the grocery run on saturday threw me off a little, and i slept most of the day, but was able to get the rest of the caulking i needed done finished on sunday night (saturday morning) and monday night (tuesday morning), took a long shower on tuesday morning and then slept all day today. i'm awake and ready to type, but a few days behind. that's ok.

something i noticed this morning was a build up of black specs around one of the areas i sealed up, which was apparently something trying to get in there that i think was a spider because i noticed a couple of large black spiders crawling along the baseboards on the other side. i've seen a couple of these, but i can't identify the species. they are never in a web. whatever they are, they are trying to get under the floor and can't, and i'm cleaning up a lot of shit they're leaving behind.

as for the rats, i'm confident that they're out of the laundry. they were leaving territorial markers, but i cleaned it all up and they've stopped. the increased light in the corners, the constant cleaning and lysoling and the placement of bleach around several spaces is working in repelling them, although i think they migrated into the furnace room, which is also dark and concealed. if so, i'll have to deal with that a little later. i am not done cleaning up the ceiling yet (these are roof rats, they're coming from the top down) and will need to buy a step stool to get up and look in there to do it. there's a hole that some pipes disappear into with a nasty draft that seems to be an entry point and that i need to clean out and get some insulation into, which i'm looking to wait until the end of summer to do. i will enjoy the hot air through the draft in the summer, but need to clean the place up. the wall in there us exposed, and rats can climb it, so i'm going to drape over it with some shower curtains left behind by the previous tenant, and may buy a few more. that will make it more difficult for the rats to move downwards, although they could still follow the broad pipes in, unless i can block that off. it's better, and good enough to use the space, so long as i'm constantly cleaning. another annoyance is that the kids upstairs are constantly jumping on the floors, shaking doewn dust and wood chips and dried shit, although i think i got most of that out with the shop vac.

one of my containers of bleach was dragged away. so, that tactic worked, and i'll have to see if it killed anything, in the end. however, the tactic i'm taking is expulsion rather than execution. i'm mostly trying to block entry. i do have glue traps intended to block their movement, but i'm not setting up baits with snap traps, although i bought a few. not yet; not unless i have to. everything, right now, is about bobbytrapping the space, with the expectation that they're smart enough to see the traps, jump upwards 90 degrees in the air, look at each other on the way down and say "i...i'm...getting out of here...", then spin around and run straight out by converting their legs into wheels, somehow. that is correct rattus mechanics, is it not? i think you get the point.

but, if they won't leave? yeah - there's glue traps for them to fall into and piles of bleach staggered around all over the place, including in places they sleep, and if they want to try to drag the bleach out and spill it everywhere all over them, it will probably kill them when they groom. but i'm giving them a choice to run away and find somewhere else to sleep, or to try to drag the bleach out, if they're stubborn. i want them to run, but if they choose to be stubborn, i have to kill them.

quebec actually wants more control over it's immigration policy. france cannot just deport people to quebec.

but i could imagine macron calling legault up and a bunch of cabinet ministers sitting around a cabinet table dumbfounded, followed by an awkward silence.

and then

il parle francais.

they should deport him to quebec.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11669836/france-suspends-crinon-after-fight-vs-canada/

i hope they get the son of a bitch, actually.

it would be better to take the nazi out and let syria have an actual civil war. secularism is by far the more popular viewpoint, and the secularists will handily defeat the islamists if given the opportunity.

you will note that this is similar to lebanon and iran, but the opposite of (southern) iraq.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/12/five-plots-to-kill-syrian-president-or-ministers-were-foiled-last-year-says-un

you know, it would be interesting if some group of barbaric thugs showed up around the strait of hormuz and started sending advanced ballistic missiles at iranian vessels coming in and out of it.

i'm just saying.

is there a facebook group called dropouts for ford?

that's right, you should study being a fatass ignoramus, instead.

then, if you come from a wealthy enough family you can be a high-level politician without having any substantive education at all.

who needs an education when you can have feudalism and class hierarchy, instead?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-osap-cuts-9.7094009

the trump administration is trying to undo the narrative of islamic fascism as america's natural enemy that my generation grew up with and which defines the global outlook of most people under 50, in contrast to the cold war narrative that defines the lives of baby boomers. during the cold war, the bad guy was russia. in the post cold war period, russia is no longer a bad guy; the bad guy is now islam. while i don't really like the cold war narrative, because i'm a leftist, i'm largely in agreement with the war on terrorism narrative...because i'm a leftist. whether the communists were bad guys is a subtle issue, and the correct answer is something like "they weren't really worse than the capitalists, and, when you look at it carefully, they were probably less bad, overall". it's hard to get angry about communism or think they're going to ruin us all with their radical egalitarianism and want to fight them. but the islamists have no reedemable qualities and such a subtle discourse is not applicable. these are much badder bad guys, and it's much easier to hate a religious person than it is to hate a communist. if the communists won, it probably wouldn't be so bad; if the muslims won, it would be backwardsness and hell on earth, in a viciously barbaric legal system that rejects any concept of dissent.

to the trump administration, that appears to be exactly the problem. they don't like this narrative at all. they want more religion, not less religion. it seems to bother them that we're vilifying islamic fascists (or were) and are sending money to communist kurdish groups (or were) to fight off the fascists. this contradicts their basic principles and alienates the groups in the region that they want to align with, like the far right governments in turkey and saudi arabia...and, increasingly, in iran. this administration wants america's allies to be fascist extremists that want to enforce their dark age rules on everybody and america's enemies to be utopian socialists trying to defend themselves. the war on terrorism does not fit the narrative they want, but a war on transgendered people does.

as mentioned, this is mostly irrelevant to me. it's not going to make any difference to me on a day-to-day basis.

but if this embrace of islamic fascism by the highest levels of american government begins to filter downwards, we're all going to suffer dramatically, as they systematically take away all of our rights to make us pliable and obedient.

there seems to be some sort of attempt by some deep state intelligence agency to frame transgendered people as crazed mass murderers, apparently due to the american right's newfound embrace of islamic fascism. we don't have islamist terrorists anymore. now we have crazy trans people.

it's an easier scapegoat, i guess. it makes it easier for america to align it's foreign policy objectives with islamic fascism, and for the mainstream narrative to attack a group that is inherently secular, rather than one that suffers from the mental illness of faith.

i don't really care, frankly. it doesn't change anything of any substance for me, as an individual. i have never cared what religious conservatives thought about me before and i don't really care now. they can continue to go fuck themselves. i will continue to defend myself from attacks by religious extremists. i have never been attacked by a christian, but i'm constantly defending myself from attacks by muslims. that's been a constant, and this doesn't change that.

i'm a little more concerned about shifts in us foreign policy towards an alignment with islamic fascism, and out of an opposition to it. it's these shifts in foreign policy that are going to create more substantive shifts in the global order that are going to put everybody's freedom in jeopardy. my freedom was already in jeopardy, anyways.

the league should have listened when they told gary bettman that shootouts would ruin the game.

if they just went to overtime instead, everybody would still be alive.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/shooter-killed-ex-wife-and-a-son-in-rhode-island-ice-rink-attack-police-say/

the truth is that, in canada, the liberals' decision to try to turn us into a military dictatorship is a gift to the ndp, as it lets them run on transferring military spending to healthcare spending. they couldn't really do that before.

but, it's a measure of the value of a society's quality of life to compare how much they spend on shortening lives v how much they spend on extending them.

if we can spend billions of dollars a year on bombs, i don't want to hear about how there's no money for healthcare or education. that's absolute bullshit - the money is right there in the defense budget.

we clearly need to cut military spending, then.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11669653/ontario-unsustainable-health-care-spending/

mark carney thinks he's john maynard keynes, but he looks more like adolf hitler to me.

his attempts to assert "sovereignty" are going to backfire and get us invaded. frankly, if i have to choose between being an arab colony or an american protectorate, i'd rather be an american protectorate.

so, i'll say it again.

i, for one, welcome our new yankee overlords.