canada being on the verge of electing a....well, they're not really a socialist party. but they're a third party. this is a pretty big deal. we're a left-leaning country. our liberal party has swung about as far left as you can without embracing socialism. for example, we nationalized the oil industry in the 70s - under a liberal government. and the party poised to win isn't likely to do anything like that. but, it's still a big deal in the landscape of the political system.

the liberal party of canada is often called the most successful political party of the 20th century. in terms of electoral victories, it is a true statement. they won long mandates and governed for long periods. they wrote the bulk of our existing constitution. in a three party system, no party is ever completely safe from losing party status. to see the party collapse would be to lose a little piece of the country's history and culture.

but, it's looking increasingly necessary.

it's not completely unprecedented. the liberals were in this position once before, in the mid-80s. canada was the last to embrace thatcherism and did so with the least amount of zeal. in the end, the banks forced a lot of the policies that we did half-adopt on to us. even our conservatives are really liberals, and they just didn't fall for any of that 80s economic mumbo jumbo. it's largely politics rather than economics, but we were flirting with a junk status credit rating for a while - because our conservative party wouldn't make the cuts being pushed, because they knew it didn't actually make sense to get to the the end demanded of them. this is a bit of a stand that canada took against the imf that i wish was more thoroughly covered. and, it was our conservative party that took it. they privatized a few things - like the oil industry: a disastrous decision that is now politically out of bounds to discuss. but, instead of rolling off health care and other services, they took the bold policy decision of raising taxes. it destroyed the party. but it may have saved the nature of the country.

when the conservatives won in 1984 under the tide of thatcherism, it was a convincing win. mulroney got over 50% of the vote. they won, fair and square. no excuses. the liberals and the then third place party (the quasi-socialist ndp) were really at a roughly equal footing for the next couple of years. there was a lot of talk of the ndp overtaking the liberals. but, that didn't happen. rather, the liberals won a very large majority in 1993 and held on to it until 2004.

why was it different then?

a lot of analysts have focused on the fact that the ndp had a female leader over much of this period. it's not something for anybody to be proud of, but it may have had a small effect. i don't think this is the dominant factor.

i think the dominant factor is the liberals' record in government in the preceding periods, combined with their following policy proposals.

standing in 1993, one would look back at the trudeau government as a pretty progressive one. it was a liberal capitalist government, so all that criticism applies. but, it moved about as far out of that rubric as it possibly could. it created universal healthcare. it nationalized oil. it wrote a very forward-thinking constitution. i could go on for a while, but it's pointless. so, when chretien showed up and said he was going to renegotiate nafta and reorganize the gst as a luxury tax, left-leaning voters had every reason to believe him - the party had a record of it. they campaigned on the left, with a history of left-leaning policies and won based on that strength.

but, the 90s were different. canada had the imf breathing over it's shoulder and had to make some deep cuts. there's two subtleties that the left misses in this debate. the first is that the cuts were meant to be temporary, until various structural adjustments asserted themselves; the harper government has all but demolished this plan, but it was very real and did result in large funding restorations in the early 00s. the second is that the imf was pushing hard for "market liberalization", and threatening consequences; temporary funding cuts hurt people, but they were better than full privatization, which was the only other option. canada could not have continued on the path it was on and accept junk credit rating status. a hefty level of criticism should be levelled at these international bodies for their interference, but the world is as it is.

that's not the easiest debate to articulate, let alone win. looking at the liberals' 90s record today does not have the same pull to left-leaning voters as it's 70s record did to left-leaning voters in the 90s. it's a combination of fiscal conservatism and mixed market economics, pastiched together under a desire to squirm out of heavy international pressure to conform to the washington consensus amidst heavy domestic opposition to it. as a collection of policies, it's not going to appeal to anybody at all. it's only in understanding the context that it appears to even make sense, and that's beyond the realm of the average voter. educated voters don't even tend to really realize exactly what was happening.

so, they can't campaign to the left on a record of leftist policies because they haven't had leftist policies in decades.

and, the electorate's shift is consequently entirely rational. this is different.

the establishment hates clinton. she can't win. that's why they bankrolled obama to victory in 2008. i'm entirely expecting the banks to step in and bankroll somebody.

the narrative, of course, was backwards. people saw obama as the underdog, taking out the establishment candidate. the opposite was true.

i'm getting deja vu.

you're talking about sanders' fundraising as a good thing. rather, it should be a red flag. had voters listened to the people that were pointing out that obama was working for goldman sachs, we might have avoided electing him.

i think it's very important that people know where he's getting that money from. as mentioned: i was expecting them to come in and fund somebody to knock hillary out. i'm a little shellshocked that this person appears to be bernie sanders. but, i guess we all have a price.

i don't want to go through this again. the liberal media has a responsibility to vet his funding sources, and get the information out there.

i'm not saying hillary is a great choice. i'm saying i don't want to go through another wall street commercial for hope and change and end up with the heritage foundation dictating policy again.

imagine forcing everybody to go to college, or pay a fine.

i'm going to take a middle position on this. i'll argue that raising the minimum wage doesn't have an effect on jobs, but it's to a point, of course. i think that more to the point is that, somewhere along the way, we have to agree that what we call the "living wage" should not be the minimum wage - but also that there should be more living wage jobs and less minimum wage jobs. i think that we need to apply a needs-based model to get to a fair answer here. market economics aren't capable of really addressing this, as they gloss over too many details and they're approaching the issue from the wrong perspective.

the idea behind calculating the living wage is sound. lots of people have families. they require a certain amount of income to exist. wages in some sense should reflect what they need. i don't argue with this, and i agree that these are calculations that need to be done to create policies that need to be implemented.

however, the truth is that the labour force is full of plenty of people that don't have families. young people. people that are single. i'm from ontario, and we're relatively progressive, but the minimum wage has still always been considerably less than the living wage, as it's calculated here - and that varies from city to city. even so, the truth is that i've never had a problem making ends meet on minimum wage. but, there's lots of factors with that. i don't pay for cable. i don't have kids. i walk, bike or take public transportation; i don't have a car. etc. nor do i want any of these things, nor would increasing my income incentivize me to want any of these things. what the living wage calculation is missing is that i represent a fairly large fraction of the workforce; the truth is that it really doesn't make a lot of sense to pay me a minimum wage that is calculated as the minimum required for a single mother to live in a city with a car, because i'm not a single mother with a car and never will be. that's almost twice what i really need. as a rational agent, i wouldn't turn down the money. but, the truth is that i'm going to spend it on concerts and guitar effects. which is good for the economy and everything. but the point is clear. what i require as a minimum wage is considerably less than what a single mother would require as a living wage.

if you take a look at the workforce, you realize that a large percentage of minimum wage workers are older people with families. this strikes me as more of a root of the problem. there has to be way to find better jobs for these people, that pay living wages - and allow me to continue flying solo rather comfortably on the minimum wage.

so, if this is an issue for federal politics, it reduces to the need for a better jobs strategy, rather than a mandated wage increase. and, if that is deemed impossible, i'm left with the conclusion that there ought to be a legislative framework that determines salaries based on needs - and restricts discrimination on the point with the highest penalties. it's very much in contradiction with liberal market values, but i'm sorry - if i'm working the same job as a mother with two kids, you really ought to be paying her twice as much as you're paying me.

even if that's not something anybody wants to jump at, it's still not really a federal issue, because the living wage is dramatically different across the country. the only way it becomes a federal issue is if the legislation mandates action at a state or even municipal level. and, while my understanding of the united states constitution is weaker than my understanding of the canadan constitution, i'm pretty sure it's unconstitutional for the president to pass a law telling the states to pass a law.

so, i think this needs to be decoupled and approached a lot more subtly. throwing a flat number out there is easy politics, in some sense. i don't think it's good policy.

the strangest thing about this is that tony banks manages to look like the archetype of the 80s pop geek - in 1972. at least you can't accuse him of following a bad fashion trend.

the return of the giant hogweed

news reports are indicating that the giant hogweed is currently invading canada, and is indeed immune to our herbicidal battering. warnings have been produced that children should be aware of their presence. can we charge the plants with nursery crimes?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f59EKHdeyKc

just another thought...and i think it requires it's own post.

you point out in the video that you have to give conservatives credits for sticking to their guns and pushing their points without compromise. but, you're glossing over a larger strategic realty, which is that we've seen a role reversal. this is summed up in the term "radical right".

the language here gets messy, because we think of conservatives as representing the status quo and liberals (or socialists) fighting against it. but, that hasn't been true in a long time - since roosevelt, really. socialism is still outside the status quo, but liberalism has been the norm for a long time. the conservative movement has made a lot of progress in undoing the liberal status quo since the 1980s, but the process continues. well, it's weird because they adopted some liberal ideas (like free trade) and warped them for their own purposes. but it's still an ongoing process of reforming conservatives in battle against status quo liberals. you can see that in this debate - you are on the defensive, and standing up for the existing system. that puts you at a strategic disadvantage that you're confusing for a lack of strength in resolve.

in the process, liberals have conceded any impetus for reform to the right. liberals today rarely fight for anything to change; they fight for things to stay the same. it's conservatives that are fighting for change.

it's suggested here that the strategic shift should be to put your heels in and stand up for the status quo. that's not going to work. it's never worked. it just exposes the flaws in the status quo. again: you're confusing a strategic disadvantage for a lack of resolve.

rather, the strategic shift that liberals need to embrace is to get back to fighting for their own initiatives. human organ trafficking is a serious issue that liberalism has a lot to say about. but, instead of pushing reforms on our own terms, we're sucked into this position of standing up for the status quo. on issue after issue, there is always a strategy that can convert the debate out of defending an attack and into an attack of our own, but we tend not to take that option. we should.

yeah, but how many people pick him as second choice? calm down. a quarter of a half is an eighth, and that's roughly what you'd expect his rhetoric - which is populist, he doesn't really mean it - to actually appeal to.

if a study were published tomorrow that said that a little more than 10% of americans are xenophobic, white supremacist, racist doofuses, you'd argue the numbers are too low.

supporters of the religious right won't vote for him. he's bad enough that moderates and independents might actually vote democrat. that's likely a plateau...

however, it says a lot about the economic situation in the united states, which needs to be seriously addressed. trump is profiting from it in the short term. it's what he does. a wake up call, but we're not there, yet.

yeah. you addressed that second point. good analysis.

well, what does that say about the process of granting tax-exemption status?

the videos are incriminating. denying it is the wrong approach. but, the issue is not the legality or morality of abortion or the legality or morality of tissue donation - these ought to be beyond question, and you shouldn't be buying into that narrative. rather, the issue is that a big, corrupt corporation is acting like a big, corrupt corporation. this is an argument to get profit-generating market mechanisms out of health care; the left should actually be taking advantage of it to push for serious health care reform.

if the right gets their way on this, it's going to amount to a privatization, and that's going to open up a market for body parts. their proposed solution is going to create what they claim they're arguing against. now, history suggests there might be something to the idea that this is what they might actually be angling for, but it's a conspiracy theory, and it's sort of inconsequential whether it's actually true - no matter how strongly you support abortion rights or medical research, there are obviously extreme ethical problems attached to the creation of a market in human organs. and, that's the greater issue that needs to be grappled with: that defunding this group is going to exacerbate this problem. as mentioned, the only logical way to approach this is as a catalyst to set off serious health care reform.

i mean, i know you just went through that, but it wasn't serious health care reform, it was just a handout to the insurance companies.

again: when you have a health care system designed around the generation of profit, you have to expect this kind of behaviour. you can make all the laws in the world, and enforce them as bluntly as you'd like - it's not effective. so long as the practice is a business, the market will drive corrupt behaviour. the root cause here is the nature of  the american health care system.

it's clear that there's a problem here, but defunding the group is not an answer. that functionally amounts to fully privatizing the business, which is likely to lead to worse abuses. this is deeper, systemic and requires a different approach.

i am a strong proponent of abortion rights and medical research. however, i do believe that the potential sale of human body parts is an issue that is serious enough for congressional investigation. some proposed solutions that are better than defunding:

1) pass legislation that forces a public auditing of tissue donation costs. in fact, make it a regular thing. make the figures accountable. ensure that exact costs are precisely delineated. this is broader than planned parenthood - it should be applied to any situation where the possible profiting of selling human tissue is an issue. this is reasonable accountability, and should really exist anyways.

2) you could install the state as an intermediate in tissue donation, and have the recipients refund the state rather than the private party.

it's not wise to underestimate the intelligence of your opponents. analysts have been predicting a rise in white supremacism as a consequence of the failure of neo-liberal economic policies for many years. mobs of angry, desperate people attract demagogues. you're better off working to reverse the root causes than smugly insulting them from a distance.

it's very delicate. quebec has already made the choice for the rest of canada: the serious option is the ndp, by lieu of their dominance there. if the country goes along with this, the ndp will likely sweep. but, if it doesn't go along with this then the vote splits and harper sweeps. for all the talk of a close election, the three-way dynamic is actually putting down two dramatic majorities as the only really likely outcomes. the way these models are distributing votes is really not likely to translate into reality; you're really not likely to see any sort of minority government come out of this election.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mulcair-trudeau-approval-ratings-point-to-potential-for-growth-1.3161855

Tired taxpayer
@Jessica Murray .........................Sorry dear but quebec does not make the choice for Canada, that was proven last election. Not trying to be nasty but id rather have putin run Canada than a PM from quebec, especially those two clowns.

Jessica Murray
@Tired taxpayer well, putin and harper are ideologically very similar, so you might get your wish.

it’s always been an inapplicable model to apply to any kind of retail or service sector. the reason is that labour demand is relatively inelastic, because commodity demand is relatively inelastic. at the end of the day, employers make decisions based on what they need to run their business, not what they can pay out.

suppose a big company like a walmart has x workers. if it could survive with x – y workers, it would. it wouldn’t keep those extra y workers just because it can afford it – it would lay them off to maximize revenue. so, you have to assume that the business is already hiring the bare minimum number of people that it can to carry out it’s operations. increasing the salary of those x workers doesn’t all of a sudden mean that the business requires less workers. it actually follows that laying off workers is consequently an impossibility, unless they want to downscale operations altogether – for example closing departments. but, they would only do that if those departments were not profitable, anyways.

rather, the realistic choice that a big company like a walmart needs to make in the face of a minimum wage hike is whether it wants to eat the loss or raise prices. the logic that follows is that minimum wage increases do not create unemployment so much as they fuel inflation.

in some cases, that inflation may then lead to job losses as small companies become uncompetitive. but, this is a consequence of the efficiency of the economies of scale and something that should not be fought against. the demand will then move to larger companies, who will need to hire workers to compensate for the increase in demand. arguing that workers should eat low wages so their bosses can remain in the bourgeois class isn't an argument that anybody should sympathize with.

so, the real issue is inflation, the real concern regarding inflation leading to job losses is for small businesses and it's something that will balance itself out in the long run.

a better argument against wage increases is consequently that it's a waste of time because inflation just eats into it. but, as pollin notes, this is acknowledging a problem without taking steps to address it.

the proper solution is to index the minimum wage to inflation. this may seem politically unpalatable, but the government of ontario has recently done this - and at inflation-adjusted levels that are actually historically high. there wasn't even any really serious pressure. it was an economic decision, to spur demand. see, that's how you actually create jobs - you give people more money to spend. canadian liberals are a different breed than american democrats. they actually take liberal economics seriously, rather than merely provide lip service to it. but, it demonstrates it's not an impossible policy.

tying inflation to the cpi [the bread basket of necessary goods] should act as a disincentive for companies that make items in the cpi to reflexively boost prices as a reaction to the mandated wage increases, as it's just an unending cycle. but, it may have the effect of increasing the prices of luxury goods. that's a shift in prices. but it has another positive impact - it's a carbon tax, by stealth. regardless, what we want is the price of necessities to not run away and if that means the price of luxuries needs to go up a bit then it's a reasonable offset.

valid point and whatnot - no argument. but, there's a part of this discussion that i'm never able to really understand. i spent hours in the car when i was kid, while i waited for parents to run errands on the way back from various things. there's a certain age where you don't really want to be seen walking through the mall with your parents, so i always asked to stay in the car - on the condition that they left the battery on, so i could listen to the radio or put in a tape. this allowed for the air conditioning to run. he'd take the keys with him. my memories spent in the car alone are consequently relatively positive.

i think that there's a larger problem with leaving a very young child or a pet in the car for a long period than the temperature. but, i'd argue that there's a relatively young age where it's not much of a concern for a short period, and that sometimes it's tactically the only real option. in those cases, it's not a very difficult task to leave the battery on to provide for air conditioning.

why that is never mentioned, i don't really understand.

deathtokoalas 
+tupen see, that's very true and everything. but, i think the likelihood of the fan failing is relatively remote. on top of that, chances are the air was on on the ride there. i'm not arguing with the premise: you don't want to leave your dog alone in a hot car for any extended period of time. but, you can't take your dog into a grocery store, for example, either. you could take them home first, sure, but that's not always reasonable. you could also just turn the fan on. it's probably better than leaving them outside tied to a pole or something in the searing heat.

as i mentioned, there's bigger problems with leaving very young kids in a car by themselves. i'd say that's up to around three, you've got abduction issues. they might randomly start choking, or...it's just irresponsible. but, once they can walk and talk, and be told to sit in the car and not open the door for strangers, and you're pretty sure they're going to listen to that request, leaving them in an air conditioned car for ten minutes doesn't strike me as much of a crime.

deathtokoalas
+tupen well, i think that physics kind of disagrees with you. but that's ok. there's only one way to find out: find a car in arizona and try it and get back to me on your results.

but, when you do the experiment, don't get into a car that's been sitting in the sun all day. leave the air on for a half hour first.

i suppose you can cook up jingoism with this kind of nonsense, but it has no rational moral footing. we routinely give awards to war criminals.

i have no tears to shed for dead soldiers; i see it as gang violence. the more they kill each other off, the better it is for everybody else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Q0MMHwx4k

canada's muslim and arab population dwarfs it's jewish population by several orders of magnitude, is more inclined towards conservative value systems than north american jews (who tend to lean left...) are and is likely not statistically less wealthy (although it may have less ultra-wealthy people). canada is better than the united states in limiting campaign donations. from a domestic political perspective, it is entirely irrational for the conservatives to blindly support israel at the expense of alienating a larger arab vote that's more inclined towards it's policies.

i think the truth is that harper is an evangelical christian of a particularly fundamentalist type. i think it's a personal conviction, brought out by a complex interaction between his religious beliefs and being raised in an environment where the second world war never really ended. i think, in his mind, nato is still fighting to save the world from evil, and supporting israel falls into that narrative for whatever reason.

you have to understand that it's widely recognized in canada that stephen harper is not mentally well - he is at the least a clinical psychopath, and has shown multiple symptoms of various personality disorders. it's not always wise to try and understand him using the "rational thought" model. he is constantly behaving erratically.

that was a long time ago, now.

it's interesting to wonder how much of an effect that this fiasco had on the collapse of the bloc. the bloc was created to represent quebec's interests; at the time of this mess, they hadn't been actively campaigning for sovereignty in quite some time, and had instead coalesced into a regional block. harper has never been anything but reviled in quebec - and this is a political fact, not a cultural one. had all those seats been liberal or ndp, there's a chance that dion & layton may have formed a government in the first place. the clearest consequence of this mess was consequently that the existence of the bloc was acting against the interests of quebec.

harper's point seems valid if you're flying on the seat of your pants through this, but anybody with an understanding of electoral politics realizes he's not making any sense. we don't vote for a prime minister. we vote for members of parliament. the members of parliament then choose the prime minister. that's not an opinion, it's the way our government works. if mr. harper wants to take the unprecedented step of declaring himself president...

the fallout of this was very negative for the liberals. i've long believed that dion was sabotaged on the inside by ignatieff, who strikes me as a kind of a machiavellian bastard. and, in the long run they might not recover.

but, i'm here today because i think the liberals are going to be devastated in the upcoming election, which is beginning to look more and more like an ndp sweep. it's delicate. due to vote splitting on the left, the difference between an ndp sweep and a conservative sweep is merely a few points. 200 seats are going to swing on 3-4%. it's dramatic, and not representative of the country's will in much of any outcome.

and, i think stephane dion is sitting in what is probably the only safe liberal riding in the country.

i believe they made a mistake in abandoning him too quickly in favour of what they saw as a coronation, against any kind of logic. dion is in the mould of the previous leaders of the past liberal dynasties: he has huge amounts of experience, and has written some substantial legislation. replacing him with a tv host from another country that pretty much everybody agrees is politically a democrat was cynical and foolish. he had a set of very good policies. he needed time, patience and support. in a past era, he would have gotten it.

the remaining opportunists will abandon the party in october, as it is now void of immediate opportunity. i expect that the task to rebuild this party is going to fall on him, once again. he'll have all the time in the world, this time.

pluto has a really weird orbit that brings it in between uranus and neptune, and actually takes it closer to uranus from time to time. there's a large, measurable effect of neptune on pluto's orbit that is well understood. accepting that the geological activity may be due to gravitational effects that planetary mechanics refers to as "oscillations" is still a little outside the realm of accepted science, but it's also a research question that is building greater support. it seems as though planets like jupiter and mars may have some effect on the geological activity that occurs on earth. likewise, the answer to this apparent mystery may very well lie in this developing understanding; it may be gravitational interaction with the other planets, primarily neptune.

i see they're ruling out tidal drag because of the perception that charon and pluto are in equilibrium, but this is a goofy assumption for three reasons:

1) those calculations are fairly crude. i wouldn't be going around using them to argue against anything.
2) "equilibrium", in context, is never going to be "perfect equilibrium". there's outside forces. it's not a closed system.
3) the larger pluto-neptune-uranus system orbits in cycles that are measured on the scale of centuries. we don't have the kind of data required to draw conclusions about the stability of the system, and won't until we can at least observe an entire cycle with what we today call modern equipment.

it's consequently more accurate to say something like "plato and charon seem to be in approximate equilibrium at this phase of the uranus-neptune-pluto system". and, that statement doesn't say anything about the possibility of tidal drag through other phases of it.

the way i'd imagine it is something along the lines of that pluto is moving through these gravitational fields in a relatively erratic fashion and that the modulations that occur as the result of that movement are exerting pressure in different directions. for a large part of the orbit, pluto would be held in place by a four-body system dominated by itself, the sun, neptune and uranus. it would often be pulled in opposite directions by uranus and neptune. oscillations in that system could produce the forces required to set off the plate mechanics.

but, i don't really have the interest to work this out in detail. at least not right now, anyways.

omm

initially written in 1994. first full recording in 1996. recreated in mar, 1998. reclaimed & remixed on july 18, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/omm

unfortunately, it's not just a dollars and cents issue. putting the decision of who gets care and who doesn't in the hands of a board of directors carries all kinds of baggage. this idea that it's an objective decision based on maximizing profit is far too kind to the system. rather, you also have to take account of things like racial biases, personal favours and every other kind of corruption you could possibly imagine.

and, that's the irony in the propaganda. the right talks about collectivist health care systems as these centralized bodies that have the power to make decisions that will affect your lives. in truth, that's the system that america already has. most other advanced countries (like canada) have the concept of universality and refusal of treatment worked into their legislation - and in some cases it's even in the constitution.

the eugenics death councils are the insurance companies. and, they exist essentially nowhere else in the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXBy1UgZRLs

of all the things i don't understand about america and americans - and there are many - one of the most startling has always been exactly why it is that kansas city is not in the state of kansas. that seems like a no brainer; real obvious. only in america, right? but, in fact, i don't even need to look it up - it's to avoid taxes, right?

i'm sure your mom is probably a very nice person

initially written in 1994. first full recording in 1996. recreated in mar, 1998. reclaimed on july 18, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/im-sure-your-mom-is-probably-a-very-nice-person

the original series was a horribly boring, unfunny show without any hint of meaningful commentary. i give it six months. there won't be a second season.

rather, people will realize that their memories are warped by other factors, like enjoying time with their dog.

the hanging part of this is especially troubling, as it has historical ties to lynching. i can't prove anything, but i suspect there's a much deeper story underlying this. who didn't get the job?

Cotton Candie
+deathtokoalas you know that feeling is unreal! I've met too many harassed stalked women who've been wrongfully hauled in with no legally binding excuse & released arbitrarily at 3 am in the worst parts of town with none of their own things... i can believe more is at work here for Sandy to have worked this hard and gotten this far then just give up? no. that's what the folks who say that ish would do.

martin michel
+deathtokoalas Lynching? lmao you fucking crackhead.

deathtokoalas
+martin michel well, it seems to me like a woman was killed via hanging by the corrupt kkk-linked police because she accepted a job that somebody else (likely also kkk-linked) wanted. that's a lynching.

unfortunately, the investigation will also likely be kkk-linked.

"it's blatantly obvious" is not a legal argument. so, there's going to need to be an independent investigation to figure out what actually happened - despite it being blatantly obvious. i'd advise beginning with the other job applicants.

you have to add up the reform & progressive conservative totals in the 90s, but the last time the conservative party of canada polled under 29% in an election was in 1945, when the opponent was william lyon mackenzie. popularity swings widely and whatnot, sure, but there's a certain level of ideological support for the right in canada, and it stands somewhere around 30%. since 1945 (that is, the post-war era), the conservatives have only polled under 30% once - the year that their former leader endorsed the liberal party, under concerns that the new conservative party was lurching to the extreme right. that's the absolute, rock bottom minimum. 29%.

so, you don't need to ask a dead dog for advice to conclude that the polling putting the conservatives around 27% is a little eager. that would be historic. harper is bad, but he's not that bad. he will hold his base.

so, you need to pencil that bottom in at 30%. that's as low as you can realistically expect those numbers are going to go. and they have - in fact - been this low on numerous occasions since 2006. harper has consistently been far less popular than his predecessors, often hovering around the party's rock bottom level of potential support. the truth is that, as a leader and a strategist, he's been an unpopular failure since the start. he's just been lucky to have an incompetent opposition.

this is why i've been arguing against the liberal strategy. they can't eat into that. they could elect joe clark. they could change their name back to the liberal-conservatives. it doesn't matter. a hair under of a third of canadians are going to kneejerk to the right-most mainstream option. not out of any reasoned argument. not out of any identification with branding or leadership. but just out of base ideological conviction. it's been trying to bleed a rock a death.

and, as was predictable, the ndp are sneaking up from the other side - because the liberals have spent the last ten years trying to get conservatives to vote for them.

mulcair may not have time to build the momentum to sweep. but he might. it depends on how fast this happens. but, the support is going to come from the liberals. at the end of the day, the conservatives will not fall through their 30% bottom. but, depending on how much momentum the ndp can generate, the liberals could conceivably lose party status.

my understanding is that the architect of this policy of appealing to conservatives was michael ignatieff, and you can put his name on the obituary of the most successful political party of the twentieth century.

==

a lot of the media is focusing on the question of how low the conservatives can go, and that has been a part of the narrative for many years. but, the truth is that we know the answer to this question, and they're already hovering around the mark - as they have several times over the last decade.

the really interesting question is how high the ndp can climb. and, given that the liberals do not have an ideological base of voters, the maximum level is probably reaching levels of support that are unheard of in canadian politics. i'm not predicting 60%. but, this is probably close to a realistic maximum threshold.

if they gain enough momentum - to the point that it is clear as day that they are the winning ticket to change governments - i do not think that a majority in the popular vote is out of the question.

the development question is sadly rare in this medium, and the response was underwhelming. the key thing to understand is that the best way for america to help development is not to do more but to do less. a much better president once developed something called the good neighbour policy, which was a non-intervention strategy. it was an excellent, progressive, forward-thinking idea. it didn't take long for the blasted monroe doctrine to reassert itself, with continued disastrous consequences. before we knew it, we were secretly funding contras to suppress the population by carrying out weapon sales to iran.

three major ideas will help reverse the violence:

1) end the drug war. legalize it.
2) stop overthrowing elected governments that are trying to end the violence.
3) put the free trade agreements that they signed at the tip of a gun through a paper shredder.

none of these are in the realm of discourse. and, a neighbour who "resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others" is not looking to be a likely development in the near future.

when you see people talking in a situation like this, it often seems like they don't really grasp the situation, and it leads to this perception that they're not reacting like they ought to. that's because they don't really understand the situation. it's not going to actually click until they get the call. they will convince themselves things are going to work out until the last moment that they no longer can.

given the scenario, the most likely explanation is probably predation. bear. cougar, maybe.

confused (instrumental)

initially written in 1997. recreated in feb, 1998. reclaimed july 5, 2015. remixed july 12, 2015. electronics added on july 16, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/confused-instrumental

confused (vocal mix)

initially written in 1997. recreated in feb, 1998. reclaimed july 5, 2015. remixed july 12, 2015. vocals and electronics added on july 16, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/confused-3

cnusodef

initially written in 1997. recreated in feb, 1998. reclaimed july 5, 2015. remixed july 12, 2015. deconstructed on on july 16, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/cnusodef

open

originally created in april, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 4, 2015. remixed july 15, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/open

why (vocal mix)

initially written in 1996. recreated in april, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 12, 2015. vocals added july 15, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/why-4

ogyanemob

initially written in 1993. first full recording in 1996. recreated in dec, 1997 and again in jan, 1999. reclaimed on july 2, 2015. remixed on july 15, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/ogyanemob

dohgye

initially programmed in 1997. digitally modified in feb, 1998. reclaimed june 29, 2015. remixed july 15, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/dohgye

werso smidits

originally written in 1996. recorded in feb, 1998. reclaimed june 28, 2015. remixed july 15, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/werso-smidits

ants followup

hi.

i haven't really looked into it much, but i don't think i can prove that it's the plants - just because ants and plants are both everywhere. even if the plants did attract them, i have little faith that removing them will take them away. and, honestly, that wasn't really what i was thinking. if it was roaches, i'd be a bit more concerned about the plants, but not ants...

my hypothesis is that it's related to the weather. it's been an unusually cold and wet summer. ants like it warm and dry. so, the cold and wet soil has led them to migrate, and they ended up in the house. it's less a pull hypothesis and more a push hypothesis - it's less that something is attracting them to the house and more that the weather is forcing them to explore, and they happened to stumble upon the house.

that said, something else that's recently changed is the barbeque in the front. and, i don't think i need an article to prove that ants are going to want to be around where there's a barbeque, as anything that gets dropped will become food. further, you can clean a barbeque, but you can't *really* clean a barbeque. maybe you could ask if they've seen ants around it and keep an eye on it.

but, again, i don't think that's the reason. i think it's the weather.

there's a study here, but there's lots of more info on the topic out there:
http://news.stanford.edu/pr/01/ants45.html

i think the only option is barricading them out. and hoping it warms up soon...

j

i don't have an issue with donating tissue for medical research, regardless of the cause of death. but, a profit motive worked into the process is absolutely a problem, regardless of the age of the person donating. a firm making a profit from people donating body parts from car crashes is not less of a problem. nor (i would argue) is a profit motive in health care, in general. now, this video is in the process of being publicly vetted, so we'll have to see what the outcome of that process is, but, if it turns out that the sale of body parts is an ongoing issue, i would argue that the solution is not to modify abortion laws, but to modify regulatory practices so that nobody is making money from the donation process. this may suggest a larger role for government and institutions like universities in stem cell research - which should not be allowed in the private sector for other reasons, as well. as a canadian, this strikes me as a problem that is unique to the american for-profit health system.

stated tersely, i wouldn't designate abortion as the problem, here (if there is a problem, here). i'd designate capitalism as the problem, here.

fwanksajerk7
+deathtokoalas Oh spare me. Without being able to make money somehow, planned parenthood would become a net drain and eventually shut down, dragging the tax paying supporters along with it. In america the 99% are already overburdened, you want them to pay even more? Just regulate it so that certain parts can only cost $X amount and nothing over.

deathtokoalas
+fwanksajerk in canada, abortion is viewed largely as a medical procedure. the vast majority are carried out in hospitals and funded by the public health care system. this is in fact the most efficient way to approach abortion. further, public polling in the united states has long upheld single payer as the preferred option.

if you're going to tax somebody, i'd rather tax the bank. but, it's not really the point. the point is more that market economies are inseparable from corruption. if you want an open health care economy, and most americans don't, but, in the abstract, if you do, then you need to make a choice:

1) you can regulate it to death, and then regulate the regulators. this is expensive, inefficient and often ineffective due to regulatory capture. further, it defeats the point. it's a no-win scenario. if you're going to regulate it to this extreme, you'd might as well nationalize it - it's far more efficient.

2) you have to accept that there is corruption in markets.

in the end, this doesn't really have a lot to do with planned parenthood. i'm staunchly pro-choice. but, i realize that for-profit institutions are inherently evil because they're driven by the motive to profit at the expense of everything else. i don't find the idea of a corrupt abortion corporation particularly surprising; it's just the corporation part that needs a reaction, not the abortion part.

you know, this is an area that the americans have wanted to place ballistic missiles in for many years - ground sites in poland, aegis systems in the black sea and the baltic, space based weapons....

to protect the area from iran. supposedly.

as i said before: i didn't initially give this a second thought. i assumed it was an accident. but, what was that (alleged) american satellite doing flying over there?

eminem has always been near the top of the list of rappers with the potential to take it to the next level and break through that ceiling that rap and hip-hop have always had, separating it into an inherent folk form. every other 20th century form has broken through that barrier, and it's kind of puzzling why rap can't/won't. this is some kind of industrial music, but it's slow and repetitive. if he could get the music running at the same kind of syncopation as the vocals this would be very compelling; i'm talking 240 bpm bass beats intersecting with busy basslines and off the wall synths. a collaboration with flying lotus. he can keep his blunt aesthetic, it may even be an asset in driving the aggression.

my hypothesis has been that rap tends to reject this because it wants to make space for the vocals. but, it's long past time for somebody to move into this space. eminem, specifically, has matured enough that i think he can find a way to get his vocals to not just co-exist with a more developed musical approach, but help it transcend.

as it is, i'm walking away from this with the same feeling that i've been walking away from every hip-hop record that i've heard since 1991 - it's just not reaching it's potential.

this is the correct analysis, and you don't hear it often - which is why i'm always posting it. the crux of israeli policy is the separation of gaza from the west bank. and, this kind of solidarity is exactly what israel was trying to prevent, in breaking up the unity government. at the end of the day, israel simply does not care about gaza. but, it has every intent of controlling and annexing the west bank.

see, i agree that it's clearly in rather poor taste for the guy to walk around with that flag, if he does. i dunno what he's doing. appealing to a southern, rural fan base or something. but, that's marketing. i mean, c'mon al. the only hierarchy that kid rock is at the top of is the "talentless morons from detroit" hierarchy. no, really. he's at the top of the pyramid. icp is the next ring down. and etc. obama's policies have done more harm to brown people than kid rock ever will.

you don't have to agree with him to realize this is a waste of energy, and he's just going to milk it for publicity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NzfI7Ath7s

this is an important speech that should be thought about very carefully.

cognitively speaking, the eye covering is very interesting.

and, then, when you're done your lunch break, you can go back to your pointless bullshit life.

that is why this is garbage. not because it doesn't have some poetic value, if you drop the mesolithic basis of it; it does. no. it's because it's a coping mechanism, designed to clear you out and send you back into the fire.

if you actually live your life by these kinds of principles, you don't need to spend twenty minutes a day dreaming that you do.

no longer confused

initially written in 1997. recreated in feb, 1998. reclaimed july 5, 2015. remixed july 12, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/no-longer-confused

i still don't fully understand this.

initially written in 1996. recreated in april, 1998. reclaimed july 5, 2015. remixed july 12, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/i-still-dont-fully-understand-this

i think it's a very dangerous error to assume that israel doesn't have a long war. and, the logic of the circumstance actually comes out of understanding their long term strategy.

i've been through this a few times. israel is willing to allow for a palestnian state in gaza; in fact, it would like to rid itself of it. it would prefer for egypt to take the lead. but the idea of gaza as palestinian land is not contentious on the israeli right. this is the land of the philistines, and not a part of historical israel.  however, israel is not willing to allow for a palestinian state in the west bank - it intends to fully colonize and eventually annex the region.

it follows that having the governments split is in their interests. since the election of hamas, the west bank has functionally been an israeli province; fatah has no legitimacy, and very little control. hamas, of course, is not a serious threat. but, should a government develop then that will force the israelis to go back to talking about a "two-state solution" - which is a dead idea on the ground, but still talked about widely in ivory towers.

israeli plans for a future palestinian state are limited to gaza and do not include the west bank. that's the logic.

cockroach experiment proposal

To: rjfull@berkeley.edu

hi.

i have a proposal for a very cheap but very interesting experiment. i could probably do it myself, but i don't really have the knowledge to seriously control it. and i know that roaches are attracted to each other.

i've got a few roaches hanging around somewhere outside my apartment; they appear to be under the foundation. they don't seem to want to move in, they just scatter in from time to time; i kill a handful of seemingly lost ones every year. they're the oriental ones.

the thing is that there's no food source in here. now, i know they can eat just about anything with a carbon molecule in it - which is impressive. but, even so, about the only option they seem to have as a *plentiful* food source is each other. so, i'm curious.

i understand that it's known that they eat each other. what i'm curious about is just how long a roach colony could survive in controlled conditions with absolutely no source of food but themselves. they'd need water. and the right temperature to breed. but, besides that, nothing.

i suspect that they could survive long enough to breed, but, then, who eats what? do the nymphs eat the old adults and carry on to the next generation, or do the adults eat the nymphs and kill the colony? if the nymphs eat the adults, it may be proposed that a cockroach colony is a fully self-sustaining entity. i can't articulate a way that this breaks any kind of energy conservation laws, as it's also known that they eat their own excretions.

this is cheap. you just need an aquarium, some roaches and some time. a good project for a grad student; or even a high school project, really. but, the results could be very important in understanding how to control them.

j

fyi: ants

hi.

hope you're well.

i think i have a responsibility to let you know that i'm noticing some significant ant infiltration in that side area, with the door and the windows (under the steps). now, i want to be clear. i'm not talking about loose ants. i've seen a few here and there - nothing alarming. what i'm talking about are actual ant hills along the window sill. they seem to be burrowing through the wood, as evidenced by these mounds of what look like shaved wood chips. all i've ever seen are a few patrolling the entrance, but it suggests that they want to move right in.

i noticed this a while back, but i thought it was just loose dirt. i cleaned the room up at the beginning of july. tonight, the wood mounds are back. this time, i sprayed them.

there seems to be a large network of them in the front yard. i've seen swarms of hundreds out around the sewer grate, where i smoke. they seem to have two entrances, there. what that suggests to me is significant tunnelling under the front yard.

i don't have any suggestions. i've sprayed the area. but i don't go in there very often. i guess what i'd be more concerned about is the question of whether what they're doing is structurally damaging. as mentioned - they seem to be eating right through the windows. that can't be good...

j

see, this is what i mean about matt being cia. the idea that the americans wanted to put pressure on israel to create a ceasefire is fantasy; all evidence is that the administration has no interest in a ceasefire, and that kerry is there for political reasons. maybe they could cut the military handout down a tad? if the situation weren't so grim, it would be hilarious.

the travel warning existed when kerry was in the country. it was to keep reporters out. that's as clear as day. and as i mentioned in the other video, it seems like the press in the room seemed to actually realize that.

so, matt wastes a good dozen questions on pushing what is obviously propaganda, meant to distract from the facts underlying the situation. it yells cia.

the only other option is that he's an idiot. a useful one.

wow. this is particularly terrible.

1) socrates asked a lot of questions, but he didn't lay much shit down. the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing.
2) nietschze was obsessed with "oriental knowledge". he was all about zoroastrianism.
3) voltaire despised basically everything. he had little more than contempt for western civilization.

you should replace the three westerners with glaucon, hegel and liebniz.

the caricature of chinese civilization is even worse. in fact, confucius is widely regarded as the ideological force behind china's return to capitalism. the hierarchical thinking is really just feudalism, and that existed in the west as well (although we never called it philosophy).

you know, i didn't really give mh-17 a second thought. malysian airlines foolishly sent a civilian plane through a warzone, and it accidentally got shot down. take away? don't fly through a war zone. and, maybe it's worth pointing out that an integrated system would be useful to everybody; it's the kind of thing that seems crazy to run on a national level. and, we're moving on to more important matters...

....but the fact that the state department is going to such lengths to assert it's narrative is curious to me. the idea that the russians shot it down out of cold blood is ludicrous. and, if there's bombers flying overhead (and in fact attacking infrastructure), the civilians in the region have a right to defend themselves - marie would agree with that. at the least, they're taking advantage of it to try and spread russophobia. at worst, it fuels the conspiracy theories.

an innocent, professional state department would have noted that the air space was not secure, sent it's condolences and deflected further questions to the relevant bodies.

i've spent a lot of time at that site (globalresearch) over the years, and i might classify it using the term "caveat lector". but i truly mean reader beware. on the one hand, it seems to be strongly aligned with russian intelligence. i've caught it posting flat out lies more than once. on the other hand, it is sometimes a source of valuable information that is difficult to find elsewhere and seems to be entirely accurate. i've long taken the position that you can neither write that site off nor take it at face value, you have to treat is a generator of hypotheses that require further verification.

robert parry is a more trustworthy source, but his article is very speculative and does not come anywhere near to authoritatively blaming the ukrainian military, nor concluding it had to do with a plane; rather, it suggests that it may have been shot down by missiles on the ukrainian side. so, this is actually a good example of globalresearch acting in it's role as a front for russian propaganda, rather than in it's role as a valuable source of rare information.

i do not have the expertise required to analyze a plane crash and conclude what caused it to fall.

however, the russian story (in this case) does not strike me as more rational than the american story. sometimes it does. not here. i can fathom no realistic motive as to why the ukrainians would shoot down a civilian airliner, let alone target a plane with putin in it. these suggestions are as outrageous and ridiculous as anything coming out of the washington propaganda complex.

it may seem broadly consistent with historical american attempts to start wars, from blowing up their own ships in havana to shooting at whales in the gulf of tonkin. but, this plane was not american, and had no americans on board. the logic doesn't really assert itself. nor is it reasonable to think that they would think they could trick europe into launching a war against russia on this basis; europe is not that stupid, and america knows that europe is not that stupid.

if we can establish it was a missile - and i think the preponderance of evidence and experts across the spectrum acknowledge this as true - then we're left with three realistic scenarios:

1) the rebels accidentally shot it down.
2) the ukrainians accidentally shot it down
3) it was targeted by american missile defense testing, as a "live test" to catch a "live missile".

i wouldn't expect either government to promote this third hypothesis, as it is in nobody's interest to have that known. the american response is rather odd and draws attention to itself, but this in itself does not prove the russian propaganda or provide it with any heightened legitimacy; when analyzed on it's own terms, it becomes equally dubious and it becomes clear that a third explanation is required. i have no evidence to provide, even as i look at both official narratives with skepticism. but, my intuition is likely to remain with the third hypothesis until evidence appears that can thoroughly reject it. of the three, it strikes me as the most likely - even if it has the least direct evidence.

his concept of infinity is disappointing. no human can construct infinitely many combinations, but that's just the point - we use a finite number of word combinations in our lives, not an infinite number. it's his conceptualization that is impossible as anything beyond a conceptualization; it's important to understand it in the abstract, but there's no such thing as an infinite collection of words. i don't know how he can be confused on that point. and, peano had no problem deriving the set of natural numbers from 0 and 1 - it's in fact the only way to do it. i don't really want to argue about induction; it works fine if you use it right, and is less convincing if you don't.

if you're curious, i think his theory is kind of unavoidable in a broad sense, but it's not wise to jump to too many conclusions about how important it really is. the dna gives us a stomach. but we decide what to eat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VyteV_7sxI

also: your brain is a quantum computer. not in some quasi-mystical sense, but in terms of the reactions it's utilizing. i think he has the right idea about minimizing resources. but, the idea that it's a turing machine is a little outdated. it's solving np problems on a second-by-second basis - fueled by nothing but sugar.

i think maybe a more interesting question is whether other animals have this "i language", or, really, just exactly how something like a dog actually thinks. 'cause it's pretty clearly thinking. as a human, i couldn't understand any other way to think. that doesn't mean there aren't other ways to think. i mean, babies are obviously thinking; i suppose none of us remember our thought processes from before we could speak. you'd have to guess it's at least the beginning of such a thing, even if it's not fully formed.

i remember reading arguments that this leap had something to do with a mutation regarding vocal chords. it's not just that a monkey can't talk to you. it's that a monkey is physically incapable of forming words. we can't know what's going on in there. and, if there's some truth to that, a broad idea of internal language may be more widespread than we realize. such a leap would be less of a mental one and more of a physical one; in a sense, almost a technological one.

but there's no jump to infinity. infinity is unattainable. it's just a theoretical abstraction. the math he's using is very widely used in computer science (the chomsky hierarchy is an unfortunate use of language....); i've studied quite a bit of it, and it's really just a mathematical formality. linguistics would lose nothing from modelling itself in the finite realm, it may even gain a little levity, but the math that exists is all infinite, so that hubris moved into linguistics with it. that's just getting lost in the model.

===

this is a long video, and i watch lectures like this when i eat, meaning i'm on the third (and probably last) segment of it. i see somebody drew attention to the larynx issue.

i don't think the question is really in the realm of questions that have answers. but, we have a lot of neanderthal dna in our genome, and that is a pretty good reason to suggest that they were at least able to learn languages that we taught them. i guess that goes back to the question of how advanced an "i language" really is - or whether it is broadly present in various degrees across the mammalian spectrum (at least).

either option is kind of disastrous for this genetic basis of the great leap. either it's ancestral, or it could be taught. i'd lean towards the latter.

it's maybe easy to jump to "language was selected". but, i have a hard time believing the idea that a fluent sapiens would intermingle with neanderthals that could not speak. a few, maybe. outcasts. rape, even. but not at the level that the interbreeding happened.

i guess that the other option - if we wish to maintain the dogmatic position that language is innately human, because it's convenient for us - is that language must be a lot younger than we've hypothesized. i get the great leap hypothesis, that all this sophistication happened and it must have been connected to language. but, due to the interbreeding with neanderthals, that kind of logic necessitates taking the development back to well before all those things happened.

i think the closest thing to actual evidence that we have for the origin of language is in constructing proto-languages and tying it to archaeological evidence, and that suggests that the language that most of the world speaks (indo-european) is barely 10,000 years old in origin. how or if the other major language groups are related to this is just speculation, but the time frame for proposed nostratic theories is barely 20,000 years ago. it seems like a fairly great leap in itself to argue that language is 100,000-75,000 years old.

if language is only 25-30,000 years old, then you can maintain this separation wall and maybe even argue it was evolutionarily relevant. but it means it happened after the great leap, and after the interbreeding.

except that it seems convenient that you can connect click, tonal and "nostratic" languages to the l1/2/3 genetic split, meaning the common basis had to be pre-migration, and that you're left with almost no option but to conclude that neanderthals must have at least had the capability to learn language.

===

i spend a lot of time walking. it's good exercise. saves gas money, saves gym membership costs; it's a more holistic way to live. it's also good for thinking.

if you look at a map, something curious jumps out - l3 is non-tonal in precisely the same places that neanderthals lived, and areas that hybrids moved into during the interglacial. there is certainly a geographic correlation. l3 is tonal in areas outside of the neanderthal range.

might neanderthals have actually played a role in the development of non-tonal languages? that is, "nostratic" languages? the instantly apparent hypothesis from looking at the map is that l3 would have been dispersed out of africa by speakers of tonal languages, who continue to exist in a continuum that exists on the eastern side of a line that slices across eastern asia from india to korea (and includes sino-tibetan and austronesian languages). it also includes some native american languages. however, in the places where interaction with neanderthals occurred, that tonality would have been lost. whether this created a pidgin, or was even primarily neanderthal in structure, would be very hard for me to speculate on, as a non-expert in the topic. but, if neanderthal language developed without clicks and tones, some cultural assimilation may have resulted in losing it.

the timeline is also consistent.

listen. if we cohabited and interbred with neanderthals, then it is obvious that we are culturally indebted to them in some capacity or another. we could not have integrated with them culturally without adopting some of their culture.

it's at least a curiosity.

could the neanderthals have been unable to understand tonal language? might we have adjusted for their benefit?

if you have an alphabet with n letters and a maximum word size of m, then there are n^m possibilities for words - in fact less than that, as many will be unpronounceable. you can then sum that over a maximum sentence size, and again over a maximum "book size", where a book is meant to represent a life's worth of thought. there are finite restrictions because we have finite lifespans. if you drop the grammatical formalities, we could express a maximum word size determined by enunciating a syllable for every second over a hundred and fifty year lifespan. such a limit would be well beyond the realm of possibility, and remain finite in scope.

the limits are perhaps not arbitrary. if we could calculate a maximum word and sentence size, we could understand the complexity our brain actually works at.

===

i looked into this a little further and i can't say if "infinite expression possibilities" was meant to be poetic rather than literal. but, it has to be. the idea that we have infinite abilities to express ourselves is mathematically false. and, that's the answer to this conundrum on not being able to jump from finite expression to infinite expression.

peano provided a construction of the natural numbers, and it remains true that infinity means counting forever - which is of course impossible. that means infinite thought is also impossible.

there's no paradox. it's just a misunderstanding of the infinite. there is a difference between arbitrarily large (which is still finite) and infinite. but, we can't even say our possibilities are arbitrarily large, because our lives are finite.

in some cases, it may be convenient to model certain things as infinite. but, that does not translate to any kind of reality.

you could then even calculate the probability that two people would express the exact same sequence of words - which could be used to prosecute students for plagiarism.

so, if you're talking about an actual language - like english - you should be utilizing a finite subset of the kleene star. that is, instead of taking the infinite union, you should be taking a union up to m, where m is the maximum word size. for mathematical purposes, you might get a stronger result if you take the infinite union, and mathematicians would like that - and not care what m is. but, a language like english doesn't have 5000 letter words; the longest (non-imaginary) word is a mere 29 letters, so all those extra strings (while harmless) are just hubris, and introduce theoretical confusion.

all the operations will work as they would otherwise. it doesn't affect how any of the theories actually work.

a computer can work forever or halt. we're not going to do that. if somebody starts talking to us in 5000 letter words, we're going to shrug and walk away - and we probably don't have enough usable "ram" to remember the syllables at the beginning of the word, anyways. we can choose to terminate the operation as a result of a buffer overflow, or something. so, it's a meaningful distinction when you're talking about how our brains actually work.

again: i think these are probably meaningful limits. and they may be experimentally determined, even. i'm not sure how. non-expert, again. but if they could be, that limit will be useful in determining what kind of language we can actually process and what kind of language we can't.

the way you want to think of our brains is probably that it's an absurdly fast processor, with basically no ram. so, we're working with registers. machine code. we just didn't evolve ram. we seem to have a hard drive, but no ram. so, we're restricted by the size of the register - and because we can't dump everything to disk (at least not consciously), we just toss stuff out of the register when we get a stream of information like a 5000 letter word. that's beyond what we can process.

so, again, from a formal mathematical perspective, you can speak of language as this infinite thing. but that makes no sense to us, as humans. it's a model of theoretical language, but it's not a valid description of actual language, or a way to understand how our brains work.

fwiw, i wouldn't be opposed to the idea of punctuated equilibrium, in principle. i just tend to resolve the gould-dawkins debate with hybridization. and, conveniently, that appears as though it might be consistent, here.

living in the 'hood, here, i'm constantly engaging with parents yelling at their kids.

"stop doing the thing i told you to stop doing!"

the kid keeps doing it. and, the more the parent yells, the more the kids continue. in fact, they seem to take pleasure in it. the more abusive the yelling gets, the less the kid listens.

because children are trolls. epic trolls. it's maybe the condition that defines being a child.

a lot of anarchists will argue that parenting is the sole exception to authoritarianism. but it's really just symptomatic of our collective inability to get out of these shackles. based on my own observations, i'd say it's one of the clearest demonstrations of the failure of authoritarianism.

the kid will eventually realize that when you play with fire, you get burned - but if you yell at them, you just increase the probability that they have to learn it the hard way.

so, i'm constantly tempted to intervene and actually *explain* why you shouldn't do the thing that they're being yelled at not to do. but, i know if i were to do that, i'd just get yelled at, too.

the fact that kissinger is so often quoted as a voice of sanity nowadays reflects very badly on the nature of the neo-con policies that have taken over. but, the fact that he's less crazy is not much of an endorsement. look: he was constantly wrong when he had actual influence. now that he's irrelevant, he's not magically right.

it's admittedly hard to understand the policy - because it's completely fucking insane. but, it's not hard to figure it out, if you can suspend your disbelief that it's actually happening. the information is out there, it just seems fantastical. this is beyond containment, it's the next phase of the pnac. the neo-cons are playing for keeps. ultimately, they're pissed off about lingering russian influence in the middle east; this is punishment for syria. but, the long game is total and absolute dismantlement.

it seems as though it's not in america's interests to have this unstable state in ukraine, but the missing context is that it's a staging ground into russia. the goal here is the kremlin: the decapitation of the russian state. and, when you get your head around this - when you come to terms with it - it becomes an entirely rational front to get to that end. in some sense, it sets events in motion in a way that can't effectively be undone. and, the russians are consequently actually under reacting.

i agree that this is likely intentional. it's some kind of frightening stew of fundamentalist christian retribution and nazi testing. ultimately, it's military testing - and these drugs are weapons. makes you wonder if they're even concocting various antidotes, ala neuromancer.

is it not rather patriarchal to suggest that passing men have the responsibility to step in, rather than that women have the responsibility/choice to take control of the situation themselves?

if i present them with a shrubbery, will they stop saying "nae"?

amy goodman breaks it down, again.

"most americans are fucking idiots. you need to show them a commercial to teach them how to brush their teeth."

again: we have to get it through our heads that they target the kids, and the women, to stop them from breeding. these statements are all over the place; they don't hide this. but, we're afraid to put it together. it's a slow-motion genocide...

in general, i'm no fan of hippies, but neil still slays. damn.

yup. i still fuck the dead.

recorded in jan, 1998. reclaimed july 5, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/yup-i-still-fuck-the-dead

i still don't fully understand this. (initial upload)

initially written in 1996. recreated in april, 1998. reclaimed july 5, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/i-still-dont-fully-understand-this

no longer confused (initial upload)

initially written in 1997. recreated in feb, 1998. reclaimed july 5, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/no-longer-confused

just say no to mood altering prescription drugs

recorded in april, 1998. reclaimed july 4, 2015.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/just-say-no-to-mood-altering-prescription-drugs

some people don't read much outside their own culture.

"a new national poll reveals that 42 percent of Americans wrongly attribute Marx’s famous communist slogan, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” to one of the country’s Founding documents. Nearly one in five Americans believe this phrase can be found in the Bill of Rights, of all places. You can take some solace in knowing that among young adults, only six percent made this mistake, though 30 percent of them believe Marx’s statement can be found in either the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution."

while this reflects poorly on the education level of americans (blame that asshole reagan, he did this on purpose), it reflects positively on their political viewpoints.

well, see, here's the thing: she's right about the bible. that really is what the bible says. and that's really how you're supposed to react if you're a christian. god only changed it's nature once, in the switch from judaism to christianity. well, and maybe a third time in the jump to islam, but christians shouldn't concern themselves with that. besides that one change in nature, god's nature doesn't change. those prohibitions are like diamonds; they're forever. it's all written there. christians can't pick and choose like that, and the ones that try really aren't being good christians. she's right on point. she gets it. most self-identified christians seem not to grasp this as well as she does.

she's wrong about the constitution, though. deists and atheists, the lot of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLUwNUg4rTA

"the fate of easter island awaits us all."

pause

"no chowder! no chowder!"

i wish they would have panned out to the audience, to expose a sea of blank, stony faces.

hedges has been uncharacteristically rational as of late. here's a good reminder that he's somebody that you want to take with a large grain, and keep your intellectual distance from - even when you agree with him.

he's just a tad unstable, as we can see here.

God
In all seriousness, folks. I don't really give a shit who you love. Love is love. I would know. I Am Love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLUwNUg4rTA

deathtokoalas
+God actually, you do. you're a delusional asshole for it, but you've made it clear in multiple passages that you're in exclusive support of heteropatriarchy. you can't walk that back; i'm going to hold you to what you said. and, i'm not you, so i don't go for perpetual forgiveness, either.

God
+deathtokoalas I'm too busy putting images of my son on pieces of toast to give a shit about what two men do in their bedrooms.

deathtokoalas
+God no. you're not walking this back like this. it's in that damned book of yours. repeatedly. you need to own that. you said it, and you meant it.

watching these briefings can at times be surreal.

it's pretty clear to me that most of the room realizes that the travel ban is to keep out reporters. but, despite knowing that, nobody states as much or challenges the spokesperson on it; instead, the discussion turns to press freedom, which produces the usual meaningless verbiage from the spokesperson, as she's announcing a policy meant to restrict press access. it's a conspiracy of silence, but a means of pressure nonetheless. they won't address the issue, but they'll coerce her into making a fool of herself.

what i'm unclear on is whether it's really seriously meant to be pressure, or just a cynical form of self-amusement.

it's typical rock star baddassery - the kind of thing you'd see in some macho 80s rock video, or something. an old cliche. and fox is playing the role of the offended conservative. in the end, it's all image - and it sells because of the reaction fox gave it.

there's no coherent messaging. no worthwhile analysis. the establishment has nothing to fear from this. but, it takes a hefty cut.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziuCl9ZbXbw

excellent production. but the machismo, misogyny & generally trite vocal content is hardly serving anything but his bank account.

disaster capitalism.

"what erdogan is saying is offensive and wrong"

...and absolutely factually accurate, with a plethora of scholarly literature to support it - much of it drawn from direct statements from israeli leaders. it's actually refreshing to hear somebody with political influence stand up and say it. and, it needs to be said and understood in order to make any real progress on dealing with it.

it's not an anti-terror operation. it's not even apartheid. it's systemic, intentional and planned genocide.

from a us geo-strategic perspective, though, this is concerning. turkey is a nato ally. blah blah blah. what is pushing them to speak like this? it's a little too wavering from the narrative to be purely internal, although that's no doubt part of it.

i've been posting about turkey for a while. they're isolated, and they don't like it. the eu doesn't want them and, frankly, if i was turkey, i wouldn't want them, either. the saudis are more interested in competing with them. their military alliances are leaving them in an economic limbo. turkey needs to be integrated into a stable economic partnership. they're not big enough to go it alone. otherwise, "turkey is a nato ally. blah blah blah" is not going to be true much longer. this needs to be a focus by us foreign policy. this relationship needs mending; turkey is not getting much out of it, and that needs to be resolved.

they're increasingly being forced to economically integrate with russia and iran, which are traditional enemies. but, given that europe sees them as foreigners and the saudis see them as rivals, this is what is left - central asia and eastern europe, which is some kind of stew of their historical homeland and their byzantine roots.

everybody knows how important turkey is to nato. but, nato is not working out for turkey. if that's not addressed, turkey is going to bolt for the cementing asian alliance. and, nato will only have itself to blame.