inri022 updated and tested

this is tested and working on the chromebook and on firefox on the windows 7 box.

what's in there, now?

- the 10 songs on the record
- cover.jpg. this release is download only, because these tracks are thoroughly rejected.
- a playlist.m3u file stored as raw text
- a 23 page doc file of liner notes over the fall of 2013
- a 23 page pdf file (same)
- an instructions file
- inri022.html.7z.txt is a 50 mb document that must be renamed and unzipped and contains (1) an html version of the liner note package, including an html5 player that can load the purchased audio in the browser and (2) deleted masters of the record from 2013, in standalone 320 kbps mp3 and embedded into the html file.

the full download, in flac, is 304 mb.

there will be further updates to the liner notes as i run through the alter-reality, and as i run through the remastering period that took place over 2015-2016. but, this is likely the last major revision to this period 1.2 outtakes collection, which is nearing a point of final completion.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrijected

it's time to stop to eat and shower.

so, i crashed this morning during testing. i'm up now and have finished testing the windows box. it won't be long before i'm done here and i should have a post up soon.

i'm still planning on getting to the dso, but it depends on timeframes. i might miss it. it's streaming...

the landlord/main-cop is back and the stinky cop seems to be gone. can i make a request to the force, which i know is reading this, to keep that gross, smelly cop away from here? surely, you can find a cop to stake me out that i can't smell from a distance of 100 yards?

very soon, and then i'll get back to inri023 when i get back, if i go.

it's done. 

final testing.

soon.

there's one more after this...

this one is much shorter, and it will be done quite shortly. soon.

why isn't the fake left press covering this?

https://thearabweekly.com/undeterred-clerics-intimidation-iraqi-women-press-protests

first liner note release for inri022

this is a collection of rejected tracks from the inri/inriched period. it's just chronologically sequenced. download only.

recorded over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. released dec 27, 2013. corrected to normalize for stereo in september, 2014. expanded incrementally between dec, 2014 and dec, 2016. merged with inricycled b and then finalized and re-released on december 16, 2016. first liner note release added on feb 15, 2020, to include the initial 2013 release in 192 kbps mp3 only. as always, please use headphones.

this release will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1996-1999, 2013-2020). as of feb 15, 2020, the release includes a 23 page booklet in doc, pdf & html, with an html5 audio frontend, that includes journal entries from the remastering process over sept-dec, 2013, as well as the initial 2013 release in 192 kbps mp3 only.

credits

released January 27, 1999

j - guitars, effects, bass, bass synth, synthesizers, vocoders, octavers, drum programming, sequencers, noise generators, sound design, vocals, found sounds, cool edit synthesis, digital wave editing, loops, windows 95 sound recorder, sampling, production.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrijected

it turns out that poll in nevada was commissioned by an explicitly republican polling firm. that might explain a few things.

i need a better source than that.

i quit smoking years ago.

and, i shouldn't have to go to any great lengths to prove that statement - it should be taken on face value.

i have not been cold turkey for a while.

but, i functionally quit smoking in january, 2016, and anybody pushing back against that is just being dishonest in their argument.

i've had maybe ten cigarettes in the past ten weeks.

and, i haven't bought a pack of smokes for casual, habitual use since the end of 2017.

fwiw, i have not bought a pack of smokes since i got back from toronto in mid december. i've bummed maybe 10 smokes in that period, while i'm out grocery shopping.

it's actually a subconscious factor in staying in tonight - i know that i'll buy a pack if i got out for the night and i don't really want to. i can probably avoid that if i just go to the show tomorrow afternoon, instead. i might bum a couple...

so, the fact that these cops are smoking upstairs is exceedingly frustrating to me. but i just have to focus on winning these court cases and getting out of here.

that means that i should get inri022 up by the end of the night.

i was badly distracted yesterday. we know that happens when i get cabin fever. and, it actually means i need to get out. tomorrow.

yeah, the wind chill tonight is still pretty bad, coming off the deep freeze yesterday morning. and, the change in the lineup at the psych show means the combination of the night falls apart.

i'm going to wait and go tomorrow afternoon, instead.

iran is an advanced society under the thumb of a brutal dictatorship.

they don't need the kinds of social programs that senegal needs. what they need is solidarity on the ground.

don't waste my time with your morality.

it's bullshit.

like, i don't even want to talk to the kind of conservative idiot that would try to frame complicated social problems in terms of morality. we diverge from first principles.

your morals are of absolutely no concern to me at all.

yes, you have to get to root causes before you can fix problems, but that's not an argument against the use of force, it's an explanation of when it's useful and when it isn't.

arguing for root causes as a means of pacifism is a co-option of socialism by religious groups. anybody that's actually read any kind of socialist literature at all will tell you of the importance of violent overthrow in the model.

it's a question of restricting the use of force to scenarios where doing so is productive and can lead to a substantive outcome. for that reason, blowing up senegal would be pointless, whereas very careful support for the revolutionary forces in iran could actually be decisive.

but, it's not some kind of moral issue. it's a tactical question.

"separating religion and state is much better then separating males and females", 

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/02/14/hundreds-of-thousands-take-part-in-million-women-march-in-iraq/

yay!

https://peoplesdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Womens-protest-in-Iraq-1536x864.jpg

On Thursday, ahead of the protests, he (sadr) again slammed the protests as being rife with "nudity, promiscuity, drunkenness, immorality, debauchery ... and non-believers."

finally - a contemporary movement in the middle east i can stand in solidarity with!

debauchery forever! drunkenness for all!

solidar, solidarity!

no, seriously. this is a positive development in iraq as of late, and i hope it has a secularizing effect, and i hope that secularizing effect spills over.

and, if there's anything we can do to help....

https://www.dw.com/en/women-and-men-stick-together-in-iraq-after-cleric-al-sadr-criticizes-protesters-immorality/a-52372819

that's an encouraging development.

i can stand with this.

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/02/iraq-protests-feminism-women.html

also, the turks need to immediately cease all support for the rebels in idlib, and i fully support any actions by the syrians and their russian backers to restore syrian sovereignty to the area.

i would then hope that the russians recognize the need for regime change in syria once the country is properly stabilized, and assad himself sees the need to make way for a civilian government.

for right now, wiping out these islamofascist nazis needs to be the primary purpose, and the turks should be ashamed of the actors they're supporting in order to advance their narrow self-interest.

this is quite different from what bernie has done in the democratic primary, which is to very purposefully distance himself from queer activists so as to not upset his chances at winning black voters.

and, as punishment for his cynical failure of leadership on this point, he will probably lose both demographics, and rather badly.

i feel obligated to respond to this, although i'd actually rather not.

first, i'll reiterate that i'm not a supporter of justin trudeau or the liberal party. there happened to be a relatively good liberal candidate running in my riding, and i did vote for her because i thought she had a good chance of getting rid of the rather useless ndp back bencher that we've had here for far too long, but i spent months insisting i'd vote for the greens, and would have if it weren't for the strength of the local liberal candidate. i didn't vote for him, i voted for her - both technically and symbolically.

so, trudeau can't lose my support because he doesn't have it in the first place.

but, the issue of homosexual oppression in africa is extremely widespread and baked directly into the culture, there. there aren't even really substantive allies to connect with. i need to be able to present an alternative course of action before i can criticize somebody for doing something, and there really isn't much of one, here.

if the implication is that trudeau sold out queer rights for a security council seat, then that would be deplorable and worthy of condemnation in the starkest terms possible, and possibly even grounds to demand an immediate resignation. i would hope that other countries would look at something like that and vote for norway instead, as we clearly wouldn't be worthy of sitting on the security council if we were going to behave in such an undignified manner as that. as a canadian, that would leave me feeling ashamed and embarrassed. but, i don't think that's what actually happened.

what can canada do with these countries like senegal that just refuse to modernize around this issue, and so many others? well, pulling investment isn't going to help anybody. nor is boycotting them. as an anarchist, i completely reject the premise that market theory is a force for social change. this is a longstanding liberal position, though, that is challenged mostly by conservative zealots on the fake left that insist on upholding these purity tests in who they interact with - that's not a position i'd ever advance or advocate. so, for example, i'll follow chomsky on his criticism of bds, in arguing that it's likely to backfire. and, while a bds movement against africa on queer rights might feel good, it's not likely to materially aid any queer people in africa; i might support such a thing abstractly, but i'd never actually advocate it, as i'd expect the outcome to be terrible for the people i'd be trying to support.

nor is trudeau standing there and saying things going to mean anything to anybody. nobody cares.

we could slaughter the leadership in the hopes of an uprising, but that would never work in africa. i've been very careful to point to iran as a specific example where there is a lot of opposition to the state, and a powerful modernizing force on the ground, and i've tried to frame the issue around the likelihood of critical mass. i would never argue for a second that slaughtering the african leadership would lead to a modernizing uprising, so the justification for doing so wouldn't exist. i am cognizant of the fact that the self-righteous moral zealots will call me a hypocrite, but that's rooted in the fact that they're too stupid to understand the argument i'm presenting. if you read this post and conclude i'm a hypocrite, you're an imbecile - but you might, and i expect as much from a certain collection of people that think with their hearts instead of their heads.

the best thing we can do is try to provide support and hope it helps to change attitudes on the ground in the long run, and my understanding is that that's actually what we're doing. i may have other criticisms for the economic projects that exist beyond this, but i would reject the explicit argument that they should be pulled to help the queer movement get off the ground - i do not think that this is a well thought through argument.

likewise, i'm hardly going to have a melt down about the prime minister attending a meeting with the iranian foreign minister. i've been clear that i'd support a very tactical strike to remove the religious leadership, explicitly, in the hopes that it would lead to a secularist uprising, if the likelihood of such a thing could be established beforehand. zarif is actually a part of the civilian leadership, and not really representative of the theocracy. again: what can canada do in or with iran? and, if you believe that it should be seeking to prop up secularist voices and minimize religious ones then isolating or excluding the civilian leadership would not be consistent with any kind of progress, even if it makes you feel good about yourself for doing it. in context, there are clearly some discussions that need to be had between the countries, and i don't see any value in preventing that.

i would support a targeted strike against the ayatollah, though. that's the source of oppression here, the religion; the civilian government, if anything, is a buffer against that.

i hope i've clarified any confusion that might exist.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/pm-defends-not-publicly-supporting-lgbtq-rights-in-senegal-photo-with-iranian-minister-1.4812426

if you put money down on andrew yang to win the presidency, i have a bandcamp site to send you to.

i think the error here is thinking this is a serious projection, rather than a way for fools to part with their money.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/14/21137882/prediction-markets-bloomberg-sanders-president

this is explored in greater detail in the dawkins film 'nice guys finish first'.

there's lots of examples in this primary, but klobuchar v warren is particularly clear. if they continue to compete, they're going to end up both getting <15% across the board. but, if they cooperate by picking a ticket and sticking with it, they could give bernie a run for his money.

buttigieg and biden is another example, but it's not as clear, yet.

i suspect i'll be talking a lot about this in the upcoming weeks.

if you don't know what it is....

...and i like the advertising example, in context.

i'm forced to live inside the system that is erected around me.

but, you would find the depth of my rejection of capitalism to be shocking, should i ever choose to get involved with politics in a serious manner. the groups i would support would be extremely radical, and i would not stand with groups in the centre, at all.

if you were to see me in action, you might begin to understand why i reject bourgeois politics so thoroughly.

but, my art is more important than my politics, and is where my energy will be focused for the near future.

and, why don't i go to shows in windsor?

because there aren't any. or, there aren't any worth going to, anyways. it would be far easier if there were, trust me. but, there aren't.

it's a small city. i'm a big city person...i need a large metropolitan area to be able to generate the kind of art i'm interested in. 

my focus, right now, is my art.

i'm not done yet.

i am a canadian citizen and live in windsor. i just go to detroit to party, because it's the closest major city. if there was a closer city on this side of the border, i would go there, instead.

i have no interest in detroit politics, and would even consider engaging myself within them to be an example of foreign interference. i may make comments or observations about things that are meaningful to me, but it's intentionally done from a great distance.

i would involve myself with issues on this side of the border, strictly, if i were to decide to make that choice. but, i am not likely to find myself interested in bourgeois politics any time soon. i would be more likely to involve myself with ngos and anarchist groups.

we have a special place in our law for indigenous groups that take direct action against groups that would infringe upon their constitutionally defined rights, it is true.

but, that place doesn't extend to people acting in solidarity with other groups, even if popular opinion is on their side.

actually, the issue here in ontario is pretty cut and dry, although scheer's suggestion (and trudeau could order the rcmp in if he wanted) is pretty hamfisted, in terms of public relations, and intended more for a political audience.

but, that's my point - everybody loves the phrase "rule of law" nowadays, even if few people seem to know what it means, but that's not really the point on either side.

the government doesn't want to create any martyrs, and should not be overly aggressive in it's actions. if they were blocking somebody from entering their own territory to lay a pipeline here, the courts would interpret the situation in a different manner than they do with run of the mill vandalism, even if that's technically what they're doing. but, this isn't what's happening. you can stand with them and agree with them, and i do to an extent, but this is going to end with mass arrests and convictions for garden variety offences like mischief and trespassing. what the police are really waiting for is for the topic to exit the news cycle - it's an entirely political response, through and through.

likewise, scheer surely knows that calling for tanks in the streets in canada is just an authoritarian right pipe dream to rev up his racist political base, although it demonstrates why so much of the country refused to even consider his candidacy. it's just crazy talk from somebody that will never hold any power.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6551391/wetsuweten-protests-trudeau-scheer/

i need to repeat the point.

if sanders is the only person that gets over 15%, he gets 100% of the delegates.

so, he could in theory get 22% of the vote and 100% of the delegates if the second place finisher gets 14%, and the field is bunched up behind him. and, that looks like what's going to happen, if buttigieg can't clear that hurdle.

there is no polling support for anybody else besides sanders and maybe biden clearing 15%. not warren, not steyer. and, the polling support for biden is rather weak (i'll get to that).

my intuition is that buttigieg remains the most likely second place finisher, but we're running out of time to build polling support, and if the data doesn't come in soon, that will need to be abandoned. i won't run on gut feelings in any scenario besides the complete absence of data, which is what we're faced with. my gut is not a convincing oracle, nor is yours. this telephone poll has a very small sample size, though, and isn't enough to go all in on - we're still forced to rely on guessing.

but, i think it's more likely that they both fail than that biden succeeds at buttigieg's expense. i mean, you've got three options:

1) buttigieg takes votes from biden and ends up viable while biden doesn't. i still consider this likely, in nevada, in the end.
2) biden recovers support from buttigieg and ends up viable while buttigieg doesn't. i can't imagine that happening, anywhere, anymore, not after listening to biden speak, recently. he's a senile idiot. you'd have to be retarded to vote for him. i'd vote against him, explicitly, if i could. he should be in a retirement home, not running for president..."too old" is maybe not a fixed number, but biden really is too old.
3) they split their own vote and both get under 15%. this is currently the second option and is increasingly looking more likely.

you could say something similar about klobuchar and warren, except that all evidence at this point suggests they're going to split and both end with nothing. they're in a classic prisoner's dilemma, and failing badly.

how likely is it that biden will be viable? polling at 18% with a 5% moe means you're between (13,23), 99% of the time. as he has tended to underperform his polling just about everywhere, it seems likely that he'll end up on the bottom end of this, that is below 18 rather than above it, so it's not strong evidence that he'll end up viable. and, these are higher numbers than i expected to see.

so, if we don't get any polling evidence that buttigieg or at least klobuchar have a shot at viability, if the polls continue to suggest that it's just biden & sanders, you should prepare yourself for the strong likelihood that sanders takes the pot, here.

these numbers are roughly in line with what i suggested, with the open questions being how much support will flow to buttigieg from biden and how much will flow from warren to klobuchar. i am skeptical that biden will run that high in the end (he's demonstrated himself to be a doddering idiot, and if being "diverse" means you're more likely to vote for a moron then that reflects poorly on diversity, doesn't it? i'm not buying into that, that's racist.), but we'll see what happens. 

note that if these numbers are roughly correct and nobody can get to 15% then sanders actually gets all of the delegates, in the end.

https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/sanders-holds-lead-heading-into-nevadas-democratic-caucuses-poll-finds-1957583/

inri021 updated and tested

this is tested and working on the chromebook and on firefox on the windows 7 box.

what's in there, now?

- the 17 songs on the record
- cover.jpg & a jpg of the backsheet for cd-r printing (the insert for the spine)
- a playlist.m3u file stored as raw text
- a 126 page doc file of liner notes over the fall of 2013
- a 126 page pdf file (same)
- an instructions file
- inri021.html.7z.txt is a 175 mb document that must be renamed and unzipped and contains (1) an html version of the liner note package, including an html5 player that can load the purchased audio in the browser and (2) deleted masters of the record from 1999 and 2013, in standalone 192 kbps mp3 and embedded into the html file.

the full download, in flac, is 570 mb.

there will be further updates to the liner notes as i run through the alter-reality, and as i run through the remastering period that took place over 2015-2016. but, this is likely the last major revision to my second record, which is nearing a point of final completion.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched

it's time to stop to eat and shower.

i'm done testing on windows.

the chromebook testing should be relatively quick. soon....

is sanders the front-runner?

right now, he is, yes. maybe he shouldn't be, and maybe he won't be next month, and maybe the fact that he is right now is a reflection of the field being unsettled, but he's the only guy you can place a bet on to get over 15% in any particular state.

it's not often that "getting over 15%" means you're in first place, but that's the reality that exists, right now.

i keep pointing out that it seems like this is intentional, and the longer these goofs keeping running into each other for, the more likely that will seem. 

ok, so i've finally got those typos i told you about on tuesday afternoon updated.

- i removed a "/p>" from the html frontend for inri002 and inri015.
- i removed an extra "</p>" from the html frontend for inri015.
- i unscratched out a track from the html frontend for inri015.

that's it. but, it means reuploading the 7z.txt package and redownloading the end point in flac for archiving.

inri002:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inricycled

inri015:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-3

the (hopefully) final update (for now) for inri021 should be up soon, i hope.

and, i may have to make some pasta in the wee hours of the morning because it's -30 out for the first and hopefully last time this year.

if the demographics in new hampshire preferred klobuchar over warren, cheating or not, it's hard for me to think that the demographics in nevada would reverse that.

warren is more white, older & a little less socially conservative. they ought to prefer klobuchar.

but, black churchies in south carolina ought to like buttigieg, too.

should i post about nevada? i have an hour and a half to blow before i turn the pc on, which i turned off early this morning to go to sleep. i have slept most of the day....

i suggested a little earlier that i basically think this "diversity" line is just an excuse and that, notwithstanding the clear reality that southern blacks are neither going to vote for a jew nor a gay male in any kind of substantive numbers, i don't really think that nevada is going to be as different from the first two states as is often surmised.

the polls that exist are ancient, now - early january. but, the trendline is actually more or less the same as we've seen elsewhere - biden & warren are falling, while sanders is stable and buttigieg is climbing, by capitalizing on support wandering from biden & warren. is there some kind of accompanying klobuchar bounce? we'd need fresh polling to conclude that, but, frankly, i'd expect something or other.

the only thing that really looks like it might be different in nevada is that steyer may be polling substantively higher, presumably cutting into the same voter pool as warren, biden, buttigieg & klobuchar. if you start with new hampshire results and you take 2% from each of those candidates and give it to steyer, you end up with:

sanders - 26%
buttigieg - 22%
klobuchar - 18%
steyer - 12%
warren - 7%
biden - 6%

and, if i was to take a guess, a priori, which is a terrible idea, that's probably not far from what you'd end up with - on the first ballot. the only tweak i'd make would be to move some of klobuchar's vote to warren.

sanders - 26%
buttigieg - 22%
klobuchar - 15%
steyer - 12%
warren - 10%
biden - 6%

what that means is that you're probably actually looking at the same three candidates in nevada - maybe. steyer is probably just going to kill off biden, without getting over the threshold, himself. and, klobuchar and warren may destroy each other.

the last thing that i want to take note of is yang, whose suspended campaign doesn't have an obvious beneficiary in nevada but who could potentially help a candidate become viable if they move together. warren is a curious possibility and maybe the best fit, but i don't know if it's enough. yang himself has suggested sanders, but sanders has not responded favourably to yang's proposals, and frankly seems to be a bit of a productionist. on the other hand, if turnout just comes down by a few points, it will have the effect of inflating totals by any candidates right on the bubble.

if we get some polling, great, and i'll change my analysis to react to it. but, maybe this is better read as how i'm expecting any polling to come up.

south carolina may be a very different story. but, i don't actually expect nevada to come in that different than the first two states, which will hopefully undercut this goofy narrative about "diversity" helping biden. his numbers were already falling there; i think he's going to do terribly, and i think warren is going to tank, too.

the real question mark is if klobuchar and steyer can get viable or not.

so, splitting yang's three between warren & sanders, my tentative first ballot hypothesis in nevada is going to be something like:

sanders - 27%
buttigieg - 22%
klobuchar - 15%
steyer - 12%
warren - 12%
biden - 6%
rest - 6%

if klobuchar clears the hurdle, she's going to split support from warren & biden voters.

what about steyer? his selling point appears to be openly supporting reparations, something klobuchar has rejected, sanders has been dismissive about and buttigieg has been most supportive of. i don't know, so let's split it equally.

and, you get something like:

sanders - 27 + 4 (steyer) + 2 (warren) + 2 (rest) = 35%
buttigieg -  22 + 4 (steyer) + 5(waren) + 3 (biden) + 2 (rest) = 36%
klobuchar - 15 + 4 (steyer) + 5 (warren) + 3 (biden) + 2 (rest) = 29%

i understand that i made a mistake in completely redistributing second votes, and that a lot of people just won't vote a second time. so, you should take everybody down 5-6%, probably.

regardless, i'm basically suggesting that the results will be essentially the same as in new hampshire, after the second vote - that sanders & buttigieg will be in a toss-up for first, with klobuchar a ways behind.

...if she's viable.

if she isn't? well, most of that 29% goes to buttigieg, and you could see him pull off his first consolidation of moderate forces, something bernie is going to not want to see happen again.

so, if the other candidates split the moderate vote badly enough that only buttigieg ends up viable, expect massive recombining in the second round, and a potential landslide victory on the order of 55% to 30%.

we simply don't have the polling to make predictions, though. i'm just thinking out loud.

if that result were to happen in a primary state, it would benefit sanders, as all of the unviable centrists would just get crossed out. so, the fact that nevada is a caucus could end up costing him, if the results end up a specific way.

but, if klobuchar is viable more often than not, and the other middle three eek out some district wins, i think you're looking at a tie between the same players as previously, and some hard decisions for warren, particularly.

now, let's hope we get some polling...

chances are that you wouldn't last very long under a system of traditional indigenous law, and i wouldn't condemn anybody to an existence i couldn't tolerate myself - i will stand with those agitating for overthrow, revolution and change. because i'm on the left, and that's what we do...

but, these colonial band councils aren't the right answer, either.

so, to summarize:

- our courts should require a treaty to define who has jurisdiction before they even try to interpret a contract.
- we should not be enforcing the indian act on groups that have never signed treaties.
- aboriginal title in canada is not allodial in scope.
- the right type of law here is international law, not canadian constitutional law.
- i generally stand with those seeking to overthrow tradition, not those seeking to uphold it, but
- pipelines are always evil and must always be stopped.

it's important to avoid treating indigenous legal traditions as a monolith, so i don't want to fall into either stereotype. the stereotype of the commie indian is largely inapplicable to the remnants of indigenous law as they exist today; what's left is more conservative in scope and leans more towards religion as a guiding force in society, and i have to strenuously reject that and support anybody seeking to fight against it.

but, there are ideas kind of buried in indigenous history that i would stand more strongly with, if elements in the society would dust them off and bring them back.

but, i don't stand with creators or spiritualism or tradition for the sake of it - i stand with science and change and secularism, and i assign these people their rights based on my own axioms, not theirs.

the indian act should not be enforced on groups that have not signed any treaties.

think of it like this: i may find myself on the same side as these conservative indigenous groups on the specific issue of pipelines, but i'm going to support those that are agitating to overthrow them in pretty much any other context. it's a question of temporary allies. 

it's not unusual, though, for a contemporary leftist to end up stuck like this. what are my choices, here? i can stand with the liberal capitalists or i can stand with the traditionalist conservatives. in truth, i'm a socialistic anarchist, and i don't actually stand with either side. the side i stand with is the one that is fighting to overthrow both the traditional aristocracy and the enforced colonial system, and introduce a system of egalitarian self-government and distributive justice. i'm a communist everywhere, and i'm not interested in these relativist arguments.

i'm aware that the perspectives of these people are often comically ignorant. a lot of them seem to think that if they sit together and pray then god will take the capitalists away. if you've read any marx, you realize how vicious he was on people like this. i don't see the point.

so, my solidarity with these traditionalist groups is really very narrow. i'm broadly more interested in standing with agents of change within the society, but not the ones that would argue for things like property rights or capitalist expropriation.

but, i'm not a conservative, and i don't stand with tradition or aristocracy.

i'm an anarchist, and i stand with egalitarianism and the acceptance of change.

i want to be clear on a point, though.

while i would stand with the rights of indigenous groups to self-determination, i would not stand with the traditionalist elements within their society, and would rather stand with the groups advocating for change within the society. and, if you can present me with situations where indigenous groups are oppressing minorities within their ranks, like happens routinely in iran, then i would support intervening with the use of force, because my solidarity is always with the oppressed and never with the oppressors.

there is this kind of tendency to define the issue in ethnic terms, nowadays, and i will reject this idea on it's face. i'm not interested in even contemplating the idea of siding with the indians against the white people - that's not the way i'm going to approach the issue, and i'll reject those terms of framing it. what i'm interested in is standing with specific elements within the indigenous community against other elements within that same community.

so, i will stand with the rights of queer indigenous people in the face of the views of their religious traditions, and i will stand with the scientific over the spiritual, and i will stand with the socialistic over the capitalistic & etc.

so, in the sense that this is about indigenous rights, i'm going to define those a little bit differently than you frequently see on the fake left, nowadays. the fake left is essentially what we used to call toryism. it wants to preserve tradition in the face of change. i'm having none of that. rather, i'm interested in solidarity with those that would stand against the band councils and against the traditional leadership, and seek to liberalize and socialize the society - as i stand with those that reject the state, everywhere else.

at the end of the day, these matriarchs are just statists and should be torn down and replaced with a council.

but, so long as they aren't giving us good reasons to dismantle their society by force, they need to sign a treaty before we can take it upon ourselves to apply our laws on their lands. we can't just show up and start legislating - not by our own legal standards.

ok, so i am getting a funny item in my device manager - "unknown device". i'd never seen that before, and i've looked.

i installed it and it came up as "motherboard resource".

i'm quite uncomfortable with this, but i don't know where it is, physically, on the board. 

i'm going to reimage the machine and disable it when it comes back up. but i'll need to keep an eye on what's going on underneath the hood. i think they plugged something into the board...

i know this all sounds insane, but i'm empirically driven and i have to react to the facts as they appear in front of me.

and, i really wish that cop would stop fucking smoking up there. yuck.

we're not looking at a 30% chance, which is not bad, really. one in three.

we're looking at a 0.01% chance - one in ten thousand, or perhaps as small as one in a million.

i've been critical of his work.

but, somebody ask nate silver what the probability of klobuchar running at 19.8% was, according to his data.

you're going to be looking at something like 0.01%. 

rare events happen; there are better fishes out there for this than jesus'. but, some events are so rare that they just don't happen.

we didn't run ten million elections in new hampshire on tuesday, we ran one.

the common law is not a set of rules that were created by the king like the civil codes were, but is rather a set of conventions and traditions that has changed dramatically over time based on the input of the people that live with it.

as a legal system, it is actually uniquely positioned to integrate indigenous legal concepts. they could not be faced with a better system to deal with. really.

if they were dealing with islamic or judaic or ecclesiastical law, there would be no compromise, at all - the book says it, and that's it. any kind of civil code coming from the roman tradition is likewise entirely inflexible.

only the common law will integrate outside traditions, and, if you look around the world, the fact is that it really has.

but, they have to participate. and, i wish they would...

again: british imperial law is actually on their side here, they just don't realize it. if the judge had somebody make the right arguments, she'd have to concede the point, and she might even just have never thought about it properly - that happens sometimes. a good lawyer would win this case for them.

this isn't the first time that trudeau has used the phrase "rule of law" in this manner, and it's frankly rather dubyaesque - he clearly doesn't understand what he's saying. he thinks that "rule of law" just means "law and order".

and, it's deeply ironic, because the issue at hand is indeed centered around the rule of law, and whether the police have the jurisdiction here to act - an issue i claim the court is incorrect about.

this particular group of natives is frustrating, though. they don't want to sign a treaty on any terms, apparently. they won't launch legal action, even when they're likely to win, because they don't want to legitimize the common law - a tragic error, on their behalf.

i want to actually enforce the rule of law, which means respecting that they're not under treaty, and abstaining from enforcing treaty rules on groups that never signed any. but, they only seem to show up in court when they're summoned, and they seem to be badly misinformed about what their options are.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/trudeau-coastal-gaslink-protests_ca_5e4437e6c5b61f8ad4e2d43e

alright, i'm back up. 

let's hope i can get this done before the debussy show.

your delusional thinking is rooted in calvinism.

and, it's bullshit.

so, when i see somebody beat their polling numbers by 10-15%, and i can't explain it using turnout, i'm going to forcefully argue that they cheated. every time.

their gender is not a meaningful factor in deducing that.

in the world of homo mathematicus, underdogs always lose, and only stupid people place bets on them.

the caveats are that streaks always end, and that sometimes underdogs cheat and get away with it.

hard work is meaningless in the face of hard math; the universe is a cold, dour, fascistic place.

i know that capitalists won't like my narrative, which is something along the lines of that nobody ever beats the odds and stories of perseverance are just bullshit; she didn't succeed with hard work, the american dream is bullshit, etc.

but, that's homo mathematicus for you.

we don't care much for human interest stories; chances are you didn't beat the odds, chances are you just cheated.

i mean, maybe it's worth reflecting a little on how polling firms get those numbers.

they don't just take a flat survey, although i often prefer to see them give me that data. they ask you questions about your age, income, etc and then they fit the data to the census results.

so, the polls you saw would have assumed roughly 20% youth turnout and roughly 60% adult turnout, with roughly 20% turnout in between. if you actually get 15% youth turnout and 65% adult turnout, and 20% in between, then that discrepancy will affect the accuracy of your projections.

but, this is what margins of error are for, and you don't expect something like that to mess with your results more than a few points. so, the low youth turnout will explain why sanders is 2-3% lower than the averages, and why buttigieg is 2-3% higher than the averages. but, it won't explain why klobuchar beat the polls by 10% - you would need lower turnout overall to pull that out, and it's not there.

instead, what you see on it's face is that very high turnout inflated her numbers. but, that just suggests that she cheated.

just an update on the turnout question.

In New Hampshire's Democratic primary, people 45 and older made up 63 percent of voters, according to the exit polls. People aged 18 to 29 made up just 14 percent.

that would mean that voters 30-44 made up 100-63-14=23%.

recent data suggests that voting demographics in new hampshire are:

18-29 - 19.4%
30-44 - 21.3%
45+ - 59.3% (45-64 - 38.5%, 65+ - 20.8%)

so, my initial perception was correct - turnout amongst young people was lower than the models would have pegged it at, while turnout amongst older people was higher. that's the basic factor underlying the results, and explains the basic shape of the data, with sanders underperforming & buttigieg & klobuchar overperforming.

but, turnout overall was not low, so you need more than this observation to explain klobuchar's dramatic overshoot of the polling, and it's just not consistent with the data.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2016/comm/citizen_voting_age_population/cb16-tps18_nh.html

if you absolutely have to put somebody upstairs to try to hack into my computer over short-range radio (da fuck...), can you pick a clean person that doesn't smoke, please?

i have no idea why they're doing this at all.

but, talk about the worst stake-out cops, ever. i can smell them, i can hear them. i mean, c'mon.

it's more than just the smoke. she smells like she hasn't showered in quite a while; it's that stinky-ass smell that you normally get, specifically, with fat women.

take a shower, you dirty pig.

and go smoke somewhere else.

like, he's supposed to be gone this week. but, i can smell somebody smoking upstairs, and i can hear them talking, too. it's a female voice. and i'm fully cognizant of the fact that it's a cop filling in for him.

i can find no sign of any installed chip in this machine.

i cleared the cmos, and the bios isn't picking anything up. 

xp isn't picking anything up.

i don't see anything.

i'm going to have to test, i guess. 

ok, let me get the system back up and let me finish this up.

ugh.

there should be no work done in that region at all until a treaty is signed.

if i was the supreme court, i would tear that contract right up.

so, what would i tell the pipeline company?

i'd tell them that they need to wait for this nation to sign a treaty before they can move forward on any project, legally - and anything they sign or agree to runs the risk of having no legal force until such a treaty comes into existence.

i want to be clear: i'm not saying that this nation can't join the indian act, or shouldn't, or even won't in the end.

but, it hasn't at this point, and these indian act band councils are consequently extra-legal governing bodies that should be afforded no meaningful legal status.

maybe the way this ends is that the band councils opt to sign a treaty. i know there's been discussions on the point for many years. but, the court can't and shouldn't get ahead of itself by making assumptions about the outcomes of the treaty process.

until the process concludes, the court should be abiding by the status quo.

the way that british imperial law worked, and this was brought into the common law via roman precedent because the romans were the empire that the british had legal documents about and sought information about when conflicts arose, was that if you colonized an area with british subjects (terra nullius) then you introduced british law to rule over them but if you occupied or conquered an area that was already peopled (like india, or french canada) then you had to allow for them to govern themselves under their own laws.

canada was interpreted under british imperial law as a series of conquered french colonies first and foremost, and an area of unceded aboriginal land, second. so, the french colonies came under british dominion and kept their civil law traditions, which were at the time under the napoleonic code. this is why an algonquin claim about unceded territory in ontario would not be recognized under british law - it was conquered from the french. the aboriginal areas, on the other hand, were given a kind of suspended sovereignty. they could keep their land and their traditions, but only on the condition that they refused to cede their land to anybody else. specifically, the proclamation of 1763 gave the british crown the monopoly over land purchases, which american land buyers and sellers did not like one bit. it's still the law in canada, though - the crown, which now means the government in ottawa, still has a monopoly over indigenous land purchases in canada.

and, everywhere was eventually bought except for most of british columbia, which just never was. there have been some "land transfers" since then, but they've been unconstitutional under our own laws! really, the right way to look at the canadian occupation of british columbia is to compare it to the israeli occupation of palestine - people keep moving in, but there's no actual legal basis for it. the correct legal status for these areas remains defined by the 1763 proclamation, which defines them as a part of an "indian reserve", gives them ownership of their own land and denies their right to sell their land to any entity except the crown.

indigenous title in canada is not what these people actually want, as it's just another type of fief; indigenous title is not sovereign land rights, in canada. the nisga'a agreement presents a model that goes beyond "indigenous title" in the sense that it's actually a kind of peace treaty, which carves out a semi-autonomous area for the nisga'a people. i don't know what the various peoples in bc want, but if they want land rights, it's in the nisga'a agreement, and not in these judicial constructions of "indigenous title", which would keep them at the whim of the colonial government. there is not actually a way for the court system to award sovereignty...that has to be done via treaty.

so, this idea that "the white man's law" is oppressing them and allowing for this and they need to rebel against it is actually wrong, in this limited context. again: you can't apply these arguments in new brunswick, or ontario. but, in bc, british imperial law actually should forbid the application of the indian act on unceded territory, at least until a treaty is signed. the judge here is actually wrong, and the supreme court should reverse her ruling.

enforcing the indian act on unceded territory is roughly equivalent, under imperial law, to enforcing common law in quebec.

this is a major error of law that it seems like this judge has made before and that the supreme court should be taking a proper look at.

so, the court is arguing that it's own jurisdiction stems from the indian act, and that's the point that i'd argue is wrong, because the land was never ceded. it was occupied. as such, the indian act is the wrong type of law to use. they should rather be using british imperial law, which stems from roman precedents and allows the occupied nation to administer it's own laws.

we have a very clear precedent of this in canada, actually. it's called quebec.

by enforcing the indian act on unceded land in british columbia, the court is advancing the colonial project. the supreme court ought to reverse this.

my previous statement about the duty to consult applying to traditional law relies on the band council leadership accepting it, as that is the relevant body under canadian law. as there is a conflict here - something i knew, but forgot - that wouldn't be applicable, in context. the company's argument that it consulted the band council and sought it's approval would essentially be correct.

but, there is no legal basis for the band council to be making these decisions, as the land was never ceded or formally brought under the control of the indian act in the first place. for the supreme court to rule otherwise would be to argue for a unilateral annexation, which is something that is actually even inconsistent with imperial law, in this country.

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/19/22/2019BCSC2264cor1.htm

she had a following in conservative circles.

but, she was truly reviled and despised on the left.

personally, i think she was often just trolling, and i generally took her with a grain of salt when i didn't avoid her altogether. but, i'm a free speech advocate in ways that much of the contemporary left isn't. 

she was the type of writer that a lot of people wanted banned and censored.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/christie-blatchford-columnist-journalist-dead-68-1.5460763

there should be an injunction until the supreme court can deal with this.

i haven't read the ruling directly, but let's get a few things clear:

1) there are no treaties governing this particular space in british columbia (that is not true in ontario), so the jurisdiction of the constitution is questionable in the first place.

2) while the duty to meaningfully consult does not necessitate a duty to listen in all scenarios, i think it is reasonable to think that the supreme court may interpret it that way under the specific scenario of the existence of traditional laws, in unceded areas, if presented with that argument explicitly, which is something i do not believe has been done as of yet.

so, if i was the lawyer here, i would make those arguments - that this case should be dealt with under international law rather than constitutional law (this is very specific to some regions in bc, where that argument is actually seriously legally compelling beyond an indigenous pipe dream sort of thing....that wouldn't fly for a second in, say, new brunswick), because canada is technically an occupation force in this area rather than a national one, and that the duty to consult should include a special place for existing indigenous law, where it actually exists and can be convincingly articulated.

i otherwise stand in solidarity with the blockades, as well.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-anti-pipeline-protests-1.5460793

i might never really agree with buttigieg much on the issues.

but, he would earn my infinite respect by taking hold of this opportunity to go into these black churches and talk about the homophobia that exists within them.

that's the test that sanders failed, and he has the chance to pass.

for southern blacks to reject northern whites over issues of sexual and religious liberation would be a massive shot in their own foot.

....because the inevitable republican supermajority that would follow would not serve their interests. at all.

it's not my place to present an opinion on what order the primaries in the united states should be conducted in. that's ultimately a ballot question that should be decided by the people of america, and the outcome should be respected and implemented.

however.

let's not confuse ourselves as to what this discussion is really about.

if biden had swept iowa & new hampshire, does anybody think we'd be talking about how these states "lack diversity"? hardly. so, what is this, really, besides an attempt for biden to lay a lot of excuses for his losses?

we haven't seen any polling in nevada in weeks, but i think there's a good chance that biden is running a distant third or fourth. latinos may generally run a little to the right of the democratic party on social issues, which is something the party shouldn't cave in to, but vegas & reno don't present your typical latino demographics, and i don't think it's likely that buttigieg's sexuality is going to be the kind of problem there that it's going to be in somewhere like texas. i would actually be rather surprised to see biden ahead of buttigieg in nevada, at this point.

so, that leaves black voters, and i'll concede the point that they're not likely to like him, but why is that? they may point to various issues regarding race relations, but the truth is that buttigieg has good answers for all of this stuff - better than the answers that biden and sanders can provide for their own errors, such as voting for the crime bill. bloomberg has stop & frisk. klobuchar has her own problems. and, warren just hasn't had the opportunity to fuck up.

i could see if the alternative had a perfect civil rights record, but has there ever been a serious democratic party candidate that has? buttigieg will argue for the reality of systemic racism, and the truth is that he's right in that answer. there is no ideal candidate from this perspective, they all have serious blemishes on their record.

so, there's lots of reasons to dislike buttigieg and not want to vote for him, but if your argument is racial, and your alternative is biden, then you're either ignorant of the facts or being dishonest in your argumentation - there is no reasonable argument that biden is a better candidate for the black community. biden also has a history of questionable racial decisions, it's just a longer history because he's older. and, if you think buttigieg is too right-wing, how is biden a solution? that's just not going anywhere. in fact, i'd go so far as to say that there is no rational reason to vote for biden over buttigieg at this point, at all.

so, why don't they like pete?

you could say he doesn't have the contacts in the community, but that's not hurting steyer or bloomberg, neither of which have any contacts in the community, either. on the other hand, sanders has been trying for decades to get black support and can't get the time of day from them. so, that doesn't seem real, either.

so, why don't they like pete?

and, why don't they like bernie, either?

if buttigieg is smart, he'll turn the issue on it's head and start talking about the pestilence of homophobia in the black community. let me tell you this, at least - they're not going to like him much, no matter what he does.

i think the faultlines in the democratic party have been building for a while, and, while northern liberals shouldn't let the party go without a fight, they should let the process run it's course. no political configuration lasts forever, no coalition is permanent. and, the coalition between southern black conservatives and northern white liberals may be getting to the end of it's cycle.

a theoretical southern black party is going to have a hard time winning without some kind of support in the north, though.

what i will say though is that the decision to headhunt me actually reflects rather poorly on the institution.

by the mid 00s, it should have been crystal clear that i wasn't somebody that cared very much about this country, or should have been offered any kind of security clearance. and, that's maybe the irony, here - while i'm not working for another government, i can tell you straight up that i wouldn't have any particular allegiance to the canadian government, if they had hired me, and probably would have ended up as a liability, and skipped the country for somewhere warmer at the first chance i got.

imagine there's no countries...

and, no religion, too.

i don't have this patriotic slant that somebody like an edward snowden has; i feel no particular connection to this country, or it's governing institutions, and no particular calling to serve, one way or the other.

so, what somebody else may have interpreted as some kind of patriotic duty just struck me as a boring waste of my time. it wasn't even ideological, really - i mean, i certainly would have some moral problems with working for csis, but i wouldn't even get that far in working out the problem. it's just a job i wouldn't enjoy doing, and i made a decision a long time ago not to spend my life doing jobs i don't want to do.

i'm not even sure that i had explicitly defined myself as an anarchist, yet. 

but, if i didn't want to do it then, nothing has changed, now. i would much rather live on disability and focus on my art than work for csis at whatever pay grade, because it's the job that matters, not the pay check. sorry.

i will not have anything to say about nevada until they publish some polls.

if they decide not to publish any, that's a red flag into the fairness of the outcome, itself.

i don't know what they ultimately want or why they're doing what they're doing. it feels exceedingly childish to me. they don't seem to operate with warrants, or present any kind of legal justification for their behaviour. it's just some kind of a game that they're trying to win.

i guess that if i'm dealing with federal agents of some sort - and i don't know if they're american or canadian - then they may be trained to approach what they think of as cyberwarfare using these methods. that is, they may be trained to play cat and mouse like this. but, i'm not a hacker, i'm an artist, and i have no interest in this at all. i'm just annoyed at the amount of time i have to waste on this.

i was headhunted by csis in the mid-00s at one point, and basically told them to fuck off. i just didn't want to work for a security agency. but, these people are trained to interpret the world through the filter of conspiracy theories. in their mind, telling them that i don't want to work for them may be equivalent to admitting i'm working for somebody else.

the last few days have been full of unexpectedly long sleeps, distractions over the primaries and eating far too much. i just wanted to get back to work today...

i've been periodically concerned about illegal entry into my living spaces since about mid-2017. that's when this appears to have started, i think because my analysis of the last american cycle got a little too close to being right for the comfort of whomever is keeping an eye on me.

but, i've been under surveillance for decades, now. 

and, i know they don't think i'm some kind of a spy, for that reason - my file goes back to the 90s. i'm just concerned they're going to use that as an argument.

i don't know how much the arrest in 2018 had to do with this.

just an update on what i think is going on:

1) it seems like my landlord is working for some kind of police agency. he's told me he's a former firefighter, and the front is that he's an auto-mechanic. but, he only seems to actually go to work every once in a while, and he's often gone for weeks at a time - indicating that he gets an awfully large number of holidays, for an auto-mechanic. i don't know if he's working for a local agency or a national one.

2) so, whatever agency it is that's monitoring me just comes down here at will when i'm gone. i have to go out from time to time, meaning i have little to no means of protecting myself, when they have the keys to my front door.

3) they appear to have been previously hacking into my laptop via the bluetooth chip on my wireless keyboard. so, i disabled that, and the system was stable for weeks, until they got down here yesterday when i was gone. i now have to waste my time trying to figure out what they did.

i don't think that moving is going to help much. do i call the cops and go into a witness protection program to protect me from the cops? but, a person can only handle so much invasion of privacy.

i'm going to have to find some way to prove that they're coming in here and work it out from there, once i have.

for now, i want to finish what i'm doing. this is such a fucking waste of my time...

the reason my posts are full of typos since mid-january is that i'm posting from a gmail account that i set up for travelling with, and i can't get into the blogspot interface to correct them from here.

i keep that machine off the internet because i've learned that i have to.

and i simply don't know what they did when i was gone, but i guess if they didn't install some kind of wireless chip then they must have introduced some kind of timer.

and, i knew there was somebody in here the moment i got back because i set my recycle bin up in front of the door as a trip wire, and it was tripped. i was kind of expecting something like this.

all i can do is look for chips, wipe it down and hope it's not persistent.

what i've been doing over the last few weeks is booting into my laptop's hard drive via the production pc, specifically because i can't connect to the internet on that machine (or i couldn't up until they apparently installed some kind of backdoor yesterday when i was out). i would then do the word processing i've been doing on that internetless machine, and upload the files to the internet through the chromebook by copying them over with a usb key.

i was forced to do this because some kind of intelligence agency keeps taking out the boot sector in my windows 7 machine in an apparent attempt to prevent me from posting to the internet, which is beyond retarded. that's never going to work...

then, they went and reinstalled the backdoor on the computer that i'm not using to post with, apparently because they got confused as to how i was continuing to post here even after they installed these back doors.

ugh.

the more they try and shut me down, the louder i'm going to yell. i'm like that. i won't be silenced.

so, what happened?

well, i guess they must have installed some kind of wireless chip in my pc. i have to buy groceries, and i can't bring my tower with me...

but, now what?

i don't see anything in there.

i'm clearing the cmos and i'm going to let the capacitors drain and i'm going to take a very close look over the system board. what do i do if i can't find the chip? i don't know.

but, the idiots installed the chip on my production machine, and i'm posting from my chromebook. the machine they installed the chip on is permanently quarantined from the internet, and has no networking capability by design. i have no intention to ever use it to connect to the internet with - it's just for making music with.

and, again - they have not succeeded in preventing me from posting here, they've just slowed down my documentation process. idiots...

there's a pattern here, though. - my machine consistently crashes whenever i post something insightful here.

you should take that as evidence that i'm on to something.

and, bizarrely, my hard drive just finally crashed, right when i was about to get back to work.

i went out for a few hours yesterday...

i'll have to put this back together, now.

it's far more likely that the pols did something wrong than that the polls were empirically wrong.

does it matter if klobuchar cheated in new hampshire or not?

if you talk to experts on the topic, they often say things like "there are inconsistencies in every election and they balance each other out.". is that the reality here?

well, i need to be clear about what i'm saying and what i'm not.

i am not able to tell you who cheated, why they cheated, whether it made a difference or if they'll do it again. i'm simply able to look at the polls and look at the results and say "something's wrong here". and, unlike everybody else in this society, i'm not accepting the doublethink required to say "i guess the polls were wrong".

again: it is far more likely that somebody cheated than that the polls were this wrong, and the media has shown us the establishment's hand by clearly prepping us for a "klobusurge" (who comes up with this idiocy?). the media is arguing that the electorate changed, but that's just a transparent and bullshit excuse. no, the electorate in new hampshire didn't change that dramatically over the last four years, and if exit polling insists that it did then that exit polling is suspect, itself. proper exit polling should be done by somebody other than the media institutions that need to be checked up on, and the fact that this is not done at all in the united states any more is at the core of the problem i'm drawing attention to - this is not the first time i'm saying this, and won't be the last.

but, i can't tell you that amy klobuchar is personally a nefarious ballot-stuffing no goodnik cheater, and i would think it doubtful that she did the deed herself. i can't tell you that she was aware of it - maybe nobody told her. all i can do is look at the results and tell you they don't add up, and insist that the polls actually probably weren't wrong.

so, does it matter? well, it depends. those 6 delegates probably don't matter. but, if klobuchar's inflated totals come at the death knell of an elizabeth warren then that matters.

i'm not a private investigator, i'm not a prosecutor, i'm not a detective, and i have no insider knowledge - i'm a nerd from canada with a math degree, and i can't answer these questions.

but, the data doesn't add up. and, somebody fudged it.

if i can get an important point across here, it's distrust of the institutions.

you should have a healthy skepticism of what the state tells you, and a healthy distrust of all political parties.

when the polling has somebody at 5-7% and they magically end up with 20% as the media is propping them up, you should be skeptical about what's unfolding in front of you, and you should be questioning the fairness of the process.

that skepticism, that suspension of faith in the system, is important, more important than these specific election results.

you hear this line from politicians all of the time.

"the only poll that matters is the one on election day".

well, no. the polling is important, to ensure the integrity of the process is kept in place. and, when the election contradicts the polls, you should get suspicious - chances are that the polls weren't wrong.

i will make this stand over and over again - when the results of an election do not make sense, i will point fingers and call for an investigation.

the 24 delegates may not be worth it. granted. it's more about momentum.

but, there should be an investigation...

...because this doesn't add up.

it's not like there was a deficit of polling, either.

if there was only one or two low quality polls...

...but there was lots of polling done, and the outcome for this specific candidate is simply not reflected in it, and what that means is that independent measures of popular support do not uphold the results of the election.

and, no, the russians didn't rig it. the dnc rigged it...

turnout in new hampshire is maybe not down by as much as it appeared to be initially. it looks like it's a little lower than 2008, but higher than 2016. so, arguing that bernie didn't get the vote out is only a part of the answer - he didn't, but it only accounts for a part of the discrepancy with the polling.

it makes sense that there would have been some non-ideological voters in 2016 that he couldn't hold in 2020, but that doesn't explain the distribution of votes. the glaring inconsistency isn't bernie's support level, it's klobuchar's. there is absolutely no polling evidence supporting this outcome at all - there's some propaganda coming from corporate media, but when the propaganda predicts the result in contradiction to the polling, that's actually a red flag about the fairness of the results.

when the gut feelings of tv anchors better reflect the outcome than scientific polling, there is something very wrong going on - chances are that the polling wasn't wrong, and chances are that the gut feeling wasn't more right; chances are that the election was rigged, and the tv anchor was in on the process.

my initial attempt to explain the situation by pointing to turnout was an attempt to provide a naturalistic explanation for an event that the evidence doesn't seem to support the likelihood of. if that isn't working out either, and it looks like it isn't, then we're left with a glaring contradiction between the polling and the results, which usually suggests a rigged election. the media's overwhelming support of a specific candidate seems to give itself away.

so, i'm changing my analysis - i think that amy klobuchar's numbers were falsified. she was propped up by the media days before, but none of the polling had her higher than 10%. when the polling disagrees with the results by this much, i don't tend to argue that the polling is wrong - i tend to argue that the process is unfair.

it's impossible to know who suffered at the benefit of klobuchar's vote totals being falsified upwards, but the main beneficiary of a split in the moderate vote was bernie sanders, who would not have won otherwise. i can't magically assign all of these votes to buttigieg - he actually outperformed his polling as well, but by an amount that is scientifically quantifiable. he didn't double his polling numbers, he's in a reasonable margin of error. but, you'll note that biden and warren both received 0 delegates.

the party itself might be pushing for generational change...

so, that's my official analysis - the results of the primary deviate so strongly from the polling that preceded it that i am casting doubt on the fairness of the election. and, i've done this more than once, now.

i believe that the results of elections on this continent are routinely falsified, in a way that north americans would naively assume is done in countries like russia, but isn't done here. it can happen here. it does all of the time...

i know what i posted about iowa the other day, but sometimes it takes time to believe the data. this idea of a falsified split to benefit sanders seems crazy, but i need to reiterate the point: when the polling fails to predict the outcome of an election, you should not deduce that the polling was wrong. you should question the fairness of the election. and, in context, the media's clear preference for the actor with the strangest results really clarifies the point.

and, you can only get so far with gramscian conditioning on this point. it's too much to invoke gramsci. it's more like some kind of manchurianism.

it's less complicated to argue it was rigged.

so, what happened?

yes, klobuchar got a bounce.

but, the real story is that sanders couldn't get the vote out, and the bounce was exaggerated by low turnout. buttigieg also benefited from this.

so, the numbers are in and klobuchar has indeed managed to stay over 19%, to my bafflement.

i'm not sure if i explicitly stated it or not, but i figured the narrative around klobuchar would be around whether she was viable or not - that she might get barely over 15%, if she was especially lucky, but that the culmination of the polling suggested she'd probably end up at something more like 13%. the polling also suggested that buttigieg would end up somewhere around 20%, although i'm less surprised that he overshot it, because he had some concrete reasons for momentum.

i was not personally impressed by klobuchar's debate performance at all; as mentioned, it came off as the last gasp of a dying candidate. and, this result itself hardly wins her the race - it may be that the last gasp was more like a last wheeze, and she's going to hack it out for a bit before she keels over.

sanders, on the other hand underperformed relative to most of the polling, although i sort of saw that coming - i pegged him around 25%.

when you have that combination of factors - the candidate popular with the young crowd underperforming, and both of the candidates that are popular with the older crowd overperforming by roughly the same amount, 4-5% - chances are that the thing you got wrong was actually turnout. and, indeed, turnout wasn't very impressive.

so, was there a surge in klobuchar support? she got a bump, clearly. but, the reason the polls undershot her by the same amount that they undershot buttigieg would be that they overestimated turnout by sanders supporters. and, that is where the inflation comes out of the numbers.

if sanders had gotten the vote out, she would have ended up closer to 15%, and buttigieg would have ended up closer to 20%, as sanders got closer to 30%.

but, he didn't.

is it fair for buttigieg supporters to blame klobuchar for costing him the win, then? well, it's kind of entitled, don't you think? it would be just as valid to flip the argument over.

what is true, though, is that the competition between these candidates allowed sanders to win, even on a weak night for him, and that if the moderate wing wants a win then it's going to need to figure that out.

if.

right...

guys.

i'm endorsing the greens. i told you that.

i am politically closest to sanders - i support universal healthcare, for example. i self identify as an anarchist/socialist. i'm more leftwing than sanders...

but, he's creeping me out in a number of ways, and i don't want to support him

i'm not a democrat, i'm an anarchist, and i would neither support klobuchar nor buttigieg in a general election.

it's interesting to me to see the order in which the data is coming in.

what i've been waiting for to post is for klobuchar's numbers to hit 18%, and they did fall to 19% for a bit, which on the screen likely means below 19.5%, but the fact that the numbers are disproportionately rural, and have been since the start, means she's getting a bit of an inflated result.

and, now she's talking with that inflated result on the screen.

i don't like her policies very much, but my interest is in analyzing the numbers. i don't work in the field, but i have a math degree. i'm interested in the analysis; i'm not really interested in the human condition. so, i'm not trying to denigrate this woman.

but, her numbers are going to come down before the end of the night....

...and the media isn't going to be able to prop her up forever.

(nbc just claimed she declared victory, which she did not do.)

i'll wait for more of the numbers to come in before i continue. but, what you're watching on tv is a charade.

so, after too much sleeping and too many distractions, i am actually finally done typesetting the html frontend for inri021, which is very similar to the one for inri015.

in the process, i found a couple of typos for inri002 & inri015 that i'll need to correct. these are just literally typos and they won't take long to fix but i have to do it.

and, then i have to take one last run over inri021, including doing proper testing to make sure it actually works. but, i'm at the very end of this. 

there are two more: inri023 (inrimixed) and inri022 (inrijected). and, then it's on to january, 2014.

but, i need to stop to get the recycle out because i've missed the last few, and i'm going to take the opportunity to eat and shower.

i think it was her poor debate performances, myself - especially her attempts to go after buttigieg, which brutally backfired.

there was also the fiasco with sanders where she tried to play the victim and nobody bought it.

but, there may have been a misconception about where she was on the spectrum, too. she seems to have initially done well with suburban, white liberals. in detroit, she seemed to be trending in the hipster-y ferndale area, primarily, as well as in the counties around metro detroit - so, oakland county, and ann arbor. these places usually vote for the leftmost candidate, so this was a little bit weird, given that she's kind of a moderate. these voters may not have realized that she was on the fence on healthcare, that she's kind of a market fundamentalist or that she used to be a republican. and, people may have just gotten scared off by her, the more they actually learned about her.

this was my position on warren from the start - i never really understood why she was being presented as a leftist in the first place, when she was obviously actually sort of a conservative.

and, i think the solution may be as simple as that people rejected her when they realized they didn't agree with her as much as they initially thought that they did.

https://www.vox.com/2020/2/11/21131657/elizabeth-warren-new-hampshire-trouble

i guess the obvious question is - "should this be proportional anyways, or should it be winner take all?".

i mean, a lot of people probably don't realize that the thing is proportional in the first place. there were people grumbling that "but, sanders won the popular vote" in iowa, clearly desiring a winner take all formula.

generally, leftists prefer proportional strategies, although we argue about how to do it. i don't like proportional representation at the parliamentary level (i prefer a ranked ballot), but i prefer a proportional process at the primary level to a first-past-the-post one, certainly. the caucuses are maybe kind of a dumb way to do ranked ballots in the 21st century. i'd rather see both the primaries and the caucuses move to ranked ballots, while maintaining the proportional delegate system.

but, i can imagine the pushback.

"it's not undemocratic to get all of the delegates if you win, because you won!"

....but you'd be more cutthroat of a person than i am, and i suspect you'd contradict yourself pretty quickly if we actually had this debate, properly. chances are that you don't actually believe that....

so, like i said - (klobuchar, warren, biden) will be lucky to get one or two delegates, total, between the three of them.

sanders will probably get around 25% of the vote, and buttigieg will probably get around 20% of the vote. remember - buttigieg doesn't get a second chance in new hampshire like he did in iowa, so it's the first ballot that is more likely to be predictive, and a bigger win is consequently more likely.

but, between the two of them, they will get nearly all of the delegates, despite getting less than half of the vote.

and, this threatens to be the norm moving forward, if the field doesn't narrow.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/breaking-down-our-new-hampshire-forecast-district-by-district/

this idea that you know exactly who or what you are when you're like three years old is....

i think it's bullshit.

and, i think a lot of trans people are just telling doctors what they want to hear.

this whole thing is fluid, and people can and do change in either direction.

what i say is that i realized i was more like a girl very young, but, i don't pretend i had some kind of early childhood schizophrenia or something. i was a nerdy, bookish kid. i understood which genitalia i had, and wasn't confused by it.

so, i didn't go through this process that trans kids are supposed to go through, where you refuse to accept your birth gender. frankly, i think the literature is kind of lacking, and probably mostly bullshit. but, you have to feed the doctors a certain line to get prescribed, so you end up with a lot of bullshit in the case studies.

i'm willing to be honest in stating that i resigned myself to what existed, and internalized it. i didn't think i was a "girl trapped in a boy's body". rather, i just realized i had more in common with the girls than the boys, and then accepted myself as an effeminate boy and left it at that.

so, there are these songs - confused, screwed up - that were written and recorded when i was roughly 14-17 and are explicitly about gender identity, but they take this perspective of existential angst and dour resignation about it. i didn't think i could actually do anything about it. maybe i wished i was a girl, but i also wished i was rich, and wished i lived in a warmer climate and ... and these are just things one deals with, as reality is that you don't get everything you wish for, in life. and, i thought i could deal with it. maybe i even thought i'd grow out of it.

all i really was sure of at that age was that i wasn't really attracted to girls very much, and that i liked to spend a lot of time by myself.

i was 20 years old when i finally decided i had to deal with it somehow and took steps to transition by contacting a psychologist through the networks at school. i started taking hormones at 21.

i was basically completely emotionally stunted at this point, as i'd never had any kind of meaningful relationship with anybody, romantic or platonic. the best way to describe me is as suffering from extreme arrested development - i never went through the emotional development that most people experience during puberty. i had the sexual, emotional and romantic maturity of a 12 year old girl.

and, that lack of emotional maturity put me through a rough couple of years that dramatically altered the course of my life.

in the end, i decided on a solitary existence. and, i'm not particularly unhappy, i don't think.

but, don't misinterpret these songs - i had absolutely no sex life, and they just aren't about sex, and shouldn't be interpreted as though they are.

we all write about the things that are relevant to us in our lives.

and, sex and romance and relationships have broadly not been relevant ideas to me in my life.

actually, the truth is that the closest thing i had to any kind of sexual or romantic encounters until i was in my early 20s was a series of avoidance attempts.

i didn't tell anybody i knew in real life; i went to a catholic school, and if there was a group of gay kids, i never figured out who they were. i think there was maybe one kid that was openly gay, but he was also....he didn't take very good care of himself.

if you talked to the people i communicated with online during high school, and these were mostly older people that i knew through mailing lists for bands, people that were university aged or older, they would have told you i identified as a homosexual male, which in itself wasn't even quite right, but was what i was sort of resigning myself to at about the age of 16 or so.

so, i was actually the kid that identified as gay and didn't want to tell anybody, which meant i found myself constantly avoiding the girls around me, who interpreted me as a straight, single boy. i just didn't want to deal with it.

the point of this post is to explain why my songs have nothing to do with the kinds of things that kids usually write songs about. there are some songs that are explicitly about identity, but i've never written a song about love or romance or sex from any perspective at all because these simply weren't things that were relevant to me. i had precisely zero girlfriends or boyfriends in high school; i wasn't even interested in the premise. i was a virgin until my third year of university. i hadn't even experienced a first kiss until i was 21.

so, these songs broadly have absolutely nothing to do with sex or sexuality in any way at all, whatsoever, for the simple reason that i had absolutely no interest in sex or sexuality in any way at all, whatsoever - and broadly still don't. my gender identity is transfemale, but my orientation is asexual. i haven't had consensual intercourse in almost 15 years, and don't feel i'm missing out on much of anything.

what the songs are about are personal struggles with identity, social and political commentaries about things like war or religion and other literary or philosophical topics.

i would never be caught dead writing a song about love or sex.

yes, it is very weird to grow up in ottawa, and have a father that was drafted by the 67s, and to have never learned how to skate. just about every kid around me, of both genders, was playing hockey as toddlers.

but, my dad found himself with a busted body, a lot of shattered dreams and no discernible future in his 20s, and he made a conscious choice to teach me how to read, instead.

i didn't play hockey. but, i went to pre-school.

this had a set of unintended consequences attached to it, i think. i ended up at a working class elementary school, and had difficulty relating to the other kids. if you're going to teach a kid to read instead of to play hockey, it makes sense to follow up on it, and they didn't - they kind of left me stranded due to finances. and, i ended up a floater. but, the early decisions were the right ones.

it was my mother that made a lot of bad choices...

but, i'm a socialist to my bones.

and, this is the sort of thing that baffles me about capitalists. we're going to watch them destroy each other and all lose because they're too stupid to cooperate for a common purpose....

i actually wasn't that bad at sports when i was a kid, it's more that i wasn't very interested in playing them, i was more interested in doing homework - i was a nerdy kid, and i preferred spending time by myself.

on my father's prodding, i actually made the high school football team in grade 9. even with his prodding, i wouldn't have gone to the tryouts if a friend of mine wasn't there, and when he didn't make the team i largely lost interest in going. i just didn't like hanging out with the jocks. it was when they tried to pull me out of math class to go to a game that i decided my schooling was more important.

yes: i actually made the football team, but then quit it when they tried to pull me out of math class to go to a game. i picked math over football. because i'm a nerd, and i'm proud of it.

but, my aversion to the people involved aside, i grew up with a very athletic father, and i had little choice but to engage with sports in some way in order to relate to him. i think i've mentioned here before that he was actually drafted by an ohl team, and was on his way to the nhl, but he blew his knees out and had to end his career. and, that had something to do with the fact that i never learned how to skate.

what my dad told me about sports was that it was about teamwork, and what he always tried to get across to me about it was the importance of being a good team player. if i learned anything from him on the topic, it was that.

if you take a course in economics 101 nowadays, it's probably going to be new keynesian economic theory, and they will actually teach you that a basic deduction of contemporary market theory is that competition is stupid.

we have this social tendency to lean towards competitive behaviour as some kind of ideal.

but, a rational economic actor will avoid competition at all costs. really. it will pay fines, it will escape markets - anything to avoid a competition. and, the reason is that competition is devastating to everybody that engages in it, it can completely destroy you.

any economist would tell you that the fact that these politicians are out there trumpeting the benefits of competition is just proof of how utterly idiotic and mentally deranged they all are. it's beyond irrational, it's child-like.

but, if you needed another example of the stupidity of competition...