why doesn't trump invade the faulklands instead?

it's not that other presidents couldn't bully and push around the cubans, it's that every single president since 1963 has had the decency to avoid doing so.

you can judge the maturity of a culture by how it treats the vulnerable.

hey, the tylenol worked this time.

i got the eustachian tubes cleared a little, but it's mostly the tylenol. eating was actually pretty brutal.

it could be a while before i'm able to get over 50% still but i feel better than i have in a week and i'm going to try to get some things done tonight that are more than watching youtube videos while forcing myself to eat unusually nutritious pizza like things and sarcastically shit posting on my blog. 

yeah, i'm largely feeling ok and i am largely even decongested but my left eustachian tube has some kind of dried gunk or snot in them and it's making my head feel like it's going to explode. 

i think the only way to deal with this is by increasing the humidity and drinking a lot of water.

i think i'll be ok after i clear my ears out.

let us not for one second be misled by the nonsensical projection of cuba as a threat to american naval power in the caribbean.

let us dispense with the glaring fiction that the cubans somehow pose a threat to the american navy.

let us dispel with the absurd notion that the american navy is threatened by the cubans.

i unfortunately have a sinking feeling that, when this is all over and done, donald trump will prove his assholery in cuba and his true legacy of assholery will be best demonstrated by his actions against these people, these neighbours, that don't deserve it.

cuba offers very little to america

let us not pretend that the american navy is unable to protect itself from the cubans.

it's easy to spit on the americans and tell them to leave the fucking cubans alone. 

but i think you don't realize how far behind they really are and how absent any other path really is.

you cannot have socialism on one island. they've done the best they can.

but this decision should be theirs and theirs alone and america should wait for them to call, not sanction them or bully them with weapons.

cuba is a society stuck in the mid twentieth century and they have no path forward out of their stagnation. the quality of life is reasonably good but it's at a cost of low efficiency everything, it has an unusually high carbon footprint and it's a matter of time before it rusts over and seizes and ceases to exist. this is not communism, it's a successful demonstration of a society that has thrived in isolation by refusing to adapt to the modern world and has no path forward but eventual and inevitable collapse.

the trudeau-chretien government made a lot of effort to reach out to cuba and was overwhelmingly frustrated by their belligerent responses. chretien is on record somewhere pointing out that canada did everything humanly possible to engage with the cubans, but they simply refused to help themselves.

how will the cubans emerge from isolation and what is the rest of the world to do? surely, we ought not wall them off like a caribbean sentinel island and send anthropologists in to observe them, to learn what it was like to live in the 1960s. we're pretty sure they're anatomically modern humans. the russians will not help them. they have nothing to offer the chinese. they have no future but america.

but i say to those comrades in cuba, those who are pure of heart, and who want to protect the revolucion, that all is not lost. i invite you to dust off your theory, and remember: the revolution must happen in america. come to america's streets. come to america's factories. the superproduction you have no access to in cuba is in truth within grasp in america.

does bombardier have actual factories and make actual products in canada or are they just some big company that mostly operates elsewhere and has a head office in montreal?

i've been wondering that for years.

i have never seen anything in canada, in advertising, in pictures, on tv, on google, at all, that was made by bombardier. they're a ghost. an abstraction.

i have little concrete evidence that they exist at all and have to take it on faith.

“It provides central banks with the space to take difficult decisions that benefit the economy, benefit the citizens of that country, over the medium term.”

that's the theory, but it's bullshit, and we've seen that over the last several years, as the central banks have caused a serious housing crisis in north america and pointlessly slowed down the economy while making no discernible effect on inflation. the central banks have made stupid decisions that have harmed the economy and harmed the citizens of the country over the medium to long term.

the basic point is that monetary theory is wrong. if we had a science of money that we could actually enforce independently of politics, this idea of independent bankers would make sense. however, there is no science of money, and the central bankers are not making better decisions that better affect people. they are in truth more often than not using out of date and demonstrably wrong formulas to make obviously bad choices, based on outdated and obsolete models, and they don't have a better science to use because there just isn't one. we're trained to look at them like scientists, but they're more like high priests asking oracles for direction. we have more than enough information at this point to make it clear that central banks are a dangerous, unstable and unsustainable way to run an economy. the central bankers are not experts in any meaningful sense, they're politicians like the rest of them, and they're making decisions that benefit a class of people insulated from the rule of law and that have legislated themselves above the rule of law, which is called investors, at the express expense of everybody else.

it's not entirely clear that trump should be taken seriously when he has argued for lower interest rates and it may just be the case that his recent hissy fit is entirely to do with not getting his own way.

but the evidence in front of us makes it abundantly clear that the idea that taking this out of the hands of politicians and putting it in hands of technocrats has not had and will not have the intended effect of putting experts in charge of something that politicians might screw up. over the last five years, the central banks have screwed up worse than any politician ever could and, crucially, they were completely insulated from any appropriate consequences when they did completely fuck up, as they clearly did. the data is clear that those rates should have never been raised in the first place. what's missing in the system and needs to be restored to bring back democratic accountability is a mechanism in which voters, taxpayers, workers and citizens can tell the bank "you fucked up, and i lost my house. fix the mistake you made.". otherwise, the future looks like unaccountable and technocratic rule by the high priest of the federal reserve enforcing the religion of monetary policy, and that future looks exceedingly bleak.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/carney-calls-trumps-us-fed-chair-pick-warsh-a-fantastic-choice/

if donald trump thinks climate change will allow for mining in greenland, let him be distracted by that.

canada should focus on consolidating this instead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_megalopolis

unlike greenland, this is a region that will see dramatic, usable economic benefits from climate change, as miami and houston sink into the gulf of america.

if canada were to admit states to the east of ontario, it would likewise want to do something like combine the several states in new england into a new province.

canadian provinces are usually pretty big. i remarked earlier that we might want to revisit that, but it would be fairly complicated.

minnesotans are nice people, but minnesota doesn't offer much to canada, on it's own.

however, a combined state of minnesota, wisconsin, greater chicago including gary and michigan called something like the province of kitchigummi is a good, workable idea that should be seriously explored.

i suppose it would require something like chicago voting to become a part of wisconsin and gary voting to become a part of michigan, first. 

i would not expect this idea to fly in southern illinois, indiana or most of ohio, but parts of pennsylvania and ohio may want to vote to become a part of new york in a separate process, and toledo could conceivably vote to join michigan.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/minnesota-join-canada-jesse-ventura-9.7067000

how is it possible that nigel farage still has a political career at all?

in canada, i think it would be better if the bank of canada chair was a cabinet position.

in the united states, the power should be returned to congress, and the president probably shouldn't be firing fed chairs. however, there should be some way to replace a fed chair, and trump's hissy fit ought to trigger a reform process around selection and oversight of the fed.

i agree that interest rates are too high and would like to see them cut to almost 0.

central bankers throughout the world demonstrated tremendous incompetence in hiking interest rates to adjust to inflation caused by geopolitics in an open global economy and while inflation did come down, it's clear it's not because the rates were hiked. the philips curve was debunked 50 years ago, but economists still use it to set interest rates, because they have no better plan and no idea what they're doing. the idea of independent central banking is largely undemocratic and technocratic, and broadly not something i'm in support of at all. in a democracy, elected representatives should be able to decide how to set rates, or at least to replace decision makers if they are unpopular. 

that was one of the most painful mornings in recent memory, but i know exactly what it was about, and i am feeling better, after standing in the bathroom with a running shower for a bit and brushing my hair. it's hard to actually shower in this weather, and any moisture from the shower gets instantly eaten by the fan and the heat. the fan works very well, a little too well, but i don't want to turn it off.

i'm going to try to stay up for a few minutes but i think i have to sleep this off. it's not gone yet. the tylenol doesn't work for this.

i'm jonesing for some of that banana shit. i still remember exactly what it tasted like. my mother was irresponsible and immature, but she wasn't stupid, and she understood the results of her actions, but she wouldn't even consider quitting. instead, she overdid it with the antibiotics. the doctor had to cut me off, iirc.

just when i thought i was over it, the earache hit.

i used to get recurrent earaches like this when i was a young child. the doctors and i both knew it was because my mom smoked in the house, but i'm not sure the earaches were uniquely caused by cigarettes. my mom was a drug addict. i knew she did a lot of heroin when i was older, but she randomly admitted at one point that she used to smoke meth in the house when i was a kid, without prompting, and i actually had no idea until then. i have seen the guy up there smoking outside, and he had what looked like a crack pipe in his hand. i believe he's been in canada for less than four months, and appears to be a muslim of african ancestry.

one way or the other, i'm going to be very annoying when i smell any kind of smoke down here, until i'm able to understand what's going on and react to it.

i used to take banana medication for these earaches. i don't know what it was.

they cleared up completely when i moved in with my dad.

they hurt. i've never had an aneurysm, that i know of, but they affect the whole side of your face. they feel like a blood vessel is throbbing under your eye.

but i know it's an ear infection, and the cause is a combination of the smoke and whatever is making me sick, working together to weaken my immune system.

i won't give it very long before i call my gp and ask for banana medicine.

for example, i spilled some sunflower seeds on the ground about a week and a half ago. i was just clumsy and dropped the spoon. i got as much up as i could, but sunflower seeds are small, and if you drop some, they'll scatter everywhere.

i have been picking them up periodically for days. i just picked another one up.

any sort of vermin would jump on a sunflower seed. rats, mice, roaches, whatever. the fact that i can spill sunflower seeds on the ground and still pick them up a week or two later tells me there's nothing living in my kitchen, thankfully.

i did spend some time sealing the kitchen up as my first priority, because i knew to. there were certainly roach sacs under the fridge, although i have not seen a single one since i moved in. but that might be what the mouse is eating.

so, i'm going to focus on just sealing up the laundry first and going from there.

i'm more awake now and still concerned about what happened yesterday morning with my pants.

i have still seen no evidence of rodents in my apartment, but i went into the laundry today and noticed a few holes in the ceiling and some pasta, apparently from upstairs, on the floor. i double checked my own pasta and they have yet to get into it, or anything else. while i'm certain these are roof rats, and have had some roof rat droppings fall from the ceiling, i also noticed what appear to be smaller mouse droppings in the laundry, which i have seen before, but have never seen in my apartment. i'm once again convinced that there are both large roof rats between the floors that i'm largely being successful in getting rid of, although they're continuing to do damage, and a house mouse in the laundry in the basement that seems to appreciate me fighting the rats and i have to concede may, despite no evidence of it, be existing partly on minimal food crumbs left in the kitchen, and is getting in and out of the laundry. if the mouse is very small, i might be underestimating it.

i don't know how to make sense of a rodent gnawing through the jeans at my knees without biting me. cats will do something called knead you, which freaked me out the first time my grandmother's cat did it to me, but is a sign of bonding. apparently, rodents will gently bite as a sign of affection, which is again consistent with everything else. but i can't have that. was it trying to move me? was it trying to see if it could eat me by taking a bite first?

as i have seen no trace of rodents outside of the laundry area, i'm going to address this to start by completely sealing off the laundry area, totally, first by plugging up any potential entry with silicon. i'm going to need to order that tonight, as i'm just getting through my fourth container, and i only expected to need a couple. i'm going to buy about ten tonight and have  them delivered tomorrow.

for now, i'm almost done cleaning my boxspring and should be able to clean the rest of the bedroom up quickly after that. it doesn't have to be perfect, but it's a mix of coffee and chocolate soy, so i want to get as much out as i can. i don't want to attract bugs.

as for the rats, i have heard them migrate out of my space and into the upstairs and i think they're entirely out of here at this point. i can still hear them in the upstairs bedroom, in the upstairs kitchen and in the staircase to the top floor unit, but it's distant, and they aren't scratching around in the bathroom anymore.

a lot of things are better here, tonight.

this morning, i started to wake up a little bit after taking a dose of vitamin d. i had cut my supplementation of d last year to isolate the source of testosterone and have been mostly inside, with little sun, since october. i bought a bunch when i moved in but hadn't taken any yet. i decided it couldn't hurt and might help. i can't build a causal model, exactly, but i started feeling better within a few hours after the second dose of 1000 iu. considering that i was probably pretty low, it has some scientific basis. it was likely better than a placebo. i'll be going back to regularly taking 1000 iu a night, now.

when i started to wake up, i realized i was on the brink of pneumonia (it hurt to cough) and started aggressively hacking out phlegm to clear my lungs, which also cleared my sinuses. i coughed a frightening amount of yellow phlegm up. when i was done, i began to notice that the tenant above me was clearly chain smoking in the house and the sickness, combined with the heat, was hiding it. while i'm certainly sick with a bacteria or virus, i realized it was the smoke that was making me cough.

that means the stalker is probably upstairs.

i did a handful of things to adjust that, including moving the hvac filter into the bedroom, repeatedly running a dustbuster in several places of the house, vacuuming the floors and running a lot of water, including letting the shower run repeatedly. it seems to have helped dramatically, as well.

i'm confident i'm feeling better and should be able to get back to work in a few days.

what's happening in canada right now is probably best described as a type of existential dread.

when you hear people say "we want the rules-based international order" back, what they're saying is that they want the 90s back. they want more american hegemony, not less. it was the collapse of the soviet union and the onset of american hegemony that created a "rules based order" with the end of history. it's the unilateral withdrawal of american leadership that is collapsing it, but i think this will be short-lived and trumpian isolation will be incomplete and quickly reversed.

the 1945-1990 period was the exact opposite of a rules based order. it was a period of competition and espionage between great powers, rampant coups in "middle powers", puppet states, catastrophic proxy wars and extreme spheres of influence that split up the entire world.

there never was a "liberal international order". that's just newspeak for the american hegemony that set in when the soviets collapsed.

one of the best way to identify a fake leftist is to listen to how they speak about america and the west.

i'm often not too fond of american policy, and i've expressed that here. however, i am also fully cognizant that every single writer in the history of socialism - every single one - knew that the revolution must happen in america. even the ones that focused on the germans knew the real revolution happens in america. 

there are no legitimate counter-examples.

when you hear people running their mouths off about the decay of america or the decline of the west, realize that these are longstanding conservative tropes about the arrogance of babylon that have absolutely nothing to do with socialism, and you've managed to find yourself in a gathering of the right, not the left. when you start hearing people rambling about this garbage, about the overthrow of the west, or the return of some traditional religious or ethnic group, you should just get up and leave. these people are no allies of the left.

the soviets would sometimes support these groups. they often didn't. it depended on whether cynical soviet calculations thought supporting them would be of benefit to russian geopolitical strategy. when the soviets did support these groups, they would nurture any hatred that their nationalism invoked in them, and the americans did the same thing when they supported the mujahideen in afghanistan, or the nationalists in china. south korea spent most of the cold war as a right-wing hyper-nationalist dictatorship bent on destroying the north by overwhelming force, but kept in check by the chinese, and the americans, who said 'no'. this had nothing to do with right or left, it had to do with great power competition between the united states and russia. the post-war order was not defined by some set of rules written in the 90s, it was defined by rivalries between moscow and washington. the "post-war order" as used today means the order that emerged after the cold war, not after world war two, and i don't think it's shattered at all. the cold war was defined by spheres of interest and immense competition by great powers. the liberal media narrative is bizarre. right now, i see little evidence that american hegemeony is being challenged, anywhere. the americans are succeeding in dominating latin amerca, the middle east and eastern europe at the same time, and probably could not have done that even in the 90s. what is happening is that the americans are unilaterally withdrawing at the height of their own power, because they've lost the plot, no longer understand divide and conquer, don't remember why they invaded and occupied the world in the first place, and think they're better off in isolation. in fact, the british made exactly the same mistake under disraeli, and it was the proximate cause of the first world war, as it opened up a vacuum for the germans to walk into. as stated previously, i would expect the germans to do exactly the same thing yet again if the americans decide to withdraw from europe. america's fortress in greenland won't protect them from german submarine attacks, but an open ended occupation of berlin will.

what i'm getting at is that no leftist would talk like this. actual leftists that have read actual leftist writers don't oppose western civilization, but adhere to concepts of progress, and expect that the revolution, when it happens, will in fact happen in america. it's certainly not going to happen in angola or yemen or venezuela or palestine or iran.

the "national liberation" struggles, when you look at them, are almost always right-wing religious groups seeking to overthrow authoritarian socialist groups or bourgeois liberal groups and when they aren't, like in iran, the fake left has nothing to do with them.

the left is not about fighting america. it's not about fighting the west, it's not about "american decline" and it's not about fighting colonialism. these are all right-wing tropes and suggestive of conservative ideology trying to co-opt you. the left is about the proletariat taking control of the means of production and the distributive justice that follows from that. when you hear people that identify as leftists or organize on the left talk about these other things, you should identify them as what they are, and get up and leave.

we're now starting to see useful idiot fake leftists actively argue that the western media is inflating the death toll in iran, and i'm even seeing that argument jump up at the cbc, which is embarrassing.

we have limited access to iranian media in canada, and i think that's a problem. sanctions don't tend to work. but we shouldn't be banning media from iran and allowing media from saudi arabia or qatar. there's no logic in that.

i don't want to censor these people, i want to identify them. if you show up at a left-wing protest or organizing movement, and you're actually in support of hamas or iran, i want to know who you are and i want to expose you as what you are.

leftist organizing structures need to be aware of these co-opting efforts by islamists and islamist useful idiots and seek to protect themselves from them.

in the meantime, canada should place a 200% export tax on oil entering the united states and use it to aid laid off workers.

i would like to stand up and loudly state good riddance to these dirty, gas guzzling, last century vehicles that have no future in canada or the world.

if canada wants to maintain it's industrial base, it should focus on building vehicles that people want, which are smaller vehicles with high fuel efficiency that cost less to fill up and are better for the environment, or electric vehicles connected to a clean electric grid. many canadians, myself included, want to forget about owning a vehicle altogether and focus on clean public transit instead, or already do that.

the only market for these dinosaur vehicles is the rapidly declining american south. reasonable americans don't want to buy these shit vehicles, these backwards gas guzzlers, these anachronisms from a bygone era, either. unfortunately, the american car industry will not produce modern vehicles because it's interlocked with the fossil fuel industry.

if canada retools these factories to build modern vehicles, the americans will be banging down our door to buy them, because the american companies won't build them.

if america will not evolve or adjust, we need to separate our industry from them and move forward. but, we should also ensure we invite the northern states of michigan, of washington, of minnesota, of illinois, of vermont, of new york, of massachusetts to join us in looking towards the future instead of trying to bring back the past.

our own governments should have already banned production of these deeply damaging vehicles and, in truth, was grappling with how to do it. these dirty trucks have no future in canada. a time was quickly approaching where they would be made in the united states, for a backwards american market, or not made at all.

canada should nationalize the factory and retool it to produce modern vehicles, by either starting a domestic company, which canada should have and bizarrely does not, or by selling the assets to modern companies from east asia or germany.

they can't move the factory. if the company was headquartered in canada, this would be less likely to happen.

canada should take advantage of these changes to make needed and overdue changes about how we use carbon in this country, not moan and complain about them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/gm-oshawa-to-lay-off-1-200-workers-friday-9.7065457

ugh. this guy's a retard.

self-determination is not treason and democracy is more important than nationalism. alberta has a right to self-determination, and it has a right to self-determination, regardless of what the rest of canada thinks about the situation.

nobody asked him his opinion and his opinion has no relevance, in context.

if alberta wants to leave canada, good riddance to it. unlike quebec, it will provide nothing of utility or value to a modern economy in the 21st century. it's politics and people are backwards, uncanadian and embarrassing and they will do nothing but slow us down. canada is better off without it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11643234/remier-eby-alberta-separation-treason/

this is utter insanity.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/lacombe-agriculture-research-centre-closure-9.7065873

i want to make a suggestion to mr carney.

speak of what you know.

do not speak of what you don't. 

you have the resources to defer.

i also just want to briefly comment on this gay hockey player tv show.

i don't watch tv. i have no idea what this is.

but i suspect it's just confirming what every american already knew, which is that all canadians are gay. right?

is there an american hockey player on the show yet? i bet he knows the ten commandments.

i want to walk back something i said about the gst rebate the other day because i appear to have been mislead.

the initial reports said the gst rebate would increase by 25% for the next four years.

what that usually means is 25% per year for the next for years. for me, that would be:

(540*1.25^4 - 540) = (1318.36 - 540) = 778.36

778.36/4 = 194.59, and that's almost back to where the carbon tax rebates were, at around $200/quarter.

i therefore suggested the gst rebates were replacing the abolished carbon tax rebates, which were abruptly taken away without compensation, which was extremely harmful to almost all low income canadians.

however, that appears to not be what the government intended. rather, they appear to be using confusing language, and apparently meant that they are going to increase the amount once by 25%, and take it away after four years. that would amount to an extra (540*1.25-540) = $135/year over the next four years. quarterly, that would be $33.75 per check for the next four years, and then that will apparently disappear, as well.

i understand that it's an hst rebate, so it's intended to return the amount of taxes i paid on groceries. for myself, because i actually buy food when i'm at the grocery store, i pay essentially no taxes on groceries. food is not taxed in canada. the only item in my normal diet with hst added to it is doritos. the items that i would buy at a grocery store that are taxed are thing like toothpaste and shampoo, and when you add it up entirely, i probably make money quarter over quarter on the gst rebate.

but this does not come close to replacing the carbon tax rebate checks, or the increasing amounts that ow income canadians were set to receive from it in upcoming years, and the government disappointingly still has no plan put forward to replace those quarterly subsidies.

i qualified for the dtc, and i have been able to replace that lost subsidy with the cdb, and then some. i also qualified for the cohb. overall, i'm better off than i was last year, as i found ways to compensate.

many canadians did not and i am still looking to this government to explain how it intends to compensate low income canadians for the ghosted carbon tax rebate checks.

the reality is that anybody anywhere in the anglosphere who has studied the issue formally in any abstraction would know that it was settled british law to let the french settlers keep their culture and any dickhead or asshole british administrators trying to force english culture on the french would have actually probably gone to jail. it's not exactly common knowledge, but it's not exactly esoteric wisdom, either.

the reality is that while carney likes to cite rudimentary sources like thucydides (i read that in first year classics, too. greek civ 101.) in a pretentious way that is intended to make him look smarter than the average bear and smarter than he actually is, any actually educated person would realize that the two speeches, at davos and in quebec, actually both demonstrate deep levels of ignorance regarding the issues he's actually dealing with today, which are not homo economicus.

the reality is that if you were listening to carney speak carefully, and you actually understood what he said, you know he mostly made a fool of himself. the reality is he's been continually doing that for well over a year. he sounds smart, if you aren't, but what he actually is is overwhelmingly pretentious. he's actually continually thoroughly demonstrating that he's in way over his head and has no idea what he's doing or what he's talking about.

there's been a lot of attempt to study the way that economists think because it seems to be drastically different than the way almost everybody else thinks. the homo economicus syndrome is a manifestation of sociopathy in the form of a personality disorder. mark carney would seem to be a prime example in demonstrating the sociopathic symptoms of homo economicus syndrome, which uniquely presents in economists.

i have in the past suggested watching the corporation to understand mark carney.

i did not previously know the role that francis bacon played in developing the common law of conquest, as it was used in canada, and elsewhere in the british empire. i was taught the common law of conquest in a 3rd year university course on indigenous law in the process of getting my third degree at carleton, in sociology of law. they put down the law in a textbook format, attributed it to blackstone, stated it, said it was based on roman law, and didn't get much more into it than that.

so i just learned something, myself.

i slept briefly this morning, for about an hour, with a pair of jeans on. i was exhausted from sitting up for a long time to eat and just wanted to stretch out and i nodded off. i got up to defecate and was awake. i'm fairly sure i did not have any holes or rips in these jeans when i went to sleep and do recall looking at one of my knees some time last night, because i had to bend down to pick something up. i noticed when i got up that i had what looks like bite marks and scratch holes in both of my knees.

i was not bitten through my jeans.

i tend to sleep in the fetal position and that is bad for pants. but these jeans weren't just ripped from wear. there are puncture holes on both of the knees.

there is still absolutely no trace of them in here. but i'm a little worried.

i don't have any food for them to eat in the basement and thought i had chased them out of here for that reason. i imagine they have very poor bowel control and that if i can't find anything it's because they aren't here.

there is a summary of the britsh common law of conquest, here:

https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AJLH/2004/8.pdf

i also want to point something out about what carney said the other day in quebec, given that quebec nationalists did not like it very much.

it's certainly true that carney's speech was remarkably naive. carney framed the relationship between canada's french and english as being some kind of historic anomaly of tolerance and enlightenment. the quebec nationalists jumped at that to point out centuries of assimilationist policy.

in fact, it's worth pointing out that the english did not do anything novel in quebec at all, but rather followed very clear existing british imperial precedent. the actual law in place in the british empire at the time, which the british empire applied all over the world, was that when you conquer a people in tact, you have to allow them to keep their own laws, language and religion. that wasn't something uniquely canadian, the british applied that rule everywhere, to everyone, and the british precedent actually came from roman law, as brought into the british system via common law. the romans allowed conquered people to keep their culture, so long as they paid their taxes. the issue was placed before the english judiciary, who studied it, and adopted the roman position.

there is nowhere in the broad british empire where the british conquered a people and enforced their language or laws on them. in india, for example, the local legislature only governed british settlers. the local indians were allowed to keep their laws. but, eventually, they opted to reform their system to adopt a legislature.

now, it's true that some random brits have run their mouth off over the years.

but quebec still has civil law, still speaks french and still has more catholics than protestants, even as it has moved towards a policy of secularism after the quiet revolution. canada has broadly followed the british imperial law, rooted in roman law, and allowed quebeckers to maintain their culture.

the truth is that donald trump, who has publicly repeatedly claimed he doesn't believe in climate change at all and suggested it's a chinese plot, is now essentially imagining effects of climate change in the near future that will require centuries to arrive at. donald trump didn't listen to the scientists when he was denying climate change, and his perception of how the arctic is going to open up is now rooted in fantasy, not science.

the science suggests that it may be the case that the north pole might be ice free for a week or two in the summer by 2060. the polar regions would continue to freeze in the winter. i am not aware of any predictions of the northwest passage actually opening up year round at all. there are some suggestions that it might be open for four months some years some time in the 2100s. it's about a 2 month journey through the passage, so even a four month time window is barely usable, unless you want to winter on the other side. projections for a truly usable northwest passage are so far in the future, and would require so much unchecked global warming, that they're barely worth contemplating.

the reality is that the shipping lanes are not opening up and that, even in the worst case scenarios, it's going to be at least 100 years before this is even worth seriously talking about. 

what does that actually mean, though?

it means a shipping lane full of dangerous ice bergs and unpredictable weather events. if the passage is three weeks slow in opening, or freezes over six weeks early one year due to weather, you could lose billions of dollars. nobody is going to rely on that any time in the near future.

there are real ramifications of climate change on shipping that the science supports, like an ice free, year round great lakes shipping route. hudson bay may become accessible year round.

but the reality is that the giant arctic ice sheets are not going anywhere for many decades or centuries to come - not even in worst case scenarios, which climate activists still hope to prevent.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/increasingly-awkward-case-of-canadas-demilitarized-arctic

if the idiot savants running nato continue to argue that a peace agreement with russia must include nato "peacekeepers" in ukraine, which is the outcome that russia invaded to prevent, then the russians will have no alternative but to continue to grind the ukrainians down until they get to the dnieper, even if it takes 20 years.

my packaging doesn't have a size, but i'm underestimating. these pitas appear to be 7" across, each.

the area of two 7" inch pizzas is calculated as:

2(π*(3.5)^2) = 24.5π.

the square root of 24.5 is a little less than 5. so, two of these things is equivalent to a 10" pizza made by a dishonest cook trying to rip you off a half inch, which is probably all of them.

i would split the recipe up, but the point is to make as much as i can get out of a can of tomato paste, and that's two medium pizzas, apparently.

my pizza is a little different this time, but it's a constant that, while the recipe makes 4, i can only eat two at a time. i haven't measured these but they're perhaps 4-5" pizzas. it's two small pizzas, but two very small pizzas. but also two very loaded very small pizzas.

- put the bacon on first

- chop one large green pepper into four parts and cut each one into small bits, and put them in small bowls

- chop up roughly a third of a fresh pineapple into chunks

- grate an entire block of mozarella cheese

- put four greek pitas on baking trays. i have two on a cookie tray, one on a pizza tray and one in a square casserole dish

- you may want to put olive oil on the pitas first

- on each pita, sprinkle: (1) dried dill, (2) basil, (3) oregano, (4) thyme

- also put hot sauce on it

- when the bacon is done, transfer it to a plate to let it cool, slightly

- note that i cook my bacon in olive oil margarine. so the remaining grease has bacon grease, olive oil and canola oil. rub that on your pitas with a small spoon to create a kind of pesto.

- rub the tomato sauce on over that

- then put the green peppers, pineapple, bacon, olives and whatever else

- put the cheese on

- bake

- cut four avacodo halves up into small chunks and put them into four small containers

- put a small amount of diced garlic in each container

- when it comes out of the oven, put the avocado/garlic topping on

- but a tablespoon of nutritional yeast (with b12) on it

- use more hot sauce

- slice it into four

- if you can lift this with your hands, congratulations.

- the pita will crisp up, but it should be pretty loaded

- you are probably better off using a fork

it's still not clear what this is, but the large amount of indigenous american items (avocados, green peppers, avocados) suggest it may be some kind of loaded quesadilla, as much as anything else. it's a franco-greek-mexican-italian pizza-like thing.

this is horrific and unconstitutional and i certainly hope somebody has a lawsuit on the way to get rid of this nonsense.

https://immigrationnewscanada.ca/new-canada-ifhp-co-payments-2026/

yeah, i'm zonked.

i've been sleeping for days. i've been through two boxes of kleenex. i'm totally dehydrated.

if i did pick something up at the doctor's office on wednesday, i can understand why they were there. 

but, if that's the case, it should pass in the next day or two. if i'm still sick on monday, i'm going to need to get to a doctor. 

no signs of bubos or bleeding. my eyes look normal. i think it's a bad cold or covid.

i'm going to make some more pizza and go from there. i hope to have my head cleared in the next 24-48 hours, or i'm going to get worried.

how can i make sense of this?

it might be that "moderate" regional actors, like egypt, who have been critical of the new regime in syria, which is clearly a fascist government, are concerned that they might destabilize their own countries. egypt doesn't align well in the normal islamic theocracy v democracy spectrum in the middle east. egypt is a totalitarian, mostly secular state that is most likely to be destabilized by islamists and would observe their rise in syria or palestine with extreme caution.

graham may be pulling somewhat of a cato in seeking to divide and conquer a little, and that's standard american policy, in a way that might escape trump or go over his head.

it is not in america's interest to have a strong islamist state in syria or to continue to allow the turks to devolve back into ottoman authoritarianism. if this is graham's way to get that across, i have to agree with him, which doesn't happen too often.

legislation with teeth to protect the kurds would apply to syria, turkey, iraq and iran.

https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/890262/senator-graham-unveils-save-the-kurds-act-vows-sanctions-against-those-targeting-kurdish-forces

this is unexpected but i'll take it.

https://hawarnews.com/en/graham-signals-sanctions-to-protect-kurds-warns-against-abandoning-them-in-syria

donald trump would appear to be a poor judge of character and poor judge of people. he does not pick good friends.

ask ghislaine maxwell.

america's new friends don't seem to be very good friends.

but america is not a good friend, and donald trump is a very bad friend.

so, you know. you get what you deserve.

the reason that the turks and saudis are both dead-set on this, despite both being in a longstanding cold war again iran, is that they worry that the precedent will be set against them. and they're right. 

i don't think that torpedoing khamenei's residence is going to topple the regime. it might, maybe, moderate it. he's a fucking stubborn old man and his time to die is already past.

i don't think removing mbs in saudi arabia would help either, as he actually appears to be more moderate than the older generation, which is still technically in charge. mbs is but a mere prince. he might even still get snubbed. it happened to bandar bush.

i do think that taking erdogan out would be helpful to the turkish people, but i don't think that's on any table except the anarchist's table, and that table is not invited to the white house.

could you imagine the germans or the danes or the french denying america access to their air space? the turks are even in nato.

with friends like these, who needs enemies?

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/saudi-arabia-will-not-allow-its-airspace-or-territory-to-be-used-for-military-actions-against-iran-crown-prince/3812690

this would be a complete nightmare scenario. we'd be forced to adopt widespread market economics and would cease to be canada. we'd might as well let the americans conquer us.

canada's population should be relatively small to maintain our social services and way of life - it should be in the 30-35 million people range. there are already too many people here, and the government should already be trying to reduce the population.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11639688/canada-population-2075/

that didn't happen. it's 19:00 and i've been sleeping soundly since 5:00.

while the officers did have grounds to use non lethal force, and had justification to arrest him for physically resisting, and, if i was there in the crowd, and i knew he had a gun, i'd be happy to see him go away, there were no grounds to repeatedly shoot him with intent to kill at short range, and kristi noem's description of the events has no reflection on reality. and this is not the first time.

she should resign or be fired.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/jan/27/gregory-bovino-tim-walz-donald-trump-minnesota-minneapolis-ice-alex-pretti-us-politics-live-news?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-69793e318f087d9994defb97#block-69793e318f087d9994defb97

i slept all day again. 

i'm sneezing every few minutes and i'm exhausted. my head is throbbing. but i think i'm awake for the first time in a few days. i'm congested, but i'm not swollen, and i'm not bleeding. it seems to just be a really bad head cold.

i ate some oranges to use them and to wake me up. there's nothing quite as delicious as fruit when you're sick and i do have extra oranges because they were on sale. i bought about 20 oranges for $3; in fact, it was about 40 oranges for $6. i'll be eating pizza for the next 7-10 days but i'm gong to wait until the morning or maybe until the evening. i may eat a few more oranges instead. oranges are a staple in my salads, so i can never have too many, but i'm happy to have them now, too..

i'm going to get some tylenol, brush my teeth and make some coffee.

i think i can get my bed set up in here tonight and get back to work.

there's a lot of information about this.

this is a good summary.

i am also in favour of government directing increases in greenhouses, to boost what anarchists call "food sovereignty". i would prefer to see direct investment rather than tax cuts, but i want to give the state a hint about this.

this was actually one of the very few policies brought in by stephen harper that i supported, and you might want to take note of carney once again copying harper. but, harper was right about this. here in southern ontario, greenhouses provide stability for year-round growing seasons, and there was a brief period where you could buy gorgeous locally grown hydroponic tomatoes, peppers and strawberries here in windsor, for cheap.

then they legalized marijuana.

i bicycled from windsor to leamington once a few years ago. amherstburg is less than an hour on a bicycle, but leamington was a full day ride, both ways. i did get back into town before the sun came down. you can smell the marijuana production coming into town from about 10 km away, and the stench overwhelms the whole town. perhaps the residents have gotten used to it, like those who live by niagara falls are used to the sound of the rushing water.

to my dismay, i slowly started seeing the affordable local hydroponic produce disappear. it's obvious that what happened is that virtually all of the greenhouses switched to marijuana grow-ops instead. a few weeks ago, i was not even able to find tomatoes in my grocery store at all, here in what, until recently, was called the tomato growing capital of the world. i had to go to walmart and buy tomatoes imported from mexico.

if you want the greenhouses to grow food and not drugs, you need to write the policies with this understanding in mind and with the realization that there may simply be little you can actually do to get independent growers to grow food instead of drugs, besides growing it under direct state control.

i think that a crown corporation for greenhouse production of produce, specifically, would be the best way to approach this. the government should mandate certain nutrient proportions in the slurry to ensure the food is legitimately healthy, as well. plants absorb what you give them, and you can pump a plant up with almost anything, if you give it to it at the root.

the other issue is labour. i don't have anything against mexicans, exactly, but i don't like the idea of importing mexican slaves to work in greenhouses. this government has made a lot of ai and should realize that robotic fruit pickers are now a thing that exists in reality.

it would be massively beneficial for canadians for the canadian government to eat the capital costs in purchasing this means of production, and holding it in public hands. if we are to have collective ownership of the means of any production, robot fruit pickers in state owned greenhouses is the best way to start.

otherwise, you should be prepared to deal with (1) the reality that drugs are more profitable than food and (2) issues with importing labour to do the work.

again with the competition. always with the competition. there he goes again about the competition.

i'm a poor canadian with an education. you should ask me.

in fact, the carbon tax credit/rebate was extremely useful to me as i spend $0 on gas directly, due to not having a car, and the inflation was mostly not being caused by the carbon tax directly, although the increases in gas prices coming from global instability did lead to increases in fertilizer prices, and that was a major cause of the inflation. some people claim that grocery stores are just being greedy, and there are specific items sold in grocery stores that get insanely marked up for huge profits to compensate, but actual food is practically sold at cost in canada. the factors driving inflation in food (specifically. just food.) are due to production costs, not greed. but if your favourite pre-made chocolate cake at loblaws is 4x as much as it was five years ago, or your brand name detergent is 5x as much, that's how they compensate and pull in these crazy profits.

shifting the carbon tax rebate to the gst refund, without levying a carbon tax in between, will at least make up for that lost income, which very low income canadians will find very helpful. some conservative called it "chump change". well, it's easy to say that when you're not very poor, but that chump change could be the $50 of pasta you need that month. this is responsible in that sense, as it's targeted towards low income groups that need it, should not be inflationary and was, i always argued, the value of the carbon tax in the first place. i never expected that the carbon tax would reduce carbon use. when faced with a high gas bill, canadians will choose to pull their kids out of hockey, or reduce discretionary spending, instead of address the gas bill. there are ways around high energy costs that don't require "innovation", and taxes are never going to "spur innovation", but canadians are so culturally tied to using gas as a way of life that they won't think to do it, even when faced with steep increases in costs. canadians are trained to tighten their belts during down periods in order to pay the bills, and that's what we saw.

in order for the carbon tax to do what it was supposed to do, it would require huge amounts of social conditioning to get people to think differently about their spending decisions. canadians are famously socially liberal and fiscally conservative and trained for that belt-tightening, rather than to innovate or look for ways around high bills. at best, they might try to reduce usage, but that's not the point of the tax. we've had a problem in canada of finding the right policies but refusing to do good implementation because the government constantly argues that the market will figure it out.

no. the. market. won't. figure. it. out.

so, when we rolled out heroin decriminalization, we abandoned the portugese model that it was supposed to be built on and instead brought in this market libertarian pipe dream and watched it blow up in our face. when we increased immigration through the roof, we just flew them in and dumped them on the street, rather than spend to build the integration services, because that's what the market is for. when we brought in a carbon tax, the government avoided talking about it, in the mistaken belief that it would just work, and the market would figure it out, when the government should have been running constant ads everywhere explaining what it was and how to adjust. no, don't pull your kids out of hockey. get a hybrid instead. etc.

for now, this replaces the income subsidy that the very poor had come to rely on in the face of the coincidental brutal inflation because they don't burn gas directly, and which was abruptly taken away from them. that shouldn't have happened; there should have been a plan to transition. but if they're fixing it, great. that takes us back to where we were last year, at least.

as for the cost of groceries, people should make more of their own food, to start. there's a connection between healthy eating and affordable eating. unfortunately, in both canadian and american society, the more wealthy eat better and pay less, and the less wealthy tend to eat worse and pay more. there's a problem of education underlying this, tied into class and tied into lifestyle.

if you want to stick it to loblaws, don't buy that premade cake. buy some produce instead.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-gst-grocery-rebate-9.7060673

apparently, this is actually something mice do when they're courting, is leave nesting gifts. i don't imagine the rodent is quite that confused, but it's still a known act of affection.

a mouse would like my diet.

a mouse would like the pizza. right?

there was nothing left out for them to get at, but if they smelled it and/or watched me make it, it could conceivably want to hang out.

if it stays in the wall and eats roaches, whatever. but if it's going to crawl into my bed and make me sick, that's not cute, and it has to go.

my upstairs neighbours are also hacking and sneezing.

that doesn't make one scenario or the other more likely.

if the mouse was a pet, it might have slept on beds? i dunno. mice are smart animals, and they apparently have long memories. if i'm right, the mouse seems to be crawling up in bed with me when i'm sleeping and leaving me items it thinks belong in a nest, like leaves and insulation, apparently as some kind of gift.

it's easier to want to kill them when they're making you sick, and if this is the source, i have to kill it. but i also want to understand this.

i still can't find any clear evidence of rats or mice in my apartment directly, but i'm again finding some odd suggestions that there's something in here.

the animals in the ceiling are roof rats. that's clear at this point.  i also think there's at least one house mouse around somewhere, but it's very elusive.

as mentioned, i was cooking with pineapple last night and i have a virus, or something. i am noticing two thing waking up:

1) while i was careful to clean it up before i went to sleep, i found a cm^2 sized pineapple leaf beside me when i woke up.

2) the used kleenexes were on the other side of the room, under the table

i suppose it's possible that i might have kicked one of the used kleenexes when i got up to urinate and i might have accidentally got the little bit of pineapple leaf in my hair when i was cooking, but this isn't the first time that i've woken up with the perception that a mouse is trying to befriend me for chasing off the rats, although i'm not sure what it's eating down here if that's the case, besides maybe bugs.

i don't want to nest with the mouse, but if i can't find a reason to get it out of here, i'll leave it alone, especially if it is eating insects. 

i wouldn't normally make pizza. i like pizza, certainly, but pizza is junk food and something i will order and have made for me. i'm the same way with hamburgers. i will make myself lots of things, but i will order pizza.

however, they gave me a small stack of tomato sauce when i was at the food bank last fall because it was piling up. nobody wanted it. so i grabbed it, and i'm going to make "pizza" with it.

my dad used to make these cheeseless mini pizzas on english muffins that were extremely italian - they had no cheese on top, but were rather loaded with basil and oregano on top of the sauce, and something on them like olives or tomatoes and often chopped ham. they were really english muffins baked with tomato sauce and topped with pesto. this is something approaching traditional italian pizza rather than the franco-american pizza we eat today in north america. his third wife had an aversion to cheese and would get upset even watching somebody else eat it, so there was no cheese on anything he made (these mini pizzas, spaghetti, penne, whatever), unless i put it on when i ate the leftovers. all leftovers went to me, because she wouldn't eat leftovers, either; she insisted on only eating prepared food, and would just throw out whatever wasn't eaten, if nobody would stop her. dad would shrug off the cheese, but he couldn't accept the food waste, and i was happy to eat the leftovers as it gave me the ability to schedule eating when i wanted to - after school, in the morning or, sometimes, at 3:00, when i came in from somewhere, and was watching rereuns of star trek. her aversion to leftovers meant there was always something in there to microwave when i came home, even if i didn't come home for supper that night, or even if they brought something back from a restaurant, and that was actually very helpful to me, as a young person. you would need at least four, sometimes eight, of these mini pesto pizzas on english muffins to fill you up, as a meal. he'd make like 50 at a time and leave what was left in the fridge for me, and sometimes i'd eat them for a week at a time. 

so, this is an idea i'm familiar with and have eaten a lot of. however, it's because of that that i'm going to address some of the defects with these mini pizzas i grew up on. 

i did not know until recently that the words pita and pizza are actually the same word. so, i'm going to one up him a little on making this out of thick greek pitas, like this, and not out of english muffins:

the major difference between the greek pitas and the probably more well known arab pita is that the greek pitas do not have pockets and are not meant to cram stuff in. you would be more aware of this if you've had a gyro or a souvlaki; you roll them up like a thick tortilla, or you just put stuff on it and eat it like a canadian beavertail, which is essentially a fancy desert souvlaki.

but what i see is a small premade pizza dough, and that makes sense, because pizza and pita are the same word, and that is exactly what it is. 

i am going to go through one can of sauce per meal and we'll see how many that is but i imagine it will be two or three. i bought a stack of them pre-made in the bread section at walmart and it should be enough to get through the sauce, i think.

when i buy a pizza, i don't order it with pesto and tomatoes, although i do like the ham and olives. depending on how much i want to spend and what i feel like, and what's on sale (2 or 3 toppings), my usual pizza toppings are, in hierarchy:

core, always:

- bacon

- olives

first add:

- pineapple

second add:

- extra cheese (but it usually doesn't count)

third add:

green peppers

i will put hot sauce on the pizza when available and, if i take it home, will prefer to make my own dipping sauce out of frank's + caesar.

i have all of these ingredients and will be using all of them, along with the following toppings on the cheese:

- avocado

- garlic

- oregano, thyme, basil

- nutritional yeast

i think we know how to make pizza, it's the ingredients here that are unusual:

- make the bacon first (don't fully cook)

- slice fresh pineapple,  green peppers

- grate cheese

- start with the greek pitas

- put the sauce down, add hot sauce to tomato sauce

- rub some of the bacon grease around the edges of the pitas

- add green olives, bacon, pineapple, green peppers and anything else (grilled chicken, perhaps, but i'm not adding that ingredient)

- add cheese

- bake

- chop avocados, garlic while baking

- add avocadoes, garlic, spices, nutritional yeast, hot sauce to top of pitas when they come out

- slice them in four

there won't be crusts here, but if i want a dipping sauce, i'll mix frank's and caesar dressing together to make it.

update: i can get four pizzas out of one can, but it's too much. i used the following proportions:

- one can of sauce

- four greek pitas

- one large green pepper, in total

- about a third of a fresh pineapple

- four slices of bacon

- one block of mozarella, but this was maybe too little

- two avocados (one half on each pizza)

i still have two of them in the fridge.

c'est bien, mais c'est pas la pizza. i don't know what this is. if i put chicken on it, it might almost be a pizza souvlaki. the pitas actually do bake up like a pizza. is it a pizza beavertail? a pissaladere with pineapple? i dunno, but it's pretty good.

i don't know what i'm sick with, but i am sick.

there are rats in the ceiling. i do not believe they're down here. at all. i've seen no sign of them down here. no droppings. nothing chewed through. no food missing. there are clear entry points, and i'm working to identify and block them, but they don't seem to be coming down here. i think it's a combination of the facts that (1) i leave the lights on at night, (2) i'm usually awake at night, (3) my food is very well stored and (4) the main floor tenants turn the lights off at night, sleep all night and leave their food out. maybe they'd come down here if there wasn't so much easily accessible food upstairs. so, the rats are nesting in the ceiling and eating out of the upstairs kitchen, which is on top of my bathroom. i can hear them up there every night.

while i don't think they're down here, they are clearly directly above me, and they are urinating and defecating in the ceiling, and i can smell it. i've had stains coming down from the ceiling, and both food and droppings coming from holes or gaps in the ceiling, which i'm trying to find and cover up.

i'm consequently a little concerned about leptospirosis. about 95% of people survive leptospirosis. roughly. however, unlike covid, it doesn't target the elderly. being young and healthy is not going to help you against this one. it's a gamble with no clear way to predict the outcome. i would generally avoid anything with a 5% likelihood of death. that's too risky for me.

what i have is an upper respiratory infection, and it's pretty brutal, but i don't have signs of leptospirosis, yet. no blood shot eyes. no bleeding. no gastrointestinal concerns, besides a little heartburn. no jaundice. i have sore sinuses, but no headache, exactly. i want to keep an eye on this but i just don't have symptoms, or at least not yet. 

right now, it looks like i must have picked up a flu or covid on wednesday when i went to an appointment. i woke up with a sore throat on thursday and started getting a runny nose on friday. i blew a lot of virus out of my nose over the weekend, but it's actually running clear tonight. 

i am noticing that gurgling with high flouride toothpaste is helping with my throat, which is concerning as it suggests i'm killing bacteria in there. it's also one of those bugs where you feel better when you go to sleep and worse again when you wake up. viruses generally work the other way around. so this is making me a little concerned.

i know the symptoms to look for. the best thing i can do is keep an eye on it and call my doctor if i think i'm showing signs of more severe disease. i would want to get an anti-biotic to kill the bacteria. right now, if it is a bacteria from the rats, it's manifesting as a flu. and i was in a doctor's office with sick people the day before i got sick, albeit briefly.

i was never vaccinated for covid. i had some technical concerns with the type of vaccination being used, and i calculated that i just didn't need it. i am in a demographic with a 99.99% survival rate. i figured my immune system could handle the challenge. i don't know how true it really is, but i imagine our immune symptoms are stronger when they get more practice. i would have gotten vaccinated for something more scary, but i just was not afraid of covid, and i don't think the data suggests i should have been. further, i actually think i got covid before the pandemic started, at a plaid concert in detroit in late 2019. i may have carried it from detroit to toronto, when i went to file court documents there. i was never tested for antibodies. i did test clear of covid in 2021 when i went to get my orchiectomy, also in toronto. if that was the case, i had an early strain, and it may have been a little different than the pandemic strain, but i did not get substantively sick during the pandemic at all, and i may have never come across it. it's likely i'd get sick if i caught a recent strain. 

but i can smell fine. 

so i'm going to hope it's a flu and not a bacteria from the rats. 

i'll also keep an eye out for bubos and you can be sure i'll be at the er if i see any swelling at all.. right now, i'm not swollen, at all. bubonic plague is actually easily treatable if you catch it early, but they might have to burn the city block down if they find it here.

i made a choice on thursday that i felt shitty enough to sleep it off before i focused on the court documents. i had to make that choice - i could try chugging coffee and hope it wakes me up and struggle through it, or try to sleep it off and get to work on it after, with the hope i'm more productive if i do. i decided to try to sleep it off. i consequently lost thursday, friday and saturday.

i was feeling good enough to get to work on saturday night, but right when i was about to start, my air purifier fell off my box spring, landed on my chromebook (it's ok), bounced off of it and knocked over a giant glass beer mug *full* of coffee. the mug is ok. by the time i got a towel, the coffee had created a mess on my mattress and box spring that had to be addressed by cleaning it.

i haven't set up my bedroom yet. the kitchen, bathroom and laundry are each mostly set up, but everything is still in boxes in the living space, the in-unit garage is empty and the other areas are full of storage items. i'm waiting on the weather, i'm waiting on the drug dealers to get evicted and i'm waiting on finishing the court documents. my mattress is on the floor. it's fine for now, but the spill required me to move some things, and it made sense to clean the floors and set a few things up, given i'm sick. 

 

- i got a lot of dust off the floor. no signs of rodents in here.

- i also blocked off two obvious rodent holes, which i don't think have been used in here recently.

- i also sealed all the baseboards with caulking, which was to block off a draft

- i was able to glue the bottom leg on one of my tables, which had broken off in the previous move. it's fine.

it's ridiculously cold out and the caulking instantly helped. i hadn't initially noticed the draft in the floor. i was focused on the draft around the windows and actually surprised by the lack of one but couldn't figure out why the temperature in here dropped so fast without constant heat. that seems to be it.

unfortunately, the box spring took the brunt of the spill and absorbed enough of it that i was going to have to let to dry. i think i can get most of the discolouration out with dish soap, but i just wasn't getting anywhere, until the moisture evaporated. so i stopped early in the morning to eat my last caesar salad (for now, i'm out of kale) before switching to mini pizzas for the next week to eat up the tomato sauce i got from the food bank last fall, i feel asleep mid morning, got up to finish my salad and fell back asleep. i woke up without a sore throat today, but with a sore upper nose (nasal cavity). i've been sneezing a lot, but it's been clear snot since i cleared the last bit of yellow when i first woke up. that's a definite change from the gobs of yellow yesterday.

i still have to clean my box spring and set my bed up before i can get back to work, but it's time to eat again, so i'm going to make some of these pizzas. this is a new recipe so i'll go to a new post.

right.

so, the repeated shots at close range are clearly unjustified. it's excessive force, and the officer should be charged with and tried for murder and go to jail for the rest of his life.

however, given that the guy got into a fight with a handful of cops (he seems to have been trying to prevent somebody from getting arrested, which he shouldn't have done. he should have kept filming and offered it as evidence.) and had a gun on him, the officers had grounds to use some amount of force, such as shooting him in the leg, in order to stop him from resisting. the officers knew he had a gun. he brought a gun to a protest. why? did he have explosives? other weapons?

there is no justification to shoot him repeatedly in the head, but there is justification to use force, and he should have been arrested and charged. he cannot help his friend by getting into a physical altercation with police. that won't prevent his friend from getting arrested. he can only put himself in danger and can only irrationally break the law. if he thinks his friend is being arrested for civil disobedience, and thinks it is illegal, the best way he can help is to document it for his friend's defence.

being a cop is hard. that's not an excuse, and this cop needs to go to jail. but this is not the same thing as what is happening in iran, at least not yet.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/24/us/invs-videos-show-federal-officer-recovered-gun

the number of dead civilians is continuing to rise and it's becoming clear that the iranians killed more of their own people in a week than the israelis killed in gaza in a year of the recent war there, and the numbers of dead in iran are continuing to climb. 

newest estimates suggest the number of dead over a week this january is pushing 40,000.

still no comment from the western fake left, who have no solidarity with leftist comrades in arms, but restrict their solidarity to right-wing rapists and thugs that want to create a society similar to the one in iran, due to being heavily propagandized by islamist state media from the middle east. it's sad and disgusting.

the americans won't do with iran what i want done or what the democratic opposition wants done, but this regime will not fall without an army being raised to topple it, and the idea that there could be anything worse than the status quo in iran is stretching credulity.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/world/middleeast/iran-how-crackdown-was-done.html

see, it would be great for me if michigan was a part of canada because i wouldn't have to cross the border to party in detroit.

let me soberly ask michiganders - not something i've done often in michigan, which those who know me will testify to - to weigh the facts in front of them.

trump wants to put a 100% tariff wall over the detroit river. you know what that's going to do.

given that fact, are you not better off in canada?

pierre trudeau did flirt with non-aligned status, and canada was certainly the most independent member of nato. but we were never fully non-aligned, and it would have been suicide to become non-aligned or leave nato.

there's actually a little irony here.

every time i hear trump say "you'll see" or some variant of it when asked a question, what i hear is "just watch me".

ok, here's some al from chicago. he can be a part of the united states of canada if he wants, too.

canadian news is keying in on that familiar phrase uttered by carney: it's a new world order.

what carney actually seems to want is the old world order in the sense that he wants to bring the cold war back. he claims we're not going back to a post-war order. i think he's wrong, but if bush was declaring a new world order on the collapse of communism that did away with global superpowers in favour of us hegemony, and most of the west went along with it, carney's proposed new world order, full of superpowers fighting and "middle powers" seeking a third way through non-alignment, actually looks a lot like the old one and that is consistent as much of the anglo-american elite never really accepted bush' new world order in the first place, was disinterested in being reprogrammed to fight terrorism and just kept fighting the communists through the post cold war period. i've remarked before that while my heart is in gen x, and i am the last gen xer, i realize that the anti-soviet propaganda pushed down on gen x from every direction, except punk rock, was so immense that we will need to wait for gen x to overturn before the west can let go of the cold war, and it's 2026 and we're still suffering through what must be the last of the boomer presidents. we haven't even got to gen x yet.

so, you can meet the new order. wrong band. it's the same as the old order. wrong song.

wrong square.

wrong date.

jokes aside.

the idea that canada can just build a protective igloo across the border and go it alone isn't some kind of noble defiance. canada is not some righteous path in a sea of corruption. canada's as bad as any other capitalist actor, and in many ways we are worse. we will not survive. 

churchill had his ass handed to him and needed help not just from the americans but from the soviets. his speeches of defiance were delusional hogwash. britain was on the brink. and he was a piece of shit, anyways.

if you want a history lesson, you might study the punic wars, or the trojan wars (as they've come down to us) or, yes, the peloponnesian war, too. you might look at the mongolian conquest of china, or of the collapse of the roman empire. there are tactics to use to get inside the larger, more powerful actor and eat away at it from the inside. the chinese infested the mongolian horde and came out in control of it. roman culture emerged in tact after the german invasions.

if canada wants to seriously survive, rather than carry out a performative form of "survival", it needs to leverage the allies it has in the united states, and it has a lot of them, and it has a lot of leverage.

i think any smart person will concede that merger is inevitable, as a merger of the north and south of china was, or a merger of italy and germany was, or a merger of scotland and england was. if we want our culture to survive and prosper in lieu of theirs, we need to approach the merger with an upper hand, and not run from it, or try to avoid it. if we do that, we will just be wiped out.

also, i can't help but post this right now.

this is the right way to do this.

canadian sovereignty is stupid. trump's a dipshit, but this is inevitable, and he's catalyzing an eventuality. the question is whether we're going to merge in a way in which we have the upper hand and make america more canadian, or the other way around, and i vote for canadianizing america. so, if trump is going to insist on being an assface, let's get this started.

as chicago will be a part of the new united states of canada, let's quote al to start.

no, not that al from chicago.

the other one.

northern states that vote to become a part of the united states of canada will be exempt from the export taxes.

if trump wants to place a 100% tax on 15% of american goods, many of which are completely inelastic or at least have low elasticity, because there are no comparable substitutes and perpetual demand, he should go for it. let's see how that works out for him.

it makes no sense whatsoever to retaliate, except via the export taxes i've been pointing to since this started.

canada should place an export tax of 100% on all items that trump tariffs.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/trump-tariff-threat-canada-100-per-cent-jan-24-9.7059620

future residents of the united states of canada should take note of that as a benefit and as a feature of the new society. in the united states of canada, there will be no right to open carry. canadians think that's retarded.

well.

if the argument is that he was simply defending his right to walk around with a gun, i wouldn't accept that. i would support the police shooting people walking around with weapons in public and would not support the idea that that's some kind of right. that's utterly retarded.

they might have perhaps shot him in the leg, instead. it seems like this was probably overkill, and the last several years of events in minnesota suggest there's a systemic problem in the police force in minnesota.

but i would, in principle, support shooting at people at protests with guns, and i would support that as a protester. it's not something that's ever come up here, but if i showed up to a protest group and there was a guy with a gun, i'd be on the other side of the square. i wouldn't go anywhere near him, wouldn't talk to him and would want him to go away. this guy showed up to a rally prepared for a war. that's not to say that the united states won't get to civil war in time, but it's not there, and i'm certainly not in support of people trying to get there.

the difference between the united states and iran is pretty overwhelmingly clear. in a democratic society, all civil disobedience should be non-violent. americans don't need to use violence to tear down a dictatorship and create a democracy, they have a system to work in. it's hard, but americans have what the rest of the world is fighting for, and there's no justification to use force when you lose an election and don't get what you want.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/24/minneapolis-shooting-federal-agents

the americans are only protecting your gold, germany.

i wonder if it's even still there.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/24/repatriate-the-gold-german-economists-advise-withdrawal-from-us-vaults

very few of the dictatorships in the middle east will survive an american withdrawal.

with american withdrawal, the long necessary arab enlightenment period may finally be in view on the horizon.

when donald trump goes to europe, he sees plain and modest buildings built for utility, while wealth is distributed more fairly to people. when donald trump goes to the middle east, he sees immense disparities in wealth, and ostentatious towers built of gold. therefore, the middle east is a rising society because it builds towers of gold on the backs of it's people, and europe is on the brink of collapse because it does not have these displays of wealth, and instead has better wealth redistribution.

the role that the united states has played in building and maintaining this order appears to be lost on him, as are the lessons of the revolutions of the past. more gold towers equals more success, and a higher likelihood of success in the future.

as a leftist, i'll happily take the mistake and call on the forces of democracy and liberation to take advantage of it.

there was a time after world war two when the united states understood that it had to occupy germany and japan, and then korea, and then poland, not in order to "protect them", but in order to subjugate them and force them to submit to american hegemony, because allowing them to rebuild and remilitarize posed not just a substantive threat to american security but the greatest threat to it. it was also calculated that forward positions in europe and asia would help contain eurasian powers, but this was secondary to the need to occupy and control america's enemies, which were germany and japan. the united states was aligned with both russia and china in world war two. 

that correct thought process is no longer being considered by the pentagon, which is now concerning itself with resource extraction in the western hemisphere, in an attempted return to the distant past, which will fail on it's own accord. it is instead encouraging it's enemies to arm themselves so america doesn't need to "protect" them, as though they were there out of the goodness of their hearts, and not as occupying and pacifying forces, with the purpose of subjugating them.

instead, america seeks to align itself with the "rising powers" in the middle east, which are, in truth, the society that is on the brink of actual civilizational collapse. they are not following russian propaganda, they're being led by the arab lobby and easily distracted by the display of gold and outward wealth. but this distribution of wealth is false, as it reflects decisions in washington to buy oil from the middle east and increase european reliance on american defence systems. the europeans can defend themselves, but the muslims cannot.

what america is going to learn very quickly is that if it allows europe to "defend itself", it will immediately reassert itself as a threat to us interests and that if it gets out of the way in the middle east, the society will almost instantly collapse. the united states is not holding europe together, but it is propping up dictatorships in the middle east. this is the opposite of their calculations. germany does not need the united states to protect itself from russia, but saudi arabia does need the united states to protect itself from it's own people.

as a secular leftist, i'm interested in this outcome. the world will be better off with a stronger europe and a weaker middle east. the mistake of america's stupid right will be of the benefit of the global left.

as for the pacific, i don't imagine the united states is going to actually withdraw from japan and, so long as it remains in japan, it will retain a deterrent.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj9r8ezym3ro

i don't want to defend the arctic.

not one canadian should die defending a pile of rocks for a multinational corporation.

why don't we sell it back to england?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vx0p77pn8o

they should label it as marketing.

why exactly are people afraid of this?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/pigs-crispr-gene-editing-9.7059040

the hubris of thinking you can change the spelling of words in foreign languages is truly something to behold and reflective of the reasons that the turkish dictator will eventually be hung on a telephone pole by his own people.

i also want to tell the turkish government that they have a lot of arrogance and no grounds or right to tell english-speakers how to spell the name of their country in english. the english believe in democracy, sultan erdogan, and we will determine our own spellings, not you.

but, if you'd like, i can reciprocate by suggesting the following spelling of canada in turkish:

siktir git

the composition of the board of peace is mostly not important, as everybody is going to vote the way trump tells them, which is why they're there.

i think that gaza needs local government, not an international oversight body.

however, who has a real role in an international oversight body like this board of peace?

- egypt, obviously

- israel, obviously

- the british have a role to play due to the british mandate and the suez canal

- the french should purposefully not be invited as they have no role to play in gaza, in lebanon, in syria or anywhere else in the middle east

- no other western european country should be invited

- the united states needs to be on the board

- canada should not be invited

- no country in latin america, and especially not nazi-aligned argentina, should be invited

- iran should be invited in principle, but an iranian opposition group should represent them, not the current government

- greece should be invited

- italy should be invited

- turkey should be invited

- these are the four stable historical powers in the region

- jordan should be invited

- lebanon should be invited

- syria should be invited in principle, but a syrian opposition group should represent syria, not the current government

- saudi arabia should be invited in principle, but an opposition group should represent them, not the current governent

- no other arab country should be invited 

so that is:

- the governments of the united states, egypt, israel, the uk, greece, italy, turkey, jordan and lebanon and democratic opposition groups representing the iranian, syrian and saudi arabian governments.