my video intercom came in in the mail today, so the only thing i'm waiting on is a package of nitrile gloves. unfortunately, as expected, the cable is only about 3 m long. i am going to need to run the cable through the garage and through two doors, which should be 5 m max. i'll have to see, but i think i'll need to buy another cable. that's ok. i can use this one to test it.

i'm also deciding that because i'm going to be putting a lot of wall shelving in here (the bedroom is a little small, too small for bookshelves, but it has that big closet/laundry area off the bathroom, which i consider preferable in concept; it means that multiple shelves on the walls are a better idea) and because i have a garage area that i intend to use to work in, it makes more sense to just order the wood i need and order a cheap circular saw to cut it with. i'm going to buy the same amount of wood, whether i cut it here or at the store. i can't bicycle with these wood planks, so i'm going to need to either walk it or cart it but some of the wood is going to be upwards of ten feet, so that even carting it from the closest store (a home hardware) becomes awkward. home hardware is also known for being overpriced. so i'm probably better off getting it cheaper online and mailed to me, and paying the $60 difference on a new saw. when i was a kid, i had a basement bedroom that had a kind of built in shelf (it was actually that the wall was about a foot from the brick, and the space lower to the ground was filled with insulation covered over by drywall, while the space higher up was not, it was just drywall over the outer layer) that i used to store paperbacks on. i'm going to build something similar to that in here, but it will be with three ten foot shelves held on to the wall with those adhesive pegs. that should be helpful to me as i work through the j's journal section of the multimedia presentation, which is the first thing to do when i get things set up properly.

it would be a shame to leave this space. it's huge. and it's cheap. i'm trying to get the furnace to work correctly and get a fan installed and get a new door on the side and i think i should be good to go after that. the landlord is absent-minded and distant but seems to be better than the last few, it's just that you have to bug him to do stuff. that's fine.

so, there's going to be another bunch of purchases when i next sit down to do it and it could actually be quite a bit, but everything else is in now except the gloves. today, i have the follow-up hearing for my harassment suit against the landlords in the last basement i was in and i will be filing something in the court of appeal tomorrow, regardless of how that goes, although i need to know what happens before i finalize what i'm filing.

nobody give a fuck about the size of the deficit. that doesn't matter.

what matters is that there aren't cuts to essential services, and what is concerning is that there will be. there's also rumours that the budget might have tax cuts, in the face of an increasingly structural deficit, created by subsequent governments cutting taxes to bribe voters. we need a tax hike right now, not tax cuts.

i've been holding out for years that somebody would get the chance to shoot him in the face. alas.

this man should have been arrested and convicted of war crimes, but the world is a fucked place.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dick-cheney-obituary-9.6965786

the nigerian government is not hamas and should not be treated like hamas. that would be an affront to decency. they need support, not condemnation.

boko haram is worse than hamas by a good margin. they should be treated worse than hamas.

these ultimatums should go directly to the terrorists. the nigerian government should not be bullied or pushed around, but boko haram should be bombed into a crater.

mark carney is marketing his budget as a big, beautiful bold bill. in fact, there's a pattern of him mimicking republican slogans and talking points, including "drill, baby, drill". there's no ambiguity about the hard right nature of the swing he's trying to engineer in the liberal party.

he's actually trying to remarket the liberals as the canadian version of the republicans. there's some historical logic to this, more broadly, but this is the worst possible time to do that.

this is not what canada voted for, and we have grounds to call for an immediate election. i didn't vote in the last election, because i saw this coming. he did not fool me. he did fool millions of canadians, who deserve a sober second opportunity.

the problem is that the ndp, canada's perpetually useless sanctioned opposition, decided to intentionally take two years to pick a leader. they won't be ready any time soon.

the greens are actually a better choice, and a more appropriate choice, right now. that party had better be ready to go.

the democrats lost control of congress. that means they don't get to pass their legislation; that is democracy. throwing a hissy fit and shutting down government because they lost the election is undemocratic and unsupportable on it's face. it doesn't matter why, and they shouldn't be given an opportunity to explain themselves; attacks on the democratic functioning of the legislative branch can never be justified and are never supportable.

rather than reach out to low income voters, which have historically formed the base of the party, and where my own class solidarity exists with, the democrats are pretending that they aren't responsible for the consequences of their juvenile behaviour, by blaming it on the ruling party. the media is following behind them in lockstep.

this won't work. rather, it's giving the republicans an opportunity to step in and fund the program, and continue to swing low income voters away from the democratic party, making it less and less likely that democrats are going to win elections in the near future. these low income voters may be criticized for voting against their own interests, but that criticism rings hollow when it's the democrats that are cutting funding and the republicans that are stepping in to save the programs.

if the democrats want to pass laws in congress, they have to win an election first. it doesn't matter if they disagree very strongly, or if they have religious opinions, or if they think the laws are "immoral". democracy is paramount, not morality. they lost, and they'll have to eat it.

but losers tend to act like losers and it just makes them bigger losers in the end when they do.

i agree with the court's decision. mandatory minimums are always unconstitutional and should never be allowed to exist in law because they're always overly broad.

the pictures themselves are harmless; they're just pictures. the law also attempts to eliminate exemptions for artistic expression, rather than allow for them. simple possession of pictures or art, even if some people consider those pictures "pornographic" or "obscene", should not be criminalized in a free society. the conservative party is expressing and reflecting an irrational moral panic that the court correctly put an end to.

the crime is in trafficking and exploiting of children, not in possession. courts need to be able to correctly ascertain the difference between these behaviours, and not be restricted by moralistic sentencing laws.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/wab-kinew-court-child-pornography-9.6965133