and obligations that are only relative to their existences as individuals in society.
13:28
i meant to get out for a bike ride today - i missed yesterday as well. it's beautiful here this weekend. - and realized i had an awful knot it in the side of my hair, when i took a shower to shave before i left. i have very fine, thin, straight scandinavian hair that gets a little wavy when it's dirty, which means that the straight, thin ends of the waves tends to curl up into vicious knots and die periodically, for some unknown reason. i think it has something to do with something getting in my hair, but i haven't entirely isolated it. it might have been the lysol i used to clean, or somebody smoking outside, but the onset of the knot attacks can be pretty vicious and i'm lucky that it doesn't happen very often. another hypothesis is static, as the dead ends tend to knot up in these vicious spirals. it does not seem to have to do with humidity (or dryness). today, i suspect i might have gotten some coffee in my hair, and it had a cascading effect.
it was not as bad as the last time, which was late 2020, when i had to cur out a fist sized chunk from the bank of my head that just fused in place. today, it was a series of about 20 mini knots that spontaneously appeared some time this morning and i was mostly able to careful slice in half without cutting much. imagine two sides of a shoelace in a knot that can't be untangled; you could save both sides of the lace by cutting it in such a way that the knot falls into parts, one on each side of the lace. so, i lost a little more than i would in a normal shower (when you have a lot of hair, it's normal to lose a little in the shower or when brushing), but not a lot more.
it took hours to fix, though, and i lost the day.
i only like to bike in peak sunlight and baking heat, so i'll try again tomorrow.
18:41
sept 18, 2022
that actually knocked me right out in a way i haven't slept in some time. i used to regularly get sleep in my eyes; that was the first time in a while. i might have needed to catch up on sleep a little, but i was also extremely dehydrated when i woke up, so i might have had a case of shower fatigue and dehydration from too much water.
whatever it was, i slept all night and may actually sleep a little more.
3:51
seems like prince harry is back in the family now that the racist queen is dead.
5:50
so, let's summarize the dead queen's moral convictions here:
1) charles can stay in the family, despite treating his (first) wife like a basket of meat
2) andrew can stay in the family, he just needs to keep a tight upper lip and stay hush about certain things.
3) but, harry is out of the family for marrying a (1/4) black woman. that is unforgivable.
we're giving this woman a national holiday?
why don't we go some find some statutes of her to tear down, instead?
3:53
is harry truly charles' son?
you can be diplomatic if you'd like, but i think it's fairly empirically obvious that he's clearly not. apparently, they even know who the real father is.
what i'm going to tell you is that, historically speaking, that's actually not that uncommon. diana was not sent at knifepoint by her father to be repeatedly raped in order to secure a military alliance, as was so frequently the case in medieval europe, but that kind of arrangement doesn't tend to result in fulfilling marital arrangements. the result of marrying girls off as children into a life time of sexual subservience was actually that a large percentage of them slept with the medieval equivalent of their pool attendants. the kings of europe were in truth quite frequently the sons of peasant stable boys. it's a coin toss, at best, as to whether any specific relationship you see in the history books is actually biological or not.
the flip side is that incest tended to be a fairly common activity amongst the aristocrats of europe.
the truth is that it shouldn't really matter.
6:12
the ruling class is correlated with genealogy, but they're really not the same thing.
i spent a lot of time studying that question and have a clear conclusion regarding it.
6:22
stable boy, clearly.
6:49
of course, that article was written in france.
they're still snickering about it, no doubt.
7:00
i've been waiting to get my stylus pen working before i get back to the stanford walkthrough. now that i'm rebuilding from 2021, i'm going to transition back to watching youtube while i'm eating, but i may choose to start with a different site, to ensure i'm shifting back to the stanford walkthrough in order.
this is going to be weird, but it's the only way to do it.
3:53
the knot in my hair yesterday was so thick and dense that i ripped open giant blisters on both hands trying to soften it up. when the knot attacks happen, the hair just folds in on itself and starts to weave together, almost like a caterpillar is weaving my hair into a cocoon. the resulting knot is dense enough to cut cheese, at least. it's bizarre.
you have to undo it until you get to the hardest, slimmest point and cut it in half rather than out. it will then mostly unravel, but you're not getting these knots apart.
i'm convinced that it's a reaction to pollution, and that some kind of particulate matter is getting in the hair and damaging it, but washing it doesn't help. it happens randomly and spins together very fast, when it does. in twenty minutes, it will go from normal to irreversibly matted up, as the hair just dies and weaves itself up in the presence of some environmental stimulus that i don't fully understand.
8:24
the media is expressing confusion about the lack of russian cyberattacks on ukraine. it's an example of the propaganda falling in on itself.
rachel maddow (who is a cia agent) has us all convinced that the russians are expect hackers, but the fact of the matter is that the russians are actually decades behind us, when it comes to any kind of information technology at all, let along information warfare. serious analysts would have mostly laughed at you if you had suggested that the russians would be launching major cyberattacks on ukraine. the reality is that the russians are clueless on information warfare, and every serious analyst is well aware of it.
have you noticed that putin uses windows?
we're ten steps ahead of them on this.
those that know the history know that they did this with nuclear weapons, too. throughout the red scare, the propaganda was that bombs had to be built at alarming levels to prevent russian strategic dominance, but the smart analysts knew that was nonsense, and the classified data released since makes it clear that the russians were not only not ahead but actually were years behind the united states in terms of nuclear technology.
anthony sutton wrote a series of enlightening texts in the 50s, 60s and 70s that explained the role of western capitalism in technology transfers to the united states. not only were the russians unable to develop the technology, they were also unable to steal it. they had to buy it.
so, no, the realization that the russians are not launching cyberattacks against ukraine is really not surprising, as the fact is that they don't have the infrastructure or the know how. conversely, it has become clear enough that the pentagon is able to livestream putin taking his morning piss, if they'd like.
this is not symmetric - they're nowhere close to us, in terms of technology. what they have is a lot of bombs and, up until recently, a reputation for being rational actors with superior logistics. they can salvage the last part of that, still, but there was never any question as to who has the superior technology.
9:54
the april 2022 archive is up on the side.
13:02
i'll put this here for now, too:
13:17
sept 19, 2022
i made it out for the 50k ride a little later than i wanted to last night and found a package from the name change office in the mail, but it wasn't what i was expecting. the windsor police are insistent that i run a police record check before the application is processed, and they have the ability to do that in statute. i need to do the record check and send the information back.
this is really just an annoyance. i don't have a criminal record, and the windsor police know that i don't have a criminal record. on some level, it may be helpful for me to have a certified document that confirms as much, but i do not want to spend $60 on it. it is really best described as a juvenile stunt by the cops, who have been operating on a clear anti-trans bias with me for months (in fact, years) now. i don't like the cops and the cops don't like me, so they're forcing me to pay the $60 out of spite, because they had the chance to do so. that's the actual truth; there's no legitimate basis for the request.
i called the solicitor general and left a message requesting an explanation, but then i called service ontario and they explained to me that it's the cops that made the request, not the attorney general. annoyingly, the cops dealing with this were on holiday today because they're in a federal union. i'll have to call tomorrow.
my position is that if the cops are insisting on the record check due to public safety, rather than due to malice or spite, they will acknowledge my financial situation and waive the fee. they are inserting themselves between myself and a legitimate name and gender change process that has nothing to do with them, and they should cover the cost of their interference, if it is truly legitimate, as it is being instituted solely on their request. they were not required to interfere; they have chosen to do so and they should be responsible for costs for that reason. if they insist otherwise, i would invite them to provide their reasoning; there is no discernible justification for their interference, so it will be interesting to read through and analyze the logic presented. i will need to file an foi, regardless, because i need to understand who made the decision and why. it may uncover some exceedingly archaic attitudes around transwomen in the windsor police department, and that may help me in fighting back, moving forwards.
if i can't get a reasonable response from the cops, and they are going to force me to pay the $60 for no discernible reason, i will need to wait until my inflation rebate comes in to pay for it anyways, so i'd might as well figure out if i can appeal the decision or not. i know i can appeal an foi, but is a bureaucratic decision under the name change act reviewable, and by who? the reality is that there is no discernible reason for the request, and i'm going to fight it as hard as i can - somebody is going to refund me that money, if i end up having to pay it.
the ride itself last night was pretty disappointing. if i had left a few hours earlier, it would have been a hotter ride, which is what i want, but the forecast suggested a temperature peak later in the evening so i planned to take advantage of that; as it is, the first part of the ride was enjoyably hot and humid, but the clouds rolled in for the second part of the ride, thereby undoing the forecast, and the calendar date then asserted itself. to be clear: it was hardly a cold night for this time of year at this latitude, but the shade is now colder than it was even last week and the ambient temperature in the absence of direct sunlight is definitely lower. you can feel the cold air on a long bike ride, and i definitely found it very unpleasant. i'm clearly spoiled, complaining about 28 degree weather on sept 18, anywhere in canada; it was nonetheless a total bust, as i rode home in what felt like a miserable, dark, cold night. in hindsight, that could have been avoided by leaving about two hours earlier, but the forecast misled me into thinking the hotter part of the day would be in the evening, which i subsequently planned around instead.
after i arrived at home, i made something to eat and felt the need to take a short rest before i took a shower, which led to me completely passing out in one of the longest sleeps i've had in weeks, which suggests to me that the season is truly beginning to shift over. i slept for almost 12 hours, with minimal bathroom breaks. when i did get up, i made the calls i mentioned and intended to eat, shower and go on another ride, as the forecast had shifted to a beautiful, hot and sunny day (they were previously calling for rain). however, the process took longer than intended, and i didn't want to make the same mistake as i did yesterday, so i decided to get out earlier and shower afterwards, rather than shower before i went out.
today was much sunnier and the heat was enjoyable when i could find myself directly in it, but there was an annoyingly cold breeze coming in from the north. i've been used to southerlies for months, so the assertion of a cold north wind was pretty disappointing. it was a better ride over all, but it's making me wish i would have been able to get out on friday or saturday, instead, as the wind was moving from the south. while the official high today will likely be 28 or 29, the board in tecumseh recorded a 36 as i drove by, and it certainly felt more like 36 in the direct sun - albeit perhaps more like 25 in the shade. these are the kinds of large temperature differences that begin to assert themselves when late summer warmth persists in regions where late summer warmth is unusual. something else to point out is that the overnight low here is 14; the increasingly longer nights moving into october and november will lead to lower lows overnight, which will make it harder to get rid of colder air during the hottest part of the day. this process should take longer this year than most years, but it is inevitable; while we may have some beautiful days here to come, the heat will increasingly take longer to build during the day and will increasingly blow out earlier in the evening. we may get a few more 27+ degree days, but they won't feel like 27+ degree days in the same way that they do when the sun is out for longer and burns brighter. i consequently need to be more careful about planning the bike rides, as i don't want to get stuck in evening cloud cover, or deal with the consequences of shorter days
it's just a reminder that as powerful as climate change is, canada is still a cold and dark place for much of the year. the basic physics of global warming are about sunlight getting trapped in the clouds and heat energy consequently building up underneath them. while northern latitudes will still experience the effects of shifting air masses during the part of the year where there is minimal direct sunlight, the fact remains that you need there to actually be sunlight in order to trap it, in the first place. climate change doesn't undo the seasons, it just morphs and alters and extends or shortens them. there's simply nothing we can do about the lack of sun in canada, for most of the year. projections for longer growing seasons are really not understanding the science well, as climate change will not create more sunlight in canada. you can't grow crops with humid air in the dark.
at least windsorites can say they had a real summer this year, as every day this summer had a high above 20 degrees. even here at the southern tip of canada, that's a pretty rare event.
that said, the forecast has been putting off the cold front that's supposed to rain away the humidity here, which is helping the heat build but isn't the cause of it. first, it was supposed to rain on sunday, then today, then tomorrow; now, it's supposed to rain on thursday morning. the realty is that it actually hasn't been that humid here, so there haven't been convection storms for that reason; the heat we're experiencing is due to the presence of a powerful high pressure system, not from excess humidity. the southerlies are returning tomorrow, and wednesday may be one of the hottest days of the year, so i think i should take advantage of it by getting some extra rides in to replace the ones i missed.
it is going to be so hot on wednesday that it will likely remain above 20 after midnight, so the high for the day will likely be recorded as the temperature at 00:01, if that cold front even gets here, at all. the forecast high for friday is 19 degrees, and i'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether that qualifies as sub 20, if it even happens at all.
if that cold front doesn't quite make it as far south as windsor - and it keeps getting pushed forward, so far from sunday to thursday. it might not. - then the humidity might not break at all and the weather could simply stay hot. i pointed out previously that it's going to take a few tries to break the heat here, this year. this is going to be serious try #2, and it might not actually push us under 20 here - or under 19.5, depending on the reading.
i need to do an update post for the night, as i was intending on doing an update post as i built the linuxbook write-up, and that has now been postponed.
21:12
this is a problem that we didn't previously have in canada, but decades of lapsed visas, combined with lax enforcement, have created an issue where none previously existed. this is a new political issue in canada, and i would call on the various actors involved to resist americanizing the issue. we don't want to import the politics around the issue that exist in the united states.
strictly legally speaking, almost everybody involved entered canada on an expired work visa and should promptly be deported without further thought, but i would resist the application of the law in such a rigorous matter, in context. there was clearly a breakdown in public order, and that breakdown is responsible for creating a situation that shouldn't exist, but mass deportations are something i would oppose in virtually every conceivable situation. even the classic example of deportation due to criminality is something i think should be opposed; i would rather send them to jail, make them do their time and then deal with their immigration status on the merits than just deport them for breaking the law.
that said, canada should not follow the lead of the united states in simply declaring amnesty. refusing to renew your work visa is not the result of being victimized, and should not lead to a victimized status; not renewing a work visa is not comparable to fleeing a death squad. it has to be acknowledged that these people are in the situation they're in because they behaved irresponsibly to get there, and some concept of consequence needs to be applied, even if the end result is leniency.
if people have work visas that have not been properly processed, those visas need to be properly processed. it is really as simple as that. further, those applications need to be processed thoroughly, and any taxes owing by the individuals as a result of undeclared income need to be aggressively recouped. further, any employers who are paying wages to undocumented workers need to be aggressively prosecuted. once the various tax issues have been dealt with, the immigration status of each individual needs to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. in most cases, canadian judges will choose leniency when faced with immigration questions regarding law-abiding citizens, but the more pressing issue is really the tax evasion - and the question as to whether you can classify somebody who has been evading taxes for decades as law-abiding, or not. if the individuals are found to be in contravention of tax law, they should be prosecuted for it first, serve any jail time as is required and then have their immigration status evaluated, afterwards. if they would like to stay in the country, judges should be lenient, so long as they demonstrate good behaviour while serving their sentences for tax evasion.
there's an issue here and everybody needs to acknowledge it, but we need to do better than the americans - we need to apply the law first, and then be lenient about status, afterwards.
reference:
"hundreds rally, march in toronto to demand status for all migrants in canada", cbc news, sep 18, 2022
22:51
they're not coyotes, they're a hybrid called coywolves that are bigger, more aggressive and less fearful of humans than coyotes.
they look like big coyotes, but they act and think like wolves.
google "coywolf". they evolved recently in algonquin park from a hybridization event, as dwindling wolf populations bred with more plentiful coyote populations, creating a much more fit hybrid species. they have been outcompeting and sometimes interbreeding with coyotes and taking over their habitat for decades, now. they spread by following the railroad tracks.
reference:
"burlington urges residents to 'continue to be vigilant' as city reports 7th coyote attack", cbc news, sept 19th, 2022
23:05
while the pandemic is probably not over, if biden insists that it is, can the united states eliminate it's vaccine mandate at the border, then?
there'a a difference between the pandemic being over and society moving on.
23:12
sept 20, 2022
i don't want my writing to be short, business-like and concise; i want my writing to be verbose, technical, flowing and unnecessarily wordy. i write in abstract, complicated sentence structures that are difficult to follow, and i don't care if it's hard to understand or not.
if you don't like this, the answer is simple: you can promptly fuck off.
0:16
i can be terse. sure. it's for effect; i'm talking down to you, basically.
0:40
the internet wants to use the death of the queen as an excuse to post queen songs everywhere. ok. you do realize that the name of the rock band queen is a reference to freddie mercury's sexual identity and stage presence, rather than the dead monarch of england, right?
the dead queen was referenced within a large number of pop culture contexts over the course of her life, but the eponymous band really didn't have anything to do with her.
that said, if you want to post some queen songs, here are a couple that may be of some marginal relevance:
these songs are not about the queen of england, they're about queeny behaviour, but they could at least be applied to be contextual, however awkwardly.
9:15
the another one bites the dust posts are perhaps sufficiently ironic to warrant posting, but that would be the only value of doing so.
9:18
and, no, i'm not concerned about the prime minister singing bohemian rhapsody with a handful of order of canada recipients in an obviously staged photo op. that is a work function.
9:19
perhaps killer queen is actually about elizabeth II, after all.
freddie mercury was an iranian that moved to britain as a child. the rest of them were british.
9:55
if the russians are actually going ahead with referenda in the east and south, it's not clear what the messaging actually is.
the west will not accept the validity of a vote to secede, even if it accurately reflects the popular will (and my understanding is that it would accurately reflect the popular will in the abstract, even if the referenda themselves are merely for show). they may be attempting to legitimize the process of annexation relative to international law, but it's not clear who is interested in international law, nowadays. the only actor concerned much about international law today would be the russians, themselves.
that is probably the correct answer; this is likely intended for domestic consumption, and designed to generate greater russian support for the russians on the ground fighting against the ukrainian occupation of the russian-speaking regions. it's not going to actually have any discernible, meaningful effect on the war, as the only language the west understands is that might makes right.
it is becoming increasingly clear that the people being supposedly liberated by ukraine do not appreciate their liberation and would prefer to return to russia. that would not be true about settlements on the west of the dnieper, but westerners are currently not well informed about what it is that they think they're supporting. the narrative in the west is that nato weapons (but not fighters, supposedly) are expelling a russian occupation of kharkov, which is language that is absurd on it's face; the truth is that the people on the ground perceive the situation as a reactionary nato occupation, undoing the recent russian liberation that they'd been hoping for for decades. there's a reason they tried to ban russian news. it follows that this massive nato-ukrainian force that invaded kharkov is going to need to stay on the ground and physically occupy the region in order to hold it, which reverses the logic in the critique of the russian invasion, but they may be happy to stay there on the russian border, regardless, as the russians don't want a guerrilla war against an unwanted occupier, they want to erect defensible borders and to move on. if the previous analysis was that this would become a war that will bleed russia as it attempts to occupy western ukraine against the desire of the ukrainian inhabitants, the opposite reality is now asserting itself in the northeast, as the occupying nato-ukrainian force moves in for a long occupation; this is now a ukrainian occupation of effective russian territory that will bleed the ukrainians, who will need to occupy the region with force and attempt to suppress a popular insurgency, as the russians that live there don't want them there and are never going to want them there. this has been the reality on the ground since 2014; what's effectively happening is that the war for liberation is about to shift from the donbas to the kharkov region.
if the russians merely want to get that point across, the reality is that nobody is listening and that nato will be perfectly happy to repress the russians living there in order to hold the area with violence. they're good at that.
if the occupying force that just invaded kharkov is really full of nato soldiers, and not just ukrainians, they are going to be difficult to evict, but it seems impossible at this point that the kharkov region will accept ukrainian rule without a lengthy fight and that the ukrainian position is consequently untenable, regardless of how much nato support they receive, whether in the form of weapons or soldiers. after fucking around and approaching the matter like a police operation rather than a war, russia may now have to fight the long war and instead support an insurgency for self-determination in the kharkov region, as it has allowed nato to walk in and occupy the area under the fog of war.
keep an eye on this question, though: if the russians are really intending to annex these provinces, it may signal the start of a massive escalation.
10:55
sept 21 2022
there is a more pressing matter to address.
where were the grown-ups when trudeau was off at the kids table after supper, and why wasn't trudeau invited?
15:07
this is the flip side of aristocracy.
trudeau is going to have to make it to mandatory retirement before the ruling elite ever sees him as anything other than the child of one of their own. do you think chretien and martin, let alone the desmarais clique, are ever going to take justin trudeau seriously?
in serious meetings, wittle justin has to sit with the kids, because that's how he's perceived, and always will be.
15:11
if this was a norse saga, what our dauphin would need to do is get all of the old men together in a single room by calling a giant feast, then burn it down when they're drunk. maybe then he'll be taken seriously.
15:12
machiavelli's got nothing on snorri in terms of actual functionality. sneaky nicco would have never come up with something with that kind of brute force efficiency.
15:13
hey, how many times did the venetians overrun sweden and impose a tribute on them?
0.
and, how many centuries did it take for the italians to assimilate the normans rampaging through the peninsula? the answer is several. they were never defeated, they just got worked into the status quo. the pope tried to launch a crusade to get rid of them by sending them after the arabs, but they tried to conquer constantinople, instead.
the dark prince ought to have been taking notes. indeed, the truth is that he did.
15:21
nobody conquers the north, bitch.
nobody.
15:24
the cold front came through early and weak, which means it's not going to get as hot today as hoped for, but also that the damage has already been done.
it's certainly going to cool down a little bit, but the forecast has clearly overshot the effect. this is a predictable outcome because the inputs aren't designed to accept the change in climate that has already occurred; this overshooting of the effect of moving systems, and especially of cold fronts late in the summer, is going to be a persistent mistake made by climate models designed for the previous climate during periods of seasonal turnover, and especially during the fall, until new models are written (or new data is fed into existing ones). the old models for the old climate are already broken, and it's just going to get worse.
15:32
i'm expecting it that it will stay over 20 past midnight tonight, and that it will get very close to 20 on friday, close enough to write it off as error.
we'll go from there.
15:34
sept 22, 2022
iran is on the brink of signing a major agreement with russia, china and india to formally enter into an asian continental defence agreement that they have been tentatively a part of for years and would effectively shield them from attack by the west.
while i am certainly in solidarity with women burning their hijabs anywhere and everywhere, the timing seems suspect, and i'd suggest this is actually the result of an american psy-op, as all of the coloured revolutions previously were.
i've been relatively clear that i cannot and could not provide any remote level of support or solidarity for the theocratic government of iran, which i consider to be infinitely worse than the secular, stalinist dictatorship of saddam hussein, in the event of an attack on it by nato forces. i would have difficulty opposing an attack on iran in the way that i opposed an attack on iraq, both because i think the government there is so much worse and because i realize that there is actually a secular opposition to the iranian theocracy on the ground, in iran. my solidarity will always lie with secularist forces, and will always oppose religious rule. what the evidence that i've seen suggests to me is that the iranian people actually want to be liberated, although how it is done is key in determining how it is received. the iranian people would not be happy about a blatant american occupation, for example, even if they would appreciate a series of targeted assassinations designed to weaken the power of the theocracy and allow for a democratic overthrow of what is an illegitimate government.
however, i would not expect a western intervention in iran at this point to be secular, even if it's what the people actually want. unfortunately. rather, to our great discredit, we would almost certainly support saudi-backed sunni jihadists that would be even worse, in an attempt to seize the real estate from russian protection, as our interest would be in advancing great game geopolitics rather than advancing democratic solidarity. we would just use the fabricated jihadist uprising as an excuse to send in nato-friendly saudi forces to seize the country from the iranian mullahs; we would have no interest in iranian self-determination and no interest in women's rights. the first thing that a western intervention would do is suppress this democratic uprising and force these women back into submission, as it's primary interest would be in replacing the iranian shia clerics with arab, sunni, wahhabist clerics, instead.
that's reality. it's vicious and horrible, but our policy in this region has been vicious and horrible for decades and biden is in every ways an extension of a dying status quo rather than a rebuke of it.
i'm consequently in the exceedingly awkward position of needing to support the mullahs against what seems like an imminent saudi-backed jihadist insurrection, even if my actual solidarity lies with the reform movement on the ground, which is going to just get cast aside in the carnage of a nato-backed sunni insurgency trying to bomb out the russian-backed shia theocracy.
11:05
the model is syria.
there were some small, localized protests on the ground in syria for democratic reform, which is something that the younger assad has actually long supported, but they were quickly co-opted by violent saudi-backed jihadists seeking to topple the government and bring in an islamic theocracy (which is not what the syrian form of government is. syria has a vaguely authoritarian socialist form of government that is run by a military junta, and has recently become a client state of russia.). given that the west's actual interest is geopolitical, and this seems like a psy-op, a saudi-backed jihadist insurrection in iran in order to prevent a democracy seems inevitable.
membership in the sco may effectively shield iran from nato bombing attacks, but it will not protect it from the sort of "civil war" that happened in syria, which was in truth just a saudi-backed invasion by foreign jihadists with the intent to topple the government and install a theocratic puppet-dictator, in order to prevent democratic reforms. the last thing that the west wants in the region is democracy, and the saudis are ideal nato allies from an imperialistic perspective, for that reason - even as we refuse to see them as the enemies of the west that they really are. they will turn on us at the first opportunity; we refuse to accept this, and refuse to realize that anything that increases saudi power puts us at extreme risk. the russians are not our enemies the way that the saudis are, and our denial of that fact puts us at the risk of great harm. we're going to need to learn the hard way.
the end result is a war on the ground between secularists and jihadists, where secularists awkwardly have to align with the mullahs to fend off a far more repressive threat - although the lines are admittedly more blurry in iran than they were in syria, where secularists had a real ally in the state in the fight against the saudi jihadists. this war is a proxy war between iran and the saudis, and by extension between russia and nato.
it is likely to last many years.
i hope that clarifies the situation.
if that sounds like a world war to you, when placed in the broader context, you're likely on to something.
11:33
it's just not likely that there is a spontaneous eruption of violent dissent in iran the same week that it announces it is acceding to the sco. these two things are not unrelated.
11:34
well, i can acknowledge that the visual is a little bit absurd. i would challenge the idea that the person is sexualizing herself in class, and instead suggest that her options are rather limited. just about any piece of clothing would appear tight-fitting over top of that chest. what is she supposed to do, exactly? wear a poncho?
i couldn't imagine myself teaching shop, in the first place. nor would i ever get a breast job. yuck. yet, in that theoretical scenario, i'd like to think i'd have probably resigned at some point between getting a ridiculous breast job and showing up to a room full of 15 year-old boys, if for no other reason than that i wouldn't be very excited about the staring.
i would kindly suggest a psychological evaluation is warranted, in context.
it's less that it's not ok and it's more that it's legitimately comical and the absurd ridiculousness of it cannot be sustained.
17:28
i have received no feedback regarding real time posts. at all.
therefore, there won't be any more posts here in real time.
sorry.
17:54
sept 23, 2022
i monitored a few things on the front page, and the retard is not going to fuck off. this is going to need to be shut down until they find something better to do.
3:18
even the files at drive are being edited. unlike blogger, drive is designed to keep track of edits, but they're not being tracked. i can't win.
i consequently have no choice but to take everything down, including the temporary archives, until i've rewritten them to remove the unwanted editing and uploaded them in pdf format.
i don't like this outcome, but it's required.
everything is coming down. it's all corrupted.
it will be posted again.
nothing further will be posted here in the mean time because i've thoroughly convinced myself that the person editing it is obsessed with it and can't stop, even when i make the point as clear as i've made it. the person would appear to have deep psychological issues, and i'm not interested in helping them. i just need to take the site away from them.
whatever collusion between google and government is driving this, the actor is clearly acting out a personal bias, and i just need to break the obsession by taking the whole thing away from them, entirely. that sounds absurd, and it is, but they seem to think this is theirs, and the only way to take it away from them is to take it down and never put it back up.
3:58
joe biden is an advocate of "trickle-down", or supply-side, economics. it's the central focus of his administration's economic policies, which some have even labelled as "neo supply side". in truth, it's the same old shit. the "inflation reduction act" is loaded with trickle-down or supply-side economics, in the form of incentivized tax cuts for the wealthy, and especially in the form of corporate handouts (in fact, for the oil industry).
it's just the latest example of biden appearing schizophrenic in policy. does he not understand his administration's policy, or is he so separated from reality that he assumes nobody else does?
12:30
well, they're right that the economy needs stimulus, but they are targeting it in the wrong place.
her claim that tax cuts for the rich are more effective is empirically completely backwards. all studies on the topic have demonstrated the exact opposite, namely that when you cut taxes for people with lots of money, it does not incentivize them to spend more, because they already have more money than they need. the money just gets wasted in savings account, where it does not do society any good. the better economic policy is actually to tax the wealthy at extremely high rates in order to take the money out of their savings accounts, where it is being wasted, and have it put to use in the economy, instead. savings are merely a deadweight loss on society, so the state should be actively intervening to reduce savings and instead make sure the money gets spent on something useful that benefits the collective good, like subsidized housing.
so, tax cuts for the rich do not spur growth, and that has been proven repeatedly; taxing rich people and spending it does spur growth, and that's a far better idea.
however, tax cuts for the middle class can alleviate spending restrictions if they are targeted at specific incomes and consequently act as a form of keynesian stimulus to get an economy out of recession, and that is what is required, at the moment.
what ms. truss is advocating is a type of dogma without the slightest bit of empirical backing, but she could correct herself by targeting the stimulus at a lower income range that would benefit from increased spending power.
what we really need right now, everywhere, is more government spending to stop the economy from dipping into a deep recession, not discussions about what tax cuts are better. however, the best types of tax cuts, in context, are the ones that target middle income earners, who neither have more money than they need nor are in too much debt to cover their expenses. stimulus checks are a better idea than tax cuts, usually, as that approach doesn't create structural deficits.
biden's targeted tax cut incentive programs for corporations and truss' income tax cuts for the rich are both components of neo-liberal supply side economics, referred to as "trickle down", and are not in competition with each other, theoretically. the two are strongly ideologically aligned, as they are both contemporary conservatives.
the competing theory, which i would advocate as a stop-gap in the absence of socialism - keynesian stimulus spending - is no longer being discussed much of anywhere, due to poorly informed analyses about government spending leading to inflation. keynesian stimulus spending on carbon transition would be an excellent idea right now, and would be both more effective in reversing climate change and better for the economy than biden's trickle-down, or supply side, tax cut incentive programs, which are unlikely to do anything substantive at all. printing money does not create inflation; we should be printing more money right now, not less, and the consequences of a contraction in the money supply are going to be severe until we figure that out.
the market crash caused by high interest rates (and quantitative tightening, which is worse) has now begun. we're in recession; they're doing the opposite of what they should be doing, right now.
17:13
it's relatively clear that the russians intend to annex the areas that are voting to return to russia. what's less clear is if they intend to annex entire oblasts or partition them into russian and ukrainian regions. if zaporizhzhia votes to join russia, does that include the areas currently under ukrainian control?
19:03
don't misunderstand me: i can and will support the overthrow of the iranian government, which has no redeeming qualities and is clearly despised by it's own people. i'm not going to argue against american imperialism in iran. this is a situation that calls for some good imperial use of force.
i'm rarely aligned with us policy, and this is a counter-example; i could not, in good faith, oppose any sort of armed overthrow of the iranian state.
what i'm worried about is the saudis, and what the long term american goals are in the region. we don't support democratic or secularist governments in this part of the world, we find brutal dictators and give them guns in exchange for advancing our economic and geostrategic aims. this is how iran ended up under the control of the vicious shah, which led to the revolution, in the first place.
iran once had a secular, modern, democratic government and we overthrew it and installed a dictatorship.
our allies are the saudis. they're going to be given the upper hand if a war breaks out, and the iranian people - which are what my concern is - could end up infinitely worse off, as syria was on the brink of.
you try this kind of shit in riyadh, and they'll just mow you down with machine guns.
19:21
westerners may wake up to find out that they're supporting a counter-revolution in iran.
19:31
