is separating kids from their parents at the us-mexican border a terrible inhumane thing that should stop?

there may be some problems with the policy as it's being implemented, but they aren't related to the idea itself. so, if the question is whether i think it's fundamentally wrong to break up families, the answer is that i don't, because i'm not a conservative, and i don't recognize the primacy of hetero-patriarchy in ordering society from the top down: i will argue that there are plenty of scenarios where it is in the best interests of a child to separate it from it's family.

one example of that would be if their parents are so reckless as to drag them thousands of miles into a foreign country, across deserts, and dodging traffickers and other criminals, with little access to food or resources. that would easily meet the definition of negligence under our laws - and, because i'm not a conservative, i'm very much in favour of taking kids away from negligent parents. and, you need to understand that your ideological views on this point are not absolute, and people have every right to disagree with you on them.

that said, the purpose of taking the kids away should be to act in the children's best interests, and i recognize that this is not exactly what the united states is doing. rather, the separation policies are designed to act as a disincentive towards migration, and tend to end up as a warehousing process.

if the intent of a person or a family is to enter into a country as a refugee, these people should be detained at their point of entry until they can be fully processed, and either granted status or sent back the other way. but, that detainment should be humane, and when separation does happen, it should be court-ordered and subject to due process.

but, not only do i not condemn the practice outright, but i largely encourage it, as it is usually going to be in the best interests of the child to take them away from these reckless, homeless & jobless migrant parents and put them in more stable situations.

i know: i'm evil, right? well, i'm a godless leftist that wants to abolish the family structure altogether. that's indeed pretty evil - if you're a conservative. sure.

this is such a stupid narrative...

there is no such thing as "happiness". it's just a meaningless label that people put on things. again: this is basic marxism. if you can trick a slave into thinking she's happy, she'll tell you she is; meanwhile, the most free person in the world can get suicidal over existential dread.

there was a group of philosophers many years ago called verificationists that argued that statements that cannot be verified are completely meaningless. now, godel throws a wrench in this, granted. but, i remain of the opinion that "i am happy" and "i am unhappy" are equally meaningless statements, because there's no way to understand what they mean.

it is generally understood, however, that people that refer to themselves as "happy" tend to avoid drug use - and that people that use drugs tend to refer to themselves as "unhappy".

i'm not irritated due to a low happiness quotient. i'm pissed off because the drugs are making me physically ill, and less productive than i could be, otherwise. and, it's that lack of productivity that is making me frustrated.

i would be much happier if i could get a reliable intake of fresh air.

today was spent looking for apartments, and while i was largely disappointed, i think i've got a good lead for thursday night.

i'm hoping to finish the review section tonight.

so, why would trudeau support such a monstrous swindle as this?

well, he is a trust fund kid.

but, he governs on opinion polls, and opinion polls have consistently shown that canadians are indeed extremely confused about nafta, partly because the initial debate around it was so confusing.

the liberals tried to argue that they support free trade and oppose nafta (the correct position, fwiw), but the reality of the "free trade" part of nafta being an orwellian distraction never got through to canadians, who have always interpreted the north american "free trade" agreement as a free trade agreement - and believed that was a good idea. after all, it was designed as a legacy project for the elder trudeau, based on the reciprocity deals of his idol, laurier.

it's the liberal position on this that is consequently so disappointing. they came in with this list of demands that we haven't heard anything from since, while ignoring the parts of the deal they initially opposed - because they're morbidly afraid of getting lost in the same debate. but, they were right then, and now they have the data to prove it. instead, they're governing as conservatives, while paying lip service to ndp ideals.

people have accused the liberals of lacking principles for years. that is what their approach to this is really demonstrative of: they're more concerned about electoral politics than they are about good governance.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2018/06/18/should-canada-give-up-on-nafta-yes.html

i was hoping that that apartment was a few floors up, but it was essentially on ground level, and had easy access from the back door.

it was a little small, sure. but, the real issue is that i need something more secure than that. it's a shame, as the location was really ideal.

clock's ticking...

no new apartments up this weekend.

have a lead for something might really like, though.

remember: this is either going to the tenant board to get costs or going to the hrc to get costs. the tenant board should be a faster process...

as is always the case, this is taking a little longer than expected, but i've got the list updated from the time i moved to windsor until the time i started up the vlog, now.

what i was intending on doing was making sure the facebook page was properly archived, but i decided i had to update the concert reviews in order to comprehensively do that.

i'll be carrying through with this until i get up to 06/16 - so a little less than a year. then, i'll be keeping it up to date as i catch up.

anything before the move to windsor will come up in the alter-reality.

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/index.html

i'm an anarchist, and virtually everything i listen to has a lineage in anarcho-punk.

so, aesthetically "punk" music celebrating being the boss strikes me as kind of shocking, whether it's coming from a confused point of capitalist fem-washing or not.

fuck bosses.

listen, i'm dealing with the same problem that every leftist in the world has dealt with.

i'll stand up and say:

"i'm not really opposed to gun control, exactly, but i understand that tighter restrictions on guns isn't going to undo the war economy or fix the culture of violence that leads to this madness..."

and, i know that all i'm going to get in return for articulating my well thought out points is howls of nra sympathizing (despite the reality that i've never even seen a gun before....) and accusations of pushing right-wing messaging, despite the fact being that i'm actually trying to push back against this moralizing christian progressivism with what is really marxism 101 - the social revolution must come first.

and, that's just one example.

leftists have never gotten along well with liberals or "progressives", so it's not like this is some kind of surprising turn of events. it would just be useful to everybody if you'd understand what direction my criticism is coming from, namely the left, so i'm not continually confusing or disappointing people.

and, that is the only outcome if you don't relent on the facts, here: you have to give up on this and accept them i'm on the far left. otherwise, i'm just going to disappoint conservatives and the alt-right over and over, and i'm just going to confuse all these fake liberals and pseudo-leftists when they figure out that i'm actually a good deal more radical than they are...

but i'm not going to teach you anything you couldn't learn in more traditional sources, except regarding how confused and muddled the spectrum currently is. i can teach a self-identifying liberal why they're actually a conservative, and why my arguments - which they find so horrific - are actually right out of marx. but, they could teach themselves this, as well, by bothering to read up on it.

at the end of the day, the labels are kind of trivial. if this group of "progressives" are actually conservatives, and they dislike my "right-wing" views because they're actually marxist, then cutting through the language doesn't undo the outcome: they still don't like me, at the end of the day. & that's fine.

but, it's maybe a call to the left to reclaim some spaces, then - which is at the crux of it what i'm actually really all about.

and, of course, the most boring thing in the world is...

having a paying job.

to hell with that.

sitting on a patio and drinking and talking about nothing? painfully fucking boring.

sitting in a field and smoking pot? deathly boring.

campfires? sing-alongs? dinner dates? watching movies? i'd rather be sentenced to torture.

give me purpose, or give me death.

no, you know what's boring?

what's boring is getting fucked up by yourself.


that's boring as fuck.

again: i've never been more than a sporadic, social type smoker - and my tolerance has always been very low.

there is no point in my life where that much pot of that intense strength would have done anything different than knock me out.

and, you can see why i'm so pissed off about the situation; i had better things to do today than sleep for 12.5 hours.

but, this is all under the assumption that nothing replaces any of it, which is not realistic.

trump is actually helping us out by attacking europe & japan, simultaneously - because they're going to be looking for new importers at the same time that we're looking for new export markets, and vice versa.

i'm not suggesting that it will be an easy process; there are certain to be layoffs and downturns in some sectors. but, all of the analysis on the topic for years has been in a vacuum, and that vacuum no longer exists.

the fear that we'd be cast out from the american trading system is inverting itself; it is rather america that is pulling itself out.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/trade-war-recession-ramifications-1.4710096

the smoke started coming in around 3:00 this morning and knocked me right out. i've been sleeping ever since. 12 hours of sleep? it smells like pot, but it is affecting me like an opiate. second hand.

so, i lost the day - what will probably be the nicest day of the year. right when i was feeling clear-headed and detoxed, too. :(.

let's see if i can finish what i was doing before i get something to eat.

actually, i've been straight edge for almost three weeks (excluding coffee and drifting smoke) and i feel pretty good about it.

given the circumstances, i don't expect to go out much this summer, and might not go out at all; therefore, i expect to be sober pretty much from now until hallowe'en.

the reason chretien signed nafta in the first place - despite campaigning against it - was that he realized that a bad deal was better than no deal, and he was right, at the time - because the deal included mexico, and we couldn't be left out of it (they'd have taken everything from us).

now, we're talking about making an already very bad deal an even worse deal. and, it still might be right that making a very bad deal an even worse deal is still better than there being no deal, if that bad deal still includes mexico.

but, there comes a point where that doesn't hold any more and you have to say "enough".

i'd be leaning towards slippery slop arguments on this, and arguing that we can't let it continue to slide, negotiation over negotiation.

what we want is a bilateral deal, whether the prime minister understands it or not.

when we shut down the institutions - the "asylums" - it was partly under the argument that these people would be better off if taken care of by their families. you'll hear thatcherites talk about the responsibility of the family, but i don't think that idea would have gotten traction in canada if not for the underlying idea that it is their parents that can love and care for them the best. it was done in their perceived best interests...

i think that this conclusion needs to be revisited.

these kids are death sentences.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/i-can-t-continue-to-do-this-forever-families-with-children-aging-out-of-care-seek-answers-1.4707909

i'm just in favour of dogs being bred solely for cuteness & docile companionship.

so, everybody that wants a dog should have a golden retriever. goldens for all, even.

i'm not being remotely sarcastic. i don't at all understand why anybody would want this scary, dirty thing to have to deal with when you can have something cute & cuddly, instead. it's just irrational to me. really.

fwiw.

the marijuana issue over the last few days has been largely reduced to smell - partly because i've taken the proper steps to deal with it. as best i can. but, tonight i have a headache deep in my eye sockets, and i suspect it's related to the second-hand smoke.

i mean, if your idea of "having a life" is working a 9 hour night shift and then going home and smoking an ounce of pot during the daylight hours, or waking up at 6 am and drinking and chain smoking until you pass out at 8 pm, then that's a very sad reflection on yourself and a very sad reflection on society, as a whole.

these are people that do not have lives worth living at all, which is perhaps why they need to numb it with substance abuse. that's very sad and all.

but, i have every right to demand that their destructive habits don't affect my own life, or the ability to accomplish the goals and tasks i've set myself to accomplish within it.

so, i'm trying to stay awake and be productive in building my period discs, and my neighbours are sitting around getting shitfaced and blowing all kinds of smoke at me, and i'm the one that needs to get a life.

right.

typical.

generally, you tell drug addicts to get a life, not people complaining about drug addicts affecting their quality of life - because i have a life to be concerned about the quality of, and they apparently don't.

that's the whole point.

not only did wynne not pick up increasingly sparse red tory support, but she lost her own base trying to do it.

if there's a broader structural lesson from the election, it may be that it's the evaporation of the clark swing. this was something that was easy to see coming, eventually.

...which means that liberals should stop trying to appeal to "progressive conservatives"; they no longer exist.

see, it's a catch-22.

to begin with, i'm never sure if they see axl rose or kurt cobain - or if that's even just exposing a generation gap, and they think i'm like ariel pink or something.

regardless, all of these options are terrible. when i identify as female, i actually mean it. and, if you ask around, you'll realize people eventually figure that out the hard way.

so, in trying to express myself as who i feel i am, people end up horribly misinterpreting me as something that i'm not. and, to an extent this ought to be easy to understand - a youngish woman that works in a library perhaps has a similar wardrobe to a male rockstar from the 90s, doesn't she?

- we both wear skate shoes.
- we both wear the same kinds of blue jeans
- we both wear snugly fitting tshirts
- we both have about the same haircut

so, you can take this costume and put it on a guy and get a rockstar, then take it off and put it on a female and get a librarian's assistant. a little bit of make-up just confuses the point further. when explained in this way, the confusion is maybe easier to understand: i'm trying to present myself as a bookish female, but i get badly misinterpreted as some nihilistic sex symbol anachronism, instead.

and, to the extent that i have a guy side? well, we're all bi-gendered in some sense; gender is a spectrum, so your average cis-female ends up something like 20% male. but, to the extent that the guy side exists, it's the exact opposite of that - it's neither kurt cobain nor axl rose but somewhere between michael stipe and ian mackaye, in that i'm not quite straight edge but i'm pretty white bread and overly nerdy. if i were to ever develop an interest in exploring my male side, the first thing i'd do is shave my head.

so, it's like - you can accuse me of false advertising if you really insist, but you're kind of missing the point.

it would just be nice if my day-to-day interactions with women weren't consistently so hyper-sexualized. that's what i'm complaining about. and, to an extent, avoiding that is the whole point of transitioning.

so, i went to see something today.

the girl next door seemed to want me to move in, although i suspect she drastically underestimated my age. i've been female-identifying for fifteen years, and i can't even go grocery shopping without getting fawned over by women that i can't tell are even of age or not. it's distressing.

the place wasn't close to being acceptable, though.

"So, if this president insists on punching you in the nose and eating your lunch, why would you continue to pretend he's still a great neighbor (sic) and go over to his place to spend your time and money?" 

because you're not buying anything from donald trump directly, who is horribly unpopular as it is.

we can't fall into this nonsense - we need to stand in solidarity with each other, not be manipulated into competing with each other.

i have no interest in boycotting american goods, or falling into any kind of jingoist narrative at all.

sorry.

that's a small step backwards for humanity, and a giant step backwards for canada.

"so, i said some things. you said some things, too. but those are just things that we said. we all say things.

you know, i had some objections against nafta, too...."

send chretien!

he's by far the closest analogue; they'll get along fine.

send douggy to the cottage for the summer.

i'm starting to think that the really disastrous handover of power here is in the desmarais bloodline.

whomever is the kingpin behind the scenes right now is making very stupid decisions, one after another. there needs to be a revolt right now at the very top.

can we please keep doug ford as far away from the trade negotiations as is possible?

look how they talked down to chris christie. they're going to treat him like the entitled fat idiot that he is.

he's a walking disaster.

i think they said 10 years last year.

that would be 9 years, now.

but, things may have happened, since, too. rents are back down a little, and i'm interpreting that as the influx of refugees moving further west.

could i stall here long enough to get into subsidized housing?

i doubt it.

but, i should call them in the morning to update the address, as it is. forgot to do that. i wonder if they can tell me what the eta is...

the waiting lists for subsidized housing are upwards of ten years, which is leaving people like myself in the situation of needing to pay market rent on a disability pension - which costs everybody a lot of money in the end.

hopefully, the new units are built to address second-hand smoking, given that it's understood that smoking and mental illness go together, and these buildings will need to accommodate those with mental illnesses as well as those with physical illnesses. it's not like this is an engineering challenge nowadays, it's just that so many of the buildings are so old....

it's going to be a while before this has any effect on me. and, i'm not happy about dilbert being the middleman, at city hall. if there's a body that will squander the funding, it's the windsor city hall.

but, it's long overdue and it's nice to see some action on it.

https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/news/2018/06/reaching-home-canadas-homelessness-strategy.html

hey, i don't know exactly where my genes are from, but it's from somewhere warm (southern italy? israel? africa?), and it's not my fault i ended up born here.

finally.

it's been years since we got some gorgeous weather like this.

and, i'm letting it all in the apartment, and not getting up until tuesday.

....& the thing about bmsr is that it would be nice to hear them live up to some of the potential they're hinting at, but never do. all you ever get from them are these boring little pop songs. when will they take the next level of abstraction and do something interesting with the form they're playing with?

in a different circumstance, i may have gone to see the stargazer lillies and stayed for the headliners. but, i shouldn't be wasting cash, right now.

but, i mean it wasn't...

sometimes, i try to grapple with a trend and, in the end, walk away from it just concluding it's not for me - i give it a fair hearing and rule against it sort of thing. but i actually do listen to it before i trash it.

i never gave that garage rock movement that existed at the time a second listen; i had about as much interest in the strokes as i had in calypso music.

it was just completely out of my sphere of interest. 

i actually don't think i've ever bothered listening to a strokes record all the way through.

i had friends into that scene, but i always thought it was stupid and avoided it pretty strenuously, from the start. there's really nothing that came out of it that i ever liked at all.

i may even go so far as to say that my reaction to it at the time was something along the lines of interpreting at as the final death blow to rock music as an art form - and, in hindsight, i may have been right.

there's just nothing going on but empty retro regurgitation - it's literally indiscernible from what it's copying. meaning it's the reduction of the form to a parody, a novel act.

and, i suppose that doesn't matter much to you if it's what you've always known, right? but it was actually really frustrating to see the media pushing this empty trash, after experiencing the high points of 90s art rock, which was actually relatively popular.

i spent the early 00s listening to post-rock.

the combination of heavy tariffs and a decreasing money supply could create a depression, rather than a recession.

they stopped printing money.

it's really as simple as that: the american economy grows when the feds print money, and it shrinks when they stop printing money. so, if you want growth, you must print money - and there is no outcome but recession if you don't.

the markets are actually being really stupid right now, because investors tend not to live in reality. but, the money is drying up...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-14/financials-etf-bleeds-cash-as-yield-curve-goes-flat-etf-watch

ok.

so, i know how i'm doing this: i believe in the right to fresh air, and that second-hand smoke causes cancer, so the management is discriminating against me based on creed by not accommodating for those beliefs.

but, what i'm going to ask for in restitution (basically, every cent i've paid in rent) overlaps with the tenant application i've suspended - for now. if i go through with that, and i'm awarded rent (which i did ask for), i'll be awarded damages twice - which they don't allow, for good reason. what that means is that i can't really file this until july 1st at the earliest.

if this somehow works out and i sign a lease for august 1st before july 1st, i'll need to reopen the tenant board case and put the human rights case on hold. i'd expect the judge to reschedule the hearing, and that's ok. i just don't want to double-dip.

if i'm sitting here on july 1st without a lease for august 1st, i'll mail the application before i pay my rent.

that means i've got a few weeks of work ahead of me, hopefully.

i'm willing to argue in court that atheism, science & secular humanism all fit the definition of a creed, as laid out here.

http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/policy-preventing-discrimination-based-creed/4-creed

the ohrc does not appear to be legislated to determine analogous grounds - it needs to interpret existing law, not write new law. the landlord & tenant board has the same mandate.

i'm going to have to derive my own grounds from enumerated ones, then.

if i feel like i'm being discriminated against due to being a non-smoker, what is that? i guess, using the logic of the people doing the discriminating, the reason i'm being treated differently is that i don't belong to their club - for that is how they see it, they see pot smokers as belonging to a club, and non-smokers as being outside of it.

i consider this absurd, and always have - potheads are the losers that think they're cool, but everybody else knows are losers. the actual cool kids just walk by and shake their heads and snicker. and, i've always approached smoking marijuana as doing something that was very deeply uncool, to the point of being a celebration of being outcast. but, one of the points i'm going to have to make in these hearings is that smoking pot isn't binary - it's not like you smoke every day or you don't smoke at all. most people that smoke, smoke infrequently; it's this idea of daily use that is unusual, and frankly deeply uncool. but, the building is full of habitual smokers (including management, apparently), and i'm not in their club, so i don't get equal treatment.

so, this seems to be the basis of the differentiation in treatment - i don't smoke every day (or even every month), so i'm not in their club, so i'm not cool, so i don't deserve equal treatment.

i don't want to be in their club, either. and, that would be because i don't have the same beliefs that they do. they seem to believe that smoking pot makes you cool, and they seem to believe that habitual pot use is not detrimental to your health, either - both beliefs that are not shared by the club i'm in, which is the club of atheistic & scientific secular humanists.

in my club, we believe in human rights - such as the right to fresh air. we also believe in the science that tells us that smoking is harmful to our health - both in the short term and also in the long term. by not accommodating these beliefs, the management is consequently discriminating against my creed of atheistic & scientific secular humanism.

so, that's what we're going to claim here: discrimination on grounds of disability regarding my bronchitis as well as discrimination against my belief in science & my belief in human rights.

i was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis from exposure to second-hand smoke when i was very young, and it has in fact acted as a trigger for many, many years.

i've periodically needed a puffer.

now, i haven't been triggered as badly as i could be, but it's because i've taken so many steps to deal with the issue - steps i've been demanded to stop, and eventually threatened with eviction over.

but, the actual grounds i'm being discriminated against is on not smoking. i am being treated differently, and the reason is that i don't smoke. rather than have my concerns addressed, i've been asked to leave. so, i really want to find an analogous ground argument...

afaik, all of the existing precedent for this is in british columbia, so this is going to be pushing new legal ground in ontario. call me the trailblazer, here - the pioneer.

i was hoping to get this done tonight, but spent hours dealing with a termite swarm. it's at least mostly stopped since i closed one of the six windows in this place, which they seemed to begetting in through - and w which there are now dozens of dead termites on.

i'd never seen this before, but apparently they fly into the lightbulbs, where they procreate, and their wings fall off. i've killed a handful of queens in here since i moved in, but i thought they were ants....they're termites....

*shrug*

i'll sleep on this and see if i can scheme something up in the morning. because i want to make the point clearer: they are discriminating against me because i don't smoke, and specifically because i don't smoke marijuana.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B79Yz_e6a6XNc3MyektfeGptWlE/edit

i actually think this is the right way to approach both of these problems.

*applauds*.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/10-patients-safely-receive-hepatitis-c-infected-lungs-in-new-clinical-trial-1.3972398

i'm still expecting this to be dragged on until it dies.

at some point, the government will need to prorogue. wait for it.

they may be intending to blame it on the conservatives and run on it in 2019. but, remember - it was trudeau that set up this sham of a senate, in the first place.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/feds-accept-most-not-all-senate-amendments-to-marijuana-bill-1.3971400

i've always preferred montreal - and, now, it seems, detroit.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/04/new-toronto-most-fascinatingly-boring-city-guardian-canada-week

"outside things" are boring...

i mean, i don't go outside in the winter, either.

because i don't like going outside.

at all.

how about staying inside and opening the windows to let the humidity in, while you lay in bed and read or listen to music?

you don't have to go outside to enjoy summer; you can let summer in the house, too.

or london...

i'm a city person, ok?

i'd be horribly bored in the suburbs.

if i had the cash, i'd move to a really, really big city like los angeles or houston.

this is a picture taken from outside my window.

you'll note that the table is so close to my window that i need to remove the screen and lean out to take a picture of it; i cannot see this table by looking out my window. that's how close it is - a foot, at most. if you pull the closest chair out and lean back on it, it's literally touching the building.

would you accept a group of people sitting there and chain smoking, or would you fight it any way you could?

you'll also note the empty alcohol containers in the wrong recycle bin, which are likely the actual root of the problem, regarding why this woman is behaving so unreasonably.

i think a better idea is to:

1) prove she's lying.
2) present the hypothesis that the reason she's lying is to distract from the actual reason she wants to evict me, which is that i'm threatening legal action over negligence.
3) demand costs & compensation for wasting my time, as i follow through with the negligence case.

honesty is the best policy, kids.

in fact, the n7 is so obviously an attempt to evict me because i don't smoke that i can use it as evidence in the human rights case.

the n7 is also full of false information, and i can prove that it's false using the journal & the vlog. i could even get the whole thing thrown out by proving that they're liars, in court.

this is again just stupid on their behalf. they'd have had a much better case by just being honest.

she showed up at 10:20 to receive a letter; i was asleep at that time. she claims she showed up for a noise complaint, that's a lie. then, she dated the n7 to 4:20 - several hours before she actually showed up, and pretty daunting evidence of the actual motive.

again: i don't want to stay here. but, i'll be happy to use their stupidity against them.

hopefully, i get a judge that's willing to actually listen to the evidence. but, it's secondary to the point, because i'll appeal, anyways.

so, i got my eviction notice. it's not surprising.

i'm going to have to file a human rights complaint, in response. i don't deny the basis of the complaint, but i'm going to defend myself on freedom of expression grounds, and claim the landlord's negligence is the source of the problem. i think they have a tough case to win in front of them, but i'm preparing for divisional court, as well. and, when the time comes that i do move, i will re-open the case to recoup costs.

is moving an option? well, to begin with, i need to restrict my options. i'm currently paying $700/month + electricity, but the electricity is free (due to the rebates). it would be about $25-30/month if it wasn't free - most of it spent on "delivery charges". my actual electricity bill is less than $10/month. given that i'm saving about an extra $60/month on the estrogen being covered, and either the ndp or the liberals had actually budgeted for rate increases, i was actually considering looking for units in the $800-850 range, which would probably be necessary to avoid the smoke - which is the point of this exercise. i'm going to be in the same stupid scenario if i move somewhere else with smokers.

again: i thought this place was better, but then the downstairs tenant started chain smoking pot and the smoker moved in next door. it's worse. i can't make that same mistake; i'll just repeat the same bullshit over and over again and have to move over and over again.

but, now that i'm bracing for cuts to income, i'm looking for something in the range of $700 all inclusive. that's a maximum. i cannot consider anything more expensive than that. nor am i going to move somewhere that's too small for the gear...what's the point of that...

surprisingly, there is a potential spot, but i need to ask about smoking. i suspect there's probably smokers there...

i'm going to have to keep looking, and there's no reason i can't change my mind about the court date at the last minute, although we'll see what the judge has to say about that, i guess. but, as of now, i'm preparing to dig in.

frankly, this is a stupid move on their behalf. they're going to spend thousands of dollars trying to get me out of here, when i'm trying to get out as soon as i can, anyways. and, they're just emboldening me to continue the protest, if i'm going to court, anyways.

why do these trudeaus always position a christ on their right-hand side?

"i can't be there forever. you trudeaus, you're going to have to find somebody else to clean up your messes, eventually. i'm staying in shawinigan."

true enough. but, this is a helluva time to take the fucking training wheels off.

jean, just tell me you'll step in if you have to.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/freeland-visits-washington-amid-trade-feud-1.4703648

whenever trudeau got in trouble, he always sent chretien in to clean it up.

he knows the drill.

one more time, jean. it's important, too.

trump is not an ideological conservative, he's clinton redux.

trump is going to get along with doug ford about as well as he gets along with paul ryan.

they should send the same people that they sent to talk to clinton.

are they sending doug ford to talk to donald trump? is that it?

donald trump is going to hate doug ford.

send chretien.

i've pointed this out a few times before, but i actually don't think i should have to do it.

i'm writing my own story, a story told from a first person perspective and that has one character in it. my story certainly intersects with other stories, but i'm not telling those other stories, and i don't intend to tell those stories.

we don't have to compete over the primacy of these stories; they're all equally valid, and should all exist. this is almost by definition; my story is not your story, but our stories are all intertwined, too. nor is there an official story of any circumstance or event.

i might be a character in your story, if you'd like - or i might not be. you're not going to be a character in my story, though. or, not unless i knew you many years ago, you won't...

so, tell your stories as you'd like them to be told, and i'll tell mine as i'd like it to be told, too. sometimes, they'll overlap, and sometimes they won't. neither is more important than any other. and, if there are historians collecting stories for some perverse reason or another, they will consult all of them and weigh them as they may...

i grew up in the 90s, which were a period where the gender imbalance in music started evening out, but which was still overwhelmingly skewed towards men. i don't want to apologize for listening to a skewed sample, given that the female musicians of the period were overwhelmingly commodified for their looks.

i'm not going to listen to bad music because it was made by girls, or ignore good music because it was made by boys. i'm a musician - i care about the sound art. i don't think my record collection needs an affirmative action program, or that gender parity within it is an ideal to strive for. so, yeah - my record collection in my formative years is overwhelmingly male.

not exclusively. there's lots of female voices in there. but, overwhelmingly - and that's a reflection of the culture, not of me.

if you wanted to be a girl in a band in the 80s and 90s, you had two paths: you could either date somebody in one of the bands (which is actually fairly common in underground music of the period) or you could market yourself with your body. it kind of didn't matter how talented you were or you weren't, that's just how it came out in the wash. the talent consequently existed largely on the fringes, and, even so, only managed success though sexuality. for example: tori amos is talented, but that's not why she sold records, unfortunately.

i guess it hit a breaking point in the mid-00s, and actually flipped over some time around 2010. nowadays, it's very difficult to find any interesting music made by men at all. entire genres are dominated by women. even guitar music is dominated by women. the only type of music dudes seem interested in making is bro-rock, and it's this like weird gym class culture that i've never wanted anything to do with. from psychedelic music through to industrial music, women really dominate the entire spectrum.

and, so, while my formative years were spent listening mostly to male voices (not exclusively. lots of girls in there, too.), nowadays i'd guess that women take up upwards of 75% of my listening time.

i think we all tend to default to certain periods in our lives, and that these periods tend to expand. contemporary music converts itself into memories over time, and my posts will even out in gender as that process unfolds itself.

i like having an appspot site, but deploying it is always something else.

i've always deployed over the gui. last time, i had to find a way to upgrade to python 2.7, because it would stop serving if i didn't. today, it was giving me ssl errors. as best as i can tell, my local ssl python libraries are out of date and i have to upgrade to a later bugfix, but the installer past 2.7.7 seems to require accessing the dot net framework in a manner that i consciously dismantled, making the install impossible.

i fixed it by using the command line.

so, i'm back to doing what i was doing, now, and should be able to push through the main facebook page before the next sleep. one of the things i'll be doing is replacing old events with links to the concert site. this is the first one...

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2013/10/24.html

trump is getting to that age where it's going to start unravelling. it's not clear if his remaining time in office is best measured in months or weeks, but i can't imagine he'll be able to run for another term at 74.

we have to just wait him out.

he's going to ruin the economy on both sides of the border because justin has nice hair, and he doesn't?

really?

probably.

like, let's get our head around it, right?

i'm just a little bit worried that he's going to think that the solution is to put on a charm offensive, or that he's going to take advantage of everybody taking his side.

but, that's the point. trudeau is young and good-looking and popular; trump is a running gag on saturday night live.

the more he keeps doing what he's doing, the deeper the disdain is going to be, and the more he's going to get targeted.

there's thirty some million people here that don't need the fallout from a petty, jealous old man keying on the good-looking, well-liked world leader that he isn't, and never will be. it's not fair. at all. but, trudeau has a responsibility to get out of the spotlight.

...even if that spotlight shifts in another direction, altogether.

is trump just jealous?

well, his numbers don't add up. it's something personal, something emotional.

trudeau could maybe take a step back from doing things like accepting honorary degrees from american universities. the truth is that neither of them deserve that kind of attention. but, nobody is asking trump to do these kind of things.

being the keynote speaker at trump university obviously doesn't count.

i'm not suggesting that this is in any way fair. but, trump is a petty, shallow guy - and trudeau doesn't really have to go make speeches in the united states.

maybe i could get a job insulting convicts.

i'd be good at that.

the thing about impaired driving nowadays is how remarkably stupid it is. deportation seems a little bit harsh, but i'm not building a lot of empathy up around it, either. my brain tells me that you need to send them to school rather than jail, but there's a point where you can't fix the stupid any more, and getting behind a wheel when you're fucked up is pretty much exactly that point. how do you get to 18 without somebody telling you not to drive under the influence?

but, i want any retribution to focus more on embarrassing them than punishing them. i don't like retribution; i think vengeance is uncivilized, that deterrence doesn't work and that it's ultimately 100% about blood lust. but, sometimes a stupid act deserves a good public drubbing.

we used to tar and feather people. why don't we do that any more?

i wouldn't expect this rule to withstand a constitutional challenge. you either need to make the rule apply to all convictions, or none at all.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/06/08/tougher-impaired-driving-penalty-a-double-whammy-for-immigrants.html

when you run a country like a business, or an empire, allies are not to be upheld for similar values and customs but treated as competitors that need to be absorbed through shady stock deals, or through hostile takeover bids. and, the more friendly they are, the easier they are to conquer.

meanwhile, dissimilar countries and flat out enemies are to be ignored, as they aren't invading the market share.

it's a backwards idea, all around. and, if nothing else comes from it, let us hope that the boneheadedness of trump puts an end to this "run a country like a business" thing once and for all.

"punishing canada" is not likely to go over well with anybody at all.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/06/12/we-just-shook-hands-trump-confused-by-trudeaus-pushed-around-comment-after-g7-summit.html

2 + 2 = 5.

i suppose that's what we should expect for the new math curriculum, right?

then, when there's a deficit, the ndp will blame him for cancelling the carbon tax...

<newfie accent">
well, if you wouldn't have cancelled the carbon tax, we wouldn't be so far in debt.
</newfie accent>

ugh.

it's not post-logic - it's logic plus!

i'm curious about the carbon tax, though.

one of the things that ford ran on was opposing the carbon tax, but there isn't actually a carbon tax in place, and nobody is actually proposing one.

the previous leader of the conservative party, patrick brown, who was taken down in an act of defamation by the core of the tory media, ctv, was proposing a carbon tax to replace the existing cap & trade system with quebec and california. a carbon tax is, after all, a right-wing approach to emissions reductions, and something that it makes sense for an ideological conservative to propose, as it is market-based, as opposed to a "statist" cap & trade system that just wants to order you around. now, i don't want to stand up for this cap & trade system too much - it's just a way for california to send money to canada in exchange for votes in san francisco. it's hard to criticize wynne for signing up for it, but it's not likely to have reduced emissions much, either.

nonetheless, it made some sense for doug ford to campaign against a carbon tax when he was campaigning against his own party - even if nobody else besides the removed former leader was proposing it. that led him to the populist schpiel. then, in the end, you expect him to align with conservative orthodoxy and support the carbon tax to replace the cap & trade, after he's tricked all the low-information voters. that's how politics works.

but, then, he kept campaigning against the carbon tax, even after he'd won the leadership - and there was no longer even the memory of the proposition to fight against. it's something i've never seen before: a campaign constructed around a straw-man argument.

it opens up the question: is this some devious ploy to get morons to vote for him, or does he really think there's actually a carbon tax?

if he really thinks there's actually a carbon tax, are we to expect the status quo when he's told there isn't? that would be maintaining cap & trade. see, but some observers have suggested that what he actually means is that he's going to abolish cap & trade - suggesting that he either doesn't know the difference, or doesn't think voters care.

so, scenario one is that we maintain the status quo, and then what? does he go back to his supporters and say he's killed the carbon tax that nobody was proposing? well, as it doesn't exist, and nobody proposed it, it's an easy win, right? and, if his voters are that fucking stupid, they'll eat it right out of his hand. maybe he'll run for re-election on killing the imaginary carbon tax, too.

scenario two is that he's actually planning on killing cap & trade, in which case we should expect the imposition of a federal carbon tax - meaning that by killing the "carbon tax", he'll be delegating responsibility to ottawa, who will impose an actual carbon tax. and, while we can expect him to fight this carbon tax, we would be right to scratch our heads and wonder why he didn't just stick with cap & trade, which is going to bring in quite a bit of easy revenue so jerry brown can buy votes in california.

and you thought donald trump was confusing. you need a fucking logician to figure out doug ford.

of course, as has been the case with trump from time-to-time, we may find out that ford is using a ternary logic system, and believes he can cancel the carbon tax and create one at the same time.

ok.

i'm still embarrassed & saddened by the outcome of the election. i do not want to look at media of doug fucking retard ford right now.

"my friends..."

i'm not your fucking friend, you obese piece of shit.

what i will say is this: this is exactly the kind of fucking idiot that's likely to get some brutal rants out of me. the guy should be working in a fast food restaurant.

for right now, i don't want to hear a stupid word out of his stupid mouth.

listen: somebody has to do this.

i should have better things to do, but there's a convergence leading to a reality where i might just not have better things to do, but i might not have the option to not do it.

the laws are a little different in ontario, but we...

well, we were moving in this direction.

for all we know, doug ford may encourage smoking hash in the laundry room.

it's a fucking laundry room, guys. why do you have to specify? but i had that problem in the last unit: somebody insisted on smoking pot in the same place i was trying to clean my towels.

i smoked for years. but, i knew where to smoke and not to smoke. i always went outside, and tried to smoke away from the building. who the fuck smokes in the laundry room? it's just hard to get yourself in the head of these people.

i had a bit of a mental collapse yesterday, and may have to deal with the consequences of it. but, my letter made the situation clear enough: any attempt to evict me will be met with a human rights complaint. and, i suspect the owner will be on the hook for it...

http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/programs/health-data/uclasafe/Pages/Can%20You%20Be%20Sued.pdf

is the suggestion, then, that it would be rational and healthy to just breathe in the carcinogens and shrug it off?

it's the society that's sick. i get that, too. that's a constant. but, sometimes it's more surreal than usual.

so, the anger flows from the anxiety. i get that.

but, if your "anxiety" is rational, is it still anxiety?

the reason i'm angry is that i'm fearful of the effects of second-hand smoke, both in the long run (cancer) and in the short run (shortness of breath, coughing, tiredness). and, in fact i can demonstrate that my fears are grounded, as i've experienced these consequences.

so, when do you stop talking about anger as a consequence of anxiety, and start taking about anger as a rational reaction to objectively demonstrable fears?

however this plays out, i'm going to need to work the anxiety angle, and it's not like it's wrong - the anxiety is real. but, the consequences are real, too. so, how is that a disorder?

An Update on The Situation in Apartment 15

I need to begin by stating the following:

- The situation in the apartment has not changed since my previous communication.
- That is, the second-hand marijuana (and, now, tobacco) smoke coming from the downstairs tenant remains constant & oppressive, and is continuing to affect my enjoyment of the space, my quality of life & ultimately my health. This unit remains uninhabitable.
- As you have refused to make a good faith effort to address the problem, you remain negligent under the appropriate case law.
- As you remain negligent, you remain liable for property damage resulting from the tenant’s behaviour & you remain responsible for providing me with moving costs to get me out of the unit.
- Further, I still want to move out of this unit as soon as is possible.

What has changed are questions around the feasibility of a plan to move until questions are answered about the depth of the new government’s pending cuts to social assistance. I live on disability due to severe concerns around my mental health, and specifically an inability to exist in social settings without behaving erratically due to stress (“social anxiety disorder”). I simply can’t handle the stress inherent in what most people consider normal social interactions. You can make appeals to whatever ideals you want, but it won’t prevent me from becoming episodic. The working reality is that I am of little threat to myself so long as I am able to avoid situations where I’m forced to interact with the people around me, but I have a history of conflict with the people around me and of being terminated within weeks of being hired due to conflicts with employees and management - my disability is hard, and there is little chance of me ever entering the workforce again. I just need to avoid people, that’s all there is to it. I think my tenancy has reinforced the point: I can’t deal with living with another tenant that doesn’t care about the consequences that her behaviour is having on me, and thinks she has some kind of right to make me miserable and sick. My contempt for this woman is astronomical.

On June 7th, the people of Ontario elected a majority conservative government on a non-platform of undisclosed cuts to social services. As no actual plan for cuts has been released, other than a pledge to do a “line by line audit in search of ‘efficiencies’”, it is unclear how deep the cuts to my income are going to be. However, if one is to take the previous conservative government as precedent, cuts of upwards to 50% should be expected. It is impossible for me to sign a lease at this point, until exact numbers are determined.

I understand that uncertainty is a fact of life, but this is how people react to uncertainty: they have to change plans, they have to downsize, they have to make due with what they have. I desperately want out of this unit. Over the last several years, I have placed a primary importance on my health. I changed my diet in 2015 to be more healthy, I quit smoking at the beginning of 2016 and I rediscovered my bicycle in 2017. But, I am now unfortunately left in a situation where I have no choice but to compromise my physical health to maintain my mental well-being, until more information is available.

I do not have a driver’s license; I’ve never driven a car before. I decided when I was a teenager that cars were destroying the planet, and I would do my part to counteract that by relying on alternate means of transportation. In hindsight, it would have probably been unsafe to let me drive, anyways, as the social anxiety would have likely led me to road rage: I would not have been able to deal with rude drivers. Over the years, I’ve held to this moral decision as best as I can. While I don’t exactly regret that decision, it means that moving is a very expensive and difficult process, now that my father is dead (and my disability prevents me from meeting friends). The reality is that I am going to need to hire movers, so I am going to require hundreds of dollars in costs to move. The city runs a service, but I used it to move in here less than a year ago and am not likely to be approved again so quickly.

So, let us suppose that I move to another apartment on August 1st, as was my plan, and the government cuts my benefits by 50% on Oct 1st. That is almost certainly going to mean I’ll need to move a second time - or that I’ll end up homeless, altogether. It is going to be hard enough to find costs to move once, and I insist they will eventually come from you; finding moving costs a second time is an impossibility. I must wait, whether I like it or not - and whether you like it or not, as well.

I will state this yet again: I want to move out of this apartment as soon as I possibly can. Right now, “as soon as i possibly can” means “as soon as the government announces the numbers attached to it’s plan to cut disability payments”. So, I can commit to starting this process a second time within days of that announcement. But, I cannot sign a lease at this time, because I have no idea how deep the cuts are going to be.

As such, I regret to inform you that I will be suspending the application I previously filed, SWT-16361-18, to ask the court to sever the existing lease. While I will need to appear at the hearing, it will only be to explain the situation to the judge in order to cancel it. I will bring a copy of this letter to the hearing. I may or may not launch a second application once the cuts are announced, depending on whether you co-operate with me or not - I will need to determine what the best step forwards is when that happens.

The lease remains in force, and I expect to go month-to-month after that until the situation is clarified, if it takes that long for it to be clarified. This is not ideal for anybody, but it is necessary given the circumstances.

I understand that you may want to react to this letter by attempting to evict me, in which case I would request that you wait. As mentioned, I am unhappy here and want to move - but i can’t, or not yet. As i want to move, but cannot, i will have little choice to fight any eviction attempts to the full extent that i can - including launching appeals to the divisional court. When you can’t do something, that means you can’t do it - even if you really, really want to. Further, I am certain to react to an eviction attempt by launching a human rights complaint, which I am acting with restraint in not filing as it is. Attempting to evict me is going to cost you thousands of dollars that you’ll never recoup - and is likely to fail, at that. As I want to leave anyways, it is in your self-interest to co-operate with me in waiting until the cuts are announced and then settling for costs, which is what I’ve been requesting all along.

For what it’s worth, I voted for the greens.

In the meantime, I have requested repairs to the unit and received no response on it. I am re-printing that letter.

something else i couldn't find...

archived.

i couldn't find anything like this the last time i did this.

archived...

unfortunately, it took me two tries due to word crashing, but i've got the music facebook page synced now, at least.

it's long past time to eat. & i'll take a look at the personal facebook page once i have - if i can stay awake.

the air quality in here today has been dangerous. i don't understand how a person can sit and smoke pot for twenty hours at a time, but it's repeatably demonstrable. she doesn't come home from work and smoke a joint, she comes home from work and smokes an ounce.

my tactics worked well enough today in helping me avoid passing out, but they're not sustainable.

yet, i have no answer in the short term, either.

*shrug*.

so, i'm consolidating over the end of 2016 and...

.....how seriously should you take the idea that doug ford cheated to win?

i think you should take it fairly seriously. all i can do is poke holes in the data, and i'm not going to get more specific than claiming that the distribution is extremely surprising - we're supposed to believe that ford got a disproportionately huge swing in exactly the region he lost badly in the last mayoral election.

and, despite projections to the contrary, that's not something the data suggested. he was supposed to be running neck and neck with the ndp in the 905 - as weird as that is, it's what the data said. instead, we're supposed to believe that all these liberals swung to doug ford. and, we're supposed to believe that they finally beat their projections with doug ford, after decades of trying and failing with the likes of tory, hudak & harper.

...and we're supposed to believe that there was a big increase in turnout, too - in an election where polls suggested half of previous voters wouldn't vote, and the options ranged from widely despised to barely tolerable.

it smells funny.

but, that's not evidence; it's just suspicion. i think the data i presented here is strong enough to prove that clinton stole the 2016 primaries, and my actual prediction for the 2016 election was that clinton would win, but trump would steal it. that was my honest projection: trump is going to steal the election. i don't have that kind of data here, yet.

he didn't give us a platform, and they didn't give us much data, either.

but, on top of that, i'm going to draw attention to two facts: (1) ford appears to be using the same people that were involved in harper cheating his way to winning in 2011 (which has been proven, although the claim is it didn't affect the outcome), and in the same regions and (2) ford and many of his candidates are under investigation for fraud - and specifically for faking voter rolls.

the biggest argument against the idea is going to be that he doesn't have the influence. but, how clear is that, really? i dunno.

and, given that the media appeared to be in on it (as they were in the 2016 presidential election....), how far up does this actually go? who wants this stooge in power? the fucking power corp, or what?

there was a serious investigation into harper in 2011, and ford is under serious investigation for fraud, as it is. i don't have any hard evidence to put forward. but, i would encourage anybody with information to come out with it.

in the meantime, i'm going to suggest that it is likely that some evidence will eventually surface.

stoned again; don't want to be.

*shrug*.

can't do anything about it except drink more coffee.

"it was the conservatives that wanted to fund muslim schools?"

well, think about it for a minute. what, exactly. do you think is liberal about funding religious schools? i know that these words are flipped upside down in the united states - where liberals tend to support the democrats, which has always been the more conservative party - but it's kind of the most illiberal thing in the world, isn't it?

it should be expected that a modern conservatism would want to extend support for faith-based funding across the spectrum; but it also should be expected that a liberal party would oppose that, and would oppose any faith-based school funding at all.

the history here is complicated, and i'm not going to get into it, but the liberals have historically been a catholic minority party, and there's a lot of old identity politics around first french and then irish identity attached to this. i went to a catholic school high school in an italian neighbourhood that shipped a lot of irish kids in from the suburbs (st pius, in ottawa).

i don't actually know where the ndp stand on this issue.

of course, for those that are a little slow...

john tory wanted to expand the separate school system to include pubic funding for other types of faith-based schools, most prominently funding for muslim schools. this was ripped apart mercilessly by dalton mcguinty, who may have been a hypocrite about it, but at the least took advantage of widespread opposition to public funding of the catholic school board. many people suggested at the time that he ought to take the next step, but he never did.

the green party is taking that next step by floating the idea of removing all funding for faith-based schools, which is the exact opposite of what john tory proposed - and what a large plurality of voters have wanted for decades.

we would probably end up with a small privately funded catholic school system, and we can only hope it withers away over time.

but, my position is that i support one secular public school system for everybody - which is the most popular position in this province.

i'm making progress on this.

it's been brutal in here all day, but i have no course of action at this point to resolve it besides running the hot water to try and steam the space out.

i don't understand why she won't go outside like a decent person would.

i hope that when the cancer does hit her, she has a long and painful death.

worst case scenario, i may have to go back to school to avoid getting a job.

i'm actually glad i didn't sign anything. i could have been in for a disaster scenario.

given that everybody knows that doug ford is going to slash disability, i'm at that much more of a disadvantage - if you're a landlord, and you know assistance is going to fall, why would you sign a lease with somebody on disability?

if he had put out a platform, we could at least plan around this. as it is, i have absolutely no idea how big my check is going to be a year from now, or what i'm going to have to do to adjust to less money.

the bottom line is that i don't want to spend my last six months or my last year fighting court battles.

i'm going to focus on completing the discography, and prepare for the worst.

that likely means i'll be staying in more, too.

i'm back in a race against time: how much can i get done before doug ford signs my death sentence?

i'm kind of back in the mindset i was in over 2014 & 2015.

what's the use in quitting smoking if you're planning on killing yourself?

but, then i got my disability renewed...

now, i'm not sure that's going to happen, so i'm back to planning for suicide.

i don't think i'm going to pick it back up. but, i'm falling into apathy around it. so, maybe it's making me sick and ruining my quality of life? i'm going to fucking die anyways, right?

when i lived in ottawa, i lived in ottawa south (where i grew up) or ottawa-centre (where i lived when i moved out, and where i voted when i did).

i mostly voted ndp federally over that period, with the exception being the vote for stephane dion. i voted liberal provincially.

as mentioned: i'm less angry and more embarrassed.

i can't believe so many of us fell for such shameless charlatanism.

and, now we have no idea what he's going to do, because he didn't tell us - we just have to look at the harris government's record and fill in the blanks.

again: doug ford is not some kind of new type of politician.

he's your standard right-wing ideologue - more like paul ryan than donald trump.

i should expect the worst.

yeah....i....

i have absolutely no idea what the government is going to do for disability amounts. i suppose there's an obscure possibility that they could put through the gai - which i was kind of half planning around. they claim they'll let the experiment through, but whether what ford says means anything or not is a coin toss.

they could freeze it, which i could deal with.

or, they could slash it by 50%.

the harris government was downright savage in it's attacks on social service recipients, so there's precedent for something very damaging. and, the economy couldn't handle what that would do, either - unemployment would shoot up to 20%. we'd be dealing with an extreme homelessness problem.

but, i expect the next four years to be very dificult for poor people in this province.

it does not make sense to do anything at all until i get some idea of what they're doing. the reason he didn't release a platform was because he knew people wouldn't like what he was cutting. but, that means i'm stuck in the dark.

i need to wait.

yeah, i...

i have no idea, right?

i get $1200/month. if i move somewhere in august, and that gets cut to $1000/month, i'll probably have to move again right away.

it doesn't make sense for me to plan to move until he announces how deep the cuts are.

i'll have to call to explain this morning.

i may just have to call my landlord to explain that i can't afford to move right now, due to instability in my income source - and all of this conflict is going to have to drag on.

so, what's going to happen if my benefits get cut?

i don't really know what the point of telling me to go work at a fast food restaurant is. there are people with kids that need the job. and, i'm not socially capable of dealing with anything more complex than that, either.

when working was a task, i could deal with it - i could go waste however many hours was necessary in order to save numbers to apply to some purpose. but, when you take away that task, and tell me it's forever, i'm left with what's essentially a death sentence - and the reality that i'd rather kill myself.

the problem is that i don't feel i'm done yet. i have a lot more work to do, before it's time to die. the question is whether i have enough time left to waste at a job or not.

i do think that it's a given that doug ford is going to cut disability rather drastically; this is going to hurt me quite a bit. and, i'm almost wondering if i want to cancel the court process in the short run.

i may have to make a call today.

"you think it was stolen? it's almost exactly what was predicted..."

that's right: it's almost exactly what was predicted.

....and, i've explained the flaws in that reasoning.

i'll reiterate: the tories usually poll at the bottom of their error bars. this generally leads to exaggerated predictions that fail to materialize. tonight, they polled in the middle of it. this is an exception to the rule.

the tories have never won a majority government with less than 40% of the vote - and have ended up with leads in the 30s many times, always ending up with minorities. this has also repeatedly produced many exaggerated predictions. but, tonight was the exception to the rule.

while red/blue switchers were the dominant voter in the twentieth century, they have not existed in large numbers for the course of my conscious lifetime. liberal voters simply haven't voted for the conservatives in large numbers in decades. but, tonight they did.

& what the data suggested, when adjusted for all of these known historical errors and biases, was that we were looking at a small pc bump (not much more than the margin of error) that was distributed equally across the province, as well as exaggerated bumps in ndp support in urban ridings, which should have produced big ndp gains in urban seats and not much for the conservatives, who had a less concentrated vote. while we saw these big ndp bumps in the very downtown cores, we also saw large conservative bumps in suburban areas that i maintain was not something that was predictable from the data, besides through projection. but, it happened, nonetheless, whether via projection or via something else.

i'm not going to adjust my methods over this. i'm going to shrug it off as weird.

and, as mentioned repeatedly, both before and after the vote, as very fishy.

turnout appears to have actually been higher than last election.

so, this was an unprecedented shift: after vehemently rejecting him for mayor a few years ago, and living through what was widely seen as hell for his brother's time at city hall, liberals in toronto actually swallowed themselves whole and voted for doug ford. i find this incomprehensible, but, barring the premise of stuffed boxes, that's what happened.

it's fishy enough to be suspicious.

the ndp didn't split the vote. liberal voters made that choice. in large numbers. apparently.

i don't think i made any errors in analysis; i think my criticisms of the mainstream analysis were grounded, and that the results were very much unexpected. i did not see any convincing evidence of large scale movement from red to blue in toronto. this is the lowest popular vote for a tory majority...ever...as far as i can see: the conservatives hadn't ever won a majority with 40% before. the tory vote was not "efficient", so much as liberals voted for them in large numbers, which has never happened before, either. &etc.

this was really just an exercise in mass idiocy, the likes of which i never thought i'd see here - and which, i need to reiterate, was not suggested by historical data, at all. it really is unprecedented.

but, so be it.

now, we must fight as hard as we can to stop him from ruining the province.

doug ford does not have the slim upside that donald trump has.

he's a dime a dozen market neo-liberal - pro-trade, pro-nafta, the whole thing. he's into empty vacuous jingoism; thankfully, he has no war powers.

ford is really just absolute idiocy, at every level - it's stupid all the way down.

how did we become this dumb?

and, if you're making minimum wage and you voted conservative, you're a fucking idiot.

he's going to reduce your salary and then send you a $14 credit on your tax bill to make up for it. i might advise him to send you a shit sandwich in the mail, along with the refund.

the numbers were not there. i'm kind of shocked. but if i have to spend the next four years marching then so fucking be it.

see, this is a part of why i like the liberals in power - it's relative peace, because the bourgeoisie just pays us off. call me a sellout, but i'm just as happy to take the cash.

when conservatives are in power, and they start launching battles in the class war, we have to ensure we're causing havoc. strikes. marches. whatever causes disruption, whatever hurts capital, whatever leads to mayhem and disorder.

let's strive to make the next four years as chaotic and miserable for capital as is possible.

it's a sad day for ontario.

another step in the race to the bottom.

another leap head first into the third world.

& the worst part about is that we're going to have to listen to the fucking idiot talk in public for the next four years. the guy is such a dumbass that he makes dubya sound like a genius.

i don't know what he's going to do. literally. he provided no coherent idea of what his plans are - he ran on cheap beer & cheap gas.

but, generally, these kinds of candidates slash funding for health care, slash funding for education & slash funding for welfare.

we'll have to see what he does before i can figure out how to react in terms of organizing marches & whatnot.

so, this isn't about "voter efficiency" - i was wrong about turnout, and the point they were making about distribution ought to have been irrelevant or wrong due to the swing. when i pointed out that the pcs can't win a majority of seats with 39% of the vote, i was right to do it - assuming that liberals vote one way or the other. if liberals vote conservative, they get over 39%; if they vote ndp or liberal, that's just not enough to win. then they just didn't vote at all. & when the talking heads argued that the ndp vote was poorly distributed, they should have been misinterpreting the evidence - but happened to fluke out because liberals didn't vote at all. i mean, what happened wasn't about the ndp's vote distribution, it was about the evaporation of liberal voters altogether. if the argument was that the conservatives can win via vote suppression, i would have agreed with the point, even if i guffawed at the numbers required to do so.

and is this believable?

i have no evidence regarding voter suppression, but would encourage others to explore the situation.

but, i mean....

there's a pattern.

toronto liberals will vote for the liberals, or they won't vote at all. we saw it federally in 2011 & in 2008...and now we're seeing it provincially...

too busy watching the fucking hockey game, or what?

i need to be clear: if all you toronto liberals would have voted, for either party, this wouldn't have happened.

i didn't vote ndp, either. but the ndp won this riding by 10,000 votes. it was maybe a little more intense than i thought, but not unexpected in the general outcome.

if i was in a swing riding?

it turns out the strategic vote was liberal after all in most of these areas. but, the ndp numbers didn't go up, or not by a lot - the vote wasn't split. that argument's not going to work, here.

it's liberals that just didn't vote, and in huge numbers.

as for the outcome, i'm embarrassed.  - not because i was wrong, but because of what the province just did.

we just elected an absolute buffoon who promised to do stupid things, and is going to hurt the province dramatically. i can't believe that the people of this province could be so stupid; we don't have a history of this.

but, now, it's time to organize & fight.

i'm going to tell you what i'm surprised about.

the range was 34-43, so i wasn't arguing that the polling was wrong so much as i was arguing that the analysis was inaccurate. if the conservatives ended up with 36, that wouldn't mean the polling was wrong, as it was correctly in the range. and, at 39-40%, that doesn't mean the polling is more right: it's a range. i was just pointing out that the conservatives usually poll at the bottom of the range. they did federally in 2015, 2011, 2008 & 2006 - as well as in every provincial election i can remember.

if they end the night in the middle of the range, that is unusual. it's not more right, it's just not consistent with the general trend. & that's what i'm surprised about. this election is consequently an outlier in terms of how results line up with polling measurements.

i haven't seen turnout numbers yet, but what it suggests is that turnout was probably quite low. this is what the models suggested, and that's fine. but, we're used to low turnout, and it's never affected the analysis before. this must have been really low turnout - so low you might want to wonder about it.

so, that's the first thing i'm surprised about - that the conservatives polled in the middle of their range rather than at the bottom of it, like they usually do. and, that would have to be because turnout was low.

the second thing i'm surprised about is that the liberal numbers are as low as they are, and that's the other side of the equation. they could still end up a tad over 20%. but, i was expecting that this is where the error would wash out, and they'd get to 22 or 23.

the end result is the outcome i feared: liberals just didn't vote at all. mostly in the gta. so, you're going to hear people talk about the conservatives swinging liberal votes, but if you look at absolute numbers, that will come out as false: conservative numbers likely stayed flat in the gta, while liberal numbers crashed. so, the conservatives ended up winning seats as a consequence of liberals staying home, the result of voter suppression through media assassination.

my analysis was rooted in rejecting the idea of equally distributing undecideds, which were clearly disproportionately historical liberal voters, and correcting the distribution of liberal voters to account for their ideological leanings. i continually pointed out that if these voters don't vote at all, the pcs would split the vote - but i didn't think that would actually happen.

had all of those liberal voters voted...

alas.

i got my huge swings in downtown toronto, but as soon as you get out of the core, those liberal voters stay home rather than vote liberal or ndp.

so, give the election to the media: it succeeded in suppressing the vote.

...if it was the media & not the machines.

no.

the majority threshold for the pcs is 43-44%.

i expect that number to fall over the night.

the cbc is going to look foolish in the morning.

way too early to call it.

calm down.

the cbc site appears to be getting ddosed by legit users.

personally, i haven't had access to a tv to watch an election on since 2002. guess the world's catching up on me...

...but, considering that the site can't handle the traffic, please turn your tv on if you can, so people like me can access the site online.

so, did doug ford blow a huge lead?

no.

his numbers went down as undecideds fell.

the tory base is static. this is a constant in this country.

again: the conservatives, under stephen harper, managed 45% of the vote in ontario in 2011. that was enough for a majority of seats in ontario.

in 2008, however, which is a better comparison over all, the conservatives got 39% of the vote in ontario - which was only enough for a minority of seats in the province.

the data suggests that doug ford will be lucky to match the 2008 totals - and that he is not even close to the 2011 totals.

historically, bill davis also needed 44%+ to run a majority. davis ran at 36 once and at 39 once and ended up with minorities both times. mike harris ran at 45% for both of his majorities.

it is entirely unclear where the narrative of "conservative vote efficiencies" came from, if not from the ford campaign itself. that sounds like the kind of vacuous bluster that would come out of his mouth, not a reasoned deduction from seasoned pollsters who should be well aware that the conservatives need exaggerated numbers province wide to allow for boosts in urban areas.sufficient enough for them to win elections. they've always had the least efficient vote.

the conservatives are up at most 8 points and they lost dozens of urban ridings by way more than 15 last time. if i'm right and they're up more like 3 or 4 points, they're not likely to improve much on their existing seat total at all - especially considering that the liberals are bleeding so heavily to the ndp.

but, even seasoned liberal propagandists are repeating this pablum.

it shows the power of the tory media to control the narrative.

this is a civil war on the left in toronto.

ford is an also-ran...

if he's lucky, the infighting is nasty enough that he wins a minority.

a lot of urban ridings looked like this:

liberal - 60%
conservative - 20%
ndp - 15%

then, they claim the conservatives have a better chance because they came in second in more ridings. right.

that riding could very well end up like this tonight:

ndp: -35%
liberal - 34%
conservative - 26%

you just want to make sure you actually vote.

just whatever you do, don't get overwhelmed and not vote.

to an extent, it even doesn't matter; despite the narrative, ford needs to make up so much ground that as long as turnout doesn't collapse, he doesn't really have a serious chance at a majority.

if you can't figure it out, guess. but don't give up - be confident in your guess.

i mean, the upside is that the tories would need to swing 20% in dozens of ridings to be seriously competitive, and we can be sure that's not going to happen.

this is a good example of what not to listen to today.

"but, the ndp would have to swing 40% of the vote in that riding to win! the liberals are the obvious strategic choice."

i was skeptical until i saw the data, too, but the ndp are swinging 40% of the vote.

or, at least they are in some places.

this is a hard problem; i can't solve it without a lot of data, and i don't have a lot of data. but, don't follow the kind of simplistic analysis presented here. it's just as bad as the projections coming from lispop.

the hard truth is that some of these ridings will swing 45% from liberal to ndp and some of them won't swing at all and it's up to you to guess which is which. good luck. the province depends on it.

don't look at me like that, blame the media for creating havoc.

but, remember: the tories have never won a majority at either level with less than 40% of the vote, and there's not any good reason to think they will this time, either.

https://nowtoronto.com/news/ontario-election-2018-andrea-horwath-kathleen-wynne-doug-ford/

this cannot be allowed to happen.

if you are in the region, i'd encourage civil disobedience.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/councilman-plans-gender-segregated-beach-days-for-religious-1.3963286

you'd have to have lungs like michael phelps to reduce 5 grams to 4 tokes.

that's superhuman. really.

it's actually about 20 joints and 200+ tokes.
 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/senators-marijuana-legalization-abstain-1.4695824

can you come up with a valid argument as to why people should have violent dogs?

i can't.

at least with guns, there's a human on the other side. you can make arguments about how gun control isn't the answer, so much as a change in the culture is. and, that remains true with dogs as well - the real answer is that we need a cultural shift away from the machismo that glorifies the ownership of these breeds. sure.

but, a violent dog doesn't have a safety on it. you can't lock it in a cabinet, where the kids can't get at it. it's an omnipresent danger, with it's own personality.

i don't know exactly how you do this, and i would like to ensure that the science is consulted - because i want it to be effective. if the science says it's not going to work, what's the point, right? but i would like to see stronger action taken, nonetheless.

ok, and it seems like that's what they're doing.

perhaps the laws in ontario could use a similar rewrite to increase enforcement.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/06/06/quebecs-proposed-dangerous-dog-law-ditches-breed-specific-ban_a_23452761/

i understand the point.

but, rather than back off altogether, i was hoping to see action towards banning all large dogs altogether. i don't feel i should be afraid to walk down the street because people want to express their chauvinism through big stupid dogs, and the fact is that i often am.

pit bulls. rottweilers. german shephards. dobermans. get rid of all of them....

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/06/06/quebec-abandons-plans-for-pit-bull-ban-citing-lack-of-science-to-back-breed-specific-laws.html

"the liberals are going to end up with the balance of power!? that's terrible..."

nah.

we just came out of 15 years of liberal government. there's not a lot of evidence that the province has undergone a fundamental shift in ideology, either; the premier's policies are quite popular, voters just hate her. there's no convincing evidence that the province has developed an aversion to debt, either.

wynne's argument is really pretty consistent with the way our system works, which the ndp have never liked; it's a check on power, to allow voters to be sure they're making this choice.

we're not stuck with this for four years; the government could fall on the first budget.

so, a likely scenario is that the ndp decide they want to do something to undo the liberal legacy, and voters need to vote on it to confirm it - or return the liberals to power.

more voting is more democratic; it's a feature, it's not a bug.

i don't see any really good reason to think doug ford will even win his own seat.

that was a crash last night, but it was a healthy one.

i need to pivot starting today.

but, what i'm going to do over off hours is the following:

1) copy the existing music blog into the master music document.
2) copy the master music document into the complete master document
3) carry on with the same process as previously.

today, i need to vote - for the greens. get some salami. get some ventolin. & get to looking for somewhere else to live.

this was a weird election.

but, it demonstrates that splitting the vote isn't necessarily catastrophic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_general_election,_1975

again: i will be surprised if the conservatives poll above 35%. am i ignoring the data? no - i'm just reading it correctly.

the polling data does not suggest that the conservatives will poll at 38-39%. what it suggests, rather, is that there's a ninety some percent chance that they poll in the range of [34, 43]. polling is never an exact number, but always a range. but, we know from experience that the telephone polling has inherent biases that favour the conservatives. so, a prudent reading of the data suggests they should end up near the bottom of it, and that there's a higher chance of them polling polling around 34-36 than there is of them polling around 42-43.

i'll acknowledge a level of intuition in pegging them at the very bottom of this range. this election has been defined by exceedingly nasty media coverage of the ruling party, which is clearly on the opposite side of the broader electorate. further, doug ford is clearly not fit for the job. in electing doug ford, ontario would be suffering a collective experience of mass idiocy that it is not known for. i would consequently assign most of that error to the liberals out of a shy effect, rather than to the ndp.

might i be wrong, though? sure.

so, let's say i'm wrong. let's say the conservatives get 39% of the vote.

look as i may, i cannot find an example of the conservatives winning a majority government in ontario with under 40% of the vote. harris polled around 45% in both wins - numbers that nobody is talking about. bill davis had majorities at 44% and minorities at 36% and 39%. frank miller had a minority at 37%. if we trust the elections bodies to distribute the ridings fairly, we can only conclude that ontario is less rural today than it was in the late 70s, and that it would be harder to win a majority in the high 30s today than it was then.

looking at federal data, stephen harper got 44% in 2011 and 39% in 2008 - which is the difference between a majority and a minority.

so, even if i concede that the conservatives may be running in the middle of their range, i don't concede that that makes a majority government likely. i would rather argue rather forcefully that it makes a minority government likely.

you can come up with whatever theory you want, but i think it is clear that the empirical data suggests that the conservatives need to be running in the 40s to make a majority government an idea to even talk about, and should be running closer to 45 to make it likely.

again: my reading of the data is that the ndp is on the brink of a sweep in toronto. i think we're looking at an ndp majority government.

but, if i'm wrong, this legislature is more likely to end up looking something like the minority government of the 70s than it is to end up looking like the majority government of the 90s - even if we have no real idea of how doug ford would actually govern.