but, this is merely the status quo. anybody can get a medical card.

as mentioned, it's fine if you smoke an ounce/week or something. but, most marijuana users don't smoke like that. most users are not habitual, but sporadic and spontaneous. social, even.

my consumption patterns would be on the lines of a gram or two a month, and not necessarily every month. so, i'm not going to plan my consumption patterns out. it's just not realistic.

so, this isn't a backup plan, unless you're medical, which is the status quo.

again: i will not mail order in bulk. i will continue to buy small amounts locally.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/cannabis-backup-plan-in-the-works-morneau-tells-provinces/article35383802/

i'd rather buy it on the street than buy it online. the problem is the time lag.

listen: if i wanted to buy it through the mail, i'd just get a medical card. but, then i need to make guesses on how much i want to buy over the course of a month. in the process, i'm going to end up smoking more than i want to. i won't do this; i'll continue to buy it underground, where i can get smaller amounts immediately on demand.

http://www.ottawasun.com/2017/06/15/dont-expect-legal-pot-stores-by-canada-day-2018-industry-expert-says

Also, conservatives in Canada's Parliament have brought up two notable concerns with legalization that could be difficult to overcome. For starters, lawmakers worry about how to keep marijuana out of the hands of children. An at-home grow provision, they argue, would make it easy for children to get hold of cannabis. The other issue being that there's no way to accurately test for cannabis impairment while behind the wheel. Without any sort of baseline impairment figure, it's difficult to see how conservatives in Canada's Parliament are going to be satisfied with this legislation.

but, conservatives have no power in canada's parliament, right now. a strict party vote would be 239-99. it's not even close.

....unless they mean the senate, but the conservatives do not have a majority in the senate either, no matter how you skew the numbers.

this worries me, though. it suggests that the liberals are floating flawed information to the press, with an attempt to engineer the defeat of the bill.

"but you can't say that homosexuality is a choice, because then religious fascists will be justified in arguing that it's ok to forcibly convert them."

what?

it's one of those weird "progressive" positions that only makes sense if you're a conservative pretending to be a "left-wing christian", as though such a thing is even possible.

i actually want to forget about the obvious logical problems with this, as though forced conversion ("gay therapy") is ever somehow justified. i mean, i'll be clear: "gay therapy" is never justified. it doesn't matter if it's a choice, it's still an egregious rights infringement, and your religion can go fuck itself up the ass. yeah, how about that, huh? it's especially egregious when applied towards children; it's child abuse. if you're out there walking around thinking that "gay therapy" would be perfectly ok if homosexuality were only a choice, but, alas, it isn't, so we should resist it because it won't work anyways then...!?!?...

...i don't know what side you think you're on....?

but, that's not even what i want to say. you've got the logic fucked, anyways.

let's say we get this gay guy tied down and try and brainwash him, clockwork orange style, into being straight. we already know this doesn't work. yet, you want to argue that it doesn't work because he doesn't have a choice?

no. ...

if he really didn't have a choice, that is if it was really hardwired somewhere into his brain, you should be able to "flip the switch". otherwise, being gay would be pretty much singularly unique, wouldn't it? i mean, you can flip just about any switch you can imagine. with the right images, you can get an army sergeant in a ballerina dress, singing rocket man. rocket mensch, probably.

is it just a wild coincidence that homosexuality is pretty much the only thing we've ever found that you can't flip? really?

i might suggest that the reason the brainwashing is so ineffective in most gay people is that they're able to reject it for the precise reason that it is a conscious choice and, further, that if it weren't a conscious choice then the brainwashing would largely work.

it seems clear to me that the reason that putin is not permitted to speak english on english media is that he sounds much less ominous.

i'm not sure on whose orders, though.

what isn't conservative about this?

this is a bunch of neo-liberal bullshit.

frankly, i always considered laci green to be a conservative, to begin with.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/on-laci-green-and-white-womens-betrayal_us_5941a92be4b0d99b4c9210ef

the design of the study is very poor, if the intent is to measure criminality in mtfs. this is from the study:

"Each individual contributed person-time from study entry (for exposed: date of sex reassignment; for unexposed: date of sex reassignment of matched case) until date of outcome event, death, emigration, or end of study period (31 December 2003), whichever came first. The association between exposure (sex reassignment) and outcome (mortality, morbidity, crime) was measured by hazard ratios (HR) with 95% CIs, taking follow-up time into account. HRs were estimated from Cox proportional hazard regression models, stratified on matched sets (1∶10) to account for the matching by sex, age, and calendar time (birth year). We present crude HRs (though adjusted for sex and age through matching) and confounder-adjusted HRs [aHRs] for all outcomes."

what they're doing, here, is determining whether taking estrogen is a hazard to increasing crime; by coming back with null results, they are confirming that estrogen will not make transwomen *more* violent. they are not measuring whether it may make them *less* violent, so their statement about transwomen retaining criminality is not justified by their own research.

in fact, it's actually a classical fallacy. 

worse, they are also including suicide as a crime. nobody is surprised to hear that suicide rates are higher amongst trans people, trans women especially. but, to argue that elevated suicide risks should be included in a study measuring criminality is not acceptable. it's not hard to see that it's obvious that if the study concludes stasis when suicide rates are included, it should also produce lower levels of criminality when they are not. this data should, in truth must, be re-evaluated to no longer treat suicide as a violent crime.

that said, this flaw is really over the question of estrogen, which should not be modelled as a risk for violence. testosterone should be modelled that way. and, the general process should be modelled in terms of risk hazards for suicide or depression, as well - that all makes sense.
 

so, what the study actually says is this:

1) administering testosterone to biological females increases their risk of violence &

2) administering estrogen to biological men does not increase their risk of violence.

by dishonestly interpreting a high suicide rate amongst transwomen as violent and criminal behaviour, it then bizarrely concludes that transwomen are no less violent than cismen.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016885

so, my laptop went at the beginning of may. i might still be able to fix it, but it's going to be of reduced value to me because i'm probably going to lose the microphone (which is in the screen). if you take the microphone out, the only other benefit of fixing it is that the board is expandable to 16 gb of ram. the board on the backup laptop is only good for 4 gb, which is a low limit for 2017. right now, i'm scraping by with 2.

the other day, i had to send an email to my maternal grandmother - a septuagenarian with an impressive stock portfolio and an ottawa construction magnate millionaire very longterm boyfriend - explaining that i couldn't call her back because i don't have a microphone in my backup laptop. i'll either have to find a way to fix my board, or get a microphone, and there's nothing i can do until then.

so, she's going to send me a check for a new laptop so i can call her over google voice.

thanks nana :)

so, what's the story about last night? i haven't had a night like that in a while; i used to narrate these kinds of evenings, when they happened more frequently. so, i'll tell you the story of last night...

i started off the night at an art show that kind of quickly descended into absurdity. it was supposed to be a performance of cage pieces, and began that way, but quickly collapsed into something that seemed only very loosely attached to cage. basically, they had two djs spinning for what seemed like an hour. the music wasn't the problem; there should have been people dancing. but, the combination of a pretentious art crowd and an unlicensed space sucked the life out of the party. i want to be clear that it was a contradiction, rather than a failure. people wanted to sit in their chairs and observe, but there wasn't a lot to observe; the venue wanted people up and dancing, but that doesn't happen after having a few red bulls at 8:30, as a stop on your way home from your practicum. it didn't make any sense.

i initially thought the dj set would finish relatively quickly, so i went outside for a smoke. i bumped into an older black guy out front that was also smoking, but smoking a different and more fragrant substance. he shared a little of that. we talked a few minutes. i mentioned i was going to the gay club (near the boundary between city and suburb) for the night, as it was open late on this night. i went back in without him, and left to catch the bus on woodward about a half an hour later.

he must have waited outside and followed me. stalked me, essentially. and, it almost failed. see, i got to the bus stop the moment the bus was pulling in; this was coincidental, not planned, so i didn't have the fare ready and i had to sort through my pockets for the right change, which left the bus sitting for a few seconds. this was long enough for him to catch up behind me, get on the bus after me and attempt to pay the busfare for me. i didn't look up to see who dropped the dollar in, and just went with it.

i did sit beside him; sort of - across the aisle, anyways. he wanted to talk about music from the 60s-80s period, which is a topic i'm known to engage in, but he was mostly name dropping things i've generally been disinterested in (hall & oates, depeche mode) or things i actively dislike (yes, elp). he was rambling, really. once in a while, he got around to a few things i could engage in (peter gabriel, john lennon), so i humoured him out of politeness. but, i mean what does one really do when this old guy wants to talk to you about music from before you were born? you either sit and listen politely, or you be rude and get up and move, but you probably sit and listen politely. he initially made it seem as though he was going to ferndale, which is just outside technical detroit, but slowly shifted his destination to align with mine. it was when i was sitting on the bus that i first realized i was dealing with a stalker.

my initial reaction was to get away, so i got up and walked to the front of the bus and stood beside the bus driver, feigning an unclear sense of direction. he quickly got up, walked to the front of the bus and indicated that he was getting off at the same stop, so i should go back and sit with him.

i did not go back and sit with him. however, he did follow me off of the bus.

i need to clarify a few things at this point, as you may be skeptical that he actually followed me across detroit to a gay bar. how do i know he wasn't going there, anyways? well, to begin with, he indicated he was heterosexual, but extremely trans-curious; it had something to do with a transgendered girlfriend that he had back in the 70s. i have no way to know if he was really partying with david bowie at the time, or if he really works for the pop artist he claims he works for. second, he indicated repeatedly that he hadn't been in this space for a long time, so long that he wasn't sure how long. 25 years? 30? 35? he couldn't remember, and wasn't consistent. but, he made it clear he didn't frequent the area. third, i found out in the course of the night that he's 66 years old. for reference, my father would be 60 years old today, if he were still alive.

the truth is that he all but admitted to following me, and i believe i had already made it clear, through body language, that i wasn't happy about it.

he nonetheless seemed to think he was doing me a favour in escorting me from the bus stop to the bar. my assessment of the neighbourhood was far less dire than his - as is the case of most places in detroit, the area struck me as more empty than dangerous. he gave me a bit of a history lesson, though. he saw the clash in that building, which is now decaying ruins. there was a muhammad ali title fight in that other building, which is boarded up. and, over there is where the bookies used to work, which was the reason people came to this street. it seems like the gay bar is the only thing left standing, and he seemed a little taken aback by it.

this is what will be left when the society collapses: gay bars, coney islands and churches.

this 'gay bar' in detroit is actually three bars that are interconnected. the area i wanted to move to was running late, so i went into the main complex to wait. he instantly offered to buy me a pitcher, which i clearly declined. i obviously can't be accepting alcohol from strangers, as it is not clear if it's tampered with or not. the situation made it a real no-brainer; it was something i couldn't even contemplate. this is in addition to the obvious signalling problems attached to accepting beer from strangers that are following you...

it was at this point that i made it clear to him that i needed some space, that i came to the bar to dance by myself and that whatever altruism he thought he was engaging in was converting itself from misguided to problematic. i bought my own beer and walked to the dance floor.

he followed me and tried to dance with me. i stepped away; he continued. so, i went out to the patio. he followed me out there, too.

the patio allowed me to renormalize the situation by expanding the conversation to include several other people. i was able to talk to other people; he found himself talking to other people. it was a more healthy environment for everybody.

unfortunately, he tried to give me another drink by buying it and placing it in front of me. i again refused, and explained to him why - he went away and came back with a drink and put it in front of me. i'd be insane to drink that. it could have anything in it, from ghb to cyanide. he was obviously hitting on me. and, i mean, what if he's some kind of cia agent trying to take me out and make it look clean? i'm serious. i don't know that he isn't. why would i take that risk?

a little before midnight, i got up to take some pills and when i came back, he was gone. he didn't finish his smoke; he thought i had left and went outside to look for me. i was actually planning on moving to the other side of the complex. as happened with the bus, he walked in as i was paying and offered to pay cover for me.

that's the third time, now. i was starting to get pissed off.

"NO. please don't."

he again followed me on to the dance floor, and i again ignored him, but he did actually disappear after about an hour or so; i think he was gone before 1:00. i made it a priority to make sure he could overhear me when i claimed i would be there until 5:00. and, perhaps he had a wife at home and a consequent functional curfew...

i spent the rest of the night apprehensive about leaving. i had given him a third of my cigarettes, and had consequently run low, but i didn't want to walk out for more, because i wasn't sure he wasn't still out there. and, what had i learned about this guy over the last couple of hours?

1) he follows people around in the shadows, then sneaks up on them.
2) he doesn't listen when you say "no".

so, i ended up bumming smokes.

i had decided at some point that if he was around then he probably meant to catch up to me on woodward, so i planned to circle around the block instead. but, the bartender saw the situation as it was unfolding and, on his own volition, offered to gave me a lift home instead. we stopped for eggs first. and, i caught the 5:55 bus by a hair. props to the bartender....

i need to be clear that i didn't pick this guy up at the gay bar; i picked this guy up at the art show. he wouldn't have gone anywhere near the gay bar if he hadn't trailed me there. so, if there's somewhere i need to avoid, it was the first location. but, i don't think that's entirely fair, either.

so, what's going on with me in terms of productivity and actual attempts to actually do something?

it's been hardware crashes. the big one was the laptop failing at the beginning of may. since then, i've been trying to catch up, and been slowed down by all kinds of errors.

the most recent was a processor crash last week that took my hard drive down with it. i was able to recover the data with a chkdsk, but it took me all week to figure that out.

i've just finished the season 14 (mar 19th - may 1st) process. i was hoping that would buy me some time before i got into season 15. but, i'm going to have to dump the card again soon in the next few days, meaning i'm going to have to get through season 15 before i can get back to the concert reviews.

this machine is markedly slower, and cannot multitask. so, i should rephrase this: i'll be working out season 15 renders overnight, and am probably just about ready to get back to the concert reviews starting early next week.

the short in the broken laptop seems to be in the monitor out, so i'm thinking about converting it into an editing station with a remote monitor attached to the out; that is, taking the lid off of the laptop altogether and just using it as the bottom of a tower. i'll need to get the board to power up first...

it's been a year of setbacks. see, and here's the thing: my lifestyle has been a consequence of this. i couldn't have been more productive given the technological bottlenecks, so why not go drinking? but, hopefully, i'm close to getting back on track.

i'm agreeing with this guy quite a bit.

https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/walter-benn-michaels-the-trouble-with-diversity-election/Content?oid=24418522

this is really accurate, i think. it's a good summary of what i've been trying to say here for quite a while.

i picked most of this up not by reading but by experiencing protest movements first-hand. they erect their own hierarchy, which is pretty much a reflection of society's, and then they label the act of adhering to it as "intersectional anti-oppression". i mean, it took me months to really get my head around it. but, it kind of hit me like a sack of bricks when i did. and, all i got in return for pointing it out was this perception that i didn't understand it - that sitting around and living a burkean fantasy is actually deconstructing it, via foucault, and not just upholding it through construction - and if there was a deconstruction underlying the construction, it was something inverted that i maybe didn't understand, but i must object and claim it wasn't actually there!

there's an essay out there explaining how foucault was basically just restating burke. unfortunately, most foucaldians are just going to react by reading up on burke, right - it almost doesn't matter, because they don't have the slightest idea who he was, anyways. and, if they learn they're conservatives in the end, they're just going to change the letter on their lapel. but, it might do us a lot of good if they do.

he's right: the left neo-liberals just don't understand that they're neo-liberals.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/

where were my ancestors in 1776?

well, there would have been a lot of them alive at the time, and they would have been in a lot of different places.

my direct patrilineal descent is actually not clear; we're all pretty sure that there was some cree in there at some point, and these tribes would have been independent, still, and loosely aligned with the loyalists, albeit quite a distance from any fighting. there may also be some african in there (two of my aunts married fully black africans and i have completely black cousins), but to what depth is not clear, either. 1776 is long enough ago these potential ancestors may have still been in africa. if they were in america, these ancestors would have likely been enslaved, but on what side of the conflict is not clear to me. my grandfather was a mason, as was his own grandfather, apparently. i have no meaningful memory of him. that may suggest a northern ancestry is more likely. but, african-canadians were rare things in the first half of the twentieth century, too, and hard to place anywhere near bytowne. the two most likely paths would have been either from nova scotia (settled by black loyalists) or from detroit, via the underground railroad. this is all pure supposition...

besides some native ancestry, the only other certainty on my paternal grandfather's side is that somebody married a french woman at some point. i do not know if these french ancestors would have been in canada or france in 1776, and keep in mind that french canada stretched from montreal to new orleans at the time. regardless, they are the most likely candidates to have aligned with the united states, up to this point, via proxy with a common enemy or not. but, perhaps they had a personal entente cordiale. i can't know.

my paternal grandmother's ancestors would have certainly been scattered across the eastern mediterranean, mostly in italy and sicily. however, she would also have had some ashkenazi ancestors somewhere as well, most likely in eastern europe.

my maternal grandmother's ancestors would have been across a crescent in northern europe: ireland, norway, sweden and finland. i suspect, at this time, that my ancestors may have existed even further east, as well, stretching through russia and into ukraine. they would have been light-skinned, with flaxen hair and blue eyes. but, i do not suspect that they would have held strong opinions about the revolutionary war in the colony.

my maternal grandfather's ancestors may have actually been in canada, and served as loyalists, but i do not know. they would have been of mixed scottish/welsh heritage, and british citizens since the acts of union. there is some evidence that my maternal grandfather was in a line of petty, distant aristocrats that held office through law enforcement. but, i never found the missing link to demonstrate as much.

we are not our ancestors. but, when i say i would have found little in the american revolution to support, and much to directly oppose, i speak on behalf of my own. if i was on this continent at the time, i would have certainly been a loyalist.

sorry.

i'm not joking, here.

it's unprecedented. but it should trigger an election. i think i said something about this months ago, but don't ask me to remember how i framed it.

we all knew that trudeau wasn't usually the smartest person in the room. but, he may have just found a way to take his own majority government down, mid-mandate. that's like drowning in the desert. if there's natural selection in politics, he deserves a darwin award.

it really should trigger an election...

wait...

if the senate votes down the budget, that should trigger an election.

i mean, this doesn't happen in this country. but that should be the result...

canada doesn't have a collaborative budget amendment process. the government presents the budget. it might get slightly modified in committee, but it probably won't. it will just get passed. and, if it doesn't get passed, it means that the government is unable to command the confidence of the house, and an election is required.

it should follow that if the government can't command the confidence of the senate, there should be an election as well. although, as mentioned, this is crazy talk, in this country.

this is the right article for the topic, but i just want to add a sobering thought of my own: the question of whether trudeau's senate amendments will outlive him or not reduces to how responsibly they abuse their power (for any use of  power, in context, is an abuse of it). i'm convinced that this is a kind of an insane ploy to let him promise the sky at election time and get shot down between elections, and insofar as that is true it is just a waste of everybody's time. but, no future government is going to be obligated to entertain the whims and fancies of a senate full of unelected independents that was appointed as some kind of twisted joke.

undoing this mess that he's made of the senate may very well be the first thing that his successor does - even or perhaps especially if that successor is a liberal.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/mr-trudeaus-frankensenate-its-alive-and-its-dangerous/article35309120/

i don't think that either of the reactions are wrong, per se, although i don't think it's reasonable to use language about "safety" or language about transphobia, unless the language about transphobia is directed at language about "safety", in which case it's true.

it's a comfort issue. frankly, i wouldn't want to go to a women's spa and end up around people with penises, either. that said, that's my own comfort level. i mean, we're talking about full nudity, here.

here's how this ought to work: it ought to be up to the community that frequents the facility to decide what they feel comfortable within. unfortunately, we don't live in a society that upholds co-operative ideas, so it has to fall upon the business owner to make decisions regarding what she wants to allow in her business, and up to clients to vote with their feet. she may want to consider surveying her customers, of course. but, if another spa opens up across the street with a more liberal access policy, and it attracts a lot of business, then the people have spoken regarding their comfort level; if that business fails, they will have as well.

i would suspect that the business with the stricter definition will be more successful due to the nature of the service, and i don't hold that truth against anybody. trans people have an obligation to respect certain boundaries. she should back off on this.

further, this is access to a spa. it's just about the definition of non-essential. and, i do not believe that a court in canada would argue it has jurisdiction to interfere.

if this upsets you, you have the right to start your own spa with different rules, but i don't think you have the right to tell this business owner how to run hers.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/body-blitz-transgender-policy-1.4158397

here's some good news...

http://globalnews.ca/news/3522802/religion-is-increasingly-seen-as-doing-more-harm-than-good-in-canada-ipsos-poll/

this is kind of a naive article. harper left a lot of vacant spaces for his successor to fill, but he could very well  have stacked the court - at the lower level. the reason that harper had a bunch of liberals to promote was that it was what years of liberal dominance left him with.

it is true that we don't have the politicized judicial system here that we might have, but it is a function of the way the system works rather than an aspect of the system itself. we can imagine scenarios where this would happen.

trudeau is, in fact, going to have to steer around the harper appointees at the lower level. or, at least you would think that he would. unfortunately, i actually suspect that trudeau will end up preferring harper's appointees over those of his liberal predecessors, as he is ideologically closer to harper than he is to them.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/stacking-the-supreme-court-1.4157799

this is a non-starter, it can't happen, and he should immediately ask them to resign.

i won't even analyse the proposal, because it's impossible.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/andre-pratte-infrastructure-bank-split-1.4158429

"i'm closer to your wife's age than your daughter's age, you old twit."

i'm not the first person that's put together a comparison between the naive pro-communist protestors of the previous generation and the naive pro-islam protestors of the current one.

bin-saud! bin-saud! binsaud! binsaud! binsaud! binsaud!

"take a holiday in arabia,
where you'll not kiss ass or get cracked..."

bin-saud.

so, the upper class white kids yelling down the christian preachers at the pro-muslim rally...

these kids are vulnerable, yes. but what you're really seeing is the racism of low expectations. the white christian preacher is held to a higher standard, while the primitive sand niggers should be left to their own: a principle of anthropological research, a prime directive. they do not know better. so, it is ok when they do it; they should not be disturbed in their capsule, or held to the standards of the more advanced society. leave their culture alone, it's existence justifies our own superiority.

that is privilege.

if they have the capability to understand this, they'll walk away on their own. if they don't, they're of no consequence, anyway.

it wasn't just the slaves, though. i've gotten push back for talking about "communists" in the eighteenth century, and i half agree, but they certainly weren't liberals; they were peasants looking mostly for land reforms. i guess the difference between an african slave and a european serf at this point was sort of blurry, anyways. they had the same masters and the same goals, which is why the american elite had to invent racism to get them in conflict with each other.

the other reason there is a second amendment is that the elites thought it better to let the settlers kill each other in fits of passion than be controlled by a commander that would distribute arms in order to kill them. put another way, it was meant to prevent the monopolization of arms by revolutionary factions.

but, it was largely about controlling labour.

so, when you see these militia groups working with the cops, you should not be surprised. you do not need to conjure up imagery of brown shirts, or references to hitler. this is what america always was.

it is your visions of america as something different than this that need to be adjusted.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/20/if-sustainable-living-feminine-bad-for-planet-and-women

i'll state it as clearly as i can: chrystia freeland is an american spy.

so, are alcohol users more aggressive than marijuana users? that's floating around, right now. i may have perpetuated it myself a little, in musing that i hope that legalization converts some alcoholics into potheads, and pointing out the public health benefits. but, i actually think that legalization is likely to bust that myth.

to be clear: yes, alcohol is a more dangerous substance, if consumed excessively. marijuana doesn't produce blackouts, or damage reasoning skills the way that alcohol does. nor does it present the same kind of long term health problems.

but, ultimately, alcohol is a cns depressant. it's the stimulants - like cocaine - that pose the largest threats for violence. alcohol consumption is clearly tied to violence (correlation), but there's not really any good reason to tie alcohol use to violence (doesn't necessarily imply causation) the same way that there is to tie cocaine use to violence (it's a stimulant). so, what's going on here?

i think that what you're going to see come out of the legalization process is the deconstruction of this myth that alcohol users are more violent and marijuana users are less violent and the realization that alcohol is more often tied to violence for the simple reason that it is more readily available to violent people. your archetypal dumb jock can walk into a bar and pound a few, then look for somebody to fight. he doesn't need contacts or friends to find beer the same way that he does to find pot. once pot is as readily available to the archetypal dumb jock as alcohol, the rate of violence observed amongst marijuana users will no doubt find itself in alignment with that observed by alcohol users. long time users of both drugs in diverse situations will recognize this as obvious, because it was never the alcohol that made the dumb jock so dangerous in the first place. what makes the dumb jock dangerous is that he is dumb.

in the process, alcohol may experience somewhat of a revival in reputation.

i'm hard on alcohol, but i'm not shy to use it, because i know how to use it safely (despite the inaccurate claims of others). and, it can be used safely, nobody doubts this. see, a big part of this is my disposition, though. it should shock nobody to learn that i'm a passive drunk. but, it seems to be harder for people to understand that i'm a passive drunk because i'm opposed to violence when i'm sober. this shouldn't be hard to put together, but alcohol seems to have really taken a beating, lately.

i was at an underground party on saturday night and they were freely selling a substance that is supposed to be safer than alcohol. perhaps my eyes were lying to me. but, it seemed to me that the people that were only drinking were able to dance on their own with reasonable stamina, while the people inhaling this supposedly safer substance limped around looking like they had multiple sclerosis. i stopped and watched one guy for a good five or six minutes. he was clearly having the kind of motor difficulties that you would normally assign to somebody going through the advanced stages of dementia. i hope he didn't suffer permanent nerve damage.

my point is just that you need to look at context. you need to be careful with alcohol, especially if you are thin like i am: you need to consume it in small amounts over a long time, rather than all at once. but, it's not going to turn you into somebody that you aren't. once we have equal access to intoxication sources, we'll see those numbers even out and begin to realize that the root causes are underlying.

next time...

http://www.windsorfire.com/open-air-burning/

the refugees have been burning shit all night, and it's...

i don't care what your mythology says. as far as i'm concerned, this is just unnecessary pollution, and it should be regulated by city anti-pollution, and anti-smoking, by-laws.

but, why should i have to call somebody to get an enforcement? why is it not obvious that if you're going to sit outside and create carcinogenic smoke all day then you should leave a residential area in order to do so? how does this evade a person's basic intuition?

or is the truth that they just don't give a fuck?

"muh religion!"

i'm going to forget about it for the night, but they can't keep doing this, either. the next time, i'll have to start off by going over and having a talk and asking them to either burn their shit inside or go to a public park.

but, the first thing i want to do is understand what they're actually doing, and why.

my initial guess was that they were celebrating the full moon. now, the full moon was on friday, but i know that their calendar is pre-modern, so it's going to generally be off by a day or two. so, i reasoned that they probably thought the full moon was tonight. but, i can't find any support for the idea that they'd burn incense on the full moon.

it's also nearing the end of ramadan, and while i can't find a religious significance for burning shit at the end of ramadan, it does appear to be a cultural thing, which just makes it that much less acceptable. if that's it, it's not even "muh religion". it's just "i'm breaking by-laws and stinking up the neighbourhood for no good reason.".

but, i found this while googling, and it made me chuckle. esophagus, trachea - same thing, right?

There is nothing wrong with a fasting person smelling good smells, from food, perfume etc, but he should not inhale bukhoor (incense) or the steam coming out of the cooking pot because these have particles which may reach his stomach.

again: bill casey sat as a conservative for a really long time. he had a fight with the previous government. the liberals saw an opportunity to take the seat, as he was more popular in the riding than the prime minister. but, it's just another example of how the conservatives have taken over the most important positions in the liberal party.

the future of marijuana legalization in canada has been put in the hands of a 72 year-old conservative. nobody should be surprised if it gets bogged down in committee, as he is claiming.

http://dankr.ca/news/standing-committee-health-preparing-discuss-bill-c-45-cannabis-act

i like the insight into the economic backwardsness that seems so strongly correlated with the baby boomer generation.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/08/taxation-government-spending-the-national-debt-and-mmt.html

i just want to point something out about what mmt advocates and other broadly new left, keynesian type economic advocates don't argue for in order to clarify a point.

keynesians have a reputation for supporting "tax and spend" economic positions, which are supposed to be opposed by free market advocates. so, what is this about mmt supporting the abolition of taxes? it's a caricature created by this army of zombie followers that mmt has developed, because they think it gives them an academic argument to just let the printing press run forever. i don't have this research, but i'd strongly suspect that your average mmt cheerleader is somebody who spent a large amount of their childhood being told that they can't have things due to the existence of artificial financial restraints imposed by parents who thought they were teaching them "values". i'm not talking about poor kids. i'm talking about parents that had means and denied it to their kids in order to "build character". this kind of parenting always fails. and, what happened to these kids? they became these mmt zombies, convinced that we can have everything in exchange for nothing...

if the government can create as much money as it wants, what do we need taxes for? and, yeah: mmt does make this argument, so long as it's at the federal level. but, it also argues that adjusting tax rates is a useful way to stimulate the economy, or to slow it down. i think the evidence does uphold this, but only on the condition that it is targeted. so, a policy of adjusting tax rates to stop or start the economy should be geared mostly at the middle class, not at the rich. this isn't a free market position, it's a realist position around the value of fiat money: yeah, we can just print it at will in order to pay for stuff. sure. so, if your concern is around spending, there's no reason at all to think you need to collect the money in order to spend it - and if your argument is that taxes need to be high in order to pay for spending, or that we cannot increase spending without increasing taxes, then that argument is invalid.

but, even that is not an argument for the total abolition of taxes. it is at best an argument for the abolition of federal taxes. while it is theoretically possible that the federal government could oversee all spending in the country, that it is not the way that any modern country works. existing, real-life countries mostly fund social services out of money that is taxed at the state/provincial or municipal level. mmt does not in any way advocate for the abolition of these taxes. in fact, the left has historically seen property taxes as one of the most progressive types of taxation.

the narrative that john mccain is senile is actually intended to protect him from more direct criticism. his intent was transparently to carry out a bait and switch, to make it seem like comey is biased towards the democrats and that the investigation consequently carries no value. now, it may be the case that mccain has lost a few steps, sure; if you are informed, you need to do some mental gymnastics, sure, but if you're not informed, or perhaps don't know much about the process, you could conceivably be confused by the obfuscation. the thing is that this is so transparent relative to the reality that it exposes mccain as hopelessly and unworkably dishonest. so, you should not give him a pass on this - you should call him out for his malicious level of dishonesty, rather than pretend he doesn't know what he's doing.

as these incidents build, it's becoming more and more obvious - beyond dispute - that when "russian hackers" are blamed, the real perpetrators are always in the united states intelligence appratus - cia, fbi, nsa, etc.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-07/russian-hacking-in-qatar-and-putin-s-ambitions

the qataris just rejected an invitation to meet with trump.

you should jump to conclusions.

https://sputniknews.com/politics/201706091054466060-russia-qatar-talks-issues/

i apologize for the video, but robert fripp is a strong advocate of intellectual property rights.

america...

you need to have an advisor with the president at all times. you can't let him go and talk to the saudis - or the israelis or the russians - by himself. there has to be somebody there to help him.

yeah, well, i didn't vote for him.

get some funding passed for primary education, for fuck's sake.

see, this was my initial intuition. after so many years of multidimensional chess - itself often overanalysed - analysts want to come up with some kind of plan.

i don't think there's any evidence for this, or at least not on the us side. everybody else has an agenda. for trump, i think it's as simple as the article presents it.

trump wanted to know who was funding extremists. the saudis told him the qataris are. he believed them. so, they tricked him into isolating the qataris. then, when he got home, he was told they weren't honest and he's changing his mind.

...because trump is not a ruthless dictator. he's a hapless fool.

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/trump-may-not-have-known-us-has-11000-troops-in-qatar-when-he-bashed-country-on-twitter-report/

ach!

scotland...

the tables have turned haven't they? it was just a few years ago that you were saying you needed to rid yourself of the british tories. and, now you've gone and undone what the british voted for.

i hope you're proud of yourself.

left: 311
right: 308

if you include sinn fein, and place the lib dems on the left, the numbers right now are:

left 308
right 307

they're at -14 and it's looking like it's going to be more like -20 by the end of the night.

the sinn fein seats do not exist, as they will not sit in parliament - unless corbyn can convince them to, which is highly unlikely. that's 7.

so, they need to get to -22 before they can consider voting in corbyn as prime minister. that would be a labour government with support from the scottish & welsh parties (which i think is proper...and would think an irish party would be proper, too, if they wanted to be in the uk in the first place), as well as the lib dems and one wayward irish unionist mp that leans left.

-22.

i actually think it's going to happen.

anything between -15 and -22 will give the lib dems the balance of power, unless corbyn can convince sinn fein to sit.

you know, turnout may be up absolutely, but it's relatively low at under 70%, so i think it's reasonable to suggest that a lot of these soft tory but really undecided voters that they got over the phone just stayed at home, in addition to a clear shy labour bias.

the online polling may not be scientific, but it at least controls for apathy better than the phone polling does. i mean, you can imagine how this goes.

you get the voter on the phone, and she's watching the telly, barely listening.

"yeah."
"tory, i guess. that's what the papers say."
"i dunno."
"listen, i'm watching the telly, so bugger off."
*click*

then you get these 10% tory leads in the polls that are based on frustrated people trying to hang up the phone.

randomization is irreplaceable, and you're going to eventually run into online polls that get it horribly wrong (we've already had some in canada) because they aren't random. but, if you're lucky, the online polls are at least self-selecting for likely voters. it's one of those situations where something is wrong by method, but in being wrong by method is also accidentally consistently right in outcome.

will the lib dems prop up the tories, coalition or not?

perhaps under the agreement of a second referendum.

farron should be absolutely firm, and vote to topple the government immediately if they do not concede.

just to clarify for those unclear...

this graphic they're using is bollocks. media claimed the tories had a 13 seat majority, but that only includes the 8 from the irish conservatives. in fact, they only had a 5 seat majority (including the speaker). but, then the guardian goes and daftly places the irish conservatives on the left, as though the irish cannot figure it out or something.

the tories have currently lost a net of 11 seats, but the irish conservatives have gained 2. that means they've lost a total of 9. the magic number is 13. if the irish numbers hold, that means you need to see the british at -15 or greater, which is still plausible.

otherwise, the tories will be able to form a government with the support of the irish conservatives, and it will probably be stable enough.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2017/jun/08/live-uk-election-results-in-full-2017

turnout appears to be up.

so, what we had was a "shy socialist" effect - undecided voters telling pollsters they were leaning conservative because they didn't want to admit they preferred corbyn, no doubt due to the media attacks. and, they appear to have been mostly ukip voters.

actually, what i hope that i've demonstrated is that reading the polls is not at all complex, it's just that you cannot believe the way the media has spun them. yes: the aptitude tests tell me i'm brilliant, and i will not deny that. but, i haven't done anything more complex than check the source. you could have done the same thing with credentials that are no more complex than grade 10 math.

my insight is simply that you cannot trust the media. but, that is not the insight of a genius. it should be common knowledge, at this point.

polling firms need to get the point: the undecideds do not necessarily distribute. they may distribute, or they may not. it is a poor assumption, at any rate. you need to provide an argument one way or the other. and, you can determine these biases empirically by simply looking at the polling differentials that appear between who provides full results and who tries to force undecided voters to pick a choice.

but, who is a typical member of this 13%?

a large percentage of them actually voted neither tory nor labour but ukip in the last election, but historically voted for labour. so, the potentiality of a shy socialist effect is that much more exaggerated. they've been carefully steered from ukip to tory, but are they just telling the pollsters what they want to hear?

but, it follows that the "shy" here may be neither tory nor socialist but ukip itself.

this is all speculation. i'm just pointing out that it appears that enough people are undecided and merely leaning tory to conclude that the decision will be made by people in the ballot box - or by people that decided in the end that they would rather do something else.

this was predictable, actually.

the survation poll - the one where the tories are only up by 1% - is the only one with an undecided option. whether that is good or not is a tricky question.

so, the polls where you can't pick "undecided" have the tories up by as much as 13 points, whereas the polls that allow you to pick 'undecided', and track 'refused', only have the tories up by a few points. one even has labour winning by 2.

polling companies tend to dislike the 'undecided' response because it decreases confidence in the results. but, this is a business consideration. they are scientifically superior.

the survation poll, then, and it's only one poll, but what it actually says is:

tories: 33.9%
labour: 32.6%
undecided: 12.1%
lib dem 6.4%
refused: 6.3 %

what that means is that 18.4% of the sample did not answer.

"but it distributes!"

well, it might seem a reasonable suggestion that it might, but then why is this poll so different? let's at least distribute the refuseds:

tories: 36%
labour: 34.6%
undecided: 12.9%
lib dem: 6.8%

the biggest difference in the other polls was 13%.

so, there is a bigger consistency here than initially apparent.

but, these swings usually exist on the left. certainly, they always do in canada. so, this is a bit of a reversal of the expectations and may confuse some models.

see, the "shy tory" effect was identified in a period where the media and broad society was clearly on the soft left. tories were afraid to speak in public, lest they be outed as such. but, i think the situation has reversed. the same conditions would instead apply to a "shy socialist" effect, as it is the less socially acceptable position in the uk as of today. and, this is consistent with the results - when you force people to answer, the undecided voters claim they will vote tory in disproportionately higher numbers, no doubt because that is what the media is implying they ought to do.

i've identified this problem elsewhere: the election is in the hands of the least capable voters. what this 13% is telling pollsters is that they don't know who they should vote for, but are leaning towards doing what they're told to do by establishment media. they could, of course, be lying. but, we have to assume that they aren't.

i think that this election may actually work the opposite way in turnout, as well. if a lot of these very soft tory voters stay home, it could end up closer than expected.

i think there is reason to expect a hung parliament, or something close to it. i do not expect a landslide, at least.

i'm sure i could clean this up a little bit by carefully sorting through it, but this is broadly incoherent:

right.

center.

left.

maybe i can join the below. i mean, i don't want to join the top....

(recycled line: reaching for the top means i must have left my beer on my bookshelf)

the underneath? the underground?

ffs. and, max is right: these are not high school dropouts. they can spell things on their signs. and, in normal circumstances, they can put together complete sentences.

get me out of here.

get

me

out....

in fact, the russians are always on the right side of history.

the civil war in the muslim sphere is not sunni vs. shia. it's sunni vs shia vs. secular. and, it is not hard to see that, whatever their current flaws, the forces of secularism are on the right side of history - and those that will oppose them are not.

the fundamental conflict is this:

vs. this:

vs. this:

and, remember: the russians are the cultural descendants of this:

the conflict points are the substantial overlaps in these maps.

what is happening in the middle east right now is probably world war three.

it's not about iran. it's about turkey.

see, what most of the media coverage missed is that there were actually three sides in the syrian conflict.

1) syria-iran-russia-hezbollah
2) saudis-israelis-isis-nato

ok...but...

3) turkey-qatar-al nusra

(& of course you had the kurds as a purely american front, and break-in-case-of-emergency plan)

it's the third faction that everybody assumed was just an arm of the second, but that was actually at the crux of the conflict. most of the fighting was between turkish/qatari-backed forces and saudi-backed forces, in a race to depose assad.

as it turns out, the russians stepped in and put an end to this. isis is now done; this is closing down. and, assad is still in power.

who is responsible for this failure?

well, you could reasonably argue that the saudis are responsible because they backed the most barbaric group of fighters you could comprehend might exist, and in the process united the syrian people against regime change. that's the correct narrative: the syrian people saw the alternative to assad, and firmly decided upon assad. they needed the russian muscle to finish the job, but that's what actually happened. had the saudis backed less extreme revolutionaries, the syrian people may have picked a revolution over the status quo.

but, trump is instead choosing to back the saudi argument that it was the qataris that prevented isis from deposing assad, and must be punished for their insolence and treason. this comes amidst a growing turkish alliance with russia, which is subsuming the third faction in the first one, rather than the second.

it is not clear what russia's long term plans are with syria. assad does not want to be dictator, and the russians have made it clear that they are willing to help him stand down, so long as he is replaced with a friendly faction. but, if the fundamental conflict was between arabs and turks for control over a region they've fought over for a thousand years, it's valid to wonder if the russians may in the end back turkish claims to the region, as it would serve their interests to have an expanded turkish buffer state to contain the clearly expansionist saudis with.

not iran. turkey.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/gulf-tension-more-threats-qatar-russia-us-dragged-crisis-892649938

i am not easily embarrassed, or one to talk too loudly about the dignity of public office, but how did our prime minister end up kayaking across to niagara falls to talk to an american talk show?

that is embarrassing.

what a clown.

it's more than disappointing, it's disheartening.

but, it's not unexpected; this is a very right-wing government.

put it in the pile of things that the ndp ought to run against, if they can ever get their shit together.

i would specifically vote against increases in military spending. 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-must-re-invest-in-military-as-us-withdraws-from-world-freeland-says/article35212024/

to expand upon what i was saying earlier...

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/theresa-may-jeremy-corbyn-general-election-result-brexit-economic-crash-recession-praying-they-lose-a7773166.html

again: while i may be slightly skeptical about the scientific validity of these yougov polls, i think this probably a correct prediction.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-poll-latest-tories-majority-miss-seats-yougov-survey-labour-theresa-may-a7773106.html

this is one of those media spots that i keep an eye out for.

so, she's got people in her own party calling for her resignation and the media asking corbyn if she is "in any way" responsible for the attacks.

the insinuation is clear. and, i'll give some credit to the elite in the uk for drawing a line on this, as it is....what exists between these lines is a series of war crimes. this cannot be condemned strongly enough.

can the voters read between these lines? but, it might not matter.

it may take two elections to get finished, but there's a shift in power underway in the uk.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-theresa-may-resign-prime-minister-police-cuts-london-terror-attack-election-2017-a7773286.html

a vlog update...

it's taken me off time over the last two months, believe it or not, to catch up to the end of april for the vlogs, but the process was complicated by the need to compile evidence for the court date, as well as my broken laptop, and i consequently can't come down too hard on the process. but, this machine does not have enough ram to render and have a browser open at the same time, so i'm going to have to shut down for the next render process, which should take me up until the middle of may.

i should be able to finally take a final look at the broken laptop while that is working, and determine if i think i can salvage it or not.

when i come out of this process, i should finally be caught up, and able to put the vlogging aside until the camera fills back up. another day or two...

again: there is an authoritarian coalition between progressives and conservatives developing, and anti-authoritarian liberals need to find a way to stand outside of it, while rejecting the duality presented by libertarians, who are not allies.

this is going to be a very difficult decade for liberals, as we watch the progressive movement be absorbed by the conservative movement (the primary vehicle for this will probably be the democratic party). what emerges from this process will be a natural expression of the authoritarian tendencies within progressivism, but will not be acceptable to liberals. what emerges will consequently be a permanent schism between progressives and liberals on authoritarian lines, which means issues where progressives and liberals diverge along the authoritarian axis - things like speech and approaches to crime prevention and law enforcement.

when the government goes after you for "body shaming", that is a legitimate speech issue and you should expect to win a constitutional rights challenge, so long as you are not breaking some other law in the process.

put another way: laws against "body shaming" are certainly unconstitutional and will be struck down at the earliest opportunity. but, that doesn't mean that it's ok to do things like film people in dressing rooms, or otherwise infringe on an individual's personality rights.

btw, i think this link details the correct explanation of the headaches i was having at the end of february, and why the aspirin solved the problem when nothing else did:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3469735

at the crux of it may be an inability to experience empathy for strangers.

so, i'll watch a documentary because i'm learning something, which makes me feel like i'm not wasting my time. but, if you sit me down and try and force me to watch a "movie", my most likely reaction is going to be something along the lines of "why am i supposed to give a fuck about these imbeciles?". there's almost no tactic to get me to care - and, if you can be robotically logical like i am for a moment, it's not hard to see the basic correctness of this position. is it not even kind of pathetic to engage yourself in the lives of strangers on film? what reason do you provide for this behaviour?

really grasping my rejection of the medium means realizing that i'm truly some kind of cyborg, but i'm more likely to argue in favour of being a cyborg than recoil at the accusation.

another way to look at is that i don't like following the lead of others. that's what you're doing when you put on a film: you're letting somebody else take control of your mind for a little while. not only does that not sound like a good time, to me, but it sounds utterly repugnant to me. i seek to be in control of my thoughts at all times. so, you'd rather see me doing something intellectual like typing or something physical like recording, or perhaps dancing, as it keeps me in control of myself. to lose control is to in some way subvert your individuality, and there's no scenario where i'd want to do that.

i can't even remember the last film i saw. i mean like fiction kind of film. i watch plenty of documentaries, still.

it would have been 2002-2003ish.

i'm not exaggerating.

i can't even argue that the quality of film has declined, because i don't actually know whether it has or not. it probably has, but i can't make the argument. i'm that disinterested, really. and, that's really not even what the aversion is about. the blunt truth is that i simply have absolutely no interest in sitting in front of a screen and watching a narrative for two hours. it's the activity that bores me. i'd rather be engaging with something than tuning out. 

sorry.

so, putin's actual argument is that he didn't try and get trump elected because he knew that trump would have been the same as clinton, anyways, because the parties are basically the same. it's the two-headed monster bipartisan washington consensus - a ruling elite dominated by lobbyists that have widely convergent interests and don't care about what voters want. trump, clinton - what's the difference?

and, the argument is that the russians don't understand american politics?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8AeBAV4EIY

what the headlines should say is something like:

tories abandon power to force labour to hang itself on bad brexit deal

yeah.

it's not that the polls have shifted. or at least, not enough to change an outcome. the polls suggest a likely tory majority, and at best a tory minority. a labour minority would be a very wide miss, and a labour majority is just not in the data.

it's the other factors - the ones outside of a fair electoral process - that are starting to lead me towards corbyn. but, corbyn advocates should not get too excited, as the win may be short-lived.

it does not appear as though the tories want to deal with brexit. you have to keep in mind that labour are the patsies in the british system, so they get stuck with the unpleasant business. in canada, it's the tories that are the patsies, and in the united states it's the democrats. the system ensures that it is these parties that pass unpopular legislation, in order to protect the reputations of the true ruling parties, relative to the ideological persuasions of the local ruling classes.

in fact, jeremy corbyn is the patsy of the patsies. if it is to fall on labour to negotiate an inevitably bad brexit deal, corbyn is the perfect one to do it as he can then be scapegoated for the certain failures in negotiation, thereby allowing labour to safely distance itself from him, and the tories to sweep back in as soon as the issue is dealt with.

i don't wish to ape the tory line, but much of what corbyn is suggesting is not likely to get through the parliament in much of any scenario. it's almost impossible to imagine the house of lords signing off on abolishing tuition fees, for example. but, the broader truth is that corbyn's time is likely to be so consumed by failed brexit negotiations that he won't have time to deal with much else.

i need to be clear: there is currently no polling support for a corbyn victory. but, i think they're going to give him one, anyways - or at least set him up for a win the next time around with a tenuous conservative minority.

expect those headlines to appear almost immediately.

this spate of "terror attacks" in britain is very suspicious. let's hope the british follow the lead of the spaniards all those years ago, rather than succumb to some neo-hobbesian nightmare.

"way back in '68...
no way.
wrong date."

i've been kind of torn on this.

if this neo-mccarthyist witch hunt is just a play for low information voters, i have to be pragmatic in giving the democrats some space - so long as the truth doesn't get lost in the charade. i mean, get it out of my face. and, don't expect me to take you seriously ever again. but, i'll be quiet.

however, if they're trying to use it to justify further foreign interventionism, then it needs to be nipped. immediately.

also, let's give max a round of applause, here. that's a hard position to take, right now.

i mean, you can imagine kissinger dressed up in masonic horse garb, waltzing levi eshkol over a floor with the middle east on it, with the saudis waiting to pair off, and nasser standing in the back staring at his shoes.

kookookachew though, right?

is this song about kissinger?

i doubt it.

it's a neat idea, though.

for the slow kids at the back of the bus, i'll repeat myself again:

my opposition to religion is rooted in a stringent conception of social liberalism that rejects the authority of clerical bodies to make arbitrary rules governing the conduct of individuals. put another way, religion is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and must be monolithically opposed on those grounds. while religions may co-exist with each other, those that claim that religion may co-exist with freedom are either acting as apologists for tyranny or are too stupid to work through the dissonance and understand what they're actually saying and doing.

religion is never a personal choice and always a social one. religion does not act at the individual level, but at the community level. it follows that engaging in religion is necessarily engaging in a subversion of democracy.

the same social liberalism that leads me to abhor religion on civil rights grounds leads me to abhor racism on the same terms. race is not a biological idea, but a construct of the ruling class to justify the exploitation of whole classes of labour. as such, the concept of race has a lot in common with the concept of religion, and they should be opposed together. certainly, opposing religion in no way implies any kind of adherence to any concept of race.

there is consequently a deep consistency in opposing religion and race (or racism, same thing) at the same time, and a contradiction in opposing one while supporting the other.

further, this is a standard left-wing position that has been held by almost all leftists for as long as there's been a left.

please try and keep up.

is corbyn really in contention?

i should begin by pointing out that it wouldn't be so crazy if he were. i pointed out a while back that the tories are going to eventually lose power, and theresa may is so awful that you almost wonder if she wants to get out of the way in order to avoid dealing with brexit. she's just about the worst candidate you could possibly imagine. what i was thinking at the time was that the election has the potential for a strong third party showing given the continuing broad cynicism over new labour, but i guess the cynicism around the lib dems is even worse, and paul nuttall seems more bnp than ukip. for all the talk of corbyn being unelectable, the situation seems to have been reversed; it is may that is clearly unelectable, and corbyn that seems to actually be benefiting from being the only sane choice - he's just in the right place at the right time to capitalize off of a clearly incompetent prime minister bumbling her way into an unnecessary election.

maybe you have to be outside of the country, sometimes, to see the obvious. and, despite what the pundits are saying, the fact that may is losing support was obvious from the start - if corbyn's associated rise wasn't, necessarily. and, i do believe that a strong third party could have performed very well in this election, so long as they didn't lack credibility (lib dems) or sanity (ukip). again: corbyn is lucky that he's become the clear default.

but, are the polls really suggesting a tight race?

well, these yougov polls are interesting things. they have gigantic sample sizes, which is a good thing in principle. but, there's no meaningful way to understand whether or not the respondents are representative. there's going to come a time in the near future where you can no longer argue that online polls exclude certain demographics, like pensioners and the very poor. but, it's still the truth of it, right now. and, it's not hard to understand why you should be skeptical when an online poll produces better results for corbyn than anybody else.

the telephone polls are suggesting that he's about 5 points behind, perhaps a bit more.

that said, you have to realize that labour doesn't need to win the popular vote in order to win the most seats, largely due to the regional dominance of the snp in scotland. you would need a good seat projection model to figure this complexities of this out.

my own understanding is that if he can get close to 5 points, he could reasonably expect to keep the conservatives to a minority, and if he can get it under 5 points he has a reasonable chance of winning a minority, himself. but, this is tricky math, and i don't have the intricate insights into it that i did for the canadian election in 2015.

so, is he really in contention? probably not. but, he could hold her to a minority, and set up another election relatively soon.

i woke up today with something unexpected: a sunburn.

what? i don't burn...

...or at least i didn't burn...

i'm wondering if this is a consequence of quitting smoking. see, for years i'd go outside for a few minutes a dozen or so times a day. is that why i didn't burn? and, is taking that out of the equation why i am burning, now?

something else i did yesterday as i was walking was that i spent some time with a new record by an old favourite.

after such a long wait, i was a little worried that i was going to get something geared more towards the broken social scene crowd. those fears are unrealized; this is a do make record, through and through.

none of their records really sound the same, and this carries it on. what i might suggest jumps out is a new set of influences. there are nods to acts like 65daysofstatic, yann tiersen and perhaps tim hecker buried into the mix. this a useful facelift, but....

what i'm left to wonder is what might have been had they been releasing all of these years.

this is not as strong as their 2009 disc, which i expected even at the time it was released to be their last and which i've interpreted as a fitting farewell for all of these years, but it's certainly stronger than their 2007 disc. it doesn't sound like an appendage, though. it sounds like a start of something new.

let's hope they keep releasing.

these companies that are saying that they want to invest in mexico are actually wrong.

the single biggest thing that made mexico such a corporate paradise was the state-owned oil company, which kept inflation and rent low, which is what allowed american manufacturers to make a profit off of the wage differential.

but, the decision to break up the state-owned oil company is unravelling all of that. inflation is kicking in, which is going to increase property values and exert upward pressure on wages. mexico has very draconian labour laws. this is a tinderbox waiting to happen.

those looking to invest in mexico should do so expecting the return of long term labour unrest in the next few years. and, people will look back on the privatization of oil as the country's single largest mistake - much as canadians do.

but, what we assign to muslims in this period was always tenuous to begin with - you had what were basically romans in spain, and basically persians in baghdad (which let us not forget was just a renamed babylon), as well as egyptians, doing the bulk of the actual work. there were no great discoveries made in the peninsula.

to use an example that readers can understand, consider isaac newton. isaac newton actually wrote volumes of work on theology - not because he wanted to, but because he had to. christians today will even argue that newton was a true believer. but, this was all a political necessity, given that he was overturning the christian world. how much more could we have gotten out of newton had he not wasted so much time writing theology in order to prevent himself from being executed?

the reality of the so-called islamic golden age is something much more like that. the religion was at best irrelevant, and in fact measurably worse than that.

here's a question for neil: does he think it's a coincidence that this interest in astronomy happened in babylon, the world's ancient centre of astronomy? the constellation names are greek and roman, but they're converted names. all of this work was initially done in babylon. so, what allowed the babylonians, the assyrians, the mesopotamians, the sumerians, to refind themselves in this period of arab military dominance?

the answer is peace. that is, the absence of war. what the arab armies brought was an end to a thousand years of war between persia and rome, fought in exactly the areas in question. when the war lifted, the people found their ancient roots - which were neither persian, nor roman, nor arab.

for the culture to flourish again, it needs to escape the consequences of being a culture of war. and, does religion help or hinder this?

the "islamic golden age" construct is not just reactionary, it's also revisionist in the sense that it's meant to counter biases in european history. i don't think it's particularly controversial, at this point, to acknowledge that european historians have historically been hostile to islam - as greek and roman historians were hostile to persia, and islamic historians were in turn hostile to europe. there were large, civilizational conflicts at play over huge time periods.

but, what the "islamic golden age" construct does is wrongheaded in attempting to remove disdain for reverence. it is a myth-based approach to history designed to counter the established european biases, and in doing so just converts the problem into a narrative that is no less wrong.

the arabs were thuggish despots that rapidly conquered a large area that was weakly defended due to centuries of war and then dominated it under heavy taxation. what you call islam today developed as a means to facilitate and organize these conquests. in time, they became weak and were defeated by a superior foe (the mongols).

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17192/beyond-tolerance-and-intolerance_deconstructing-th

i got a compost run in today and finished my grocery shopping for the month, minus a few top-ups near the end.

i got lucky with good prices on tomatoes and cheese. she could still give me the $58, but i doubt it's going to happen. in fact, i think she's going to insist i dismantle the fans, and eat the $50.

they're not smart people.

it was tight, but i'm clear, and with $8 to spare until next friday, when the ontario tax credit comes in. that will give me $69, total, for the rest of the month - which is probably enough to get out once. but, i'm not sure i'm going to even want to, yet.

july should offset for me into a normal month because it's a gst month. but, of the years i've been here, july tends to be weak for concerts, too - or at least weak for my tastes. i guess it's festival season, and i'm just not a festival person.

what i'm actually thinking is that i should be more productive over the summer, hopefully. but we'll see what i can find.

right now, my feet are sore again from walking and i still have cleaning to do tomorrow, so i won't be back to doing anything until saturday, probably.

so, how do we even try to understand what trump is saying about the paris agreement?

he seems to be of the opinion that the regulations are going to hurt business, which is probably sort of true. but, he wants to specifically argue that it's going to make the country less competitive.

what this clearly implies is that he sees pulling out of the agreement as an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage over the rest of the world. while all of the other dumb countries are trying to reduce emissions, america will eliminate regulations, thereby bringing back the jobs.

of course, that won't work, anyway.

but, this is equivalent to assigning america as the world's pollution dump. what he's saying is he wants to import the world's pollution, by bringing back the dirtiest production, and not putting any restrictions on it.

and, he thinks he's outsmarting the rest of the world by doing it.

so, when he's talking about making a better deal, what that means is creating a new agreement that allows america to be more competitive by giving polluters more space to pollute.

this whole thing about needing to work together to reduce emissions just isn't a part of the calculus. he's solely concerned with trying to find ways to trick other countries into taking on a greater burden, and ways for american companies to pollute more. so, he's at least in favour of emissions targets in other countries - because that will make america more attractive for polluters.

that donald. he's smart, all right.

what can the rest of the world do but start to consider real sanctions against this government? this is beyond absurd. if trump's only concern is making america more attractive to polluters, the rest of the world has to boycott those polluters.

there's not another choice.

the judge was initially pushing me to provide an empirical basis, but in the end she shifted the burden of proof to them, which is actually in accordance with the existing case law: the premise of second hand smoke affecting my enjoyment of the premises is a purely subjective/experiential thing, by definition, so it falls on them to demonstrate that the air is free of smoke if they wish to justify their interference with my enjoyment of the space. it's the correct legal answer to the question, as i posed it.

so, i'm allowed to run the fan unless they can prove i'm making the whole thing up.

the property owners are, in fact, resisting the court order - which is why i requested the wall.

maybe she can call the cops and have them threaten me, again?

the judge seemed to realize the inevitability of this. the actual order is as follows:

1) they need to either

a) get the air professionally checked or
b) just install a fan.

2) if they don't do either of these things, i can deduct $50 a month from the rent indefinitely, until they do. a little less effective than the wall, but so be it.
3) i also get costs, at $58. that is, $50 for the app and $8 for the coal. if they don't pay me costs before june 15th, i can deduct it from july's rent.

i'm just as happy to leave the fan as it is, so i won't deduct the $50 over july unless they demand i dismantle it, without checking the air to demonstrate it's clarity (and the ruling did not provide for a ppm, so i'll accept trace amounts as justification). the smokers are moving out, as it is. so, as long as they don't bother me for the next month, it should blow over just fine.

but, they're pushing back on costs - they want a receipt for the coal, as though they think this is some kind of negotiation and they get to make a "deal".

it's a fucking court order to pay costs, you goddamned idiots. you can let me take it off june or you can give me cash or i can unilaterally take it off july.

"that's unacceptable. i need a receipt."

you need to learn how to fucking read, actually, is what it looks like to me.

ugh.

so, i'm apparently out the $58 until july 1st. *shrug*. i'll survive just fine.

today was only half as productive as i really wanted, but it was good.

1) i got my pill cycle reset back to the start of the month, which is great news for me.
2) i finished about half of my grocery shopping.
3) i won the court case, and got $58 in costs. i'm still waiting to see if the landlord will accept it on this month's rent, or make me wait until next month.
4) i paid down half of the loan. the other half is due at the end of june.
5) i had the company remove authorization to debit my account, and provide it in writing - meaning they're the ones breaking the law if it happens, and i can prove it. retaliation will be brutal.

i'm going to nap for the evening. i want to at least pay the rent tonight, even if i have to wait until tomorrow morning to finish shopping. so, i can't fall asleep too long.

i'm only budgeted for $30 spending this month, so getting the other $58 is going to be helpful, to say the least. they're in their rights to make me wait until july due to the wording of the case, but it seems rather obtuse to do so if i'm offering to deal with it up front.

i won the court case.

which means.

1) i get to keep the fan....although, the upstairs tenants are moving out, anyways.
2) i get $58.00 - $50.00 for the application and $8.00 for the coal.

that $58.00 is huge this month.

the idea that trump pulling out of the climate accord is going to make a big difference in emissions is rooted in the false premise that the accord was ever going to reduce emissions in the first place.

and, what the politicians of the world that bought into this - trudeau, perhaps more than any other - are pissed off about is that they (falsely) perceived paris as a way to quiet down the discussion, and trump as opening a can of worms.

activists should actually thank trump for stopping the issue from being sidelined. i keep going back to this point: trump is going to do a lot of really stupid things that are against his own interests, because he's not smart enough to realize it and he doesn't have the staff (which he wouldn't listen to anyways...) to shut him down.

trump's self-interest is to just be quiet and let everybody think the issue is solved. instead, his insistence on fighting the issue is giving activists a new opportunity to push for actually meaningful, binding targets.

but, let's be honest. if paris was the best we could do, we were doomed, anyways. activists should be focusing less on international climate agreements and more on direct action in shutting down specific emissions sources.

we might get some breaks in the courts, but there is not a federal government anywhere that is truly committed to emissions reductions. not canada. not the normally reliable swedens or norways. there's no country on the right side of history, here.

we have to do this ourselves.

the scare-mongering around minimum wage hikes seems intuitive, but it is actually rooted in the irrational premise that increasing the costs of labour will decrease the demand for it. that's the crux of it. if we want to be technical, we should be talking in terms of poor modelling. more specifically, the scare-mongerers are modelling labour as perfectly or strongly elastic, when they should be modelling it as nearly perfectly inelastic! but, you almost lose something in context by getting technical.

think about the argument: increasing the cost of labour will decrease the demand for it. that's ridiculous. why would you think that?

it's the same kind of goofy thinking that wants to conceptualize a government budget the same as a household budget. it's really not intuitive at all, it's ridiculous on it's face.

but, this is the crux of the junk economics on the right. they throw ideas at you that are barely comprehensible enough to even be wrong, then they repeat them so often that you take them as obvious. of course increasing wages will reduce jobs - i've heard that every day of my whole life. why? well, because increasing the cost of labour will decrease demand for it. obviously.

this link explains.

https://jonmalesic.com/2013/03/10/the-minimum-wage-and-elasticity-of-labor-demand/