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