feb 1, 2023
(note that this is being dramatically edited in real time by state actors attempting to literally change the constitution by changing the present. this is right out of orwell, at this point.)
the canada health act is a piece of federal legislation and for that reason it cannot place restrictions on how provinces manage heath care funding, for the reason that this power is explicitly granted to the provinces in the constitutional division of powers. any legislation by the federal government that falsely attempts to decide how provinces spend money on healthcare would be blatantly unconstitutional and necessarily struck down by the courts, as that is not within federal jurisdiction. there is no ambiguity on the matter.
this jurisdictional problem is what the canada health act exists to address. while federal legislation cannot interfere into provincial jurisdiction on health care, the purpose of the canada health act is to provide leverage to the federal government by giving it the power to threaten to withdraw federal funding from any provinces that decide to move to a two-tier health care system, which is intended to then coerce the provinces into holding to the public system, as the provinces are reliant on that funding. this was strictly a power move by the elder trudeau to put the issue on the table: while the federal government cannot stop any province from moving to a two-tier system, it can threaten to withhold health care transfers to any province that decides to do so and then potentially carry through with it if that threat does not put the province in it's place. the elder trudeau gave the provinces a choice between holding to the public health model and receiving federal health care funding or abandoning the public health model and abandoning federal funding along with it.
to be clear: the purpose of the canada health act was to ensure that any provinces that chose to move to a two-tier model would be punished for it by the federal government, by legislating the threat to react by withholding funding to any province that does so. if the elder trudeau were in power today, he would be using the canada health act to coerce doug ford into not privatizing the health care system by threatening to withhold funds if he were to do so. we know he would do that because the legislation was written for the express purpose of allowing him to do that.
such a scheme requires the active participation of the federal government to provide a convincing threat to withhold funding to any province that begins to privatize and what has changed is that the younger trudeau has taken a complete 180 degree reversal on the purpose of the elder trudeau's legislation and co-opted it to do the precise opposite thing it was written to do. where the elder trudeau wrote the legislation to give him the power to intimidate the provinces into holding to the public model under the threat of losing funding, the younger trudeau has withheld funding until the provinces agree to transition into a two tier system. the focus is on ford and legault, but it is actually the younger trudeau that is agitating for this change, in a direct reversal of his father's policy.
singh is absolutely correct, but he's missing the point; trudeau is not failing to use the tools his father left for him, he is co-opting the tools left by his father to bludgeon his legacy and vandalize his grave. trudeau is taking a sledgehammer to his father's primary accomplishment, and the country refuses to even see it, let alone react to it.
singh can promise to use the canada health act in the way it was intended to be used if he wins, but there is no use in pretending that trudeau doesn't know what he's doing, or isn't intentionally misusing the legislation in yet another clear abuse of power. trudeau's randian tendencies have long been understood, but this blatant attack on the public health care system is completely out of the blue. there were murmurs, but no discussion. there's no mandate for this because nobody even saw it coming; nobody even wants to admit it.
singh can promise to use the canada health act in the way it was intended to be used if he wins, but there is no use in pretending that trudeau doesn't know what he's doing, or isn't intentionally misusing the legislation in yet another clear abuse of power. trudeau's randian tendencies have long been understood, but this blatant attack on the public health care system is completely out of the blue. there were murmurs, but no discussion. there's no mandate for this because nobody even saw it coming; nobody even wants to admit it.
as for this propaganda piece, it is clearly intended to confuse people as to what the purpose of the canada health act is and what it was written for by simply sweeping the intent of it's author under the rug. this is a serious red flag from the state media.
13:11
feb 2, 2023
the west should not expel turkey from nato, it should assassinate erdogan and install a secular leader in his place that is eager to replace the unitary state with a federalist one in order to provide some level of sovereignty to the kurds.
feb 4, 2023his time is up. regime change in turkey to realign it with the west is long overdue.
turkey is in the west's sphere of influence and the west consequently retains the right to depose of it's leaders and install new ones at it's discretion. talk of the west defaulting on it's authority over turkey due to an insolent client are daft.
2:07
great. that's just what the country needs.
maybe they can start a tent city outside bountiful, bc.
11:03
the chinese are carrying out a humanitarian operation in xinjiang that will modernize and civilize the population living there, which partially means helping them secularize. what they are doing should be commended, not condemned.
yet, maybe i'm on to something. are muslims in north america aware of the existence of utah, and the fact that the laws there are more similar to the laws in the cultures they come from?
muslims across north america should strongly consider relocating to utah. they might find they'd be happier there.
11:19
11:31
feb 3, 2023
i've been arguing we're on the brink of a dark age for quite some time, so it is at least expected to see the federal reserve adopt the logic of the bloodletter; if bleeding the economy does not cure the disease, it needs to be bled more, clearly.
do not expect anybody to think empirically, analyze the evidence and deduce that rate hikes don't actually reduce inflation. they're not even following a theory, they're just lying through their teeth.
rate hikes increase profits for bankers. that is all.
the expectation would be that rate hikes would increase debt loads in the short run, rather than reduce spending, and here it is:
the problem with americans is that they are so shit-eatingly optimistic because they (think they) know that god is on their side. it's manifest destiny. just say your prayers, and everything will work out swell.
the next step is a decrease in spending, right? nope; americans are not rational enough for that. look at the stock market, which now has a 20,000 point bubble. no, the next step is a market crash and a housing crisis, as americans sell off assets in order to maintain their high levels of consumer spending.
10:29
i think the position should be abolished, as well.
answer me this question: will the representative for "islamophobia" also be tasked with combating anti-semitism throughout the world and denouncing the persecution of yazidis and christians in muslim dominant countries, including in africa? will it address the continued persecution of zoroastrians in iran, the ongoing attacks on buddhist cultural origins in afghanistan or the persecution of animism in central asia?
as i pointed out last week, the government has functionally replaced harper's office of religious freedom with the office for promoting islam, which indicates a very clear pro-muslim bias in the sitting government at the expense of all other religions. this is unacceptable in a secular society. is the signal that the government expects canada to become a muslim country, and soon? i don't believe that "religious freedom" should be a constitutional right, but that doesn't mean that i support base persecution of religious minorities and, insofar as it exists throughout the world, persecution of islam is neither unique nor more of a problem than persecution of other belief systems. when balanced properly, muslims are actually some of the biggest rights abusers.
i would vote against having any such office at all, but if we are to have one it should be the office that the liberals abolished in 2016, and not the one they set up last week.
11:07
there is really little question that ilhan omar is a blatantly racist bigot and should not be sitting on any committees, anywhere.
it is disappointing that the republicans had to remove her from committee. the democrats should have done so, themselves.
i would encourage the democrats to primary her.
12:49
there's nothing described in this article that isn't protected speech. these whining ukrainians are getting annoying.
i would actually consider attempts to censor russian flags or to prevent talks because they are "pro-russian" to be deplorable forms of aggressive russophobia, but that is the extent of anything contentious that is described in the article. so long as the ukrainians are firmly corrected for their attempt to restrict free expression, that is the extent that ought to come from this.
however, this does indicate why parliament should not have voted on the question of a genocide occurring in ukraine. the idea is laughable, from an academic perspective; it was strictly political. while ukraine is not a free country, and ukrainians may not understand this because they come from a culture of conformity and uniformity, government declarations are not binding on the viewpoints of citizens. just because our government has a particular viewpoint does not mean that citizens in canada need to share it, nor should canadian citizens be censored or punished for holding views that differ from that of their government, like is done in an unfree country like ukraine.
if ukrainians are expecting canada to act like ukraine, or to import the censorship and conformity of thought that exist in ukrainian culture to canada, they will be sorely disappointed at the outcome and should just pack their things up and go home right away.
15:45
feb 4, 2023
a weather balloon from china has been spotted over the western united states, but the american military is claiming it is not a weather balloon, but a ufo.
19:25
a weather balloon from china has been spotted over the western united states, but the american military is claiming it is not a weather balloon, but a ufo.
19:25
feb 7, 2023
note: i'm trying to explain something, and the fucking idiot that is editing the site is altering the language to try to reverse the meaning of it. this is beyond surreal. in this post more than others, the editor needs to shut the fuck up and try very hard to understand what it is that i'm teaching them. attempts to manipulate the language in this post will not lead to a different outcome, they will merely lead to the frustration i'm making an attempt to prevent.
humans are not inherently selfish creatures, and capitalism is simply organized boredom that is deeply unsatisfying to many of us. you will never understand that if you don't shut up and listen and your system will continue to fail over and over until you listen to what i'm saying and adjust.
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i am going to explain how i will react to such coercion in order to set proper expectations as to what my behaviour will be, should it happen.
i am a member of the proletariat class, which means i must sell my labour in order to exist. i do not have the choice to avoid this; as a member of the class that must sell it's labour in order to survive, i am enslaved by the exploitative system of capitalist hierarchy. slaves may be treated a little better here than elsewhere, but coerced labour is always slavery and any system of "eat or die", be it leninism or what we call liberal capitalism, is just a different flavour of slavery, from the perspective of the proletariat. in order for the proletariat to emancipate itself from it's condition of slavery, the proletariat must collectivize the means of production and radically alter the system of distribution, with the end goal of abolishing the proletariat altogether. nobody should be forced to work or die; from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
being cognizant of the condition of the proletariat has little relevance to how labour is to be approached in the existing system of capitalist exploitation, except in terms of defining tactics of avoidance. in a system where the individual has no option but to either exploit others or be exploited by others if they participate in it, avoidance through disability is the best alternative, both in terms of how to approach such a brutal system from a moral perspective (which i don't care about abstractly, but try to hold to personally, in terms of a personalized set of morals that has little resemblance to any historical one) and in terms of how to approach it from the perspective of maximizing individual quality of life. this understanding of what labour is in a slave society like liberal capitalism informs what the proper reaction to how the slave owners extract their rent ought to be, but individuals have little opportunity of radically altering the terms of their enslavement, besides using disability as an escape mechanism.
a capitalist would argue that a member of the proletariat should work hard in order to increase it's class mobility, but this argument is juvenile. what capitalists label as the "middle class" is merely the better payed portion of the proletariat; the proletariat condition of coerced labour is not absolved in a middle class existence. work and work and work as you may, you're still always going to be a slave. the endless rows of dead suburban houses here are populated by what are in truth merely well taken care of slaves, as our slave masters enforce a type of benevolent despotism. in recent decades, our slave owners have (perhaps correctly, perhaps not) reasoned that they will be better off if they take good care of their slaves because it will prevent them from revolting. certainly, the west has a number of history lessons to tell about the consequences of vicious slave revolts.
there is a way for individuals enslaved by capitalism to emancipate themselves from the condition of the proletariat in a capitalist society without working together to collectively seize control of the means of production, but it is not by working hard to get ahead but rather by finding a financial scheme that emancipates the individual from the condition of the proletariat to be forced to sell labour in order to exist. these emancipation events are rare and defined by luck, they are not defined by appeals to the protestant work ethic. there is no elect. you will not be rewarded for your toil. you will merely be driven to work harder, in order to be exploited by your slave masters more totally.
to somebody that is aware of their condition as a member of the proletariat, what is the difference between participating in an activity like dishwashing and participating in the activities carried out by government employees or by lawyers? the difference is merely that the state (there is no such thing as the market. this is fairy tale nonsense, spoken of by adults with the mentality of children.) will distribute resources to individuals based on how valuable they are to the slave masters, the bourgeois owners of capital, who dominate the state either directly or through financial proxy. a lawyer is a better treated slave than a dishwasher because a lawyer is more valuable to the slave owners than a dishwasher is, but a lawyer and a dishwasher are still both slaves and they still must both work to be fed, or they will be starved by the masters.
there are people, some of whom are even marxists, that may be coerced into performing certain activities for the masters in order to become slaves with preferred status, due largely to a desire to maximize accumulation in their slave quarters. in the past, these people have been called "house niggers", which is an apt way to describe a lawyer. this is in some sense self-interested selfishness and in some sense just blurry thinking; if a slave wants to become a lawyer strictly in order to take advantage of their better treatment and preferred status with the eventual goal of one day buying themselves out of slavery, they will need to maximize accumulation by abstaining from luxury and live like a dishwasher for a lengthy period of time in order to do so. the luxurious lifestyles of the nouveau riche in the professional classes merely holds them in slavery by placing them in debt, which obscures their true poverty.
i will not be coerced into performing activities for the masters through status symbols like vehicles, trips or mcmansions. these things do not interest me, and i would not spend money on them if i had that money to spend; i would be the lawyer that would live like a dishwasher in order to work hard to emancipate myself from the condition of being in the proletariat, and buy my freedom out of it. yet, what am i saving up to buy, if i have no aspirations towards wealth in the first place?
when i look at the difference between participating in the activities perform by office employees and participating the activity of washing dishes, i consequently don't consider any of these things, but rather consider which of these activities is most likely to help me achieve my life goals as i have defined them individually for myself and which one i would enjoy doing more as an activity. rather than analyze the difference between these activities in terms of status and wealth, i would prefer to look at what the concrete functions of these activities are in order to determine which set of activities that i would find to be less oppressive.
what does an office worker do?
- an office worker needs to be concerned about their appearance at all times, and spend large percentages of their wages on items like clothing (made by child labour in shit countries, or by prison inmates in the united states) and personal grooming.
- an office worker needs to be overwhelmingly concerned with status and must go into debt to buy vehicles, houses and other things that they don't need in order to keep up with the joneses. office workers that avoid displaying their status will be marginalized and eventually eliminated.
- an office worker will spend large amounts of time in meetings and will need to have strong social skills because they will need to work in teams. office work is a social activity.
- an office worker will be paid in terms of a salary rather than a wage and will consequently be expected to take their work home with them, including working on weekends and evenings.
participating in an office is a demanding activity that requires you to dedicate the whole of your existence to. you are compensated for this by vacations, but you are expected to give everything you have to the office, like you're joining a cult, and will be terminated if you are not properly enthusiastic.
what does a dishwasher do?
- nobody cares what a dishwasher looks like and they don't need to spend their wages on clothing, cars or grooming.
- dishwashers are not expected to go to meetings, work in teams or have strong social skills. dishwashing is an individual activity.
- dishwashers are paid in terms of hourly wages for the amount of time spent working, and are consequently not expected to take their work home with them.
the only important question is which of these two activities would make me less unhappy, if i were coerced to participate in it against my will. when i look at the nature of these two activities and compare and contrast them, i would prefer to participate in the activity of dishwashing than participate in the activities carried out by a lawyer or by a government employee for the reason that the activities carried out by dishwashers infer a lower level of responsibility and minimal amount of stress and that the activity of dishwashing provides for more freedom away from the place of labour. these are things that are extremely valuable, in terms of helping me achieve my life goals as i've defined them and in terms of maximizing my enjoyment of existence. for most people, the increased wages of the government employee or lawyer relative to the dishwasher would merely be used to purchase debt, in exchange for luxury items that i have no interest in purchasing and would not purchase if given the opportunity. i would opt to live in humble conditions and save that money for early retirement, instead. yet, the possibility that i might be able to actually buy myself out of slavery by working as a lawyer, even if living like a dishwasher, is too remote to consider seriously. it's a rate issue; simple math. then, what is the value of the increased stress associated with the activities of the office worker? there isn't any, in truth, and that is clear if you are able to see through the propaganda of status symbols that keeps the ponzi scheme running.
the abundantly clear rational and self-interested decision to make, relative to my life goals as i have defined them, is consequently to pursue compensation for the activity of washing dishes in order to take advantage of the larger amount of free time and lesser amount of responsibility attached to that activity and to strenuously avoid being trapped in a government job or carrying out the activities associated with being a lawyer at all costs in order to avoid the time wasted carrying out those activities and the responsibility and stress attached to them because the difference in compensation between the activities is not great enough to undo the condition of enslavement inherent to the proletariat condition.
the only actual way out of the condition of enslavement inherent to the proletariat in a capitalist society is via sheer luck; i will get nowhere in this society by working hard and playing by the rules, as i do not want to be a well paid member of the enslaved proletariat class, i want a way out of the condition of being in the proletariat.
if i end up coerced into performing forced labour against my will, your expectation should be that i will seek out low wage work that requires minimal intellectual investment and not high wage work that requires knowledge or skill; it is the former that is consistent with my life goals, and not the latter.
if i can ever find a way to emancipate myself from the proletariat, my perspective on how i approach labour will dramatically change. i may find it worthwhile to go to law school to get a professional designation to work pro bono (i have an undeclared undergraduate degree in constitutional law) to advance social causes, as that would be labour that is uncoerced. right now, that is not relevant to me.
7:59
from what i can put together by reading between the lines, there are two issues of importance in the healthcare negotiations between the pmo and the provinces:
1) the question of privatization, which the pmo is pushing and the provinces are not pushing back on (because they are almost all conservatives and want that outcome, anyways)
2) the issue of taxation.
it's not the jurisdictional issues that are causing problems, because nobody in power seems to care what the constitution says, anyways. if they could suspend it, they would. these are people with no respect for constitutional democracy, and that think they can do whatever they want. it's taxation, specifically, that is creating problems.
this is an old problem. the reason that the federal government was given funding responsibilities without jurisdiction over delivery is that it had greater revenue generating capacity (partly because it could generate sovereign currency from debt), but we stopped doing that after the nixon shock, and the federal government has made reforms to allow the provinces to increase tax rates, which none of the provinces will do. mulroney altered a tariff into a consumption tax to generate revenue for healthcare (called the gst) and got bludgeoned for it, eventually leading to a reduction in said tax which has left us in structural deficit and is a substantive part of the funding problem. the feds, however, seem adamant that they will not increase taxes, but will instead demand that the provinces increase taxes, to pay for the services downloaded to them in the 90s and which none of the provinces ever altered the tax structure to adjust to.
everybody has made mistakes here, and it is the federal government that is primarily to blame, but the provinces should really be generating their own income. i don't support the tactics that the federal government is using, which are likely to just lead to the same set of problems as previously (this hardball tactic has been implemented for decades and has had no outcome but delays in care), but the provinces nonetheless need to take control of their situations and use their revenue generating powers to fund the services that have been downgraded to them. why is this not obvious?
1) the provinces have often been under the control of conservatives, who have never strongly supported the system.
2) conservatives don't like raising taxes.
the media will talk about a lot of things, but the actual point of contention is taxation and it is difficult to see a solution that doesn't involve the federal government accepting it's funding responsibilities, perhaps at the expense of funding on other core issues.
it's hard to decide how much of the funding narrative written by the liberals is real and how much is intended as drama, under the expectation of an impasse on the taxation issue, which the provinces will not budge on. this offer was designed to fail.
22:52
from what i can put together by reading between the lines, there are two issues of concern in the healthcare negotiations between the pmo and the provinces:
1) the question of privatization, which the pmo is pushing and the provinces are not pushing back on (because they are almost all conservatives and want that outcome, anyways)
2) the issue of taxation.
it's not the jurisdictional issue that is contentious because nobody in power seems to care what the constitution says, anyways. if they could suspend it, they would. these are people with no respect for constitutional democracy, and that think they can do whatever they want. it's taxation, specifically, that is the sticking point.
this is an old problem. the reason that the federal government was given funding responsibilities without jurisdiction over delivery is that it had greater revenue generating capacity (partly because it could generate sovereign currency from debt), but we stopped doing that after the nixon shock, and the federal government has made reforms to allow the provinces to increase tax rates, which none of the provinces will do. mulroney altered a tariff into a consumption tax to generate revenue for healthcare (called the gst) and got bludgeoned for it, eventually leading to a reduction in said tax which has left us in structural deficit and is a substantive part of the funding problem. the feds, however, seem adamant that they will not increase taxes, but will instead demand that the provinces increase taxes, to pay for the services downloaded to them in the 90s and which none of the provinces ever altered the tax structure to adjust to. this is mismanagement on a colossal point of failure.
everybody has made mistakes here, and it is the federal government that is primarily to blame, but the provinces should really be generating their own income. i don't support the tactics that the federal government is using, which are likely to just lead to the same set of problems as previously (this hardball tactic has been implemented for decades and has had no outcome but delays in care), but the provinces nonetheless need to take control of their situations and use their revenue generating powers to fund the services that have been downgraded to them. why is this not obvious?
1) the provinces have often been under the control of conservatives, who have never strongly supported the system.
2) conservatives don't like raising taxes.
the media will talk about a lot of things, but the actual point of contention is taxation and it is difficult to see a solution that doesn't involve the federal government accepting it's funding responsibilities, perhaps at the expense of funding on other core issues.
it's hard to decide how much of the funding narrative written by the liberals is real and how much is intended as drama, under the expectation of an impasse on the taxation issue, which the provinces will not budge on. this offer was designed to fail.
yet, understand that the squabbling has to do with the political fallout over whether the provinces should increase taxes or the federal government should increase transfers. the correct answer is for the provinces to increase taxes, but they won't do it and the federal government doesn't know how to force them to do it.
22:57
feb 8, 2023
i'm not done yet, but i have spent much of the last month building a series of playlists to watch while i'm eating, for the next several years. the koala oversight committee is currently the only profile that does not exist on the side, for the reason that i do not intend to post content to the profile. this is strictly a watch profile and will shortly be the only profile i watch anything on. this is taking over for the fake account, which i am currently transferring the watch history from.
i will likely eventually add it to the side, but this page is of such uncertain utility.
i have also been reasserting control over one of my oldest profiles, which has long sat as a convert footage dump. this is now strictly my listening profile.
i think i posted my listening list already. i'm currently researching prokofiev, as i survey the music of the 1920s and 1930s in an attempt to salvage something worthwhile from what i think was our culture's absolute artistic low point.
i am splitting these profiles apart and assigning them to different chromebooks so that i have their functionality strictly separated. i don't want my listening profile to recommend videos, and i don't want my viewing profile to recommend music. you have to really separate the profiles physically to accomplish that; google's algorithm is, truthfully, absolutely terrible at what it does and will relentlessly annoy you unless you are exceedingly vigilant.
the third chromebook will be used for writing blog posts and reading the news and will have a profile dedicated strictly to it, as well. i will need to install linux on the third chromebook, first.
the truth is that i've been distracted, but i will need to do a lot of legal writing over the next few days.
19:09
feb 11, 2023
this is utterly surreal.
it doesn't appear in the article, but the article is about the phillips curve, which was debunked 50 years ago.
the data is not challenging the model because the model being referenced was discarded in the early 1970s. since then, nobody has taken the phillips curve seriously and nobody has thought that inflation and employment are related.
this article is the economics equivalent of a headline that reads "recent experiments challenge the validity of creationism".
what is true is that increasing interest rates should eventually lead to lower aggregate spending, which should create a recession, which should lead to job losses. the reason that this has not happened and probably will not happen until interest rates are approaching 20% is that access to credit makes it too easy to go into debt and because people don't make decisions based on long term considerations but rather make decisions based on short term profits. whatever the homo economicus model says, what people actually reason is that they can go further into the debt in the short run to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle because things will get better in the long run, without actually figuring out how things will get better in the long run. humans don't plan for the future, they live in the moment.
my analysis of the situation several months ago was that the expectation at this point was that credit card debt would shoot through the roof, first, and that is in fact what has happened. people will need to have their access to credit entirely cut off through defaults before they stop spending, and then you will start to see the effects of the rate hikes in the form of home foreclosures and a slowdown in consumer spending because people will no longer have credit cards to put purchases on.
i am not presenting an alternative theory; the theory being presented by the news, and being relied on by some layers of government, is 50 years out of date.
13:21
feb 12, 2023
a "cylindrical object" has apparently been shot down over alaska, and landed in the canadian wilderness, which we call the yukon territory.
there are not many cylindrical objects that i can think of that aren't missiles or satellites. or saucers.
yet, there is apparently nothing to fear: it was only a weather balloon
at least things are back to normal, regarding messaging from norad.
12:13
how many cold war ufos were russian-made (or potentially japanese made, early on) objects?
probably a great deal of them.
12:16
we sent things into their air space, too. the band u2 is named after a spy plane, of which there was a famous incident of a downed pilot that was captured by the soviets.
it may actually be the case that the correct reading is that shooting this object down is an escalation that reflects the severity of the situation, given that it was largely avoided during the cold war.
12:17
the japanese are taller today than they were in the first part of the 20th century, when average height in japan was barely 5 feet. it would not have been hard to find a room full of grown men in japan at the time with average height closer to 4 foot 10 inches. they would have appeared very tiny to a group of norse-descended american farmers, many of whom may have never seen an asian before, at all.
they may have been malnourished, but it might have been island dwarfism, which we think has also occurred recently in neolithic britain.
12:30
feb 13, 2023
obviously, i don't have any self-interest in seeing russian (i said russian, not chinese) drones or missiles infringe north american airspace, but actions have reactions and nato cannot act with impunity.
if we are going to do things like this, we should expect retaliation.
that is why we shouldn't do things like this.
the russians know damned well that the backwards ukrainians are not responsible for this.
0:17
based on what's being described about these objects, which is not much, i would not even consider it plausible that the chinese have the technological know-how to create them. china is growing quickly, but they are still china and china is still a long ways behind the west in terms of technology. the trajectory makes it clear that these objects at the least spent a large amount of time in russian air space, if they did not come from russia.
all evidence right now points towards the russians, but are there wild cards?
given that the objects are coming in via alaska, the only other conceivable potential launch points would either be in japan or be in outer space, itself. the only other countries with space stations are russia and china.
i have no inside information, i'm merely being logical. the assumption should be that these devices are russian, until it is demonstrated otherwise (if it's not true).
as stated, i do believe that the russians were sending objects into our air space for most of the cold war and that these objects form the basis of the ufo mythology in north america. i don't think we would shoot down spying apparatus; we would only shoot down drones or missiles.
the object shot down north of michigan was apparently heading towards an air base.
16:42
feb 14, 2023
there was a survey recently published that concluded that drugstore masks don't work well in protecting individuals from viruses, and it's being presented in the media as some kind of challenge to conventional wisdom.
if you looked at any study done before 2020, they would have unanimously rejected the premise that masks of that quality had any value in combating the spread of viruses. this was not a point of contention; the science was clear that such masks would not work in that setting, which is why higher quality masks were required by doctors. what those masks were engineered to do was minimize the amount of air pollution getting into the lungs. the difference between viruses and particulate matter has to do with particle size.
studies are helpful to confirm things, but this is a case where the outcome is so obvious that the mechanism makes empirical studies unnecessary.
size of virus: < 300 nm and usually much, much less than that.
size of pores in drug store mask: >80000 nm and usually much, much larger than that.
you can do the math and decide whether you think an empirical analysis is worthwhile or not. a mask is supposed to work by trapping very small items within it, but when the object you're trying to block is 250x smaller than the wall you're putting up to block it, you're operating strictly on luck. i'm being generous, even. if a virus is 50 nm and the pores in a cloth mask are 500000 nm (500 um), this is a factor of 10000. that mask is completely useless against that virus!
what happened after 2020 is that the pandemic introduced a substantive confirmation bias in the studies, as brought to us all by Government Science, which is insisting you take nonsense on faith because the state exists to protect you (lol) rather than control you. smart people realize that the pandemic was a really devastating red pill regarding not just the behaviour but actually the intentions of the state, as an entity that is really not remotely interested in the concept of truth as it devises ways to manipulate and control the population. they don't fucking care what's true and what isn't, at all; they care about finding ways to trick you into doing what they want you to do.
the future will look back at this period in befuddlement and amazement, as it tries to grapple with how so many educated people could be fooled into believing something as empirically debunked and mathematically obvious as the claim that drug store masks will protect you from a virus. the premise is utterly absurd, which is exactly why the state had to send brownshirts after the people challenging the narrative.
at this point, the government needs to give up on the bullshit and back off on the lies and focus on ways to try to rebuild public trust rather than continue to deflect, mislead and lie to people. nobody believes you anymore. the more you lie, the worse the outcome will be, not just for the state but for public trust in science, which is what i care about. i don't care if the state collapses, but i care deeply about the public's perception regarding the honesty of scientists. as an advocate of good science, it has been very painful to watch the state lie with such effortlessness, and cite such disingenuous science as it does so. restoring public trust in science by admitting the state was dishonest and by seeking an honest dialogue is paramount to the reestablishment of public trust in the advancement of actual science at the expense of Government Science.
this is the kind of paper that represented the status quo, pre-2020. it's an example of a massive consensus.
1:05
feb 15, 2023
i've been pointing out for years that the reason the winter models in eastern canada keep calling for what they call "classic canadian cold" (which means miserable, dark and bone-chillingly frigid) and keep getting milder and milder winters (in windsor, we have had a total of two weekends of winter and the average temperature has been hovering around 10 degrees celsius. it barely dipped below 0 (where water freezes) throughout the whole of january, even at night.) is that the models need to be rewritten to account for the climactic change of the warming atlantic ocean becoming the dominant regulating factor all the way to the great lakes.
a warmer atlantic is not a short term weather effect, it is a permanent and long term change in the climate. we've seen this several years in a row now and it's not going to change back. this is the new normal.
some years, the atlantic may temporarily turn colder and we may see colder years when that happens. this is likely to be correlated with the solar cycle, which drives ocean currents via magnetic forces (not via total solar irradiation). this is developing science.
it's precisely my point that it's developing science and that the models need to factor in the new normal of a much warmer (and increasingly warming) atlantic or they're going to keep getting it wrong every year.
the ocean currents in the pacific will continue to play some role in the weather here but the region is going to be increasingly dominated by the high effects of the local phenomena.
it's been four or five years in a row now that the meteorologists keep explaining that they got it wrong due to the anomaly of a warm atlantic ocean undoing the models, after i predicted that outcome in advance. it's time that they realize this is permanent climate change and adjust their models to compensate for it.
5:01
now, here's jagmeet singh trying to block a merger that will eliminate wasteful competition in the internet sector by citing debunked 19th century market theory nonsense (it is the competition that causes high prices, in general. competition only leads to lower prices when there is a new entry into the market because the established firms try to price them out. when a market is established, firms collude together to maintain high prices by forming oligopolies, they don't compete with each other to increase market share by cutting prices; competition in an established market between successful firms is completely irrational and to be avoided at all costs. this is economics 101, nowadays. the idea that competition reduces prices in a "free market" is what economics 101 professors are trying to teach you isn't true, and what you would only hear from a total economic illiterate. it's utterly ignorant of modern concepts of how economics work, and something you generally only hear from the extreme right.).
i would support this merger because combining services should reduce operating costs, which should in theory reduce prices. those savings may not be passed on, but there would be little reason to expect prices to increase due to the merger (besides the obsolete 19th century theory) and empirical studies are overwhelmingly clear that that is almost never what actually happens when firms merge in real life. it make no sense to waste resources on competing over access to transmission networks; there should be a single state-run monopoly on transmission towers, which should be administered the same way we administer publicly owned roads.
the reason our prices are high is not due to a lack of competition (which is an incoherent idea), it's due to the difficulty in maintaining an expansive network in a region with low population density. the only way to avoid those costs is for government to absorb them via nationalizing the lines. so long as we expect private corporations to run private lines across a massive country with more trees than people, costs will necessarily be high.
it is unlikely to make a tremendous difference, but anything that consolidates delivery should reduce costs, not increase them.
6:30
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was introduced as a response to the increasingly efficient organisations that started to develop around the turn of the late 19th century. Contrary to the standard rhetoric around monopolies, standard oil reduced the cost of petroleum significantly. It was not the ability to increase fees that made enemies and political attacks against these large organisations, rather it was their ability to deliver better quality products to many consumers at a rate far less than the previous industry mean value.
7:04
in a socialist economy, where the means of production are held in common by the people, we would not seek to restrict firms from merging but would rather organize all economic activity in the form of state monopolies tasked with the goal of providing goods and services to the people at cost and distributed via need. attempts to force firms to compete via government dictate are not "progressive", they are reactionary and backwards.
7:07
if you put aside the theoretical limitations of the debunked 19th century market theory, access to wireless or cell networks is not a good application of that theory, regardless. first, the barriers to entering the market are substantive - you have to build a transmission network and that's extraordinarily expensive. if you're not building the network, you're paying to use lines that are owned by your competitors. in practice, the more competitors that exist in the market, the more fees will exist (necessarily) to use lines owned by other parties. crucially, you're also paying the salaries of multiple executive boards to do the same thing, which is a major cause of high prices; combing two or more executive boards into one should reduce operating costs dramatically, which might reduce prices.
due to the high operating costs, price wars will just place firms into debt, meaning that trying to offer a low price isn't a sustainable tactic. my isp is teksavvy because i'm on a grandfathered plan with a low access speed and a low cost and they're constantly on the brink of collapse because what they're trying to do makes no economic sense.
you hear this in canada all of the time, that costs are high due to a lack of competition, but it's really the basest kind of ignorance. if we really wanted to seriously reduce costs, we'd want to monopolize the lines and allow the state to absorb the costs via corporate taxation. there's no escape from the basic fact that it is always going to be expensive to use an system with high operating costs that is necessarily sparsely utilized due to low density; there's no market solution to this, and all you're going to demonstrate is market failure by trying.
anything that leads to more consolidation and less private networks will benefit consumers.
7:34
there has apparently been over 60 "mass shootings" in the united states already this year, on feb 15th. there are hundreds of such occurrences in the united states every year.
this is not random gun violence; this is somebody showing up in a public place and randomly opening fire on random people for reasons that are difficult or impossible to ascertain.
the democrats want to ban guns, which doesn't in any way address the problem. the republicans want people to have more guns so that would be victims can defend themselves, which is in insane.
i'm going to ask a different question. these shootings repeatedly occur in the same way, as though the shooters have been trained to carry out a template. they frequently target minority groups that usually don't pose any specific harm to the general population (i cannot offer a blanket condemnation on attacking churches or mosques, as these are institutions of violence and that kind of activity has historically been necessary as a means of self-defense against the spread of hate, intolerance, state control and authority in the guise of religion. colonialism always sends the religious explorers out as the first line of attack, to try to brainwash the population being targeted for takeover. we may need to carry out a full scale attack on religion and the religious again, and we may need to do it soon; we will likely need to continue periodic mass purges of the religious until religion ceases to exist altogether. we should not enjoy doing this, but we must realize the imperative of defending ourselves against the virus of religion, as the consequences of allowing ourselves to be infected are too likely to be fatal to not take seriously.). what if this observation of the existence of order has some value to it?
is it possible that the mass shooter phenomenon in the united states is actually organized and is actually a form of state terror?
i ask this with the awareness that the longstanding disappearance of indigenous women in western canada is clearly the result of state actions, and that everybody that has looked into the facts around the situation has concluded that they are being targeted to prevent them from breeding in an act of state orchestrated genocide, although we have yet to receive disclosure on this and may never get it. the government just buries any commissions. it will never admit that it has been and is continuing an intentional genocide against young indigenous women by disappearing them at the age of fertility, and it is not reasonable to suggest it ever will. somebody will need to find some documents somewhere, and that may be difficult to impossible.
there are two reasons i can hypothesize that a state would carry out a terror operation of continual, random mass shootings on it's own population. the first is to carry out a targeted genocide, but that seems less obvious when looking at the american data; black women are not targeted the way that indigenous women are in canada. the second and more likely motive would be to keep the population in a state of perpetual fear, in order to maintain a certain state of political conditioning. it's a sort of pavlovian conditioning, to minimize opposition to bald grabs for state power. pynchon explores this in the first section of gravity's rainbow, as he discusses the effects of the v2 rockets on the english population during the second world war.
i am merely speculating.
at what point does a pattern, when repeated independently, begin to show strong suggestions of a designer, in this case the intelligence apparatus of the state?
11:27
feb 16, 2023
i agree that it is not fair that there is a special tax for marijuana producers that alcohol and tobacco producers don't have to pay.
the government should also enforce an excise tax on alcohol and tobacco products.
likewise, i would encourage the united states to also tax empty properties on their side of the border, even if the infrastructure problem is not yet as profound, there. while this is not the dominant cause of the problem (immigration has increased the number of people faster than the market or government have been able to accommodate), there is simply not enough housing available to facilitate the unnecessary bourgeois luxury of transiting back and forth between houses that are left empty half of the year.
canada does not respect the primacy of property rights, nor should it - that was a crazy american scheme that is one of the worst ideas in the history of the world. the social needs of society are paramount; bourgeois property rights are worthless.
there should even be a law that prevents individuals from owning more than one property and prevents corporations from owning more than 5.
6:11
in fact, it would be this article at the national observer that is canadian state propaganda, created wholesale by canadian intelligence agencies like csis and the rcmp, to discredit supportable facts and empirical observations by smearing them as "russian propaganda".
the use of provocateurs, for example, is not a "russian trope", it is a well documented tactic deployed by capitalist governments going back to bismarck, who invented it to round up and imprison the socialists trying to remove him from power. bismarck was a tyrannical despot with no democratic legitimacy who deserved to be hung in the public square, like mussolini was; it is telling that capitalist governments everywhere have developed their state repression tactics primarily by copying his vicious and barbaric attacks on the german socialist movement. the qpp actually admitted to the use of provocateurs at the montebello summit, when the protesters in the crowd identified one and stripped off his clothing to reveal army fatigues. there's a video of it floating around, but here is the article of the cops admitting it:
when an article attempts to discredit supportable facts and empirical evidence by smearing them as "russian disinformation", you can be sure that that site is merely acting as a front to disseminate state propaganda by the relevant government, which is in this case the government of canada.
the reality is that this was a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens that were legitimately concerned about their rights being actually trampled. unfortunately, they directed their protests towards the wrong level of government - the federal government authored almost none of these restrictions - but they were trying to get their point across abstractly rather than concretely and they were successful in doing so. they will be remembered as being on the right side of history, against a tyrannical state enforcing heavy-handed, evidenceless restrictions on individual freedom in the name of science, despite the science not supporting a single one of them. history will roundly condemn justin trudeau as a pathetic dictator, and a man of low moral stature and lower intelligence. he may even go down in history as the man that led canada into the end stages of a failed state, but it is too early to state that.
nonetheless, might the russians have tried to co-opt this spontaneous movement of concerned citizens?
the article doesn't present any convincing evidence of such a thing, but rather recycles canadian state propaganda that anti-statists on both the left and the right are well aware of, while adding some new smears about this qanon thing. i can state with clarity, without being there, that the qanon people were the cops; that is exactly the kind of thing the cops do. the operator of the global research site, michel chussodovsky, is (or was. he's very old.) an economics professor at the university of ottawa and was very vocal during the alter-globalization movement. you might critique his articles, but he's an academic and his motives are to advance his academic positions. the idea that he's a russian agent is a baseless smear authored by people that don't want to argue with him (or can't argue with him) about his economics. he would not support the economic system embraced in recent years by the kremlin. at all. i have never heard of the other site.
it wasn't that long ago that it was the right-libertarians, themselves, that accused everybody of being a russian spy, in a plot to institute a one world government (through the united nations). today, the new bircherite mccarthyism is being peddled by the bourgeois left, and the target is the remnants of the old bircher movement. it is surreal, but we live in the era of orwell.
the takeaway is that you should not take this site very seriously because it's just spewing debunked canadian government propaganda.
12:24
12:46
“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”
just like the good old days, huh?
the objects were clearly russian and were probably quite dangerous. we don't normally shoot down weather satellites or spy balloons. if they were corporate devices, somebody would identify them as belonging to them and ask for compensation (this would be an expensive mistake!), which is not the case.
stay calm and keep shopping.
18:20
feb 17, 2023
this is not surprising, but it's not convincing, either, and it doesn't mean anything.
it doesn't change what the facts are or how the situation will be evaluated, in history; it merely demonstrates the corruption of the state.
14:19
the primary war aim of the pentagon in creating this mess has always been to restrict the russians from projecting sea power by controlling crimea. this is an ancient struggle that goes back to before the great game and before the start of the british empire, to venetian intrigue in the black sea, as it struggled against declining byzantine control of the bosporus.
the reason the united states is doing this is because it can; it saw a rival losing control over a strategic naval base and it moved to conquer it.
the russians have no choice but to reverse the balance of the conflict, and it seemed like they understood that for a while in their operations in syria, but they seem so incredibly naive regarding western attitudes. the russians don't understand why we hate them; it baffles, hurts and confuses them.
some tactical naval bases that the russians may want to focus on shifting the struggle towards would include the bosporus and dardanelles, gibraltar, the suez canal and red sea, the malacca straits, gotland, the north sea and the persian gulf. these are aspirational targets, but the point is that they need to get out of the defensive and put the americans on the defensive, instead.
america will not stop in it's harassment.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/17/ukraine-wont-militarily-retake-crimea-top-democrat-00083492
15:46
feb 18, 2023
could marianne williamson take a run at biden?
i'm continuing to struggle to understand the motives of the actors that are manipulating events around me, and i continue to believe i'm being drugged against my will. i'm going to clarify a specific point for the reason that i have some clues that the actors that are manipulating events around me are confused and require some clarification. i've done this on a number of occasions.
the difficulty that the left of the democratic party has been facing in recent cycles is that it can't get black people to vote for them; the black vote in the south is not just moderate, it is monolithic. they vote in blocs and they want candidates that have a conservative veneer to them, at the least. they are highly suspicious of anybody that presents themselves as 'progressive', which is a code word that means 'racist' to many african-africans, and this is historically correct - the progressive movement was primarily a racist reaction to the south losing the civil war and the progressive era was responsible for the american eugenics movement, which attempted to breed certain characteristics out of american blacks via forced sterilization, incarceration and other tactics.
no single person could possibly be more popular with black women than oprah.
it is exceedingly unlikely that she will win, but she is actually the ideal candidate to take biden on one-on-one and i would actually expect her to give him a scare. there is going to be a substantive "not biden" voting bloc in the democratic party, and all it needs to get some traction is support from black women, which is something that nobody can figure out how to generate.
to be clear: i find the woman frightening because she speaks frequently of mysticism and spiritual mumbo jumbo. this is a red flag; it is disqualifying language. she's an unacceptable candidate for high office. i am no fan of joe biden, but i would support joe biden over marianne williamson.
14:20
(again - this is the perfect example of the abject stupidity of the unwanted editor. i'm trying to explain something to them that would help them better understand why they're wrong, and instead of shutting the fuck up and listening, they try to distort the meaning in real time. there's no use in communicating with retards; these people are too stupid to understand why they're stupid.)
the fundamental problem is that these people, who seem to be some kind of police psychologists, are very bad at evaluating evidence. they are not very good at logic, as psychologists tend not to be. psychologists are generally flat out idiots, for the reason that they are taught to use poor reasoning skills in their vocational training. instead of evaluating situations by looking at multiple possibilities and weighing the likelihood of each, they repeatedly jump to specious conclusions based on flawed assumptions of "human nature" and as a result repeatedly derive incorrect outcomes.
psychology is best defined as organized specious deduction. it is not a science and does not even adhere well enough to logic to be described as bad philosophy. psychology is charlatanry and sophistry, pure and outright.
a couple of years ago, before the pandemic, back when i frequently went to concerts, i used to post show reviews in this space that took on the form of narrating adventures. why did i write those reviews?
the primary reason that i wrote the show reviews was that i have an interest in documenting my life for future historians that are interested in my art. this site is a personal journal; i know that some actors think the site is something else, but it is not. it is not a particularly perplexing conundrum to understand why somebody may narrate their life occurrences in their journal, even as the technology around journal keeping and journal writing has dramatically changed over the last 20 years.
the secondary reason that i wrote the show reviews was as a form of marketing for my own art. in the contemporary reality of post-modernist late capitalism, where everything is irrational, it is personalities that people "identify" with that define how people interact with art, rather than the art itself. the art is the music, but people are unlikely to care much about music, as music, in contemporary reality; people lack the attention span and the intellectual capacity to appreciate sound as an art form because they lack the quality schooling and raw intelligence to understand how to do so. people relate to music via stupid, shallow things like clothing and hair style, as well as is via gender expression or skin colour. this is not a positive reflection on the existing culture and the kind of scatterbrained idiots that capitalism has left us as, but it is the truth of it. i decided at some point that i was more likely to draw attention to myself by narrating my existence in a series of adventures than i was by recording music and uploading it to the internet, even as the purpose of drawing attention to myself was always to draw attention to the music.
i have now clarified that the two reasons i wrote the show reviews were for historical documentation and for marketing my music in contemporary reality. however, this is not actually the point i want to make.
i've become cognizant that these police psychologists are obsessed with how i narrate how i interact with cis-women in the show reviews, for the reason that they think they can draw some kind of specious deductions from the narrations. it is true that there are frequent narrations of my interactions with cis-women, and it would be easy to jump to conclusions and draw specious deductions by not thinking the presentation through very carefully. what is the actual reality?
the simple, basic truth is that i have documented these interactions for the reason that they actually happened. if something else had happened, i would have documented that instead; what is documented is documented for the simple reason that it is what occurred. while i have chosen to avoid documenting some interactions, the actual truth is that every single interaction that has been documented in this space did actually happen and that the narrations, as presented, are as close to my memory as i can remember them, which is what the purpose of documenting them actually is. i am really simply documenting my life as i remember it happening by narrating it in the form of a series of adventures and i am doing so strictly for the aforementioned historical and marketing reasons. the interactions with ciswomen that are documented are documented for the simple and singular reason that they are what actually happened during the adventures being narrated, and that is all. really.
i am getting closer now to the point i want to make. it should be noted that, while i frequently take note of the fact that ciswomen repeatedly hit on me when i'm out an adventures, there is in fact never any implication that those advances lead to actual romantic or sexual encounters for the reason that my adventures are intended to document what actually happened and the simple fact is that there never actually was any romantic or sexual encounters to document. if such encounters had occurred, they would have been documented; they are not. anybody reading between the lines and inserting the existence of romantic encounters would simply be making a mistake; that implication is simply, bluntly not there. the actual truth is that i have not had sex with anybody at all since the mid 00s, which was years before i moved to windsor. i have turned down sexual advances from both genders since i've moved to windsor, and at one point also had to turn off a transfemale that was hitting on me in detroit. the actual truth is that i have not had any kind of sexual or romantic encounter with any of the ciswomen that i documented hitting on me when i was out on adventures, nor have i in any place ever stated or implied that i did.
facts aside, is it reasonable for a reader to decide that i was trying to imply i was having romantic encounters with large amounts of ciswomen? the term that toxic masculinity uses to describe this is "over-compensating", which is defined as a less dominant male that is trying to project a false image of their sexual prowess in order to inflate their ego. i am certainly not very dominant, there is no question about that. yet, facts about what the show narratives actually say aside (claims of sexual or romantic encounters are simply not present in the reviews), is there any actual reason for anybody to think i was trying to inflate my ego?
no. the narration always indicates where i walked away, or went somewhere else; there is never any implication of meeting up later for the reason that meeting up later never happened. i'm actually constantly trying to escape. any person that has read my show review adventure narratives and concluded that i was trying to project myself as sexually active is really merely demonstrating poor reading comprehension abilities and jumping to purely specious deductions; there is nothing in the narratives that says anything remotely like that, at al.
i've arrived at the point i wanted to make. the actual truth is that the way i narrate my interactions with cis-women in my show review adventures is actually always to mock them for hitting on a transwoman, who is frequently standing before them in revealing lingerie type clothing, with bleach-blonde hair and wearing large amounts of skanky make-up. the reason this is repeatedly narrated is simply because it repeatedly happened. what i am doing is reflecting to myself that it is comical to me that there are ciswomen everywhere i go that don't fucking get it, and that i have to repeatedly make fun of for hitting on me. i then, without exception, turn down their advances and reassert my queerness in doing so.
if there is some kind of a "projection" here for a psychologist to deconstruct, it would be that what is being projected is my queerness and that the reason i'm projecting it is that i'm somewhat insecure in it. in repeatedly rejecting the advances of ciswomen (and i'll reiterate that everything in these narratives actually happened. these are reflections. this is not fiction writing.), i am affirming my queerness in the face of ciswomen rejecting it, and broadcasting it to the historical record, to frame my sexuality the way i want it to be framed. i want to frame my sexuality to my future listeners in the way i've defined it, not in a way that others might define it.
this shouldn't be necessary for me to clarify, as there shouldn't be police psychologists trying to manipulate situations around me. alas.
18:31
(again - this is the perfect example of the abject stupidity of the unwanted editor. i'm trying to explain something to them that would help them better understand why they're wrong, and instead of shutting the fuck up and listening, they try to distort the meaning in real time. there's no use in communicating with retards; these people are too stupid to understand why they're stupid.)
19:41
feb 19, 2023
i'm continuing to build the video list and people that think i'm trying to advance a specific position for gain (rather than seek out multiple perspectives and develop a synthesis in order to arrive at a concept of truth) may become confused as to where i stand on a number of issues for the reason that i do actually watch and post videos from multiple and disparate perspectives, which is rare in the existing media landscape where everybody is picking a rigid position and pushing it without concession because they want to maximize profit by selling a political view to identify with. the insistence on bias in internet media is really a function of the need to try to corner a user base, as what was once news media degenerates into a type of video game. contemporary news media sells identity politics for click bait.
i want to answer a specific question: what do i think about alexandria ocasio cortez? in fact, i say almost nothing about her in this space and i am both posting videos critical of her and also posting videos of her speaking directly to the list. that would not be consistent with somebody advancing an agenda.
the truth is that i didn't choose the topic of discourse and the fact that there's any videos of her or about her at all is a reflection of decisions made by biased media sources, not decisions made by myself. i have come across both perspectives as i navigate the media landscape, so i've posted both. i am not trying to advance any specific argument so much as i'm trying to document the media i've consumed; my own opinions and analysis will never be reflective of any specific source, but will always be arrived at by analyzing multiple disparate perspectives and authoring my own position via reflection, research and analysis. what conclusion have i come to about this person?
i actually have not formed any sort of substantive opinion about the woman and almost never post anything at all about her for the reason that she's not of any actual relevance or any actual importance. she is an entry level house member in an uncompetitive district that has never authored any legislation and is frankly unlikely to author any legislation any time soon. her relevance as a congress person is nil and it is unlikely that that will ever change. i don't post anything about her because there's nothing to post about; she's never done a single thing worth analyzing.
you'll note that i talk more frequently about kyrsten sinema for the reason that she is actually relevant and has actually made a substantive legislative contribution to left-wing activist issues, which is why they're trying to get rid of her.
if alexandria ocasio cortez is entirely irrelevant, what exactly is the reason that she has generated so much press about herself? the answer to the question is the question itself. while she has never written any legislation and likely never will, that is not of much importance to her financial backers, who use her as a way to generate an online user base to sell advertisements to. stated tersely, she's a media star for a clique of fake left media outlets that want something to cover and so have fabricated her as a story of substance in order to give themselves something to write articles about. if you were to only read the fake left media, you would be left to conclude that this is a person of great importance, which is just the point, but the truth is that it's an information bubble for the users of the fake left media video game to buy into and nothing more or less. she is of no relevance to anybody outside of that bubble and never will be.
should she and her young clique of friends decide to author some actual legislation, i may feel compelled to say something about it. until then, i would expect the silence to continue. there's simply nothing to analyze.
i would suspect that she'll likely resign her seat within a few years to take a job as a media analyst for msnbc (she might be a good pick as a host for 'the view'), without having ever authored any substantive legislation at all.
0:38
there was a viewpoint articulated in the last century by people like isaac asimov and bertrand russell, as well as more recently by richard dawkins, that the state should be administered by scientists for the reason that scientists are the people most qualified and most appropriately positioned to administer the running of society. a lot of people might not realize it, but this actually fundamentally a marxist position.
unfortunately, it was a mistake.
(note to the unwanted editor: when i say "government", i mean direct democracy. government is defined as the will of the people, which is in direct contradiction to bourgeois representative government, which is the dictatorship of capital. we don't live in a democracy and we don't have a government, we live in a state under the control of the dictatorship of capital. i am in favour of government, and opposed to the state. when i say "the state". i mean the nexus of bourgeois capitalist interests that control the machinery that monopolizes power, through a tyranny of force. justin trudeau heads the canadian state, but he is not a member of the canadian government because there is no legitimate government of canada; we have a state, we do not have a government. the parliament of canada is a state, it is not a government. "the state" and "the government" are not just not synonymous, they are antonyms, in use. this is standard anarchist terminology. stop replacing my use of "the state" with the term "the government", as the terms mean the exact opposite things and when i say "the state" i never mean to say "the government", and vice versa. anarchists seek to abolish the state and replace it with a government.)
the state cannot be trusted to interpret science for the reason that it is inherently tyrannical; the state will inevitably merely use science as a tool of control, the same way that it has utilized religion in the past. this does not absolve religion of it's historical "sins", but what we have learned recently is that the idea that you can build a better society by simply plugging in science in place of religion missed the point about the fundamental brutality of the state. religion is evil, surely, but it has no power when separated from the state, and the state can always come up with something else, like science, to use to control people in it's place; while religion is a tool of violence to be used by the state, the root cause of the violence is the existence of the state, itself. those of us that have been so concerned about minimizing the power of religion are running up against a hard truth that we should have been more focused on reducing the power of the state, which is now using science to oppress us, instead. we thought we won a great battle against the slavery of religion, only to wake up to realize we've merely transformed the colour of our chains.
we have long realized that there needs to be a separation wall between religion and the state to protect the state from the influence of religion and have perhaps forgotten that the religious organizations initially consented to that wall because they wanted to keep the state out of religion, as well. this latter concern may not be of much concern to modern people, except to realize it's applicability to the relationship between the state and science; we also need a separation wall between the state and science to prevent the state from corrupting science. asimov and his contemporaries were wrong in projecting a future where scientific socialism could run an enlightened state like a machine; the state will merely destroy scientific inquiry in it's thirst for dominance and control. nothing good can come from State Science. it may already be too late to avoid the onset of a dark age, where science is systematically destroyed to consolidate state power.
we need to leave the proper functioning of government (as we separate the government from the state) to liberal principles, leading into an eventual marxist bureaucracy and the abolition of the state altogether. science can only inform those liberal principles from a distance because it is the axioms of liberalism that must take priority over the dictates of (misinterpreted) science, in the realm of government decision making. the alternative is state totalitarianism, dominance and oppression in the name of science and widespread human misery.
16:15
feb 21, 2023
for the american president to walk into kiev and speak directly opposite to putin is an exceedingly provocative action that clearly demonstrates the scope of american intentions in ukraine.
the russians need to see the situation clear-eyed; the messaging from the americans is unambiguously clear as to what their intentions are and how they are going to behave in the future.
however, russia needs to take note of something before it attempts to defend itself from a major invasion from the west for the fifth century in a row and that is that it no longer outnumbers western europe. the population of the eu is now thrice that of russia. everything else aside, if this catastrophe once again reduces to a simple barbaric invasion in the literal sense of the word, russia is now the outnumbered party and could consequently see itself overwhelmed by sheer force.
of course, the chinese have a very large standing army and a lot of surplus people that they might even be eager to get rid of. that would be a tipping point. yet, this is just never how history unfolds - russia always tips the balance of power. some unforeseen turn of events, like a major nato defection, is a plausible thing to look out for to reassert the usual unfolding of history.
on it's face, however, russia is in danger of get out-russianed by a much more populous eu and it should be cognizant of that reality.
19:22
feb 22, 2023
comparing the roxham rd crossing to the large stretches of undefended fields, mountains and forests that separate canada and the united states is disingenuous. people periodically die trying to cross the farmer fields in the prairies, or may have to go on a substantive hike through a mountain pass guarded by cougars or grizzlies. roxham rd is a paved through way that you can literally take a cab across.
roxham rd is designated as an unofficial crossing due to the fact that it splits a community in half. unfortunately, such notions are now quaint and outdated. roxham rd should not be closed, exactly; it should be converted into an official border crossing, along with any other similar crossings that anybody can drive across, unimpeded. the time where such border access was reasonable is long passed.
this would make it more difficult for migrants to cross the border from the united states into canada, but the point of the agreement was to prevent such things. would be migrants to canada should respect process and follow the rules; canada should reject applicants that don't respect our laws.
in the united states, the primary concern that they need to address is the push factors, which are largely the result of american imperialism and the depravity of the horrific monroe doctrine, which must be abolished at once. american capital benefits from the influx of cheap labour, so it intentionally creates problems outside of it's borders by funding gangs and political despots in order to capitalize on the displaced labour. the very demagogues calling for tighter border controls are the same people responsible for driving people out of their homes and towards the border, where they can be captured as slaves and sent to work in factories.
in canada, the issue is not push factors but pull factors. people in underdeveloped countries have unrealistic perspectives of canada as an unpopulated utopia where they can go to find a "better life". in truth, most migrants find themselves worse off in canada than they are in their homelands, as they end up living in deep poverty and reduced to functional slave labour. canada is a very big country, but it is itself underdeveloped and we are facing a severe housing crisis as a result of overpopulation relative to lagging development and a political class that merely wants to drive down labour costs by importing as many low wage labourers as is possible, to emulate the exploitation in the united states and ultimately to maximize surplus value extracted from this labour force of functional slaves. people are not pushed into canada; people are drawn to canada by false promises, unrealistic stories and overzealous marketing. there should be an attempt by government to address the reality of seeking asylum in canada as a descent into poverty and slavery via a targeted marketing campaign,
this false hope of the "new world" as a place to escape civilization and have a "better life" is not new, although the boundary points have changed. there were studies done on italian immigrants to new york in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that demonstrated that the children of the migrants were actually a foot shorter than their relatives in italy, over the same period. the reason for this decrease in stature was due strictly to severe malnutrition. new york absorbed the huddling masses yearning to breathe free and reduced them to slavery, poverty and malnutrition. those italians would have been better off in sicily. what america received in the long run from this influx of italian migration was a serious problem in the form of organized crime, from desperate people trying to find a way to feed themselves and their children. these italian migrants were coerced into going to america for a "better life" and what actually happened was that they became so impoverished in america that their children had stunted growth and they had to turn to organized crime in a large scale response in order to feed their families and survive. capitalism requires slaves, and that is all that capital ever intended to use the migrants for.
the trends in canada don't suggest a different outcome here, with the caveats being that there is far less infrastructure here and a far less forgiving climate. the direction we're headed in is watching migrants freeze to death in hordes on the street, because there is nowhere to house them.
arguing that putting a fence up at roxham road won't solve the problem is disingenuous, but the broader point that the government needs to address the pull factors is not. there is a lot of false hope about canada out there, a false hope that will merely increase in delusion as the country sinks further into the consequences of overpopulation. these false hopes should be addressed by government in a marketing campaign to dissuade would be migrants from coming here to freeze to death.
15:13
i strongly support google's decision to block the mainstream media from their news aggregator and would encourage them to integrate more independent voices from bloggers and other non-corporate sources in their news search algorithm.
the reality is that the google news aggregator includes far too much mainstream media concentrated far too strongly in a pro-government bias and not a diverse enough number of perspectives from voices not aligned to state media, or voices that represent other states than the one the reader resides in.
i have no obligation to agree with my government and every right to seek out dissenting voices. google should use this catastrophe as an opportunity to stand up for free speech, in liberalizing access to a wider spectrum of views than those determined to be acceptable by state censors.
17:50
this deal is a catastrophe that is going to lengthen wait times dramatically and make it far more difficult to get access to basic care. the result is going to be overwhelmed hospitals, full of people that can't or (rightfully) won't pay out of pocket for necessary private services, along with easy access to luxury services for those with the financial resources to pay their way to the front of the line.
this is utter barbarism. it is a sad day to be a canadian.
we should all be embarrassed by this outcome and we will all suffer greatly for it. in some way we got what we deserve; this is what happens when you allow an aristocracy to take control of the state. the children of enlightened rulers are always contemptible idiots that utterly destroy the accomplishments of their fathers.
17:58
what can we do to fight trudeau's secret agenda to destroy the health care system?
boycott private health care businesses (even those paid for with public dollars, for now); make them take operating losses and force them to shut down.
18:01
if the university of british columbia - along with other institutions, like the local university here in windsor (which is very poorly regarded) - would build their own housing in the form of a couple of giant skyscrapers, it would do a great deal to alleviate the problem, as the influx of foreign students is one of the biggest factors sitting on rental supply and driving up costs. there's hundreds of thousands (almost a million!) of foreign students living in low rent housing in canada.
there are large swaths of windsor that will only rent to students of specific ethnic backgrounds. indians buy up houses and convert them into what are better called rooming houses than rental units; they'll put two or three people in a room, and they'll only rent to indians, as though anybody else would tolerate that. when i was shopping for a unit a few years ago, i ran across an indian renter that advertised a bachelor unit as a two bedroom apartment by arguing that the kitchen was a "room". worse, there was actually a family (two adults and a child) living in the kitchen when i want to go see it (and another family living in the living room).
if you could get these students out of the community and into skyscrapers on campus, that would be tremendously helpful. ubc is missing the point; instead of complaining about the law, they should be building more on-campus housing.
22:07
this is a relatively large facility by local standards (windsor has almost no tall buildings, although i have learned recently that there are larger residential towers in the east end), but it is still a small building for a handful of wealthy students and doesn't address the problem. this will not help at all.
there's apparently about 20,000 foreign students enrolled in the university here. most of them won't gain anything from the degree, if they even complete it; many will find jobs working in the restaurant sector, or even picking fruit in leamington, and then overstay their visa. yet, that's how many there are: about 20,000. the population of the windsor census metropolitan area, which includes windsor, lasalle, tecumseh, lakeshore and amherstburg, is around 350,000 people (a little less). windsor itself has a population of a little less than 250,000 people. this is south detroit, recall.
at 100 people a floor, and considering that 50 floors is very tall for an apartment building, you'd need to build four such buildings simply to house the international students in the city, and that number is not going to shrink.
the federal government should help them build it.
22:46
there's prime land on campus available for housing, too, they just need to get rid of that dilapidated old church and build the housing on top of it.
22:59
this is a picture of windsor facing detroit, on the north side of the river. you should recognize the renaissance center, which is the cluster of black buildings.
the university of windsor is in the cluster of buildings in the bottom of the picture. downtown windsor is the small cluster of buildings across the river from downtown detroit.
downtown detroit is actually pretty small, in comparison to other large cities i've been to. yet, you'll notice the absolute deficit of any sort of buildings in windsor, at all. it looks like a rice plantation.
windsor is not a small city, in terms of the amount of space it fills up, but it's population density is absurd and it needs to put a focus on building up. the university needs to be leading the way.
23:07
my understanding is that there used to be large buildings in windsor, but many were torn down due to disuse and not rebuilt due to depopulation. many of the fields in the middle of the city that can be seen in this photo used to be skyscrapers. i know that one of the big green spaces used to be a hospital. the university is one of the factors that is repopulating the city, so they need to be contributing to it's rebuilding.
23:20
feb 24, 2023
(edit: today, the retarded editor is systematically destroying this blog post by inserting awkward, complicated sentence clauses in place of the simplistic and guttural language which i prefer, in context. while i will often build complex sentence structures to express difficult ideas, i don't write in the form of repeated run on sentences, which is all the retarded editor is capable of producing in it's poor attempt to emulate my sometimes difficult to construct writing style; today, i do not want to write something complicated, i want to express simple ideas using short sentences and minimal amounts of punctuation. fuck off.
the editor doesn't fucking get it and isn't going to fucking get it but refuses to accept it and will not fuck off. how does one rid themselves of a worthless person like this?
to be clear: the second police report clarified that the officer did not intend to charge me when he arrested me on a hybrid offence without a warrant, which is arbitrary detention every single time. there is no other conclusion than that he arrested me to intimidate me. the law is very clear that he had to ticket me, not arrest me. the officer badly screwed up in admitting as much (i guess i kind of tricked him), and the opp then bafflingly published it. it make you wonder if the opp officer might have been ordered to do something he realized was wrong and gave me an out. the other option is really thorough incompetence. i should get the police to settle very quickly, i just have to go through the motions.)
i wanted to build a single comprehensive watched videos list and post it to the front page of the channel, but it became impossible to manage once it surpassed 700 entries. youtube makes you reload everything from the server every five seconds, so you're constantly spinning out in rebuilding caches; it's a design flaw in youtube's user interface, but they will aggressively argue it's a feature. i doubt it's even a speed issue on my slow connection, given that the actual bottleneck is on the relay back and forth from their many ad and bot servers.
due to the constant spinning and lagging, i had no choice but to split the master list up into a series of smaller lists organized by year watched, instead. what that means is that i can finish lists by year and put them aside. i didn't actually split the master list up until a few days ago. i've actually been spending the bulk of my time since mid-january compiling this list as a time filler as i've been waiting for the (not that. the. take a fucking grade school grammar course, you retard.) final windows 7 update to appear in .msu form (or was, initially. i've been making this list and checking it twice, over and over. i do that.) before i build a minimal automated windows 7 iso for the typing machine. i intended to spent much of the last month (month is singular) doing legal writing, but i've actually only spent a handful of days doing so, which is largely because i've had to readjust deadlines as the various cases further unfold.
i made a request for inherent jurisdiction on the karen report, and the case management judge made a complete fool out of himself in reacting to it. first, he claimed that the divisional court cannot accept inherent jurisdiction, which is just entirely wrong; then, when i proved he was wrong, he reversed himself by allowing for a restricted form of jurisdiction under the jrpa, as a way to save face for being completely dismantled and entirely made a fool of. now, a number of incorrect decisions by both this judge and the panel previous are piling up on themselves to back the court into a corner where it cannot make any decision at all without unraveling one of the previous mistakes; the court has made a number of stupid mistakes and now cannot proceed in the face of a number of it's own contradictions piling up on top of themselves. the court has tied it's own hands in a tangled web of error and contradictions resulting from it. i can hardly call the judge a buffoon to his face, so i have to instead remain sardonic, as i compile the mistakes made by the court into a series of farcical deductions (reductio ad absurdums, but presented as valid conclusions, sarcastically, and without telling anybody i'm being sarcastic). i'm an excellent asshole, and i can have fun with this, but it means i'm putting aside the other filings until i can get a better grasp of how the court is going to bullshit it's way out of this.
i wanted to ask the criminal court in windsor to criminally charge the karen with filing a false report (as that is the correct outcome for all karens everywhere - all karens must be incarcerated for filing false reports.), but the corrupt criminal court in windsor will not respond coherently to the application and i will need to try in a different jurisdiction, instead. the windsor court recused itself from the initial case because it had a conflict of interest. remember the judge that was gyrating all over the prosecutor during the ticket trial that i appealed (and currently has a permanent stay on)? she now has the same last name as the prosecutor, which was not the case previously. yes, the city's criminal court judge has married the city prosecutor. are you going to get a far trial in a court where the prosecutor is literally married to the judge? what a fucking joke. i won't be filing in that court, but i am intending on reporting the situation in order to get one or both of them removed. i'm baffled that this is seen as acceptable by windsorites; it's outrageous. however, i was able to coerce the human rights tribunal into restarting the human rights case against the karen by carrying out a bit of a stunt at the divisional court level, so i want to wait. i don't want to have the karen arrested and placed in jail the same week that i'm trying to sue her in human rights court.
the intent in requesting criminal charges against the karen for filing a false report is actually to flush out the identity of the witness in the case, a person named ryan. the issue in the case is that i sent a large number of rental applications to an individual named ryan, which the karen has admitted to falsely claiming were sent to her (and speciously whined to police about as "harassing"). however, i cannot get ryan to respond to any emails. ryan is almost certainly an employee that the karen hired to do day to day work for her property empire (she owns a large number of properties in the city, in addition to having once worked as a crown prosecutor) and is not responding for that reason. if the cops file charges against the karen for filing a false report, that will expose the identity of ryan, and allow me to subpoena him in the civil case. this is very heavy-handed, but i cannot think of a better tactic to flush ryan out from hiding, and i realize i will need to.
i want to at least get the arbitrary detention case ready to go, even if i don't file until next week or later. after the release of the second police report, i now have as much evidence as i'll ever be able to gather, as the cop has admitted that he was not intending to charge me when he arrested me (which is a smoking gun, legally - when you pull all the legal scraps together, he needed to intend to charge me to arrest me, or the detainment is arbitrary). i also want to get the re-application for inherent jurisdiction to rule directly ready, although i'm expecting that the justice will crack sooner than later and i won't have to actually do that. the next response from the justice is going to require him to accept that some error occurred in a past ruling due to the fact that the contradictions in the various previous rulings have tied his hands and prevented him from doing anything at all, but this is going to be an act of artistry in how he chooses how to bullshit his way out of it, and in which case he decides was a mistake. there are a number of paths he might pick.
it's only partly the justice's fault. the truth is that he's being an asshole because i'm being an asshole, but also that he needs to shut me down because i'm not a lawyer and i'm acting too much like one. the court is exceedingly dismissive of non-lawyers. it doesn't matter that i have a law degree, and it doesn't matter that i'm a logic machine and it especially doesn't matter that i have a mensa level iq - the absence of passing a bar exam means i have to be belittled and bullied and pushed around. i know how to outsmart a bully, but this is the part that is his fault, because he's been blinded by arrogance. however, the reality is that this legitimately is a difficult and confusing case and the precedent is legitimately that he's not supposed to do any thinking. he has badly screwed this up, but i grasp where he's coming from and his need to apply the precedent in as conservative a way as possible. this justice has a reputation for being an activist, but that's perhaps exactly why he's making errors in trying to be aggressively conservative - he's perhaps out of his element.
i don't know what he will decide to flip, but he will have to decide to flip something, otherwise the court will remain trapped in a corner that it cannot get out of. my job is to push him into the corner as aggressively as i can in order to force him to crack. it's dangerous, but i have no other tactic.
i intended to finish my february shopping on the 15th, which was a warmer day, and then do some legal work over the weekend. annoyingly, i couldn't find some key items like red peppers and kiwis at the closest stores, so i intended to go out early on the 16th to go on a longer walk to the further stores to find those items. unfortunately, it then rained early on the 16th and a cold front came in in the afternoon, which made it unpleasant to go on a long walk looking for kiwis. i then intentionally decided to skip the walk on the 17th due to the aforementioned cooler weather. i legitimately intended to go out for the walk first on the 18th and then on the 19th but i annoyingly kept missing the minimal time window to mail my taxes (the post office is only open a few hours a day on weekends) and so kept having to turn the day over to the next one. i was finally able to get out later on the 20th and frustratingly realized that everything was closed early on that day due to some made up bullshit government holiday; it seems as though everything closed early to prevent having to pay staff overtime, as everything was otherwise open. some holiday, right? what a pointless annoyance; they should just abolish it. at the least, there should be the option available to get time and a half, like any other holiday, rather than just be sent home early, and to prevent customers from being inconvenienced by what is in truth puerile, utter nonsense. i was left with the annoyance that i couldn't mail the package for that reason; i also realized that the store i wanted to walk to was closed before i even left. i was able to finally get out on the 21st and find the items i needed to find. i then intended to spend the 22nd cleaning and get to work in the 23rd but i lost the day because the power went out for about ten hours due to the freezing rain. i've been periodically adding to these lists during down times since the 15th and i've accidentally managed to disorganize myself, in the process.
i have realized that i can archive in the forward direction by using the search syntax (which previously did not work correctly), which will skip a step in the process, but also means that i'm starting over again from where i began in 2013. this has to be the last time i do this, but it also has to be the way it's done. i have to construct everything offline and upload it in iso format to payhip, i'm deciding. i keep posting here, but i know it's pointless.
what i want to do before i move to the forward direction is get the data out of the search histories for the various accounts because i don't want to log into the koala oversight committee account from this machine ever again. the focus is on clearing the watch list out, specifically.
is there any purpose to this? not explicitly, except that i want to do it.
i can post the 2023 list here (forwards and backwards) as it is now finished from jan 1, 2023 up to today. this list will keep building as i watch videos. i will rewatch some videos from past years, and these will be placed at the front of the list, but i will then shift back to the mit lectures.
in time, that will click over to the 2024 list and etc.
3:30
feb 25, 2023
what is the chinese intent in their tabling of a peace plan in the ukraine conflict?
the western media is trying to argue that the chinese are not neutral mediators, but they are not trying to mediate so that is an absurd strawman. certainly, the reason they acted this week is that they are concerned about the russians pulling out of start. however, i don't think that's what they're doing.
what china is doing is walking into the (not a. the. you don't understand grade school grammar; you are an uneducated idiot.) power vacuum created by the absence of any sort of global american leadership under the biden administration, which has abdicated it's role as global hegemon by getting bogged down in internecine warfare. all biden wants to do is play shoot 'em up and watch things go boom, as he funnels cash to his cronies in the defense industry. that is nothing resembling leadership, it is the definition of an absence of leadership. a global leader would be advocating for peace.
what the chinese have decided is that if america wants to abdicate it's leadership role as the global hegemon by participating in barbarism instead of asserting and implementing peace then they will walk into the vacuum and assume that role for them. the audience for such a piece of theatre exists in the underdeveloped regions of the global south, who will rightfully see america as small and petty for advancing war and china as wise and strong for advancing peace and side with china over america for that reason. which would you rather follow, the vindictiveness and pettiness of tribal warfare or the high-mindedness of global peace?
america is currently behaving like an overgrown child for that reason that it is currently led by one. if america wants to remain the global hegemon, it will need to start acting like one; otherwise, more mature societies will walk in and take it's place.
16:37
america can take it's big stick and lodge it up it's own ass.
16:56
this is truly comical.
there is a difference between being critical of russia and being pro-ukrainian. the left can be critical of russia, but it should not be supporting ukrainian nationalism and it should not be supporting the ukrainian government, not even remotely.
i have a suggestion for mr trudeau: if you believe in the cause of ukrainian nationalism so strongly, why don't you put on a ukrainian uniform (you're already most of the way there...), pick up a gun and go fight for them in the trenches?
23:29
feb 26, 2023
(edit: this post will not be published. i have made my point and will edit it offline later.)
my criticism of russia has been muted for the reason that i have slowly realized that the russians made a necessary if very painful decision to act pre-emptively. it is abundantly clear that nato was planning to conduct an offensive military operation against russia from a launching pad in ukraine, with the intent of dismantling the russian state. the reason this has become clear is due to the difficulty that the russians have faced on the ground in ukraine, which is empirically demonstrating that there are already nato forces in ukraine and russia is already at war against nato in ukraine. ukraine is a primitive, backwards draconian dictatorship that could not have withstood a russian attack, otherwise. the irony of the situation is that the harder this is for the russians the more it proves they were right and that if the russians somehow manage to actually lose the right it demonstrates that they should have done this in 2014. if you are kneejerking against this analysis, please think it through carefully.
the russian media presented the analogy of the russians sending troops into canada, but even that is not enough of a mindfuck; the better analogy is of the russians sending troops into texas. they had no real choice but to react.
now, that doesn't mean that the russians aren't doing bad things, but we know the ukrainians are doing bad things as well and should be careful to ensure we aren't deciding one side's crimes are worse than the others, as that is typical yankee imperialism. nor does that align the russian action in international law, although they did cite a clause before they invaded that does have some limited relevance and their contravention of international law is certainly not more egregious than american actions like the invasion of iraq. the difference is that the invasion of iraq was clearly an aggressive attempt to conquer a foreign country that legitimately posed no threat to america, whereas ukraine clearly did pose a substantive threat to russia (as empirically demonstrated by the unfolding of the war), who clearly was acting to pre-empt a larger conflict.
there's an old byzantine barbarian management strategy that says you can fight them here or fight them there. when faced with a hostile invasion force on russia's border, russia had the choice to fight them in russia or fight them in ukraine and chose to act first in fighting them in ukraine. yes, they broke international law in order to do that, and that is worth pointing out, but there are examples where it is necessary for a country to break international law in order to survive. if you legitimately believe that nato was planning to invade - and the evidence certainly backs up the argument very strongly - it becomes difficult to condemn the russians for acting pre-emptively, even if they end up losing, which just demonstrates they were right.
i'm refraining from criticizing the russians for these reasons, but i won't react poorly to a criticism of the russian invasion. yes, it is illegal, yes, bad things are happening. an analysis without context has obvious limitations, but these things are at least true.
what is seriously bothering me from fake leftists is not their criticism of the right-wing government in russia, it is their embrace of the even more right-wing government in ukraine and the even more right-wing paramilitaries fighting for ukrainian nationalism. any waving of the ukrainian flag or solidarity with fascist groups in ukraine is unacceptable and should be condemned in the most forceful terms possible. these groups are horrific, and anybody that supports them is aligning with the extreme right and defaulting their place in the left, in the process. i spit upon you - you disgust me.
in other conflicts between two bad actors that involve western imperialism on one side and some shit government on the other, the western left has shown the subtlety required to pick a left-leaning actor on the ground. in syria, for example, rejecting both islamic extremism and yankee imperialism meant standing with a largely secular leftist movement, which found itself forced to back assad to protect itself from the religious crazies backed by the saudis. in iran, we know how to back the people without supporting the government. the best reason i can come up with the difficulty we're having in finding an acceptable side to support in ukraine is a combination of ignorance about ukrainian politics and racism in the force of white supremacist identity politics. iranians are actually pretty white, but most of us don't know that; the ukrainians look like us, while the syrians o the libyans don't, so we drop our critical thinking filters.
ukraine is one of the areas in the world with a history of real self-government, and the donbass region is actually one of the very small number of areas in the world that is responsible for some anarchist experiments, coming from the tradition of bakunin and kropotkin. these anarchist communities existed before the spanish revolution and before israeli kibbutzes; they were crushed by teh red army in the aftermath of the russian revolution. the descendants of these people that were responsible for very early experiments in anarchism today live in the "people's republics" that declared independence from ukraine, by citing ukrainian attempts to stamp out their language and culture (and these claims are very grounded). is it possible to support the autonomy of the people in the east of ukraine without being co-opted by russia?
it is difficult, and i'm going to claim you can make the intellectual distinction but will inevitable find yourself supporting russian actions. it's certainly not like that 98% of crimeans voted to join russia, but it is nonetheless clear to all objective observers that the people in crimea do legitimately want to exist in russia. a leftist needs to put the autonomy of the people living in the war zone at the front of their position, not one imperial state or the other. i am not in this region, which the russians call novorussiya, and i cannot know how many wanted to actually rejoin russia and how many wanted to be an independent state in the russian sphere. i know that the people in the region legitimately wanted out of ukraine. i'm left to deduce the rest.
the fog of war makes discerning facts difficult, but the ideological lines of right and left are nonetheless very clear: some criticism of russia from the left is certainly warranted, but the left should have nothing but scorn for ukrainian nationalism and nothing but contempt for the ukrainian government. the left should be seeking to ascertain the desires of the russian-speaking population on the ground and give them a voice and then stand in solidarity with how they choose to organize themselves, whether it be in semi-autonomous regions on the boundary of russia or as direct provinces of the russian state.
the fog of war also makes it difficult to ascertain where the boundary between novorussiya and the western extend of polish civilization (called the borderland of poland, ukraine) really is. the russians have not yet attempted to control regions that are not russian-identifying, but it might. i will reserve my criticism of them for when or if that actually happens.
19:07
don't forget to put your hijab on before you quit drinking.
22:10
feb 27, 2023
i've pointed out repeatedly in this space that the classical models of perfect competition are ridiculous and that nobody has taken them seriously in decades. the content of a first year economics course in the 21st century is a careful, gentle process of unteaching classical economics because while it has permeated the culture and become a part of what people call "common sense" it is simply wrong. it is necessary to unteach these mistakes before the contemporary theory (which is more successful at predicting outcomes but is still a far cry from being a science) can be taught.
this article gets a little closer to a modern understanding of economics by discussing oligopoly (the major grocery chains do not compete with each other to attract consumers by lowering prices, that is ridiculous. that would benefit consumers, but how would it benefit shareholders? it wouldn't benefit shareholders at all. why would they do something so absurd and irrational? the truth is that they don't. rather, the major grocery store chains always avoid competing with each other as much as possible because competition is irrational. instead, they collude with each other to set prices high and keep them high, via communicating with each other behind the scenes. in fact, you might notice if you walk into these spaces that the stores themselves don't even set the prices or control inventory on items like dairy and bread, but rather merely rent floor space to the suppliers, who control their own space in the store. dempsters, kraft, etc will bring their products into the store, place them on the shelf, remove old items and then indicate what the price is to be set at to the store staff, who just write it down. the store merely rents out the physical space. it would be kropotkinist if it weren't for the price.), and it is broadly correct but it could do better by bringing in the machinery of game theory.
price setting is a game of chicken played by buyers and sellers (i'm avoiding the term producer). sellers set the price as high as they possibly can and then dare the buyer to avoid paying it. whether the buyer has a choice or not is defined by the elasticity of the demand, which is itself defined by factors like the existence of alternative products or the necessity of the good. if buyers keep buying, sellers keep increasing the price. while a seller will need to pay all associated costs to generate surplus value, price setting itself has nothing to do with input costs, besides it being a minimum floor; the price set on the good is always the highest possible price that the seller can get away with setting it, and is always determined empirically by experimenting with it.
this is why i started flipping out when the media started setting an expectation for inflation. printing money doesn't create inflation (i consider the bank's technical push back on that issue to be a deflection; the bank did print a lot of money, and it was right to do so and should not have stopped doing it), and input costs will only increase prices if consumers will allow for it; it is only the expectation that cost increases are inevitable that gives sellers the cover they need to hike the price up and say "i dare you not to buy it". it is the media that creates inflation or deflation by deciding it will or won't happen because price setting is a game of psychology and not an accounting process (primarily).
it follows that prices keep increasing for the simple and singular reason that people keep paying the higher prices, when they're set. if loblaws is halting price increases, the sole reason could only be because it is seeing decreases in sales and is worried that it is going to have to start throwing things away. i would expect the items that consumers can do without (and have high elasticity of demand) to start coming down in price, while items that have kept selling will keep going up. this might lead to a decrease in the inflation rate and an increase in most people's bills.
that said, grocery consumers have the inevitability of food spoilage on their side and will always win this game of chicken if they stand together, in solidarity, against the sellers. i was out last week and bought a large amount of avocados on sale because they had been marked too high and were starting to turn. likewise, cheese always goes on sale. buy it in bulk when it does.
while i have certainly seen regular prices spike, the fact that i mostly eat fresh produce means that i haven't actually seen prices stay high, here in windsor. they try to hike the price, but they can't; everything ends up back on sale, eventually, because it just rots if they don't put it on sale.
it can be hard to avoid buying things; sometimes it is because you're undoing brainwashing via advertising and sometimes it is because you legitimately need to buy an item. however, the only way we will win this game is if we stand together in solidarity with one another against the sellers and force them to reduce prices or take losses. if they're going to hike the price, make the food rot; wait to buy everything until you see it go on sale.
https://financialpost.com/news/economy/canada-grocery-oligopoly-dulled-competition-fuelled-inflation
21:00
the chinese have apparently tried to infiltrate the liberal party of canada using a spy with the name of "hung dong".
it makes you wonder what kind of intelligence they have on justin trudeau.
22:19
(just wait until hung dong hears about this!)
22:26
ok, ok.
22:27
feb 28, 2023
i finally got the case management judge to back off. great. rather than implode in a fiery set of contradictions, he just kind of wandered away, bewildered; after a lengthy pause, and without resolving any of the problems he created, he suggested the parties follow the rules instead of his direction. well, i don't actually remember asking him for his opinion.
i can (and need to) get some documents filed in the next few days, now.
19:48
radiohead used to be a good band, really. unfortunately, over time, it turned into a retarded guy mumbling over a piano that he didn't actually know how to play and a lot of pretentious idiots decided it was "deep".
22:45