the condescension was really uncalled for and hard to watch. i mean, by the time i was eight i had a better understanding of american foreign policy than lucas over there. if you're going to bring a kid like that in at all, what's the point of being snide about it......

and, it's hardly like resource management is a less pressing issue than war. in terms of consequences, it's the most pressing issue. in terms of war, it's the dominant underlying factor. mallory was right to shift the topic; you adults are all doing this all wrong.

la la la la (2002 mix)

i'm squeezing an extra single in.

this was meant to be rabit is wolf. sean wanted a song that just went "lalalala". i think his intent was to try and simplify my thought process, because what i'd been doing sounded more like FTIeikdTY7isdD7E5dk!. he was just kind of like "how about.....lalalala.".

it got a bit of an eye roll from me, as you could imagine, but i played with it. he wasn't really that excited about what i did, and it just didn't move forward. there were no further sessions, as he became interested in working with a more conventional early 00s "emotional hardcore" (think at the drive in) style guitarist and i got very involved in a relationship

despite his initial suggestion, i'd consider the result to clearly be of my own doing. so, i took the core of what i did and warped it into the first track on the reflections symphony.

as his intentions are clear, i don't have a problem completing the vocals on my own, and it's what i'll be doing as inri043. there may have been a vocal part recorded, but i don't have it any more.

so, the ostrich thing is getting pushed back a release. this is going to be a relatively quick remix, with a simple vocal line. and i'm releasing it as rabit because it's collaborative in the abstract, despite sean not actually existing in the track.

for now, this was the initial forwards version of the song, which is only coming down to me over the space of time via mp3 and a collection of scattered source tracks. there's actual nothing but guitars in this version. it's dated to nov 15, 2002.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/lalala-2002-mix

untitled (vst mix) (for thru)

i decided the vst mix is good after all, it just needs volume....

--

this track was initially written as a folk punk song, but i jumped to the scorewriter with it almost immediately. the expanded guitar demo was written in a scorewriter and then performed, rather than vice versa. it was initially less about explicitly creating a techno song and more about ordering the parts in a way that could be deconstructed more effectively.

the taiko drum part was initially just to keep time; it wasn't supposed to be a part of the song. but, as i built it up i began to realize how interesting it sounded as a techno tune and sort of ran with it.

written over the summer of 2002. remixed in december, 2014. this render is from dec 26, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-3

untitled (intended original mix)

ok.

i've decided to keep the intro guitar part out of the 2002 mix, because i'm going to soundscape the fuck out of it in ways that i couldn't have really done at the time and it just doesn't sound good in raw form.

so, this mix is done. the rss will update. i'm back at the three vst mixes for tomorrow.

when this comes up, crank the bass on it....

carefully. it's potentially speaker-blowing. but it's made to rock the low end hard.

that was the hard part, this should be quick from this point.

this compiles all the 2002 files into a mix that is as close as i can get it to sounding as i initially imagined it back in 2002. mix completed jan 27, 2015.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-intended-original-mix

this really isn't that new. it's been clear for a while now that there are far too many named species; there was paleoanthropological literature produced in the 80s and 90s that put forth the idea that all these homo *s are just presenting variation, and they need to be condensed into two or three species rather than a dozen or more. you're fighting against the egos of the researchers. this will eventually come out in the wash.

if neanderthals and sapiens produced viable offspring, and it is clear now that they did, then what that means is that - by definition - they were actually not distinct species. rather, what you're seeing in the difference in the bones is just local variation.

likewise, there wasn't a dozen "archaic" species in africa, but merely a lot of variation. these are going to need to be deleted.

now, the next question is regarding erectus. i don't see any reason to rule out interbreeding, a priori, by analyzing bone fragments. rather, it strikes me as entirely reasonable to project a discovery of erectus genes, should they be possible to really analyze.

once you get to more primitive forms, you lose the ability to differentiate. that is, you can place early sapiens (which probably interbred with ergaster) in africa, neanderthalensis in europe, the denisovans in northern asia and erectus in southern asia. but these would all just be local populations, not distinct species. any further hybridizing would exist within these base populations, which would have existed in these regions for a very long time before the out of africa migration.

the result is nothing revolutionary. it's merely a synthesis of the once competing singular and multi-regional hypotheses - out of africa, yes, but what came out of africa interbred with local populations wherever it went, creating continuity in local populations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ScqOVxPHA8

you need to take this stuff with a grain of salt. the reality is that everybody working in the field wants to name a species and is willing to twist any fragment they can find into an opportunity to do so. look around you; human variation is dramatic. we should be reducing the number of named species, not increasing it.

Grant Molyneux
I prefer wombats myself, but what is wrong with Koalas?

deathtokoalas
the nefarious cuteness of koalas cannot be tolerated by any polite society. they must be destroyed.

Grant Molyneux
You should give them a break. After all their brain size has actually reduced over evolutionary time due to the tough food they have to digest. And hey if cuteness and nefarious (comments about defenseless marsupials) are concerned you should be destroyed also. LOL :)

deathtokoalas
you fool. do you truly believe these nefarious creatures have suffered decreased cognitive abilities, or do they merely have you under their psychological control? when a caterpillar loses it's legs, it gains it's wings. their cuteness has served as a distraction. they must be annihilated before they control us all.

he brings up something important near the end, and i'm not going to fill in the blanks, here. if you see this message, do not reply to it or like it or share it. i'm only posting it here, now, because i know my life is coming to an end. just simply read it and understand it....

it was understood through most of the 20th century century that reform, for the elite, was a hobson's choice. they could share their wealth or be sent to the guillotine. and, the grisliness of the consequences aside, most people can realize the justice in the threat - so long as it's used carefully.

but, technology has changed and, because of it, the elite no longer need to live in fear of the consequences of their greed. it creates a dour future.

first, there will be no sharing. that has been decided. there will be war. that is all.

second, the technology will be used to it's maximum extent. riot police. precision drone strikes. surveillance. there's nowhere to hide. 40,000 dead in ohio...

there's always this discussion about tactics. putting 1+2 together means there's not a choice whether to fight or not, and there's not much question as to the outcome.

don't fight. in any way.

flee.

get out....

these kinds of international agreements are imperative, moving forwards. we have to learn how to sustainably share our resources, rather than remain in competition over the most profitable way to exploit them. and it's one of those little - but important - things that makes you remember why it's worthwhile to have the fascists with the Ds in charge, rather than the fascists with the Rs in charge.

of course, the rest of the world also needs to be careful about american motives regarding things like international straits.

but the actual premise, here, is very truly an absolute necessity.

i don't want to comment on this documentary directly...

yugoslavia was kind of a turning point for me. it was a little before the apec summits, which is when i caught the media balls out lying to me for the first time. but it was yugoslavia that was my first point of confusion, the first point where it clicked that shit wasn't really adding up...

i wasn't old enough to really have the focus to follow or interest in following what was really happening, and the state of the internet wasn't such that i would have really had the tools available, anyways. the internet as a reliable source of information? is she mad? well, that's kind of what i want to talk about.

the action-reaction premise struck me as reasonable. the serbs were carrying out genocide. they needed to be stopped. therefore, war was justified. and, i can't claim that my logic on the matter has wavered over the years, even if my position on the conflict has become a bit more nuanced. if milosevic was carrying out genocide then he should have been obliterated by a united nations force to enforce the message that the world does not and will not tolerate this. that remains as true today as it did then. what's a little less clear is how valid the premise is, or how much it holds up relative to various complexities. why were the russians pushing back? and why were chinese embassies getting bombed?

see, it's not that i've concluded that the narrative i got from western media was "wrong", exactly. it's that i've concluded that there's no way to know. it's the rabbit hole that people started warning us about in the first half of the twentieth century. and, what's happening moving forward is that a generation of kids are becoming cognizant that this orwellian prediction is not something that might exist in the distant future, but the reality we live in day-to-day. it's the only reality we've ever known.

faced with some ideas that didn't add up, and some contradictions coming from people in my class that were born in the region, i wanted to clear things up. i was really just curious. so, how does a young person attempt to determine what happened in yugoslavia?

in the past, one might look towards literature. but is this reasonable today? certainly, publishers have no real interest in whether they're publishing bullshit or not. in our existing economy, books are a product and not a source of information. the publisher is not going to care about the level of inaccuracy, so long as the book sells. so, you can't trust the written documents. there's no real functioning review process.

worse, is that the nature of the evidence is subject to any and all types of modification. pictures can be doctored. film can be manufactured. actors can be paid. the media is as valuable as the source, and no source is above question.

the internet provided me with an opinion that seemed to be outside the bounds of state censorship, but it seemed impossible to believe. like i was watching the xfiles. it wasn't helping with my realization that there's not a useful source.

if you realize this, how far back can you take it? if you take an agnostic position on yugoslavia - as i claim you must, unless you were there yourself - do you take an agnostic position on vietnam? auschwitz?

it's right down the rabbit hole...

what i eventually found useful in getting a better understanding of what was happening was not evidence coming at me from yugoslavia, but the history of the region combined with understood geopolitical aims of the major powers. if you present me with an image of a mass grave or a chemical weapons attack, that means nothing to me - i know this is easily manufactured, and i do not trust you enough not to manufacture it. however, if you provide me with this evidence in the context of the "chessboard" (if you will), then i can begin to draw conclusions by making deductions about rational agents.

i suspect i'm not the only person my age that fell through the rabbit hole in this time period, and i think it's something that warrants further exploration on it's own merits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzvNZz-X-50

ostrich

it's been a while since i uploaded anything totally new, so i'm going to jump ahead a little with this. it's not clear how i'll be presenting this, yet.

this is an abandoned mix from late 2002 (uploaded unmodified) and will be the track i'll be working on next.

as this is the last track of the jjjjjjjjjjj phase, i'm going to finish this as an epic. it's an exceedingly rough skeleton. i thought i had more of a score than i do, so i'm going to have to score it first. again: i thought this would be sort of quick, but it clearly needs a lot of work.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/abandoned-mix

grargh.

i'm having difficulty focusing. with all the other stuff i'm always going on about, if you had a bit of an outline of my life you'd maybe question why i'm not wondering about add. i'm kind of textbook, actually. but it's never really been something i can't get over. and i'm not about to start popping crack-cocaine....

to answer the question directly? i don't accept the existence of add. i think it's just an excuse to sell drugs to kids. sorry.

so, what's really going on?

well, i've been through this before. repeatedly. it's generally driven by a feeling of ineptitude. meaning it's more like a type of depression that sets in when the tasks in front of me aren't easy to complete. i think this stems from not going through a lot of difficulty as a kid. i was a gifted kid. i didn't learn to struggle. i didn't learn to compete; there was nobody to compete with. i wasn't faced with something i couldn't do with minimal effort until i was in my 20s, and i simply didn't know how to approach the situation. i kind of go into these states of shock, instead, where i can't address what i'm supposed to be addressing.

when i know i can get what i want out of my tools, i tend to be very efficient. it's when i'm not sure how i'm going to proceed that i start to procrastinate. it's the same thing with all aspects of my life. if i know how i'm going to approach an essay, it's done relatively quickly. if i don't, it's not done until the last minute, or a week past the due date.

what it exposes isn't some kind of chemical imbalance that can be fixed with drugs. it's more like a reversed value system. i don't have this "protestant work ethic". and i don't glorify hard work. rather, i expect to be talented enough to do things without trying, and i get depressed when i realize i'm not.

i don't find forcing it helps. it has to pass. but what's pissing me off at this particular point in time is that the amount of time i have left is probably limited. i'll find out on the 17th. but it's very likely that i will take my own life sometime between april and july, as my disability runs out and i'm left without further acceptable options. i should be getting as much done as i can...

instead, i find myself wasting time on youtube.

my goal over this period was supposed to be to get a whole lot done. but i've wasted most of the last month, and am not really clear when this is going to lift.

if i'm not able to focus on this track within a day or two, i'm going to have to skip it and come back to it.

the first time i EVER received ANY grade less than 70 was in the second year of university.

there's been a lot written about why c students end up managing things, and a students end up as drone workers. a big part of it is no doubt due to reducing independent thought in management, which is a fundamental tactic of the class war. that is, the big bosses don't want the little bosses to be smart - they just want them to be obedient. but i think another part of it is that kids with lower grades are more resilient. they have to fight harder, younger. it becomes a more dominant component of their life.

somebody like me that walks into the eighth grade, gets thrown out for picking on the teacher and then gets an a anyways because i was at a twelfth grade level when i was 8 just spends that whole process in stasis, whereas somebody that's moving at the grade level in the way the system demands is constantly struggling and learning.

at the end of it, i spent high school tossing planes and smoking pot - and still got an a average because i could have passed an equivalency test in the 7th, before i set foot in the place. the kid that struggled through with a B- consequently learned a whole lot more than i did, both scholastically and non-scholastically. when the kid that struggled walks out of school, they're walking into a world they were prepared for. when i walked out of school, i was walking into a world i didn't understand at all.

i guess it took me ten years just to figure that out.

and, at the moment, i haven't the faintest clue how to address it.

all i know is that, when i'm faced with a challenge, i tend to get depressed and give up rather than become determined and try harder.

he's missing an opportunity to make an important point.

the class war is all about reactions. that's what he's getting at with his cyclical thing (which is maybe a little counter-revolutionary, but whatever). so, the next thing that has to happen is that labour has to react to globalization. but, he's restricting his context to america.

you could pull the bangladeshi producers to their knees with general strikes, but the way things are nowadays is that they'll get up and move to cambodia.

so, action must be co-ordinated across borders to be effective. and that's hard..

..,.but it's inevitable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VbUBbvu4Co

super sore right arm...

the first thing that jumps to mind is that i've been dealing with a lot of symptoms of ms lately, and it's more evidence. but i feel that's jumping to conclusions. it might be correct, but what else could it be?

sore arm = heart attack? it's on the right side, which doesn't *really* matter. but it feels like a muscle issue. i've had my blood pressure checked several times over the last few months, and it's actually very low. so, i'm going to write that off as obscure.

carpal tunnel syndrome? don't laugh. i do absurd amounts of typing, and noticed my left wrist was a little sore the other day. i think i'm going to want to monitor that. but it's a little too high up in the arm.

for right now, i'm actually going to merely assume that i pulled it a little doing groceries yesterday. i ended up with a bigger bag of fruit than i was expecting because the strawberries and bananas were both on sale. and i had a coffee in the other hand, along with a knapsack full of soy milk and oj, because it was also on sale. so, it was a big haul. i felt it as i was walking, but not when i got home; then again, you generally don't notice it until you wake up.

i do a lot of walking, but no muscle training, so i'm in very good health but weak as a twig. the solution is to fix my bicycle and start using it...

a sore arm probably won't slow me down tonight, but it might. we'll have to see if it prevents me from sitting up or if i'm going to have to spend the night in bed.

the reason this is important is that the dominant crt race narrative largely upholds the idea of white supremacy. the idea of slavery as having to do with race is very recent, and came out of economic factors. for centuries, it was mostly about class. as class-based civilization collapsed in the dark ages, it became mostly about religion. and, as class-based civilization has been re-established, it's again become mostly about class.

i just think a global perspective is imperative to get to a real understanding of what slavery is, and this is in turn imperative in breaking down the hierarchical divisions. the way this is being approached currently isn't doing that, it's just enforcing the euro-centric perspective of white people as global hegemons - a narrative that is easily understood as largely false, if you're able to take that global perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BfYGsdv-OQ

i apologize for the source. yikes. but this is the value of youtube as a source, lol. this is easily verifiable.....take it as a starting point...

to rephrase this...

i've had this debate with white people. it goes something like this: if it's true that all races are equal (and that needs a statistical definition to be coherent due to individual variability, it's a blurry thing to try and even define), then why is it that white people have been dominant throughout history? if blacks and whites are equal, why have whites continually enslaved blacks for thousands of years?

and the answer is that the premise is false. slavery has historically usually not been about race. and when it is about race, there's no one skin colour that clearly dominates the other.

but by rooting itself in anti-empirical thinking on the topic. the dominant current leftist narrative on this (however wrong it is) is producing the empirical data that racists need to uphold their views.

i mean, it's a valid empirical question, right? if you want to know if there are superior races, you don't begin with an assumption (whatever the assumption is). rather, you look at the evidence and draw conclusions. that's how smart, modern people approach questions of the sort.

if you take this perspective that white people have been dominant throughout history, an empiricist is going to conclude that white people are, in fact, superior. and, to be blunt, i couldn't argue with the point; if it were a correct understanding of history, i'd have to agree with the deduction. so, it's important to collapse these false narratives and push the point that history does not provide this empirical argument at all.....

flipped around, consider the truth of the following statement: if it is really true that all races are equal, then history should show all races and skin colours and cultures enslaving each other at roughly equal proportions (relative to the social and technological abilities of the relative periods). and if you read it inclusively, history does in fact demonstrate this, where it is possible, throughout the old world.

you gotta check the genes, dude. and it adds up. sort of. there's a lot of white and a lot of native in there, too. but the dominant genes in african americans are the same as the dominant genes in western africa, and they're not found elsewhere. these are very different than the genetics connected to the austronesian migration across the pacific, or the native american genes. demonstrating a physical similarity to austronesians is not useful in suggesting a native american ancestry.

the similarity is the result of plasticity, which is very high when it comes to bone morphology. so, you'll notice that the indigenous people of brazil would also fit your test fairly well, as they look similar to polynesian peoples. yet, they are not genetically related. rather, this is the result of everybody living in a rainforest.

if you grabbed some people from sweden and made them live in the rainforest, it wouldn't take more than a few generations for the same traits to develop. you can already see this rather clearly with the skin tone of californians of scandinavian descent.

you're right about arabs invading malaysia, though.

wait, is this some kind of mormonism or something?

you know, i don't want to really disagree with her exactly, but i think she's taking a fairly narrow approach. but, i mean, she's what, 23? sometimes 23 year-olds sound like 23 year-olds.

she kind of picked a bad example with agriculture, because nobody's going to argue that agriculture originated in africa. excluding the nile valley, which is in africa but is geographically separated from the rest of africa, africa doesn't really have the right climate for this. it's generally understood that hunter-gatherer societies carried on in africa because it made more sense to continue that way of life in the region. agriculture developed for reasons that weren't applicable to most of africa, and didn't make sense in the terrain. now, it's hard to be sure about things that happened thousands of years before written history, but the widely held consensus is that agriculture developed in the near east about 10,000 years ago. there's some evidence that it may have developed independently in china. but, nobody argues against the idea that the agriculture that took root in the nile and moved south to ethiopia migrated into africa from the "fertile crescent".

that being said, there's some evidence that some of the earliest egyptian civilization may have been black. very contentious topic. you're arguing over the shapes of noses in carvings and wall paintings. but, i think the evidence actually does lean in that direction, indicating that one of the earliest advanced cultures was probably a black culture. the idea is that it probably developed around the modern sudan and moved north up the nile. over time, it would have converted itself into a white culture through migration and integration into a series of asian and european empires. now, here's the twist on this: the same evidence that suggests that the civilization was black in it's earliest stages suggests that they had white slaves. so, you've got to swallow a poison pill, there.

i don't want to trivialize the african slave trade, but the idea that it was about race is sort of a half-truth. it was actually mostly about religion. i can't write an essay here, so i'll do it in point form. this is the historical timeline...

1) arabs declared non-muslims slaves. arabs didn't invent slavery, and they probably weren't the first to racialize it, but racial based slavery was not common in the roman world that they took over, so this was a relatively novel development. but, it was really about religion, not race. the arabs enslaved africa thousands of years before westerners did. but, they also enslaved white slavs in eastern europe (slave and slav are, in fact, etymologically identical - the english word for slave is ethnic, but it refers to eastern europeans, rather than blacks), indians and anybody else that wouldn't convert. this was the result of the systemic slavery of eastern europeans in the muslim world.

2) the catholic church copied this with a papal bull in 1452 that declared anybody that wasn't a christian a slave. and, in fact, when catholic europeans sailed to ethiopia and found christians there, they could not legally enslave them and consequently did not. the ethiopian state survived as an independent african kingdom deep into the colonial period, before finally being conquered.

3) the reformation happened, which made northern europe independent from southern europe for the first time since charlemagne (how's that for an over-simplification?). this took countries like england outside of papal authority. but, the same basic idea of religion being the dominant reason for slavery continued to apply, and was often inverted. rather than catholics enslaving non-catholics, you had protestants enslaving catholics. hence the enslavement of ireland. meanwhile, countries like spain continued to follow the papal bull and enslave the non-christian cultures they could conquer.

4) the slave trade was commercialized, which is when it got really brutal. and plenty people in africa of multiple ethnicities - blacks, whites, arabs - made a lot of money from it. america was built on top of this slavery, but it still wasn't fully racialized. a plantation in the period would have had a mix of african, irish and native american slaves. many black americans have significant irish ancestry as the result of slave owners trying to "cross-breed" them for traits the way you'd cross-breed dogs.

5) there was always a contradiction in puritanical christians building a country on top of slavery based on non-conversion. the idea doesn't really jive well with utopian christian virtue, and the white american settlers were in many ways all about that. it wasn't until after slavery had become institutionalized in the united states (and this is relatively late - the early 1800s), and people started questioning the increasing brutality of it (partly due to their puritanical upbringing...) that religious justifications were converted into racial ones. all of a sudden, you had the church arguing for racialized slavery using biblical quotes. even as the civil war was happening and rights were being won, this hierarchical idea of race-based labour was institutionalized.

6) over the last few generations, the dominant enslaved group in the united states has actually shifted from purchased black slaves in the southeast to migrant workers in the southwest. black slavery didn't end so much as it took on the form of incarceration over trivial laws.

what i'm getting at with this is that the entire narrative revolves around casting the african out as the other - and the bulk of the justification came from religion first, and race second.

so, what is black culture, then? well, if you're going to tell me i shouldn't listen to hip-hop because i'm white, you're just enforcing the separation and upholding the hierarchy. the premise of music belonging to a culture at all strikes me as kind of ridiculous. i'm not going to tell a black guy he can't listen to rachmaninov (i'm skipping over beethoven for a specific reason) or play romantic piano music because he's black. i'd rather listen to the tunes than get weirded out by somebody's skin tone. and i don't understand why anybody would want to tell me i can't listen to or perform hip-hop because i'm white, or that it ought to be "pop" instead.

that kind of integration ought to be viewed positively. and, i get that the history here kind of sucks, given that blacks have largely lost the last few forms they pioneered. but, i think it's a complex question as to whether it was truly lost/stolen or if it was abandoned.

i just don't see how we're moving forwards with this separation of music and art into colours, when we live in such proximity with each other and share so many experiences....

it's incredibly pointless to try and argue whether white or black slavery was "worse".

firemedic30ca 
It's not really an argument of which was worse as much higher as it is a demand for recognition. The fact of the matter is every race on the planet has been a victim of slavery. It's rich vs poor, and was never skin color vs skin color, like most are taught to believe. The sickening part of this is the refusal of any one to accept it, there by allowing another part of our dark history to be forgotten.

Now, slavery was horrible no matter what your color. However, there was a point in time in which African slaves were highly priced and sought after as they were considered harder workers, while white slaves were not. This lead to more deaths among the white slave population simply because they were a dime a dozen and less desirable. The torture and punishment was essentially the same, but whites suffered a higher mortality rate. One could argue that because the blacks lived longer and suffered more, that life for them was worse because they weren't afforded the mercy of dying and no longer being a victim.

Facts are facts. This happened, and the circumstances are what they are. Accepting it doesn't make you racist, doesn't down play black suffering or change it in anyway for the rest of the world. It only changes the perceived power of those that continuously attempt to use black slavery to their favor.

deathtokoalas
i was responding to the comments section, which is full of debates about which is "worse".

but it's equally important to take slavery out of the western colonial context you're pigeonholing it into. the largest slave trading civilization in history was not america but the islamic empire, which transported upwards of ten times as many slaves out of an area that included modern day africa, india and ukraine. it's quite instructive to look at the systemic system of slavery that the arabs set up. it's a little bit unique in it's "diversity of slavery" due to the fact that they were in the middle of the world. an arab slave harem would have had people of just about every colour in it. nor would their colour have had anything to do with their condition. the mongols also took white slaves.

from the racial perspective, the arabs did not treat ukrainians any differently than they treated africans. both were inferior peoples. and they lived roughly similar lifestyles based around small agricultural villages, pastoralism and hunting. arab slave traders would land in the crimea and go out and round them up out of their villages. it was really identical to anything you'd imagine a spanish slave raid of west africa would look like, except the skin colour was reversed.

what it actually had to do with in all of these circumstances was not race or wealth but religion. i mean, it's about economics, obviously. but the criteria for oppression was always "you're in the wrong religion". the muslims simply enslaved anyone who wasn't muslim. white, black, whatever - didn't matter. the basis of slavery in western colonies is actually based on a papal emulation of this muslim economic policy, starting from a papal bull in 1452 that gave the portugese king the right to enslave non-christians. the british enslavement of catholic ireland is also religious in justification.

and, they were consistent about this in weird ways, too. one of the oldest churches in the world is actually in ethiopia. it seems to have been christianized in the roman era, and then cut off from europe - and never islamized. when the portugese arrived in ethiopia and found christians, they did not enslave them - because they did not have papal authority to do so. in fact, they formed an alliance with them against the "saracens". the result was a war where white europeans and black africans fought against arabs based on religion rather than skin colour.

so, what you're saying is correct. but it needs broader context. slavery is not and never has been about one race's superiority over another. it's always been economic in justification, and centered around broad civilizational themes. skin colour was one civilizational theme, but very short-lived. things like religion and language have historically been far more important in determining who the elite subjugates.

cogli
you are absolutely correct. And that is continuously manipulated for and by what ever socioeconomic agenda is being foisted upon us at any given moment..at which time talking of Koala we could use the ReClaim Australia movement as a classic example of your theme...the main thing that stands out with all of this is the manipulation of ignorance, lack of historical knowledge and context. Interesting also that throughout these discussions when discussing the Americas nobody has thought to mention the Chinese..on a scale of who had it worse ..phew! that's like losing the number 10. .............. But the interesting thing with the Irish that I have found, is how profoundly the Ireland Irish were shocked and horrified by what racist bigots the American Irish had become by the early 1900s..this blog and others like it made me do a little digging and there are a massive number of comments by De Valera, Collins, The IRA right the way through to the 70s when discussing funding from The USA how they are happy to work with The American Black liberation movements and Islamic groups but were not in favour of accepting aid from Irish American groups they labelled " a bunch of racist bigots"..which was bit surprising compared to urban myth....... Interesting also is that the polling in the USA showed that The Jewish Americans were by far and wide the greatest supporters of the Black Liberation and Black equality movements throughout the 40s 50s 60s and 70s ..so some eye openers there...and if we go back to your premise and apply it to the current elite model, it is interesting to see that Ireland has deliberately and forcefully blocked all attempts for anti Islamic protests to get off the ground.. their anti Islamic march as a result, managed to get only 12 protestors..where as the Australian elite are using these protests as an asset/ blind/diversion...so the alignments are still following very very old trading paths at the same time as showing,... how cultures self colonise to fit the elite of their environment in order to survive and succeed...your comment reminds me of the statement by the ex head of IBM at a Multinational Corporations meeting in the 90s :::"we are now in the privileged position where we  farm the entire world by the logic of profit..We  decide what education a country gets or if it gets one. What toothpaste they use and what they eat for breakfast and Culture, Race,  Religion and National Boundaries are  just another marketable product."

deathtokoalas
i think that nativism is a natural and almost inevitable reaction to oppression, and a lesson we have a hard time learning. up in canada, protest movements tend to integrate themselves with indigenous groups. over time, it seems like we've lost the plot on this. the reality is that an indigenous protest has greater legal protection; so, a native group can blockade an oil company and not have the cops break it up the same way that they'd break up an environmental group's blockade. it makes a lot of sense to build alliances out of that to get to common ends, and it consequently makes sense for protest groups to push solidarity with indigenous sovereignty struggles.

but, nobody really looks into the society they're fighting for: one where gender roles are enforced through expulsion, women have very few rights, gays are banned from everything, positions of civil authority are limited by ethnic background...

i look at their proposals and say "this is israel.". and, yet it's the same friends organizing solidarity rallies for the native groups that are organizing solidarity rallies for palestine. ironically, the only answer i can come to with this is that it's a type of marginalization. that is, it seems to be rooted in some kind of weird stereotype of the "benevolent indian" - the "noble savage" - that couldn't possibly cause anybody any harm.

i think if you really take a look around at the world, this is a pattern that repeats itself through history. the more you tear down an identity, the more it breeds violent forms of nationalism and extremism.

in some cases, there's little choice. the black liberation movements into the 70s were necessary, and their work has been left unfinished. with the racial profiling, school-to-prison pipeline and massive racial inequality in the united states, it seems like there's no other way to go. that's going to produce these exclusivist strains. like, i'm not on the side of anybody that clams that white people shouldn't be allowed to rap - or black people can't like rachmaninov. but, when your culture is constantly being ripped apart, that exclusivity is an inevitable reaction by people trying to reconstruct an identity.

it's easy to say "these are the last people you'd expect this from, they should know better". but, maybe that's misunderstanding the issue. maybe, it's more reasonable to think "you'd expect people with a history of being repressed to lash out at others".

web
So very true. We were never there so we do not know. All we know i what is told to us. Those who truly knew what happened are sadly gone and with them the truth.

deathtokoalas
well, i'm obviously drawing from sources. i'm not consulting my crystal ball. this information was recorded. it does exist. and, not just in historical documents, either. the video suggests dickens, and he is certainly widely regarded as a valuable source of information on the topic in england - to the point that i read dickens in high school. there's the famous text by engels, of course. and modern scholarship (zinn, for example) is ensuring that the class basis of slavery is not forgotten.

i mean, even a cursory history of greece will point to the helots. as oscar wilde pointed out not that long ago, slavery and civilization are intrinsically related. this isn't likely to be forgotten, even if it's kept a little obscured.

untitled (out of ram mix)

so, i've spent most of the night listening to two nearly identical versions of this track and trying to decide which one i want to use.

when i initially recorded the track in cakewalk (as an experiment with the program) on a windows 98 machine, i ran out of ram after eight tracks and had to go back to my normal wave editor collage-build mixing process to finish it. unfortunately, i didn't really like the edits i made and ended up defaulting to this version for many years. however, it was only saved in mp3...

on aug 11, 2010, i converted the track to 32-bit directly from the mp3 (which i verified in dec, 2014 via phase inversion) and uploaded it to bandcamp, as a part of the never really finished and with now unclear future tetris project. while i don't feel that the sound quality of the track is sufficient to act as a base for a final version, the process of compressing, decompressing and then converting to 32-bit produced something special on the bottom end that i feel is worth keeping for it's own sake. however, i'm going to have to keep the track as download-only for two reasons. the first is that i'd have to convert back to 16-bit to burn it. the second is that there's not going to be room on the disc for it, anyways.

so, i'm leaving that as it is - and the next thing i'm going to do is revisit the remix of this that i did to emulate it. now, yes, i'm going to take a snapshot at this point, but it's also going to act as the core of the final mix, so it's going to have to be a little more produced sounding. that's kind of why i felt the need to make this available. it seemed foolish to sit there and try and make a clean mix sound like a muddled mp3 mix; i got a cool bass sound out of the compression, and i should just let that be. if i'm going to remix it, it makes more sense to remix it for optimal quality.

so, that's the next thing. i've got a few hours to blow while i wait for the temperature to hit zero, then i need to do groceries. it won't be done today, but it will probably be done and uploaded for tomorrow.

this is dated to sept 1, 2002.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/untitled-original-out-of-ram-mix

i saw it again out the window tonight...

it's definitely too small to be a cougar, but the tail is too big to be a house cat.

it might be a fisher.

this is outside the fisher range, though. hrmmn. it's in the "historic range".

it could have been a pet. either way, i don't think it's cause for concern. there's my "testing" and neutralizing...

i mean, fishers are violent, nasty things. no doubt. but they're not powerful enough to pose me a serious threat the way a mountain lion would...

i used to bicycle up the cross-canada trail behind bells corners through stittsville and out to carleton place fairly often, and there's tons of deer back there. it's less that we humans don't fall into their "natural prey" like you'll hear some naturalists suggest (either out of some remnant creationist intuition, or out of an attempt to not create panic), but when there's that much good food to eat, skinny humans full of leather and cotton are less appetizing.

you move pretty quickly on a bike like that when there's no traffic to worry about, but you can hear things. and you can feel yourself being stalked, somehow. they're back there, and if somebody were to really look for them they'd no doubt be shocked by how many.

melanistic pumas are not supposed to exist outside of south america. but, it strikes me as a little bit daft to rule out the possibility altogether. those genes gotta be in there somewhere, waiting for the right mutation.

that's clearly a house cat, though.

it does look like a house cat - due to the ears, and the grooming behaviour. and some of the side shots look like a house cat's face.

however..

evolutionarily speaking, a cougar is basically a really big house cat. so, there's a lot of shared characteristics. for example, a cougar can't roar like a lion - and purrs like a house cat. it also grooms itself like a house cat.

there have been some cases of house cats growing very large, and it really wouldn't be out of the question for a population of feral cats to grow to the size of cougars over many generations if the right evolutionary pressures were present.

it's consequently hard to be certain - although i'd lean towards it being a house cat. it's definitely not a lynx or a bobcat, though.

if you could have gotten a shot of the tail, it would have been more clear.

you know, i wonder if people were sitting around in the 50s wondering when they were going to pull out of korea and japan and germany...

i don't understand why this is such a difficult point for people to get their heads around. one does not conquer a country and then pull out. the premise is absurd.

purple robes = emperor. bit of a fuck you, actually.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCF3XyAyXMU

it's a nice speech and all, but there's two concerns.

1) unlike chemical warfare (where blowback is a problem) or mutually assured destruction, rape is an effective means to control a subjugated population. it is perhaps the single most effective means to control a subjugated population.
2) there have already been several agreements signed, including the rome statute. the united states will not ratify this agreement, for obvious reasons. rather than sign new agreements that are unlikely to get ratified, it would make sense to ratify and enforce the agreements that have been agreed to and signed.

it's difficult to take ol' johnny boy seriously on this. i don't doubt he means it on some level, but he's fighting against all this double think. this has been a sort of constant for boomer age democratic politicians. the gen xers don't even seem to have the moral conflict raging in them, so this administration might actually be the last moment of sanity for quite a while. like, you could see it with hillary all the time - she seemed to actually have difficulty articulating some of her speeches. she was visibly revolted at herself more than once. but, she couldn't fight against her careerism. that battle raged, but her career always won. every time.

with ol' johnny boy, it seems like it's more of a military oath. dies hard, i guess. so, again, i don't doubt that he'd like to see some movement on this. so, why not ratify and enforce the rome statute? the russians might actually go along with it, if you take the lead (the chinese, on the other hand, wouldn't sign an agreement to consider signing an agreement, as it would restrict their options regarding signing the agreement). because it's not what's really going on, and he's under no real illusions about it.

part of his job, as secretary of state, is to sell war. that means sanitizing it, to neutralize the opposition to it. and, women have a disproportionate opposition to war. if we can rebrand war to be free of rape, might it be easier to sell to women? the future of the democratic party in some sense rests on this proposal.

and, again, i don't think ol' johnny boy is really opposed to this sanitizing, either. i mean, if you can kill a few less troops and still get the same objectives? keep the kids at home, send out robots instead. yeah, i think ol' johnny boy would see some good in that.

but a realist needs to be a realist. and this is a public relations campaign.

otherwise, they'd ratify the rome statute. right?

almost all of them do have degrees. the reality is that you actually pretty much need a degree nowadays to even bother applying; not only are these not jobs for kids, but they won't call you back unless you have post-secondary. fuck, i have two degrees and i can't even get an interview in fast food. whatever cultural bias exists to suggest these are jobs for kids doesn't actually make any sense. think it through for a few seconds, rather than allow media to define it for you. you don't let kids play with that much money, or let them run dangerous equipment, or put them in charge of running an operation that requires strict adherence to strict rules. these stores face massive performance-based competition on a wide open market: they need to get things out faster than the restaurant across the street, they need to be cleaner, they need to have better service, etc. the owners can't afford to hire children to do these jobs, and risk underperforming. they need and desire people with experience, work ethic, maturity and mental discipline that they can plug into a high-paced, physically demanding work environment. the idea of the apathetic, slacker teenager working at mcdonald's is some kind of tongue-in-cheek early 90s snl skit, not anything remotely reflecting reality.

but my point of commenting here today is to point out that this is a complete waste of time from any kind of leftist revolutionary perspective. you can expect career unionists that just want to enforce the status quo to get behind this kind of thing. the union hierarchy obviously wants to increase union membership. but that's the extent of it.

an actual communist would look at the situation and argue that these restaurants should be abolished altogether. imagine the situation of a worker in detroit driving by a closed factory on a daily basis on her way to a fast food job serving other working-class people. do you think a socialist is going to look at the situation and say "gee. she deserves more money.". no. a socialist is going to look at the situation and say "fuck fast food. that factory is unused. let's smash the doors down and get it running again.".

nobody is doing that, because there are very few socialists on this continent. there is no threat of something like that happening. rather, we're stuck in a situation of pointing out that it's something that could happen, if only people would stop wasting their lives working these pointless jobs.....

so, i don't have any opposition to building robots, but i don't see any benefit of building smart robots.

i read a lot of science fiction when i was a kid, and it presented me with the proper moral questions that are coming up in reports like this. but, it also gave me a lot of fantasies of a world where robots take over the role of slaves. as i grew older, i started to realize that the science fiction of the middle part of the 20th century was actually an extension of the leftist ideals developed in the latter part of the 19th. robots are our most realistic path to communism, and probably the only realistic option we have in front of us to abolish the human misery necessary for industrial capitalism to function.

so, why are we so obsessed with building them in our images? i don't see a value in it. robots making cars and running supply chains sounds like actual emancipation, in a way humans have never come close to accomplishing. but, robots telling us what time it is sounds like an extension of the capitalistic enslavement we're currently trapped within.

as so many people have said before me: the value of technology is what you do with it. it's not inherently evil. but we need the proper foresight in place as to how robots can free us from labour, and how they can make the whole situation even worse.

put simply: keep them stupid.

some people drink 3/4 of a bottle of something on their birthday and pass out somewhere.

i ate 3/4 of an x-large pizza and passed out somewhere (safe). although it may have been the cough syrup. so, maybe not tomorrow, but the next day at the latest...

i probably won't eat for like a week, now....

"it seeks then in russia the enemy it has lost in france, and appears to say to the world, or to say to itself: if no one will have the complaisance to become my enemy, i shall no longer have any occasion for navy or armies, and shall be forced to diminish my taxes. ... unless i make an enemy of russia, the harvest of wars will be terminated." - thomas paine, 1792

new cold war? no.

well, he took me *half* seriously. and it turns out he could fill out the forms, but decided not to. instead, i got two appointments in february - which is enough to string me along without pulling off the aspirin stunt. it's still possible, but not for another month. we'll see how that goes.

i dropped some hints, mentioned i may need to "generate a crisis", so it shouldn't be a total surprise. i think he's mostly got me coming back in for observation on the 2nd; i can see an actual psychiatrist on the 17th.

this message will self-destruct in 24 hours.

i just realized they scheduled me with a nurse, who can't fill the forms in, anyways. i don't think it's likely that i'm going to be taken seriously, today.

i'd consequently say it's almost completely certain that i'm going to be in the hospital by noon. i'd just point out that the purpose of this is to create a crisis, because they seem unable to react to perform on a crisis management level and solely able to perform on a crisis response level. that is, i seem to have little choice but to create a crisis situation if i want to get these forms filled in. this is a very stupid/liberal way to organize a system that is likely to cost more in the long run than a focus on prevention would, but we live in a very stupid/liberal society....

the point is that i'm not putting myself in serious danger, at least not today. i will give them a time frame before i begin to consume the aspirin. i will consume the aspirin in the medical facility, if i have to. they will have no choice but to call an ambulance, and they should be able to pump my stomach fairly easily.

i will ensure that this is done in an easy to respond to manner the first few times i do this, because the point is to draw attention to myself rather than to actually succeed. classic cry for help scenario. if this drags on unsuccessfully, and i'm faced with eviction again, i will choose a more decisive way to kill myself than overdosing on aspirin at the doctor's office. i've explained my position on this, and the rational factors that may or may not lead to my decision.

i'll update if there's a different outcome. but that would be a surprise to me.

i've given them every opportunity to respond in accordance with their public mandate, and wash my hands of responsibility regarding the consequences of their inaction.

i can only hope that more people are willing to take this kind of a confrontational stance when it comes to dealing with public institutions that have been co-opted by liberalism, and are now working against their designated purpose.

hopefully, people get fired.

yes, as others have pointed out, legalizing marijuana would make it more difficult for kids to get it, not easier. i was fifteen once. want beer? that's hard - you've gotta convince somebody to buy it for you, or you need to steal it from somebody's fridge. want pot? that's easy, you just need to find $10 and not be hopelessly socially ostracized.

but, here's the thing: he's not actually going to do this. the liberal party has been promising this for years. it's like national daycare - it's a populist campaign ploy. the whole campaign on the left and govern on the right thing. if they actually do it, they'll lose that voting demographic. and that says nothing of drug war pressure from the united states.

these ads may be popular amongst the base, and may help raise money. but this is not a smart strategy from the conservatives given that it's essentially a non-issue. seen a poll on this? support for marijuana legalization in canada is nearly as popular as cats are on the internet. and, when you start talking about people under 50 it's almost universally agreed upon. it's just making them look like a bunch of old, out of touch fuddle duddles.

let's be honest...

if pet were alive, he'd be using exactly the same tactics as harper: he'd be pointing out that his son is intellectually unfit to run the country, calling him an empty suit and a bleeding heart and mercilessly making fun of his hair.

as much as i'd like to see a change in government in this country, the reason he'd be doing that is because it's true.

the liberal party has fallen a long way over the last twenty years. i'm not going to write another retrospective or post another eulogy. but there was a long period of time where, even if you didn't agree with them on every issue, you could count on them to run somebody with a head on their shoulders that wouldn't do anything stupid. those days seem to be over.

what i will say is this: there is no longer a default choice. if they get back in, it's not going to be another dynasty. and there's no clear answer as to how we can get back to that sort of passive comfort level of at least being pretty sure there's an option that's at least not going to fuck anything up.

it's a trick question. all eastern coyotes are coyote-wolf hybrids. there are not any pure coyotes in this region. if you see something that looks like a coyote, be aware that it is certainly part wolf.

their primary diet consists of feral cats, which are more along the size of an animal that is at serious risk. that includes small dogs. however, they will eat your labs if you give them the chance. you should keep them on a leash.

they seem to be all over the city at this point. i'm right in the middle of downtown, and just walked outside and saw tracks across my front lawn that seem intermediate in size between a wolf and a lab. my neighbour feeds the stray cats; i suspect there'll be at least one missing in the morning.

you need to be careful with these think tankers, as they're all working for somebody.

the sunni/shia thing is a tool to promote various conflicts, rather than the point of the conflict itself. well, there may be some legit nutbars in saudi arabia. but it's a secondary concern. it's not hard to guess what it's actually about. it starts with an 'o' and rhymes with "coil".

take a step back. the meta conflict remains the cold war. the intelligentsia has wanted to move on for years, but it's a lot of delusional neo-liberalism. history didn't end. it didn't even shift. same shit carried on without a blip. it's just that the americans got a step up on the game. what's been happening since 1990 is that russian influence has been waning, and the chinese haven't been able or willing to step in, which created a power vacuum. the various proxy wars are the result of local interests stepping into this power vacuum and jockeying for control.

so, you've got this saudi arabia v iran thing. but this is not the dominant conflict. the saudis are armed to their teeth with billions of dollars of us arms. the iranians know better than to poke them. it's a conflict that's over before it starts. even the israeli intelligence people have come out and stated that iran is unable to pose any kind of a military threat to anybody in the region.

rather, the dominant proxy war happening right now is between turkey and saudi arabia. unlike the iranians, the turks are serious players and pose a serious threat to saudi ambitions in the region. europe's continual refusal to allow turkey in (and if i were turkey, i wouldn't even want in at this point) has forced them to focus to their south. syria. iraq. egypt. all this instability is the result of turkish aligned groups fighting with saudi-aligned groups to walk into the vacuum created by the assumed inevitable russian pullout (which is in fact not inevitable, and not happening).

meanwhile, america is doing what the british have been doing for centuries, which is keeping everybody at each other's throats and profiting off the conflict from all sides.

i mean, what's been driving this mess in syria is the question of which american ally is going to take over when the russian-backed assad regime falls - the saudis or the turks. but, in fact, it seems as though the russians are going to maintain control of the region, even if it means that all that's left of it is a pile of rubble.

and the saudis and turks are reduced to bickering amongst themselves on the iraq/syria border, while the kurds are all like "hey, wait a minute here..." and the population is increasingly siding with iran as a stabilizing force.

well, i've got all my documents in order. tomorrow morning at 11:00 am. at least it'll be nice out....

i'm going to have to bring up the ms thing. i don't know if there's some kind of test for it. it may be the best way to do this. i mean, i can handle some muscle spasms and stuff but i've recently been getting the classic difficulty swallowing, and i think i'm really better off getting it diagnosed. if i can get them to take me seriously...

it's an mri...

detroit has a serious wild dog problem, but i'm not aware of one here and getting across the river would be rather difficult.

City of Windsor naturalist Paul Pratt said he hears reports of coyote sightings from everywhere in the city, even downtown. Coyotes took down a deer in the woodlot behind his LaSalle house about a month ago.

They’re mostly nocturnal and largely go unnoticed, Pratt said.

“If you have small dogs or cats, you shouldn’t let them out at night unattended, even if you’re in a built-up area.”

He said there are more coyotes in Windsor now because there’s more wildlife in Windsor – skunks, feral cats, groundhogs, possums and deer.

“There’s all this wildlife, something’s got to eat them,” said Pratt. “We have coyotes.”

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.