it was vindication, if unfortunate, walking to the front entrance today and getting a rush of hot air from upstairs. you know when you come in from outside and can feel the heat rushing at you? it was like that. except i was walking from a basement to a main floor, and feeling the heat coming from behind a closed door and *down* a flight of stairs. and it's 13, not -20. and it's electric radiator heat, too. indicating that it was just right cranked. no doubt to fight the air conditioning on the main floor. i've mostly avoided raising it past 21, which has mostly kept it off. i'm not likely to crank it more than 22 more than a few hours at a time. so, somebody else is more irritated than i am by this unseasonable air conditioning...

i slept through most of the afternoon; a hot shower warmed me up nicely and then knocked me out cold. but it does seem as though it was on again a little after 4:00. i'm still feeling it a bit...

that's another possible answer, for the short term, that i can accommodate better than my neighbours. if he's going to turn the air up in the afternoon and leave it off overnight, i can sleep in the afternoon and stay awake overnight.

there's a bunch of reasons i don't really want to crank it. the rent is low here. i'd rather wear a sweater than see a rent increase, but it's within reason - what's a piss off is how unreasonable setting the air to below 20 is. which i think is the real reason i'm concerned, rather than the actual temperature. that, i can deal with. but if we get into this a/c v radiator fight, it's going to fuck the landlord and that's going to fuck us. electric heating is also quite dry. and the truth is that i like it a little cool. it's one of the reasons i like basements.

we might finally get a real warm up next week, but it looks sketchy.

i'd normally go talk to the guy, but it's not a situation where we're legal under the law. tenant law is badly skewed towards family members. if it's intended to intimidate non-family members, it's worked. i have to be careful to not get into conflict with them and more or less resign myself to his right to have the air as he wants it.

see, the flip side is i have the right to get the heat up. and the lease is the lease, regarding rent costs. there was a verbal agreement to keep the rent static. i think that endows me with a responsibility to try to minimize heating costs. the day i get a rent increase, that's out the window. but, for now i'd like to try and stick to it.

it's just...it all revolves around being reasonable. and the actual owner is reasonable. but i don't feel like i'm getting that from his brother upstairs.

i mean, it's hard to compute the idea that he doesn't realize turning the air on in an unseasonably cold early may and late april is unreasonable. this has to be "i don't fucking care". and it can't really be something that an explanation can resolve.

wonder how successful a claim that current tenant law is unconstitutional would be. it's clearly discriminatory; not clearly enumerated, but perhaps analogous. see, it pits s. 15 rights directly against "property rights", which are in quotes because there is actually no legal recognition of property rights in canada, despite the idea being thrown around by various types of liberals. i mean, there's contract law. sure. but it's not at all the same thing. i would *hope* that s. 15 would trump these imaginary "property rights". but that's up to the judge...

i'd be skeptical. but it would be an interesting case that would bring to light a lot of interesting questions. or, at least it would if i was orchestrating it.

this is the east-european superstate (centered in warsaw) that is in the process of being reformed for the purposes of swallowing up western/european russia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish–Lithuanian_Commonwealth

"in soviet russia, poland invade you"

seriously, though. this is what's coming.

i think this is worth watching for a more subtle analysis from some wiser people. it always makes me laugh when i see some 30-something associate prof think he can use his greater understanding of the modern world to overturn decades of experience. it's the wide-eyed naivete that the older folks have grown beyond; you can call them cynical, but realize it's largely synonymous with being wise when the topic is geopolitics. matlock's statement that (maaaaaaatlooooooock. ok. sorry.) he's talking about reality, not human rights, was really refreshing. so, just shut up and listen...

al jazeera has it's own biases, but i'm finding the analysis (if not the actual coverage) to be coming from enough of a spectator position to only be mildly pro-western. it's more ideological than hierarchical. that objectivity is not universal on the channel, but it's nice in this conflict. while it lasts, anyways.

but even the greater wisdom in understanding here isn't really getting to the mindfuck that we're entering the end stages of this conflict, notwithstanding the russians unveiling some secret weapon or coming clean on their alliance with the intergalactic space empire (i still claim they would have contacted the communists and not the capitalists) or something. the section on russia joining europe is sort of getting it, but only accidentally.

if anything has changed, it's that the go-for-the-jugular strategy of the current administration is just too outlandishly aggressive for them to really get their heads around. they get the context better, but they're having trouble moving from this idea of balancing alliances that was dominant from bismarck to kissinger (the space of their entire professional lives) and getting into the new neo-con reality that clinton bombed into existence...

they don't just want nato bases in kiev. they want nato bases in moscow, too.

"whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."

i'll take the latter, up to the caveat that the classical conception of a god was not an omnipotent, monolithic force but a being with faults and strengths.

i very well may cite this, in the future, as an argument for my continued claims of not belonging to your species.

it took me a while to getting around to watching it, but this is an important speech, historically, that will be cited for decades to come. you have to get through a little bit of propaganda to come to it, but putin is announcing a drastic shift in russian foreign policy: an end to american appeasement. that is provocative language, but in the era of over the top propaganda the truth is indeed often provocative. and, like churchill before him, putin is too late: this is the end of the russian empire. what remains to be seen is whether the new regional power is going to be europe or china, or whether they just split russia down the middle.

see, here's the thing i was worried about and we've seen confirmed in the east of ukraine: russia may have been forced into crimea by threat of losing it's strategic regional bases (if one pushes a spring, it does indeed bounce back at you, as vlad said), but it cannot simply stop with that reaction. it's like setting a string of dominoes in motion. russia now has no choice but to attempt to reassert it's hegemony over all of eastern europe, which will lead to it's imminent collapse..

likewise, once assad has rooted out the rebels he will have no choice but to launch a counter-attack against saudi arabia. there's a major proxy war in the region on the horizon with a less certain outcome attached to it.

now, it's a new century. generally speaking, excluding the middle east, tactics are very different now. nobody wants to set off a war of alliances. i'm not suggesting that russia is planning an invasion of poland, which would start a nuclear war. i'm suggesting that russia is moving into a period where it attempts to control events in eastern europe through economic leverage and covert intelligence operations, like we're seeing in the east of ukraine. goals include taking power in these countries long enough to pull them out of nato, and crucially long enough to prevent the construction of that missile shield, which will reduce russia to a slave of nato. i think annexations like we've seen in crimea will be exceedingly difficult to organize.

it's a race against time, and one russia is destined to lose. especially if it continues to waste time in eastern ukraine, while nato further fortifies the baltics.

none of this is really new. it's in the pnac. supposedly, books have been written about it (i haven't read them). but let's be clear what the theatre is in this war: it's the famous resources triangle of instability. what's changed is that a serious front is opening in eastern europe.

one of the different aspects of this front is that nato and america are on the defensive, which i think is unique in the post cold war world. that's not to assign the russians a position of strength. it's very illusory.

so, this is what has changed: russia has reacted, and now cannot reverse the machinery it has set in motion until every former warsaw pact member has resigned it's membership in nato. which will not happen.

warsaw is the new moscow.

dontlaughtoomuch11
"russia now has no choice but to attempt to reassert it's hegemony over all of eastern europe, which will lead to it's imminent collapse.."

====>Retard bitch, you made the TERRIBLE mistake but TERRIBLE mistake of confusing Sovjet Russia with Modern Russia, seriously??? Has the USA yankee propaganda made your brain that weak that you can't even think straight?!

deathtokoalas
well, no. i'm equating modern russia with soviet russia with czarist russia, actually. all of these things are different stages of a russian empire. none of these stages were communist or capitalist in any meaningful way, they all shared the ideology of empire.

there was no such thing as the cold war. there was a conflict between london's empire and moscow's empire that heated up a little after the french revolution, when they became the two dominant empires vying over global control. london was replaced with washington, but this is an insignificant detail; the american empire is the lineal descendant of the british empire. and, one can maybe extrapolate that back further, by connecting london to rome and moscow to constantinople. there has always been a conflict between the empire to the east and the empire to the west.

such is the nature of a world broken up into states.

that is not a result of propaganda. i don't watch western media, but i doubt there's many western talking heads comparing putin to churchill or voiding the american revolution by reducing it to a civil war within the british empire. it's the result of having a solid understanding of history, and being able to see when an empire is on the brink of collapse.

the reason russia cannot reverse the attack is that, if it does, nato will become more aggressive. every sign of weakness from russia merely strengthens america's kill reflex.  if they do not take control of latvia, nato will place missiles there directed directly at moscow that will eliminate all russian sovereignty. if they do not take control of poland, it will be used to retake latvia. and etc. there is no end to this, other than the west changing it's mindset out of this endgame/final-kill/conquer-russia mode and into one that respects their boundaries.

but all of this is completely impossible. putin is fifteen years too late to reverse the collapse of the russian empire - which he is responsible for by not reacting to the expansionism by the american empire. all he can do is watch helplessly as his allies turn against him in a rush to steal the country's resource wealth.

the kill is approaching, and the world will feast on the carcass.

note that there's always the possibility that the russians have some secret weapon, or are covertly aligned with an inter-galactic empire (i think it more likely that an alien species would initiate contact with communists than capitalists) or something. but, by all open and earthly appearances, russia is pretty much mated in five or six.

i mean, putin's gotta pull a heraclius or something, here.

---

Beastinvader
Go Putin! Funny how people will talk about the injustice of the Tartars being forced to leave. Yet they won't mention that those tartars supported the NAZIs.

marcwhatever
Stalin was same criminal as Hitler was. In USRR there was a lot of people who supported Hitler in because they thought he bring them more freedom. I don't know how i'd act if I was a Ukrainian (for example) just after Holodomor and face chance to kill soviets. Btw. half of Tatar population was killed or deported before 1933, repressions after WWII only ended up whole thing.

deathtokoalas  
but the history is always stated in a vacuum, as though it's an unprovoked aggression. nobody talks about the brutality of the mongol invasions, or how russia and ukraine were enslaved by mongol hordes for centuries. slave and slav have a common root in the english language, due primarily to the slave trade that existed in the period. millions upon millions of slavic speakers were rounded up by crimean tatars and shipped south to the ottomon empire, where they were sold as slaves within the islamic world. it's actually one of the greatest atrocities in the history of mankind, up there with the extermination of american indigenous populations and the transatlantic slave trade. and, western media has the audacity to suggest that the crimea was the "ancestral homelands" of the tatars? after they invaded from east of the caspian and depopulated and enslaved the indigenous inhabitants? herodotus makes it clear that the indigenous peoples of the crimea were the agricultural ancestors of the modern slavic groups. when you put stalin's deportation orders in context, it's as a process of revenge that is difficult to actively condemn.

Keeper Web
It was political change, what Stalin did I can't even start on something to defend his actions, but compare it to the change in US civil war, how many human rights violations and human tragedies you can find there. You can find it repeating it many times in history, but Stalin had more "recognition" on the subject.

Beastinvader
I didn't realise the problems began before WW2. My mistake. I have to learn more about that period in history. Thanks for letting me know.

deathtokoalas
to get to the root of the history, begin by googling the term "harvesting the steppe". it's hard to condone what stalin did, but when you understand the history it's also hard to condemn it.

we could talk about native american tribes potentially rising up against american settlers, but that's maybe hard to put under any concrete basis. however, if you look at land redistribution in africa, that's maybe a more concrete way to understand it. the anc (under mandela) toyed with the idea of redistributing land from white settlers to indigenous blacks. in the end, they didn't. could anybody have condemned them if they did? this has actually happened in zimbabwe (under mugabe). there's no doubt that rights abuses have occurred. but, it's also very difficult to condemn, given that black africans obviously have a greater right to the land.

what's annoying, to me, is the lack of context in discussing a complicated issue. instead, it's consistently framed in a lingering cold war narrative.

Beastinvader
I agree. I happen to be South African and I'm well aware of what Mugabe did and what the ANC is trying to do.

Two decades of Black Economic Empowerment and they are pushing for more. But in South Africa it's more complex. The Zulus were in the East when the Dutch arrived in the cape. Under Dutch (and later British) rule we expanded to incorporate the whole of West South Africa and the East coast. The only people there were nomadic people who wanders around.

I admit that the wars against the Zulus might have been wrong.

My point is just that the white people here has as great a right in this country than black people.

Also, thanks for the info. I'm at this moment looking at the history of the tartars.

yeah. heating situation here is now officially ridiculous, and something buddy and his brother are going to have to work out.

it hit a low of about 7 degrees this morning, with an overcast high of 12. even so, there was enough retained heat in here from yesterday that the heater didn't really kick in until this morning - and even so, only weakly. but, see, the air conditioner wasn't on. nor should it have been, with temperatures ranging between 7 and 12 - in addition to it being overcast and rainy. so, it was *actually* close to 21 in here. which was nice.

in addition to this, it seems like nobody was home up there for most of the day, which allowed this normal situation to go undetected. the air is now noticeably on, which is triggering the heaters again.

it's 12 degrees out. the heat came on because it's cold. that's what heaters are supposed to do. but the heaters were in fact barely even running. i'm being totally normal here; it's turning the air on to reverse normal heating operations when it's 12 degrees out that is anomalous.

and, i had the bathroom heater off, but am going to have to put it back on.

i mean, i can get that these are bigger people. so, it's like they're always wearing a few extra layers. ok. but, why not open the window, then, when it's overcast and twelve? that makes a big difference for the surrounding units, due to the way air conditioning works.

it's been a slow ramp down, but i'm willing to finally (albeit cautiously) declare myself a purely social smoker. the last three weeks of april were pretty much cold turkey, we're talking one or two opportunistic puffs over three weeks, and it's really put me over that final hump. i've been slowly disassociating the habit from the things i had it attached to: wake up, after meal, etc. at this point, those connections are just not there anymore. i even spent my smoke money on mushroom soup, which sounds weird but the expenses related to fixing my pc had me broke all month and i found myself down to spaghetti and canned beans the last week, which is something i don't want to repeat. hence, a large stack of mushroom soup (which i use as pasta sauce).

so, i have no nicotine budgeted for may. if i get to june 1st without breaking, i'll be done with the "cautiously" part.

it was weird walking around this morning, though, 'cause i found myself hypersensitive to other people smoking. smokers will mostly agree that they can't really smell the smoke coming from the guy at the bus stop. i can't say it ever bothered me before i started smoking, either. but, when you've stopped smoking for a while, you start to notice it, and it starts to bug you because you're trying to avoid it. it's especially been the smell, for me; once it gets in your clothes, you start carrying it around with you and it's a constant reminder. i mean, i'm sure i'll get used to it over time. but that was a surreal experience that i took as indicative of something positive...

pfft.

that's no match for my illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator.

also, weren't the russians denying this? right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, or what? welcome to capitalism, russia.

gingrich is the scariest one because he isn't a scripted, empty suit. and he's right. bismarck is a very good comparison. it's the comparison i've been using myself for several years, actually. well, almost, anyways. i've been using it as a secondary comparison.

a far better comparison is to winston churchill.

yeah, that'll win some hearts and minds back.

we've got a heavyweight clash between mental midgets here, folks.

"can i get a pizza?"
"sure. it's $8.00."
"a large one?"
"yup."

*pause*

"is it on sale?"
"you don't watch much tv, do you?"

best strategy is to keep it off most of the time, and set it high for about an hour when the air gets bad. i mean, i don't want to kill my landlord on the electrical bill, either.

i really think it should cease to be a concern once we get a week or two over 20 and i can just keep the window open. it's just that the basement is having a hard time "turning over" because we're stuck in this middle temperature range, and the air is really acting as a huge setback in it doing so...

actually, no. it's the gradient i'm noticing. keeping at 21.5 is just a waste of electricity - i'll have to crank it if the air comes on, regardless.

it seems to have levelled out. thankfully.

what i'm going to do is take it down to 21.5 and just leave it there. that'll trigger it before it gets too cold...

it must be about 10-15 degrees upstairs.

i mean, it's been over 20 all day and the heater has been working at 50% for an hour to get it to 22. ridiculous...

i've lived in air conditioned basements ~ half my life, and i've never seen an air unit run this irresponsibly.

another way to measure the temperature down here is via the floor. and i'll just say that the floor was not this cold at any point in the winter. which is bizarre.

i should hopefully be able to turn it back off in a few hours.

i mean, i can't articulate how stupid it is that i'm cranking the baseboard heat to fight off the air conditioner upstairs on this rarest of nice days of the year so far. but it would be below 20 in here, otherwise. and that's not acceptable to me.

i just wish it would warm up and stay warmed up. if we can get a week or two of warm weather, the basement will heat up. it's just that all we're getting right now is a few hours every week or so, which the air is negating. so, it feels like march in here because every time we get that little bit of warmth (a) it goes away and (b) the air sucks it out.

and the landlord wants to put an air conditioner in here. i'm trying to explain to him that it's not only unnecessary, it's completely backwards. he needs to try to get his brother to turn the air down....

i mean, if my thermostat can't even get to 22 then it's certainly not air conditioner weather. that's called enjoying the warm weather. air conditioner weather is 30+.

the thermostat was hovering around 21 naturally (ie not really on) before i turned it up to 22, but that was not indicative of what it feels like in here. it's that frigid air conditioning air that sinks down and makes you feel like it's january, even as the temperature in the room stays steady. yuck.

yeah. it's 25 degrees out and i'm shivering with a sweater on. absurd.

so, the heat is now on. buddy can explain that to his brother.

i mean, move to winnipeg if you want to live in a tundra.

these teases of summer are painful.

...and it's finally warm out for a few hours and the air upstairs has triggered the heat on. again.

whatever. the window is open. and if i have to, i'll turn the heat up. i don't care at this point. it's just inconsiderate to turn the air up that high, this early.

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (vst mix) (intermediate)

i posted this back at the beginning of march, right before my drive crashed, with the caveat that i may revisit it slightly. the drums need some work, but i'm not going to use (directly programmed) midi to tweak them, so that leaves this done with. this is final (as chiptune). no further tweaks.

the update, however, is the addition of a wind section to take over some arpeggiation. i've boosted this slightly in the mix, but not too much. it was finding that middle point that took all day.

i've probably pointed out a few times that you need to listen to this stuff loud and through headphones to get it. this is especially true of this track, which needs volume and headphones to get the dynamics right.

canned guitars aside, or perhaps included, i think this mix sounds outstanding. it's just going to get better, though, as i layer it over with drum effects and live guitars.

this is the vst mix, including computer generated guitars. in addition to being the core of the final track, it's interesting to point out just how good computer music can sound nowadays. excluding the introduction, i didn't play a single note in this song. the guitars are all played through midi-based vst instruments and put into digital amp models and digital effects emulators. it's really rather remarkable how far the technology has come....

written in early 2001. initially rendered mar 7, 2014. re-rendered due to shift in instrumentation on apr 29, 2014.
 
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/vst-mix

i haven't thrown a bag of garbage out since mid-february, but it's that time and i'm sort of dreading having to do it. and it's actually only a plastic shopping bag. at this rate, my proverbial pile is going to be at a rate of much less than a green bag per year. which still sucks, but is a far cry from the supposed 650 kg a year that most of us dump into a landfill, which is something i currently can't actually fathom.

btw, if i can do this, you can do this.

a) recycle. that partially means buying things that are recyclable, which isn't hard nowadays. about the only thing i've had to turn down recently were styrofoam eggs. i mean, honestly. eggs in styrofoam? to save a tenth a cent per package? what planet does this asshole farmer live on? if you're reasonable about your shopping, this should really cut you down to organic material and plastic wrappers.

b) compost. now, listen: i agree that having compost in your house is fucking revolting. why not just go and buy some roaches at the store and let them loose? yuck. but, that's *actually* kind of how i arrived at this approach, in a round about way. see, i was a little unhappy about leaving coffee grinds and pineapple cores and other bits of organic material under the sink, so i started freezing them. after a while, i had a large pile of frozen organic material. and, why throw that in the garbage? so, i found somebody to give it to that runs a community garden. that actually solves two problems: it *stops* the shit from rotting in your kitchen and it recycles the organic material. perfect.

b.5) don't eat a lot of meat.

c) there's still wrappers. i can't recycle them here, but i'm going to see how much of it i can get rid of like this:
http://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/cheese-packaging-brigade-r.html

i think that could very well get me as close to zero waste as is possible. what's left is dust and hair. and i'm not letting anybody compost my hair, it could mess up your human dna....

Z12IT
how many bottles of Wodka do this bandits drink every day?

Victor Podolsky
Hmm.. probably 1/2 of  the Vodka-per-day dosage? Just to make sure I got you right Wodka = 2*Vodka ?  

deathtokoalas
wodka is the west slavic term for vodka.

rap news 24

deathtokoalas
it's actually not apartheid, which most people don't understand the meaning of. the west has chosen to use the term apartheid due to positive association with the so-called victory in south africa (which has not really ended racial separation there at all, it's just created a small black upper class) and due to concerns about the possible offensiveness of accusing an israeli state of genocide. but, if it were apartheid then the goal would be to convert gaza and the west bank into factories to produce goods for israelis, which sadly was actually proposed by the americans recently as part of a "peace plan" to "improve the palestinian economy" but was rejected outright by the israelis, who want to ethnically cleanse the area. the proper terminology for this is not apartheid but genocide.

...and this marketing strategy to make bds and other actions seem less "anti-semitic" has unfortunately failed. i think it's time to backtrack and be more graphic about the truth of the matter.

stop calling it apartheid. start calling it the genocide that it is.

archi2a
So every company that has factories abroad is evil? Or does that only apply to the ones owned by jews?

deathtokoalas
that depends on whether you've stopped beating your wife or not. have you, archi2a?

it's capitalism itself that is "evil" due to the reduction of human labour to a commodity. whether the model is being applied to asian workers being beaten to make electronics for westerners or palestinians forced into wage slavery for israeli luxuries, we're talking about the same fundamentally horrific situation.

however, that's not what is happening. the israelis do not want the palestinians as slaves. they simply want them removed from the planet. this is not apartheid; it's genocide.

fwiw, i don't have enough faith in markets to think that bds has the potential to be successful. nor does the israeli government seem to take it seriously. netanyahu is just using it as a prop to raise campaign funds. but that's not particularly relevant to pointing out the nature of the situation on the ground, how the apartheid designation is drawing attention away from the genocide that is continuing and drastic steps that ought to be taken to counter it.

archi2a
If the Israelis want the Palestinians "removed from the planet", why does Israel supply electricity, and medical aid to the Gaza strip? Why does it allow palestinians to be treated in israeli hospitals?  If there's a "genocide", where are the piles of corpses of Palestinian civilians(that's what happens in a real genocide). Why does the Palestinian population have one of the highest ratio of growth if they're being mass murdered?

deathtokoalas
your questions are talking points - propagandistic in nature - and not worth answering directly. further, you probably work for somebody that is paying you to post this and i probably don't have a legitimate chance of convincing you, because you're not actually thinking about the things that you're posting. however, for the benefit of other people reading this, i'll talk around your talking points.

israel can't simply snap a finger and be done with the palestinians in a moment. if it was that simple, they indeed would have done so. there are some boundaries that they have to adhere to so as to maintain a working relationship with their allies, which include arab governments in the region who are concerned about how continued israeli colonization of the region may destabilize their own governments. so, it has to carry out a long and slow process of colonization and replacement. the current stage of this long term process is related to eliminating the possibility of a future palestinian state. that is a type of genocide. if you look up what the word means, you'll see that. but, you're not interested in doing this, you're just pushing nationalist propaganda.

archi2a
I stated facts, go ahead and check them for yourself, or come visit Israel or Gaza and see for yourself, I've got nothing to hide. 2) I can actually get paid for exposing biased BS about Israel? Who should I sign with?

deathtokoalas
i doubt i'd be allowed into the highly contained open-air prison that is gaza. from the israeli perspective, this is an effective way to contain the palestinian population in the short run. it's admittedly not entirely clear what the long term plan regarding gaza is, but the foreseeable future is for israel to continue to run it as a prison.

archi2a
Gaza is not controlled by Israel. There are no israeli soldiers there. And anyone can come and go through the security checkpoints. Furthermore, Gaza also has border with Egypt, which is too in a war against Hamas and also strictly controlls its border to prevent weapon smuggling.

deathtokoalas
see, this is so outlandishly absurd that it's more worthy of laughter than any kind of response.

as rap news once said, many years ago,

"people, please, research the truth. nowadays, it isn't hard to do."

archi2a
What is absurd? The fact that Gaza has a border with Egypt? Check a map for G-d's sake. That's exactly what I'm telling you, research the truth. I've only stated facts, which you can verify yourself. Or, as I said, come visit, see for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

deathtokoalas
mmmhmmm. like the fact that gaza is no longer under israeli occupation?

archi2a
Exactly. Do you have any picture of Israeli soldiers stationed in Gaza after the disengagement in 2005?

deathtokoalas
these lines in the sand are based around these arbitrary technicalities, like kids playing dungeons and dragons. as though moving a few feet past some arbitrary border has any meaning to anybody except professional propagandists. and this is something israel has utilized quite loudly: move the soldiers back ten feet, then claim you've withdrawn. the united nations isn't buying it. independent media observers aren't buying it. really, nobody is buying it at all.

you're lucky i've got a headache and am hungry, because i want to be recording guitar tracks right now, but am waiting until midnight for a check to clear to get something delicious to put on my spaghetti...

i've got some pictures of some people being prevented from delivering food & medical supplies. that almost seems like a blockade of some sort. and when you can blockade somebody from all angles that's the same as occupying them.

but, wait, let me guess - that was unnecessary because israel runs a generous welfare stare that provides them with everything they could possibly need. that was a previously stated fact. so, they must have been smuggling in weapons. qed. those terrorists!

archi2a
Yes, of course there's a blockade by sea, to prevent Hamas smuggling weapons from it's main backer: Iran. Anyone who wishes to donate to Gaza can do so through the Red Cross, Israel, or Egypt, but not by sea. And like I said, Egypt controlls its own border with Gaza in the same way.

You can answer when you think more clearly, if you wish.

deathtokoalas
i see. so, gaza is not occupied by israel, israel just controls all movement in and out of the area through direct military force, by means of it's own interests in the region. got it. the difference is absolutely meaningful and abundantly clear.

archi2a
Yes, both Israel and Egypt. And if Hamas didn't rocket israeli population, this blockade wouldn't be necessary. In fact, if there hadn't been for the constant suicide bombing in bars and buses, there would be no security fence either (at least not in the Israeli border).

deathtokoalas
mmmhmmm. so, you would embrace the right of return, then, if the palestinians would only denounce violent tactics?

archi2a
I would embrace a Palestinian state coexisting in peace with the State of Israel.

deathtokoalas
indeed. it's easy to state that once you've built security fences around the area. separate and unequal. but, does that mean you would support an immediate moratorium on settlements in the west bank, to ensure that this theoretical state can exist somewhere in the physical world? do you realize that existing government policy is to eliminate the possibility for such a state in the west bank by cutting into the area piece by piece?

also, supposing that the state of israel continues to refuse to accept the palestinian right of return, how do you propose that palestinian families regain the land that was stolen from them besides using force?

ffs....

http://www.cnet.com/news/bitcoin-mining-malware-reportedly-discovered-at-google-play/

now, every cpu is a possible drone to generate currency from. not only do we have people wasting resources on nothing of any value, we have computers doing the same thing.

i'm not really surprised, although i'll say that i looked at this as a harmless ponzi scheme up to this point, rather than anything legitimately threatening to the real economy. this is providing for a different perspective...

could we just get the point that the problem is exchange value itself and abolish currency already?

a: i think there's this huge problem in the world.
b: really? what's that?
a: well, money is just made out of thin air, like it's some kind of meaningless abstraction, or something.
b: isn't it a meaningless abstraction, though?
a: never mind that.

b: well, what's your solution?
a: i think we should make money out of processor cycles.
b: isn't that out of thin air?
a: never mind that.

a: when it's just made out of thin air like this, it lets banks create these imaginary bubbles that they can get rich off of.
b: but aren't they going to do the equivalent thing, regardless?
a: what do you mean? what is equivalent to making pretend money, stealing it and then charging for it?
b: well, isn't that just a function of their unlimited power? if you were to modify the system and leave them with comparative levels of power, wouldn't they figure something else out? isn't the problem the lack of accountability, rather than the (more or less entirely arbitrary) way the money is created?
a: you surely don't suggest that we should regulate bankers, do you? what are you, some kind of commie nazi globalist fascist?
b: do you even realize that you're completely contradicting yourself?
a: never mind that.

b: have you considered just abolishing money?
a: pft. how do you suppose i exploit people without currency? dumb communists...

there's a couple of interesting points here. it's an intriguing watch, for al jazeera's troll if nothing else. free speech doesn't mean giving equal time to idiots. that's cnn logic.

the hybrid citizen thing is something i've been pushing for a long time with almost nothing but grief from the left, which i've found downright depressing. the identity politics (using vacuous buzz words like "intersectionality" to try and gloss over it's reactionary character) on the left has gotten to the point that it's as bad as the prejudice on the right, with the difference that it seems to represent right-leaning elements from minorities. i think this is an interesting point that has not received enough attention.

one of the prime examples of this is the current president, who speaks more glowingly of reagan than of roosevelt. my memory is failing me - i can't remember if it was obama or somebody else that came right out and stated "i would have rather joined the republican party, but the primaries were full of racists, so the only way i could make a difference was by joining the democratic party". if it wasn't obama, a prominent black leader has stated this. that's not to conflate the left with the democrats; the few people that are reading this semi-regularly know enough not to put that blurred vision in my eyes. nor is to suggest that all black leaders are secretly conservatives, which is equally outlandish. yet, something similar to this seems to be common place. the right simply doesn't accommodate, listen to or take anybody seriously unless they're rich first and white second. that pushes the entire spectrum into would-be leftist movements and has the effect of co-opting them. the result is that you end up with people that would be on the right of the politics of their previous culture speaking their voice within leftist currents in western culture. worse, modern leftist ideology denies any kind of debate on the perspective presented as a type of colonialism. islam, specifically, consequently becomes defined *within the left* by it's rightist and religious tendencies, because they are more numerous and more vocal; marx and bakunin and the rest (who, it must be stated clearly, were all openly racist against everybody) are put aside to provide for first-person perspectives, which itself implicitly enforces the narrative of an "alien viewpoint".

that's as much of a problem as white supremacism is, especially in the context of so many white people not having any kind of real ethnic identity. i'm italian, but the only italian traditions i have are enjoying pizza and spaghetti, neither of which are prepared in ways that are particularly italian, or are ghettoized to italian characteristics at this point. i'm irish, but don't have any irish traditions at all. i'm french, and grew up a few kilometres away from a french speaking area, but don't speak french very well. my culture is described more by weird americanisms like sesame street, the smurfs, michael stipe, jello biafra and cereal for lunch (and eggs for supper). michael jackson told me it didn't matter if i was black or white, and i believed him, because i didn't really understand what the difference was in the first place. growing up, listening to backwards sitars was no stranger than church organs (and perhaps a little less strange, 'cause i understood george harrison better than i understood church hymns). materialism was ubiquitous and normal; christianity was the other. you get the point. i'm white, but i don't understand or connect with white culture, and i'm very much the norm. but, that's a good thing. yet, i get accused by cultural conservatives masquerading on the left (when they ought to be on the right, and would be if the right wasn't blatantly racist) as being some kind of fascist when i point this out, when it's really very much the desired end point of pretty much all leftist thought. there's no room on the left for cultural nationalism. it really can't be synthesized with the abolition of the nation state; it's just antithetical, with no possible compromise hidden away.

so, this idea of hybridizing is the future we really need to be embracing, and we're going to run into opposition from nationalists on both sides, whether these are miscategorizations or not. that doesn't reject the idea of local governance, mind you. it just rejects attaching it to an ethnic character. we've learned that there's no such thing as race, but i don't think people are aware of just how much gene flow exists. this idea of looking at each other as hybrids isn't some empty conceptualization that we need to get abstractly, it's an empirical fact. "i am an arab" or "i am russian", or "i am dutch", are statements that are void of any meaning. but that's not so easy to get across to people that have had their identity programmed into them by the nation-state since their birth.

the other thing i wanted to point out is that i was surprised that the explanation by the young female prof snuck in. the hosts were trying to ignore her. she was spouting bland academic jargon, or some other populist nonsense. but, then it came up, and i smiled. i just want to clarify this further.

racism = unemployment = capitalism.

those equalities are each a little tentative. there's some conditions required. i'm oversimplifying. but it's very accurate.

what that means is that taking this idea of nationalism away from the state is also taking away their time-tested approach of reflecting criticism during economic downperiods, which means unemployment crises in the modern period. bluntly, this is going to get much worse before it gets better, whether any of it makes any sense or not.

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (orchestral fade out)

mixes 2-5 have been replaced. mix 6 has been retained to represent the "original track", as it is the closest of the mixes to what i was hearing as i was scoring it. but to keep with my posting format, i need to record today as the day that a new mix, mix 7, was rendered.

mix one, that is the fully modern vst mix, should be up very shortly. i'm toying with upping mixes that contain no guitars and/or mixes that contain only guitars. conversely, i may just upload the cpr file as a part of the download so people can play with it. customizable sound founts may even be the future of music, or some other meaningless vague projection that probably isn't true because people couldn't seriously be bothered.

this is just played through the orchestral preset of bandstand, with the caveat that the drivers are very poor (forcing the machine to miss things faster than an 1/8th note). the bass part was definitely written for electric bass, but it sounds neat through an orchestral haze, doesn't it?

written in early 2001. rendered and modified on apr 27, 2014.

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (directmusic mix)

played through winamp on a sb live! through directmusic and captured in a sound editor.

written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014. re-rendered due to shift in instrumentation on apr 27, 2014.

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (bandstand mix)

i downloaded bandstand for the drums because the way i wrote the track required something that would read general midi through channel 10 and this isn't really how cubase normally works. bandstand is basically a way to play old midi files through vst by emulating a wavetable card in software, so this qualifies as a different card mix.

written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014. re-rendered due to shift in instrumentation on apr 27, 2014.

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (m-audio mix)

played through winamp on an m-audio delta and captured in a sound editor.

written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014. re-rendered due to shift in instrumentation on apr 27, 2014.

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (soundblaster mix)

those numbers can get confusing as they change to accommodate new ups. i often number them myself, but i'm not totally sure how many mixes this is going to have, yet. i suppose i'll have to stop at 74 minutes.

this is an update of the primitive card mix to include the new wind section instead of the arpeggiated guitars. they're all updated now except the vst mix, which i'm going to need to do something about the drums as well, on second thought....

there may be a few more, but, as i just said, i don't know the sequence.

when i do, i'll number. and they'll post through rss....

written late 2000 & early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014. re-rendered due to shift in instrumentation on apr 27, 2014.



there may be a few more, but, as i just said, i don't know the sequence.

when i do, i'll number. and they'll post through rss....

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (original mix)

played through winamp on a sb live! and captured in a sound editor. this is what the track sounded like on playback as i was composing it. note that the background guitar parts have not yet been converted to wind instruments.

written in early 2001. rendered feb 11, 2014 from the unmodified original midi track. defined as "original" on april 27, 2014.

we're entering an era where remarkably fast computers are basically worthless. there's capitalism going and making no sense again. the kind of stuff you could pick up on the curb (awaiting garbage pickup) could run a space station as a screensaver, but it's last year's model so who wants it?

somebody does.

how much is a brand new ibm with a dual core processor, 200 gb of space and 4 gb of ram worth to you? this is pushing the brink of 32-bit technology. couldn't upgrade it further, without jumping to 64.

how about $50? well, it's only 32 bits, after all! that's soooooo 2000s.......

you'll see 'em on the curb if you look for 'em, no doubt. along with perfectly working televisions that have gone out of fashion due to some kind of geometric obsolescence.

what i'm getting at, though, is that there's a real social revolution underlying this, as the technology works it's way out and into the hands of creative people that can do something unusual and perhaps unexpected with it.

wait for it.

on third thought, it's noticeably slower, and the time presented is varying wildly. my previous stable image didn't do that - it calculated it properly and just ticked down. but, vista/7 does do that. to the world's annoyance. so, i'm on the other side of some updated dll that i'd rather not be on, but the slow down is only roughly 30% (only 30%, lol, but you only notice it for big transfers), so i'm not willing to go through the headache of rolling back.

if it presents something more bothersome, sure. right now, i want to get back to recording.

shit is otherwise up, tested and working. i don't know how long this is going to take, but i'm glad to get back to actually laying down some tracks. it was ridiculous that the machine imploded the day before i was going to start actually doing some fresh recording (rather than sorting through and cleaning up old stuff).

but, i'm here. let's hope the floor doesn't cave in or something.

aaaaactually...

i was copying files as i was running my script, and it was horrific. chipset drivers were updated, but i hadn't yet ripped out 80% of the system. which is what my install script does. no exaggeration.

now that i have, copy is back to normal. what took me an hour a few minutes ago now takes 3 minutes.

this indicates to me that it's probably related to one of the many (almost all) windows services that i've actually deleted. i didn't say disable, i said delete.

it's still awful, however you look at it. there's clearly something in the os that is slowing down basic functions to absurd levels. as i pointed out in the other post, this is a widespread annoyance.

it indicates why i run my script, though

a little research seems to pinpoint the problem to a set of updates in about mid 2011, if people are curious.the way this seems to work, though, is something like this:

1) microsoft breaks something.
2) hardware companies refuse to learn how to change their drivers to fix it.
3) people get frustrated and buy new hardware that plows over what ms broke with increased speed/power.
4) profit.

the result is that increases in hardware performance are merely being used to correct windows, which gets more and more broken with each release cycle. we're constantly forced to upgrade to maintain stasis. it's like they've found a way to mimic inflationary monetary policy. let's just be happy those fucking cloud computers never caught on, or we'd be really fucked.

for now, quick fix is to put yourself behind a good router, lock your OS down the smart/hard way, don't have browsing habits that are comparable to your clueless grandmother (NO IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO RUN CUTECATS.EXE), never ever launch internet explorer (i've taken the approach of actually deleting the IE dlls altogether, which is technically illegal, but whatever) and stop updating windows...

or install linux. if you don't have expensive music hardware without linux drivers.

AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

as a part of recovering from this mess (mechanical hard drive failure, followed by bad bios flash - fixed the bios, but the hard drive was not salvageable), i slipstreamed up to the latest xp updates. now, i'd normally do this by testing first, but the drive was wiped so that step got skipped.

one of the reasons i stick with xp (and will continue to more or less indefinitely) is that hard drive operations on my hardware are very slow with newer versions of windows due to a driver signing conflict that reduces to the computer industry being inept and incompetent, which is the result of capitalism. root of all problems. i ranted about this a few weeks ago.

but, what am i getting after the updates? the same fucking thing as i'd get with windows 7 or vista. it's taking an hour to copy a gb of data to an external drive, because of a bunch of stupid security bullshit. supposedly, anyways. as mentioned before, i think microsoft is just trying to coerce me to buy new hardware. it's preposterously corrupt, really.

of course, i'm not actually going to buy new hardware, i'm going to uninstall the "security updates". but because i'm slipstreaming, this is a time consuming pain in the ass.

i'm going to have to test it first before i go through the process. the thing i need to determine is if the security bullshit is getting in the way of multitasking or not. i can deal with slow copy operations for now. but i can't deal with broken multitasking...

.....running and tested....

i'm back in business.

i had to spend the last few days waiting for files to copy around all over the place. but i've now got everything filed and cleaned and reconstructed and recompiled and backed up and reburned and am just about to reinstall windows, which should launch the install script. i expect some minor issues to appear, but i also expect to actually get some tracks down within a day or two.

here i go...

i've got some old things that got lost in my watch list. i guess the nature of this page is very different now, but i warned of this and am happy about the change. i like to watch the news when i'm eating. otherwise, i have better things to do. that wasn't previously true, but it is now...

this is all very true and everything, but iranian sovereignty is not merely under attack from the west. i suppose the recent events in ukraine have magnified this, but it's not something recent.

iran was an important part of the great game. the anglo-sovet invasion of iran (which wasn't solely about german influence) is a largely forgotten part of the second world war. bluntly put, the russians and anglos have been fighting over the country for centuries. it's really remarkable how many global conflicts ought to be understood in these terms, isn't it? yet, this narrative is almost entirely lost in the west.

it's true that american pressure has and will continue to draw iran closer to russia and china (there's been an acceleration of russian policy on the issue over the last few months), but it is only at iran's peril of becoming a satellite to an alliance that it does not share basic values with. iran doesn't want this at all.

hence, it's attempt to come out to the americans with smiling faces.

i don't have any criticism of the topics discussed in the interview. i think it's all very true. but you have to get this in context of a struggle for influence in iran that iran has agency over, rather than a hostile takeover without outside parties (excluding israel and the saudis).

but, when you take out the other explanations about military opposition and what not, there is a very simple reason that the military option is off the table in iran: they are a russian ally.

i just came across an economics textbook written by ronald macdonald.

now, it's from the 70s. the poor bastard's parents had no idea what they were inflicting upon their helpless son. that's a "if you could go back in time, would you" worthy dilemma. legitimately.

yet, could you imagine now....? do you think there's even one kid with this name? well, one that doesn't have abusive parents....?

i almost certainly hate you, and i definitely don't want to be your friend.

deathtokoalas
sort of head-scratching. there will always be morons, but the russians can't honestly be so cynical that they think westerners will take their propaganda in uncritically or otherwise entirely ignore western media. conversely, he's actually been doing a good job of softening the western rhetoric. if i was the kremlin, i'd let him be. he's actually giving them quite a bit of credibility.

there's three caveats to this.

1) an escalation is being planned, and they want him out of the region before it happens.
2) there's some thought that they may be able to convince him to change sides, as well.
3) things aren't quite as they seem.

i couldn't imagine his life is in danger.

specifically, i think it's important for the russians to realize that nobody with critical thinking skills is going to be surprised by any kind of smoking gun regarding russian troops in the region. it is blatantly obvious that there are special forces operating in the region. no amount of propaganda is going to reverse this obvious truth. nor were these images necessary to demonstrate as much. you're not hiding anything. we already know.

nor would confirmation of such an obvious truth change anybody's opinion on the situation, if our opinion is meaningful in the first place. nobody in the west sees russia as an uncorrupted good guy. at best, russia is a lesser evil with a huge array of substantial corruption problems.

westerners that will intellectually argue in favour of russia's position will rarely be taking an actively pro-russian position, and more often taking an actively anti-american position. the propaganda has some value in seeding that resentment. yet, conflating that with legitimately pro-russian opinions is a gigantic error.

there's consequently really nothing to lose by letting the footage out, and much to lose by holding the journalist.

George
Are you calling Vice a pro-Russian propaganda? That's just..funny.

deathtokoalas
no, that's not what i'm suggesting.

i am, however, suggesting that perhaps what vice was looking for was not a proper reflection of what was occurring on the ground, and that the act of merely sending back images of what was actually happening was helping to counteract the narrative from washington. he may have been sent as a pro-american propagandist, but he wasn't able to find evidence to back up that perspective; instead, he often sent back evidence that countered it.

it may not have upheld the russian narrative, either. but that's a non-starter to begin with.

i mean, he was sent to send back images of russian troops invading the region and terrorizing the population. instead, we're getting pictures of ukrainian soldiers being disarmed by civilians. he can try and talk around that, but it's precisely the opposite of what he was sent there to send back.\

that being said, i must once again point out that it is blatantly obvious that russian forces are orchestrating the situation, and evidence demonstrating it (if it does exist, and he has captured some of it) would be akin to evidence demonstrating that water is wet. the idea that a substantial number of ukrainians would spontaneously organize to join russia out of fear of ukrainian nazis is itself rather comical.

i point this out in relation to american propaganda all the time: if you want people to believe it, make it credible. these cartoon narratives don't really sway people, they just foster cynicism.

rr0b0
wow finally there's someone with a weighted opinion here

holyteejful
I agree with your opinion that he is actually really unbiased and has just been digging for the truth. Sad that the Russians see him as interfering, clearly not provoking anything, just asking questions-- being a reporter and all; you're right when you say that he has actually been way more lenient towards Russia than, say, FOX news LOL...  I sincerely hope he is not in any danger, they are probably just trying to intimidate him and throw some false agendas at him to mislead him.

deathtokoalas
i'm not suggesting he showed up without a bias, but his perception does seem to have softened over time as the evidence unraveled in front of him. he may not have been able to confirm his bias. importantly, he doesn't seem to have allowed his bias to prevent him from sending back images that contradicted it. evidence-based reasoning is hard to find in the modern press.

...and that might have actually pissed his boss off.

holyteejful
After watching all the "dispatches" evidence does point to heavy "covert" Russian operations and that the surges of violence is propagated by extremists on both sides of the political spectrum ... That makes it so much easier for undercover "Spetznaz" (call them what you will)to do their job; I almost guarantee they pose as regular people, Ukrainian soldiers AND "regular" Russian troops as well. Nothing he has reported has really contradicted the rhetoric being spewed by Washington, although I am not much of an avid listener to the mainstream media myself.. He is probably one of the few reporters from the USA who speaks Slavic, so Vice sent him over there (or he volunteered). I personally think that he has been doing a good job. I have watched several other Vice reports and his boss, Shane Smith, seems like a fairly overall truly liberal guy with a sense of ethics that wouldn't allow strong bias on the part of being Pro-American everything. I mean, most mainstream media has almost nothing negative to say about Israel, but Vice has a report from the Palestinian perspective that is almost anti-Israel. I always love to hear both sides of every story to get the full context; I feel it is very important for making informed decisions in future conversations and possibly for elections.... also not sure if anyone knows, but Simon, the reporter,was released from detention in Slovyansk today after being held for a couple of days.

deathtokoalas
i guess you're not aware that the funding for vice's recent delve into news reporting has been coming from no less a source than rupert murdoch, himself.

===

nice to hear he's safe.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/int-hist.htm

it's funny.

i've basically arrived where i have in life by convincing myself of the single axiom that existence is meaningless, and this makes conventionally interacting in society entirely worthless. centring your life around anything related to property, status or wealth is just throwing your life away to utilitarian/capitalist excesses. yet, even this is not rational: if the aim is maximizing pleasure in the short amount of time we have to do it, doing loads of drugs makes more sense than working in an office. rejecting hedonistic capitalism within the context of this futility of breathing leaves only the individual's whimsical fancies as remotely meaningful goals (i skipped some steps there). art for art's sake (or knowledge for knowledge's sake) is consequently the only worthwhile pursuit (any other existence would and should rationally end up with a quick suicide, as it would be the fastest way to lessen the amount of existential torture brought on equally by slavery and boredom), and capitalist society is merely an obstacle to avoid.

if mortality could be abolished (and i'm ok with existing in software), the entire calculus would change. this ought to present the individual with a hobson's choice to pursue immortality at all costs, as the worst thing that could happen would be to die trying to abolish death. unless failure is certain, of course, in which case why waste the time? unfortunately, i'm convinced that this isn't feasible in my lifetime. death remains the only concrete reality worth planning around.

so, faced with the certainty of all of this meaningless, the only thing that can actually motivate me to get out of bed and pursue these goals is the certainty that i have a finite amount of time to complete them in, bringing me back around again to where i began.

"yeah, well, i'm 30% of the way into paying off a high interest loan to get a piece of paper to allow me to pay property taxes, and that requires me to spend 75% of my time living for somebody else (and maybe more if i'm married). so, you lose at life."

it's actually not so bad for me if people actually continue to think that. i mean, there's two ways forward from where we are: full communism or state-driven social darwinism (popularly, if somewhat incorrectly, referred to as 'fascism'). we've been leaning towards the latter for decades. and, if that's the unalterable future, i can't benefit from winning the argument.

i can snicker about it on my facebook page, though.

to put it into a little bit of perspective, this rightward shift of our so-called socialist party has a lot to do with the establishment perception of our centrist liberal party, which (despite being moribund for ten years, despite a recent, and perhaps illusory, resurgence under the son of a former leader who was in fact not as electorally successful as some suggest) is still largely perceived of as our "natural governing party". even with the shift in direction the government has taken, there's still this broad feeling that we're living in an anomaly and the liberals will be in power for 70 or 80 of the remaining years of the century. once they get in (and they may win next year), they tend to stay in power for upwards of twenty years at a time.

this extreme insider perception of the liberal party (which, despite staying closer to the ideological goals of liberalism than american liberal parties have, is largely true) has made them less competitive through much of the working class. this opens up a lot of three way races in working class areas, and often pits the socialists directly against the conservatives. now, a lot of these areas are specifically auto union areas, where wages are high enough that we're not talking lowest tax bracket. we're talking union areas where average wages are more than one jump up. so, the socialist party actually has to float these policies to keep union members from jumping to the conservative party, which may in fact more accurately reflect their class interests. this has left people in the lower end of the wage spectrum without political representation, but it's been a slow process of awakening to this.

the debate has sort of trickled down, too. it has a little bit to do with lingering resentment about an introduced consumption tax called the gst. now, that was a long time ago, but it's still just massively loathed. this works in two ways. first, the conservative party did decrease this by 2%. it may not have actually saved anybody any money in a measurable sense, but it's a symbolic thing; correctly or not, there's a perception in the working class that tax cuts are things they benefit from, because of that association with the gst cut. but it's a half-right sort of thing. consumption taxes are regressive. there was a big debate ten years ago about it; the liberals and ndp wanted to cut income taxes instead. this was in the context of giant surpluses (themselves stolen from ei premiums) that have since disappeared...due largely to cuts in corporate taxes.

but the take-away is that the process that goes through the heads of the lower wage people is taxes=gst=bad. tax cuts = no gst = good. breaking through that might actually be impossible. it might be an irreversible shift in canadian politics.

what i wanted to point out though is what i thought leo was going to talk about, which is that the ndp are actually in favour of pipelines so long as the oil is refined in canada, so as to create refinery jobs in canada. that is, so as to increase union membership. this is something else that is confusing canadians, but the policy has been very clearly stated: the ndp considers jobs more important than the environment. which is again just like the conservatives....

d scoleri
This is pure bullshit..I had a couple of classes with Leo at York..He is a Marxist and views everything through that lens! Cannot believe anything he says!!

(deleted)

d scoleri
You actually need me to define it for you? Easy, Marxism is a failed  system of governmental control over the entire economy... with no private property rights. Essentially, it's a world run by bureaucrats. The only ones to prosper in this type of  economy are bureaucrats and the so called intellectuals (such as Leo Panitch)  they use  to try and justify their existence. How about some examples?  Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam,  China can be viewed as somewhat Marxist but luckily for them, they realized the fallacies of the system and have turned more and more to capitalism.

CryptedSky
No. Marxism is not a system of governance, it's a swooping ideology through which you can analyse and comprehend the events driving history and the economy forward. An analysis of a certain situation is Marxist when it defines a class structure and describes conflicts happening in a society as part of a far-reaching struggle between these classes. Classical marxism explains the conflicts found in a society as reflections of the meta-struggle between the poor disowned working class (proletariat) and the rich proprietor class (the bourgeoisie). Further marxist analysis reveals that the middle class is the buffer class emerging out of the inevitable victories of the working class and that if this middle class erodes, violent social conflict is sure to reemerge. TBH, it's a very matter-of-fact uncontroversial notion that even heterodox capitalists have embraced.

Some scholars and political thinkers have pushed this type of reflection even further during the last decades of the cold war as it was becoming clear that the cold war was turning out, in practice, to be a tacit contract between the USA and the USSR to allow them to colonise the third world without even a slap on the wrist (see Noam Chomsky). The most notable is probably Immanuel Wallerstein's description of what he calls the World-System Theory which describes globalisation's end game through a marxist viewpoint in which the proverbial «west» is the metropolis for the benefit of which the periphery is robbed of it's ressources and labor and given hope by the implementation of a «semi-periphery» which is semi-rich and acts as an economic buffer zone between the extreme wealth of the «core» and the extreme poverty of the «periphery». It's an amazing analysis.

Tl;dr, Marxism is not a system of governance, it's an intellectual instrument of social-political and economic analysis.

Wether marx himself was a communist or not is irrelevant to his work as a philosopher.

deathtokoalas
it's been my experience that academic marxists are generally more interested in his philosophical arguments, which have little application to reality, and are even generally hostile to the basic socialist premise of workers owning their own means of production because they view them as too incompetent to manage it. i don't want to paint a wide brush on either of these commentators, but the reality is that most "academic marxists" are really just liberals, and often not even particularly radical ones.

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deathtokoalas
they'll often use marx to analyze capitalism, but in the end present some kind of keynesianism or heavily watered down lassallianism as an alternative. marx would rip most of them apart as bourgeois fakers.

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deathtokoalas
well, yeah, that's just it. it's the hegelianism that these academics are really on about, not anything about social revolution. it's a little annoying that they call it "scientific socialism" when hegelianism is inherently anti-scientific, but that's just where the problems start. it's a lot of teleological nonsense, really. in the worst cases, they'll take the ideas to these scary extremes that suggest that freedom is really just an illusion, so the key to a happy working class is tricking them into thinking they're happy. that may in some sense come from marxist thinking, but it kills the spirit of marxism - which is meant to be a way to salvage self-ownership in an era of socialized economics. that's not a desire for a system of collectivization, it's a reaction to the technological innovations that have asserted it as an unpreventable necessity. even today, socialized production is the norm from the auto plants of detroit to the clothing factories of bangladesh. so, how do we reassert the free, liberal individual in such an economy?

then, when you read some, like, foucault, where he's talking about the state enforcing hegemonic norms through social ostracism...where's the individualism in that....

it misses the point.

proudhon wasn't really a disciple of marx, he was more of a competitor to him. marx wrote some scathing criticisms of his influence on the paris commune revolts (specifically, he blamed the failure of the revolt on the proudhonists refusal to seize the banks, because they were opposed to centralized banking. this allowed the state to raise the funds necessary to retake the city.). personally, i'd categorize proudhon as a liberal (and what you're calling libertarianism to be indistinguishable from classical liberalism) rather than a socialist, although his idea was to combine the two things. if this is your position, you probably don't have any significant disagreements with the bulk of these so-called marxist profs. it's probably all minor disagreements about which order things should occur in. it's just a matter of getting underneath the rhetoric and getting them to admit that they basically just want better laws to redistribute wealth more fairly and stop bankers from being so corrupt.

i sit more on the bakunin-kropotkin-malatesta strain of anarchist communism, which is both a legitimately revolutionary perspective and puts me in a lot of opposition to marxism (which i consider to be an authoritarian, statist form of governance). but, i do rely on some marxist analysis, where it's reasonable. and i realize there's a lot of hot air around who claims they're a marxist...

----

jabraun10
Does Canada have the ability to enact a vote of no confidence?

deathtokoalas
canada has a parliamentary democracy, which means that the prime minister is chosen by parliamentary vote rather than by direct plebiscite. it's less like a president and more like a speaker of the house. the parliament could theoretically elect anybody as prime minister, subject to very mild requirements of things like citizenship.

no confidence votes are generally considered to occur around money issues. the opposition could vote down the budget, for example. that would trigger an election.

currently, the conservative party has a majority of the seats in parliament. that is why they were able to elect the prime minister. it is also makes a vote of non-confidence virtually impossible.

so....sort of. it is a possibility that enough members of the sitting party could vote with the opposition to force an election. however, it is exceedingly implausible.

it should also be noted that canadian voters tend to cynically interpret such votes as opportunistic and politically driven. harper was recently declared in contempt of parliament, and yet managed to win a majority (up from a minority) shortly afterwards. conversely, the man that engineered the vote that declared him in contempt of parliament lost his seat.

canada suffers from tremendous vote splitting. until that is addressed, these sorts of tactics are more likely to backfire than succeed in removing harper from office.

it should also be pointed out that harper is actually a more moderate face fronting a group of radicals that would instantly do things like ban abortion and move back to "free market" health care if he wasn't stopping them (because he knows such reckless action would collapse a conservative movement that has recently been through collapse and reconstruction). replacing him with somebody else, like jason kinney for example, may actually lead to more radical policy. the less freaky possible replacements (such as john baird) have identity issues that are likely to explode on them should they take a serious run.

nor are the opposition parties much better at this point. the reality is that the chinese may actually prefer to see baby trudeau in office, because he could get away with burning down the entire rainforest - whereas harper needs to be more careful about what he does. kind of like how obama can get away with open drone strikes, where bush had to be more crafty about how he lied in public.

from western governments, criticisms about "freedom of the press" are almost always veiled attempts to restrict press freedom for sources they do not like, which is often community or government based media.

this idea of calling private media "free" is itself very much a type of newspeak. private media is not freer than community media in any way. it's often the other way around! what private media is is corporate media, and hence driven by profit. that doesn't make it less controlled; again, that can and often does imply greater control and more censorship.

who has a bigger reach in america: pbs or fox news? yet, in canada and britain it's more subtle. it's clearly more complex than whether it's owned by government or by cartels.

in the end, if you're a journalist on the front lines it doesn't matter if the ceo is threatening to fire you or if the government is threatening to silence you. it doesn't matter if you're reading a script by the ministry or the oil/weapons cartel.

so, freedom of the press is and always has meant freedom for corporations to suppress the press.

and it's always been up to people to organize around the press.

one gets the impression that it was meant to dock in sevastopol.

i watched the first half hour or so of this and was disappointed by how western putin came off.

first, he looked into the camera and flat out lied. very american behaviour. second, the entire thing is noticeably a pr stunt, with questions designed to produce populist responses.

not that this is new, or anything. the western narrative has always been hard to square with russian propaganda. sure, you had these shots floating around of putin wrestling bears and taming tigers, but what the western reports cut out is that the reason he was taking on these predators was to save some helpless kittens. it's not the kind of fascist machismo that arnold was preparing us with, it's strong-protect-the-weak type stuff; less terminator, more kindergarten cop.

but it's propaganda, nonetheless. there's really little use in watching it.

as for my shot of reality regarding the russians, it's not that i was naive about russian interests or accepted everything they took at face value. it's not hard to see what their actual interests are in syria, for example. however, i had interpreted them as being fundamentally disinterested in aggression, carrying out defensive strategies and ultimately in a position where pointing out america's bullshit around the world was actually a good preservation tactic. i've pointed out repeatedly on this page that russia has done everything it possibly can to not react to american provocations, but that ukraine is simply too close to moscow to not react. the important thing i'm trying to get across is that russia cannot merely react in a careful, controlled manner - the moment it reacts is the moment it shifts strategy from passive, defensive maneuvers designed to shift world opinion to aggressive, pre-emptive type action. it's still defensive, but it's taken up a notch from diplomacy to action. one could say it's moving from a war of words to a proxy war. it's still not a hot war.

...although few people seem to realize the extent of this defense shield, even pussy cat putin himself. the london-moscow conflict is not far from a mate, at this point. dangling nukes from a string over putin's head is the power necessary to facilitate an overthrow. gas prices? lol.

whether the russians get it or not, and i mean really get it (it's abundantly clear that they understand the threat abstractly), is still unclear to me. however, it's very clear to me that that pandora's box is now opened.

that means that we all need to be more critical about russian press, as well as russian-backed sources.

another actor that cannot merely carry on is assad. whether assad was actually, really a military dictator five years ago or not is an open question, although those informed would mostly lean towards not. he is now, and he has no option but to counterattack.

the future blowback that this administration is creating will haunt the world for decades to come.

script successfully reconstituted, precisely how i left it.

i need to double check a few things and do some more filing but i'll be back up tomorrow or the next day.

the point of a script rather than an image is that it's dynamic. burning a dozen discs would defeat the point. i'd might as well just ghost it if i'm going to do that.

but i'm going to have to start backing it up more regularly.

this interview is a work of surrealist art.

this is good, but i wish he would have said something about the continued existence of export-driven agri-economies. the standard and united fruits are not the force they once were, but it's that sort of thing that's still going on. he's talking about it like there is no industry, but there is in fact a significant one, it's just very much a plantation style export model. given everything he's saying about the oil, it's a really ridiculous set up. but venezuela has always been and remains a colonial state....

this works into the environmental aspect, in the sense that local production reduces the need for transport. it's maybe a difficult topic. but if the whole world "raises itself up" to the level where it looks at agricultural work as slavery then we're all going to starve to death. rather, we need to reclaim the honor inherent in feeding people. we need to decolonize together.

deathtokoalas
would you expect the army to take pleasure in massacring it's own civilians on the order of international bankers?

this is why they need foreign contractors. it's an age-old problem. the romans needed to do the same thing. put simply, it's not easy to convince people to murder members of their own community. soldiers tend not to like doing that...

i suppose if you were seeing images from hungary or tienanmen square, you'd be praising their discipline?

"the reason i signed up for the army was so i could massacre my fellow citizens because they rejected foreign-imposed austerity packages that will throw them into abject poverty."

J Gates
if I work in a bank, am I a banker?

deathtokoalas
what are you getting at?

J Gates
just trying to figure out what you define as a 'banker'

deathtokoalas
in context? imf. world bank. prominent shareholders. etc.

J Gates
i just work at a big bank

deathtokoalas
well, did you order the crackdown from your cubicle?

into your headset?

while your colleagues stared at you?

J Gates 
well no, but I do work in an international bank. Isn't that what 'international banker' implies?

deathtokoalas
well, it depends. i'm not talking about the janitor.

J Gates
I'm not the janitor

deathtokoalas
i legitimately don't think you are, but somehow my attempt to derisively make it clear that it is obvious that people that merely work for some international bank (perhaps as a teller) aren't responsible for violently pushing through imf reforms isn't getting through.

if you are actually a decision maker at the imf or world bank, and you are responsible for setting "market reform" policies, what are you trying to get across?

there may be some missing context necessary here.

- the imf is demanding austerity reforms.
- this is driving the instability, as it is elsewhere in europe.
- while that doesn't produce a banker sitting in brussels barking orders to the ukrainian military, the crackdown is a part of the process of pushing the reforms through.
- it follows that the military crackdown in the region is in order to ensure that austerity measures are put in place.

J Gates
wait, but ukraine isn't implementing any austerity, it borrows money from russia

deatrhtokoalas
for an international banker, you seem badly informed. ukraine is in the process of being put through the same shock treatment as greece, and the east is going to be badly affected by it because it has high unemployment and low wages.

that's not to suggest that the russians aren't organizing events on the ground, because they clearly are. but, these sorts of things can't be successful unless they're tapping into a level of existing resentment. one of the reasons russia seems more attractive than ukraine is that russia has a more generous social system - better welfare payments, better pensions, etc. if i was standing in donetsk, with absolutely no employment possibilities and a family to feed, i'd be far more attracted to the russian welfare state than the imf-driven ukrainian austerity packages, too.

which, incidentally, is why russia will not annex the region and will continue to push for an internal solution. that's not going to stop them from wasting resources and money on these covert operations, though.

they fell for it. they can't get out of it, now. this is going to be a headache for russia for the next decade.

J Gates
huh? greece went through the shock treatment from borrowing money from the EU. Ukraine is going through a political protest and divide. I think you're the badly informed one here buddy.

deathtokoalas
well, the precise problem in greece is that they can't deflate their currency because they gave away their monetary sovereignty. if they could just devalue, they'd mostly be out of the mess. but, instead, they've been forced to sell off their assets to foreign investors, cut pensions and whatnot.

i live in canada. we have a confederated system of provinces, where wealthy provinces send "equalization payments" to less wealthy ones. this could be roughly equivalent to the "bailout packages" if they were enforced on a regular basis, as they are here. it's a necessary consequence of a centralized currency across a country with vastly divergent economies. yet, that's not politically palatable in germany. and, in fact, it's very unpopular in some areas of canada (alberta, especially). we've developed a terminology of "have" and "have not" provinces. besides abandoning the euro, that's the only civilized way out of the mess in greece.

while ukraine is not dealing with the same problem of a lack of monetary sovereignty, the imf prescription is the same: privatize everything and sell most of it off to people outside of the country. but this itself is less of a kick in the gut than cuts to basic services, which are what is driving the protests in the east of the country.

the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. if they were at comparable strengths, it would be good news to find out they're killing each other, as it would weaken both of them - morally and functionally. in actuality, this kind of tactic is somewhere between "waste of time" and "worthy of a darwin award".

I FOUND MY SCRIPT

it was hiding in a virtual machine...

that makes life soooooooooo much easier....

it's even fairly recent. sept, 2013.

last place i looked...

well, i can't disprove the claim that it's nato missile testing...

comets aren't all that unusual. what's interesting to me is that rt decided to publicize it.

don't let those fucking hippies trick you with their crypto-conservative nostalgia for the "good old days" and "simpler times" of the 60s. their concept of history is highly selective. please seek the opinion of outside observers.

our culture has not declined since 1970; it was shit to begin with.

what's amazing is how little has changed.

nonononono, you don't get it....

bankers are not our enemies. big money loves you. it's china that is our enemy. it's a bait and switch.

so, stop hating on the banks and start hating on china, like you're supposed to.

hate. hate. hate. hate.