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.