i have to do this to get the point across.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/UhE3TL7GyfvWKHvV7

https://photos.app.goo.gl/e7hZJCZ5SS6LbesW8

https://photos.app.goo.gl/4T85hPVt9VKncvVy6

i need to buy some new clothes. my last clothes run was c. 2010 and i bought a lot of second hand jeans and tanktops. i still have essentially all of the tanktops, but the jeans have largely been worn through, and either cut into jeans or put aside for sewing work (i bought a sewing machine that i haven't set up yet).

i'm going to want to wait until i get the results of the hearing. it doesn't make sense for me to spend a lot of money on clothes right now.

however, i think i'm done with pants. i just want to wear skirts and dresses and shorts for now on.

the canadian government is still citing the philips curve.

that should really be disqualifying on it's face, nowadays. there should be a giant cane that swoops out from nowhere and removes you from the press conference, while your arms paddle and swing to try to stay put.

nope.

citing the philips curve should be the last words you're allowed to make in public, in 2024.

i mean, corporate profits are at record highs.

what's not to like about the economy?

just quit your low-paying job and buy some stocks, instead.

i have referenced a few times that a part of the dubya/biden comparison is in the imploded economy. biden has recently actually started campaigning on the economy, citing positive job growth.

this is actually an excellent demonstration of the democrats being completely out of touch with reality. inflation goes up 400%, while wages maybe went up 50% (if you were lucky), and biden thinks strong job numbers are something to run on. the reality on this continent (it's the same thing in canada) is that getting one of these low wage jobs isn't going to let you afford to rent an apartment anymore, let alone buy a house. you end up living with your parents until you're 60, or living in your car if you're already an adult. the inflation in food and rent since 2020, particularly, is absolutely devastating to a huge number of people that can no longer function in this economy.

these are conditions that are comparable not to some of the recessions we've had recently but to the great depression of the 1930s. and, biden wants to run on a strong economy!

trump doesn't have a policy to address this, and he's not going to address it if (when) he wins.

but, the last thing biden should be campaigning on is the strength of an economy where workers have seen their purchasing power halve or quarter, and especially not by citing job growth numbers. people are right to spit in his face.

what's the solution to this problem? well, we're going to need to see some labour action to get wages up, but government can help by increasing the minimum wage. dramatically.

so, would biden be immune from prosecution if he ordered trump assassinated?

they say it was a kid on the roof, but we've heard that one before. have they done a search of the area for suspicious looking grassy knolls?

i kind of wish it was biden that ordered it, and i kind of wish he hit him. it would kill two birds with one stone.

be careful with those lyndon johnson comparisons.

what next? well, biden had just as well go home and get some sleep. that's going to be hard to beat.

i didn't realize that my hair was straw-y in the pictures from yesterday. the retards upstairs actually cut my hair last year, which has created this hideous layering effect, which i think is horribly ugly, but i'm not going to be able to level it back out until the front grows a bit more, and the cut has slowed me down several months. i suspect the testosterone i was forcibly drugged with also slowed the rate of growth down.

===

july 13, 2024.

yes, i'm embarrassed by what these disgusting religious morons have done to me and it's been depressing and maddening and frustrating but i refuse to give up. i want them to give up. i want them to fail. i want them to go to jail. i'm going to keep fighting.

that said, i am succeeding in fighting them off and i will continue to fight them off and i will overcome their repeated assaults and forced drugging. i mean, it's bad, but it's manageable.

i want to remind you that i'm 43 years old and i was born xy. all things considered, i'm still doing pretty well. the pictures of me from 2016/2017 are now almost ten years ago, when i was in my mid 30s. i still look relatively young, but i looked *extremely* young then. i'm not going to look like i did ten years ago, again.

i will win, and they will lose. this is a fight we *all* have to win against a violent, extreme, religious ideology that needs to be vanquished from the planet and assigned to the dustbin of history.

(blogger is making it essentially impossible to embed a video from here, which is weird because i've done it before)

https://photos.app.goo.gl/d5soMSKPBVfvjQ477

there are pictures from march, april and may but i haven't sorted through them yet.

i don't quite look like myself again, yet, but it's getting better, and all i can do is wait for the estrogen to work.

i'm more sad than angry. these people are disgusting, perverted losers and i don't understand why they even care what i look like, but my life has been a struggle to fight them off for months, and it doesn't look like that's going to change soon :(.

"Every dime that we spend needs to be accountable,"

is that doug ford doing a line by line audit?

a right-wing liberal concerned about "fiscal accountability"?

no, it's the supposedly left-wing olivia chow, pulling the usual switcheroo on toronto voters, who once again got suckered by the ndp and are in the process of bracing for an upcoming austerity budget.

if it was doug ford, he'd just call his favourite banker up to ask for more debt, then make sure his family owns shares in the bank. but, municipalities should have access to public debt, and should have a mechanism in which the province takes over.

in canada, the province has total control over the municipality which is a "creature of statute". yet, the city is on it's own for debt, somehow. that's a contradiction that needs to be resolved. if the province wants control over the city, it should take control of the debt; if it wants the city to take on it's own debt, it should change the legislative framework around incorporation so that it is more fully autonomous and can go to the bank of canada directly.

i noticed japan was at the nato conference.

that could only mean one thing.

putin had better watch out for the secret ninja corps.

the creepy losers upstairs keep demanding i "look like my father". in fact, i've posted here about how glad i am that i don't look like my hideously ugly dead father and that's the last thing i want, but the idiots are some kind of pseudo-freudians, so everything is about your parents and everything is about sex to them....when the truth is that nothing, for me, is about sex, and nothing is about my parents. freud is the biggest pseudo-intellectual since aristotle, and we can only hope he doesn't do the same level of damage, in the long run.

their "therapy" has little option but to cease and desist. they can't get in here. they keep talking to me when i'm sleeping, though, and i'm in a precarious situation, as they didn't want to give up.

i consequently decided that there was no other option but to bleach my hair a little bit early. i wanted to dye it in may, but i wanted it to be longer than it is. the psychotic losers actually cut the front several times while i was asleep before i realized it.

i dyed it various shades of orange or red several times over the last year, as i was waiting for it to grow in. the result is that it is bleached, but is a strawberry-orange-blonde, with complex hints of orange and red highlights. this was very intentional. right now it is roughly chin length, and the highlight should go grow out as the hair does.

i didn't use the purple, but i might do my roots purple some time in the winter, before the next bleach job in the spring. that would leave the top a bright blue or purple hue.

so, is that it? is it back to normal? no. i'm still struggling with some aspects of the forced drugging, and i will need it at least back to shoulder length before i decide it's back to normal. a consequence of the forced drugging with testosterone that i cannot undo is that my hair is noticeably thinner than normal, and i'll just have to wait for it to grow back in. all i can do is stop them from further drugging me and wait for it to regrow.

so, things are moving in the right direction, but only slowly, and it's going to be a while still before i'm back to productivity.

i'll try to get some pictures up soon. i basically look like i did in 2012/2013 but older, rather than i did after the last estrogen boost in 2016. this is a step backwards in the transition, and not something i wanted, but it's manageable and not catastrophic.

an unfortunate corollary of the iraq war is the ignorant position that the middle east wants to be muslim. there is a small area that is inherently arab, and islam is a form of arabic ethnic nationalism, but there's a much broader region hat understands islam as a colonial force and is trying to overthrow it.

the reason i would support an attempt at regime change in iran is that i know that the vast majority of iranians are not religious, and there is a simple reason for it: they're white. the iranian regime has to be imposed by vicious force because it's extremely unpopular with the vast majority of white iranians. conversely, islam is more popular with the invading arabs, who have colonized the region in the west of the country.

the reason assad is still running syria is because it's a secular society that doesn't want islamic rule. the same is true in turkey, but turkey's politics are confused by ethnic divisions that inflate the muslim minority's power. the lebanese are majority christians. eastern europe knows the history of islamic imperialism, which actually kidnapped their children and brainwashed them into slaughtering their own people. likewise, there have been periodic anti-arab uprisings throughout north africa for over a thousand years.

there are counter-examples, but they are almost entirely constrained to the arab core, of which iraq is in. afghanistan was a secular society before the russian invasion, but something rotten happened there in the intervening years. that might be the whole list.

so, don't be confused. islam is a conservative, controlling ideology and it is incredibly unpopular in most of the world because it is incredibly oppressive. iraq was an exception due it's geography, and not the rule.

trump will mop the floor with kamala harris so badly that states like oregon and new york will become swing states. that is a bad idea.

she was the most irresponsible vp pick since dan quayle, and that much more so given that she has a real chance of becoming president in the next four years, even if biden runs and wins.

there's really not a good answer. that's the problem.

when bill tried to tell us he didn't inhale, everybody just laughed at him. his presidency was defined around plausible deniability, but there was no plausibility to that denial. if anything, it won him votes, in the end.

did he ever extrapolate, though, on whether he inhaled that cigar?

this was with an employee in the oval office. like, during work hours. with people sitting outside waiting to come in. you couldn't do that on tv nowadays, you'd get cancelled.

the comedians and punditry class, not to mention democrats, are going to make a big deal out of trump having sex with a porn star in a weinstein-like moment (what does a porn star say in response when you call her a slut? it's true. it doesn't excuse the financial cover-up.) and i want you to stop and retreat and not do that.

i'm not endorsing biden, which is a passive vote for trump, but i don't want him to win in a landslide. i don't really want him to win at all, it's just that he's the only other guy running.

a couple of years ago, the liberals in canada tried to go after the ford family for their drug use and it incredibly backfired. it turns out doing drugs is not only not disqualifying but is seen by a large number of voters as cool. this is a vicious indictment on canadian democracy, perhaps, but it is true nonetheless.

pussygate gave trump a bump (no, i mean in the polls, you sick freak), it didn't hurt him. if you make an issue out of trump fucking a porn star, even if t was out of desperation, that is going to make him look a lot cooler than biden, who goes to bed at 7:30 pm on a friday night.

just avoid this. please.

besides. is this really that far out of character for a president?

thomas jefferson had his slave girls. bill clinton had monica lewinsky. when jfk had an affair with marilyn monroe (just to mention one girl of many), was that kind of like fucking a porn star?

there's a lot of important issues to look at. stormy daniels is not one of them.

jon stewart did a skit about the president talking to god where they tried to quote the old testament, but i don't think joe has ever read the bible, or knows what you're talking about. i have repeatedly compared biden to bush - and it seems like it took four years for everybody, including jon stewart, to catch up to me on that one, but now we're there - but biden doesn't know about ecclesiastes or mog or magog or whatever the fuck you're going on about.

if you wanted joe to listen, you should have cited the byrds.

joe knows the byrds.

like, what year is it? 1948?

biden has really turned the clocks back, when he was elected to set them forward again. america is in desperate need of somebody forward-thinking.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-nuclear-bomber-jet-tu-22m3-pilot-fsb-1922085

biden's speech at the nato conference exemplified all of the reasons i suggested not voting for him in 2020.

i understand that americans don't tend to care much about foreign policy, and that some may find his aggressive and bellicose rhetoric to be "leadership" or "inspiring", but my own analysis is that this man's death wish against the russians is worse than any american president since kennedy, and he scares the fucking shit out of me.

the geriatric idiot is going to get us all killed, and what will it matter to him, and his less than five years of life expectancy?

that said, something lost in a lot of the analysis is that trump's decision to shift nato forces eastward to poland was step one in generating the very provoked russian reaction into ukraine (after years of what was aggressive but sort of empty nato expansion on paper, mostly to enforce a protection racket to push arms sales rather than to actually attack the russians). trump shouldn't be blamed for biden's failures, but he did at the least set the situation up. it's not clear that he has the capability or vision to de-escalate, even if he seems like the better choice to give it a try. biden just wants to keep fighting the commies until he dies and will look for a way to keep at it no matter what is presented to him in terms of de-escalation, detente, or even peace. trump at the least seems to want peace with russia; biden very clearly does not, he wants to keep fighting the cold war.

everybody is looking for some way out of this catastrophic election, and i'm worried that the issue of nuclear war is going to get lost or ignored, when it is in truth the most serious issue in front of all of us. biden has brought us closer to nuclear war than at any time since the fall of communism, certainly, and probably since any time since the 1950s. we're just supposed to blame it on putin, but the reality is that that's bullshit. biden is the bigger problem. nobody is even talking about that, except for trump, and he's right to point to it as a very serious concern.

if trump were president yesterday, his nato speech may not have been much to remember, but it would not have left me shaken and frightened the way that biden's did.

i'm freaked out about what happened but relieved that the board flashed.

i'm also feeling a lot better

it has been confirmed that there is somebody living upstairs, but i think it's the same people as before. i'l need to carefully adjust.

i'm awaiting a response from the hearing.

hopefully, i can get back to productivity shortly.

i also hope that i don't have to use that jumper a third time in another ten years.

the production machine is fixed. again. what happened?

after clearing the cmos, it booted normally, which tells me it must have been overclocked. 

so, i'm going to deduce that the following happened:

1) somebody came in here and overclocked the pc

2) then they tried to update the bios to have the intel me in it

3) the pc shut down and refused to boot

i had to reflash it with a bus pirate, then kickstart it with a 600w power supply (as opposed to the 550 w supply that is normally connected to this board) to get it to turn on due to the attempt to overclock it, which caused the heatsink itself to start smoking. clearing the cmos in the fixed bios then cleared the overclock and it booted up fine.

i don't know if they damaged components or not. i'll have to try one thing at a time. i'm not in the clear on this, yet.

these idiots need to fuck off.

it took me several tries, but i was able to flash the motherboard for the production pc using the bus pirate, which allowed the device to boot up, with a caveat: the motherboard started smoking.

i don't know what happened to the board. i know that i woke up and the machine was off and it looked like somebody ripped the power out of the socket.

did somebody overclock the device?

i'm going to try to clear the cmos and see what happens, but it's smoking in the heat sink (the one connected to the chipset, not the one one the cpu) without any obvious sign of actual heat, so it might be fixable.

if not, i can buy a new board, if i can get the cpu out.

however, this has just gone from very weird to very suspicious.

ten minutes later, somebody knocks on my door without notice (not allowed.) and i can hear all kinds of smashing around upstairs. it sounds like somebody is moving the appliances out.

the media has shifted the goal posts, but france doesn't generally govern with coalitions. the largest party is actually the national rally, and there's a good argument that they should be granted first chance to form government.

that would be hopeless, you claim.

well, given that the phony melanchon is going to be sent home with a nice gold watch (set to standard time, hopefully) for his decades of service to the banks rather than allowed into government, and the fake left has more in common with this so-called far right on first glance, it's worth a try.

the other option, a grand coalition, is clearly what the french bourgeoisie wants and has actually wanted for years. in a real sense, a grand coalition would neither be a failure nor an emergency but actually the idealization of macron's political vision. if he gets it, this will be a stunning victory for macron. macron might want to make the grand coalition permanent, and then dare the left or right to try to topple it.

that outcome is dangerous, but is where france is heading. the two demagogues would be best to realize it and break through what is turning into a prisoner's dilemma by co-operating with each other instead of wasting their time competing with each other. they will accomplish nothing via wasteful competition, but could be a revolutionary parliament that can pass real changes if they work together on common core issues, instead.

i don't think it's helpful for biden to tell us he's waiting for jesus to come to get him.

it suggests he knows his own days are numbered or that he's starting to hallucinate.

why isn't "i talk to god" disqualifying language in the united states? to most of the world, that's fucking psychotic.

it would appear that sean hansel is currently trying to convince law enforcement and banks that he is me by claiming his name is jessica murray.

there is nobody named jessica murray. jessica murray is a common name in real life, but it is a fake name i use on the internet. the girl in these pictures, videos etc is not actually named jessica murray.

rather, my legal name is jessica parent and that is the legal name attached to all of the media on this site. i have used the name jessica murray on the internet since ~2005 to add a layer of obfuscation to identifying me, so that people would have difficulty connecting me to my birth name, which is jason parent. as a transfemale, i did not want to be readily identified as jason parent, but i'm currently left with no option but to clarify my birth identity, because of this loser, sean hansel. i was considering changing my name to jessica murray when i got around to it, but when i legally changed my name in 2022, i changed it to jessica parent and not to jessica murray. i continue to use the name jessica murray on the internet as an obfuscating pseudonym.

i don't know how long sean has been impersonating me online for, but i am unfortunately at this point going to need to try to put sean in jail because the retard won't fuck off and go away.

i have not spoken to sean since ~2010ish, and we did not speak very frequently after ~2004ish. i have not known sean at all during the entire period i've had facebook (after 2007ish) and youtube (after 2005ish) accounts and he's had nothing to do with any of this media or any other component of my life in any abstraction or any way at all. sean was on the outside of my friend group from roughly 1998-2002ish, which was the second half of high school and the first couple of years of university. sean went to the local college, and i went to university, and we didn't stay in touch. we were never close friends.

a mutual friend named jon wanted to start a band in 2001 with himself on guitar, myself on bass and sean on vocals. i wrote a handful of demos for that project that were recorded in 2002 that i later finished as instrumental pieces, because sean's lyrics and vocals were stupid and sucked. for that reason, there are less than 10 songs in my discography with sean as a "guest vocalist". they are all currently considered to be unfinished demos, and all of them were finished as instrumental pieces. i have recently actually taken them down from my main bandcamp sites and left them only on the side project site for rabit is wolf.

jon wanted sean to sing because he thought he was fashionable. it was a marketing decision, not a musical decision. conversely, my role was intended to be as a composer/arranger/producer/musician and mostly exist in a background role, rather than be the center of attention. i would not have chosen sean as a collaborator, and the demos that exist were essentially an accident. 

jon was correct in choosing these roles as that best fitted for our personalities. sean likes being the center of attention, and i don't. while i turned out to be a pretty blonde girl when i want to be, i'm still not interested in being the focus of attention, and would have absolutely no interest in singing in a rock band; i would still prefer a production/composition role in the background.

all of the pictures and videos connected to this site on youtube, facebook, etc are of me. none of them are of sean hansel, and sean hansel is not jessica murray; jessica murray is jessica parent is jason parent, and sean hansel is somebody else. sean is not transgendered, he's a straight male that has apparently developed some kind of fetish around pretending to be me. sean has scraggly, dirty blond hair that is poorly taken care of and has never dyed it to my knowledge; i have had hair that is brown, black, orange, red, purple and sometimes blonde and i take very good care of it. my hair is currently reddish-orange and i'm planning to bleach it, soon.

sean does not actually look very much like me at all and it's actually extremely obvious that the pictures and videos are not of sean. my frequent dye jobs are just the most obvious evidence in a pile of obvious evidence. he is only fooling himself and should step away before i have to embarrass him in court.

all of the music connected to the site was written by me, none of it was written by sean. sean is not a musician. sean works in advertising/sales and is a business person.

all of the writing was written by me, none of it was written by sean. sean is an individual of below average intelligence that has few meaningful opinions and can barely spell his own name.

sean is a phony, a fraud, a fake, a liar and an imposter, and now he's also trying to be a thief. he will fail and will be punished for it.

what sean does do is play video games, a lot, and any gaming profiles with the name deathtokoalas or jessica murray may in truth be sean. they're certainly not me, ever, at all. i don't play video games and do not have profiles at gaming sites anywhere.

i do not have an in use twitter account, as i dislike the medium and interface of social media. i'd prefer to post at a blog, but i'm converting this into an offline archive and will only be publishing digests in pdf form. my only twitter account is the one on the side, with the red hair, which is intended as satire. i believe sean uses twitter, so if you're looking for an active twitter account with my identity information, it is unfortunately probably him.

i have tried to set up instagram and tiktok accounts and would like to, as i could actually use these mediums, but cannot because i don't use a mobile phone and they won't let me verify the account with my voip number. *shrug*. sean probably has accounts of these sort, and if you are looking for accounts using names attached to my identity, they are probably him. unfortunately.

the twitter, tiktok and.or instagram accounts in question would have no association with the other accounts linked to from this megasite.

i have a large number of email addresses, some with variations of the name jessica murray (or my old facebook name, jessica amber murray), and some with other names. email addresses from google or microsoft or yahoo are free and anybody can use any name they want to set up an email address. i can't tell you if sean has been using an email address with a name connected to my identity or not, but he might be. i've recently had to connect all my email addresses to my phone number to prevent attempts at identity theft and can prove which addresses are mine. somebody has been trying to steal access to my accounts, and it is a good guess that it is sean.

if you are confused about something, please contact me at death.to.koalas@gmail.com and explain it to me. i would like to better understand the situation and generate evidence to use against sean, legally.

i would call on sean to move on and stop pretending to be me before it is too late and he ends up in jail for being a fucking retard. i don't want to deal with this. at all. i want him to fuck off and go away.

the elections in iran are not free or fair, but the death of the previous hardliner president and his replacement by a less insane person are suggestive that the regime realizes that it's recent fascist crackdown on it's own people is not sustainable, and it is going to need to cave a little bit if it wants to maintain power.

it might not result in substantive policy changes in the short run, but that is a major change in the regime's direction, especially given the age of the dictator in charge, whose days are numbered.

is this the result of western pressure? i doubt it.

rather, i would suspect that the russians, who are iran's primary partner in the world, convinced the iranian leadership that it can't dominate and control forever, and it needs to find a way to allow for liberalization, in order to prevent collapse.

it's a better outcome than the alternative, but i would avoid getting excited.

as for melanchon?

i'm sure the bankers will give him something nice and shiny for his loyal servitude.

unbowed my ass. what a phony.

does the french debt matter?

kind of.

it's the eu. this is one of the components of sovereignty that eu member states gave up when the eu was created, the ability to control their own sovereign debt. it was a massive victory for the european banking class. now, you can't bail out france the way they should have just bailed out greece.

one of le pen's policies has long been to stop buying private debt and start financing public spending with public debt, instead. in most of the world, this is a hard left socialist policy, but the socialists in france won't touch it, and french media calls it right-wing. i watched the coverage on france's government youtube channel, and it was relatively clear that this policy, while never stated (never. ever.), was at the crux of the bankers' somewhat hysterical response to le pen. 

nobody mentioned that le pen actually doesn't support a "frexit", either.

french tv made it very clear that the most important issue in the next parliament is going to be the debt, which i suspect wasn't even discussed by anybody in any party as an election issue. surprise!

but, that's what you get when you vote for the bankers, kids. 

don't be like france, kids. don't make that mistake. don't repeat it over and over again.

the bankers in france have somehow managed to get self-identified leftists to ignore their material conditions and vote for the status quo, by creating a boogeyman of racism that isn't substantively different than the status quo. the bankers are not afraid of marine le pen for her social policies, they are afraid of her for her economic policies.

the narrative is that the parliament is unworkable, but i don't see why the socialists in france wouldn't support austerity now, as they have for decades. french voters apparently have short memories and got distracted. it was the neo-liberal policies of the previous socialist government that created this situation in the first place.

macron will likely still retain control over parliament, and there is very little that melanchon can actually do about it. the only workable coalition is the one that macron wants, which is a grand coalition that includes his centrist parties, the republicans and the socialists, which are the old bankers parties, the status quo.

you can argue that this isn't the parliament's mandate, but it actually is. there's nothing illegitimate about what happened, but it negates any messaging from the voters. what mandate did the voters hand to parliament? when leftists voted for the centrist bloc, they voted to maintain the status quo; when the centrists voted for the leftist bloc, they also voted to maintain the status quo. ergo, the message french voters sent was clearly that they did not want social or economic change and that is therefore the parliament's clear mandate.

that might not be the message they intended to send, but it is the message they actually sent. clearly. unambiguously.

i think that macron should resign and that there should be new parliamentary elections, but i don't expect that to happen. rather, i expect a grand coalition to develop out of the old bankers parties - the socialists and the republicans - and for it to implement vicious austerity. the french people got a little uppity here and will need to be punished for it with vicious cuts to social spending. this will in turn merely generate further support for what is being called the far right, but is being strenuously opposed by the status quo because it is actually a real left.

french voters need to learn the lesson, which is to never trust a banker. unfortunately, they're going to have to learn the hard way. worse, they appear to be slow learners.

the other possible outcome is that the parliament is unworkable and a new election is coming soon, but i don't think that the socialists, who won seats, will allow for that outcome. the socialists will work with macron, and that will be enough to hold the government.

i also want to point out that, while exit polls are very reliable, they are essentially a survey of the population, with a margin of error. this particular election will have a lot of very close results. there is a caveat that the projections may be substantively wrong, and if that happens it will not be because the exit polling was wrong but because the error wasn't properly accounted for. if ~40% of the seats are within 3%, as i believe is the case, the exit polling is of limited predictive value. note that this caveat works in both directions.

there was a concerning ruling in the united states about presidential immunity. the american bourgeois fake left is arguing it proves that the supreme court is a threat to democracy. rather, i think it's a demonstration of why you shouldn't politicize trivial issues and blow them out of proportion to score political points, and a reason for the democrats to take a good hard look at themselves for blowing the capitol hill fiasco out of proportion, and trying to politicize a non-issue and turn it into a specious, polarizing ballot question.

a couple of justices are arguing that the president of the united states is now above the law, and they might be correct, purely logically. if justices were doing math when they worked out their rulings, they'd have no choice but to deduce the clear outcome that the president is now indeed above the law. at some level, we expect our justices to behave in this way, as well. however, anybody who has looked at the issue in any depth at all knows that our court system is not this euclidean, archimedean system of kantian purity, but that, rather, it is the case that justices constantly contradict themselves, frequently in their own rulings. the legal philosophy in opposition to the idea that justices are perfect arbiters of truth and logic is called legal realism and is the same school of thought that produced critical legal studies, from which we got critical race theory. i would argue that, while any pure philosophy requires a dialectic to approximate reality, and that you will be led astray by uncritically following any philosophy, legal realism and critical legal studies are the approach to analysis that best approximates reality.

does the president have the right to assassinate an opponent, then? well, let's see what happens if one tries. i wouldn't expect the court to uphold that idea.

that doesn't mean i like the ruling, although i broadly agree with it.

 

for the issue at hand, what is trump charged with, exactly? i can't figure out what law he was supposed to have broken, or why this was sent to the supreme court at all. i have said almost nothing about this, because i'm not remotely interested in it, because i don't see a legitimate news story underlying it, but rather see a democratic party desperate to tar it's opponents any way it can and that's willing to sensationalize a story using warped narratives, flawed logic and poor media analysis in order to confuse voters. the only story here is that the democrats tried to blow the situation out of proportion to confuse voters for their own self-interest, and that it spectacularly backfired.

the supreme court should have simply argued that trump didn't actually break any laws, but it instead took advantage of the attempt to generate a politicized ruling by counter-politicizing the situation instead, after the democrats gave it to them as a gift. i can criticize them for that, as it is not archimedean and i wish they were. i don't blame them for it, and it's not a surprising outcome.

(i'm reminded of the part of the debate where biden attempted to criticize trump for firing his general, which was christmas in july for donald trump, who got to remind everybody how much he loves firing people)

the democrats need to actually understand that they no longer control the courts, and they need to take the case as a wake-up call. the democrats have previously been able to rely on the courts to take their side in politicized rulings, of which roe v. wade was actually an example of. that expectation is no longer realistic. if you drop a bullshit case on the lap of this court, it's going to make you pay for it.

biden can always try to test the theory by ordering trump assassinated and see what happens. it's not like he's going to live long enough to go to trial.

justin trudeau wouldn't know a cunning plan if it stood up in the house of commons with a cunning plan tshirt and demanded it be taken note of as a cunning plan, and then sang the cunning plan song, as it was being ejected from the house by the speaker.

i don't know how a person plans their way out of being disliked. 

it's politics. people have shelf lives and expire. trudeau is curdling up and needs to be thrown away.

but, them damned liberals and their infinite growth, right?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-liberal-caucus-st-pauls-byelection-1.7255883

there was some concern that these women wouldn't be prosecuted, or would even be seen as victims. *barf*.

i'm not going to pontificate about this from a basement in canada, as i don't know what this woman experienced, what she did, what material support she provided to a terrorist group, etc. but, there has to be legal consequences for knowingly participating in a terrorist group like isis.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-woman-terrorism-related-charges-1.7256463

no. listen.

there's value in trying to force him out rather than asking him to step down as it tests the level of support.

if they fail, it was a bad idea. if they succeed, the proof is in the pudding.

i didn't answer the question.

do i think biden should drop out?

not exactly.

however, i think that prominent democrats should to try to force him out, and see if they can. the only conceivable alternative is kamala harris, who is unlikely to win an election against anybody. yet, the reality is that she's almost certainly either going to take over when biden dies, or have to use section 4 of the 25th amendment when biden embarrasses himself one moment too far. the latter is a real possibility.

a democratic purist may suggest that, as harris is certain to take over, it is harris that should run at the top of the ticket. ok. there's an argument for that. the flip side is that biden has, to this point, been the stronger candidate. that might be changing.

if the democrats think that harris should be at the top of the ticket, they should mutiny and force biden out. however, i don't see any reason to suggest he should step down.

i thought i had an intestinal parasite a few years ago. i couldn't prove it, and i still can't, but i'm not convinced it is gone, or that it was never there.

that's the problem: i can't prove it. these things breed rapidly, and have been evolving for billions of years longer than we have. we're ultimately descended from them, very distantly. they're very sneaky.

what i learned doing research is that there's been murmurs in the western medical community for decades that the prevalence of parasites in western populations is dramatically higher than western governments want to acknowledge. american science conquered parasites sometime in the middle of the cold war with progressive sanitation practices. therefore, you only get parasites in backwards third world countries like mexico, china, cuba and russia.

so, you might have a parasite eating your brain, too, but the difference between you and a descendant of joseph kennedy is that you don't have access to the doctors or the medical equipment that he has, so he found his parasite and removed it, and you will never find yours, you'll just get dementia and die young, instead.

i am not fan of any of the kennedys. i don't know who killed jfk, but they did the world a favour, because jfk wasn't somebody that should have had his finger on the button. jfk was a deranged lunatic with a death wish that almost started world war three like five times. rfk seemed far more put together, but he was no less arrogant, and just as dangerous. it's less that rfk junior is the mental midget in the clan and more that the society has evolved since the 60s. if jfk walked through a time portal and ran for office tomorrow, you wouldn't like him any more than you like his half-retarded nephew, and you should realize that.

i have not posted about rfk jr and i'm not going to.

let us never speak of him again.

a small group of pro-hamas idiots blocked the pride parade in toronto, because they don't hate gay people. not at all. i would have went around them, but the parade organizers apparently didn't want to give them a headline.

i read a part of their vomited out manifesto, which declared solidarity with "palestinian homophobes", who don't "deserve this". that's a complicated moral question, as some of them do deserve this, which is the actual factual reason they're getting it, while others perhaps don't. blanket statements, in context, are not appropriate.

there appear to have been at least a couple of gay people in the group, unfortunately. in response to their solidarity, these "palestinian homophobes" would instantly kill and probably decapitate our naive canadian gay anti-semites. i believe the contemporary penalty for being gay in palestine is being thrown off of a building to your death. in iran, who is funding this, they execute you with construction equipment, and rip your head off your body. in public. like, with a crane. it's a huge mess.

the term "useful idiot" is most appropriate.

as i stated, he didn't come off as more senile than he did four years ago, he just came off as exhausted and unable to stay awake.

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3269228/joe-bidens-new-plan-after-debate-catastrophe-stop-doing-events-night

the trudeau government is in trouble and set to badly lose the next election. i've been waiting to see if they're going to alter some policies or pick a hill to die on, and it's become clear that the pmo would rather get crucified than win the election. this is expectedly foolish behaviour from an overwhelmingly juvenile collection of staffers put together by an overgrown child.

the opposition is focusing on the carbon tax, but this is red meat for it's base and not what is driving poll numbers. canada is dealing with an overpopulation problem, but it was the harper government that increased immigration to unsustainable levels in order to try to change the population dynamics in the country (in canada, brown people tend to be religious conservatives and vote for the tories, something that is also true in britain, which is a better way to understand canadian politics, and something the pmo refuses to understand, because it's mostly composed of people that went to school in the united states and get their politics from cenk uygur), and all that trudeau has done is hold to the policy set by harper. i've been pointing out for years that trudeau is just harper lite and historians will look back at the harper-trudeau years. trudeau is to harper as clinton was to reagan; trudeau was elected to overturn much of what harper did, but has instead been a caretaker government that has simply enforced the reforms made by harper, without adding much of anything at all of it's own (save a few poorly thought out ideas enforced on them by their coalition partners, the ndp). even the carbon tax, as it exists, is a dusted off harper policy. the consequences of overpopulation in canada include a housing crisis and inflation, which has been worsened by energy prices, which has been caused by global instability. the number of people that actually believe the false narrative that inflation was caused by printing money, or that it was decreased by monetary policy, is very low, and the number of people voting for decreased spending will be even lower. almost nobody in canada wants decreased government spending or reduced government services.

rather, i would suspect that the actual driver of trudeau's low poll numbers, which are concentrated mostly in young people, is the selection of internet reform bills. young people can no longer access half of the internet via facebook, and while the pmo has blamed facebook, it's pretty clear that young people are blaming the pmo. nor do young people want their speech restricted by an over-reach of government. 

these bills are unpopular and are probably what is actually driving trudeau's numbers down. it's not an exaggeration to state that, for many young people, trudeau ruined the internet.

this is a problem for two reasons.

the first is that the bills are supported by trudeau's political base, which is actually retired people that are voting for his father, and are afraid of the internet, because it's something new and scary and unknown. these bills are reactionary in the worst sense, but they are a reflection of the pmo's actual voting coalition, which is reactionary to it's core. the old folks love the guy, it's the kids that hate him. second, it is abundantly clear that trudeau believes in the idea of these bills and that trudeau, who has the psychology of a true believer, who is a dirty utopian idealist, will happily climb up on the cross to die for his beliefs, and is going to take the party and the country down with him.

the bills are illiberal. this is not a reaction against liberalism, but a reaction against illiberalism. 

the party should mutiny against the leader and pull back on these illiberal policies, in order to try to rebuild it's base. a few years ago, it was the conservatives that were dead in the water when their aging base died. somehow, the liberals have managed to seize generational defeat from the hands of clear victory by becoming nanny state conservatives. when the seniors die, the liberals will have nobody left to vote for them, and evaporate into history. if they don't pull back from the brink, we're going to have some serious problems in this country, which is extremely liberal, and yet which has no liberal political representation to vote for. that is an algorithm for the rise of a populist movement, which trudeau has created by pushing forward illiberal policies, and which he claims to be trying to fight against.

i'm further left than most people, and i would be disenfranchised anyways, but what they're doing is multiplying me two or three planks to the centre, and creating a generation of disenfranchised voters that are also economically poor voters that are susceptible to demagoguery as a result of their disenfranchisement and their lack of economic status. these are not conservative voters and will not be interested in voting for the natural opposition in this country, these are disenfranchised liberals that can no longer support the governing party, because it no longer reflects the ideals and values of the country's majority and are going to end up supporting some kind of alt-right because they are liberals and it is at least libertarian, and not because it is economically or socially right-wing.

trudeau is clintonizing canada, and turning toronto into detroit. they need to get him out of there before it's too late.

the best thing trudeau can do to stop a populist movement in canada is resign, because he's the reason one is developing, and not an antidote or solution to it.

this is a good article. i'm a leftist, but i'm a realist before i'm a leftist, and the most frustrating thing about the state of politics right now is that it is utopian and idealistic, both on the right and the left, and has lost it's grounding in reality.

i would like to see the united states, especially, drop it's utopian nonsense and return to some hardnosed realpolitik, and that is neither going to happen with biden nor with trump.

i want to add that the civilian criminals involved with oct 7th should be charged with crimes, extradited, sentenced and sent to jail for life sentences. i've been saying that from day one. the trials should be essentially show trials, and that is fine, as such a hideous crime deserves a show trial.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-two-big-lies

as a hard leftist that is constantly criticizing fake left bourgeois phony socialists, if i was in france, shouldn't i be in support of this supposed left-wing coalition?

the best answer i have for that is that i'm not in france. it's very hard for me to know the details of precise policy implications, and i'm not going to pretend i can tell french voters what is in their self-interest.

however, from a distance out here in canada (and i can at least say that i'm rather culturally aligned with the quebecois nationalists, even if i don't support independence, or the "quebec libre", as their dead fascist dictator once demanded), i would have to point out that the french "left" seems extremely right-wing, and the french "right" seems extremely left-wing.

i can at least tell you that, as a hard leftist, the french "left"'s recent embrace of the extreme islamic right and open support for right-wing terrorism doesn't seem very attractive to me, as a left-wing voter. it is the french "left" that is producing anti-semitic statements and has open bigots running for it, not the french "right".

this switcheroo is happening all over the world, one way or the other, sometimes incompletely, but it's pretty consistent.

that doesn't mean i'm going to sign up for french nationalism. i haven't signed up for quebecois nationalism, and it's a lot closer to me. however, i would ask any real french leftist to very carefully analyze it's temporary allies and determine which is closer to you ideologically and which is in truth a complete and total right-wing fraud.

i want to clarify something that i said earlier.

in canada and the united states, the government can take virtually any land from virtually anybody it wants, so long as it provides a fair compensation for it, which is a court-ordered remedy. that is, the compensation is a part of common law, not legislated law, and it's there because the government has a historical habit of just taking land without compensation. while this is in some way a consequence of colonialism, the connection is convoluted, and the state uses the process, called eminent domain, on non-indigenous owned land more frequently than on indigenous controlled land. it doesn't matter what it's for, either - it could be for highways, for infrastructure or, yes, for settlements. the courts just insist that when the government steals your land, it pays you a fair price, meaning what we have here is a court-enforced requirement that the state buy your land rather than steal it.

what i said previously was that i think israel should follow western precedent on eminent domain seizure as a guiding principle in how it deals with the west bank, which is obviously never going to be a palestinian state. it currently does not do that, it just takes it. the reality is that all western governments give themselves the right to eminent domain; what makes israel different is that it is not providing compensation, and that is what should change.

i'd like to see somebody walk around canberra with a video camera and ask people what their ancestors did to get sent there.

i bet more people know than you'd imagine.

the british conservative party is campaigning on a policy to fly illegal immigrants to rwanda. 

that's not a joke. that's an actual policy. it's based on an act of parliament that declares rwanda a "safe country" and is accompanied by a large cash transfer to the genocidal dictator of rwanda, who has run the country without elections since 2000. 

rwanda was of course the site of a relatively recent round of genocide, based on tribal bickering. you couldn't come up with something that was more mean-spirited if you tried to.

and, the media is concerned about marine le pen.

is there a core of a good idea here, though?

australia is apparently full. so, i might suggest instead that they make it an eu wide policy and that they exile all of the migrants to elba, and then dare them to try to escape to a stable of white horses waiting in a remote village not far outside of marseilles.

so, europe has a problem with immigration, but it has international law to deal with, as well. over-population has consequences, and we're dealing with it in canada, too. i actually don't think there would be much particularly wrong with shipping the migrants out to a detention centre on a remote island, so long as it's relatively humane conditions, and then processing them at a reasonable rate and sending them back. however, it would really have to be a block-level decision and not one made individually.

there is, thankfully, essentially no possibility that the tories are going to win the election on thursday, but they should not be allowed to live this down. this should be remembered at every election for decades.

this is the cycle where you should vote for the greens in the united states if you always wanted to but were afraid to. the united states needs a systemic third party that will pull the democrats left, even if they rarely or never win.

the reality is that trump might be the lesser evil, right now and that he's almost certainly correct in claiming that, in the long run, biden's presidency will be seen as the worst, or one of the worst. i've made that claim myself in this space, several years ago.

i would rank trump somewhere in the middle of the pack of presidents of the last 50 years. he was nowhere near as bad as bush, jr and he was nowhere near as corrupt as reagan. whether he was better or worse than clinton in terms of actual policy is a coin toss, even if clinton can honestly and fairly blame everything on the republican senate.

biden is more near bush jr territory - economic collapse, pointless wars due to incompetence and mismanagement at the highest level, the perception by others and projection of abject weakness, etc. all we need is miami to sink into the ocean this summer, and we're reliving history as farce.

vote green if you can.

as was the case in italy, fears that marine le pen is some kind of fascist are not supported by facts or evidence, although her father did have some pretty creepy policies. in fact, i would describe marine le pen as a real secular leftist, and contrast her against the fake left that has taken over the popular concept of what a left means. on virtually every point, including a strong embrace of secularism, le pen aligns on the traditional left, and not on the traditional right. this is actually very different than meloni in italy, who is by any definition of the term a very traditional conservative.

i took a look through their most recent platform the other day and while there are a few planks in it that are stupid (you don't want to refuse to educate the children of illegal immigrants. that is stupid. that is the last thing you want to do. if anything, you want to take them away from their parents and send the to boarding schools, but you don't want a mass of uneducated, economically disadvantaged immigrants in your country, that is an algorithm for crime.), i actually agreed with most of it, and i would have endorsed her over macron, which is stated as a hard leftist. 

france actually needs this. france needs somebody willing to strongly enforce women's rights in a society where they are perhaps waning. france needs a strong voice for secularism, to refresh the values of the revolution. french secularism is different than american secularism, and i would rather see most of the world adopt revolutionary french secularism than the more conservative voltaire-penned secularism of jeffersonian and madisonian democracy.

ultimately, le pen and her new friend there are being given the opportunity to show us what they're going to do. they might blow it in a barrage of stupid populism. or they might be a breath of fresh air and be exactly what france needs just right now. we'll have to see what they do.

i would not have endorsed biden anyways. i would suggest taking a very serious look at jill stein.

however, trump really destroyed biden on foreign policy, and that's not a comment about biden's age. as a canadian that cannot vote in the american elections, my primary concern is american foreign policy. trump was clearly the better candidate on that specific issue, in terms of specific polices and ideas. the primary reason i did not endorse biden in 2020 was that i worried his foreign policy would be a disaster, and i was correct. he is going to start world war three, if he hasn't already.

however, trump is awful on immigration (i say that as i realize that biden has been more vicious than trump was, despite what trump said) and awful on climate change. the united states does not have the kind of infrastructure problems that canada has. i actually think a partial solution to canada's housing crisis could be the united states accepting a substantial percentage of the refugees that have come here, as they have the infrastructure and we don't.

i don't care about the deficit in principle, as it is a meaningless abstraction. yet, massive tax cuts are not a good idea right now, as the country needs investment in public infrastructure.

i did watch the american presidential debate.

biden certainly looked awful, but i want to remind people that he wasn't that different 20 years ago. even then he frequently trailed off. i actually think this is a tactic to stop talking when he doesn't want to talk. it's a bad tactic, but he's been doing it so long that it appears to be intentional. i think he needs a new tactic, but i'd be hesitant to present it as evidence of cognitive decline, because he's always done that. he'd better stop, because if it didn't make him look senile then, it does now.

he frequently stumbled over words, but he has frequently publicized that he has a stutter.

yes, he looked and sounded awful, but that's what joe biden is normally like. i didn't see anything that suggested to me that he's lost control, even if there were moments that suggested he might not have much time left. my analysis would be that joe is still with us, but that he might not be in four years.

i have a different suggestion: the debate was at 21:00. that was probably past joe's bedtime. he was probably very sleepy.

i might advise that biden's team try to schedule debates earlier in the day, when the president can stay awake.

the supreme court of canada has already ruled that you can't criminalize suicide in this country. the website is clearly protected as free speech and via the right to bodily autonomy by canadian constitutional law, meaning the website has a clear constitutional right to exist. i would hope that the canadian civil liberties union is taking up the case.

the government should withdraw this obviously unconstitutional legislation before the court stikes it down and the crown should withdraw these unconstitutional charges before the court throws them out. this website is and should be entirely legal in this country.

“It just can’t be that easy,” Cohn, 38, told CTV News Toronto in an interview in March. “All he had to do was go to one website, and it was so easy to access.”

this is a completely backwards moral position. yes, it should be that easy, and the state has no right to restrict the individual, who has complete autonomy over their decision to live or die, from accessing the tools to harm themselves.

it must be that easy, under canadian law, and any attempt to make it harder is unconstitutional, due to s. 7 of the canadian constitution. in canada, we have the right to complete self-ownership. it should be that way in america, too - and i hope that it is, one day.

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/don-t-care-says-pro-suicide-website-linked-to-kenneth-law-of-canada-s-online-harms-act-1.6942666

death threats over gender politics seems rather irrational.

however, when a transfemale shows up at a battered woman's shelter looking for help, it seems to me that it is beyond the need to explain that she is in dire need of assistance and it would consequently seem to me that an empathetic person, female or not, would and ought to be concerned about helping that person avoid being the victim of further or greater violence, rather than trying to figure out if they have a penis or not. the latter point doesn't strike me as very important.

i don't think that transgendered people want to be the focus of this kind of politics. this is petty and stupid.

perhaps rosie should start her own party, and call it the Blonde Party, where she can cry if she wants to, cry if she wants to.

after all.

you would cry too.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyxx243yr16o

seems as though jamaal bowman (a fake leftist (former) american congressman) is casualty #2 for the political mistake of sympathizing with hamas terrorists in public.

the bourgeois left may take a few more casualties to get the point, unfortunately. the oil-funded pro-arab lobby and the pro-muslim media are both very powerful in the west nowadays, but they only represent a fringe viewpoint that is out of touch with voters on the ground. i've been trying to get that point across, and a little bit of empirical evidence in the form of two "surprise upsets", one due to jews staying home (in toronto) and the other due to jews turning against an incumbent in a primary (in new york) is helpful to get the point across.

while i oppose conscription in most scenarios, israel is a special case; if a country is to have conscription, it should be applied to everybody equally. in principle. so, the israeli court ruling that orthodox jews are to be conscripted is the correct one.

however, i would suspect the idf would find itself extremely disappointed in the quality of orthodox conscripts, which is what happened in vietnam, and the reason the united states abandoned conscription.

i also want to point out that biden's team should look at these results closely, as well, as i've been pointing out for months that his politically-driven attempt to interfere in and police the conflict is going to badly backfire, as he is going to lose 10x as many votes for abandoning the jews in their fight against fascism as he would gain for siding with a terrorist group, due to some kind of feeling that they're being treated unfairly.

i'm not one to get preachy about morality, but the moral position here is abundantly clear, and it is siding with the israelis in their struggle against fascism. most people have very little difficulty figuring that out and realize very intuitively and very quickly that there is something very rotten about somebody that can't figure it out.

i would hope that the liberal party apparatchiks have a better analysis than this.

recent conservative results in the riding v liberal results:

2024: 15555 v 14965

2021: 13587 v 26429

2019: 12933 v 32494

2015: 15936 v 31481

2011: 17864 v 22409

2008: 13948 v 26286

2006: 15021 v 29295

2004: 11226 v 32171

before 2004, there were two right wing parties in canada and you have to add the two totals, but that should be done with some apprehension because a substantive number of red tories in ridings like this one would have become liberals after 2004. i'm going to do it anyways, with a caveat. it's also worth pointing out that the liberal swing to the right after martin lost them some votes to the ndp for a while, although they came back after the ndp committed suicide by electing tom mulcair.

2000: (10099+5457=15556) v 25358

1997: (11520+3564 = 15084) v 26389

1993: (12499 + 5727 = 18266) v 27775

in 1988, there was only one conservative party in ontario, and it won the riding, but the liberals still got over 20,000 votes in a riding with a much smaller population. it should be pointed out that 1984 and 1988 were massive landslides for the conservatives in canada and 1984 was a very bad year for liberals.

1988: 25206 v 21655

1984: 20914 v 16659

the liberals won in 1980 but, due to population growth, citing raw numbers is no longer helpful.

the claim in the article that her vote total of 14965 would usually be enough to win is pretty dubious. the average conservative turnout since 1993, not including yesterday, in actual real elections, was:

(13587 + 12933 + 15936 + 17864 + 13948 + 15021 + 11226 + 15556 + 15084 + 18266)/10 = 14942.

this is supposed to be a liberal stronghold, so winning by 20 votes is not "enough to win". indeed, the average liberal turnout over the same time period was:

(26429 + 32494 + 31481 + 22409 + 26286 + 29295 + 32171 + 25358 + 26389 + 27775)/10 = 28008.

don stewart's total was about the average turnout since 1993, give or take a reasonable margin. conversely, leslie church's total was roughly half of the average turnout since 1993, and over 10,000 votes less than any other liberal candidate since 1993.

it is abundantly clear that liberal voters decided not to vote in the byelection and i hope the liberals figure that out and adjust to allow for more democracy. leslie church has claimed she doesn't want to give up. this is not helpful, she should get the message and move on, or at least stand back and have an open nomination that lets the people in the riding choose their representatives.

i'm not a liberal, i'm a libertarian socialist. the bourgeois positions of the soft capitalist class constantly frustrate and annoy me. i'd rather vote ndp, but they're a bunch of phonies; every time the ndp actually gets elected, it results in budget cuts at the provincial level. the ndp can say what they want, but their record is clear: ndp governments are austerity governments, always. even olivia chow is pushing through austerity as the mayor of toronto. they're complete frauds, and i say that as a hard leftist.

it is because i am a hard leftist that i won't have anything to do with fascistic right-wing organization like hamas, and would utterly consternate anybody identifying as a leftist that expresses any remote level of sympathy for any level of arabic supremacist islamic fascism. that position is untenable. netanyahu is unquestionably the lesser evil.

as terrible as they are, the liberals are by far the least terrible party, and the conservatives are by far the most terrible party. they need to learn the actual lesson here, which is that there's a lack of democracy in this country, and that they need to increase grassroots participation. as a bourgeois party, the liberals have a longstanding problem understanding this, and it costs them elections every ten-fifteen years as a result of it. the conservatives are far better at getting grassroots voters involved, even as they constantly turn on them after they get elected.

canadians won't like pierre polievre and will dispose of him relatively quickly, if he accidentally wins. the liberal party should not let that happen by making the mistake of continuing to enforce candidates on voters.

and leslie church should absolutely move on.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/veteran-liberal-toronto-st-pauls

the results in the toronto byelection this morning are certainly notable. a parade of pollsters are going to react by claiming the liberals are headed for a massive defeat, and trudeau should resign.

i've been calling on trudeau to resign for years, but my analysis of the situation is rather different. i do have a math degree, and i have worked in polling. i tend to provide alternate analyses of the mainstream polling media.

if you look at the raw numbers, the conservatives were actually relatively flat, but the liberal numbers completely caved in. turnout was down 20%. these two things, together, indicate that what happened was more along the lines of that the liberals couldn't get their vote out rather than that there was some kind of massive swing right.

this is certainly cause for alarm, if you're a liberal (and i'm not), but there are a lot of reasonable explanations. it was game 7 in the stanley cup finals and with a canadian team, and perhaps the conservative base was a little more devoted to their cause than the liberal base. there were some concerns about trudeau's hamas sympathizing messaging (including repeating hamas blood libel propaganda, probably from facebook) in a very jewish riding, and that may have kept a lot of voters home. it's also worth pointing out that the liberal candidate was parachuted in, and replaced somebody with deep ties in the community, who was also rather clearly pushed out to make way for one of trudeau's friends. trudeau and his parachuted-in candidate may have been punished for kicking a popular elder out and replacing her with a backroom party operative that nobody knew anything about.

the liberals are certainly in trouble, but the national polling in canada is very difficult to distribute correctly, which is a point i've tried to help with and had some impressive results with. the liberals could conceivably win a majority and lose the popular vote. for that reason, they shouldn't freak out too much from bad national polling. yet, that is why this byelection was supposed to be helpful. unfortunately, the actual reality is that the byelection has too many anomalies to expect it to be representative, and i would advise avoiding using it to predict much of anything.

the lesson the liberals should learn is to stop parachuting in these backroom party hacks like this. the candidate lost because she was unknown in the riding and rejected by the voters for it. an mp's job is to represent their constituents. if they allow for a nomination in the riding, they should probably win the seat back in the general next year.

they pulled the heritage minute on louis riel, because it was "violent" and "scaring children". right. the obvious truth is that it isn't something the state wants indigenous people, or anybody else, thinking too much about, but rather something it wants to sweep under the rug of history and forget ever happened. it's not the end part that the state wants to forget, it's the part about revolting against the crown.

nonetheless, there's an easy way to get kids more involved, and that is to play music that they like.

the democrats are running on abortion.

hillary clinton once supported a constitutional amendment to restrict abortion rights. i don't think she ever reversed herself on that, either.

but, the democrats are running on abortion.

joe biden's response to the end of abortion rights, as president, was to tell people they should elect somebody that would stand up for their rights, and legislate abortion rights. not him, though, apparently. in fact, he nominated anti-abortion judges.

but, the democrats are running on abortion. they'll get lots of votes, too. so, why would they change anything, if they're getting lots of votes? it's a perennial vote driver.

there are lots of issues where the democrats have a history of being confusing or breaking promises, and this is one of the worst. if abortion is your ballot issue, be careful who you're voting for. you might not get what you're expecting.

the alberta ndp party is very small. according to the cbc article, it had 16,000 members a few months ago; that made it very easy for naheed nenshi to crash the party and buy his way into power. he received over 60,000 votes, which was a commanding win of 86%. 

yet, 63000/x = 0.86  <----> x = 63000/.86 = 73000. 

73000-63000 = 10000.

16000 - 10000 = 6000.

6000/16000 = 0.37.

 that also suggests he only got around 35-40% of historical ndp voters, and he brought the rest in.

then, is nenshi a viable candidate? yes, he is. but, he's a conservative.

this is essentially the same thing that jagmeet singh did and i would expect more or less the same outcome. on some level, nenshi may be viable, but traditional ndp voters are going to like him less than anybody else in the province and leftists don't have a lot of brand loyalty to parties that abandon their mandates. nenshi will appeal more to alienated progressive conservative voters than to ndp voters, but the trick is that there's 3x as many pc voters in alberta than ndp voters so that might actually work.

i would expect nenshi to destroy the party in the long run, even if he manages to win a term or two. you're not going to recognize the party when nenshi is done with it.

this depicts what people from the eastern mediterranean coast looked like c. 250 ce.

they're pretty white - partly from roman, greek, armenian and iranian migration, but there's not a lot of reason to think the migration patterns in the region were substantively different 1000 years previously. the migration patterns did change dramatically after the end of the last roman-persian war, when the region was depopulated, c. 650 ce.

jesus probably actually looked relatively similar to this guy:

something else that should be pointed out before i stop for the night, and this will upset people but it is true, is that the post-exile or post-captivity jews that "returned" to israel from babylon, and brought this religion that was heavily influenced by iranian zoroastrianism with them, probably interbred heavily with their iranian overlords and probably looked a whole lot more like modern russians or poles than they did like modern arabs, who have a substantive amount of subsaharan dna as a consequence of the arab slave trade. roman propaganda tells us that the ancient canaanites were darker skinned than they were, but it is extremely unlikely that they were as remotely as dark skinned as arabs are today. when the jews left israel after the roman exile and settled around the world, they were likely not very different looking than other southern european groups, meaning that this idea that they lightened their skin in europe is actually a mistake; rather, the jews that stayed in the south probably grew darker over time, due to the influx of dna from africa that occurred as a result of the arab slave trade.

if you're serious about decolonization as a concept, rather than a buzzword, you should fully comprehend that dearabization and deislamicization need to be placed at the conceptual core of decolonization, and the means everywhere where arabs and islam acted as a colonizing force; it means in both north and subsaharan africa, in the middle east, in eastern europe, in india, in iran, in central asia and in south-east asia. arabs are only indigenous to the south of the arabian peninsula, the area near yemen, and islam is only an indigenous religion in the deserts of arabia. it is a colonizing, imperializing force everywhere else in the world. 

if you don't include dearabization and deislamicization in your concept of decolonization, you are not serious about decolonization, you are just using the language to enforce and implement some other ideology, like arab supremacism, like anti-semitism or like islam itself.

in israel, what decolonization means in an actually coherent sense is dearabizing the genetically hebrew indigenous population, as it is arabs that colonized the region in the name of islam and that is what needs to be undone to decolonize it. palestinians are jews that were colonized by arabs and converted to islam, and they know it. that is what the truth actually is.

further, if you are a jew, you should realize you will attract more flies with honey than with vinegar, even if that looks difficult now. your grandchildren will thank you for making the effort.

there's another article here:

https://www.jpost.com/magazine/features/the-lost-palestinian-jews

as it turns out, ben gurion actually realized that the palestinians were descended from jews and proposed converting them, but the idea was abandoned. the science since his time has merely proven he was right. i think his ideas, which he left to us in his writings, should be revisited.

it's the only way to actual, real peace - not a hobson's choice peace, not "peace" at the end of a gun, but actual integration.

this is the only solution to the demographic problem.

i don't think force is required. contrary to popular myth and recent pseudo-science, cultural identity is not something inborn or inherent to the individual but a consequence of hegemonic conditioning. people tend to very happily convert by free choice, if conversion provides them with opportunity.

the reality is that the palestinians in the west bank are almost entirely hebrews with jewish roots that converted to islam because converting to islam gave them economic advantages. the israeli state should ensure that converting back to judaism is beneficial to the population in the west bank, and watch them do so, without needing to put a gun in their back.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/most-palestinians-are-descendants-of-jews/

this was at one point fringe, and then controversial, but it is now uncontroversial at all.

it has been thoroughly established using genetics that the palestinians are basically entirely hebrew in their ancestry.

https://www.shavei.org/blog/2016/06/05/palestinians-jewish-roots/

i was under the impression that his father celebrated festivus.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/ben-stiller-speaks-out-israel-hamas-war-need-peace-1235929874/

i watched an interview with jeremy corbyn and his butt buddy the other day (i think it was piers morgan) where, in response to piers pushing back on the idea of genocide in gaza, corbyn and his bud kept bringing up the situation in the west bank. they refused to discuss the situation in gaza at all, in their claims of israeli genocide, which is actually reflective of a level of dishonesty, as it indicates they knew their argument wasn't sound.

i've pointed this out myself a few times: there is a much better case for genocide in the west bank, which is a territory that israel absolutely wants, than there is in gaza, which the israeli fundamentalists don't consider a part of historical israel due it's status as being inhabited by philistines (a greek ethnic group that gave it's name to palestine, after the relatively successful roman attempt at genocide after a series of jewish revolts in the 2nd century, but which i have repeatedly pointed out that i think is an ethnic conflict dating to the punic wars) rather than jews. yes, that's crazy. it's also true. they would be more interested in annexing lebanon (which i learned recently is actually a hebrew word) than gaza. i mean, they withdrew from gaza, as they were settling the west bank.

this is very relevant information to understand how the israeli right views the situation:

as i pointed out a few days ago, israel has a convoluted but somewhat convincing legitimate historical claim to most of lebanon, but syria (and damascus) represents a very ancient border that was never settled by canaanites or other hebrew-speaking people but is rather the far edge of the iraqi mesopotamian crescent. the philistines are in the red area, but israeli fundamentalists consider the region foreign territory.

the west bank is, to these people, firmly a part of israel, and if you understand the history, it's actually very hard to argue with them. when the un created israel in 1948, it couldn't just ignore the fact that the population of the region was almost entirely arab and muslim, and it had been that way since (a) the crusaders were expelled and left and (b) the region was "arabized" under the process of islamic colonization, and the hebrews were converted from jews (and christians, the latter conversion having had already largely happened first) into muslims. certainly, the existing inhabitants of the region deserve some kind of compensation if the state is going to seize their land (as we would do in the west, and if israel wants to be a part of the west), but the west bank should be a part of israel, if there's to be any israel at all, and even if it means resettling the existing inhabitants in a fair and just way, such as financially compensating and resettling then in jordan, syria or egypt, giving them the opportunity to stay and convert (back) to judaism or even just letting them stay and be peaceful and get along, if they can. my actual criticism of israel is more directed at it's racist land ownership laws, and persistent attempts to enforce segregation. i support a single secular israeli state where everyone is equal under the law, regardless of race, religion, language or ethnicity (and you will note that, in the case of hebrew jews v. hebrew muslims, these differences are difficult to actually even define).

the point of this post is to ask people to look at the evidence before they knee jerk around what is likely an upcoming policy change in israel regarding the west bank. the media is painting this jewish minister smotrich as some kind of crazy person, and insisting we return not to oslo and clinton but all the way back to camp david and carter, while the reality on the ground is that you can't even call the west bank swiss cheese, anymore. what's left of palestinian settlement in the west bank is better described as a handful of low income ghettoes, and you can't build a country out of that. smotrich is reacting to reality. by insisting on two states and returning to oslo or camp david, you're the one that's out of touch and crazy.

if this outcome really upsets you so much, you should have reacted some time around oslo. it's too late now.

the discussion needs to be about finding ways to get equal rights for palestinians inside israel and in finding ways to get just financial settlements to the ones that leave, not in finding ways to have two states, and those holding to that idea are out of touch with reality. this upcoming change in policy is a foregone conclusion and a formality to acknowledge something that already happened over ten years ago.

immigration and housing, and how immigration has affected housing, is going to be a major issue in the next canadian election. unfortunately, we are going to be presented with the choice between being pro-immigrant (and voting to worsen the status quo) or being anti-immigrant (and also voting to worsen the status quo), when the issue is really not about immigration, but about the inevitable consequences of embracing neo-liberalism.

i randomly watched this video on youtube last night, for no good reason other than that it was in the sidebar:

is canada in a similar situation to china in the 1980s? not yet, but it is moving in that direction. what i want to draw attention to is not a comparison of china and canada but a discussion of what china did to reverse it's housing deficit into a housing supply.

we are going to need to do something similar in canada, or we will end up in the same situation as china.

increasing or decreasing immigration does not address the issue at hand, and these are subtle economic arguments that are more stochastic than causal. i mean, you can make a great argument for one approach or the other, and then something like covid happens, and everything you said becomes meaningless. increasing immigration even further might be good for the economy if a bunch of random stuff happens, or decreasing immigration might be better if a bunch of other random stuff happens, instead. you're not getting anywhere trying to make predictions when you don't have laboratory conditions. our smartest brains have utterly failed to turn economics into a science, and the people we elect to run our parliaments are very far from our smartest brains.

it's going to be very hard to break through this broken dichotomy.

but we need to strenuously avoid the temptation to politicize this and make about immigration policy. yes, immigration is putting strains on our housing, but we have 40 million people in a giant, vast land. we should be underpopulated. dramatically. yet, we've somehow overpopulated ourselves by making bad resource allocation decisions and very poor land use planning.

we need to find a way to build, build, build, build and not be distracted by the politics of migration or immigration, even as we should be apprehensive about letting too many social conservatives into the country, lest we wake up in iran, or texas.