it's always startling to me just how badly scientists have a grasp on public policy and economics. i think it's easy to trace it to this self-perception of themselves as bearing this kind of burden of being the world's real thinkers, although people looking in on the outside realize how laughable that perception of themselves really is. yet, if you're operating under this bizarre perception (enforced by a lot of things: plato, asimov, star trek, hollywood) that government's role is to carry out the dreams of the intelligentsia...

maybe a little marx might help? there's so many methodological flaws, i can see the push back. but, it could pull their head out of the clouds.

the united states didn't spend trillions in iraq to build a better society. they spent trillions in iraq because it was profitable. they wouldn't spend a dime on bettering the planet...

....and, so the crux of this debate needs to change drastically. we live in a society where governments are controlled by banks. public policy is collective action that maximizes profits for shareholders and investors. if you want them to listen, you need to speak their language.

that's probably not going to happen. yet, as i've mentioned a few times before, it probably won't be particularly hard to get a construction firm to pick up a trillion dollar project building floodwalls across the eastern seaboard.

yeah, well, join the revolution then. that's how shit works...

in the economic reality we live in, flashing around estimates that suggest a higher financial cost of not acting is actually an argument for not acting.

if it's expensive for the state, somebody in the private sector profits. that's why the private sector controls the state...

austerity is just cutting out state investments that have demonstrated low returns and have poor forecasts.

the function of the state has always been and remains to transfer tax money into private hands.

so, adaptation is big business and we'll see movement on that. prevention doesn't present any revenue streams, so we won't.

kidnapped by extremists or disappeared by nato?

it's always impossible to say.

yup. i just booted into windows, and i'm happy about it. another save for the bus pirate.

now i need to figure out how i'm going to reconstruct it. i should be back up and recording by the end of the weekend.

I FIXED MY MOTHERBOARD.

IT BEEPS! YAY!

so, i had the cables connected wrong. derp.

not my fault, though! the manual was wrong!

it's flashing right now, i'll know in a few minutes...

it's telling me it can't identify the bios chip, but that doesn't really add up.

well, the device seems to work. but this isn't designed to run on windows, really, and i'm going to have to boot to linux to even begin to troubleshoot it.

bus pirate came in today. just about to unpack it...

well, i was going to say that this is evidence that the russians don't control the crowds.

that they're driving shit behind the scenes is totally fucking obvious.

....just like it was totally fucking obvious that western forces were running things in kiev.

i still can't fathom an actual invasion. and i still think they're wasting precious time. who controls a few factories in the east of ukraine isn't going to matter once those missiles are hovering over moscow.

conversely, if the americans are being smart about this, what they're doing right now is negotiating base rights in the baltics. and, indeed, where's mccain been over the last few days?

it's exciting footage and everything, and it's provocative to consider, but it's symptomatic of the horrifically shitty military tactics that have plagued the russians since....

....since stalin killed everybody that could have posed any threat to him, and centuries worth of russian military genius along with them.

they had me for a minute, they really did. i was thinking russian resurgence. but, this fool's errand is perhaps moscow's last hurrah, on the pivot of a historic shift in dominance in the slavic speaking world to nato-backed warsaw.

put bluntly: this is exactly what the americans wanted.

"imperial treachery!"

but it only works over and over, for thousands of years now, because the barbarians are idiots.

this could be byzantium tricking the bulgars into getting attacked from behind for the twenty-third (who is really counting?) time. are they *ever* going to figure it out? or is this worked into the unfolding of history?

second time as farce, ok. but this is more like being stuck on the wheel. egads....

i like the rant, here.

for the other guy's point, sure. it could be said that relying on technology to solve the problem is faith-based thinking, and consequently unscientific.

well, it's nice to see the communists expose themselves. hudson isn't particularly surprising.

on the one hand, though, it's also interesting to see all of this dormant cold war programming reassert itself. i don't think many people under 40 are going to react well to the idea of turning russia back into an enemy, especially with the experience we've had with our own government. but, the older generation seems to be booting right up to the command prompt, and launching right into those old flight simulators and vintage copies of sid meier's civilization...

so, we must ask: wolfenstein v. duke nukem?

(actually, it's not even worth asking. duke nukem was fun for ten minutes. wolfenstein was addictive.)

so, communist or not, he seems to be being activated the way he was programmed to be. this is really intriguing to me.

on the other hand, he does make some good points. if you can get through the pynchonesque cartoonism, it's worth watching as a summary of recent events, including the tying of some loose threads.

but, he's still not talking about that missile shield...

so, i don't know if my mail dude was trying to do me a favour or trying to piss me off and i'm consequently torn as to how to react. the package got here, but through a difficult route - and unsigned, when i was supposed to sign. that works out to my benefit, but it's more future packages i'm concerned about.

right now, i'm almost afraid to open it.

i'm going to probably walk down to the post office and ask them if they can automatically hold items to this address. there's no way anybody can contact me down here without prior consent, which is on purpose and not going to change. i'd rather they hold items there to begin with, and just send me an email to get me to pick it up. it removes a set of hands from the chain.

so, here's the story...

first, the crux of this is that i've made myself difficult to contact on purpose for many years - as long as i've lived on my own, basically. people coming to my old apartment would complain i was unlisted and they had to use their cell, but this was no accident. what a lot of them didn't realize was that i wasn't just unlisted; the buzzer actually wasn't set up. there was literally no way for anybody to contact me from the intercom.

and who uses the intercom? jehovah's witnesses. rogers. vacuum cleaner salespeople. mary kay. politicians. kids with fundraisers. people i don't want to talk to...

there's no intercom here. yet, when i moved down here, i took the doorbell out. it's for the same reasons: i do not want random people to be able to bother me.

you can agree with me by emulating me. it might get rid of some of the door-to-door type if more people adopted this method.

pretty much the one casualty of this is the mail dude, who drops off packages from time to time. yet, it's generally far too infrequently for it to justify being annoyed by children and religious idiots. i'm perfectly happy with going down to the post office and getting it myself. as mentioned, that prevents the unnecessary risk stemming from the mail dude handling it.

however, i happened to encounter him on my front step a few weeks ago and he wasn't very happy with my attitude. he asked if there was another bell to ring, because mine didn't work - i had to tell him i don't want it to work. so, he asked me for a phone number. right, like i want to give a random stranger my phone number (and i actually don't have one, anyways). i told him i'd rather he just leave the slip in the box. he was both confused and upset...

see, the mail people in canada are coming up against some possible extreme layoffs. looking at the government's plan, it almost seems like a scheme to make the mailboxes smaller and force more expensive courier options; what they're doing isn't going to eliminate carriers, it's just going to make the process more expensive. private carriers win, everybody else loses. no surprises, here - it's been the trajectory of government for decades.

however, i happen to be the type of ("real") anarchist that is opposed to frivolous work, and i'm not sure how anybody could argue that delivering mail is less frivolous than working a cash register. it's a job i don't think should exist; it squanders resources i think could be better applied elsewhere. if i can walk to the post office, why can't everybody else? so, i wouldn't be particularly upset about layoffs, and am not particularly empathetic to this guy's reaction to my request to leave it in the box.

the key question: did he pick up that i didn't care about his job?

i had a package arrive this morning that required a signature. strangely, it ended up down the street, left without a signature. i only know this because of the kindness of the neighbour who brought it to me, and was able to contact me by knocking on my landlord's door.

on first glance, it seems obvious that the mail dude is being an ass, here.

however, given that he knew i don't answer the door, he may have thought he was saving me a trip.

i actually don't appreciate that. but i'd rather talk it through than write him up. well, unless he's looking for severance, i guess. but i can't reasonably make any of these assumptions.

so, i think the best thing to do is determine if i can get the post office to hold items and email me for pickup when they come in.

the device is apparently undamaged. and, in truth, with the way it was packaged, it would have been hard to damage it.

oddly, the canada post tracking site continues to state that the item is "out for delivery". i'm going to let this run through the system and see what happens. if it works properly, i should get a refund. and maybe i deserve one. i'll give it a few days....

ahahaha....

see, i saw this coming, though. and it's a better strategy than fighting them.

she came very close to stating the widely understood, but never articulated, truth: those imf conditions are designed to reduce the population. it's ideological malthusianism.

the most important thing i learned from....decades....in school is the following:

if you're going to go to school with the purpose of doing something competitive with it (be that in employment or in academia), you have no option but to pick something you love to do. things may have been different in the past when the field was narrower, but nowadays living in north america means you're competing against two thirds of the planet for just about anything, and if you're not loving it then somebody else is going to mop the floor with you.

you might have a greater pure aptitude in the topic and in general. you might have higher test scores. you might be a harder worker, even. yet, if you're doing it for labour then the blunt reality is that you have no chance against the thousands of other people that do it for *fun*.

it's actually sort of an anarchist's ideal: the only kind of vocation any of us have any real chance in any more is what we'd love to be doing, anyways. the problem is that so few of us were raised with that mindset. we were told to do something we don't love because it is marketable (only to be outcompeted by somebody that loves it), or even to do something we loathe because it's profitable (only to run into the same problem). while that's happening, we're wasting developing skills doing things we enjoy, and getting behind those that figured this out.

if there are changes to immigration, or drastic improvements in living standard elsewhere, maybe it will once again make sense to tell your young, operatic nephew they'd be better off as a dentist. but, as it is, there's no deficit of kids that knew they wanted to be dentists when they were three years old and have spent their whole lives preparing, and the reality is that your nephew doesn't stand a fucking chance against them - he's really better off exploring his vocal chords.

i think that's a mass shift in social mindset that we need to have.

i'm not going to even try to enumerate all the things wrong with this. it's not worth it.

i just wanted to point out that this is yet more clinton redux. hillary was wearing the pants, secretly in charge and ultimately a lesbian. except that wasn't silly youtube blather, it was on cnn. i don't know why they're using the same script. it wasn't very successful on clinton...

wooo!

2014/04/14 23:36 MISSISSAUGA Item processed

so, i'm thinking tomorrow or the next day.

meaning that i may not end up getting any work done on this old laptop, after all. but it's now fully loaded.

including this neat, fairly new little trick regarding playing direct into midi. always wanted something like that...

(i knew this was going to happen, btw. lol.)

"those guys over there are being divisive."

it works more often than not.

he's not dead yet, apparently.

but there's no new information in this speech.

actually, i took advantage of the snow by going for a long, brisk walk. 'twas nice.

i have a lot of opposition to your concept of personal freedom. capitalism is a shitty way for people the world over to live because it abolishes personal freedom - both at the worker/slave level and at the consumer/bot level. a replacement order should be one where personal freedom is truly maximized. in fact, that was the whole point of the socialist program - we needed socialism precisely because industrial capitalism made liberalism impossible. but, i get your point. it just applies more to the co-modified capitalist ideal of "personal freedom" than it does to actual freedom.

besides that, i like your analogy. unfortunately, there isn't much to add to the debate. the thinking is long done. it's a question of action.

basically, oscar wilde said everything worth saying here:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/

1) civilization requires slaves. even engels admitted that this whole dictatorship of the proletariat thing was the best compromise available relative to nineteenth century technology. we need slaves, but if we make the slaves and the bosses the same thing then the slaves will hopefully be mistreated the least. that's communism, and it's not surprising that it hasn't worked (for all marx' talk of contradictions in capitalism, his solution was merely another one).

2) it's not the nineteenth century anymore. we can actually start building a lot of this stuff. we don't even have to talk about automating luxuries at this point. how about automating food? might it be the best way to solve the food crises we're facing, anyways?

3) we've consequently functionally eliminated the barrier to liberalism that marx and engels pointed out. if we can replace socialized production with automation, we can get on with building a free society.

but there's two reasons why this is going to require something as drastic as nuclear war or secretly starting a colony on another planet or something:

1) scarcity in food production is a weapon in the hands of the ruling class. they demand that breeding be roughly linearly proportional to productivity and the food be rewarded as compensation for forced labour. so, we get scarcity continually enforced as austerity, instead. they start off with this axiom with all the force they have, and they know they cannot maintain the existing system should the lie be exposed as what it is.

2) hierarchical socialism, which would cease to exist.

solution? eventually, the technology to abolish the contradiction between liberalism and industrialization will be cheap and easy enough to produce that it cannot be suppressed. it's all in the mode of production. it's all driven by technology. that's something marx was right about.

until then, the anti-capitalist (anarchism is the only real anti-capitalism) needs to adopt a strategy of avoidance. this is a highly personal thing. what does the individual despise about capitalism? how would the individual live on the other side of it? is there a way to scheme a path to an approximation of this existence? can small, shifting spaces be claimed temporarily so that it's migratory inhabitants can move from bubble to bubble? there's no way to overturn this, to reform it or to revolt against it. it's not a social choice, but a function of the technology. resistance is truly futile, until the technology is innovated upon. so, innovation is possible, but avoidance is the only real means of breaking free.

mass avoidance could raise awareness and temporarily bring the system down, but it can't change it. so long as the technology remains the same, what we call capitalism will recreate itself - because it is a function of the technology. avoidance as a revolutionary strategy could only bring us back to the dark ages, or further back. there's a primitivist strain of anarchism that understands and promotes this.

but if you're opposed to that, you're stuck waiting for the technology that can truly democratize production.

deathtokoalas
the language is edgy, but that only means "racist" to people that lack any sort of critical thinking (i.e. the pc crowd). it's actually starkly anti-racist; it's a sort of an allegory of sin through a sheltered white perspective. the burning is an allegory of hell, and he's burning with them for sinning with them - sleeping with them, which is the ultimate sin in a white patriarchal system that forbids any kind of genetic mixing.  he's not separating himself or the listener out, he's putting everybody on an even level with what he's describing. in the end, we're all on fire.

some kind of white guilt? maybe, but i think it's more of a literary device. he's stated repeatedly that he's just fucking with people. but you can pick up a lot of pynchon in thirlwell's work. i don't think an australian working in london and new york really has anything resembling a first hand understanding of these things, but if you read pynchon you'll get the perspective spot on.

that's how i've always interpreted this, anyways. really, this could very easily be one of pynchon's scattered tunes...

GaussRifleGrunt
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

deathtokoalas
i'm split between trying to interpret that and calling you on trying to confuse me.

NeuroProctologist
Well said. Though I wouldn't say it's only racist to people who lack critical thinking. It is racist. Period. He's using this wording, wielding the power of it, and some still are/would bb very rightly justified in criticizing him or anyone who would fit his profile, of wielding that power for any reason. Some would say he's not justified in making use of that imagery/wording, and I say they're just as if not more correct as he is in attempting to effigize his targets here.

But still, I enjoy the song, and intent behind it, while also recognizing he's kind of stepping over an edge.

deathtokoalas
no. words are meaningless without context.

NeuroProctologist
Just because you don't possess that context doesn't mean others don't. We do not speak/act in a vacuum. If you think there's nothing to criticize about him, I think you're getting starstruck a bit too much. I've always seen it as being his intent to walk that line and be target for as much for critique as he is for praise. His persona at the time was meant to provoke, good intent or no.

deathtokoalas
he's certainly trying to provoke, but his aim was always quite clearly to ridicule various *isms. he focuses pretty strongly on racism, but he ripped down misogyny and homophobia just as strongly. it was a common tactic in punk rock ("kill the poor" isn't a request, it's an explanation) and probably hit it's apex in industrial music with all the authoritarian imaging and in your face performance art. it's true that a lot of people aren't going to get it, but that doesn't give the messaging a meaning it doesn't have, it just means people aren't understanding it.

i mentioned pynchon, and i really think it's a huge influence. when pynchon starts exploring american racism (or south african racism after this was released), he gets very in depth. he uses a lot of language and imagery designed to explain various types of thinking that have defined how society has operated in the past (and that still linger, socially). but it's not racist to do that. if you want to really rip something apart, you have to understand it. not using certain words or just ignoring the whole thing  isn't going to eliminate institutional racism or the kind of racism that defines social ostracism. if you really want to get to the core of it, you have to talk openly about it by exploring and exposing it.

so, are some people going to get offended by this? probably, yeah. but anybody that takes a song that's meant to ridicule racism and calls it racist is just not understanding the song. it's not the artist that deserves to be criticized, it's the people that don't understand the art.

really, the best way to ensure that nothing changes is to never talk about it. and, whether the pc crowd realizes it or not, i really don't think it's an accident that political correctness is so heavily enforced by interests that don't want anything to change at all.

actually, i want to rephrase this a little: it's meant to be provoking and offensive, so being offended means you do understand it. it's the reaction of condemning him for it that is misunderstanding it. he's throwing it in your face, telling you it exists, because he wants you to do something about it. that's what separates it from being racist, and it's also what allows it to function as art.

...and it's the precise thing that defines the art movement that he was a part of.

i also just want to get in before somebody starts talking about agitprop, because i really made an attempt not to. sure: it's propaganda meant to agitate. but, it's subverting the idea of agitprop, by just throwing it in your face. somewhere, it derives from it, but industrial music really took the idea somewhere else entirely...

NeuroProctologist
I agree with much of what you say, except for where you begin to draw this line in the sand where people who become offended "don't get it". Being non-minorities, this is a common refrain. But in listening to people who are part of the marginalized groups being addressed with this type of language, a common notion is that it is not our place to take up and brandish these words/ideas. This isn't "not talking about it", It's simply avoiding the idea that "I, an outsider know what's best for you".

If I decide to make a statement using swaztikas, and a holocaust survivor takes offense a my delivery, or decides that my message is drowned in the delivery, I don't see how you, me, or thirlwell, can tell them they are wrong.  This seems a pretty plain and intuitive notion to me, and dressing any defense against it in "But well...art" is mostly just self-serving and tone deaf in my opinion.

Goes hand in hand with the belief I've been sticking to for a while that offensive art does not need to be defended, and shouldn't be. The moment we successfully do so is the moment it begins to lose it's impact/significance.

I can see arguing that there are two equally valid and mutually exclusive sides to this issue, but saying that it's definitively one way or another basically equates with saying "My lived experience is valid, yours is not".

deathtokoalas
but, there's an objective intent and it overpowers the subjective reaction. interpreting something is not the same thing as analyzing it. ultimately, the question of whether it's racist or not is a true/false binary that has nothing to do with how it's interpreted or what the sum of the person who's interpreting it's life experiences are. you can't force your experiences on to reality - and, really, trying to do so is completely tyrannical. i'm really not in line with this critical race theory stuff, i find it fundamentally anti-scientific and in direct contradiction with any kind of post-enlightenment thinking. that doesn't necessarily mean rejecting experiences, it just means enforcing them as subjective and, quite possibly, completely wrong.

in this case, because he's trying to piss people off, you can't really disagree with people that get offended. but, in a more subtle situation, if you had somebody who wasn't trying to be offensive and accidentally offended somebody? i'm going to tell the person that's offended that they've misunderstood, not that the sum of their life experiences is a more important metric and the person should consequently be silenced. that's bullshit...

fwiw, i think thirlwell would agree with you that there's a line, and he recognizes it. i've read interviews where he claims he wouldn't walk through a jewish neighbourhood with a swastika, because there's no "irony" in it. but i think he's not expressing himself as well as he'd like to. what he's trying to do is separate between a hateful act or message (which he'd reject) and a type of violent art that's meant to agitate people into a reaction (which defines the bulk of his work). you're drawing the line in terms of an audience reaction rather than the artist's intent, which is missing the point of what art is.

there's a lot of contradictions in the crt approach, and i don't want to sit here and list them. i've read more than enough essays by people of colour to come to the understanding that those contradictions are understood by some people of all colours, genders and orientations and that it's enforcement by academics in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the beginning of this one is going to be a temporary phenomenon. it's just intellectually unworkable.

but, it's contradictory to say "it's not our place, as members of the majority, to take the lead in the struggle" and then say "it's not my place to educate you on your oppression" and then say "it's not the majority's place to construct tactics to deal with racism within the majority itself". there may be valid reasons underlying each of these positions, but when extrapolated to full generality they are just not consistent with each other, and they consequently need to be more carefully defined. nor is there any logical reason why the people defining them ought to be of any specific racial or gender type.

i don't, personally, see anything wrong with what thirlwell has done over his career in trying to get certain ideas across to what is overwhelmingly a white, male audience and i don't see anything contentious with explaining the tactics to people that might otherwise be confrontational about it - because i think that, once it's understood, the core of that anger will mostly alleviate.

i mean "you don't understand" isn't meant to be a statement of superiority. it's meant to be a prelude to an explanation that will help people understand. and, once it's understood, there's not a reason to be angry, there's a reason to stand in solidarity.

NeuroProctologist
I would disagree that I am drawing that line. I think both the artist and the listeners perspective are valid, and that neither overrides the other. My very point is that each of us get to draw our own lines. It's sort of a paradox, as many areas of life are. Extrapolating to a generality doesn't work in this case, sure, but that is usually the case with most things.

Pretty sure I read that same interview! and again I do agree with much of what you say. I don't see anything wrong with his work according to my own values, I'm just not about to try to argue against someone who's personal experience dictates he did step over a line. Slurs don't hit me the same way. I'm not a target.

To put it flatly, the nuance here is highly likely to be lost on a black person. Why? Because they don't get? Or because the effigy he's trying to create is already too real to them, and there's nothing empowering to be found in someone shoving it in their face more? I don't think they would care if it's ironic. Nor should they really. This particular exploration of the subject is not likely to be funny or empowering in any way for them. I see that as valid. It works for you or me, because we get to laugh at and distance ourselves from this cartoonish representation of our own culture/demographic. That is empowering.

Make it more real: if you play this around a black friend, and they take offense, you gonna argue with them? Or just say "Sure whatever, we can listen to something else". It's not a matter of being silenced, it's just being friendly and recognizing that intent isn't magic.

BTW, cool conversation. Not often you get this quality of discourse on youtube of all places ;)

deathtokoalas
see, the thing is that i think it's a little dismissive to deduce a black person would get more upset about it because they're black. and that's kind of exactly the criticism of crt that you hear coming from minorities - all this "woah. wait a minute. just 'cause i'm black doesn't mean i can't like pink floyd or beethoven, or dislike hip hop or miles davis.". it loses the whole basis of an individual with individual perspectives, in favour of a group identity. this is another contradiction that is right as it's core, because it's supposed to be about experience. but it would reject the kind of individual experience that doesn't uphold it's values.

i've met some black people that i feel i could have a conversation with this about and that i think are entirely willing and able to get their head around it. and, the "irony" may even be more real to them. but, i mean, the art scenes foetus was involved with in london and new york were both overwhelmingly white scenes....that was the audience, and this was meant for it....

this kind of thing is actually pretty common in hip-hop, too. it might come from a different perspective and mostly be directed at a different audience, but it's really the same thing when you break it down.

you're opening a can of worms about art that i'm maybe at fault for leading the conversation to, but have ranted about all over youtube and don't really want to revisit. but an artist can't be producing art to satisfy an audience's concern, otherwise they're merely catering to a market and producing a commodity. art must challenge it's audience.

NeuroProctologist
All I can really say, is you seem to have a sense for nuance, but you also seem to be really insistent to drive each point of nuance into some expanded generality. Of course anyone can defy any stereotype that is placed on them, and most people often do in one or more ways. The majority of the time I'd say.

This started with "the language is edgy, but that only means "racist" to people that lack any sort of critical thinking",  and to loop back to that, the only real point I think I contend is that people can not "get it" while still being fully aware of the artist's intent. Non racist people can still do racist things. Under a persona, for art, or not.  And racism, in general, is not some clearly defined thing with neatly identifiable borders.

Saying "I'm not okay with him ironically dropping n-bombs" is not censoring, or being anti-art, or small-minded, or generally anything.  Whether the producer or the consumer is right or wrong is sort of irrelevant, and it need not be expanded into how art should be produced, or for what reasons...trying to even go there would be absurd I think.

But then again, I'm not really of the opinion that everything must reduce into a collected set of neatly reconcilable facts. These two things can be at odds with each other. One doesn't need to be more correct the way I see it. Perhaps I won't convince you of this, but I at least appreciate the good faith discourse.

And if you ask me, art must'nt do anything, aside from be observed. But I'm sure that could get broken down easily enough if dissected ;)

it took a lot of wasted time waiting for things to copy around all over the place, but i've managed to get my medium old laptop back up (not the really old one that can barely hit google; this is about ten years old, and fully useable for just about anything). the hard drive has been causing me problems since last summer, but it turns out the black screen was actually the result of not activating windows (i forgot i had installed it)...

the drive isn't really to be trusted anymore, though, so i need to be working off a usb key. i wanted to work off an external drive, but windows 7 just flat wouldn't read it. works fine in xp. vista too, even. not 7. there's all kinds of dumb info online about the drive being "incompatible with windows 7", like it broke plug and play compatibility through usb or something. it's a glorified fucking thumb drive. it should read on everything.

but i suspect it's the same basic problem i spoke of earlier, with changes to the way the os reads drivers. i'm not privy to background info on 7 like i am on vista, but talk about arrogance. they get all kinds of complaints on this, and rather than fix it they make it worse.

unless, of course, somebody figured out you could sell more drives by forcing people to upgrade their hardware with their os...

i repeat: perfectly functioning drive on xp, vista. brick on 7. official reason: "incompatible". most likely technical reason: the 7 kernel considers it a "security threat". actual driver: hardware sales.

anyways, i wanted to back up to that drive, so i put vista back on and copied the shit over, and then put 7 back on. it will read fine in xp when my bios comes back. but in order to get it from my new laptop (also running 7) to the old one, i had to use my mp3 drive...

so, it now exists in five places. that's more than sufficiently safe.

anyways, the thumb key is more than enough space for one song at a time for a few weeks until things resolve themselves back to stability.

the thing is that i bought this laptop refurbished to use for school in the short run and turn into an effects rack long term. the hope was also to turn it into somewhat of a live out. i mean, it's hard to lull a tank of a pc out and about. the signal was supposed to dual out of the laptop and the pod into a stereo receiver and play through a set of celestions, which i had interpreted as a sort of modern, technology-friendly update to the classic marshall sound. i mean, trying to run this stuff through amps creates garbage. it has to be through clean signals...but getting as close to the original path as possible struck me as worthwhile.....

it's not quite to that point. well, i never finished the symphony i wanted to perform, anyways. but, it is going to end up with cubase, guitar rig and pod software - along with other guitar effects, which will turn it into a backup guitar studio.

i cannot hook it up to a firewire interface and consequently cannot connect it to the mixer or any of the things into the mixer. nor does it have a midi in/out. so, my options are limited...this is temporary....

....but it will get me back to work while i'm waiting.

there are cheap usb soundcards nowadays. it's not really necessary. but if that bios doesn't flash...

actually, something else i won't be able to do (i don't think) is drive the signal. i'll have to check. the question is if the usb sound card out on the pod takes a dry or wet signal in.

if it does, i have no real complaints regarding guitar tone. i'll just have to wait until the mixer comes back up to tweak it.

if not, i'll have to see how it sounds, but i'm not compromising my tone, either....

unfortunately, it makes sense to me to think that the usb out is just a signal from the unit - meaning it won't matter what i put in front of the thing, it won't pick it up.

hopefully, it surprises me, but it doesn't really make sense to me to think it can do that.

i use it largely for amp sims. i use guitar rig for post-processing. well, it's what each is made for. the problem with the amp sims is they need some fire to reverse that dead, digital sound. i guess if i was doing that corporate emo hair metal thing it would be fine, but i'm not; i find i need to drive it with a tube pre-amp to be useable, and i need to drive *that* with some boxes to get the most of it.

i didn't think that through.

i'll find out in a few hours.

i'm actually able to recreate fuzz-->tube-->amp fairly well with that setup, and without getting evicted.

so, it looks like colbert's personality just died in his promotion to late show.

...and chances for a republican president in the next cycle just doubled.

yeah. these fucking democratic party operatives speak out of both sides of their ass.

the reality is that clamping down on immigrants is POPULAR in the united states. this is a perfect example of the tyranny of the majority, where a populist policy is used to clamp down on a minority and increase the government's power.

i don't feel that the people opposing these policies fully grasp this. the average american has absolutely no interest in the plight of the american immigrant, except to complain about how they "stole their job" and *should* be thrown out of the country.

to make it worse, the reality is that ice isn't even restricting itself to immigrants - illegal or not - at this point. american citizens that happen to be hispanics are getting deported. it's not because they're illegal immigrants (they're not immigrants at all), but because they're not considered to be white. when you extrapolate this, you get to the core of it. it's a "white america" policy.

...and it has OVERWHELMING SUPPORT in some areas. for the president to stand up against this would mean damaging his political prospects, or the political prospects of his party.

so, the guy shows up and blames it on the republicans to it's much smaller left-leaning constituency, all the while knowing it's a populist strategy that they're pushing in order to get votes. the white house no doubt has other spokespeople that they send around to other constituencies to take credit for their softer, gentler and very ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing.

they'll talk about the dems getting 70% of the hispanic vote or whatever, but they've got a hobson's choice. they know that as bad as the democrats are, the republicans will be worse. and the democrats are just tightening the screws....

what is left remains merely the hope that the fascist with the d beside his name might be a little less brutal.

deathtokoalas
they would be far more useful as compost.

deathtokoalas
it's the second-best idea of what to do with dead people, though.

DAVA65
You're not suppose to use meat in compost.

deathtokoalas
amateurs shouldn't, due to risk of bacteria. experts know how to deal with that.

i mean, the idea here is that they're being burnt anyways, so why not get the energy? but the organic material is far more valuable, and burning it away is really downright dumb.

Bravo NovemberHotel
Something to consider in our nuclear times is that man is on the top of the food chain and we use to live relatively a long time. That means we accumulate radioactive atoms and it is not a very good idea to use our bodies as organic material (to grow food at least). For the same reason it is not a good idea to burn it either. The old concrete grave is probably the best option. Sad, a little exaggerated maybe, but who knows?

deathtokoalas
um, no, you're about as wrong as could possibly be. humans are not particularly radioactive to begin with, but if we were then what makes you think we would be less radioactive than apples or cows? it's the same environment. so, your concern is fantastical to begin with, but if it wasn't then your analysis would be incoherent and your suggestion would be irrational.

i'm not interested in supernatural hokey-pokey. the whole religious aspect of this is too stupid to justify further comment.

graves were useful at one time because they sequestered disease. we're kind of past that, though. worse, our increasing population (due in large part to hygienic practices) has rendered that organic material more valuable.

buried bodies eventually become compost for the grass in the cemeteries, but it takes a very long time for that process to happen. nor is that grass feeding anybody. you'd have to wait for it to go all the way through the food chain, round and round in circles. it's both wasteful and inefficient.

in fact, it's so wasteful and inefficient that it acts as a sink. we have an upcoming food crisis. i don't want to exaggerate by suggesting that burial and cremation are a cause of this crisis, or that we'll starve if we don't reverse the sink, but this is a known solution that we're not likely to find ourselves with the luxury to ignore.

so, get used to it.

i just took a hot shower. it seems to have warmed up the whole apartment. let's see how long it lasts.

of course, it warmed me up too!

but the heat went up a few tenths of a degree and turned itself off. that's measurable.

if i'm understanding what's happening properly, the air should suck that extra heat and moisture up and out. eventually...

yeah. heat's back on, and that cold, dry air is back. hour, tops.

i can't really complain about the air upstairs today. it's almost 30 outside, with the humidex. and, yes, we have a humidex, which is weird this time of year, even if not coming out of a brutal winter. so, it's reasonable to have the air on.

but maybe not so high. it's more than a bit odd to have it be 25 degrees outside and have my heaters (set to 21) on. not a bit, but half-blast. that's independent corroboration, really. what it demonstrates is that the air conditioning is making the basement colder than room temperature. otherwise, the heat wouldn't be kicking in. but what's worthwhile is that that's an objective standard - lower than 21 is lower than normal, and justification to push back.

it's partly because it's early in the year, though. i remember the thermostat reading 26 when i moved in. it'll warm up over the summer. for now, i've just got the windows open.
see, even if it does warm up, though, that doesn't mean i'm going to want to keep the windows closed. it's not just the temperature, it's also the air quality. air conditioning makes the air so unnaturally dry. i really prefer that hot, moist natural summer air. a natural breeze is infinitely superior to a machine vortex (on a different floor at that).

but i'm a little worried about how that's actually going to work. it's going to rain sometimes. i'm in a basement (also note - i haven't seen any ants since the first week i moved in, but an open window is an invitation), so i'm going to have to close it sometimes. if i keep the window open and let the breeze run through, is that going to put the air upstairs on higher power? i mean, that it's working at all down here suggests it's sucking up air through the floor. is it just going to turn itself up higher to suck more? if it does, it could just make it worse in the end, especially in rain situations.

on that note, my best tactic may be to try and crash it. that happens, right? it overheats, or something? if i just blare all the heat i can muster, i could conceivably overdrive it...

i'm not really considering that right now, it's just an idea. a last resort. i get that the guy upstairs would be in considerable discomfort if i were to crash his air (he's a big guy). right now, it's just a combination of unusual factors. i'm going to assume things will right themselves as the basement slowly warms up.

there's probably some kind of equilibrium point, where very small amounts of heat will warm it up a little bit, a little more may actually make it colder in here, and large amounts will overpower. i'd probably have to get that information empirically.

well, ok. in total this makes some sense. but i also think he all but states "listen, i watch the news like you do".

i don't think people are likely to revolt like this over nationality. states like to use things like language to control populations, but only the most malleable and brainwashed take this seriously in much of any way. they didn't really talk imf protests here; that strikes me as a more realistic reason for larger protests, should they happen. for right now, the coverage on rt makes it pretty blatantly obvious who is in charge, here. 99 times out of 100, a news report that describes a protest as having something to do with language or religion or "cultural identity" is statist propaganda; real people on the ground don't care about that nonsense and mostly don't even know what "cultural identity" even *means*.

you're also running into the same double standard that appeared in crimea, but in reverse. if we are to accept the existence of ukrainian self-defense units, why not crimean ones? if we are to accuse russian soldiers of posing, how can we deny reports of german soldiers in the west? and if we are to argue for western influence in the coup a few months ago, how can we be so naive as to deny russian influence in donetsk?

this isn't good guys v. bad guys. it's two equivalent ruling classes fighting over who gets to exploit the area.

so, of course it's the russians, legitimate concern about imf packages (and statist nonsense about language and religion that nobody actually cares about) aside.

but i wanted to say something about the demands. we've learned something from crimea, namely that the russians are moving to a lower level of transparency than they've had over the last few decades. so, we need to start thinking in cold war terms again (and fuck the useful idiots in the media that would have you think otherwise). an old tactic to eventually carry out an unpopular task is to show that there is no other option through exhaustion of seeming options. but, this itself seems like a stall.

i've stated here repeatedly that i see no reason to think russia wants to split the country. rather, i'd think nato would want to split the country - as the media narrative seems to imply. russia has successively exerted significant influence on kiev since independence. the clampdown on control was part of the reason that the parliament was stormed. even so, this isn't actually a revolution, it's just a shift in which ruling faction is ascendant. and it's entirely reversible with minimal effort. the russian goal is not partition, it's to retake control of kiev and pick up where it left off. yet, it needs a backup plan, and it needs to give it some time.

so, they've gone back to a tactic they used throughout the cold war - begin with a less unpopular position that is related to but not identical to the (unpopular) one they want, push it hard through media, watch it build support, demonstrate it's impossible and the only possible answer is the previously unpopular position, make arguments for compromise and hopefully eventually put in place the truly desired option. it's right out of machiavelli. and it's not just the russians that do this.

maybe future tactics won't be so obvious, but the key here is to stop taking the russians at face value. they've recently proved (or re-proved) that they're being sneaky and that their public statements are no more trustworthy than the ones coming from western states.

the way you actually ought to think of language is not as something inherent to self-determining peoples, or some other equally silly liberal nonsense, but as a kind of mark of ownership. you'll see states use it like this. it's basically the russian argument in this mess. they're claiming that the russian speakers are their property and they have the right to protect it.

there's been a lot of talk of all kinds of nwo silliness, like inserting computer chips in people to take ownership of them. but, it's really largely unnecessary - it's just an evolution of the nation-state. why bother inserting a chip when they can teach a language and religion to children? it can't really be cheaper, and it's probably more likely to spur resistance. the id chip already exists, and it's your so-called "culture" - your language, your religion, your customs. these already turn people obedient and pliable. it's been how the state has used language and religion for centuries...

so, i can't help but snicker when i hear it from christians, especially, who don't seem to have the slightest clue that they're actually opposing what really amounts to a change in technology from one means of state control to another.

ok, they're not going back as far in time as i thought. i'm familiar enough with this.

i've pointed out before that chavez is easy for a canadian to understand because the story actually has a lot of parallels with trudeau - he was somebody who was attacked as a far leftist by his opponents, to the point where some of his supporters began to believe it, but was in actuality simply an establishment liberal that actually believed in liberalism for liberalism's sake, rather than as a means to an end.

the idea that he was this ideological leftist is actually simply republican propaganda - although he certainly took advantage of it as best he could.

the russians have extremely good reasons to involve themselves in the baltics, but the dominant issue here - more pressing than the economic issues, more pressing than the crimean base - is simply not being discussed.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/12/05/us_shoots_down_russia_s_push_to_scrap_missile_shield

this is a topic i don't know a lot about (my concept of history is euro-centric), and i'm happy to take the time to learn.

but i just want to point out that authoritarian dictators can be and have been popularly elected repeatedly. it doesn't resolve the (really not-so) confusing alliances, but it clarifies the language.

well, see this is where this guy gets confusing. i don't need to hear the propaganda.

but, here's this thing: these security groups aren't marines. in fact, they're most certainly not marines! this isn't about bringing americans in, it's about kiev being unable to trust it's own police force to stay loyal to it.

this is unexpected.

his legacy is catastrophic. we know he's a liar from how he cooked the books in his time at queen's park, but we don't yet know the depth of his dishonesty from his time spent in ottawa. it's a virtual certainty that whomever takes over is going to find all kinds of accounting fraud. with a record as crooked as his, how he managed to get the job in the first place is really befuddling.

it's going to be a shitstorm, that seems clear. makes me wonder if somebody put something in his toothpaste.....

humans are idiots.

it's not afraid of the leaf. the wind (combined with his snorting) has confused it into thinking it's a moving animal. to a dog, a moving animal is food. because dogs kill living creatures by crushing them in their jaws, then eat them.

yet, the leaf isn't reacting. no chase is about to happen. so, the dog is really confused that the leaf isn't expressing any kind of fear, and doesn't really know how to go about killing it.

but, idiot humans would rather anthropomorphize scooby-doo in than deal with the homicidal nature of their pets.

the dog would have reacted very similarly to a dead mouse.

well, of course they banned them. it's a racist policy in disguise. the monitors would quickly figure that out, and there would be an official international reaction to something everybody already knows.

generally, the result of these sorts of complaints are changes to canadian laws. the government we've had in power since '06 has no interest in disobeying american dictates, but that hasn't always been true. even so, our sovereignty only goes so far as it contradicts the will of our hegemonic masters. wait for it...

i was able to reconstruct and authoritatively back up my archival material a lot easier than i thought i would be able to. the only thing i've lost of any consequence is a couple of backing files for 'ignorance is bliss'. i can live with that.

now that i'm a little more focused as to what i'm looking for, i'm going to do one more data recovery scan through the other two physical disks to see if i can salvage anything. i'm not overly confident.

as for the script? i did this once before and concluded the data was garbled, but if i can reconstruct the directory structure and file names of the script, and get a bit lucky in pulling out a few text fragments, i should be able to rebuild the script with minimal effort - even if it takes a few days to write it all out and do some virtual testing. well, shit, it could be a month before the bus pirate gets here, anyways.

i'm going to move some things around with the expectation of getting used to living with three discs for the time being. i'm not sure i could even buy a 250 gb sata II drive new anywhere (and second hand hard drives are a dumb idea). so i'm going to end up upgrading.

when i do, i'll move the music files to the new drive. they're both the most important and need the most space. that'll leave me with two 250s i can boot into 32 and 64 bit, respectively, and one to use for various types of backup.

for right now, though, i don't have the appetite to set up a 64 bit system. but i might end up at least nliting it, depending on how much time i end up waiting for, and how successfully i can salvage the other laptop.

as the problem with the other laptop is the hard drive (there's a pattern here; i'm tempted to go to ssd, i'll have to check prices), what i'll have to do is work off an external. then again, it hasn't actually died yet. in the long run, that's another component i'll have to replace, but it's not a priority.

so, i'm chugging away at this. i can't provide an eta for getting back to what i was doing, but i can at least report having a few ideas.

there is absolutely electricity in the air. this isn't pushing towards contradicting thermodynamics. there's two important questions:

1) is there enough to use? (almost certainly not)
2) what kind of effect might such a thing have on something like farming?

free energy sounds great, and i'm usually all for experimenting, but this is something i'd say should be avoided. it could literally be the process of sucking all the life out of the earth....

....to play angry birds.

now, as for pulling all the magnetic energy and radio signals we throw around back down...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJTl2oqaWPs

i've read a little research over the last few years about how mammals actually have a genetic memory of electro-reception (magnetic reception). you hear about it a bit in herd migration, sometimes. and supposedly birds are really good at it. but it's nothing like sharks, for example.

if we had a sixth sense in our genetic history and lost it, it's because we couldn't use it. i think the basic answer is that terrestrial creatures have less use for it than water or air based creatures.

but, we now live in a world with radio waves and wifi and cell signals bouncing everywhere. even if we're not the beneficiaries, it's interesting to ask questions about how this might drive evolution in the future.

i think it would be awesome to be able to sense fields....and the repressed physicist in me jumps at the possibilities in better understanding the universe...

if only lamarck was right, huh? alas...

i mean, who needs wearables when you've got a wifi receptor (and perhaps transmitter!) in your brain?

conversely, this is maybe an area of future research in genetic engineering:

http://www.actahort.org/books/29/29_34.htm

just to clarify, what that suggests is that sucking down the electricity out of the earth *might* lead to a reduction of crop yields.

that's where quantifying it becomes useful. but, millions of cell phones can't be negligible. i don't think we should be thinking of this as renewable and infinite, like the sun.

yeah. just from a brief googling of this, it seems like it has to do with the difference in polarity between the earth and the atmosphere. if one were to start sucking out the electricity, they'd be draining the charge from the earth, which could in theory actually fuck the whole field up. i'm getting the impression that this isn't entirely predictable, but would also require large amounts of sucking. kind of a doomsday scenario, but maybe reason to be careful with this.

i mean, you have to work in the size of the earth and it's rotation and what not. but what happens at the moment that charge pulled out equals charge created? how likely is it?

"The earth can be considered as a big battery, and thunderstorms pump back electrons that the earth gives off. It is estimated that without that replenishment of electrons, the earth would lose all of its charge within an hour."

great.

cmd files may technically be programs, but people interact with them like text. they're more like modern-day scripts, really.

in trying to salvage old files off my working drives (to replace the files on the trashed one), i've noticed that i'm often able to pull text files up that have been deleted for up to five years but i can't pull off cmd files that were deleted last month. it doesn't seem to be dependent on size. i'm led to conclude that ntfs is filing cmd files as programs and they're getting easily corrupted as binary.

but they're not really programs. they're certainly not binary they're text...

i realize that there may be some security issues with treating scripts as text files. but how serious an obstacle is this nowadays really? i mean, if you can launch notepad remotely, you're pretty much in control, are you not? even so, wouldn't it make more sense to block at the kernel than the file system? even backup drives crash. rather, this strikes me as an ancient windows artifact from the early 90s or the late 80s when cmd files really were programs and that should be updated for modern usage. i can't be the first person that's run into this.

i don't know enough about other file systems to comment.

interesting.

i'm sure there are parallels in arab history, but the history i know is in france. jay points out what i was thinking when watching this.

there are a handful of dominant frankish kings - clovis, charlemagne - that managed to unite a large area through warfare and conquest. these empires were then split up amongst the king's sons as a strategy to present conflict over the empire. the hope was that if each son had it's own kingdom, they wouldn't fight over the big crown. of course, that rarely worked out in france, but it was eventually more "successful" in germany where dozens of states were set up - until the prussians showed up, and the horrors of german nationalism appeared.

i'm not drawing silly comparisons. but the whole thing is really astounding.

yeah. the americans want to be an exporter, not pull themselves to sufficiency. that's propaganda. everybody makes more money if the saudis and americans ship oil to each other.

the americans have their own export interests in reducing supply.

yeah. the spindle motor was broken

i'm a dumb chimp with any kind of tool. taking a pair of vice grips to it pretty much destroyed the platter.

but i couldn't fix that in a freezer, anyways. and the idea that i was going to pay $600 or more for recovery is flat out laughable.

this is precisely why i can't hold a job :)

it took no more than fifteen seconds for me to irreversibly damage the drive. and i'd be no less patient with your face, or a power plant.

or care more than i do about the drive.

so be happy i realize that.

that's going to cost me several months.

there was no answer....

i was hoping i could get the drive spinning by unjamming it, but it was clear within seconds that the motor was burnt. the drive was burning up. zero movement.

to replace the motor would mean removing the platters. i neither have the tools nor the co-ordination to carry out something like that. so, removing the platters means trashing the drive. simple as that.

i panicked and twisted hard with the vice grips, hoping a harsh tug would pull it free (but knowing the motor was burnt). i'm clumsy; it shot out of my hands, and pushed the heads deep into the platters, as well as taking a chunk out of the top platter itself.

which was foreseeable the second i grabbed the vice grips. i mean, i knew. but i also knew it was dead.

my only hope at the point was to just tear it apart trying to get the motor to spin. nope. dead.

i know it wasn't electrical because i swapped the boards out. plus, the heat indicates the electricity was getting there.

lost: install scripts going back 5 years, the musical work i'd done over the last six months.

the motor in this unit is actually connected directly to the board. it would have been a (de)soldering job.

the musical work was mostly compiling and remastering. i have the final files, and the source files. what i lost was the intermediate work, which is unfortunate but not catastrophic.

i could theoretically reconstruct the script from my old pc, which has a more stripped down version of it. i don't know if i'll bother.

now that the drive is officially kaput, i'm going to start the process of reconstructing what i had compiled - which was a total of three isos i had put aside to burn at a later date.

right now, i should try to sleep.

it's not firewire, but hdmi. *grumbles*. screwed...

...except...

....i could in theory work out the crux of what i was working on by installing the pod drivers direct through usb.

and on that note, i've wanted to set up my other (half broken) laptop as a real-time sound processing device for a while. guitars, mostly, of course - but drums, too. see, the hard drive comes up and down. i was going to wait until i could replace it....

i also wanted to dual-boot it. that's something to keep me occupied as i'm waiting...

i'm just finding the idea of blowing this time reading to be depressing. i jumped through hoops to set this up. i'm pissed off that i'm dealing with broken hardware, and depressed that it's my own stupidity at the root of it.

the problem with the hard disk, btw, is physical. and the way the heads are aligned in the model is really tricky. i don't want to open this up, but i'm going to have to. however, i'm also only going to touch it under the precise circumstance that the arm is unaligned. anything else, and i'm screwing it back up and throwing it in the freezer, because it's pretty much hopelessly broken.

i didn't realize that my bus pirate was being shipped from asia. i'm pretty sure that the website was registered to chicago. i would have picked somewhere closer, if i realized that.

as far as i can tell, it's sitting in a boat off the coast of singapore, waiting to be filled up with mail.
and it could be there for weeks...

so, i'm considering converting the laptop, which is what i'll have to do if the bus pirate doesn't work anyways. i'm going to do some reading and decide in a few days.

i don't see any rational reason that this couldn't handle a firewire device. i just really don't like the idea of mixing with a laptop sound card. ugh...

but, at least if i get the tracks down, i can remix it later.

that other pandora's box...

it's about time. but, these groups are american-backed. it wasn't that easy.

crushing defeat for sovereignty? hardly.

liberals: 42%
sovereigntists: 55%

the charter split the vote, and while many analysts will express confusion, this was fully predictable. this happens over and over again in canada - the centre shifts it's policy to appeal to the right, and merely loses support on both sides. ask paul martin. ask dalton mcguinty. right-wing voters tend to interpret these shifts as validation for their right-wing cause, rather than as a reason to support the centre. the more the centre appeases the right, the stronger the right ends up.

the appeasement needs to stop.

i want to say "fuck the adq/caq"; i want to say "the results demonstrate that this kind of bullshit is not to be tolerated", but what the results actually suggest is that marois' validation of racist bullshit emboldened the right to take a stand.

and, of course, the principled aspects of the left abandoned the centre, moving to the more principled qs instead.

the result is the liberals split the vote.

completely predictable....

in the long run, a sovereign quebec needs a spectrum, and one is beginning to develop with the pq in the centre and the qs and caq to it's left and right, respectively.

hopefully, what happens over the next few years is that the right moderates and the centre recalibrates.

but i fear that, by giving these voices a podium, marois has opened up a pandora's box. quebec is viewed throughout most of the country as an insular, xenophobic society. it's been argued forcefully for many years that this is an exaggeration - and perhaps a little bit racist itself. would a policy be less popular in calgary, if not in toronto? would borden's "white canada" still resonate if campaigned upon? it's hard to say.

what is clear, though, is that the liberals must close this box before what was unleashed gets out of hand.

that's their mandate, and they'd better follow through on it, or face an emboldened monster the next time around.

so, i've seen some videos about rabbit-squirrel hybrids. i have an interest in this.

something i noticed living in ottawa was that the urban rabbit population was increasing. of course, wild rabbit populations are known to increase and decrease wildly due to predation, but it's hard to see what kind of predation would exist in downtown ottawa. coyotes (and incresaingly coywolves, actually) are known to exist in the suburbs, but there are many serious barriers to moving right into downtown. who knows, though. these animals are shy and good at being evasive. yet, even if there were a few wild coyotes, i couldn't imagine them acting as a check on the rabbit population.

rabbits and squirrels would occupy similar niches in an urban setting. they're also mildly related (i'll get to this in a second). so, we have a situation where i believe hybridization would be more likely than competition, if it is indeed possible.

now, the only way to know if it's possible is to check. i haven't been able to find anything useful with a quick google search and would suspect that such a targeted breeding program would be considered useless. nothing could be gained except a more hardy nuisance species. well, that's exactly the possible evolutionary advantage, though. about the only realistic proof of such an idea would be to find a specimen and test it. it also falls under the category of questions that cannot be effectively disproven, not even with tests.

one of the arguments against this will no doubt be to point out that they exist in different orders, but this is a bad argument. it's circular. species are indeed partially defined by their inability to mate outside their boundaries, but we're learning that the methods used by naturalists (number of teeth, or bone structure) are not remotely conclusive regarding the question of genetic compatibility. all kinds of animals that have been defined as different species are in fact genetically similar enough to mate. rather than argue that they're in different orders (because they look different) and therefore cannot mate, we need to carry out experiments to determine if their differences in physical appearance actually provide enough of a genetic difference to justify putting them in different orders. this process of updating linnaeus to a genetic basis is an ongoing process that in many ways is still in it's infancy.

the tree of life has many pending revisions.

it's currently understood that lagomorphs and rodents are cladistically closely related. that is to say that rabbits and squirrels, while in different orders based on physical traits, are considered to share a relatively recent ancestor. certainly, rabbits and rodents are more closely related to each other than they are to other animals. of all the other mammals, rodents provide the most likely cross-order hybrid potential to rabbits. we simply cannot know until we experiment, or until we find a specimen in the wild.

one clue, though, is chromosome count - and this is actually quite promising. rabbits are at 44, while rodents are at 40. this provides an intermediate point of 42. while it would be most likely if they had a shared number of chromosomes (cat hybrids are possible due to a shared 38 chromosomes across the different subspecies), the second best is an even split. an example of this kind of intermediate argument comes in whale/dolphin hybrids, where everything gets split - chromosomes, teeth number and other features.

i'm not wiling to say it's possible until i see a specimen, but if such a thing were presented i would definitely want to present it as evidence of my alternate theory of evolution. i'm certainly not willing to write it off offhand. the shared common ancestor is too recent, regardless of what the aristotlians classified them as.

i want to clarify the can't disprove thing, because i over-simplified. what i meant was that just taking a few rabbits and trying to cross them with squirrels and seeing it fail isn't rigourous enough to disprove the possibility.

now, if the precise genetic incompatibility could be isolated, and if it could then be proven that this incompatibility is constant throughout one or both genomes, then that's conclusive. then you could say that they're incompatible due to whatever genetic component that is characteristic of all rabbits and/or all squirrels.

otherwise, there's the lingering doubt that this population of rabbits or that population of squirrels has some kind of mutation beyond the shared ancestor that prevents mating. and, in full generalization, it couldn't be anything other than a mutation that would prevent mating - because they share a common ancestor.

so, you need to get into a lot of details before you can rule this out. what you'd want to do is find the most archaic representations of both species to test. and what that even means is difficult to determine without mapping out all the mutations in the first place.

i'm not an expert on rodent or rabbit dna, so maybe that work is further along than i realize. but my oversimplification stands, until the genomes of both species - and the mutations that led to them as distinct species - are fully understood in concrete, quantifiable terms.

it's not as simple as just taking random variables. it's the exception to the rule, the negation of the probability, that is what is being sought, here, to disprove the claim.

it's not just theology that runs into the unicorn problem. it's an issue within science itself.

there's even the bizarre possibility of rabbits back mutating to a more primal state. i mean, fins have become legs have become fins, and there's some suggestion that this has to do with turning things off and on.

if rabbits and squirrels live within close quarters, could rabbits even return to a "genetic memory" in order to breed with squirrels? i'm being teleological. but the epigenetics just might....

regardless, all it would take would be a handful of viable individuals to conceivably create the material to allow for a back-crossing, at which point all linneaen hell then breaks loose.

mind-boggling.

it's the root of a simple equation, x^2 - x - 1 = 0. that is, x^2 - x = 1. this can be solved using the quadratic equation. it can also be expressed as a limit. sure, it's sort of neat that the pattern is easily and intuitively grasped, but there's an underlying theory that makes this connection rather unremarkable.

there's nothing mysterious or divine about this. it's just the root of an equation.

well, if somebody released you from a trap (that you may have been stuck in for days) wouldn't you react by feeling a bond of friendship? running off wouldn't be my first reaction. nor do bobcats get a prey response from humans (thankfully), unlike some of the larger cats (doing this with a tiger or a lion or a jaguar or a cougar probably would have gotten these guys eaten).

so, i think what the bobcat saw was some new friends and wasn't particularly keen about leaving them behind, before the truck scared the fuck out of it (caves aren't supposed to roar. da fuck? i'm getting out of here!). it was roaring, but that's a bobcat being a bobcat. it's a shame they didn't give it a bit more time before scaring it off...

everything has been pointing to a decision by the egyptian ruling class to carry out a cull of it's excess youth population.

marxist historians have been pointing to high unemployment as a function of a "baby boom" as the root cause of the instability. there's probably a great deal of truth to this idea of overpopulation being at the core of this. but, this kind of thing - while cheap and easy - is not a long term solution. humans are a special type of animal in the sense that we can be taught not to overbreed.

unfortunately, this does nothing to reverse the perception of islam as the primary enemy. it's still islam that is at the core of the overbreeding, and it's not likely that you're going to get through this argument without a social revolution.

now, i know that egypt is largely thought of as a mostly secular society, but the recent conflict has demonstrated that this is somewhat of a charade and that, underneath the gloss of official government-endorsed enlightenment, lies much continued backwardsness.

regardless of what perspective is chosen, the problems in the region continually reduce to the role that islam continues to play, culturally. the answer to this problem is not military, and the other religions don't provide for more enlightened thinking. rather, it's dawkins that has the proper perspective - namely that local, secularist groups need to be strongly supported by the west in their aims to modernize society and change a number of cultural norms, such as high breeding rates.

otherwise, these problems will only exacerbate as the climate warms and these culls will be more than a lazy strategy by an ignorant and authoritarian state, but necessary to maintain civilization throughout the rest of the world.

not alarmist. reality.

i still don't think this region is particularly strategic, but i suppose it's a good dry run for poland.

then again, i don't know why i'm expecting smart tactics from the russians. i'll admit i'm impressed with the professionalism of the crimean succession, but bad tactics is precisely the reason they're in this mess.

if they waste too much time and effort slowly breaking up ukraine, they're going to forfeit any opportunity they may have in destabilizing nato nations on their periphery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUYEgMu1ZMY

they ought to be focusing on the missile shield. once surrounded, ukraine would be easy to dismantle.

people's republic of donetsk?

you know, i can't afford to pay for a cell phone.

memo to the children of the middle east: it must be nice to have that kind of wealth.

so, the russians are not to be outdone in their psyops.

the situation has become ridiculous. laugh. it's absurd...

the americans have been using this trojan horse method forever. do you know how many countries have banned the red cross? that's not paranoia. it goes way back...

another organization with a lot of question marks around it is amnesty international.

i do need to point out, though, that cuba's not likely to take capitalist money without a huff.

predictable.

i should have known better than to click this looking for a substantive argument against dawkins.

besides mentioning him briefly, and completely mischaracterizing his views, this article says nothing about dawkins at all.

it's just a troll for ad revenue.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/05/richard_dawkins_is_so_wrong_it_hurts_what_the_science_vs_religion_debate_ignores/

but i'm waiting for an iso to build on an ancient pc, so i'm going to bite.

the crux of modern atheism is simply the elimination of religion from policy discussions. this absolutely requires a tactic of pushing for cultural change. however, it doesn't call for the active repression of religion. if the culture were to change, as it must to remove it from influence, the question of repression becomes a sort of canard - or at least it does from a liberal perspective, as i can assure you is the perspective of both dawkins and hitchens (i am not familiar with the other guy).

that requires a public discourse on some level, because religion is embedded in the cultural makeup of most existing societies. that is to say that it is not possible to minimize the policy effects of religion without challenging it publicly, because that is what the debate is. far from being intolerant, that is actually what is called democracy.

religious people like to try and use this sort of trump card of personal belief, but it is bluntly incoherent to claim that public policy is beyond criticism because it is personal. this doesn't make the least bit of sense, and atheists are not going to allow this trump card any time soon so the religious really just might as well drop it.

in a sort of abstract sense, religion has the option of avoiding this discourse by removing itself from the public arena. yet, this is neither something that could be accomplished by any centralized religious authority nor something that religion could ultimately even survive, as it is, by nature, a deeply cultural thing. religion cannot disentangle itself from politics - or at least not without the cultural change that atheists are pushing for.

so, it's a position that is incoherent because it's rooted within a contradiction. religious people want to argue that a cultural, collectivist phenomenon is beyond criticism because it is a personal belief. that circular logic cannot be squared.

but, it exposes a weakness in their position. instead of providing arguments, they pull out this trump card - they are beyond question.

this is of course anathema to any sort of critical thinking, be it scientific or not. so, it gets under the skin of people that use evidence and logic for their epistemological basis.

that's not to say that i think that science and religion are in absolute conflict. i don't. and neither does dawkins or did hitchens. rather, i think that science has the ability to reformulate most religious questions and provide naturalistic explanations for them, and that religious people should not push back against this. further, religion has the potential to continue to provide these questions, even if they're often worded badly.

what cannot be justified is when religion rejects science because it contradicts it. that is something that should be called out from the highest places with the loudest speakers and used as an example as to why faith-based reasoning is fallacious.

...and it's not because it's personal. it's because it's not personal. it's because it's public.

consider the evolution of morality, as one example. until recently, morality was the scope of the religious. i've even heard the argument - and made it a few times myself - that religion maintains a place in the world because of it's ability to teach morals. maybe there's no evidence god exists, but that doesn't mean that we shalt kill.

recently, though, we've been able to understand morality as something that develops with complex societies. we now have a naturalistic explanation using natural selection (and modified ideas for group evolution) that allows us to understand why we make these rules. with this greater understanding of morality, the religious model is becoming obsolete.

this has public policy ramifications. a society that understands morality as a naturalistic development where the altruistic are more likely to pass on their genes will not construct the same laws or have the same social order as one that thinks that rules have been enacted by god. and, perhaps we have come to an arbitrary difference that is defined by political preference, but that is all the more reason that it is a public debate to determine the kind of society we want to live in.

so, these pleas ought to fall on deaf ears.

also, islamic thinking in the middle ages was directly descended from greek thinking. i believe it was empodkles that came up with the four elements, not that persian dude. and i think it was anaximander that came up with the first crude theory of evolution, although it was borrowed from the babylonians (who thought we evolved from fish).

it's also beyond ridiculous to suggest that the western intellectual tradition did not merge science and philosophy. from aristotle through to newton, we see a confluence rather than a division.

yet, what one *can* see in the west is that philosophy has moved beyond god as unnecessary, because it has reasoned it's way past it. god has famously been declared dead.

it's unfortunate that so much of the rest of the world has yet to receive the memo.

well, i got the ram updated in my old pc from 640mb to 1gb, which cost me $12. 1 gb is the max the board can take (this thing is ooooold). i haven't re-installed my sleek image yet, but it's definitely faster just browsing through the desktop. i have a usb 2.0 card (yes, the ports are 1.1, it's that old) coming for $10. i'll eventually have to replace the hard drive (mechanical parts, *will* eventually die), but this old clunker is otherwise absolutely maxed out.

the guy that sold it to me jerked out, though. he said he'd sell the 256 sticks for $4 each or give me 5 for $12. well, it's no brainer. i was expecting at least one of them wouldn't work, and sure enough one of them doesn't. but, within the 5 sticks are 2 64s. so, i got 2 working 256s, a broken 256 and two working 64s. well, i would have paid $6 a stick (that's still stupidly cheap), but if you're going to sell them at $4 a piece (and having one that doesn't work is a reasonable chance one takes when buying 15 year old ram from kijiji), why bother basically giving me two 64s for free? why not just tell me you only had 3 in the first place?

i'm going to hope he made an honest error on that, cause it doesn't otherwise make sense to me.

...not like i have any use for two sticks of 64-mb sdram.

....but, people tend to interpret their economic position in relative rather than absolute terms. i don't want to reduce this to behaviouralism v homo economicus yet again, but, yeah...

if you're used to being hungry, and food goes from being plentiful to being rationed then you might not react as badly as somebody that is used to having easy access to food and has seen shortages of specific items. the rich may riot over a shortage of toilet paper, while the poor learn how to live with a shortage of milk.

so, we've had a lot of distractions here, but who is delusional enough to think israel wants peace?

you don't have to distract me. i've been tuning it out. waste of time...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azoAj_oqOGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LICOSiWqG4k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlZ9tn8t7KU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8HYBnSR74w

indeed. southern europe is being crucified on a cross of euros.