i'm pretty sure i've heard them rustling around where i can't see them. with all the cats and the skunks around, it seemed like a matter of time. but it took the snow to reveal them: very clear canid tracks coming up across the front lawn, right to the door and across the other way. right where the cat that's been following me around sits, actually. relatively large, at that - if these are coyote tracks, it's a big coyote. may be one of those coywolves...

i suspect that may be the last i'll see of that cat.

it's said they're around, and you'll rarely see them. they know they can't really take you down. but there's kids around here. and it's enough to be a little bit more cautious about going out at night.

i haven't set up my new blog yet, and i have my meeting on monday. this post will eventually self-destruct. but, for now i'm going to post on the results of my meeting in the comments of this post. i suppose if there's no posts here by tuesday, that's bad news.

existence (vst mix) (for thru)

this was a piece i wrote up in the fall of 2001. i can't remember exactly what the root of it was, but it had something to do with a voice-leading assignment for what was the equivalent of a course in music theory 101. the root of the piece may consequently come from what was presented to me. i can't recall exactly - but i believe the assignment was to build the different voices up.

my negative relationship with music theory is stated throughout this page and was well established well before the end of 2001. i had an interest in the music theory course for the purposes of deconstructing the theory - in the context of writing, specifically, and not performing. i actually have one of those classic stories - i failed this course. it is actually the only course i have ever legitimately received an F in. hey, if einstein can fail math, i can fail music theory.

the story actually revolves around sight-reading aspect of the course, and specifically it's vocal content. there were three aspects of the course (theory, vocal sight-reading and african drumming which i'm thinking was meant to be a rhythmic component but was really just a ridiculous waste of time). i really wish they would have let me sight read on a guitar, or even a piano, because i'm just simply not a talented singer; i've never had aspirations to become one, and i had a lot of problems controlling my vocals. even with that being said, the reality is that i had a very low level of _interest_ in this. i probably could have passed the course if i spent less time on abstract algebra and more time singing in the mirror, but i just couldn't be bothered...

i really disapprove of the way the course was designed. i was interested in learning about music theory, and needed the course as a pre-req for more advanced courses, which i never ended up taking. i still don't fully understand why i had to pass a singing exam to take further composition courses. the best answer i got was that the school didn't want graduates who couldn't pass a singing exam, but i was at no point enrolled in a b. music so it's a pretty weak response.

anyways, this was a voice-leading assignment that i perverted into something mildly atonal and then built up into something else. you can hear it if you listen, except that it's all "wrong". i'd have to sit down and analyze it to come to a more detailed exposition on it's "wrongness", and i'm not going to, but it's not hard to hear how "wrong" it is, either.

i was clearly listening to a lot of glass at the time, but this goes beyond his medievalism. i'm using so many "wrong" notes that it's ultimately just chromatic - although there's no tone rows or anything that's formally serialist about it. it's not meant to abolish the structure so much as it's meant to just flaunt the rules. that gives it an almost satanic feel, in the context of a vocal piece using "forbidden" intervals.

but, looking back, i think that what the piece really explores is existential anguish. i was in the second year of a math degree (after switching from physics after switching from software engineering) and really had little idea where i was going with it. i was considering switching into music and probably would have had i not failed the singing exam. the thing is i actually knew i was going to fail the course at that point, and was just feeling lost as a result of it. i ended up in math as this sort of default choice, vaguely thinking i might end up teaching somewhere but not having any real interest in it...

so much choice, so few options. i suppose that this is how i expressed what i was feeling about this reality at the time.

i can't remember the exact way this happened, but i believe the piece was initially written for voice (as a voice-leading assignment) and then expanded into further voices and then converted into a composition for nine instruments. i've picked halloween as the date, but that's symbolic - it was around then, anyway. it would have been around december that it was put aside, because i don't remember working on it after i moved.

this version was created in october, 2014 by mixing three separate vst mixes together: the choir mix, a string orchestra mix and an arranged mix.

written in the fall of 2001. rendered, remastered and remixed in late september and early october, 2014. this render is from october 3, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/existence-4

the walk (vst mix)

this was written as the introductory walk scene to the first rabit is wolf single; this vst version is exclusive to this collection..

written late 2001; re-rendered through vst on jan 10, 2015.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-walk-2

as much as vice and others want to put a happy spin on these guys, they sure seem like crazy terrorists to me. lipstick on a pig and whatnot.

wow. i've been calling myself an evangelical atheist for years, and thought it was a sort of a unique description. is mr. eno also an alphabetical egalitarianist and general grammar anti-authoritarian? you know what they say about great minds...

...and regarding u2 and christianity, bono's position has always been very skeptical of organized religion, despite wanting to connect to the moral underpinning. i'd interpret him as a secular humanist. i mean, it's kind of weak to suggest he needs to share philosophical positions with the artists he produces. but there's not much hypocrisy, if you really follow what bono was actually saying.

"i'd break bread and wine if there was a church i could receive in."

as for what's he's saying...i get his point..

but, if you legitimately reject the concept of faith, it's not really a debate of whether you should or shouldn't have control. i think this is kind of meta - he's discussing the question of whether we can choose to be in control, which necessitates us being in control in the first place.

and, ironically, if you really don't believe there's a power, that breaks down to really not being in control - you're at the whim of the universe. it's not just some kind of pantheism. it's the inevitable consequence of really seriously diving into atheism. atheism is not some randian thing about free will. in fact, it's christianity that gives us free will (calvinism aside, but calvinism is very weird in relation to most religions). atheism rejects that and replaces it with stochastic processes, randomness, chaos...

it's a better fix to add this to adblock:

youtube.com##div#theater-background.player-height

the intersection of two identical particles moving in completely opposite directions (vst mix) (for thru)

ok...

so, to understand this piece, it's necessary to go back to 1998.

i was working out primitive sequencer parts for the first inri demo and it just sort of crossed my mind that there was really nothing stopping me from composing symphonies except for a lot of music theory. well, if i could write electronic music without training, why couldn't i write symphonies without training? i mean, the score writing program exists in front of me. it was just a question of experimenting with it. i could do it myself...

...but i actually already had a pretty hefty disdain for music theory by the age of 17. i'd managed to come across a music history textbook that traced the deconstruction of western theory from beethoven through to schoenberg and this, combined with my experiences as a guitarist, was enough to prevent me from taking it seriously. the perception i had was of modern composers viewing music theory sort of like how biologists viewed creationism. i use that analogy fairly frequently. it just didn't strike me as relevant.

now, i've softened a bit over time to a view that music theory is best understood in terms of the underlying physics. this renders the theory useless, but upholds the basic relationships between tones as physical, mathematical realities. the thing is the next step of abstraction is understanding that these mathematical objects can be arranged and analyzed in any arbitrary way, and the conventional theory really *is* a fallacy akin to creationism. so, i still hold to the general thesis. this is actually the first serious example of me putting that disdain for the idea that music should have a theory into real action. i remain adamantly of the view that art is not a realm where theories should exist or be viewed with anything other than scorn. theories are rigid, formal things; art is informal, chaotic.

so, it's 1998. i have a scorewriter and a very basic soundcard and i want to bullshit a symphony out of it. i did this by composing a single brief melody by randomly mashing notes into a scorewriter. i then took that melody and pasted it over top of itself at differing speeds (64th, 32nd, 16th, 8th, quarter, half, whole notes). i then took that, cut it off near the end of the half notes and pasted it over itself, backwards.

that might sound like it's going to sound awful, but it actually sounds quite lovely. one could analyze it quite easily, but it's creation is beyond the realm of any rules of construction.

which is where art belongs.

...excepting the algorithm i used, of course. i suppose it's more reich than schoenberg, but kind of more xenakis than either.

in 2001, i ran the midi file through my soundblaster live!, which as primitive as it is, has a much nicer wavetable in it than the primitive soundcard i used in 1998 and 1999 (i don't remember what it was). i also slowed it down by about 20 bpm and allowed the full file to "intersect", which let it breathe more.

why? well, i was writing a lot with scorewriters at the time and was just experimenting with the old file, really. but i was also finishing up what would be the only year i would spend in the math-physics department, and thought it sounded like i would imagine intersecting particles *should* sound like. i was generally interested in finding ways to combine science with music then - an interest that is present in older tracks as well and that has stuck with me. i may explore these themes further in time. one of the ideas i really wanted to accomplish was a physical modelling of the universe, to actually simulate the music of the spheres, as pythagoras imagined it. i think i underestimated the complexity of such a task....

of course, i never expected the music of the spheres to be tonal. and i wouldn't expect the sound of particles intersecting to be musical, either. but, we can take some artistic license. if intersecting particles are to make a sound, it OUGHT to be something like this!

written june, 1998. reimagined june, 2001. slightly rearranged and re-rendered at the end of july, 2014. this render is from july 24, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-intersection-of-two-identical-particles-moving-in-completely-opposite-directions-4

the symphony of psilocybin induced madness (vst mix)

this is the vst update, for the second half of the thru disc.

the core of this was written in my parent's basement in the spring of 2001. planning on going to a rave that weekend, i had previously purchased a large amount of drugs; i was, however, forced to stay in due to having a calculus test that sunday (the rave was out of town). well, my parents were gone for the weekend, most of my friends were out of town and i had a massive stash of drugs...

it is quite literally a symphony of psilocybin induced madness and was written directly into an ancient, hacked score-writing program. while it has been labelled as a symphony of drunken confusion in certain contexts to get around certain social stigmas, this is inaccurate.

written early 2001. this render was completed on jan 10, 2015.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness-4


also available here:
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/vst-mix-3


inri027 has been updated:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-symphony-of-psilocybin-induced-madness

take heed, google: you've been doing things better than your competitors have over the last few years. i'm using a lot of your services right now for that reason. but, if you start getting invasive you're going to start driving people out and propping up your competitors.

i suspect google is actually trying to get people to move to chrome, but the way chrome works is very invasive and it's very bad on ram, as well. again: i'm more likely to avoid youtube than i am to use chrome.

i'm more likely to not use youtube than i am to accept autoplay. it's just not a good feature, and if i can't control it then i'm not using the site.

if you're annoyed by youtube breaking flashblock, and simply do not consider allowing autoplaying videos to be an acceptable option, one workaround is as follows:

1) temporarily put youtube in your flashblock white list
2) install an out of date version of flash
3) clear your cookies/cache/etc

that way, whenever you go to a video it will tell you that flash is out of date, which will block the autoplay.

hopefully, flashbock resolves this quickly...

the time machine (vst mix) (for thu)

regarding this piece, my memory is blurry; yet, i have a vivid recollection of playing parts of it for my guitar teacher on a sunny day, where there was still snow on the ground. it's funny how we remember seemingly irrelevant details, but i guess the atmosphere of the performance is important because the performance is. that would date it to roughly march, 2001.

i switched the piece from classical guitar to piano halfway through writing it, and vaguely remember thinking that an impossible interval had something to do with it (a specific c# cannot be hit on a standard classical). yet, that doesn't change the fact that it's guitar music. the counterpoint is very guitar.

to further complicate things, i've long wanted to turn the piece into a jazzy idm romp. it has a kind of a jingly feel to it that belongs in the warp records sphere.

conceptually, the time machine aspect referred simply to the slowed down guitar chords at the beginning of the song. if you play it a certain way, it sounds like time is collapsing in on itself. or, so i thought, anyways. the various versions i have created here have made an attempt to take that idea to it's logical conclusion. it's a mix of the vision i had at the time and a bit of hindsight.

written early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. final render completed on july 5, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/the-time-machine-5

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

this is one of the tracks that i can't date well. i do, however, remember working on it during the winter, which means it must have been late '00 or early '01. i'm going to consequently deduce that it must have been what i was working on over the 2000 christmas break and date it coming out right after it.

actually, i have another reason to date it in early '01 rather than late '00: the introductory piano part was recorded live into my notation program on my dx100, which i was given over christmas (maybe a little before; it was a cheap garage sale pickup) to act as a controller for my recently broken jx-8p, that i had tried to take apart over the summer to clean a sticky key (a common problem with mid-80s roland analog synths) but failed and left keyless. it's still keyless. yet, the dx still drives it....

that introductory piano part formed the basis of the track, which built itself up fairly quickly. somewhere, i lost the nwc file by saving it as midi, which ruined all the formatting. it's been sitting on my drive ever since.

thematically, the track is meant to orchestrate a feeling of claustrophobia with society pushing down on you too hard. it's meant to transmit a feeling of existential dread. at the time, i really felt stuck with life in general and not sure how i was going to get out of it..

written late 2000 & early 2001. initial instrumentation and render completed mar 7, 2014. minor instrumentation changes to facilitate a small wind section were implemented in late april, 2014. final render completed on may 3, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/stuck-in-the-middle-of-an-alley-closing-in-on-all-sides-5

that's an incredibly immature cat, with no concept of personal property. you expect a puppy to act like that. but a grown cat? no. it's supposed to be the adult in the room...

you know, it's really remarkable. as hard-right as this administration has been been, and as hard-right as successive administrations have been for decades, the media continues to push them from even further right. is there any end to this continual rightward movement of the center?

but, the discussion on israel demonstrates how important it is to have a policy wonk in this position rather than a pr person, and i hope this is corrected in the next administration. i'm not sure if she got this job as a favour or because the administration legitimately wanted a pr person. but, being unable to express the administration's position on this matter is a point of failure that has no end point but confused messaging.

whatever your views on the conflict (and i'm far more empathetic to the palestinian struggle than the reporters in this room), the logic underlying the line of questioning is beyond warped. it's ultimately rooted in the base assumption that the united states has sovereign control over palestine. one could not coherently arrive at these questions without this core imperialist assumption. the logic suggesting that the state department can provide incentives by dropping support is the kind of thing that makes sense in the context of like the american civil war or something, and even there is going to come up against dramatic opposition from states rights supporters. the key is sovereignty. washington had sovereignty over virginia. it doesn't have sovereignty over palestine. trying to apply this kind of model to the behaviour of an independent, sovereign state (and this applies equally well to some of the questions about syria) is the kind of warped nineteenth century logic that led to the first world war.

the american position here - and this goes back to at least carter - is to try and engage the "moderate" palestinians, for the precise reason that it's well understood that completely cutting them off is going to send them to the arms of hamas. you cut the funding, that's what's going to happen. not less rocket attacks, but more of them. and without getting into the hypocrisy in too much detail, it's worthwhile to point out that it doesn't seem to have even crossed anybody's mind that the same logic applies to israeli attacks on palestine, which are always considerably more catastrophic. the more you isolate israel, the worse the attacks become. both of these things are demonstrable from shifts in policy over the last fifty years.

so, yes, you have to engage with the "technocratic government" if you want to prevent them from working with hamas. cutting them off will force them to work more closely with hamas, because it will then become their only option. that's the entire fucking point of the strategy.

and, it's imperative that the state department can put somebody in this position that can explain that, rather than let the hare-brained analysis of these dipshit reporters stand up without challenge.

missed pickup

jessica
hi.

it seems like you missed a recycle pickup today at 805 marion. the thing is i'm not quite sure what to do with it. i can't take it back inside, it's been sitting outside all day.

do you do missed pickups the day after, if they're pointed out to you? or do i need to find some other way to dispose of it?

public works - environmental
Good Morning Jessica,

Thank you for your e-mail. You may call 311 to report any missed garbage or recycle. It will be assigned to a Supervisor of your area for further investigation.

jessica
i'm sorry, but i don't have access to an inside telephone and it's a little cold to stand outside. is there an email address i can contact, instead?

i mean, otherwise the stuff is going to have to sit outside until monday at the earliest.

(pause)

never mind, i braved the cold and they're going to come get it.

BUT

it would be useful if there was a website people could go to to report something like this. it would be a simple form to fill out and would probably cut down on costs for the city, too...

public works - environmental
Yes there is a site available at http://www.citywindsor.ca/
Type in 311 in the search bar top right if you read down the page there is a link 311 online that has a form for you to fill in and send to the call centre.

deathtokoalas
the point is that he doesn't own the rain. therefore, he has no right to prevent it from flowing downstream and he has no right to modify the eco-systems around his property. use of public resources needs to be determined collectively, not individually. that being said, the jail time is an unfortunate penalty; a little direct action in the form of blowing up his dam would have been preferable.

George Vasquez 
100% correct. That asshole got off light.

deathtokoalas 
well, like i say: it's a little ham-fisted to put somebody in a cage over something that can be easily resolved by activism.

Young Master Gandalf 
Then tell me, who does own the rainwater that falls on your land????? imo everbody has the right to collect rainwater for use on their land. You Americans are really nuts. And you could even claim it's a gift from God, knowing most of you are Christians, so what's wrong by using Gods gift he gave you? If God didn't want him to use rainwater, he would not have let it fall down on his land.

deathtokoalas 
it is because nobody owns it that it must be allowed to flow through.

i mean, putting out a coffee can or something is one thing. but, this guy is building a dam. he's not just collecting a bit of water falling on his property, he's expropriating it from miles around.

the right way to look at rainwater is that you take what you need and let the rest run by, so it's accessible to the other creatures (human or not) in the region that also require it. the theft in damming is from everybody, miles around.

there have been wars fought over this, when one country decides they want to dam water in such a way that prevents it from flowing into another country. and, for good reason. that's theft.

Young Master Gandalf 
That was over 150 years ago, now there is water plenty. And the states don't own the rain. But I know, you Americans have stupid rules and laws. And imo this has nothing to do with collecting rainwater, it had to to with blocking rivers and streams of water, it was never about collecting rainwater, cause your neigbour could just do the same with the rain that falls on his land. It would be something else if he had blocked a river, a brook, a stream, a chanal, then you are right to imprison him, but for rainwater??????????????????

deathtokoalas
i was unaware that rainwater patterns changed that dramatically in 150 years. but, there are two contemporary examples of this: proposed dams on cataracts on the nile are creating tensions between ethiopia and egypt, and chinese engineering programs are upsetting the indians.

i'm a canadian. but, i believe these rules are set on a state-by-state basis and generally allow a certain level of collection for personal use.

we seem to agree that this is well beyond that.

it should be illegal just on the basis of affecting the wildlife in the region.

Young Master Gandalf
I live in the Netherlands and there is no law that prevents me from collecting rainwater for personal use. If I had some land, and want to make a pond or a small lake on that land, nobody can prevent me from doing just that. If however there would be a creek, or small brook on my land, then I'm prohibited to block that waterstream, imo those are two different things!! The example you give, is about the NILE, a natural river, and that's something complete different.

deathtokoalas
i'm not well read on dutch law. however, i would have to think that if there's enough water running through your land that you can dam it, then that qualifies as a stream.

that would be different from a free standing pond.

Young Master Gandalf 
Just dig a hole in the ground, and wait for the rain to fill it up, there you have my free standing pond.

deathtokoalas
it's not quite that easy - it's going to evaporate, seep or spill over.

regardless, what he was doing was rerouting runoff from a broad area with pipes (you can see it in the video) and damming it. that run off would have found it's way into streams - and as you can see, it was a substantial amount. so, it's still not comparable.

the issue here is less in the collection of rainwater and more in how much he was collecting. it was clearly beyond any reasonable concept of personal use. i'm not sure how the netherlands interprets common law (i know you had an early parliament, but i suspect your law is probably based on civil law from years of spanish domination), but that's how english law works - it tries to determine behaviour relative to an abstract "reasonable person" and then rules based on that criteria.

turns out the roots of modern dutch law are napoleonic, rather than habsburg. good to know.

see, this is the shit i want to see. that guy on his knees is a cop coming to the realization that he's on the wrong side of the fight. a little dramatic....

you know, for once, it'd be nice to see a parody of existentialism that doesn't miss the point altogether (and i'm not sure how he's characterizing the statement about artistic integrity as randian except by wording it in a bizarre way, although i'll admit i ran into a few people at occupy that tried to merge worker politics with support for ron paul - and were promptly made fun of).

see, it doesn't matter if he gets through college and gets a higher paying job or if he takes the job as an office temp (although reality is that he'll be lucky if his college diploma gets him a paying job in an office, that's where mom's social standing plays a role). whether he's making $50/hr or $10/hr, his life will still lack meaning. he'll still be forced into employment he has no interest in. the point is that the effort and the social standing that comes with it doesn't make a difference in an individual's happiness.

nor is the doctor's ferrari anything more than a temporary alleviation of the deep emptiness that defines his existence.

it would be easier if more people realized all of this, as building a movement to create a system that provides meaning would actually become possible. alas, we're instead persistently driven into the false promises of illusory happiness that consumer culture provides for us.

now, if you'll excuse me, i am going to ponderously play a single chord on an out of tune guitar for an hour as i meditate on the purposelessness of capitalism.

i've just unblocked about ten thousand people, which apparently required a lot of ram. i don't know what google was doing in the background, but it's clearly calculating something.

i will no doubt have another ten to twenty thousand people in my blocklist by the end of the year (those fedora idiots will be reblocked on immediate contact), but i always clear all my blocklists at the beginning of the year because, hey, it's a new year. maybe the idiots of the world have grown slightly. without that kind of optimism, there's just no use...

but, have no illusions: i am not all of a sudden less likely to block. it's just my yearly pardoning.

it's funny how the coughing itself can tire you out, even as you're just getting over it, making it seem like you got kicked back to the start of it. woke up feeling like somebody spent eight hours jumping on my chest....

it was the perfect storm to ignite my asthma/bronchitis. it's a result of living in a second-hand smoke environment when i was a kid, and comes up whenever i get a flu in the winter. it happened before i started smoking, smoking hasn't made it worse and quitting won't make it better (although i haven't been smoking a lot lately). the flu comes and goes in 24-72 hours, but the bronchitis it triggers can last for up to six weeks after it's gone.

i'm a pretty strong advocate of the idea that people between 17 and 60 should *not* be getting yearly flu vaccines - we're better off fighting it ourselves. unless we get a nasty strain...

...but i think i'm finally accepting that the bronchitis has put me in the "special" category, and i may finally crack next year.

i honestly think i just sort of got used to it.

this kind of thing has been going on forever and shouldn't surprise anybody.

i just want to point out that there's no contradiction in criticizing the administration for it's tactics on human rights grounds and working up reports to justify further intervention elsewhere. liberal interventionism is a weird animal. but it doesn't see anything wrong with arguing we should blow up libya to get rid of ghaddafi and arguing that we should use democratic processes to modify our own behaviour, too [although it would never argue libya should use legal means to reform itself, or that ghadaffi should blow up washington]. and it can be legit, too.

so, you shouldn't get caught in this trap that suggests that criticism of the american record on human rights somehow means the group isn't working to justify intervention. it's just wrong.

it indeed doesn't make sense to turn an ally into an enemy...

...unless you think you can convert an enemy into a slave.

i don't know if the russian narrative is purposefully ignoring this or missing it altogether. i've been pointing out for years that the russian policy positions are just hopelessly naive. consider bmd, for example. they want to join the system? that's their response? when you hear this, what else is there to do but take a sip of vodka, put your head in your hands and laugh/cry? i know they've started building their own recently, but i don't think there's been a shift in policy..

so, i'm going to claim that it's established that the russians are consistently naive. which makes the question as to whether they really get this or not valid.

the americans don't want a merger. that's what would happen if they started integrating, and it leaves open the threat of russian pre-eminence in the alliance. there's a few countries that might find themselves in agreement with russia more often. it's giving the russians an opportunity to establish hegemony right underneath the hegemon's nose. that's not how hegemon's behave.

nor do they want to be in this perpetual conflict point with russia, or even to integrate russia into the empire in a passive way.

what the americans want - and you have to contemplate this carefully - is to defederalize the russian state into small republics, then integrate each of them into their system independently. if they're going to be able to do this at any point in the near future, that window is closing.

so, no it doesn't make sense to convert a possible ally into an enemy. but it does make sense to seek to dismantle and permanently obliterate an enemy altogether.

whatever else you want to draw from this video, it's rather clear that the vast majority of syrians prefer the modern, secular stability of assad's russian-backed government over the threat of a return to saudi-style extremism (i say return to, but i think it might be millennia since such totalitarianism, there). that ought to be respected, and tactics for regime change ought to be modified.

and the saudis ought to be told to fuck off.

in the long run, there's no future in the region besides the conquest of saudi arabia by secular forces and the deposition of the regime there. this is where we need real regime change. and it's only a matter of time before an administration is elected that has the clarity of thought to realize it.

whether the saudis are toppled by an american-led push or by a mass uprising (perhaps one that is iranian or russian backed), it is certain that they will be toppled. smart american policy would seek to topple them on america's terms, rather than help them carry out their disastrous policies and then wait for the consequences.

careful - most shrews have a venomous bite. it won't kill you, but it will sure hurt...

that was another 15. one of the nice things about not having any responsibility is that when you get a 48 or 72 hour flu you can just sleep it off. everybody *should* have this right. but, most people don't.

i think i'm awake now...

yeah.

i'm groggy.

but i'm ok.

i feel a little bit better, but am still unlikely to be able to do anything besides copy & paste for the next 12-15 hours, if i don't fall asleep (like i did this morning).

definitely a virus....

i just woke up from about 21 hours of straight sleeping, which itself came after a short awake period of about two hours. i've basically been sleeping since about 5:00 monday afternoon. which means i need to eat.

deciding to sit down and clean this up over the next few days worked out fairly well, because i'm so sore right now that it's just about my only option regarding things to do.

i've been noticing a sort of stretching issue for a while, now. i guess i spend a lot of time with legs under a desk, or with legs curled up when i'm sleeping (i can't help it, i go full fetal over night no matter how i fall asleep), and i walk a lot on top of it, so slightly sore legs are not a strange thing for me. when you're sore, you should stretch....

what i've been noticing stretching for the last little bit (specifically the one where you push your legs out from your body while lying flat) is that there's a point where it almost seems like my limbs are pulling out of their sockets. it's only ever happened previously with one leg at a time, but it's this mix of pain and numbness that's sort of hard to describe in any other way than it feeling like the leg is about to pop right out...

i've ultimately concluded that, despite the displeasure, this is probably good for me - because it tends to work. however, i need to, once again, point out the ms-ness of such a circumstance. it's part of a number of things pushing that way, but, i mean, there's not much to do about it..

before i went to sleep yesterday evening, i got a little stretch in and it hit me in both legs for the first time, which actually collapsed me off the bed and down on to the floor (i'm ok, obviously). but did it ever hurt. if you were here, you would have seen me collapsed on my thighs and sort of gasping for air.

given that i woke up with a cough, i'm now not really sure if the reason i'm sore is due to sickness or due to falling the wrong way. but i *am* sure that i'm not likely to move far from this spot for two or three days.

which should be enough to get this cleaned up. unless i can't stay awake...

it's a kind of a complex point.

i think she's missing it. the idea is that all that hegemony stuff is more effective if people are willing participants. i know i'm putting some words in there, but it's really the whole point; this sort of "peace research" is not about reversing the hegemony, it's about institutionalizing it.

so, are the actors using ideas about history and religion and other things to create chaos in the region? yes. to an extent. i think the american military has demonstrated it's ignorance about things a few times. for the most part, though, i think these things are intentional or at least made intentional when they're pointed out; the bush administration may not have foreseen the sectarian fallout, but the military presence in the region has sure done everything it can to use it as a divide and conquer technique. so, it seems naive to suggest that they don't know any better when they're clearly going out of their way to cause all kinds of mayhem.

but i think that's missing the actual point that he's making - what they don't realize is how much more successfully integrated these regions would be if less violent tactics were used to subdue them. and, to a major extent i think he's basically right. there has to be significant wealth redistribution in this region.

regardless of the back door politics that may or may not have gone into enacting and dismantling glass-steagall, the reason it was effective has less to do with trying to reduce speculation and more to do with putting rules on what can be used to speculate with. glass-steagall doesn't abolish the kind of wild financial behaviour that leads to these brutal crashes, it just protects certain types of savings from being gambled on.

the reason this is important is that the bailout is then only possibly used the way it's meant to be. bailouts were a type of socialism when they were brought in. if a bank is going to go under, the state steps in as a "lender of last resort" and keeps the bank afloat. but, why would the state do that? it shouldn't be to protect investors. not even the most ridiculous state capitalist would argue this is justified. it's to protect citizens that have their savings in the bank. this is the entire ethical and legal basis of bailout legislation, and it's not functional when the banking isn't separate.

now, if you separate the two types of banking, you can just go ahead and let the gamblers ruin themselves. the size of the institution is no longer relevant; the state has no obligation or mandate to protect investors.

this is very poorly understood by the general public - both activists and non-activists. glass-steagal is not a way to fix the banking system, but it is a way to stop bankers from gambling your savings off. i don't feel the interview helped to clarify the point.

i think a big part of the confusion is that people can't contemplate the idea that if you have money in a bank, and the bank goes under, that money no longer exists. banks are just viewed as these magical machines that produce money from the ether, relative to the totals we have in them. our totals are absolute. they cannot be modified.

but this is total ignorance.

i think the necessary educational component here needs to be in what actually happens to your money when you put it in a bank and why this is not a safe practice if bailout legislation is successfully reversed. that naturally leads into an explanation of why the continuing existence of bailout legislation is so hugely important to working people, and an explanation of the things that the banks are doing to abuse that social safety net.

so, it seems like the production of hair is something your body does to help remove harmful cholesterol. and i'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with modifying that excretion system, such as via electrolysis. testosterone is produced from cholesterol...

it's pretty wacky, looking into this sebaceous gland. it's constantly producing clones that it then smashes in order to expel the cell contents, which get converted into hair. that's almost how a virus works. now, supposedly the cholesterol is good for your skin, and that's fine. but, your body seems to see the need to expel it. generally, when your body expels liquid it's to get rid of something it doesn't want.

if i go in there and smash up all the glands, i'm going to end up with a build up of that cholesterol somewhere else. and, if you want research money to do a salacious research report on, i think it would be interesting to try and measure a relationship between heart disease and hair removal.

untitled (vst mix)

this takes the midi file as it was created in 2002 and updates the playback to utilize modern vst synthesizers and guitar modellers. render finalized on dec 26, 2014. 

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-vst-mix

the reality is that canada benefits from warming in just about every way - longer growing seasons, better exploitation of resources and a more enjoyable climate. to any body governing canada, this is not a crisis but an opportunity. and i think that this fundamental calculus needs to be understood in approaching ways to deal with canada. canada will never respond to this as a crisis situation - because it is not a crisis situation to canada. it is just about the best environmental conditions that are even possible for canada. it is optimal.

but, see, that screws the rest of the planet over. so, as a canadian, i'm torn between recognizing what is good for my area of the planet and recognizing what is good for the planet in general. and, that's difficult because it means that this region is going to have to make sacrifices for the well being of other regions. which doesn't tend to happen. this region is actually notorious for that.

and, it's particularly problematic because we're actually even in control of the factors increasing the warming. it's not just us, it's russia as well. but we're a dominant factor due to our extraction techniques, and our permafrost.

the reality is that putting the frozen person in charge of the thermostat is going to lead to higher temperatures. that is a fundamental calculation that has to be recognized about how future canadian governments are going to react to this concern.

if we get a liberal government in, they may increase foreign aid to areas undergoing desertification out of a sense of legitimate guilt. canadian liberalism is really the last remaining branch of the original british liberal tradition, and by far it's most complete extrapolation of thought in the canadian constitution and charter of rights and freedoms. i think it's reasonable to project into the future this legitimate feeling for the necessity of reparation, and to have that feeling shared by a broad sense of the population. canadian liberalism can still produce this sense of legal fairness - i'd argue probably uniquely in the british tradition.

but none of that will stop canada from increasing emissions, it will just a set a self-imposed price on it's behaviour.

another strain that's going to develop is that canada is going to see itself increasingly isolated with russia. now, the current government is behaving rather stupidly in regards to this, so any kind of natural aligning is going to be stunted until they're removed from power. but, it's increasingly inevitable that we're going to see closer co-operation between canada and russia as their policies align internationally, if not domestically.

the reality is that the basis for canada as a non-aligned state is already well established from the trudeau and chretien years. the liberal party in the second half of the twentieth century didn't want nato to define it's international relations and often acted as a semi-neutral go between for american interests, while resisting nato operations in favour of united nations operations. it wanted an independent foreign policy, and had one up until the current prime minister took over. if a liberal government is able to re-establish an independent foreign policy, that kind of relationship might develop between canada, russia and the united states - the latter of two which are on the path to direct conflict. that kind of third power actually has a very important role to play right now and canada is kind of uniquely situated, between them in multiple ways, to play it.

given the american psyche, and we've seen this repeatedly in american history, it's more likely that americans will get up and leave the regions they've damaged than stay and try to fix it. and, the direction that californians and texans and others are going to move towards is north. the question is how far north.

the idea that canada has any real say in the matter is pretty tenuous. we're utterly dependent on the americans for security, and if they decide to move a few units into montreal or toronto we're not really going to have much to say about it. there have been concrete plans, even, to do this - some as a contingency plan for world war two in case the british fell and some as recently as the succession referendum in quebec, which would have ended with clinton declaring montreal the capital of the new state of quebec.

so, is the reality that canada has similar security issues to a country like poland? i think this discussion immediately requires an acknowledgement of the difference of scale. canada is lightly armed, but very large and there's a dramatically different (shorter) history there, despite much of it being unfriendly. yet, it's the same basic dynamic, where canada could conceivably be in need to seek protection from a force which has no future historical role but to dominate it. there's no need to work out the hypocrisy, because there's no need for consistency.

with russia, further, the situation is far less ominous - we really have nothing but commercial relations to look forward to, as russia couldn't possibly pose anything but a pyrrhic threat to canada, no matter how hard it tried to.

i think that sets up some historically strange dynamics that are going to need some foresight to navigate around.

one could even say that russia has met it's match with canada, in terms of natural defence barriers. i mean, they could maybe pull it off. for a week. then, they've doubled their size and are open to immediate dismantling. from all directions. it'd be a race with china for central asia.

which opens the country up as equals, which is my point. cross-polar trade could be the dominant economic relationship in canada within a few decades.

the thing about the kennedy assassination is that it remains unresolved. whether the resolution ultimately ends in filling in details to the official story or in a different story altogether remains an open question, but what is clear is that the story is incomplete. so, theories, in this context, are valid hypotheses to be checked - even if they seem ridiculous.

i tend to lean towards lbj as the most likely suspect. but there were of course a dozen other people with motives and ability. in the end, the story may never be told.

you have to wonder, though, if, at the root of it, it wasn't just some high tory reaction to the irishness of the whole situation. i mean, you have to imagine that these conversations happened in london.

"history has turned upside down, i tell you. there's an irishman in charge of the empire."

british heads of state have been killed for similar crimes of ethnicity in the past. and, really it's not clear that the mindset of the british lords is altogether much different today, when it comes to certain things, than it was a thousand years ago.

given the conspiratorial complexity of certain theories, i just sort of like the simplistic stupidity of this one.

this is a softer argument that i think i ought to try first and foremost, and continue moving back to...

the fact is that i went in to see the doctor in the first place because i wanted to discuss factors that were disabling me from finding employment. i went through a long process from that point, but the essential premise has remained in stasis. i remain in need of that discussion about factors that are disabling me from finding employment. that needs to be a basic step forwards, and it's unlikely to resolve itself in a period of three months. so, if you're not going to diagnose me on the spot then you need to put the things in motion to have me have that discussion relatively quickly, so i can get another year or two to either be diagnosed more rigorously or to try and carry out any recommendations.

it's funny how you meet these people that think they can conquer any odds. it defies the entire concept of odds to think you can conquer all odds. so, there's an implicit misunderstanding of the concept inherent in this perspective. so, to me, the more interesting question is how such absurdity can arise?

i think there's a simple psychological explanation that essentially renders the concept as relative - despite all arguments to the contrary. it's ultimately just not carefully thought through, of course. but, i think the way it works is basically this - if you've never put yourself up against serious odds, if all of your challenges in life are things that you're more likely to succeed at than fail at, then you might gather the perception that odds aren't important. if you've always been favoured, and you've always won, it's possible to delude yourself into thinking you'll always win. see, that's the odds working, though. kind of comically.

so, you get these situations where people are faced with 100:1 odds and they approach it with the attitude that the situation is inevitably going to unfold in their favour, like every other situation always has. which is the comfort of modern existence, i suppose.

but there are rationalistic explanations for morality, and focusing on supernatural explanations in the form of universals is missing out on an opportunity to study something in detail.

when you're dealing with questions of biology, and the key point to get across is that it is a question of biology, the kinds of laws you see in physics are usually not applicable - because we're experiencing things at the micro level. you zoom out enough, you'll see those laws start to work. but that doesn't mean that what we're observing is universally "true" in some sense. it just means that things begin to demonstrate an order when you view them from a far enough distance of abstraction. which is basically a tautology, and doesn't imply anything of any value.

so, when you're looking at the moral systems of individual cultures this universalizing approach is completely backwards. those universals are just aggregate data. rather, each culture is going to develop an entirely individualized set of moral codes and ethics that apply uniquely to their environments. in other words, it's a question of evolutionary biology.

so, a culture with more scarce or less developed resources might have a tendency towards competition, whereas a culture with more developed resources might have a tendency towards a more social distribution. these things can get crossed when cultural values change slower than the technology does, which is essentially the situation we're in right now. when you look at specific examples of the way that settled people constructed moral systems vs. the way that nomadic peoples did, you see these kinds of differences come out starkly.

i just remember getting into this debate with profs into law or philosophy, and feeling like i was talking to somebody stuck on the other side of an epiphany that should really be old news by now. our morals don't come from a higher being. there's nothing universal about the way they operate. they don't exist in some cloud somewhere; they can't be revealed through mathematics, logic or empirical discovery. rather, they're attempts to ensure our own survival (some failed) that can be understood relatively well when looked at in an evolutionary perspective. nor are they entirely unique to humans in anything but their reflective complexity.

if you really want to entertain the notion, breaking the cycle would necessarily mean erasing yourself entirely from history. there's interesting consequences of that (as history would take a different path without you, however miniscule), but it's not what i was thinking about at first.

what that means is we could never know of anybody that's actually succeeded, because all trace of them would cease to exist.

it follows that all claims of enlightenment through this process are necessarily false.

but, frustratingly, it doesn't eliminate the possibility. it even opens up explanations as to why the event seems so rare - we can only remember the fakes.

it's remarkable how these ideas can reinforce themselves through seeming absurdities.

do dogs understand that they're being used for nefarious purposes?

like a drug sniffing dog for example. do they have enough awareness and empathy to say "yeah, i smell it on this person, but they seem cool so i'm not going to draw attention to it.".

well, we know that dogs are very good at sensing personalities. they seem to react differently depending on your emotional state. so, it's not pure fantasy.

i don't think i'd want to be the one that tests that idea....

you have to wonder if wolves have similar capacities. i mean, they're pack animals. it makes sense that some kind of concept of emotion would develop out of that. but, i would think that contact with humans would be a driving force in evolving that trait. knowing which humans are cool and which humans are assholes is something a semi-wild dog needs to be able to do on a day-to-day basis in order to survive.

you can see something similar in elephants. apparently, they react negatively to people who speak certain languages, because they associate poaching behaviour with those languages. that's something of value to pass on to future generations, even if it's kind of racist.

but what i'm thinking of is pretty sneaky. i think dogs may need at least a few more centuries before they can do sneaky things like that...

i'd love to come across a file of mine deep in the state (i think i'm getting my psychiatric evaluation, just from a distance) somewhere that has this broad stamp of deduction on it, in startling blunt clarity. like, a file marked BONKERS in red stamp. presented as a medical diagnosis...

our evaluation of this suspect is that she is simply bonkers.

....signed off for by a doctor, illegibly, but with credentials typed in boldface. to scream it's legitimacy.

i'm also glad the days are getting longer, again.

i think i'm pretty much used to that hour difference, now. it's from moving from one end of the same time zone to the other end. i'm used to the sun being up by 6:30 pretty much the entire year - and becoming visible not longer after 4:00 during the summer. here, it's quite often not up until well after 7:00. even at the peak of the summer, you're pushing 6:00, which kind of makes it feel like spring the whole year. i made it home in the dark from a compost-drop at 7:45 the other day.

the flip of that is that the sun is still up at 5:30 for pretty much the whole year. which has got me feeling like fall never ended, because i never got the cue of night time at 4:00 on a cloudy day.

i've actually tried switching to central time to recapture the difference, but i just found myself constantly converting in my head. it was just reminding me of it, rather than helping me forget it.

so, i think i'm used to it. but i'd still be nice to get the sun up a bit earlier...

you know, i was going to say something about how people have to go to work in the dark here.

but i guess it's also true that people have to go home in the dark in ottawa. i can remember getting off work in the dark quite frequently.

i think it's kind of better to get off work in the dark, because it just plunges you directly into the night, which is where you want to be when you're working during the day, anyways. but that's just a perception.

i think the more valid reflection is that you're stuck with one way or the other up to a relatively high longitude.

you know, it's true - cats really are always plotting to eat us. like, that cat that's been following me around..

see, i always knew that the cat was really stalking me as a possible prey item, but i was trying to rationalize ways around that obvious deduction, because it's not something you really want to come to terms with. that cat is following me around because it would like to eat me. how pleasant.

i think if it was a really serious concern to me, i'd of course react differently. but it's a cute, black and white furry cat with a bit of a swagger in it's steps. it doesn't really strike me as ominous, even if i know what it's really thinking.

when it comes down to it, though, do i really want to get into a fight with a cat? they seem cute and harmless. but, they're very agile and absolutely capable of catching you by surprise. we have a weak spot - our necks. and, cats are entirely aware of that weak spot. it doesn't take much to take you out through your neck. a smart cat would be able to exploit this.

you think past it, though. it's just a cute cat.

a cute cat that sees you as a possible prey item, if it can just get the right opportunity.

i think these studies that suggest that people that listen to specific types of music are more intelligent because they listen to that music are getting the causality backwards.

first, if you're focusing on a specific genre, you're doing this wrong. if the idea is the abstraction in the music, no specific genre has a monopoly on that. you may get different correlations, depending on personality. debussy is going to appeal to a different type of person than mozart does. and skinny puppy is going to appeal to a different type of person than genesis does. but, it's all abstract music and it should all have basically the same effect, if the factor is the abstraction in the music.

focusing specifically on "classical" music is going to mostly simply produce class differences, which are well understood as having an effect on test scores. it's a situation where x is correlated with y, y is correlated with z and a fallacious conclusion is being drawn that z is therefore caused by y - when it could very well be that x and z are where the causal relationship is occurring.

but the point of this shouldn't be to isolate "intelligent people". "intelligent people" is a pretty broad category, that encompasses humans with a wide variety of tastes. rather, the useful conclusion is something like as follows:

"if you actually legitimately enjoy mainstream pop music, it is probably because you are not of above average intelligence."

but you don't need a study to understand that.

even that's maybe a little unfair, as it's not impossible that you could be into abstract music and still like pop.

maybe something like...

"if you *only* listen to pop music, then chances are high that you're not that bright."

i think the key thing that bugs me about the studies is that they tend to focus so much on mozart. mozart was not the most abstract, creative or interesting writer of his era from any perspective. even people that really like mozart will acknowledge how prodding he could be from time to time. if the studies were based on something a bit more difficult....

i'd expect that if they did a direct comparison between kids that listen to mozart specifically and kids that listen to a spectrum of other "classical" composers, mozart would actually rank near the bottom in terms of test results.

i entirely agree that things are constantly in flux, and the causal model has problems at the micro level. i think the intuitive understanding is that things are happening too quickly for causality to apply. i say intuitive, but that's a tricky thing to understand if you try to break it down, despite it being the intuitive way to kind of understand it.

i think you can try and put some kind of conceptual bounds around it, though. every causal reaction requires a finite amount of time. if there's so much energy in a system that it pushes the cause through faster than a reaction can occur in, then you'd see causality seem like it's not working. you could think of it like a censor failing, by missing a signal because it's too fast - or in some cases like a censor exploding by taking in a signal that zaps it like a laser.

depending on the scale of the subject, the micro might be very perceptible to us. so, the question of how music affects intelligence is micro on this scale - it's reinforcing each other, because it's happening at a time scale that is shorter than a reaction can develop in.

but i think you can still pull out patterns, and the patterns are still meaningful, even if they require some careful analysis.

it's a more complicated matter as to how the russians should deal with it, but, given recent and not so recent history of the cia using ngos as front groups to stir up dissent, it should be acknowledged that when they call these groups "foreign agents", the reality is that they're probably right.

this is my basic argument.

=====================

So, the problem isn’t really whether I’m capable or even willing to find employment, it’s more a question of whether anybody is willing to allow me to work for them. And, the answer is that nobody is, and nobody’s going to.

To be honest, I would prefer not to. I don’t think that’s all that unusual. But, I do recognize that I’m not supposed to have a real choice in this matter. So, if I were to choose, what kind of job would I pick? Well, let’s separate out two kind of jobs – high wage jobs with lots of responsibility, or low wage jobs with little responsibility.

I would actually prefer the low wage job with little responsibility. The reason is that my aspirations and goals in life are not within the workforce, they’re within art and academia. Unfortunately, my art is quite unusual (and hence unmarketable) and my academic opinions are equally unusual. If I were to work a high wage job with a lot of responsibility, I would not have the time or energy to devote to my goals and aspirations and would consequently be very unhappy. So, I believe I would be less unhappy working a low wage job with small amounts of responsibility, as it would give me more time to focus on my goals and aspirations. I can also say that I’ve determined this through experiment.

So, let’s focus on the low wage jobs with low responsibility. Unfortunately, this option is not available to me, for the precise reason that I have a lot of education. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried removing the degree from the resume, I’ve tried adopting colloquial language, and I’m just too transparent – the hiring manager can see quite clearly that I’m introverted and bookish, have an IQ around 150 and am simply not going to fit in to that kind of environment. I don’t have the right profile for this sort of labour. So, while I would prefer this, it’s not something I can actually get. They want young, personable people. I’m simply not that person.

What about the high wage jobs with more responsibility, then? Well, ignoring the fact that I would be unhappy that way, it’s not an option that’s available to me, either, because I don’t have the psychological profile that fits into it. You need to have drive, motivation and a desire to compete. I have none of these things as they apply to private or government sector employment – my aspirations and goals are in art and academia. Worse, I’m not particularly good at integrating into systems of vertical management. Probably the best example to use is what happened when I applied for cra…

They had me write two tests. The first was an iq test, and my grades were very high. 95th percentile. This is consistent with past iq tests I’ve written. The second was a behavioural test, which I’ve failed thrice. What that means is that I’m basically certified by the state as unable to exist properly in a management system. I’m too independent-minded, too willing to take things into my own hands, too unwilling to rely on the hierarchy to make decisions. So, I’m not going to fit in there, either. We can have discussions about this, but my perspective is that the test results are essentially accurate – I’m not good at being told what to do or following what I perceive of as illogical rules for the purposes of protocol or convention. Again, I can’t change this – it’s my nature. A different system would value this, but ours rejects it as anti-social.

So, I’m left without any kind of option. I can’t do the drone work because they don’t want people like me doing it, and I can’t do the higher wage work because I can’t fit in there, either. So, I’m not left with any other option (so long as we accept that starving on the street is not a real option) besides trying to explore the reasons I can’t fit into either environment and trying to construct a disability out of it.

There isn’t a disability underlying my bookish introversion, it’s just my nature. However, I believe that there may be a personality disorder underlying my inability to fit into structured environments. This is what I’m trying to get diagnosed.

So, some examples of past behaviour that fit this pattern….

it's starting to look like where i am is going to just duck under the jetstream most of the winter this year, and may actually see above average temperatures. there might be a lot of rain, but that's less annoying than periodic deep freezes.

the rest of eastern canada doesn't seem like it's going to be so lucky.

i think they may have slightly exaggerated the effect of the vortex, and slightly underexaggerated the effect of the el nino, which positioned the path of the jetstream about 100 km south of where it seems to be settling. which takes me from right on top of it to right underneath it, and makes the difference between a winter defined by north winds and a winter defined by moist rains.

as i mentioned before, i think this has to do with them not integrating solar effects into their models. it's a minor thing. but, being positioned where i am, it's a huge difference maker.

forecast temperatures this week are between 2 and 8. no snow on the ground. no snow in the forecast. they're claiming it will get cold in two weeks, but they've been saying that for a few weeks and keep bumping it up. it seems like they misforecasted...

i mean, it could still switch. and it will no doubt get cold once or twice. but i think i'm in a sweet little spot this year...

the bad news is that, if i'm right, the fact that we're at the peak of a very weak solar cycle means winter could get pretty nasty for a few years after this year...

this is a good graph, because it balances the things out at the end.

(the blue is "global warming", the yellow is the sun, the red is the temperature, which is flatlining as the blue and yellow move in opposite directions.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Temp-sunspot-co2.svg

but where we are, what's more important is how the sun affects the factors that affect the jetstream. there seems to be research that suggests that these dips in the jetstream are correlated with solar activity, which is something very localized (temperature wise) to eastern north america - and tends to create warmer temperatures in the western part of the continent. so, you're not looking at a decrease in global temperature caused by the sun's decrease in power so much as you're looking at the global spread of energy modified in a way that makes us, specifically, colder - and other places warmer.

so, what that means is that even if carbon dioxide keeps skyrocketing, if the sun doesn't come back hard we could very well be stuck with all kinds of wind blowing south from the arctic making us very cold - while africa and india fry.

i've blocked them all, but i don't think it's an exaggeration to state that the reddit army is killing youtube.

you can't get a word in past them. they upvote each other. and they're complete fucking idiots. it's very unfortunate.

i don't know why they're doing this, but it would be great if they'd just stop.

i don't want to really argue with any of the points in the video, i just want to kind of point out that being an academic in the neo-liberal era is going to result in picking up some biases, no matter how much one may align against them, and point out a few things that, by being omitted, presented the kind of status quo idea of markets being drivers of peace.

1) the us military (and i'm going to include intelligence agencies in that category, for the purposes of this comment) acts as an enforcement arm on the "liberalization" policies pushed by the imf and similar organizations. that is, those states that don't want to do what they're told are subject to intervention, destabilization and all manners of coups, who will impose violent policies on the population. it's consequently rather inaccurate to suggest or imply that this is a peaceful or stabilizing process. even canada has arguably seen some soft coups over the last several decades (trudeau, chretien).

2) these policies mostly apply to small states, and it's of course a process of extraction. large states, like russia, cannot be controlled quite like this. and, so you don't get this peaceful market order of capitalists colluding for profit; rather, you get the old nineteenth century model of empires competing for resources. and, we saw this all through the cold war and still see it with american policy against russia and china.

now, i understand it's hard to stand in front of a classroom and speak like this in 2014. but, that's a reflection of academia's willingness to tow the line, rather than of reality.

deathtokoalas
the title of john maus' new thesis has been leaked:

"On Projecting Pseudo-Intellectuality Through Performing Bad Retro for Stoned Teenagers."

RedPill Swallowed
Jealous.

deathtokoalas
naw. even in my late 90s synth-pop phase, i never had any aspirations towards this. and while my background is in math, and math is kind of like philosophy, my epistemology has always been empirically driven. i'm just dismissive.

RedPill Swallowed
I'm not even going to pretend that I don't need to google some of those words, lol....I'll just agree.  Have a nice day. :)

deathtokoalas
it's not that rough. if you ignore silly people like kant, like you should, and like maus doesn't, mathematics and philosophy share an approach to understanding knowledge, which is based in deducing things from assumptions with logic. this is somewhat - albeit not entirely - contradictory to a scientific worldview, which attempts to understand knowledge through experiment.

it gets confusing when you acknowledge that there are quasi-empirical branches of mathematics (like constructivism). but that can kind of be glossed over for the purposes of getting to my point.

....which is that i don't really have time for speculative branches of philosophy. well, i guess it's fun to read sometimes. and you have to define questions before you can test them. but there's not much room for jealousy, there, as a result of that.

accidentalprotégé
I don't agree with everything that comes out of John Maus' mouth but what makes his music "Bad Retro?" As someone who dislikes socialized medicine I still think Rights For Gays is a banger.

deathtokoalas
i'm a fan of the period he's drawing on, but i just don't hear anything except watered down emulation.

Me Ear
Do ya get out much? Me neither. I'm a fat, damaged idiot tho. And your aspirations to truth are fine if it gets you thru shit. Really. I'm not being sarcastic. Even your aspirations to a superiority over others are harmless here in youtube comment sections. Bluntly tho, you don't know shit. Humanity is a tribe of monkeys that fell out of a tree one unfortunate day. And there's good folks and cunts. That's it. But what do I know? lol. Best wishes.

deathtokoalas
yeah. i'm post-godel. i get that. that doesn't have much to do with what i was saying, though. if anything, it's an argument in favour of empiricism.

Me Ear
Well, thanks for replying. 1 or 2 folks were nasty to you on here. I can be nasty too, very. Godel? Not heard of him, if it's a dude. It's in humans to value truth, yes. But there isn't any. And what you believe? It's not important. I'm exaggerating somewhat, yes.

Religion, philosophy, science, can have a place, yes. But anyway, one guy, or girl, sees a cat with 3 legs, kicks it across the road. Another guy or girl feeds it. All the rest is theory, in my view. And, no, I wouldn't kick the cat, on my worst possible day.

deathtokoalas
godel was an early 20th century mathematician that produced a series of important proofs. he's been described as the most important logician since aristotle. and, in some sense he defined a type of thinking that is necessarily post-aristotlian.

i have to oversimplify dramatically. but, he demonstrated that we have a choice between completeness and consistency. what that means is that there are necessarily true statements that can never be proven true - and that we can in fact prove can never be proven, despite being true.

that has a lot of implications to the axiom-deduction approach to epistemology. it throws kant out the window, to begin with. his whole concept of synthetic a priori knowledge being superior is rendered ridiculous.

again: i don't really see any point where you're disagreeing with me. you're just displaying that you didn't really understand what i typed.

Me Ear
I drink, listen to music and type shit for something to do, which I don't usually remember because I'm mentally disordered, damaged and drunk.

A serious (not sarcastic) question - why post clever stuff on youtube? And, again seriously,  where can doing so lead to?

(There's clever folks on youtube, yes, but most of them seem to end up wanting to die fairly soon after they've posted on the toob amongst folk like me, don't they?) 

deathtokoalas
see, here's the thing: maybe people reading my ranting might click on my name and check out my channel, and then go to my bandcamp site. the more places i leave links, the higher the possibility.

it's a benevolent type of spam/marketing, in the sense that people get something out of it. and, i don't get deleted or marked as spam, either.

Me Ear
I'll look at your channel then. I used to rant til I got a troll. Who had a channel. lol. I looked at it eventually, worst music ever. lol again. You know what tho? Your enemy is your helper too. I imagine you're smart enough to have heard of the concept. Except young kids are killing themselves coz of trolls now.. There was a case of somebody in this country who trolled somebody on 6000 websites. Those 2 should've got married, they had very similar interests.lol. Peace. xxx

if you were a dog, you'd realize that pineapples have a very strong piney odour that could be easily mistaken for another dog. see, it's a weird dog though: spiky hair, stationary. and on the counter. da fuck?

dogs operate almost entirely on smell, and they can pick up things with their noses that you can only contemplate in the abstract. it's not reacting to the way it looks...

but, put your face up against a fresh, unpeeled pineapple the next time you get a chance. you'll only get a fraction of what a dog will get. but it's enough to demonstrate the point. it has a very territorial smell.

i mean, if you have a better idea i'd like to hear it, but just keep in mind that it's going to be smell-related rather than sight-related. i think we all know this, but i think we easily forget it - because we're so vision-centric, ourselves.

you'll notice that when she puts the pineapple down, the dog smells it from a distance and instantly reacts. that's what's going on...

now, it doesn't have to think it's a dog, exactly, to get that kind of confused reaction. i'm sure the chemical reaction happening in the dog's brain is fairly specific in it's "that's a dog" reaction. i don't know if the glandy smells coming off a pineapple are chemically close enough to trick the dog's brain in that respect (and if it's just a few bonds off, that confusion is entirely plausible - it's about the geometry of the molecules sticking together). but, given that pineapples have such a territorial almost urine-like smell, i'm fairly convinced that it's interpreting it as some kind of living thing, and is just unaware as to how it should react.

put another way, i think the idea that this is a territorial reaction is correct. that pineapple's territorial smell is invading it's turf.

stripping that provision out of the bill would not protect taxpayers. rather, they'd lose their savings when the banks collapse again. the problem is much deeper than opposing bailouts, which are unfortunately required to protect taxpayers against irresponsible banks.

fighting the symptom, not the problem. typical democrat...

deathtokoalas
simply breaking them up isn't much of an answer, either. it didn't work then, and it's not going to work now.

there needs to be stronger regulations on what banks are allowed to do, not an increase in the number of ceos in the cartel.

to put it another way, what warren is saying is that the solution to unregulated capitalism is the enforcement of liberal market theory. and this is somehow being understood as "left wing"?

from a class war perspective, this is rather intriguing.

so, years ago people started drawing connections between violent behaviour and violent messaging. so, studies were done and the conclusions come to were largely that the violence in these kinds of games act as an outlet for rage at a system that treats us as worthless commodities. that is, the evidence seems to suggest that video games do more to prevent violence than they do to create it, thereby creating a pliable and subservient population that takes out it's anguish on a screen rather than on the system that produced the anguish. it's kind of marxist, really. video games are a sort of opiate of the masses...

now, if you extrapolate that to something like this, you can construct a kind of sedative out of it.

so, are you done clinging to the one aspect of your humanity that you have left? good. get back to fucking work...

ok, here's the thing: elephants are remarkably intelligent. they've recently been classed with apes and dolphins, and it's becoming clearer and clearer that they really belong in a class of their own. they are the animal which surpasses all others in wit and mind. there's some evidence that they're able to understand syntax. that's extremely rare. really, we can only be sure that humans can do that.

what does that mean? well, you can teach a dog to fetch a stick, and you can teach a dog to fetch a beer. but the dog doesn't understand that fetch is a verb. it takes the two commands as independent things. so, you'll need to teach it to fetch a third object as a new task. it seems to be that elephants can be taught what the idea of fetch means, then apply it independently to different objects without being explicitly taught. that's a remarkable level of cognitive advancement.

so, all these comments that are like "look. even a dumb elephant can figure this out." are really missing the point. smart ass comments about bratty kids aside, the reality is that full grown elephants are as intelligent as toddlers.

so, entanglement....which i was thinking about as i was walking back from the store....

something's communicating. it's impossible to deny this. figuring this out means figuring out what's communicating and how. that's the problem. i think a big part of the confusion is not being able to define the problem properly.

...which is because our current theories state that communication is impossible. but, there's no way around this. despite the need to uphold existing dogma in the field, i have to think pretty much everybody into this understands this.

if that means reevaluating things we're pretty sure are accurate, that's a necessity. because the problem is figuring out what's communicating and how.

i think one of the things that needs to be reevaluated is the idea of light as a speed limit. there's not really any good reason for this. now, if things can move faster than light, it opens up the possibility that something is communicating at superluminal speeds. that doesn't solve the problem, but it puts some structure around it. meaning, you're looking for some kind of tachyon.

and, if you acknowledge that light has a mass, then all you really need to do is find something with less mass than light to find an object that could possibly qualify as a tachyon. there's not really any good reason to think that light doesn't have mass, either.

but, i think the key thing that i can contribute from where i am is properly defining the problem. something is communicating. the problem is figuring out what is communicating and how. in the end, a proper theory needs to explain this, not deny it.

one of the things i want to focus on when i shift is trying to find assumptions that are embedded in science, figure out their source and expose them for merely being assumptions. once they've been disarmed, they can be questioned. my understanding is that the idea of light as massless is essentially a religious statement. there's a wide range of stuff in biology i want to focus on as well - the relation between natural selection and economic liberalism, the relation between creationism and the rejection of hybridization as a driver of evolution, etc. i guess my main thesis is that the separation of science from religion (and they were historically both branches of philosophy so they share a lot in common) is incomplete and that some attention needs to be drawn to this incomplete separation in order to get to the core of some contradictions.

that is to say that religious ignorance remains at the heart of science, but it's not really widely understood that this is the case.

so, i got my extension pretty easily. i didn't even have to ask for it. suggesting somebody's reading this....

hey, it's alright. it's evidence in my favour, right?

so, i have until april, now. camh is on the 12th of january. that gives me plenty of time to work something out in a less dramatic fashion and pushes possible appeals forward until july. that's actually enough time that i might get the discography done, at which point plans begin to shift.

i'm hoping i can get at least two more years on odsp, which should hopefully give me enough time to (1) complete the discography and (2) get a good chunk of the reading i want to do before i go back to school done. if i can get five years, it should transition me just about perfectly into a master's program somewhere. possibly in kitchener or london. there's reasons i moved to windsor, but the local place of higher education is not one of them. i stayed at carleton for a really long time because i was tied to the city and it was really a better option than ottawa for the things i was studying (and also because i liked the campus). but i think that going to a lower ranked school actually stifled me a little in terms of dealing with less than brilliant profs and slightly tedious curricula. if i'm going back to school, i'm going to go to a good one.

the flip side of that is that i really, really like where i'm staying. i wouldn't move unless i was pretty serious about it. and i'm projecting that forwards, but it's hard to predict where my head is going to be in 5 years.

and, if i can get permanent, i can basically just work out my ideas without the necessity of having to deal with the education system at all. i think there's something to be said for being the eccentric oddball that escapes peer review by publishing papers to appspot.

but, one thing at a time: i got my extension. so i can relax for the holidays and start scheming in january.

for fuck's sake, lucas...

you've been pushing the point for a week that deserting should imply the guy shouldn't be "rescued". it's getting annoying. she's been diplomatic in her response, as is her job, but let me break it down for you...

an institution such as the us army cannot allow any deserters to go unpunished for any reason under any circumstance. it must push down the message - loud and clear - that what will happen if you get caught will be so severe that you don't want to even think about it.

the army is not a democratic institution, and it can't be in order to maintain an empire like america's. it must be a ruthless, top down structure that makes dramatic public examples of people that break ranks. and, it must jump through every hoop possible to punish those people in as violent a way as they possibly can be punished.

so, deserting is not a reason to leave him there. deserting is a reason to bring him back, so his peers can see what happens if they get the same ideas in their heads.

i think i got it. or at least i think i'm happy with it. but the undo function isn't really good enough. i want total rewind. maybe that's a use for those glasses google is trying to sell, and nobody seems to want. because, really, what the fuck are they besides a surveillance device?

i'm seriously considering installing a camera on my screen to keep track of what i'm doing, so i can rewind the thing in case i haphazardly change something and forget what i did.

i mean, telling myself doesn't seem to work. and it's not even feasible, when you really think about it.

i bet the cia'd love that, huh?