they should be focusing on reducing portion sizes and increasing exercise, not keying in on specific sources. but, they won't do that because they're lost in these right-wing ideas about human nature.

i'm not joking. it's not that the doctors and public health experts can't work out a basic conservation law, namely energy stored = energy consumed - energy spent. i mean, we're not doing nuclear reactions at the cellular level, here. it's not happening at speeds approaching the speed of light. there's no relativistic effects; the simple newtonian conservation law is plenty accurate. they know that. they passed grade 10 science.

but, they're convinced that there's essentially nothing that can be done to control for gluttony.

so, instead of telling people that it's ok to eat a double bacon cheeseburger if it's compensated for with exercise and reduced intake elsewhere, they tell people to stuff their faces with celery.

if it worked, we'd be reducing obesity levels, right? it doesn't work - because their understanding of human nature is all wrong.

we need to teach people how to budget their calories in a way that allows them to adjust their impulsive behaviour with long term planning. people are not going to stuff their face with celery all day, they're going to eat that double bacon cheeseburger. but, because the health professionals are telling them to eat celery, they don't know how to do this responsibly.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-food-guide-chanages-healthy-eating-1.4170245

see, i don't even want to call this a religiously-motivated terror attack.

i want to call it an episode by a psychotic person.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/muslim-community-in-michigan-condemns-despicable-knife-attack-1.4172691

rather than search for windows 7 machines, i should be able to just tell them to forget about the os, right? it'll probably save me a few dollars, actually.

i should put this aside for the moment and worry about doing a bit of editing, instead. next week...

i'll be able to get the laptop that i want for $500. 8 gb expandable is fine for now; if i ever need to upgrade it, i can.

there's no use in wasting money on unnecessary frills. it's just an access point. it's just meant to type with. it's better spent on other things...

it's not that my desktop needs an upgrade. it can take a 64 bit OS. it can take 16 gb of ram. it's currently running 32 bit xp and has to for hardware reasons, but it has a huge amount of room to grow.

it's just...

...when's the next time i'll get the chance?

one thing at a time: i need a new access point. i've already had to reboot this thing three times due to the usb freezing and taking the mouse out.

should i actually take the opportunity to buy a new desktop?

what i'm replacing is my typing pc. and, how did i even get to this point?

well, i initially had my 90s desktop for this purpose, but i ended up homeless, and i switched to my laptop, which was the only machine i had at all. i've been using the laptop in my bed ever since.

...but it was initially supposed to be the old machine that i used for this reason.

nowadays, i'm using it as an access point, for the reason that i know that my connection is monitored and i want to keep my data off the network.

what i'm thinking is that i've learned that laptops are much harder to service and prone to breaking in ways that desktops aren't. i'm a little bit apprehensive about buying another one.

i do want to have a laptop that i can take from a to b, but i can use the vista laptop for that reason.

as an access point, i don't need a really heavy duty laptop. i just need a sufficient amount of space and enough ram to stop firefox from crashing.

i should do this one thing at a time. but, i'm probably going to buy a large amount of inexpensive gear rather than a top of the line new machine. it's just going to get me what i actually want, better.

first thing is the access point, and if i can get more for less with a desktop then i should do that, instead.

no.

i'll get a standalone device for the tablet.

i want to avoid touchscreens altogether.

what i'm looking for is the best windows 7 laptop computer i can find.

i'm not seeing any upside to 10, at all.

i think i'll stick with 7...

in fact, i even have extra keys for it.

can i get a laptop with a pen input? i've been wanting that forever. it's not just the math, it's the music, too. i don't need or want a touchscreen, i want to be able to scrawl in equations and notation in real time and have it convert it into math fonts. i know a lot of the technology is about text-to-speech, but what i really want is to write, not to talk.

i'm a nerd. sorry.

with the amount of cash she's given me, i'd might as well up everything to the max, but the key thing i want is lots of ram. i think the processors nowadays are all ridiculous. and, i'll be happy with a few hundred gb of actual space, given that i'm moving the editing off to a different machine.

"is $5000 enough?"

thanks, nana.

i'm actually going to put that money to good use. i'm counter-intuitive: the more money you give me, the more responsible i am about it. and, i have a number of projects to deal with. this is going to take a while and will be the focus of the rest of the summer, but things will be better when it gets done.

1) i need a new hard drive for my media/tv pc. i'm not yet ready to retire it altogether. this will be very cheap, if i can even find an ide drive at all.
2) my 90s laptop is still humming, with no reasons to mod it.
3) but i should fix up my vista laptop, which might mean upgrading past vista, to start with. i want to eventually convert this into a music processor. it will need a new hard drive, a new dvd and 2 gb of ram. that should be around $100.
4) my windows 7 laptop will, in fact, be converted into an editing station. i'm going to get at least 4 gb of ram for it. that's actually good enough for now, beyond getting some better software.
5) i'm going to get some kind of phone so that she can call me. i'll have to research this. it may be an ip phone, or may be an unlocked smart phone.
6) i'm going to finally get my strat fixed.
7) i'm also going to look into a starter tablet. i mean a tablet, specifically: a device i can write onto with a pen. remember, kids: i have a math degree.
8) i'm going to get a new primary laptop, for sure. i'm mostly going to be focusing on a machine with high ram capabilities. i need to do a huge amount of research into this, as well. how bad is windows 10? should i stick with 7? i'm ok with 7. should i even finally focus on linux? and, no, i do not want a mac.
9) i should also get my bicycle fixed.
10) anything remaining can be reasonably focused on furniture.

$5000 is a ridiculous sum, for me. it's probably 5x what i need. but, i'll take my good fortune with the proper responsibility and make sure i put it to good use.

i need to do a lot of research...

how does don pittis remain employed? this is characteristic junk from him. he's reading the official unemployment rate, rather than the real one, which is still over 10%. removing workers from the market because they can't find a job doesn't mean that there's a deficit of them, it actually means that there's a tremendous surplus of them. in the current economy, you would actually expect that the pressures on wages would be downwards, which is what we're seeing.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/inflation-canada-outlook-1.4167888

the other thing that happened yesterday is an escalation with the property owners over how to deal with removing cat feces from my window. they put some soil there, and the cats have been attracted to it. they don't want me to remove the soil, but i cannot have cat shit wafting through the screen. so, i appear to be headed back towards litigation. i'm going to be more quiet, this time, until it goes through, other than to say that it is the same basic legal question.

so, i got everything up and running only it for to crash on contact with the internet. i remain convinced that us intelligence is annoyingly concerned with me...i vlog....i'm an open book....this is stupid...

nonetheless, it seems to be what is.

i slept through a chkdsk yesterday morning, and it appears to have largely resolved the situation. i hope. i then slept a lot this morning, as well.

so, the laptop has the screen removed - like, unscrewed. it's just the bottom. it's out to a monitor. i haven't set up a mic yet. everything works except a usb in, but i sort of expected that, too (the ribbon won't stay in).

do i call my grandmother and telll her? now, i want a new laptop :\.

i should be honest.

as i'm concerned about cia interference, i'll be falling offline in the next few hours, after i do little research on some things. this machine will render 5x times faster. i'll be back up in no time.

i don't want to make it seem like i'm taking this lightly.

but, this is the capital city of one of the most barbaric regimes that the world has seen since the second world war. when the numbers are counted, isis is going to have a special place in infamy for it's near genocide on a dozen ethnic groups, and soulless persecution of everything to the left of genghis khan.

...and, the reality is that the civilians in the region supported this.

there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see cities getting bombed. all i can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep this kind of barbarism at check than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of real justice.

this is the right choice.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-us-is-destroying-raqqa-in-order-to-save-it-and-civilians-be-damned

so, what's the lesson?

i need to be clear: i've worked tech support. in fact, i've worked hardware replacement tech support for the exact company that manufactured my laptop. if somebody else did exactly what i did, and called in, i could have been on the other end of the phone. and, i'll tell you: none of this should have happened. i knew what i was doing, and i didn't do anything wrong.

the lesson is that laptops can be exceedingly finicky when you take them apart. small buildups of static and imperceptible shifts in grounding can alter what is a complicated and not always properly shielded signal path. it could have even gotten hit by the magnetic field in the apartment.

what happened to me is proof that disassembling a laptop is inherently dangerous and should be avoided unless you're highly technical and highly confident in it.

i've made massive progress in reclaiming my broken primary laptop this morning.

so, back at the very start of may, i took the laptop apart to clean the fan. i couldn't get the thing to turn back on, but it didn't make any sense to me, unless it was some kind of ground issue. so, i let it sit plugged in, hoping the electricity could find it's way to where it needed to.

it actually did, giving me an opportunity to find the short, which i determined was either in the video out or in the screen. all i know for sure is that plugging the video card in shorts the whole board out. then, i lost power again, so i left it to sit plugged in, again...

the first week didn't get me the signal back, so i put a few extras screws in and the signal did in fact reappear when i got back from detroit on saturday morning. i've been able to reconstruct the machine and send it out into an external monitor. i'm not done testing because the bios doesn't seem to like the hard drive i'm testing with, and the hard drive that comes with the machine is currently in use. if it boots, i have my machine back.

sort of.

see, i'm afraid to even plug the screen back in. the entire screen is off the thing altogether. that means i've lost the screen and what is in it: wireless (never use...), a webcam (never use...) and a microphone (which i use quite a bit - it's my phone).

or, at least i *think* that the microphone is in the screen. we'll find out soon.

i have it connected to the monitor that i bought in november, which i needed to replace anyways because the resolution is bad with cubase. it's not so bad for video editing, though.

...and my grandmother wants to buy me a new laptop so i can call her, which will have a microphone in it.

what all of this means, for me, is that i might be in the process of spinning this laptop off into a video editing device. in fact, it just clicked that i can use one of my external webcams as a microphone, anyways. that hadn't clicked. ok...so i have a microphone anyways....

the other benefit of the board i just fixed is that it has 4 gb of ram and is expandable to, i think, 16. i'll have to check. the backup machine i'm on is 4 max and currently has 2.

i don't even need a new laptop to spin the other machine off. what i need is this:

1) a new/used monitor for my desktop. $30.
2) some more ram for the editing machine. $20.
3) some better evaluation software for editing, which will actually make sense if i dedicate the machine. i've been doing this long enough now to get some real software. $0.
4) a new hard drive for the backup machine, which will become my internet access point. $100.
5) some more ram for the access point. $10.

i mean, i'll take the laptop. i could use it, sure. but, i've hacked something out for now....

in the long run, i'll obviously want to put the screen back on the laptop. i don't actually think i damaged anything, i think it was grounded poorly due to some dangling wires or removed electrical tape or something. i'm going to want to carefully read up on this.

for now, i'm ok with the monitor out and webcam mic.

it should be reassembled properly by this afternoon.

yup.

early voting: rep: 66,657 / dem: 76,028
day of voting: rep: 67,938 / dem: 48,865
(source: nyt)

no, that isn't normal; that is the classic footprint for a stolen election.

when we started this process, i didn't really care who sold the stuff. i'm approaching this entirely from the perspective of liberalizing access. i don't care about keeping it away from kids (kids will smoke if they want to), about shutting down criminal sellers (i know that this is mostly based around lies) or ensuring a safe product (unlike the kinds of drugs that are synthesized in the bathroom sink, weed is actually rarely tampered with and easy to find in a pure state). but, if the government insisted on selling it as a monopoly, whatever...

as time has gone on, and the process has unfolded, the government has demonstrated itself as too right-wing to do this effectively. i want to be clear: it's not that i don't think government, as an abstract, can do this well. it's that i don't think that this particular, right-of-center government can do this well, because it's approaching the issue from the viewpoints of all of these conservative value systems, rather than the simple task of liberalizing access. doing this right would require a much more liberal government with a very different set of priorities.

as such, i'm agreeing with the market institute, but only as a consequence of the circumstances: i don't necessarily think that the market ought to be able to do this better, but i think the market will do this better than this government, which just wants to pander to the right at the expense of liberalizing access.

http://business.financialpost.com/news/privatize-marijuana-sales-to-avoid-conflict-of-interest-between-public-health-and-profit-c-d-howe-says-in-letter-to-bill-blair/wcm/881ab02c-fbc3-4fc0-8e40-ecef67054fd0

i'm actually in favour of using corrective rape to break christians, muslims and other homophobes.

it's a fair punishment for homophobia, i think.

i think that the correct way for me to respond to this is to put out a request to the pmo to actually read up on what effects climate change is going to have on germany.

here's the thing: nobody familiar with this government thinks they actually care about climate change. on that level, this is a non-story. doesn't she know she has a social license? i mean, they have carbon taxes in germany, right?

no. the story is that the pmo was so ignorant of germany's stance on the topic, and what germany has to lose should we reach a tipping point, that they had the temerity, dare i even say insolence, to ask them to pull back on it.

and, what you should take away from it is this: while it may not be news that trudeau has no interest in emissions reduction, it is news that he doesn't even seem to understand the consequences of that policy position.

http://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/06/19/news/despite-denial-explosive-report-about-trudeau-and-merkel-still-standing

just sell it in the spice rack at the grocery store. no taxes on groceries, right?

i'm serious: the only way this is going to work is if they sell it in existing stores. there's no reason to create a new store. you can sell it in grocery stores, corner stores, pharmacies, the lcbo, the beer store, smoke shops, head shops - whatever. but, the store has to already exist, or the overhead will be impossible.

forget taxes. dealers don't have to pay rent. they don't have to pay salaries. they don't have to pay benefits.

the infrastructure of an existing store is imperative.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/provincial-marijuana-sales-retail-1.4167735

i don't normally comment on the kardashians, but i just want to point out that i've run into this issue myself. people don't instantly know my genetic background, and i don't know how relevant it really is anyway, but if i meet somebody in march, they're likely to get confused by the time july hits, when i've darkened five or six tones. with me, it's really ridiculously dramatic. i'll go from pasty white to east african almost overnight. in fact, it's going to come up in the vlogs...

i've only been accused of 'blackface' once. it was around occupy. this white upper class dude noticed i was all of a sudden darker than an egyptian (she was clearly actually turkic.) woman, and accused me of blackface. but, nope - i was just out protesting in the sun all day. sorry.

but, i have memories my whole life of walking into classes in september and getting hit on by italian girls until roughly december, when i'd start getting hit on by polish girls, instead. it was the neighbourhood i went to school in.

so, you want to cut her a little slack on this one. skin colour isn't static, and those of us that are of mixed race often actually find it fairly malleable.

http://people.com/style/kim-kardashian-west-blackface-kkw-beauty/

i find it hard to condemn the indiscriminate attacks.

i wouldn't have opposed the fire-bombing of dresden, either.

there are certain regimes that are so heinous that, when civilians support them, they need to be treated as extensions of them and wiped off the face of the earth along with them.

https://www.rbth.com/international/2016/10/25/iraqi-kurd-official-isis-enjoys-considerable-support-among-civilians_641947

i don't think this topic can move beyond speculation. this is probably about the best summary of the reality of things that you'll find:

Although the Russian military has been slow to embrace cyber for both structural and doctrinal reasons, the Kremlin has signaled that it intends to bolster the offensive as well as the defensive cyber capabilities of its armed forces. 

i might add that it has probably been slow to adopt cyber warfare for simple technical reasons, as well.

i know it's hard to drop the idea of the superior or at least comparable russian threat, but the reality is that it was always nonsense. they were stuck in the dark ages up to world war one, and only got out of it due to a lot of fdi from american capital. in world war two, they couldn't compete with the germans on technological terms; they just (eventually) overran them with sheer force, and, again, with a lot of help from the united states (lend-lease). during the war, the russians captured a substantial number of the best german scientists and kept them working on the space program for decades afterwards. but, they also carried out a lot of espionage. there was certainly not a lot of space for technology to flourish after the fall of communism; what you had, instead, was widespread theft and piracy of western technology, with little innovation in the region, itself. if the russians have cyberwarfare capabilities, they would have been built from scratch over the last ten years, and would necessarily be still playing catch-up. but, the russians have been playing catch-up the whole time...

i mean, you'll note that putin runs windows on his desktop, right?

i'm picking up on an idea that has been expanded upon by a number of writers. to be balanced, i'll cite both sutton and chomsky. they were always years - decades - behind us. this is the reality: the russians have been chasing the west since napoleon, at least.

there was a section in the oliver stone interview where oliver stone seems convinced that putin is hiding something. that's not exactly what i picked up. but, if you want to use that language, then what he's hiding is that there isn't a substantial russian cyberwarfare program - because they don't have the capability to construct one that is competitive with the real players: the united states, israel and china.

i didn't get a lot out of the series. but, it wasn't meant for me.

one of these days, the crisis will not be averted.

when will the prime minister admit his senate reforms have been a disaster and a mistake and reverse course?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/senate-votes-against-splitting-up-liberals-budget-bill/article35390179/

although, i should point out that all evidence i've seen suggests that the policy makers in the government continue to hold to the complete myth that marijuana is addictive.

if you think marijuana is addictive, mail order makes sense, because everybody is smoking an ounce a month.

but, this is ridiculous.

the reality is that pot is used the same way that alcohol is. people that smoke everyday are not the norm, but the marijuana equivalent of alcoholics, and they need help, not cheap weed. the vast majority of users smoke on weekends, holidays, events and the odd week night if they're out with friends. they consequently have no use for a mail order system, and you should not expect them to use it.

nonono, the british have the perfect plan.

what you need to do is this: put all of the muslims on one side of the road, and all of the christians on the other, and work this out with a giant game of chicken. we've got organ donation cards over here, folks - don't forget to fill one out before you race!

let them kill each other off. and, good riddance to the lot of them.

A U.S. warplane shot down a Syrian army jet on Sunday in the southern Raqqa countryside, with Washington saying the jet had dropped bombs near U.S.-backed forces and Damascus saying the plane was downed while flying a mission against Islamic State militants.

there's no contradiction, there.

 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-usa-idUSKBN1990XI

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