putin should offer to release the wall street journal journalist in exchange for julian assange.
0:26
i don't even have a driver's license, and they're sending me $500/yr on a carbon tax rebate, in addition to another $250 to supplement the $750 they've already sent me for inflation, just in case you thought some of that carbon tax money should be used for inflation.
by saturnalia 2023, they'll have given me nearly $2000 to compensate for what is around $25/month worth of grocery inflation.
i've actually started a savings account for it.
7:32
april 2, 2023
this is an obscene violation of press freedom and western governments should put pressure on algeria to release this dissident, immediately.
likewise, this is outrageous and bangladesh should be roundly condemned by western capitals for it's total absence of press freedom. future foreign aid to bangladesh should be made reliant on the government implementing reforms for freedom of the press.
these are examples of actually repressive states that actually don't respect press freedom.
conversely, russia has every right to jail people that are obviously conducting espionage against them and america should fully expect to give up something - like julian assange - in exchange for the return of their apprehended asset.
20:58
april 3, 2023
i want to explicitly state that i am neither much like a gay man nor much like a gay woman; i am neither of these things, but am rather a celibate transfemale that has not had sex with anybody at all (by personal oath) in almost 20 years and would identify as a heterosexual female if forced to pick a category. however, i would prefer to not be categorized and to not pick a sexual orientation at all (it seems pointless to have a sexual orientation when you never, ever have sex and have no interest in or desire to have sex in the future) and identify as celibate and asexual, instead. i use the broad label of "queer" rather than anything more specific.
the science does not support the claim that sexual orientation is genetic or fixed; the educated scientific perspective about sexual orientation is that it is fluid, changeable and up to the individual's choice to express or not express. nor is sexual orientation binary; sexual orientation is a spectrum, and people can and do exist at any point along it, and can change their position within it many times throughout their lives. the entire concept of sexual orientation as a distinct category is itself a recent and poorly defined victorian moralism that should be discarded along with other imprecise and obsolete victorian moral ideas like race. people can self-identity how they want, we have freedom of assembly and association, but there isn't actually any such thing as "sexual orientation", it's a false dichotomy designed to place people in a forbidden category in order to punish them for subversive behaviour. the term "homosexual" was invented as a diagnosis for a psychiatric condition to describe a tendency to engage in same-sex sexual behaviour, with the intent of developing a cure for it. before that, in the distant past, the old abrahamic religions once punished what they called "unnatural behaviour", they didn't erect a category for people that engaged in it; that was something new that came out of the era of victorian moral panic and that only became wrongly embedded in science via the intellectual disaster of eugenics. the more recent idea of sexual orientation as inborn or innate variation is chomsky-esque pseudoscience. i am therefore comfortable using the terms celibate and asexual together, as a cohesive part of an integrated choice to refrain from sexualized behaviour because i've decided that i'm intellectually disinterested in it. i'm bluntly just not into it; i'd rather stay in and read or make art by myself.
i am definitely more like a gay man than i am like a gay woman; at the least, i would share the point in common with gay men that i am primarily attracted to male bodies rather than female bodies. that, however, has little meaning or relevance. it's worth pointing out that the singular female i have had a relationship with was a competitive rower with a basketball scholarship - she was a visibly muscular, very physically strong and noticeably built young woman that could easily defeat me in an arm wrestle and was very proud of her six-pack abs. she was also extremely aggressive with me to start and there wouldn't have been a relationship if she hadn't been aggressive with me.
so, if you have to, you can compare me in your mind to a no-longer-quite-so-young michael stipe, for the length of time that is required for me to grow my hair back. i would not be offended by the comparison. in fact, he would be my single biggest musical influence, which is a point that isn't obvious until pointed out, and then becomes overwhelmingly obvious once it has been. by extension, you might then compare my buddhist-like austerity to that of ian mackeye, who was in turn a dominant influence on michael stipe. this is one of the lines of influence that i'm referencing when i call myself a punk.
the label of punk has unfortunately entered into the realm of the meaningless, as it has been claimed and co-opted by virtually every imaginable musico-political ideology. when i use the word punk, i mean a tendency that primarily asserted itself in the early 1980s as a reaction against the bourgeois hedonism of 70s rock music in order to replace it with the reclamation of rock music as an agitprop vehicle for working class struggle, which in hindsight was pretty naive but was at least worth a try as a way to organize the lumpenproletariat into a force to march against capital. this use of the term punk implies something that is anarchist, socialist, vegan, straight-edge and celibate in abstraction if not always in practice. i have not always held to all of those lofty ideals as an individual, even as i've always felt ideologically aligned with them and always tried to hold to them in principle. in recent years, i've actually been closer to actually living all of those ideals than i ever was previously; for example, this is not the first time i've lived through lengthy stints of many years without the use of any alcohol or drugs at all, but the difference is that i might legitimately hold to it, this time. this time, it feels more and more like a conscious choice and less and less like just living through pragmatic reality.
i am, in fact, a transfemale that had split ends that could not be fixed and that had no other choice but to shave my head in order to start over clean. that is the objective, empirical fact. my hair is going to grow back and it's going to grow back longer and sexier than it ever was. i have actually recently increased my estrogen dosage (again) and when the hair does grow back it's going to look great, as the results of the orchiectomy continue to finalize the structural part of the transition, which is the hard part that often requires surgery.
in the meantime, if you have to, if you insist on it, i will not be angry with you if you interpret me as the early 80s hardcore punk that i've always had inside of me, for the short period of time that it takes for me to grow my hair back. i'm an empiricist. further, it might even be helpful to lay that down in order to undo and reject the misinterpretation of me as some kind of 80s hair metal idiot, which i am aware of and distinctly bothered by. it is overwhelmingly frustrating to me, as a punk rock transwoman, to be misinterpreted as a guns 'n' roses fan because i happen to be pretty with blonde hair and happen to be able to play the guitar relatively well. that is something that angers and frustrates and saddens me to no end. i am culturally diametrically opposed to everything that that misinterpretation stands for and couldn't sit in the same room as that false projection of me for five minutes without berating them as an oxygen-wasting, useless-eating idiot. if i actually was that person, i would do the world a favour and kill myself; in some sense, perhaps i now have, and perhaps killing myself in public a few times in a ritual sacrifice might help people let go of it and throw it away as the trash that it is.
i have pointed out that this is going to be extraordinarily difficult for me over the upcoming months as i live through the necessity of cleaning and regrowing my damaged hair back. i am extremely embarrassed by the situation, but the other option was continuing to rip it out until it started to look like it was thinning in order to try to stimulate regrowth in damaged areas, which is a potential outcome that is even worse. my hair should come back thick and lush, now that the damaged split ends have been removed; i do not have hair loss or any expectation of it (hair loss in genetic men is caused by excess testosterone. i have almost no testosterone at all.), but when you start ripping your hair out in chunks because it's matted up and forced to grow segments of it back, it starts looking like you're getting bald spots or combing things over, which is of course very embarrassing, and especially so given the context. i will try not to lose my religion in the next few months as i'm struggling with the necessary consequences of a hard decision i had no choice but to make. in the mean time, please remember that everybody hurts, sometimes.
1:49
april 5, 2023
the real housing crisis that we're facing in canada is a bad attitude by the bourgeois class about this stupid idea of "home ownership", and this childish hierarchical social structure enforced by banks and car companies. on the left, we spend so much time railing against heteropatriarchy, but what we're really failing against is feudalism, which no longer exists; what has replaced heteropatriarchal feudalism is the "american dream" mythology of white picket fences in suburbia, which both implies and necessitates widespread car and house ownership. this overwhelmingly conservative social structure, which is enforced downwards upon us by banks and advertised to us over mass media like a scientology seminar in the underlying religion of market fundamentalism, is what is really preventing affordable housing starts and causing mass homelessness. the immigration is a dominant stress point, but we would be able to deal with the immigration if we could only discard the culture of 50s worshiping neo-liberal reagainte 80s-ology first, which faces crises that render it on the brink of collapse every few years but frustratingly just won't go away.
we don't have ecological or affordable housing because the banks and politicians don't want ecological or affordable housing, they want everybody to live in a plot of land in these suburban mcmansions and take out debt to buy cars and mortgages in empty luxury that they largely not only don't need but don't even want. then, they want you to spend three hours a day driving back and forth from work, so you can use what is left of your salaries, after debt repayment, to pay the oil companies. they refuse to look at the economic indicators that explain why this unsustainable model has been collapsing for decades, let alone at the ecological indicators that clarify that we're going to end up in underwater deserts if we don't fundamentally change how we live. instead, they retreat to the scientology tactics to try to brainwash people into upholding the disastrous economic model by enforcing a social or financial hierarchy and making it a juvenile game to try to climb up it.
meanwhile, the masses of workers and modern peasants are looking at each other and snickering, and rather asking themselves "but, when are they going to address what we actually want, which is modest living arrangements that are affordable, more free time to spend on things we care about (with less time in traffic) and clean air and water for ourselves and our children to exist in?"
11:38
i don't know how many times i've called don pittis an idiot or yelled at him for being clueless in this space.
this is a relatively good article. the underlying mathematics is game theory, and it might have been helpful to point that out, but it's a big step forwards from the naive classical models that politicians cannot extricate themselves from, for the reason that the masses are not demanding that they do.
far from the government being composed of some enlightened class that is uniquely capable of ruling us, the reality is that mass ignorance produces, upholds and enforces ignorance in government and that jefferson's insistence that mass education is necessary for a functioning democratic society is a too often forgotten but prescient insight.
12:12
i actually think they should bulldoze the temple mount complex and everything on top and around it and turn it into a shopping mall.
there is no value in leaving it there because all that the idiots are capable of doing is fighting over it. burning it down might even help them move on; sometimes, you have to destroy the relics of the past in order to rebuild for the future. it's just some old crumbling walls. there are perhaps minerals that could be melted down and reused commercially, but it's otherwise just some falling apart and dilapidated structures that are long overdue for urban renewal.
just burn the piece of shit down and build something else there instead. problem solved.
16:17
...and, this would appear to be some young muslims dressed like jihadists and enjoying ramadan by targeting a polytheistic site of worship.
i admit that my solidarity is with the polytheists over the monotheists, but my actual reaction is more along the lines of "isn't multiculturalism a great idea?".
we went out of our way to pile millions of religious conservatives from all over the world on top of each other into a small, densely populated region. we shouldn't be surprised when the outcome is that they start attacking each other, just like they've been doing for centuries back home.
18:10
summer made it's first attempt to assert itself here, today; i didn't go outside, but it was nearing 30 degree humidity for a few minutes, before it crashed to earth in a thunderstorm and a tornado warning. ontario gets very few tornadoes because of the great lakes; today, it was the cold air in the great lakes smashing into atlantic air that threatened to create a very early tornado attack.
it should make another try next week, and i actually think that summer is going to win this fight this year in the second week of april.
i don't want to say we won't get colder days this year, but what we're going to remember about this summer is how hot it got and how fast it set in, and then how long it stayed that way.
19:17
is artificial intelligence frightening?
sometimes, the more you learn about a topic, the more frightening it becomes. that is something that can be said about aids, felids, rap fans and muslims. sometimes, fear is driven strictly by the fact that something is unknown rather than any sort of logical analysis. artificial intelligence would fall strictly into the latter category.
most people today probably actually do realize that "artificial intelligence" does not remotely mean what some might imagine that it does by watching movies or tv. these systems do not mimic our brains to superhuman abilities. how could they? we don't understand the underlying physics of our brain chemistry.
what artificial intelligence is is a program that stores data in a database and remembers how to find it by using search terms. these programs are continually getting better at searching for information, but that is all they actually are, automated search engines. google itself is more frightening than any artificial intelligence system imaginable because all that any of these systems can ever actually be is a subset of google. artificial intelligence, as we currently understand it, has no capability to think for itself and we do not remotely understand how to design an electronic system that actually does have the ability to think for itself.
i do not see the utility in building mechanical or computational systems that have emotions or personalities. the meaningful economic value of robots to human civilization is that they can be ordered to do necessary work that humans find to be degrading; assigning robots sentience would undo their worth to us, as dumb labourers of which value can be extracted from with minimal input variables. thankfully, we do not remotely understand how to create sentience; the only thing that can be said about creating mechanical sentience at this time is that the computational complexity required to engineer and manufacture a sentient mechanical system is at such a high order of magnitude that it can only be vaguely guessed at. there is no discernible difference between the real-ness of existing biological sentience and any theoretical mechanical sentience; descartian dualism is discredited, nobody today thinks the brain is somehow different than the body or that it cannot be engineered from scratch using a deep enough understanding of chemistry. the problem isn't some magical quality that carbon-based chemistry has and silicon-based chemistry does not (such a magical quality does not exist) but rather the mathematical complexity of the engineering problem, itself. first, we will need to be able to design, build and mass manufacture miniaturized quantum computers as a prerequisite to creating mechanical sentience; in truth, we'll no doubt have mass manufactured cold fusion before we even get a theoretical model of quantum computing. therefore, it's at least 20 years away. there are some badly written articles about quantum computing out there in the mainstream media but the actual reality is that we do not currently have anything remotely close to a theoretical model of quantum computing and we will probably never be able to control qubits to perform reliable computations at all; however, it is a necessary prerequisite to the engineering problem of creating mechanical sentience to be able to reliably solve the math problems of high computational complexity (np or np-hard problems) that our individual neurons routinely solve millions of times per second, by merely existing at the quantum level. the premise of engineering real sentience in silicon is consequently unlikely any time soon as it would require the utilization of a technology that can reliably solve np problems in reasonable time frames, which does not actually exist. this isn't about moore's law; an entirely different way to do math in silicon is required, one that more accurately utilizes the physics of electron transfer in chemical reactions, which is also something that we don't currently understand. quantum science is a way to use statistics to make mathematical predictions about physical behaviour that we can't actually predict because we don't actually understand it.
actual mechanical sentience would be defined as billions of individual quantum computers interacting with each other to form a web of synapses because that it is what our brains are; the ability to mass manufacture miniaturized quantum computers in silicon and network them together is consequently a pre-requisite for the design, engineering and creation of mechanical sentience, which is no doubt entirely impossible in silicon. neurons do this, so it is theoretically plausible, but probably never in silicon. on this planet, we would be better off engineering proteins to perform the computational tasks required to develop mechanical sentience, which is why evolution uses proteins (that is, carbon) instead of silicon in the first place.
this rap news is, like their best videos, actually a rather brilliant analysis of the topic from a number of perspectives, in the form of an asimovian short story. sentience is something we're not close to being able to create and may never be able to actually engineer, due to the computational complexity involved in doing so.
don't be alex jones about this, please.
19:42
april 6, 2023
The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds.
yes; if we define things entirely differently than they are currently defined. "the appropriately programmed computer" would necessarily be billions of individual quantum computers interacting with each other to form a web of synapses, and not a boring turing machine. boring turing machines cannot be sentient.
i don't think that the turing test is actually even at all useful. when computers are dumb, the turing test is about whether the computer is as good as the human player; when computers are smart, they will destroy humans at any game, and the process of deciding which is which flips over. the artificial intelligence algorithm then requires the inclusion of random mistakes into a computer's decision making outcomes in order to pass the test so that it is no longer obvious which is which and what is the utility in that? even if that were to be successful in tricking a potential human, it doesn't demonstrate anything of any meaning or value in terms of whether the computer is a program or not. as a human being, i take exception to the idea that i am defined by whether i can play games like a computer does or does not. that is a trivial and largely juvenile consideration, even if it did make some sense in turing's time, in the very limited context he applied it in. generalizing the turing test to a broader discourse on mechanical sentience is a foolish mistake.
it would theoretically be possible to emulate artificial intelligence (as defined above) in a boring turing machine by creating a map of billions of software qubits that can function as virtual synapses because qubits can in fact actually be implemented in the software of a classical computer via emulation (as qubit virtual machines), but this would be a ridiculously complicated process that would require a server room the size of the ones used in particle physics experiments, at least. due to the likely impossibility of mass manufacturing quantum machines to web together like neurons, it may end up how the brain gets modeled, anyways.
7:25
i just googled some of the newer systems and was actually appalled by what i found. ibm is apparently charging $1.60/second to use their system. how well does this system work?
With a 99% two-qubit error rate (without error mitigation), you have 1,28% chance to get a good result when using an algorithm with 422 two-qubit gates.
you probably aren't using that algorithm. this device is being marketed as having 422 qubits but you're probably using 1 or 2 in any actual computation, because if you tried to use more than that you'd have a higher chance of getting a wrong answer than a right one. a 1% chance of getting a right answer is pretty useless.
to arrive at a 1% chance of getting the right answer, you have to cool the thing to absolute zero, which means you need to log into it from wifi.
are these bugs that will be worked out? some people might be optimistic, but the actual reality is that we do not have a theoretical model of quantum computing that is able to actually do error correction. there is no reason to think these bugs will ever be worked out, besides empty faith in some abstraction of progress.
i'm a cynical person, but what ibm is clearly doing is trotting out a fancy looking replica, calling it a working quantum computer and ripping people off by charging for access to it. at a 99% error rate, they could well be sending you results generated by a random number generator. who would know?
governments and investors are piling money into this, too. it's ibm! wait, though; when was the last time ibm actually did something?
there is some possibility that we might be talking about ibm as the quantum computing pioneer in ten years. from what i can see, and i have an education in this topic, it is far more likely that ibm will be in front of congressional committees explaining how they conducted the quantum computing ponzi scheme that ripped governments and investors off for billions, with no plausibility of producing a working outcome.
i'm watching an mit biology lecture series, and the professor (who is a mathematical biologist) is consistently arguing that evolution is superior to humans at the task of biological engineering. primitive systems like bacteria and yeast have evolved to work as quantum computers. we would be better off looking at ways to harness their molecules as computers than trying to build quantum computers it in silicon.
11:35
this is far more promising than quantum computing.
11:46
april 7, 2023
i am not surprised by the jobs report in canada. there is no contemporary economic theory that argues that increasing interest rates will create unemployment, and there is no relationship between employment and inflation (as previously surmised in the long discarded phillips curve). these are all ideas that were contemplated in the middle part of the last century and all of them were decisively discarded as incorrect well before the year 2000.
it is not likely that the increase in jobs is a consequence of government spending, either. rather, a cursory analysis is that the result of global inflation and global sanctions against russia have made canada more competitive in key sectors, which has increased exports. this would only be one factor and could not explain all of it, but we're not seeing a tremendous level of job growth or increases in gdp, either. canada is consequently one example where the result of global inflation (partially caused by sanctions on russia) is a net increase in jobs because that inflation in foreign supply chains provides canada with a sudden comparative advantage in exports. canada is uniquely positioned to step in as a replacement supplier of russian resources. we see something like this here regularly when our dollar goes down and american firms start hiring canadian workers instead; a strong american dollar has the tendency to generate job growth in canada. a weak canadian dollar is also good for exports and may also be helping to create jobs.
Farm, fishing and intermediate food products, motor vehicles and parts, and metal and non-metallic mineral products all contributed roughly equally to the rise in exports, Statscan said. By volume, total exports were up 5.3% in January.
wood exports are also dramatically up, which is a substantive jobs driver in canada, where we are of course all lumberjacks.
the jobs report is consequently not a useful indicator to understand the effects of the rate hikes as no educated person would have thought that the rate hikes would have created job losses in the first place.
a better indicator - and this one is on target - is credit card debt. you have to remember that humans are not only not rational, we're actually pretty frustratingly dumb primates. most of us can't figure out basic tasks for ourselves. when faced with rising interest rates, we will take on credit card debt at higher rates to pay interest on debt we already have. this is an incredibly stupid tactic, but we do it anyways because we're so idiotically optimistic. we're so incredibly stupid that we delude ourselves into believing that if we follow the rules and go to church then everything will work out in the end because we will be rewarded for our good behaviour, even in the face of elementary mathematics that clearly states otherwise.
this is the first-order effect of increasing interest rates, and it is on target:
it is true that the ability of consumers to access credit will help avoid job losses in retail in the short run, but that is not where the jobs are coming from right now. retail is actually starting to show some signs of mounting losses. so long as canadians have access to credit, they will utilize it to offset the rate hikes and hope things get better, no matter how stupid that actually is, tactically.
the second-order effect is when the credit runs out and what happens at that point is that people start losing their houses. it is not even clear if spending actually even goes down after the housing crisis, as moving is expensive and the reason you move out of a larger house and into a smaller one is that you want more disposable cash because the concrete experience of spending money right now is more valuable to you than the abstract notion of saving to climb up some hierarchy some day. you don't want to save your house, you want to save your lifestyle; you'll downgrade your house to keep your lifestyle. this is not what classical economists call rational, but it is not stupid at all. humans are not biologically trained through evolution to plan for the future, we are trained to react to the present, and we largely do. even if some job losses do occur in retail, we are currently generating jobs via exports.
look out for strains in the housing market; that will be what actually happens well before job losses occur.
you can call this primatological economics, or perhaps hitchensomics.
9:09
why is 20th century economics consistently so completely wrong when applied to the world, today?
it is partly due to assumptions about human behaviour that have proven to be woefully incorrect. we should start with the assumption that most humans are abject idiots that can't do basic math, rather than the assumption that all humans are thrifty and rational and will intuitively optimize outcomes.
an equally important part of the reason that 20th century economics is so wrong today and the more important concern right now is that 20th century economics was based on the assumption of an almost completely closed economy. keynesian stimulus spending, for example, is an excellent idea but it absolutely requires tariffs to function. starting in the 80s, tariffs were torn down and then the internet came along and now we currently live in an almost completely open economy. yet, we continue to use economic models designed for a closed economy and then get confused when they don't predict outcomes effectively.
10:01
i strongly suspect that trudeau's hidden agenda to privatize health care was rooted in an expectation that this case would end in mr. day's favour. the supreme court made the correct decision.
the conservative party in ontario, currently led by the ford government, has longstanding plans to privatize healthcare and this should not change how they behave.
i do hope, however, that the trudeau government takes a step back from the brink and returns to it's historical position on universal healthcare, which is still held by an overwhelming majority of both it's voters and it's donors.
12:32
april 8, 2023
the pentagon is investigating the situation around war plans it believes were leaked to the russians. this is plausible; there are many, many people in the ukrainian chain of command that are russian. this is the unstated reason that they can't have things like f-16s.
wait.
so, the pentagon is confirming that it is directly planning operations on the ground in ukraine with the ukrainian military, then? these are apparently war plans that were written by the pentagon, directly.
this is trivial. what i want to know is how many nato troops are currently on the ground shooting at the russians in ukraine. it is not zero; it is not small, either.
10:36
we've lost the plot on carbon taxation; the liberals are now trying to spin it as a wealth redistribution scheme instead of as a pigovian tax. it was the liberals that introduced the tax.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-housing-ontario-land-use-planning-changes-1.6804894
i have argued from the start that carbon taxation is actually little more than a wealth redistribution scheme, and one that i dramatically benefit from, but this is because i realize that the overwhelming empirical evidence is that pigovian taxes are not remotely effective in incentivizing individuals to refrain from engaging in sinful behaviour. sin taxes have not been remotely effective in reducing smoking or over-eating habits when they've been legislated and implemented in order to do so. sin taxes on cigarettes, marijuana and shit foods are, however, justified by arguing that the resulting income stream can and should be directed towards the health care services that smokers and fat people disproportionately utilize as a consequence of their poor decisions in life; it is a way for smokers and fat people to contribute financially to their own health care costs, which are higher than average directly due to their choices. likewise, carbon taxation can be justified as a way to ensure that people that make bad choices to pollute the environment are forced to contribute financially to solutions to undo the consequences of those bad choices. while carbon taxation can be justified as a punishment for bad behaviour and as a way to generate financial resources to undo the consequences of that bad behaviour, there was little reason to expect that a carbon tax would reduce emissions at the level of individual consumption; it remains to be seen how effective it will be in"spurring corporate innovation". corporations hire people with the job description of being homo economicus and that perform the role intentionally as the core of their job function. a corporation is inherently a more rational creature than a human being and certainly will at the least consider adjusting to try to reduce costs, should the high price of carbon force it to do so. some corporations will merely pass on the costs, whereas others will adjust to reduce operating costs to maximize profit.
pigovian taxes are intended to punish individuals for specific sinful behaviours by making engaging in those specific sinful behaviours more expensive. the intent is to increase the cost of engaging in sinful behaviour and then to provide an incentive for individuals to no longer engage in that sinful behaviour, or engage in it less frequently, by giving them a financial reward if they choose not to. carbon taxes consequently intentionally increase the price of carbon and therefore intentionally increase household expenses if you continue to commit the sin of creating carbon emissions. that is the intent of the policy - to make polluting expensive in order to punish people that keep doing it. as a consumer, taxpayer and voter, you are supposed to react by creating fewer emissions, not by organizing politically to undo the carbon tax. the problem for advocates of pigovian taxation is that this theory has never been effective in producing the desired outcome.
on the other hand, if you choose not to commit the sin of creating carbon emissions, the government also rewards you for your pristine moral social behaviour. this year, they're going to give me $500 in four $125 installments. i do not have a driver's license, have never bought gas, have never owned a car and have never even driven a car. i have avoided automobiles for my whole life because i am morally opposed to burning carbon, which i consider to be extremely sinful behaviour in my quasi-indigenous and very non-abrahamic system of morals. creating pollution is a sin because it harms the ecological web and upsets the biological balance of mass symbiosis that we exist within; to somebody that does not believe in the existence of a sky god and does not consider disobeying supposed orders from said hypothesized sky god to be of any relevance, it is acts that harm the fabric of the ecological web we exist in that form the basis of the concept of sin. in my system of morals, creating pollution is not just a sin, it is actually the worst sin imaginable. as i burn no carbon directly, the purpose of the carbon rebates is reduced strictly to the role of offsetting grocery inflation, which they have sent me separate checks to offset that are more than sufficient given that my diet consists almost strictly of fresh fruit and vegetables, i do not eat meat and i only buy non-perishables in bulk when they are on sale.
this wealth redistribution scheme consequently greatly benefits me and will benefit me more and more every year; therefore, i should support the policy of carbon taxation. however, it doesn't seem to be altering behaviour very much, as the people affected by it are reacting to it by taking political action against it rather than by adjusting their behaviour in alignment with it.
there is a good argument that the conservative party should be attacked on this from a moral perspective. rather than explain the policy to their voters and ask them to behave morally by reducing their carbon use, they are taking the immoral position of politicizing carbon taxation and exploiting it as a wedge issue. i would like to hear the ndp make this argument, but they are too busy copying the free market rhetoric of the liberals and the conservatives and are instead parroting the immoral conservative party position on carbon taxation, which is ceding the moral high ground to the liberals, if the liberals choose to take it. i am as poor as poor can be and i am a beneficiary of the redistribution mechanism, as it is redistributing wealth from the middle class towards me; i have little patience for people complaining about the increased costs of creating pollution, and strongly agree that they should be punished for the crime of continuing to create pollution when there is no longer any ambiguity as to the clear moral consequences of their behaviour. they have no moral grounds to complain about being taxed for polluting at all.
the liberals are not going to win this argument by trying to trick people into thinking this is a tax cut. rather, they should aggressively argue in favour of carbon taxation by framing it as a moral issue, by attacking the whiners that are complaining about it as immoral sinners for continuing to pollute and by going out of their way to carefully explain how pigovian taxation functions at every opportunity. they may die on this cross, but if they do it is a worthwhile death; they cannot get off the cross at this point, anyways, they're better off staying on it and arguing their point.
13:48
april 9, 2023
i don't oppose this, exactly; it's more that i'd argue that it's insufficient.
the tories were not elected by urban density advocates, they were elected by wealthy suburbanites that send them substantive financial donations. i've been highly critical of this development model, but this is the development model that tory voters support and it's going to continue to be the policy implemented by tory governments. in order to end this unsustainable development model and change the resulting government policy, we will need to stop electing conservatives to government, first. there is no utility in pretending that they're going to change.
a more constructive approach is to take notes for what the government can do in response, once the tories are thrown out of power.
i don't want to live in the suburbs. at all. a one hundred tower skyscraper in the suburbs isn't something that is attractive to me or to people like me and is merely going to end up difficult to find tenancies to fill. the demographic realities in ontario are such that the pandemic was likely the first step in asserting systemic white flight, similarly to what happened in detroit; there's a lot of people that flatly want out of the cities, and a lot of them vote for the tories. that's fine; let them move to sudbury. white flight out of toronto should help relieve the negative effects of overpopulation that are occurring due to poor density planning.
i would request that, in addition to these changes outside of urban centres, which are of no relevance to me, that policies designed to increase density in the urban centres, where people want it, are also legislated and enforced. we don't have to choose between density and sprawl. while the tories are in power, they will seek to maximize sprawl in suburbia because that is what their voters want; good governance implies that they should also legislate policies that enforce a development model that increases density in urban regions because both climate and immigration realities require that approach from government. after we remove the tories from government, we can then legislate ways to make their sprawl more ecologically sustainable.
7:43
april 9, 2023
does ukraine even know it's easter time at all?
(trick question)
i was making a salad this evening, as i don't celebrate christian holidays, and i started to notice the smell of burning pigs wafting in from around the neighbourhood. christians do indeed sacrifice a pig to their god on this day, so it's not an odd smell. it nonetheless instantly stuck me as absurd that a jewish holiday would exist around the consumption of pigs, until i realized that this isn't really a jewish holiday at all, is it? we eat pigs at the solstice because our germanic ancestors always did. our cruel roman imperial overlords tried to force us to abandon our history and worship their vampire spirit instead of our own gods, and it worked on some level, but they couldn't divest us of the pig sacrifice. if you are indeed sacrificing a pig today, you should take note of what you are actually doing, which is offering a ham up to the god frey, in a market transaction that you expect will end with the blessing of a good harvest. do not look down upon this; cherish your history, for a moment. stew in it.
the first cannibalistic christian zombie vampires would have never eaten a pig; they would have been too busy eating each other.
i suggest the following soundtrack for your offering to frey:
17:50
april 11, 2023
in past years, when we had a left, it used to aggressively argue for the removal of the ten commandments from schools and was largely successful in doing so. the opposition to removing prayer from schools, back then, was the radical christian right. what we have today, which is a fake left, is now bizarrely arguing in favour of prayer spaces in schools.
there is no way to make these positions consistent with each other, but we're missing the point if we try. what has actually happened is that the left has disappeared and been replaced by religious and ethnic identity politics that attempt to legislate the interests of their own specific ethnic or religious (or nationalist.) identities at the exclusion of others. there is nothing remotely left-wing or liberal about these ethnic or religious nationalist groups at all. in past years, this may have been justified by arguing for "minority rights", which is itself a conservative idea that leftists should be skeptical of on it's face. today, the fake left has now come full circle and is now arguing directly against the core principles of leftism, which includes the abolition of religion from state institutions, by replacing those core principles with the ideology of conservative religious policies.
nobody calling themselves a liberal, a socialist or a leftist should be in support of prayer rooms at schools; supporting prayer rooms at schools is a radical right-wing position that has historically been supported by the extreme christian right and is today being supported by what should be called a radical islamic right-wing. the premise of prayer rooms in schools is entirely antithetical to any vague concept of leftism. i stand staunchly with those seeking to remove all vestiges of religion - be they the ten commandments or prayer rooms - from all schools, everywhere.
i would behoove of the society around me to recognize the existence of an extreme right-wing islamic religious movement in favour of prayer rooms in schools when they see it, rather than delude themselves into false precepts of "minority rights". the radical islamic right is merely masquerading as minority rights activism on the soft left; do not be fooled by them. see them for what they are.
if a christian group were to argue for prayer rooms in schools, it would be rightly condemned by liberals for advocating the politics of the extreme right. we have vanquished christianity to the dung heap of history. the christians are mostly gone, today; they are defeated. yet, the ruling class is reacting by replacing christianity with islam. as christianity has been defeated, our new enemy is now islam. we need to end the double standard, remove the wool about "minority rights" from our eyes and rightfully condemn muslim groups for advocating prayer rooms, as well.
the correct way to talk about the issue is to reference a movement in quebec by radical right-wing islamists to introduce prayer rooms into schools. the premise should be presented as absurd on it's face, and in direct contradiction to the society's secular values system, which includes the strict separation of church and state.
muslims are free to move to a society with different values if they don't like the values in quebec. should they choose to live in quebec, they should understand that there is an expectation that they will respect the institutions there, which includes an absence of religion at school.
9:35
april 12, 2022
is banning praying on school property unconstitutional?
there's an argument that it might be, unfortunately. this is due to a deficit that exists in our constitution, which allows for this absurd notion of "freedom of religion". i have been clear over many years that i oppose the inclusion of this clause, which was not a part of the elder trudeau's initial constitutional draft but was rather added only to appease the evil conservative lougheed, and would support removing it immediately. if this could be redone, i would hope that trudeau and chretien would dig in and reject including any concept of religious rights in the charter, as it is not a justifiable or supportable human right and it has caused our secular society all sorts of annoyances. as it is, all we can do is undo the mistake by expunging it from the charter at the earliest opportunity.
if government was introducing a blanket ban on public prayer, it would be easier to answer in the affirmative. the premise of government saying "you cannot pray anywhere in public at all" would be a more clear infringement of this supposed right of dubious worth. if government is only saying "you can't pray here in this place, but you can go mumble at the wall like an idiot over there instead, if you insist on being retarded in public so that everybody can witness it.", that is a very different position. government is not actually proposing restricting public prayer absolutely, it is only restricting public prayer on school property, where expressions of faith are not intellectually appropriate. faith is the diametric contradiction of education and, for that reason, faith does not belong in and should not be welcome in places of education. government has valid grounds to be concerned about the embarrassment of it's public schools being filled with idiots mumbling at god in public; the purpose of public education is to educate people (especially poor people.) out of their cultural backwardsness, which explicitly means halting the perpetuation of ignorance, religion and superstition. for that reason, any sort of allowance of prayer in places of education undoes the purpose of public education and cannot be conscientiously permitted in places of education.
for those that wish to be militant about asserting this supposed right of dubious value, does that mean that they do not accept that government has any authority to legislate where public prayer cannot occur, at all? might it be considered a rights infringement if a teacher tells some group of idiots that starts babbling to allah in the middle of a classroom, while classes are occurring, to shut the fuck up and go babble to their imaginary friend somewhere else? might prohibiting prayer to one imaginary deity at the congregation of a worship to another be considered a rights infringement? what about a court room?
the state requires some level of control over where people are permitted to mutter nonsensically and it is up the courts to determine whether that control should be more or less. i don't care if people want to be retarded out in a public park, but the idea of people praying in the company of others is oppressive and offensive to me and the cultural restriction we have in the west against prayer in schools is absolute and paramount. quebec is a few steps ahead of ontario in it's abolition of the catholic school system, but that is something that needs to be done here, too. our publicly-funded catholic school system is a national embarrassment.
even if the court disagrees with me and rules that restricting prayer on school property is a substantive rights infringement after all, it then has to evaluate whether it may be justified in the form of an oakes test. secularism is a valid public policy that is supported by a majority of quebeckers. there are strong grounds to use an oakes test to uphold the ban, at least until we can get this dubious clause removed from the constitution. quebec has never signed the constitution; knowing what i know today, i would not support ontario signing the constitution until the clause on freedom of religion is removed from the charter, either.
there should be some protection for religious belief, but it should not be seen as something distinct from other types of free speech, or less amenable to balancing than other speech rights are. the idea that religion is somehow inherent to an individual's core being is a very dangerous way to think. religion is a tool of control created by state institutions in order to dominate and rule populations with, it is not an individual belief system or something that belongs to individuals, themselves. individuals who interpret religion for themselves in ways that contradict the institutional varieties are branded heretics and persecuted for it. religion is consequently not free speech but the literal opposite of it.
a better way to interpret religion is as a type of political organization. under this interpretation, a religion becomes indistinguishable from a political party and should have all of the same rights, restrictions and obligations of a political party. restrictions on prayer should be seen as equivalent to restrictions on political activity and the claim to a right to pray in public should be seen as equivalent to any other freedom of assembly. in that scheme, the process of balancing via an oakes test again becomes paramount, and i would rule that this is a valid type of rights restriction, due to the primacy of secularism in canadian culture.
they are not being told they can't mumble like retards at all, they are merely being told to go mumble like retards somewhere else, instead.
4:22
april 13, 2023
i would strongly support the reversal of the 1930 resource agreements and am excited to hear members of parliament talking about it. a brief history listen is required to understand why the conservatives are (as per usual) lying to you. if you know the history, they can't lie to you.
the provinces of alberta, saskatchewan and manitoba were initially much smaller than they are today. a large percentage of the land area that is currently within these provinces was previously within the northwest territory or a large area called rupert's land, both of which were federally administered crown lands that were designated by the king as indian territory in the 1763 royal proclamation. starting in the late 19th century, the federal government began a process of signing treaties with the indians in the federally administered indian territory for the purpose of assimilating them into canada as farmers and teaching them how to farm the land in order to generate produce that could be exported (and taxed). the indigenous people that lived in this region were nomads and strongly rejected this attempt to change their way of life, which led ottawa to respond by encouraging immigration from eastern and northern europe to farm the lands, instead. the secondary reason for the numbered treaties was to demonstrate that the crown was active in the west, in order to dissuade american settlement of areas in british jurisdiction. as the basic system of alliances from the seven years war was still in place, the crown sought to build alliances with the indigenous groups and keep them loyal, in case of an armed conflict with advancing american colonists, who literally wanted to exterminate the indians. it is for this reason that the treaties frequently have terms that seem beneficial to the indigenous groups on first glance; they were, in truth, giving away everything they owned to the crown in exchange for becoming wards of the state. today, indigenous people in canada are legally classified as wards of the state which the crown owes a fiduciary duty of care to. when the provinces were organized into their current geographic configuration, these federally administered lands (brought into crown jurisdiction by the numbered treaties) were initially maintained as federally controlled "indian reserves" within the provinces (like federal parks are today). it was not until 1930 that the land was legally transferred to the provinces in a set of "resource agreements" by the racist asshole rb bennett, who was the worst prime minister in the country's history.
stated tersely in point form,
- in 1763, all territory west of the appalachians was declared by the king to be indian territory in the royal proclamation, which also granted the crown a monopoly on land purchases from the indiains. this included the northwest territories and rupert's land.
- from 1850-1930, agreements were signed with the indians in the indian territory that transferred the land from the indians to the federal government, as per the process defined in the 1763 royal proclamation.
- during these years, the boundaries of manitoba, saskatchewan, alberta, british columbia and ontario were augmented by the addition of federal land that had been transferred to federal jurisdiction in the numbered treaties.
- in 1930, the federal government completed the land grab by transferring the indian territory to the provinces, which in the process also extinguished the indigenous rights that were established in the treaties, rendering them null and void.
the courts have since attempted to correct this historical wrong by re-establishing some of those treaty rights in law.
the conservatives are bloviating about the 1867 constitution, but not a single one of the western provinces existed at all in 1867. the 1930 resource agreements were a simple theft of indigenous land; the conservatives in truth have a lot of fucking nerve arguing that they have jurisdiction over the land due to the division of powers in the constitution, when the transfer agreements have nothing to do with the constitution at all.
the federal government should uphold the rule of law by adhering to the numbered treaties and transfer the land back to it's rightful indigenous owners at once.
rather, the recent comments that i find to be disturbing and in need of censure are those by ms. freeland at the imf, which is her actual home base and where her allegiances truly lie. i would hope that there are people in ottawa that are analyzing her comments carefully, and evaluating whether she should be removed from cabinet for them, as they were openly racist and borderline treasonous.
back in 2015, the liberal party released a substantive election platform that included a promise to use the bank of canada as a source of funding for green infrastructure projects. after weighing mulcair's thatcherite rhetoric against trudeau's naive cluelessness and being left with the conclusion that the options demonstrated a poverty of choice rarely seen in elections anywhere, i decided that this single section of the liberal election platform was worth voting for; i did not claim to know whether or not the party would actually implement this plank in their platform but it was at least something i could vote for, and i did in fact vote for it. we do not need green new deals or great leap manifestos, so much as we need massive state funding for rapid green infrastructure development. this was at least the correct proposal; i felt obligated to vote for it, when i saw it before me in the platform, whatever reservations i may have had about whether it would actually come to fruition and actually exist in actual reality.
over the next several years, i found myself increasingly disappointed and appalled by the direction of government, which initially completely ignored that part of the platform and eventually destroyed it by converting it into joe clark's favourite idea, the public-private partnership. the singular thing in the platform that i deemed worthy of voting for as a tactical approach to emissions reduction by increasing public ownership of utilities was instead implemented as a way for government to shield investors from startup costs, complete with capital provided by blackrock. i am utterly disgusted at the party for how it managed to destroy the one and only good idea that it had.
the united states should consequently completely ignore chrystia freeland, as what her government has demonstrated is what not to do if you're serious about carbon transition. the liberal party got there first, and it had good ideas, but those good ideas were systematically undone by bay street when the bankers actually got their claws on them and replaced with the worst type of corporate welfare, instead. if america wants to re-establish some form of leadership in the world by spearheading a climate transition through massive government funding, it should pay no heed to the likes of ms. freeland, who is acting strictly in the interests of investors.
10:34
when the court arrives at a correct outcome with an incorrect argument, do you accept the correct outcome or challenge the incorrect argument?
i'm not a pragmatist, but i want to take the path of least resistance right now.
the reality is that the outcome is what i asked for. i said that last time, too, but i let it go and should have tied up loose ends. the lesson is that i need to tie up loose ends, this time.
i'm fairly certain that the police are purposefully withholding information and the court is allowing them to, which forms the basis of the outcome. that information would appear to be quite damaging, although it's not clear to whom. the depth of corruption may be deeper than i thought. i can't say that, exactly, but i can continue to play along and explicitly request the release of documents.
12:22
these are not heat records in windsor, but we're bordering on a heat wave with almost a full week of days in the 27-29 degree range. a heat wave in canada is defined as three consecutive days over 30 degrees, which might not be that much if you live in texas, but is a rare event here (or used to be). you can make fun of us for not being used to the heat; we make fun of you when you close schools due to an inch of snow. we're just far more used to extreme cold, here.
i tried googling it and i couldn't find the right terms.
any individual day in mid-april may have records closer to 30 than 25 in windsor, but are there historical examples of a week or 10 days of solid 25+ degree weather in windsor, ontario in early april or late march?
there were comparable results in 1977, which is the year that toronto set records in:
14:53
april 15, 2023
the premise of cra workers going on strike to demand a reversal of lost purchasing power due to inflation is a good example of why public sector unions are of questionable utility in a socialist society.
if inflation goes up, workers have less money to spend. that is correct. in response, workers are asking "why should we be the ones to take the loss when inflation increases?".
this response by workers would be entirely coherent, correct and worthy of solidarity if the union was of workers labouring for private sector companies that exist strictly for the purpose of stealing surplus value from them and gifting it to investors. when surplus value and inflation simultaneously increase and wages stay stagnant, the result is an effective theft of wages from workers. i would stand in solidarity with private sector unions demanding wage increases in that situation through strike action, and without reservation.
however, the government is not a business, does not operate like a business, should not operate like a business, should not be seen as operating as a business or imagined to operate as one via analogy and does neither generate profit, nor should it run at a surplus. government should run at a constant (moderate) loss, which should be funded by central banks creating money. it follows that the claim that inflation amounts to governments engaging in wage theft from government workers is incoherent.
however, it is true that government has collected increased tax revenues from inflation on consumption taxes and therefore has a responsibility to pass that surplus revenue on to not only it's workers but also it's citizens.
wage increases are going to be required, once inflation has stabilized (probably at a level that is higher than the benchmark, in the medium term), but workers are actually putting themselves in a poor bargaining position by arguing for wage increases before the results of this round of inflation are clear. i actually think that inflation will increase this year, as statistical tricks like cutting the gas tax undo themselves and the international factors causing the inflation actually get worse. will they strike again next year?
i would propose that the gst rebate being handed to low income recipients be instead extended to a high enough income bracket that it covers almost all cra workers, along with private sector workers who are also overpaying consumption taxes, and that discussions about structural adjustments to wages be put aside until fluctuations in inflation stabilize, which will be after the war we are fighting, which could be quite some time from now. this will address the immediate concerns of public sector workers without coercing them to prematurely sign away their rights in response to an event that is still in process and which could leave them worse off than they started.
for almost all workers, the decrease in purchasing power from inflation primarily has to do with grocery prices. it would consequently be appropriate to introduce a tax on the widely published and obscene grocery store profits to fund the proposed gst rebates for cra and other workers.
12:08
i'm sure that many people have beat me to it in dedicating this to the dalai lama, but so be it.
the reason that so many religions demonstrate the endemic phenomena of old men interpreting young boys sexually is due to the prevalence of pederasty as a religious rite in the classical world. it's really less the case that pederasty is an act of deviance within the structure of the religions and more the case that pederasty is what the religions were historically about.
if you can't have sex with little boys, what's the point of having a cult? without the sex, it's just singing boring songs and mumbling at statutes. who wants to participate in that? the point is the sex.
unfortunately, as history develops, it becomes the religions themselves that condemn behaviour that is largely harmless and really entirely natural. did the kid consent? if he did, who cares?
there are far better reasons to criticize the dalai lama than this.
and, yes, the red hot chili peppers are the most correct vehicle for discussions of liberalizing attitudes around homosexual male behaviour.
19:39
april 16, 2023
it's been a few days short of a month, and what can i say about my hair?
well, i miss my hair. i am, in truth, still in shock; it hasn't sunk in yet.
the hair is at least growing back everywhere. i'm not young anymore; all evidence is that i'm going to continue growing hair until i'm at an advanced age (i don't have testicles, so how could i have high testosterone? hair loss is therefore chemically impossible.), but it's always a concern when you get to a certain age. it is actually growing back relatively quickly. while i would never decide to wear my hair this short, it is now at a growth level that would not be uncommon amongst conservative men. 3.5 weeks after it was shaved to the scalp with a razor, my hair is now longer than matt damon keeps his regularly, at least nowadays, if you want a reference. famous females famously have mental breakdowns and shave their heads, but i don't know of any celebrity females that keep their hair short, regularly; that said, i don't keep up to date with celebrity gossip, either, and maybe i'm missing a cultural reference. whatever. there will be no pictures of this catastrophe. if it keeps growing at this rate, it should at least be somewhat presentable by early to mid june, even if it will remain far shorter than i'd ever want it to be for the next 10-12 months.
i went out to purchase some groceries in the pleasant summer heat this week, which opens the question as to whether i'm succeeding at the punk-chick-with-short-hair look, or if i just look like a dorky guy with a shaved head, all of a sudden. i have been overcompensating by wearing push-up bras with plunging necklines, along with more makeup than normal, as i warned the universe that i would. nonetheless, even with that explicit presentation, the question of whether i am succeeding or not weighs heavy.
this is difficult; in truth, few cis-women could effectively present with hair this short. the number of women that can convincingly express a shaved head while continuing to present femininely is very limited, to the point that it might even be qualified as elite. if you can legitimately pull off a shaved head, you should apply for modelling school, whatever your age. almost no women look like women without their hair, which is a reminder that humans demonstrate very low levels of sexual dimorphism, which is why we need gender as a social construction to differentiate us in the first place.
the truth is that i have pleasantly surprised myself. while success under these conditions is relatively difficult to define, i am confident in stating that i continue to look female, under the explicit condition of sufficient moisturization. when my skin dries out, as it would tend to this time of year, it starts to crack and i begin to look gross due to having bad skin, which makes presentation more difficult. when i am sufficiently moisturized, it creates enough of a glow that i do continue to unambiguously look female, despite the lack of hair.
reactions from random people while i am out shopping are always mixed, but what i noticed this week was a distinct difference in reaction based on gender. men are suddenly noticeably far less interested in me, which is an easily predictable outcome. i get catcalled by men extremely frequently and just shrug it off as idiocy; maybe that will be placed on pause for a while as my hair grows back. on the other hand, as somebody that has been living as a female for 20 years, almost half of my life, and that was certainly cognizant of being female before i went into transition (despite not knowing how to react to that reality), i am deeply aware of when cis-women reject me as female and other me and when they interpret me as fully female and accept me. the body language, tone of voice, etc vary widely from different ciswomen and are very easily interpreted, with a little bit of practice. some will hate me and there's nothing i can do about it; others will accept me as female in a spectrum from enthusiasm to caution, while others have a fetish about transwomen that makes them fidgety and giggly in a discernible way and still others consider it some kind of license to get aggressive and grope me or otherwise hit on me in a way they interpret as a "role reversal". i've been living this long enough that i can interpret the various reactions fairly easily and what i experienced when shopping this week was that the ciswomen i interacted with overwhelming accepted me as fully female, with little reservations or apprehension about it, even with or perhaps actually because of the lack of hair. the characteristic reaction was a wide-eyed grin, which is an expression of surprise that articulates "ohmigod i can't believe you still look like a girl even without hair.". that initial reaction will subside in the upcoming weeks as the lack of hair becomes normalized and the new hair grows back, and we'll have to see how the reactions change, but the initial reaction of acceptance rather than rejection is at least evidence that i am, in fact, succeeding and did quite a bit to boost my confidence while i'm stuck without my hair, waiting for it to grow back. counterintuitively, it's actually the "awkward phase" that is likely to be more difficult than the shaved phase. lest it be claimed that i'm misinterpreting the context of the wide-eyed grins, i want to assert with some force that i'm not. as stated, i've been living this a long time and i can tell relatively easily if a ciswoman is accepting of me as female, is rejecting me as female or is actually attracted to me in spite of or because of it.
i don't expect to be outside often in the upcoming weeks; i'll have to re-evaluate soon and see. however, it is at least growing quickly and i don't look as awful as i might have feared, so it could be said that a difficult process is going about as well as it possibly could.
13:37
the dalai lama has just announced a spiritual retreat to the luxurious thai caves.
bring your scuba gear.
18:36
i would suspect they're probably correct.
the media gets the causality backwards, because the system is lying to you. interest rate hikes are not intended to reduce inflation, they are intended to ensure that investors don't lose money when property begins to devaluate. the ordering was that housing prices started to decrease first and then interest rates came up immediately afterwards. the market forces pushing housing prices down were largely pandemic-related.
if housing is beginning to appreciate again, the bank will see pressure to reduce interest rates to encourage price appreciation. investors are better off that way.
at the end of the process, homeowners may look at their finances and realize they're out some amount between ten and fifty thousand dollars, depending on their property. yet, who didn't lose money?
that's right.
get it?
20:24
apri 17, 2023
if the state is concerned about "foreign interference", it should be addressing propaganda created by oil companies to confuse citizens into believing conspiracy theories.
these policies will certainly reduce oil industry profits, by intent. oil companies have a self-interest in mobilizing people against these policies.
it is the corporate sector that best understands how to control populations, not government. it baffles me that people are naive enough to blame these psy-ops on foreign countries, when they're obviously being conducted by the american deep state, which is run and operated by the petrostate, at it's core. while exxon has a relationship with russian oil extraction, it is exxon that created qanon through the cia, and not some exercise in "russian interference". multinational corporations exist beyond nineteenth century nationalism, and have no allegiance to any particular country, but rather use all of the state institutions they can co-opt, including institutions on both sides of conflicts, to advance the financial interests of their shareholders.
there is a long history of this kind of interference by oil corporations in municipal decision making, as well. our suburban society is designed around the primacy of the car. we keep public transit underfunded by design. etc.
if you have ever been to windsor, you might notice the streets are very wide. this is also true in toronto. the reason for this is that they were built for electrified tram use. in both toronto and windsor, as well as many other places, which interests organized to remove the trams? that's right - the oil industry.
10:47
listen, this is not my fault, and i don't take responsibility for it.
i'm a transgendered female that would prefer to have long hair but had to cut it because it was badly damaged.
i never was a long haired dude and i do not apologize for not being somebody that i do not want to be.
rather, you can experience me as a short-haired female for a little while instead, and while the outcome is unintentional, and i certainly wish i didn't have to go through this, it may have some positive unintended consequences in fucking people off that i don't fucking like, anyways, and that had distorted perceptions of me that i am not interested in living.
go fantasize about somebody else. that is your dream, it's not mine.
so, here's so irony for you, you fucking idiots.
18:43
april 18, 2023
i would like to get a little bit more information about this before i react, because i suspect this is not what anybody is deducing it is.
the ford government claims they want to build affordable housing. i somehow doubt that's what they're planning. the opposition claims it's an affront on public land and a handover to developers, which sounds like a valid point on it's face, but is not what i suspect that the government is actually up to. this discourse that is developing, however disingenuously, where the political right is claiming to support housing density (which is what actual environmentalists want) and the political left is legitimately opposing development (which is what phony bourgeois green capitalists want) is upending the entrenched class allegiances in ontario politics and realigning it with something more similar to the kind of politics you'd expect to see in the united states, where you have the upper class arguing for urban parks to walk their dogs in and working class people pointing out that they need somewhere to live in the midst of the sprawling mansions of the rich. this is also called gentrification. is the concept of gentrification applicable to the science centre?
it's not moving the science centre itself that i would be concerned about; the structure itself is a warehouse turned into a museum and could be rebuilt anywhere. the concept of a museum is updating in the technology era, as well. if we agree that the structure needs to be rebuilt, the question of where it is rebuilt becomes a triviality. nobody should have any particular connection to any piece of land out of tradition or history; a more central location downtown may actually be preferable for the centre, itself. there's not any particular reason to oppose moving the science centre, on it's face.
however, if you look at the site, it's not the science centre itself that is of value, it's the fact that it houses the observatory of the royal astronomical society. you can move the museum; you can't move the observatory. moving the museum becomes a difficult prospect, unless you're also planning on dismantling the observatory, which should be a nonstarter.
who would want to dismantle the observatory? that sounds crazy.
the neighbourhood has a majority muslim population, and it's easy enough to deduce that they don't like the science centre, because they don't like science. a giant structure dedicated to science as the centerpiece of their neighbourhood would actually be offensive to them, as they would see at as a place of paganism and satanic worship that undoes the primacy of spirituality. in their perspective, the observatory ought to be properly turned into a mosque and the mosque ought to replace the science centre as the centre of the community.
this is what muslims have done everywhere they've gone for centuries: they dismantle the society that exists and replace it with their religion, then pass authoritarian laws that kill anybody that disagrees with them. islam is the most brutal force of settler colonialism in human history.
i suspect what is actually happening is that they're converting the site into a mosque, and the discussion about affordable housing is a red herring.
18:38
windsor now has an official bird called the tit mouse.
stop laughing.
23:02
april 19, 2023
first, the united states bombed a gas pipeline (i insist it must have been torpedoed by a submarine) sending russian gas to europe and blamed it on russia because it wanted to capture europe as an export market, which we should not forget was the actual point of world war two from washington's perspective. this biden-trump talk of returning to a post-war order requires the existence of europe as an export market for american goods.
it doesn't get cold enough here for something like this anymore. they couldn't even open the canal in ottawa this year. at all.
then, europe shifts to using windmills to produce electricity, which is unstable because the wind in the area is unpredictable. it's a good back up source, and they've been lucky for the last few months. that luck will run out.
nonetheless, the americans will hardly allow that outcome to stand. they didn't bomb out the pipeline for nothing. so, now, they're broadcasting that they will dismantle europe's windmill generators and, once again, blame it on the russians.
russia has no self-interest in taking the windmills out and doesn't tend to use the bbc as a propaganda outlet, but the united states sure does. how long will europe tolerate this?
1:26
i actually think that twitter should put a "government media" label on the new york times.
1:58
i keep saying that windsor is the place that time forgot.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/rideau-canal-skateway-2023-season-closed-1.6738557
residents in lasalle should bluntly explain to the woman that she's an idiot.
7:54
trump is sort of like a republican incumbent, and he's been barely running at 50% support. what kind of incumbent can barely get 50% support? that makes him weak.
he won't stop, though. that's why i created a nickname for him, don coyote - because he's so smart, like a coyote.
i'm a secret pollster, you'll recall. observers should remember that trump was the moderate in 2016 and that republicans picked him because they wanted to avoid the extremism of cruz and rubio. if it's trump v. desantis, trump is still the moderate.
i suspect that a workable moderate - whatever that means, in context - will send don coyote home pretty quickly. nikki haley is unfortunately female, and that's a non-starter for that position. i don't know who might run, but i expect that they'll quickly generate momentum when they do step in.
9:59
april 20, 2023
Guilbeault tells Canadians that “emissions intensity from the entire economy [is] down by 42 per cent since 1990.†He ignores that total emissions are up considerably.
....because he doesn't understand the words he's saying.
i mean, just look at him; he looks like a capuchin in a suit. give him an organ grinder and toss him some change. he deserves some positive reinforcement for spelling "emissions" correctly.
steven guilbault wouldn't know a cunning plan if esso sent him the memo via priority post and his parliamentary secretary told him to sign off on it for a dime.
that's not an accident, either, it's a feature; he's easily tricked into signing things with the kind of propaganda you give to low information voters because he's a complete idiot that has no idea what he's talking about.
0:07
my neighbours are setting off fireworks tonight.
how long before this retarded country makes 4/20 a stat holiday?
"4/20 is canada's most important stat holiday, where we remember all of those who made sacrifices for marijuana legalization by taking aside one special day of the year to not go to work stoned."
"take the day off, jones - get some rest and sober up. be sure to come back in nice and baked tomorrow."
21:40
april 21, 2023
19:53
if the canadian government is going to spend billions of dollars on building factories for a foreign company (could they not find a canadian company? or were the canadian companies not upscale enough for liberal party brand marketing?), it should ensure that it takes a share in the ownership of the factories and is given shares in the company, to ensure it gains some level of operational influence over the workings of the company.
state investment that transfers the ownership of the mean of production into the hands of the public and consequently generates dividends to be distributed in the public interest is a good idea. no strings attached handouts to foreign capital (and foreign investors) in order to "create jobs" is not a good idea.
21:41
april 23, 2023
i used to play this song a lot when i was a kid as the solo contains the kind of technical punk rock with a jazzy overtone that i found highly interesting, as a guitarist. mr. deleo is a highly underrated guitarist and also one of the bigger influences on my guitar style (check out the break down in to spin inside dull aberrations or the come down after the climax of the first movement of interplanetary isomorphism for obvious nods to deleo's jazz-punk style). it's a shame about the direction the band went in after this record, but the second and third stp records are legit classics.
i'm not for sale.
sorry.
17:00
it's now been almost five weeks since i shaved my head, and the empirical observation of substance to take note of is that my widow's peak is starting to grow over, which is making me look less alien and otherworldly.
i have always had natural blonde highlights in my hair. when i was in elementary school, the girls used to tease me by accusing me of wearing mascara (which was false. i was born with it.) and my mother used to jealously accuse me of highlighting my hair blonde (which was also false. the highlights are natural.). i'm certainly observing some lighter hair growing in around my ears, but it's currently not clear if what i'm observing is that some white hair is growing in on the side or if what i'm observing is that the natural blonde highlights are growing in at a larger proportion. i've noticed recently that the minimal amount of body hair that i have (on my legs, for example) has also been coming in white rather than brown, which is an unusual reversal that might be related to the orchiectomy; it is often the case that people will have blonde hair when they are young and that it will turn brown as they age, but it is far less common for the opposite to happen. to be clear, my hair is still naturally brown, but there is also a noticeably substantively larger than usual amount that is coming in either white or blonde, depending on the light, and we'll have to see how it grows back in, either white due to aging or blonde due to estrogen (or progesterone) dominance. i look far better with dyed blonde hair than natural brown hair, but i tend to dye it in the spring, and i'm likely going to skip it this year.
19:47
april 25, 2023
over the last several years, we've seen an increasing level of hypocrisy set in on the fake left about how it treats political prisoners, which is in line with the general realignment of the fake left into a pro-america, pro-imperial and pro-war political configuration that no real left could possibly have any loose association or affiliation with as it is no longer anything resembling a lesser evil. when political prisoners do things that fake leftists like, those fake leftists will (usually rightfully) actively agitate for their release and condemn their captors as oppressive, but when political prisoners do things that fake leftists don't like (for example, tamara lich or jacob chansley), the fake left calls for blood and demands they be executed in public on the 6:00 news, and almost without exception for behaviour that is objectively far less criminal and frequently difficult to ascertain as being criminal at all.
i don't watch tv and haven't watched tv since i was a kid. i "cut the cord" in 2002, but i'd already tuned out by about 1999. the last thing i remember watching on tv was the xfiles finale.
as such, my image of tucker carlson is as a bowtie-wearing cnn anchor fighting the fake leftists of the time on the tv show crossfire and not as a fox news troll. i have never watched an episode of tucker carlson's newscast on fox; i don't have a tv, and haven't had one in over 20 years.
however, i've seen a substantive number of clips on youtube that are such that the characteristic that i associate tucker carlson with, at this distant vantage point, is as being the right-wing anchor that calls out the hypocrisy of the fake left in how it reacts to state-held political prisoners like tamara lich and jacob chansley, who have committed no crimes and are being persecuted strictly for their political views. for that, he will be missed.
“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.†- chomsky, a long time ago
17:43
in other news, smiley dmitry has turn his smile upside down and is now threatening to depose joe biden and install elon musk as president.
elon musk cannot be president of the united states because he was born in south africa. but, that's just a technicality.
this is why dmitry is not president.
elon musk would be shit present, anyways. he'd make everybody pay $8/month for their birth certificate.
18:20
april 26, 2023
i have decided that i'm going to keep this site the way it is for the foreseeable future. it is easy for me to ascertain when my posts are being vandalized by an outside actor. so long as this continues to be the case, i will need to maintain the status quo of publishing one post at a time, and then taking that singular post down within a few hours or days of posting it. i will not reconsider this algorithm until i see a total cessation of vandalism at the site.
i have spent months trying to build a watch later list and have continually been frustrated by youtube's interface while doing so. the plurality of scripts running, which are constantly communicating with back-end servers, makes it almost impossible to scroll through a channels video list back to the start, which is what is required to build the list. it would seem as though youtube is getting ready to delete old videos to save server space, and that might not be of much importance in the context of pop culture sites, which is what youtube mostly wants to sell, but the site i'm most interested in is the mit site, which has thousands of videos and which isn't concerning itself with what is fashionable and what isn't. a news site archiving on youtube to externalize server costs (in exchange for ad revenue) may want to reconsider it. what i'm doing is not complicated, but the script keeps forcing me to start over again, which is making it endless. i'm almost done, but that's been true now for weeks.
i've been focusing on legal case that is dragging on and on in between, and have been in a holding pattern for weeks as a result. again.
when i finish building the watchlist, i'll be done the setup on that site of the apartment and will need to get back to building the image for the typing machine, which will then become the focus of my attention as i pick back up on the writing i put aside in mid-2020.
the last three years have been weird, to say the least. my entire life has flipped over and i've become a very different person, in the process. in many ways, i'm more like the person i was before i went on hormones; i'm back to being an utter hermit, that has no interest in the world outside of my room. i have spent a very large amount of time writing court documents in that period that have allowed me to buy some new ewuipment or replace long lost equipment and i have fixed a lot of the items that broke, either literally or structurally, from 2016-2020, but i have completed almost no musical compositions and have barely even done anything musical at all. the second half of 2020 and the first part of 2021 was spent consumed with nutrition science, whereas the summer of 2021 was spent focused on a cancer scare that culminated in hitch-hiking to toronto to get an orchiectomy. i started on the journal in the second half of 2021, which was not a wasted period, but i had to put it aside because i was convinced somebody was vandalizing it in the nae of "editing" it and i couldn't establish data integrity. i did start some recording in the early part of 2022, but i put it down in the middle of a february thunderstorm and never picked it back up because i got lost in recursion and could not get out. i needed to spend the summer outside in the sun to get it out of my system; i don't feel the same urge, this year. i finally put the blog down altogether in september and have been struggling to pull together ever since, between court
5:27
as is often the case in contemporary conflicts, sudan would appear to be very complicated. the media is predictably trying to convince you simultaneously that it's an internal power struggle and a russian plot.
i would suspect that the issue that nobody is mentioning, namely the giant hydro dam nearing completion in ethiopia, is the primary driver of the conflict. long term instability in sudan essentially cuts egypt out of the equation.
7:06
biden is older than trump, but trump himself is too old to run and that should be made an issue in the primary by a smart republican challenger, who should slam him as being a weak, feeble old man.
i remain convinced that trump is a weak primary candidate, that he was always a compromise candidate in the first place (trump won precisely to block cruz, who even republican voters thought was crazy) and that he will lose against a moderate candidate who is savvy enough to point out that trump betrayed his voters by embracing exactly the kinds of politics, such as on abortion, that he was elected to not embrace. trump has no actual support in the republican party base, so it's not a question of collapsing his support base, it's a question of presenting a superior alternative that republican voters actually want. republican primary voters rallied to reject cruz, and then got him in substance, anyways.
what is a moderate candidate? it's not john kasich (that was a misbranding. kasich is also a right-wing extremist.), and it's not chris christie either, it's somebody more like mitt romney. there's nobody in the field that is anything remotely like that and it is no doubt largely because trump created an exodus of moderate conservatives into the democratic party, which they have now taken over and which is now the country's conservative party. in fact, historically speaking, the democrats are usually the country's right, not the country's left. the longterm consequence of trumpism is that it destroyed the establishment left, not the establishment right; the establishment right is alive and well in the democratic party, it is the mainstream left (even the softest left definable) that has been completely annihilated, and which has left no discernible trace.
this is consequently going to sound insane, but there is actually a wide open hole in the primary for a liberal republican to run through, and that is actually what donald trump proved in 2016 before he took a compete 180 degree turn to the right, once installed as candidate; republican voters are adamant and insistent that they don't support these demagogues that the media and party elites keep foisting on them to the point that they elected donald trump to stop it, and then watched trump morph into exactly what they voted against. a smart analysis should realize that that is the take away from the previous election results and project it into the upcoming primary.
the problem is a dearth of candidates. there's a small number of moderates in the senate that would wipe trump out, but trump's brand of politics is retributive, so it requires a level of risk. chris sununu is the kind of candidate that republican voters actually want (and can compete in swing states), and he should be looking for a new job, soon.
otherwise, the best argument against biden's age is that the other guy is just as old, anyways. if you were (justifiably) concerned about joe biden being demented and feeble when elected at 78, you have to eat the fact that donald trump will be 78 in 2024. it's no solution.
i've pointed out before that trump effectively delayed the onset of structural democratic dominance that had been building since the late 90s. we're entering an era where the democrats will usually be in the oval office, and it is precisely because they are the country's conservative party and therefore appeal most to key growing swing demographics like latinos and muslims, in addition to blacks, all of whom are overwhelmingly conservative in their political ideologies, in aggregate. this is the new right-wing political coalition, and it's very brown and very democratic.
the republicans are only going to break that by swinging annoyed white liberals in northern states, which is what donald trump actually did, but he then betrayed himself after he won and is now damaged goods. fool me once, shame on, fool me...won't get fooled again!
nobody wants the new boss to be the same as the old boss. that won't work a second time. however, it was the right strategy, and an actual liberal republican that stays liberal after being elected can actually win and can actually break the onset of decades of structural dominance by the democrats. they're wasting their time with the likes of ron desantis, who is not representative of republican voters and who has no chance of winning a general election.
13:07
april 27, 2023
“As we look at what the baseload energy requirements are gonna be needed by Canada over the coming decades, especially as we continue to draw in global giants like Volkswagen who choose Canada partially because we have a clean energy mix to offer to power. We’re gonna need a lot more energy,†he said. “We’re gonna have to be doing much more nuclear.â€
i hope zee germans are listening. you know they are listening.
they told you it was clean and signed you up for nuclear? must be zee jews.
(insert hitler reacts to volkswagon battery plant sourcing from nuclear video)
nuclear is not a clean energy source and the germans know that; they just shut the last nuclear plants down in germany last week for that reason. mining uranium in the yukon (or saskatchewan) will very quickly create more carbon than the tar sands, as they resort to fracking out minuscule quantities from ore so low grade you could handle it with your bare hands.
the easy way out is hydro, but our government won't build hydro dams because you can't sell it as fuel.
3:44
i would see some value in voting for a candidate that upheld the science by understanding that vaccine mandates, mask laws and border measures don't prevent transmission of a highly contagious virus but should rather be recommended as a protection mechanism within vulnerable populations that ultimately needed to change their lifestyles by avoiding contact with young people, who were better off letting the virus spread rapidly. such a candidate would see the value in preventing churches or bingo halls from meeting, and would introduce severe restrictions on access to geriatric homes, but would not order bars or schools to close.
that, however, is not robert f kennedy jr and i would not be tempted to vote for him in protest. i would rather vote for marianne williamson, who i must say looks pretty good for her age.
the only politicians that legitimately understood the science in real-time were the swedes and, bafflingly, boris johnson. rfk jr's position on vaccines is infinitely inferior to boris johnson's.
however, somebody like me that has broadly similar views to me and is just that little bit less educated and that little bit less fact-focused might not see the difference between voting for a principled candidate that is following what the science actually says in rejecting useless pandemic restrictions in the name of individual freedom and somebody that is just opposed to vaccines outright, or even thinks they cause autism. that subtlety was itself a casualty of the pandemic.
rfk jr also has toxic views on climate change.
it's consequently not clear exactly how to interpret the polling, except to grasp it as a very clear level of dissent against authoritarian pandemic restrictions in the democratic base, which it has been clear for some time is definitely there. this is the same demographic that gave gavin newsom a scare.
7:12
the only "appropriate" response to an authoritarian and religiously minded set of rules banning bathing suits for being too sexy (oh lordy.) is to call for a mass action "slut swim" and "slut walk" at vancouver public parks to protest the puritanical dress code recently introduced by the park board.
it may seem trivial, but it's not. it's a step in a process that needs to be nipped at the bud. if you tolerate this, you're opening up the floodgates, vancouver.
23:13
april 28, 2023
while there is a russian force on the bank of the dniester, moldova is not a slavic state and is not within the purview of pan-slavic hegemony, or the russian sphere of influence. despite existing between russia and serbia, romania is exactly what it's name implies it is.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9538708/credit-card-debt-canada-equifax/
whether the romans should exist north of the danube is defined by whether they can defend settlements there and the answer that history initially gave was "we cannot defend these settlements", until constantinople fell and the barbarians started invading from the south, which flipped over the protective value of the danube; rather than relying on the danube as protection from the barbarians riding in from the north, the romans now needed the danube to protect them from barbarians encroaching from the south. by this time, slavs and romans were more similar than different, as well.
the question is outside of the boundaries of pan-slavism and potentially where i might break with the kremlin. if the kremlin is attempting to project power on to nato-occupied romania, however unrealistic that may be, it is projecting a return to the soviet empire, and no longer implementing the pan-slavism of the nineteenth century. i am a pan-slavist and support a unified slavic political entity, wherever it may be centred, but i am not a stalinist (i am an anarchist) and would not support the invocation of soviet imperialism in romania/moldova, even if i will frequently point out that stalin was both the lesser evil and the better tactician in the second world war.
the turks are usurpers and have no place in this narrative or in history except to be rightfully expelled from europe and sent back to asia, but what that means is the re-establishment of romanian and greek independence and not the establishment of russian client states in the south-east of europe. the russians will eventually need to liberate constantinople, as that is their purpose in history, and will be the end of a historical process, but it must be with the aim and end point of the resumption of greek sovereignty in the bosporus, rather than in the framework of russian expansionism.
the question of baltic identity as something distinct from slavic identity is an open question, but the romanians are neither slavs nor greeks, they are latin speakers and properly belong to the west.
let the russians build their bridge to serbia through magyar-occupied pannonia, which has volgaic identity, instead.
15:20
this is a more important metric than gdp, for now.
when you start seeing headlines talking about credit card debt getting out of control, you will know the recession is nigh.
20:41
april 30, 2023
gaming culture has somehow been associated with concepts of cyberpunk and anti-authoritarianism, probably due to the implementation of technology, but the truth is that it is the modern equivalent of stupid 80s metal combined with the militarism of patriarchal 80s culture and that any modern concept of punk rock anti-establishment politics should be vehemently opposed to it, and ripping it apart as idiotic at every opportunity, in the same way that the punks went after garbage like rambo.
i never did get much into propagandhi. they've been a metal band now for years, right?
0:40
Liberals can spin all they want about an increase in government programs, there’s absolutely no way to justify or rationalize a 31 per cent increase in the size of the federal bureaucracy in the first seven years of Trudeau’s reign.
as we can see, thomas mulcair, the previous leader of canada's fake left ndp, is still up to his old thatcherite rhetoric.
i actually support increasing the size of the federal public service and support raising taxes on corporations to pay for it. i don't need to hear them justify that, i enthusiastically think it's a good idea. the idea that cutting the size of government is a consensus position in canada is only true in the ndp management's right-wing fantasy reality (it's not just mulcair), and has long created serious concerns amongst informed leftists about voting for them. it is comments like this that make the liberals seem to the left of the ndp, and the empirical evidence is that it is usually (not always.) true.
this is a politician that authored the policy proposal that deficit spending is "not an option" when he ran for prime minister, and that both lost the election and saw his party obliterated almost strictly for that mistake. he would clearly not have a strong understanding of the fiscal priorities of canadians in the context of the size and role of government in society; he sounds more like a politician from the united states.
the liberals would be daft to run an actual banker for prime minister; the raison d'etre of the liberal party is to act as a front for bay street banking interests, so bringing in one of the corporate sector apparatchiks as a politician would undo the purpose of having a liberal party in the first place. they'd might as well just dissolve parliament and declare tiff macklem king. yet, the liberals have been increasingly moving in the direction of doing away with facades in recent years, so it's an open question as to whether they may have lost the plot or not.
trudeau does have a clear successor, but she's never been an acceptable candidate and the politburo is beginning to clue into it.
in a democracy, this calls for a leadership race. freeland should be named interim prime minister and announce she's not running while a leadership contest takes place. i do not currently see a front-runner, but would suspect that voters (liberal party members) would not place mark carney in the top tier of candidates, for the precise reason that he is a banker.
22:30