i need to be careful.

there are plenty of black people in canada. and, as dawkins says, we're all africans.

but, the vast majority - i believe over 90% - are recent immigrants from the carribbean, with the balance being from africa directly, since 1970. there were small communities of black loyalists in nova scotia and later on in alberta, but we're talking about very small groups of people. and while canada is famous for the underground railroad - of which i live on the terminus of - the fact is that very few of the freed slaves stayed in canada, with the overwhelmingly majority choosing to back migrate into the northern states. people missed their family, and no doubt felt out of place in what was then an almost entirely white culture, but the dominant reason in the literature is the weather. seriously.

slave descendant african-africans in canada are honestly a fraction of a percent of the population.

a proper stand in for mlk in canada would be somebody like louis riel.

https://phys.org/news/2018-10-taxing-carbon-good-idea.html

i think this analyzes the reality well, then produces the wrong solution.

i don't believe in markets; i don't think markets solve problems, i think markets make problems worse.

what i believe in is people. and, what that means in the existing paradigm is actually bigger and bigger government.

https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2018/07/18/agreed-carbon-pricing-isnt-working-now-what/

but, a carbon tax the way it's coming in is not a tax on everything - it exempts imports.

it's a solely a tax on domestic production, most notably on fuel, as well as on exports.

it would be a far better idea to make it a tax on everything....

i have never voted ndp at the provincial level, fwiw - and until last year had voted strictly for the liberals, in various ridings in ottawa. i skipped the previous election because i felt i didn't know the riding well enough.

when i voted for the greens provincially in this riding, it was a protest vote for the local candidate, who seems to be a little more of a left-leaning green. i did not bother to look into mike schreiner's politics, because i wasn't voting for mike schriener. but, i did take the time to look into the local candidate, because the green's have this split personality up in canada - you need to check to see if they're on the green left or are one of these "green capitalist" types.

i would not have voted for a "green capitalist", not even as a throwaway vote. faced with that choice, i would have just voted liberal.

bernie is wasting his time in south carolina, and kind of losing the plot, overall.

i have a 78 year-old grandmother who has gotten into the habit of asking the same question three or four times in a row, and showed no signs of dementia well into her 76th year.

i want to see a younger candidate that distances him or herself from the narrative in washington, and refocuses on things people actually care about. not russia. not border walls. not identity politics.

and, yes - they're going to have to find a way to split the vote in the south and sweep the upper midwest if they want to win the primary. the south is conservative; they will pick a conservative candidate. the potential leftist candidate has the choice between coming to terms with this and losing yet again.

you half expect him to start quoting ayn rand, or something.

he's some kind of eco-friendly rand paul.

yuck.

also: mike schreiner is demonstrating himself to be somewhat of a disappointing idiot.

so, yes - we need serious climate change policies.

but, a carbon tax on exports and fuel is just a way to change the channel, and one that could potentially harm a manufacturing-based economy, while just increasing reliance on imports.

the unfortunate thing is that your average neo-liberal won't find much to criticize in a plan that is more or less designed to export jobs as a cheap pr stunt. if imports are cheaper, it's good for consumers, right?

and, listen - you can cite a bunch of neo-liberal economists, but i'm just going to come back with some marxist analysis about how markets don't work, and i'm sure i can find a few working economists on the left that have ripped the thing down, although i haven't looked, because i haven't needed to....the argument is too elementary to bother seeking backup...

an argument from authority works when you're citing a field that operates in facts and data, which is not economics, and is especially not neo-liberal economics. economics is an ideologically driven profession that operates on deductive reasoning and, on the right, often via faith in free markets. bringing in some neo-liberal economist to preach the faith is just deflecting to another type of guru.

the reality is that you have to adhere to a belief system called "market fundamentalism" to swallow the koolaid on pigovian taxes, which mainstream economists are happy to do on a mass scale. the data isn't actually there - they are at best harmless, so long as they are not foolishly applied for political reasons, which is what is happening in canada.

i'm in favour of wealth redistribution, and i'll take the $20 check. we need serious climate change policies; i was initially agnostic on the thing, not seeing a reason to oppose it, but being wary of supporting it.

but, the feds really need to be looking at ways to tax imports, otherwise they're cutting off their nose to spite their face...

and, we see the result of this: that's a part of how we ended up with doug ford in the first place.

and, fwiw, mlk day does not exist in canada, and most canadians are only vaguely aware that it exists in the united states. this is not a shared holiday, because we don't have a shared history, in context - and the number of canadians of african-american descent is, in fact, statistically negligible.

so, the way this works is that the two bourgeois parties set up a false dichotomy to a serious problem that neither of them want to solve, then get you arguing about it instead of trying to solve the problem. the way to solve climate change is to introduce a tax, and if you oppose the tax then you work for the fuel industry - it's demagoguery on both sides, and indicative of an absolutely broken narrative around something that needs very serious solutions absolutely immediately.

what is being introduced into ontario is not a carbon tax, it's a gas tax. if it was a carbon tax, it would tax imports - and it's not doing that. rather, what it's doing is strictly taxing local production, which will give importers an absolute price advantage. it's a tariff on ourselves. and, if brought to it's logical conclusion, it is strictly recessionary in the sense that it will offshore certain types of production - which will then be presented as a victory, as canada's carbon footprint will decrease as the jobs leave the country.

now, a recessionary policy might not cause an actual recession, but it might. and, because ontario is reliant on manufacturing - unlike bc or alberta - there is a higher chance of it happening here than there.

the solution is a massive increase in green infrastructure using state expenditures.

but, you're just supposed to just pay the tax and think that your suffering is saving the world.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/01/21/doug-ford-called-out-for-claiming-trudeau-carbon-tax-will-trigger-recession_a_23648762/

hi.

 i think the problem is that my request is not being properly understood.

 i understand what a criminal record check is, but it is not what i'm looking for. what i want to know is what the border officers in the united states have access to. i will repeat the circumstance.

in early september, i was arrested and charged on what were ridiculous charges that were dropped in november, before a trial date was even set. there is currently an ongoing opird investigation to investigate whether the officer may have acted in retaliation or malice, meaning the only relevant trial that is occurring is of the officer, but it is sufficient in context to recognize that the crown dropped the case. i was - i believe illegally - fingerprinted while i was in custody. i am seeking information about who can and cannot see that these prints exist.

i do not have a criminal record, and as such i know what a criminal record will produce. an occurrence of this sort would only show up on the deepest of vulnerable sector checks. but, the record check will not give me the information i am looking for, which is information about the existence of the prints. nor do the border guards in the united states do a criminal record check - what they check is the cpic database. as such, i do not care about a criminal record check and see little point in carrying through with one, what i care about is what it says in the version of the cpic database that is accessible to the border cops in the states.

i expect the prints to be destroyed, but there is a lengthy process involved. i have a nexus card, and am a frequent border crosser. i need to know what i am exposing myself to before i cross the border.

and, i will reiterate that i have not broken any laws, but am rather seeking that the officer be severely disciplined for his behaviour. i also feel that my s. 6 rights are being infringed upon by the general thrust of the circumstances, as i am fearful of attempting to cross the border until i know what the cops can see, due to no fault or behaviour of my own.

so, i think my request for a cpic readout is not only quite reasonable, but strictly within my constitutional rights - that i have a right to know what information a foreign government is able to access about me, more or less on request. but, all you've told me is that the results are "restricted".

this is creating more questions for me. why are the results restricted? i have no criminal record, no history of conflict with law enforcement and no reason to think there would be anything in the database at all. am i under investigation of committing a crime? because i don't remember committing one, and would be strongly taken aback by any suggestion that i have. i was only initially interested in the question of the prints, but now i want to know what is in the file, as there should not be anything in it at all, by my own calculations.

i cannot accept that the information is being withheld under s. 19 or s. 26. i am not asking about somebody else, and i am not seeking information provided by a provincial institution - or at least i don't think i am. i am asking for a readout of my own personal information, and i have a right to see it.

 so, i am going to reiterate my request a second time - and hope i don't need to reiterate it a third time to the privacy commissioner, or a fourth time in a court of law.

1) my primary concern is in understanding what the border cops on the american side can see. the best way to do this would be to produce a total printout of the cpic results, and then draw attention to the parts that are accessible to the american border cops. do the american border cops have total access to the database, or partial access? i will also need this information before i can renew my nexus card.

2) i believe that this is set out in a memorandum of understanding, but i cannot find it. can you please produce the most recent memorandum of understanding that defines what the american border cops can and cannot see when they search the cpic database from their side?

3) because i cannot see my file, and it is *my* file, i would like to explicitly request the printout merely for the sake of requesting it. again: i am not looking for a vulnerable sector check. what i want is a printout of my entire file.

4) am i under investigation? please provide me with a detailed reason as to why this information is being "restricted", as the answers provided are incoherent and i can imagine no reason at all.

i thought that this would be a simple, routine request. but, denying me access has only made me more insistent to access it, and i'm willing to fight to get this information, which i'm clearly entitled to. we all have restrictions on our time. i would request that you refrain from wasting everybody's and just give me the printout.

 j

the only reason i think i'm smarter than you is that the system told me i was, over and over again.

and, maybe the system was wrong, granted - maybe these tests don't mean anything. maybe the better way to measure intelligence is by success in the market, in which case i'm an absolute retard. who knows. really.

all i can do is repeat the test results.

listen, i never interpreted myself as the smart kid. i didn't want to go enriched classes; i preferred to hang out with the dumb kids. this isn't self-delusion - i would rather be stupid. in a backwards society, intelligence is actually a curse.

but, they kept doing these aptitude tests and i kept coming back in the 99th percentile. it started in grade school, carried on through high school and was most recently demonstrated through government employment tests. i scored in the 99th percentile on the gct-2, which is a kind of iq test for government hiring. i got something like 96% on a test with a 60% pass requirement. i destroy these things. routinely. consistently....

i went to an interview, and they were just astonished by the sight of me. most people that write these tests fail them outright. 75% is exceptional. they'd never heard of a 96%. they thought there was some kind of mistake. then, i showed up in like sneakers and a plaid shirt with shoulder length hair, and they basically told me to go back to school. well, they probably all got Cs, so that's not hard to grasp.

i'm not the kid that overreached, i'm the kid that underperformed. i didn't do my homework, i skipped a lot of classes; i generally didn't take it seriously. sometimes i was irresponsible, other times i was disinterested and still other times i was dealing with heavy real world shit like homelessness and just unable to focus. i really strongly disliked participating in class. what i think is more important to point out is that my heart wasn't in it, and for that reason i fully agree that i should have dropped out - not because i was unable to do it, but because i legitimately didn't want to.

and, my grades are actually reflective of that. i initially graduated with a B+; my marks went up when i went back, and my gpa is now a weak A. but, it's not a bunch of marks in the middle - it's a lot of extremes. it's strings of As followed by strings of Ds, and you can see my life experiences very clearly reflected in it, if you read the attached essay.

but, nobody wants to read the essay. and, i don't even care, really; what i care about is an end point of actual academic work, not some letters or numbers to get a job with. i'm all about the love of learning, and i'm only frustrated by my inconsistency in the doors it's closed.

but, i'll concede that i may have to change my statement to "ottawa used to be the coldest capital city in the world, before the recent effects of climate change led to an exaggerated effect of hotter and longer summers on it's continental climate."

looking at the data very quickly and coming to a tentative conclusion, it may be less controversial to say that ottawa has the coldest winters of any capital city in the world (perhaps excluding the central asian ssrs, including mongolia). a cursory glance suggests that an ottawa january is 5-10 degrees colder, on average, than the baltic, north sea or iceland. but, these cities don't seem to get nearly as warm in the summer, for the same reason that they don't get very cold in the winter - the ocean currents regulate the climate. 

again: i'm not confident in data from bad sources when it defines itself poorly and then contradicts itself. i don't believe that the average temperature in ottawa is higher than the average temperature in helsinki. at all. that makes no sense. but, if the numbers are closer than meteorological science suggests they should be, it would be because the hotter summers in ottawa are warping them, which may be particularly evident since 1998.

i don't remember the source of the source of the article i read that pointed out that ottawa is the world's coldest capital city, but i will point out that it was a very long time ago - around 1998 or 1999. i remember people not believing me, and posting a link in a discussion group to back it up. i remember the term "continuously inhabited". and i often cited the cia factbook for information of the sort in this period, if somebody wants to try the archives (that is a guess). that link does not currently appear to be near the top of the google search results, but the sources at the top of the results are really not very good - "worldatlas.com" provides no meaningful data, sources or figures and differs dramatically from the wiki page, which doesn't mean that i'm right so much as it suggests that there are different definitions floating around. "average temperature" is also somewhat of an unclear metric to begin with, and it is possible that you could come up with different rankings by altering the metric. average temperatures are also subject to change over time, as climate shifts and weather patterns evolve. you'd have to define what you mean very clearly. all i can see from a cursory search is that the different sites don't even agree on what the average temperature of ottawa even is - that the accuracy of the data being thrown around is by no means clear.

i will point out, however, that mongolia is not universally recognized as a country, and my source may not have recognized the former ssrs as independent countries, which they were not until 1991. if the source was the cia factbook, it may have been somewhat out of date, even at the time.

that said, ottawa has what is called a continental climate, which is very different from most of the cities on the european coast, which are moderated by the ocean streams. i suspect that a careful analysis of the data would present moscow as the only serious competitor, if we ignore the landlocked central asian ssrs that did not exist before 1991, which have the double whammy of near desertification.

i am not accepting the idea that the capitals of the baltic states, or even iceland, have colder average temperatures than ottawa. sorry.

i'm under some kind of cyberattack, and i actually think it's the rcmp. i am not going to be able to do anything at all until i can get not just my laptop but now also my main desktop back on line. everything else is secondary - i have no existence, otherwise.

i'm typing on what i want to be a strictly mobile device. this laptop/tablet is not intended for daily use, and is not a solution to the problem.

on saturday afternoon, i checked my mail and got back my access to information request from the rcmp, which was a dvd with a large amount of information on it (you can tell from the burn size). the totality of the request was a 16 kb pdf file with the statement "restricted" - they are not releasing this information, and i do not know why. my best guess is that they there were (multiple) undercover officers at occupy ottawa, and i have a file on record because i participated in the protests, but i'm going to have to file an appeal to figure it out. i believe that this is a basic request that i should have been granted instant access to, but we live in a culture where people assume you have no rights unless you introduce yourself as a lawyer. i believe that the dvd had a boot sector virus on it, and it has taken out two of my machines. but, i think this is also a part of a broader attack that seems to focus on taking out my video cards. twice is a coincidence. three times is a pattern.

i don't want any software from adobe on my machine, as it is bloated spyware, so i open pdf documents in a virtual machine. i initially couldn't get the thing to read, so i tried a reboot - and the laptop never came back. after a few reboots, i decided the disk was suspect and tried to boot from my pc.

i'll remind you that the laptop i'm using has a blown lamp in the display monitor, so i have to send the information out through the video card. this is following a short in a newer laptop's system board, which i think was caused by an attack on my processor. the hard drive initially came from the newer laptop, which i am looking to refurbish, eventually.  what that means is that i'm unable to see error messages coming from the bios in the system. but, my assumption was a drive error - because i've seen that happen before. on top of that, i then remembered that i had scheduled a chkdsk and thought that perhaps the reason the machine seemed slow to boot is that the chkdsk was running, which i had then terminated by rebooting. oops.

i got a x7b on reboot, which i decided was probably a boot sector problem caused by the aborted chkdsk. but, the chkdsk had minimal problems. the boot sector seemed fine. so, i copied everything off of the drive and reinstalled - which worked fine, indicating i wasn't having a hardware problem at all, something was corrupt inside of the install.

i was able to work the problem down to a corrupted system hive in the registry and was making good progress in fixing it. i shut the machine down to take a nap, and now it won't post. the laptop's hard drive was plugged in...

i can use this device for file transfer operations and internet access and i still have the bus pirate if i need to go in and flash over parallel. there were plenty of explanations for my laptop's hard drive getting funny. but, there is no rational explanation at all for what just happened to my main pc.

it's almost 7:00 am, which is when the hydro rates change. i'll have to start by stripping the pc down, taking out ram, etc. but, i won't be able to start until after 7:00 pm.

and i'm frankly very depressed and frustrated, so i'm planning to spend the next 12 hours sleeping.

stop.

did you go to university?

did you graduate?

do you work in your field?

maybe it's a utopian model.

maybe it's a good time to dust off my idea about how to fix the education system, which is...

more high school.

yes: i want four extra years of high school.

it's a different spin on what sanders was saying, if you actually listened to it, which is that we're up against what is really a failure of public policy. you can't get a job washing dishes without a college degree nowadays - unless you're an undocumented worker willing to work at half the legal wage. what sanders was really advocating for was an expansion of the public education system, just as what he's advocating for in healthcare is "medicare for all" - an expansion of an existing program.

i've been arguing this point for a really long time, though. sanders has a few decades on me, but he was a kind of distant novelty candidate for me until 2015, as he was for most of the left. you'd see him on left-wing talkshow once in a while as the oddball from vermont; he always made sense, but he wasn't projecting a clear platform like he has been since.

but, there's a social component of it, as well. four more years of high school would normalize a broader understanding of certain topics. the way they teach physics in high school is a disaster, and you don't really have the space to get as broad of a basic education as you should. i took eight oac classes - which was unusual - and i didn't have time to take law, economics, accounting, history or even geography. the eight were calculus, algebra, finite math, chemistry, biology, physics, english and computer science. is that really good enough for what we call "general education"?

so, four more years of high school would normalize a deeper understanding of some basic life skills; four years is really not enough, as evidenced by the number of people that are going to university. the assumption would then be that most people would enter the workforce after their eighth year of high school, rather than go to what would now be called post-tertiary education. only specialists would go to tertiary schooling. this would allow the universities to be more selective in admission, and more focused on research.

you could argue that you're expanding adolescence by four years, but i think that's a benefit - it's giving people more time to figure out what they want. if there's a root cause to the student loan crisis, it's in trying to force 18 year-olds to plan their lives out. that is what is crazy about the whole thing.

"and, then they expect you to pick a career...."

four more years of english would open up more space to focus on more classic literature. four more years of basic science would help us create better public policy, by being more science literate. four more years of arts would help us grow ourselves at an important period of our development. and, understanding how to program in multiple languages - as well as perhaps to speak a few - is something that everybody should know how to do.

you would fund these four more years of high school the same way you'd fund the four that exist right now. and, while that sounds expensive, it probably isn't, because you'd be transferring over so much of what we pay for tuition. the administrators would have to take a pay cut, certainly - they'd be paid like principals. many professors may even get a raise, to the level of high school teachers.

over time, the system will staff itself, emancipating the necessity of research professors to teach undergraduate level courses.

as mentioned, the trade-off would be very high requirements to get into what would be a much smaller university system that is strictly focused on higher level topics and research.

“In 2012, the Quebec government decided to raise tuition rates. In response, a quarter of a million students took to the streets to demand change. The result was a halting of tuition increases,” reads the ‘Protest Against OSAP Changes’ event post. “This year, The Ontario government has decided to target our right to education through the recent OSAP reform. All students will be affected, and now it is our time to tell the government that we will not sit in peace.”

hrmmn.

i still have my red square somewhere, and memories of marching through gatineau.

that would be fun. i'd get into that.

these kinds of policies are putting us on a one-way ticket to third-world poverty levels.

i mean, it's easy enough to point out that the tories do very badly with educated people, so that it's in their interest to reduce the level of education in society - they don't want an educated population, because they thrive on low information voters.

but, if that's the goal then you have to have some way to sustain it - you have to house and feed these people that you're trying to keep out of the education system. it's expensive, as a tactic.

if you take away the ability to advance, and then take away the social safety net, the result is going to be mass failure, and dramatically increased levels of extreme poverty.

worse, this is happening in a reality where unskilled labour is being squeezed out - where there are less opportunities every year.

as an anarchist, i welcome the recruits. this is revolutionary potential. keep it coming. but, from a ruling class perspective, this is utter stupidity.

so, first you slash social assistance, and then you make it harder to go to school.

what exactly do they plan to do with people? send them to jail?

we're going to end up with masses of homeless people. that's the total consequence of these policies: the homeless population is going to shoot through the roof.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/2019/01/17/free-tuition-program-is-gone-tuition-reduced-and-student-fees-are-no-longer-mandatory-ford-government-announces.html

like, i don't want to frame the issue in the terms of whether canada is ready for jagmeet singh or not - as though having a prime minister with a magic beard is some kind of progress, rather than an unimaginable regression to the nineteenth century.

the more pertinent question is whether jagmeet singh is ready to more genuinely become a canadian or not.

and, right now, it seems as though he isn't.

it's not a triviality.

it's a big deal.

listen.

i'm not afraid to tell you that i don't want to vote for a practising sikh.

i don't want to vote for a practising christian, muslim, hindu, zoroastrian, wiccan or jew either.

i'm just a little unclear as to what the liberals are projecting in bc.

they could just be trying to distance themselves from controversy, without really thinking it through; it could just be a rejection of bad pr, with little thought to the substance. ok.

they could even be throwing the riding, under the hopes that singh wins - but that would no doubt be a racially motivated calculation, as it's not hard to figure out that the reason he's tanking so spectacularly is that the broader left is a little uneasy with the premise of putting a sikh fundamentalist with a magic beard and a funny hat in charge of the country. quebec, in particular, always votes for the most quebecois candidate, and singh is really an also-ran under that metric. dion actually won seats in quebec; ignatieff was routed in the province, and it's not unimportant that he was seen as less quebecois than layton. a native quebecker of irish descent like mulcair was disadvantaged but competitive against trudeau; a sikh born in india and raised in ontario is lucky if he polls ahead of the conservatives, in the end. this is a reality in quebec: they vote for their own. and, as the liberals will need to dominate quebec to hold their majority, singh is kind of their ideal opponent.

that is to say nothing of the difficulties singh is going to face in the smaller cities in ontario that the ndp had been trending well in, or in the urban regions of alberta where a united left could potentially be competitive. singh is running in metro vancouver for a reason - it's about the only place he's not certain to get annihilated in, and about the only place the ndp has any chance of being competitive in in october.

they could get wiped right out...

but, let's ignore that for a second and take the situation at face value: that the statements were not reflective of "liberal values".

are the liberals rejecting identity politics? since when?

the statements come off as something from a bond villain, in a way, in the sense that they sound right out of the liberal war room. the idea that she'd do well with chinese voters is not something that was overlooked by liberal strategists, or something. it's kind of the point, actually. but, you're not supposed to come out and say it like that....

it's a head-scratching reaction, from a party that has recently built itself almost entirely around identity as a political strategy - there really isn't anything else to the "liberal brand" right now besides identity. so, are they broadcasting some kind of change in strategy away from identity politics with this?

or are they just clarifying that you're not supposed to talk about it?

whatever the pros or cons of the thing, "the wall is a waste of money" is a dumb argument, and you sound stupid making it.

you will get a bigger multiplier effect by building a wall than you will by increasing the foreign aid budget. if you're concerned strictly about the economy, a wall is a better idea.

see, you can't win a humanistic debate by appeals to fiscal conservatism, which is usually wrong in the best of situations.

i really want to hear people that are opposing the wall to stop talking about how it's a waste of money - because anybody halfways literate in economics knows that this is the kind of thing where the economic benefits increase exponentially with the amount that is spent. it would be anything but a waste of money. even if it doesn't keep a single person out, it would still be worth it in spin-off jobs. this "the wall is a waste of money" spiel is just making people sound like complete economic illiterates.

what would be better than building a wall would be digging a ditch, and filling it back in, and then building a wall over it, and then tearing it down, and then building it again. think about the revenue. brilliant. and, the taller, the better.

so, i don't want to hear this - it's deflating. i'm not a conservative, and i'm not going to support a policy rooted in the premise of fiscal conservatism, and the rejection of keynesian infrastructure spending. it's a backwards argument.

what i'd like to hear somebody say is that they're going to build the wall because it's good for the economy and address the actual issues surrounding unwanted migration - because i both support keynesian infrastructure spending, and i want to get to the root causes of the issue.

don't tell me to support a conservative backlash, and then temper it with some lip service to tepid humanitarianism. i'm not going to bite into that. give me a humanistic solution to a humanistic debate, and then approach the economics of the wall from the right side of the spectrum - and concede it's a solid job creation strategy.

ok.

so, sdi - star wars, whatever - is something that i am unambiguously, unapologetically opposed to. i can fight this one straight on.

but, is nancy pelosi opposed to it?

i just can't align can i? because i'm disenfranchised, and i've been aware of it for a long time. maybe, in some sense, what i'm trying to get across is the depth of it, in the hopes that somebody takes note - because i maintain that i'm not all that obscure, over all...that i'm representative of an increasingly ignored swing demographic that is getting badly squeezed out of the discourse.

so, yes - i am willing to aggressively attack sdi. but, are the democrats?

so, i'm going to get back to organizing that email.

what it says is "press 4 for transcripts".

but, then you press 4 and it says "that option is invalid".

it wasn't invalid last month....

i've got lots of time, still.

the phone system is still not set up.

and, you know what?

i'll call them on monday.

the argument that these people want to use - and have had some success with - is that opening up market access will improve access to resources, which is essentially an article of faith in the market - it has no empirical support, whatsoever. it's really so ridiculous on it's face, that you have to treat it as disingenuous.

the one province that has seen a "liberalizing" in market health care is quebec, and delivery has collapsed since it happened. if the argument was that it would reduce wait times, that has proven to be a horrible failure - wait times have shot through the roof.

well, wait times for the rich have decreased. but, wait times for everybody else have increased exponentially. see, and this is the truth that everybody knows, and that the advocates of a two-tier system are really pushing for - that allowing for private care directs resources away from the general population in favour of luxury access for the rich. you end up with healthcare on demand if you can pay for it, and are stuck waiting so long that you'll die first if you can't.

to an extent, i'd like to see theses issues clarified by the supreme court, who has been kind of vague about it. the right case could allow the court to explicitly declare a right to health care, which is what we really need to abolish this perennial threat of privatization. but, the system has walked this kind of fine line that has prevented it from explicitly doing so, although it's come close.

the continuity on the court is that it has consistently wanted to order the legislature to increase spending, but it can't do that. so, it has come up with these convoluted rulings that have often been badly applied. if you force the court to act on a s.7, in a situation where a poor person can't get access to something offered in a private clinic, you could get as close to a positive right to health care as we have to abortion. that case hasn't happened yet.

doug ford is a level of corrupt that is unusual in canada, and unheard of ontario. we're normally able to sniff this kind of thing out. but, he has demonstrated the unusual quality of being able to sweep immigrant communities, and has essentially played into their naivete. one would think that if they wanted private health care they would have opted for the united states - that the social systems in canada were a draw. and, you'll excuse me for being a little pissed off at the premise of foreigners moving here and dismantling the health care system.

these are things we haven't seen before, and we've got a problem on our hands.

but, his challenges may, in the end, make the system stronger - if we react appropriately.

gordon campbell is a pariah in bc, and a national embarrassment.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/09/26/fears-grow-of-more-private-health-care-under-doug-ford.html

we're going to have to drag him through court.

and i wouldn't take support from the trudeau government for granted, either.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/01/14/ford-flirts-with-private-health-care-at-his-peril.html

the regulatory health bodies in ontario need more funding to meet their targets, not to abandon the targets to increase profits under some kind of transparent excuse about "taxpayer money".

so, if a regulatory body fails in meeting it's targets, the solution is to abandon the targets.

the ford government does not care about health care, it cares about profits for health care providers - and this is a step towards a privatization process that will lead to worse results across the spectrum.

nobody in ontario voted for private health care. but, they don't care. they never did.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/lhin-ontario-doug-ford-local-health-integration-networks-1.4980509

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Neighbor_policy

the activist left should be figuring out a way to get these people to stay where they are and organize for local change, not come to america to work slave labour under the table, undercutting organized labour.

and i don't mean that abstractly. american unions should have people on the ground, helping them organize their own society.

they say there's no opportunities; what that means is that they don't have access to education.

a wall is a bandaid, but in the face of this kind of population movement, some kind of barrier is necessary. when people talk about open borders, they mean a two way exchange of goods and people - not a one-way movement of slave labour. if you don't try and reverse this, the inevitable long term consequence is that you end up with this bizarre kind of voluntary slave economy in the united states, and increasingly in canada, too, that is going to decrease everybody's quality of living, for the benefit of a small elite at the top.

it's obvious that american policy in the region is largely to blame for this, but nobody wants to talk about a good neighbour policy - the republicans just want to double down, and the democrats just want the slaves.

the labour movement needs to get people on the ground. yes - it's dangerous. but the consequences of ignoring this, one way or the other, are going to be severe.

this is how empires fall.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/16/migrant-caravan-honduras-march-trump-wall

yeah.

the option is in the automated system, but there's no connection to the phone there.

what i'm going to do is assume this is a glitch and try again tomorrow. if i can't get through, i'll try the operator, instead.

what the democrats are doing is taking something that has no effect on most people, and converting it into something that visibly affects a much larger percentage of their voting base, forcing them to react in ways they shouldn't have to.

they're taking something that people may abstractly oppose, and converting into something that concretely affects them, forcing them to react in a more visceral way.

the inevitable backlash does not come in the form of "ok, i support the wall, i guess" but in the form of "i don't fucking care about the wall, but i need this service, so build it already, if that's what you have to do to get the service to operate; the service is more important to me than the wall. and who is standing in the way? it's the congress? fuck the congress."

"so, let me get this straight.

i don't get paid this week because the democrats are standing up for undocumented workers? i'm supposed to go to my landlord and tell them i can't pay them because i'm standing in solidarity with something that is undercutting my labour power? what the fuck. and, i'm paying for this, on top of it.

don't get me wrong, i don't like trump, but with allies like the democratic party..."

listen.

it's not a question of what side people take on the wall issue. as mentioned, i actually don't care if they build a wall or not. and, this isn't something that affects 95% of people directly, so that is going to be the broad response.

i've pointed out a bunch of times that i have a math degree, but i've never worked on the data side of a survey firm. i did, however, work as a survey interviewer for many years as i was going through school; my direct experience is not crunching umbers, but asking people questions. and, i know how this works better than most - you have to get somebody to answer a complicated thing with a binary response, and you get all this skewed data as a response to it.

consider the following question: would you prefer stalin or hitler?

and, the person is going to hum and haw and say they don't like either, but my responsibility as an interviewer is to get them to answer the damned question: stalin or hitler. pick. damn it.

and, if we learn that 60% of people prefer stalin to hitler, does that mean that 60% of people support stalin? remember: he's dead. he can't hurt you.

trump may not win this argument directly, but i never said that he would. so, you can do all of this polling and come up with these awful results and deduce he's losing - then end up baffled when he wins re-election with a 30% approval rating, because the democrats are running at 25%. and, this is the danger the democrats are running up against with this: you don't have to actively support the wall to get pissed off that the government is shut down. you don't have to be pro-trump to turn on the democrats for being obstructionist. you don't even have to oppose illegal immigration to get frustrated by not being able to go camping.

the error the democrats are making is in thinking that they're going to be able to deflect this all to trump. they won't - they're going to have to eat a substantial percentage of this. the last time that nancy pelosi was in charge of congress it had a 9% approval rating at it's lowest point, i believe, which makes trump look popular in comparison.

so, i will state what i said previously. the obvious kneejerk is to blame trump, and i don't know how long that holds for. but, the democrats are the one playing a dangerous game here, not trump - the longer this goes on for, the more they risk a backlash. that backlash may not translate to republican support, so much as it manifests itself in apathy towards the democrats, which is probably their bigger threat amongst certain demographics. but, they can't win this, in the long run - they can just turn voters against them.

if it was something more substantive, it could be different. but, nobody wants to suffer to avoid building a wall that doesn't affect them in any way at all. and, people are eventually just going to be looking for the easiest way to get paid - as they find themselves abandoned by a democratic party that is either more interested in questionable abstract symbolism than economic facts, or in undocumented workers than unionized labour.

that's odd.

i used to be able to get through to transcripts through the general line; it's no longer a valid option. hrmmn.

i'll try again after 1:30.

i've decided to wait. again. i just don't want to act prematurely. i got a little eager last month and want to learn from it - i want to be aggressive about this, but careful in my approach. i believe i have a year to file the discrimination lawsuit. but it's really the suit against the cops that i feel is more lucrative, and i'm not acting on that until i get the report against the cop in, which i'm now being told i'll need to wait until early february for.

i want to file everything i'm filing in the court house all at the same time....that would be the constitutional challenge against the cops and the request for original audio.

i have to reiterate the absurdity of what i'm doing: i'm asking the justice to release original recordings, under suspicion of somebody altering the record. it's only not crazy because i'm so sure that i'm right. and, until i can demonstrate my point, i understand that i'm going to be viewed as a loose cannon. i'm really dreading having to walk in and do it. but i don't have a choice, given that i'm certain it was altered.

what i need to do is talk to somebody in the transcript office about how the data is stored, and at least get some information about somebody that i can ask about it - because i don't expect the justice to know, off of the top of her head. i need to be able to prevent a clear and concise request.

so, the way this is shaping up is that i'll probably get this all filed at the same time in late february or early march. for the day, i want to make these calls.

fwiw, daddy went to work today for the first time in a while, and it seems like this kid - who does not appear to go to any sort of school - is sitting upstairs chain smoking.

i initially toyed with just ratting her out, but i can't believe he doesn't know.

so, he seems to have signed a non-smoking lease with the downstairs tenant, all the while allowing his underage daughter to smoke in the house.

i'm going to have to make a complaint at some point, but not until i'm able to follow it through, somehow, and that is going to be difficult, for a while. i'm still kind of hoping i can wait it out - that she goes to school or gets a job or moves out or something.

why is my life such a constant stream of absurdity?

ok.

i'm going to make some calls. at least. here i go...

the s-300 systems are not currently operational, as there is nobody in syria that is trained to operate them.

this is a lengthy process. it could be months, still, before they are operational - over very loud voices of protest from tel aviv.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russias-s-300-didnt-stop-israeli-from-airstrikes-on-iran-in-syria-2019-1

if you want to support an actual indigenous movement in the region, the kurds are not the people to support - they are ultimately aryan invaders from the north, some combination of scythians and mitanni with a deep, if polluted, heritage in the steppes.

as i've stated before, they should probably be relocated to iran, or even sent to siberia.

the indigenous populations of the region are semites and caucasians, specifically assyrians and armenians. and, the kurds were actually complicit in the genocide...

this is the indigenous movement to support, and it requires throwing the kurds out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_independence_movement

people pushing for a kurdistan don't really understand the history well, or don't care to as they push their own strategies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assyrian_population_1914.svg

the kurds historically live in a region that is about 20% of the area that they're currently occupying, the balance of which is historically semitic.

this was not and cannot become a war of conquest for the kurds.

that land needs to be returned to some kind of sunni-assyrian confederacy, under broad syrian control.

well, no. the kurds don't have this kind of a say in the matter.

they are occupying an area that they liberated from fascists, but that doesn't give them the right of conquest, or something. and, see, this is why this rojava group gets contradictory reactions from anarchists....when you look under the surface, they're quickly exposed as just another stalinist cult.

the kurds did not conquer northern syria, they liberated it.

and, they need to go home, now.

the correct thing to do here is bring the united nations in.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/01/syrian-kurds-reject-turkey-controlled-security-zone-190116081756141.html

i'm really suffering from a lack of motivation, right now. i have very little energy, very little drive. i just want to sleep.

i called my grandmother on monday, and it took away the entire day. tuesday was mostly spent sleeping. i guess i'll try again today, but i'm just so drained....

i'm almost certain at this point that the problem is that teenager upstairs, but i'm not sure how to deal with it. it remains the case that my best way out is to sue the cops, but i have to get enough energy to fight through the effects of her habits, first.

i signed a non-smoking lease for a reason, but he can't evict his teenaged daughter. i'd have to sue for damages to my health on the way out. but, i'd have to find a way to prove it, first.

i just want a clean, healthy, stable place to live so i can work on my art, and it's very depressing that it's so difficult to find.

are there enough of a russian identity in israel for putin to do the world a favour and take a run at likud by supporting a new political party?

the travel advisory to china was the right approach all along.

we can't be getting into some kind of quid pro quo on hostages or something. it's medieval.

that said, you won't find me shedding much of a tear for meth dealers, either. that stuff is death - and i wouldn't be opposed to charging a person like that with a thousand counts of attempted murder. as a rule, i don't support capital punishment, but meth dealers are a special category of scum, and should be locked up for life with no chance of parole.

it is not safe to travel in china.

i repeat.: it is not safe to travel in china.

the democrats are a bourgeois party, and they don't want to cut off the flow of illegal labour - nor do they want to improve their working conditions. but, there is no body in the american political spectrum that represents the interests of working people, so you're left with this charade, where you need to pick between passive and active repression.

there is no flow of cheap labour from canada; rather, we seem to be acting as an escape route. so, we're a better target for a bourgeois party, such as this.

that said, i would welcome some increased border security around areas like roxham road. and, don't fool yourself - if the democrats decide to switch directions, the point is going to be keep the unskilled labour from flowing out.

i would advocate working with them to erect the appropriate barriers.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4845968/democrats-u-s-government-shutdown-canada-border/

this is actually quite reasonable, even if i think it's something the united nations ought to be doing, rather than the turks themselves.

there needs to be some kind of buffer zone, in the short term. a 30 km buffer is not the turkish invasion of syria that people are worried about....

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/turkey-syria-safe-zone-border-erdogan-trump-withdrawal-troops-kurds-a8729126.html

another approach would be to send some missiles into some israeli airfields, and, that would be proportionate.

but, they have to do something - they can't just let the israelis bomb them with impunity.

i understand that the israelis are trying to pull the russians south, to give the turks easy passage into the north, and that biting is in some sense taking the bait.

but, as is so often the case in this region, it doesn't matter. the primary concern is not in keeping the turks out of the north, but in safeguarding the south. so, if the israelis want to pull the fighting south, the reaction should be to push it very far to the south - all the way to jerusalem.

the best response is probably to focus on a targetted assassination through brute force.

turn his house into a crater.

this idiot netanyahu is going to start world war three, in order to try and win an election.

the russians basically have no choice but to respond. and, whatever they do should be swift and lethal.

it is finally time to teach the israelis a lesson that they will learn from.

why are we using up valuable resources on american senators?

send him back to kentucky.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/rand-paul-hernia-canada-shouldice-1.4978260

what?

it's historical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard

turkey is dying, and screaming out in pain.

i think this is a lot of talk. i've stated that before. the turks are not so stupid, not now, not today.

but, even if they do succeed in slaughtering the kurds, and are not wrecked by a consequent embargo, it will only be putting off the inevitable. a hundred years ago, it was the armenians, in more or less the same geographic space. a hundred years from now, it will be some other group that will expand into the vacuum. assyrians, perhaps. or, maybe the armenians even come back; they are the region's historical problem demographic, after all, going back to fucking darius.

turkey simply isn't a real country. it never was. and, it can't be - it just doesn't have the demographics to exist.

but, how do you get an army this big to stand down?

erdogan simply cannot be talking like this. so, he now has to make a hard choice: accept a russian entrance into constantinople, or await the inevitable coup.

listen: i think we should abolish marriage altogether, so enforcing the laws strikes me as completely backwards.

what's important is not upholding the sanctity of marriage, but upholding the right to escape it.

so, you don't have the right to dictate to people what they should or should not do.

but, you do have the right to disassociate with somebody if you don't like what they're doing.

and, it's very important that this specification - while obvious to most westerners - is maintained as a constant throughout the law.

in a secular society, we don't generally write laws regulating who is allowed to have sex with who - we leave that to the discretion of the people having sex, whether they're married or not, and of whatever gender combination - so long as the consent is legitimate, and possible to provide for.

so, you can only marry one person at a time, which is a kind of a legal formality, but that doesn't mean you can't have relationships with multiple people if you want. that is a freedom we have in this society, so long as we're willing to accept the legal consequences of cheating on our spouses regarding questions of alimony and child support.

i'm just pushing back against the idea that reversing the sexual revolution is some kind of feminism, because the situation of course works the other way as well - women should not be legally punished for cheating on their husband, which is probably the more pressing issue to concern ourselves with in terms of consequences. that's a freedom we have in this society, so long as you're willing to accept the legal consequences of the subsequent divorce.

what we do, instead, is provide people with the freedom to dissolve the contract - to walk away if they don't like what their partner is doing.

well, ok, but we can't be outlawing infidelity, either - that's a step backwards for everybody.

rather, muslim women need to begin to accept the idea of divorce.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/polygamy-canadian-muslim-community-1.4971971

so, the email is stored in 6 sprawling, overlapping documents full of duplicate entries - it is a huge mess.

i have sorted through the first two and set the third one up, but i'm putting it down for a few hours, at least, and planning on making some calls today.

multiculturalism is, in many ways, deeply reactionary, even.

and, no - the abolition of cultural or religious or racial identity would not make us all the same, but would rather give us the freedom to define ourselves as individuals, against the conforming forces of identity politics.

i've been over this before: this idea that having a bunch of different representatives from a bunch of different religious groups is reflective of a diversity of opinion is laughable. there are few institutions that stamp out independent thought as effectively as christianity and islam do; you walk into a mosque, and everybody thinks the same way, dresses the same way, acts the same way and says the same things, in response to a wide variety of questions - this is the opposite of a diversity of thought, and if you want to increase a diversity of thought, you don't increase their numbers, but break up their system. this panel of religious representatives is reflective of a conformity of thought, rather than a diversity of it.

if we want actual diversity, and actual independence of thought, and actual critical thinking, then we must fight against the conforming and dulling intellectual effects of religion at every turn.

so, it would follow that a world free of cultural and ethnic identity would be an algorithm to maximize diversity, not one to stifle it - and that this insistence on maintaining cultural and ethnic identity is the actual retarding force in normalizing critical thinking.

i might even make the following argument: while nationalism is a rejection of globalization, what we refer to as multiculturalism is the conservative way to embrace it, by maintaining the existence of distinct cultural identities within the globalizing process - and what should be called postculturalism is the truly liberal way to embrace it, by embracing the true abolition of nationalism, and discarding the insistence on holding to cultural identity as backwards in a globalizing society.

there's an abstract for an essay for you, kids.

the lingering effect is a kind of brain fog - a constant lethargy, lack of energy and inability to focus.

again: there's a difference between finding a puff here and there (my usual habit) and chronic exposure to high-potency strains of the stuff hourly for months. habitual marijuana use makes you lazy and stupid - that's not news. what i'm trying to figure out is how long it takes to clear it out.

and, the answer is a long time, apparently.

and, yeah - i'm now 38 years old, apparently. how'd that happen?

i don't really celebrate birthdays. i think it's bourgeois.

but, what i'd like to give myself is the gift of clear-headedness - not sobriety, exactly, as i don't have a problem with that, but clarity, to be free of the effects of the habits of others, and to regain the mental alertness i took for granted until around this time last year.

i'm coming up on eight months of abstention, and four months in a cleaner, if not completely clean, environment. and, yes - i'm still feeling it.

one day at a time.

it can't be forever.

it's a relatively large area covering most of bc and some of the yukon - maybe the last one left in north america.

but, they're real life injuns. really, truly. never conquered. never ceded. just right there, the whole time.

but, i also need to keep pointing out that the duty to consult should only be applicable in situations where eminent domain is legal, which are situations under some kind of treaty, which is not the case in bc.

in bc, it needs to be understood that these are fully sovereign tribes and that acting without consultation is invading and occupying a sovereign territory.

so, the courts can come up with these kinds of rules of thumb, but the more foundational issue in this case is the jurisdictional one - the only meaningful ruling from the court is for it to rule it doesn't have jurisdiction, which it has actually come fairly close to doing, already.

the case law stipulates that you have what is a called a "duty to consult", which is semantically identical to a request to seek consent. that said, the case law does not necessitate that the consultation is adhered to in any way.

it's basically down to the judge. there have been cases that have been overturned on appeal under the claim that the consultation was not legitimate, and i might suspect that this would be the case if the lng issue were brought to the supreme court, as the consultation was not through the appropriate body.

but, it may just buy time, as a meaningful consultation wouldn't be legally binding.

the globe article was frustrating to me because it made it seem as though the issue was being pushed down by a meddlesome international body, when the opposite is actually true: the canadian courts are actually responsible for a substantial amount of the direction and tone of the conceptualized internationalization of aboriginal law.

am i going to get killed if i call for the mass conversion of mosques into planetariums and observatories?

meh.

come at me, bro.

so, what's the difference between a multiculturalist and a postculturalist?

a multiculturalist wants to build more churches and more mosques and more temples and more synagogues, and then have the people that frequent them build networks of solidarity and understanding, whereas a postculturalist wants to empty the places of worship and convert the structures into something more useful, depending on the context - some of them would make excellent libraries or data centres, while others would make good homeless shelters, and still others could be converted into museums, while those domes could be converted into awesome planetariums....

i could go through a dozen examples, bu t i think you get the point.

i want less religion, not more of it.

listen - i just don't think that "multiculturalism" is a liberal concept. it's very tory in concept, this idea that we should accept our differences and try to get along in perfect harmony. that is a deeply conservative vision of how a society ought to operate.

liberalism should be striving for an idea of post-culturalism, which seeks to rip all of these obsolete cultures to shreds and move together as a unified, secular society with common humanist values rooted in empirical, scientific truths.

this just doesn't exist in the discourse. i'm being asked to choose between being accepting of multiculturalism and doubling down on christianity, which is a choice that exists strictly on the right of the spectrum - it's a choice between the tories and the reform party, and i don't want to and won't pick a side on it.

like everything else with this government, the nice rhetoric quite readily exposes itself as a distraction for absolutely naked colonialism, when challenged in any way at all.

it's actually been quite a while since a government has been this blatant about it's assimilation policy.

and, this is just...

It’s an issue that must be resolved within Indigenous communities, but governments are grappling with it, too, especially as both B.C. and Ottawa are preparing to enact the principles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which stipulates that they must give consent to industrial development on their traditional territories. By endorsing the declaration, the federal government has said it will aim to secure Indigenous consent on projects but does not guarantee it.

*sigh*

the obligation to seek consent does not come from the united nations, and is not recent. it comes from the canadian supreme court, and is now many decades old established practice in canada. the federal government is already obligated by well established case law to seek consent....

in fact, the united nations declaration is largely built on existing canadian case law, rather than the other way around.

gotta love the fucking globe and mail. ugh.

the reality is that the band councils were designed to be a rubber stamp for the government in ottawa, and that's exactly what they usually are.

the area that we're talking about is about 20,000 square km and has a population of about 2,000. it's mostly densely forested land, punctuated by rivers and valleys. people live in camps - in tents - and survive by fishing and hunting. i want to hesitate to suggest that jobs don't exist, but the idea of a job is more communal than financial, and the exchange of currency for a task is actually somewhat corrupting to the communitarian basis of the economy.

the 2,000 people are distributed amongst five clans which, if you're scottish, you know is synonymous with a concept of extended family. so, the population is essentially composed of five isolated, extended families living in camps in the woods. they share everything; they're family. and, they broadly make decisions by unanimous consent, not by majority decree. anybody involved in any kind of activism has run across these kinds of decision making bodies and is aware of how difficult they can be in actually getting anything moving; they are perhaps not well suited to activism, and could certainly not be effectively extrapolated to an industrialized, urban economy, where you have a multitude of class-based competing interests trying to take control of a body that is seen as wielding authority (and has the sympathies of law enforcement). could you imagine a city of even 200,000 people operating on unanimous consent?

but, likewise, the introduction of western-style voting to very small, close-knit communities in isolated areas is likely to create conflict where none currently exists, and where there isn't actually any rational basis for conflict. when you take class out of a society, you largely eliminate the concept of democracy, because you don't have interests competing against each other; rather than have different interests competing over control of the community, you have a community discussing what is in it's best interests - like a family does, in the western system.

it's consequently less of an ethnic conflict than it is a difference of scale. when indigenous society has scaled up in the past - as it did with the six nations, or the settlements in cahokia - it has needed to adjust, and adopt confederacies that look something like western systems of governance. it is well understood that the united states took the six nations governing structure as a model when it started off with it's 13 states. likewise, the kind of governing structure that exists in the indigenous regions of bc today is not foreign to western culture, and even still exists today in certain isolated areas of europe - including on certain islands in the united kingdom, itself.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-a-contested-pipeline-tests-the-landscape-of-indigenous-law-who/

the social norm is that that we should go to school when we're young and retire when we're old, but i think this is backwards.

we ought to have fun when we're young, and go to school when we're old.

and, i wish i had figured that out when i was younger...

so, i'm going through these old emails and the most bizarre thing is going through my mind: i want to go back to school.

i say that like it's some kind of shock. it's not, or not exactly, it's that.....

i was such a mess at the time, the archetype of the kid that just doesn't know what to do with themselves. and, i was just a kid. i had no idea at 20 what i wanted to do with myself; i knew i liked music, but i knew i needed to find some way to pay my bills, so i found myself dragging myself through these programs, while daydreaming about how to get out of them, and then, at the end of it, i just completely abandoned everything.

i didn't go to the government interviews because i didn't want a government job, i wanted to work in academia. then, i didn't go to grad school, because i didn't want to be a teacher, i wanted to work in the private sector. then, i didn't finish the programming degree because i didn't want to work in an office behind a computer. then, i didn't finish the law degree because i didn't want to rubber stamp corruption. and, it was just like - fuck it, i'm going to finish my art and go from there...

but, that's just another way to put something off, right? i had an abstract end date of 40 years old: i'd be done the art by my 40th birthday, and then focus on academic work one way or the other, whether that means going back to school or just working on the website. and, i was making good progress until mid 2015, when the shit hit the fan - and, now, 50 seems like a more realistic goal.

i don't feel this is something out of the public discourse, but it's out of a novel or something - real people don't do this, right? real people figure out one thing or another, they don't walk down all these dead-ends, only to retrace the same steps again.

the thing is that i'm remembering how much of a disaster the whole thing was. i wasn't just your typical unfocused kid, i also had anxiety problems that made it impossible to meet people. i had gender issues. i was on drugs. i spent something like five semesters without a fixed address, trying to teach myself group theory from a distance, between jobs, at 3:33 am, stoned, in my girlfriend's stairwell - it was insane. and, i found myself malnourished and underfed half the time, on top of it. but, how do you explain that to your profs, you know?

"i'm sorry my assignment is late, but my parents kicked me out of the house, so i had to spend the week trying to find somewhere to sleep."

i should have dropped courses and went back later, but i was over-confident about it, and decided i could work it out. and, besides - i had no other source of income besides student loans.

the thing is that i had strong semesters of straight As, too. i've been over this before - my transcript is bizarre. it's half As and half Ds, because i either aced courses or blew them - because i was either stable and focused or completely disinterested or often actually literally starving.

i'm alumni, so i can register at carleton. but, the cost is prohibitive. and, it won't be until i finish the discography, however long it takes...

...but, if i find myself back in a legitimately stable position, in the long run? yeah.

what i decided is that if i'm going to teach, i don't want to start until i'm in my 50s or 60s. to me, that's the right age to teach - when you're older. young people should live lives, not just move from the desk to the board. and, students deserve somebody with some life experience - not some kid out of grad school.

i'm not re-evaluating. i'm just reflecting.

trudeau is kind of making a mockery of his party, and of his father's legacy; it's easy to forget that this is really the last remaining representative of the ancient british liberal party - these are the last whigs left standing. they're supposed to be all about science and data and empiricism, not about identity politics or emotional responses to complicated issues.

i don't want to vote for the inter-faith party of karmic unity and cosmic harmony. i want to vote for the science party.

will the real liberal party please stand up?

i think i posted something like this a few weeks ago, but what's my projection for the 2019 election?

there's some signalling that the liberals want to run on islam, which is a complete misunderstanding of the 2015 election - but one that the liberals have repeatedly broadcast that they hold to. they think they won because they stood up for accommodation rights in quebec, which is empirically incoherent. trudeau got lucky; the country didn't want to give harper another mandate, and the ndp, against all good sense, ran a blowhard fiscal conservative with a beard, allowing the liberals to avoid the split. we can't be allowing our election narratives to be defined by these awful tory media outlets like the globe and mail....

it might seem stupid on first glance to try and frame the narrative as christianity v islam, which is exactly what they seem to want to do, unless you buy into this fucked up narrative that seems to be dominant in the core of the party. christianity may be dying a slow and painful death, but even the least generous numbers are going to have christians outnumbering muslims in this country by at least 10:1. you only run on this if you think that the fastest growing and rising demographic, secularist atheists, are driven more by an animus against christians than they are by rational thought, and that they're going to feel some kind of imperative to stand up for muslims against christians. it's a tactic that insults the intelligence of voters.

if they run on this, they're just going to tune out young people, who are going to vote for third parties or stay home.

but, more concerning to me is that it broadcasts that there is an increasingly powerful faction in the liberal party that sees the european heritage of canada as something that needs to be abolished - as something that belongs to the past. i'm not going to stand up for christianity, exactly. but, i'll fight pretty hard for enlightenment values, and see good reason to push back against another abrahamic perversion. what's frustrating to me is the options that are available: in an election being framed as between islam and christianity, with no discernible third party of mention, am i going to have to write-in science?

so, i'm quite certain that i'm not going to be voting for the liberals, this time around. and, i'm also quite certain that i'm not going to be voting for the ndp - who will almost certainly win this riding fairly easily. to me, the decision in front of me is whether or not the green party candidate is going to be able to convince me to get up and vote, or if i'm going to sit this one out.

and, i actually think that my disillusion is going to be defining.

i don't think the fundamental nature of the last election has changed, which is this dramatic 20 point swing on the left. i don't see much evidence to suggest that harper will outpoll scheer in terms of absolute numbers - he may even do a little worse. but, if trudeau is unable to get people to actually vote for him, he could end up in freefall due to apathy.

it's still early. but, the volatility on the left has the potential to produce a wild outcome - if only somebody would step up and actually try to appeal to it.

In May 2007, Anthony Harriman, the senior director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council....

you gotta be fucking kidding me.

so, the debate is over whether heroin is entering the united states via the mexican border or via shipping ports.

"these guys don't tell me anything" - ronald reagan, when asked about iran-contra.

latin america is not generally seen as an opiate producer, but is rather known for producing stimulants, most notably cocaine. i'm not exactly privy to any secret knowledge, here. but it would be news to me to hear about poppy fields in columbia.

rather, it's widely understood that virtually all opiates in the united states originate from afghanistan.

it's hard to know how much of the whole thing is disingenuous theatre, but if the president really wants to get to the bottom of where the heroin is coming from, he's going to have to ask some difficult questions to the people around him.

there aren't any harrimans left are there?

so, what am i even doing?

i've been carrying out a 500 gb transfer across external drives, on a usb 1.0 connection. it's been running for almost a week, and is almost done.

in the mean time, i've filed almost every file on my laptop, by year, going back to 1995. yes: i have a few files from 1995 and 1996 that are timestamped properly. most files, however, are dated to after august, 1997. there is going to be a process to weed out duplicates.

i've also started organizing email, and this only goes back to 2003. i had emails going back further at one point, but i lost them in a reformat before i went to bc in may of 2003. i vaguely recall backing them up before i left, but i don't think i've seen them in years. i will need to scour, but i do not think i have anything older than when i got back from bc.

that said, one of the things i'll be doing for the alter-reality us trying to track down usenet posts from roughly 1997-2002. my isp dropped usenet around that time, and i never went back to it.

there is also some possibility of finding archived posts at places like the rhml, but i will need to do some work in finding them....

the copy process made calling difficult, because i'm calling out over gmail. now that it's almost done, i could conceivably make some calls today or tomorrow.

the "rule of law" is a term intended to apply to governments, specifically those that wish to discard the rules for personal gain. it refers to the fact that the government must also follow the law - that they are not above it.

one example of the rule of law would be the requirement of a colonial government to respect the rights of indigenous people on unceded lands, rather than take matters into their own hands. an example of a breach in the rule of law would occur when a colonial court attempts to enforce an injunction in a territory that it has no jurisdiction over, perhaps due to financial kickbacks from an oil and/or gas company.

the "rule of law" does not refer to any kind of authoritarian supremacy of government over the people, but rather the opposite concept: that the government is to be impeded by constitutional principles (written and unwritten) in it's use of force against civilians.

so, when justin trudeau speaks of the "rule of law", is this some kind of orwellian newspeak, some kind of deep irony? i think that this is to give the man far too much credit: it is a misapplied colloquialism rooted in absolute ignorance of the legal system in the country he's in charge of.

it does appear to be the case that isis was essentially created by nato to justify an invasion of syria with the intent to topple assad. i've offered little dissent on the point; i haven't challenged that narrative - isis is a construction of the west.

and, with the destruction of isis (mostly by russia), it's starting to look like they're just trying the same thing again, with groups located closer to the turkish border. the turks will need to invade syria to kill al qaeda. this is your ground force to topple assad.

now, i need to point out that a turkish invasion of western syria is not the same thing as air raids in eastern syria, and supporting the latter does not imply support for the former. i don't operate on black and white moral principles; i adjust to facts on the ground, and take things on a case-by-case basis. i could support a temporary alliance with imperial forces to blow up isis; i can't support another actual nato-led invasion of a former soviet satellite. the granular details here are important.

but, there is an underlying question that really needs to be asked out loud by more people - if you understand that the islamicists are created by the same people that are bombing them, how can you support bombing them? how can you deconstruct the lie, and then still support it's purpose? doesn't deconstructing the means mean abolishing the ends? what doublethink is this?

unfortunately. this is not a logical position, and in some sense i wish that it was. i wish it was as easy as just calling out the truth of the matter and washing my hands of it. but, if you want to be logical, you need to analyze the outcomes of all possibilities and pick a least bad option, not just the outcome of intervention contrasted to a utopian vision. and, sadly, it still makes sense to attack established islamicist groups in pretty much any kind of scenario, regardless of who is funding or creating them: action more or less dominates inaction under just about all cases. and, the reason is that the islamicists are going to kill a large proportion of the people you're trying to avoid killing, anyways.

it's always dangerous to be utilitarian about war casualties. but, if your argument is that we shouldn't bomb because we're killing innocents, then this is not a rational position, in context, because the islamicist groups are going to slaughter innocents whether we bomb them or not. this is the variable that complicates the scenario, and that the pseudo-left seems so intent on ignoring: inaction will lead to a comparable level of slaughter as action. so, you can't avoid the slaughter by disengaging. it's difficult, but it is what it is: ending the killing isn't a good reason to stop bombing. if we bomb, people die. if we don't bomb, people die. so it goes.

the left used to understand the centrality of religion in all of this, and the importance of undermining faith to eliminate war. but, this has been discarded recently by a post-colonialist theory that is essentially a conservative revivalism. we've been conditioned to stop asking the right questions, and have ended up with all of the wrong answers.

stamping out the religion is a hard problem and, yes, there is a role for wealth redistribution within it. but, there is no way around the basic reality on the ground - so long as there are fundamentalists going around killing people, you have to support a resistance against them as a first step. it doesn't matter who is funding them, or why; you can't ignore them - that's just a formula for blowback.

give a hand of applause for the machiavellians in washington, if you must. but don't tell me to turn a blind eye to religious extremism....

it is even misleading to suggest that the elected band councils have jurisdiction over the reserve lands.

these institutions are a product of the indian act, and are strictly colonial entities. they're funded entirely by the state, so it should be of no surprise that they tend to do what the state says. and, there are in fact massive issues with corruption.

so, the way this works is that the pipeline company asks the colonial body for approval, and then receives it. it then takes that to the court and claims there was consultation. but, the body never represented the indigenous people in the first place, so it only qualifies as consultation if you never intended to consult.

the question of representation is of course difficult. but, these tribes are so small that the councils are essentially extended family meetings. it's not like you have some aloof king ruling over an oppressed mass of people - the kinship is so tight they're operating at a clan level.

if you accept that these lands are unceded, then the parliament has no authority over them, which means the indian act has no force and the band councils are themselves merely a fantastical mechanism by a foreign state to enforce it's will from a distance - they have no more jurisdiction than the courts do, and no more legitimacy than the canadian parliament does.

when it comes to politics, there is a difference between opposition and indifference, and i think this is sometimes lost or exaggerated in the discourse.

personally, i would be opposed to climate change, but indifferent to "religious freedom". i would be opposed to poverty, but indifferent to inequality. so, i can vote for a party that is pro-muslim (to a point), so long as it rigorously opposes climate change. and, i can vote for a party that is broadly bourgeois, so long as it puts some redistributive policies in place to address the worst kinds of poverty. conversely, i wouldn't be interested in voting for a party or candidate that demonizes the rich, but doesn't believe in wealth redistribution.

i am not an american, but i do not find myself particularly opposed to a border wall. rather, i find myself largely indifferent to it. and, i might suspect that this is the case for most voters.

it is true that there's not much of an argument in favour of the thing, but it is also true that there's not much of an argument against it, either. give it a try. try and argue against the wall, convincingly. the best thing you're going to come up with is the cost of the thing, but that's a bad argument: infrastructure projects have high multiplier effects and are good for the economy.

as there is really little reason to oppose the wall to any great extent, i don't expect that the democrats are going to be able to hold support much longer, if it isn't already starting to crumble. the initial kneejerk reaction may be to blame trump. but, the longer this goes on for, the more it hurts the democrats.

trump's base is large nihilistic and doesn't care about the government, anyways. he's not going to lose support over this. but, the democrats are risking a dangerous backlash if they wait too long to cave.

i'm not going to say to build the wall. i'm indifferent to it.

but, i am going to remind people that they need to pick their battles.

while it is not clear how the tribes in the interior of bc are going to react to the enforcement of the court's injunction around the pipeline being built through their sovereign territory, my legal opinion of the situation is that any movement by the police into this territory amounts to an invasion force, and subsequent illegal occupation of the region, which legally and morally justifies the use of force in reaction.

and, i would stand in solidarity with the indigenous groups against any such illegal occupation.

turkey is a bizarre country, because it is a historical power that is universally viewed as an occupier. it has historical power over this broad swath of land, but no historical connection to any of it. none of these areas ever really became turkish, but the turks never really assimilated to the area, either. and, all of these fragmented states around the old byzantine empire, including those that converted to islam, are united only in their opposition to turkish imperialism.

i've written this essay a few times, now. as these economic blocks build up around them, the turks are kind of at the end of their history - they can neither enter into a block, nor can they take control of one, as their geography and history would demand of them. the turks seem destined for some kind of catastrophe, one way or another.

there is an argument that the turks ought to join the eu, as the region has a deep history in europe. this would be a reunification of the empire, in some sense. but, the europeans do not seem to want them in europe, not any more than they did five hundred years ago. there is no doubt some subconscious feeling that the turks will eventually fall, that constantinople will be liberated, but the way that works itself out in actual policy is a kind of distant tolerance that never reaches acceptance. yes, the turks exist. c'est la vie.

there is likewise an argument that the turks ought to join the arab world, but the history here is truly no less hostile - the arabs never conquered the city, but were rather conquered by it in what was really a muslim phase of roman imperialism. whatever role that christian theology played in the egyptian and levantine revolts of late antiquity, it is clear enough that the arabs were eventually welcomed as liberators to end what was a long roman-persian war that had been fought on semitic lands for a thousand years. turkish expansion via the sultanate of rum (after the mongol destruction) was in a real sense the return of the romans from the inside out; in the end, it was more like a long civil war that ended with the muslim faith dominant, and the old regime back in place. and, if it weren't for the inability to convert the greeks, that turnover may have been historically total. as it is, the collapse of the ottoman state was also the most recent liberation of arabs from roman hegemony. whatever historical process exists around this in the long run, one should expect the arabs to give the turks the cold shoulder into perpetuity.

i would suggest there is a far better argument to unite istanbul with moscow, and resurrect the byzantine state. but, the peculiarity of the turkish state asserts itself once again, here: while greeks and slavs are forever historically intertwined, the fact that the turks are muslims is a difficult cultural block in reunifying the east. that said, the future of the region is no doubt in secularism, rather than in islam or christianity. and, for that reason, a new eastern empire rooted in universal secular values is perhaps the most historically correct home for turkey, in the end.

the other option is for turkey to look directly east and try and project some kind of dominance over the turkish areas of central asia. while this may seem rational to a naive observer, there is no history of a unified turkish state, and certainly no history of a turkish state centred in the bosphorus. rather, the idea being projected is of iran - this is the iranian cultural sphere, the iranian empire. and, while the geographic space we call turkey has historically existed within iranian empires, it has never been assimilated within one. there is a line through the peninsula, on the western side of which the idea ceases to make any sense.

the war in syria has maybe made the problem of turkish isolation more obvious, but it hasn't presented any meaningful solution. europe is as hostile as ever, as they carry out a proxy war against the arabs and continue this awkward frenemy dance with the iranians. but, that russo-turkish alliance is potentially the basis for a deep friendship and potential economic integration - whether the current turkish leadership realizes it or not.

for right now, the russians need to be careful not to let them occupy syria, as that's just going to set the whole thing back in motion again.

i admit that there's a lot of historical sense in the turks taking over, and they are certainly well positioned to counter saudi attempts to destabilize the region. i've pointed out repeatedly that the turkish-arab conflict is in many ways the more real conflict, compared to the arab-iranian one. this is a long war of history...

but, there is a recipe for catastrophe in allowing the turks and russians to compete for influence in the region like this, because i'm not sure that the various people that live in syria really want them there. the danger is that if the turks get too aggressive, it could actually produce a response in arab nationalism, which would no doubt be islamicist in nature due to the condition the region finds itself in. there's this idea in the west that turkish soldiers are preferable to western ones because they're muslim, but this is just another example of westerners not understanding the complexity of the history in the region. while there is historical justification for pan-arabism, the idea of some kind of muslim megastate has always been a colonial fantasy; the conflicts in this region have always been less religious and more ethnic. remember: the british were nominally initially brought in to protect the arabs from the turks in the first place.

america's geopolitical strategy is of course to divide and conquer, so these bugs are easily misunderstood as features in washington.

i would like to see the turks pull back.

but, so long as the americans are sitting in the middle of the playground, this is all just abstract discussion, anyways.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/opinion/erdogan-turkey-syria.html

so, it seems as though the syria withdrawal was some kind of political ploy, or some kind of depraved negotiating tactic or something.

but, all it's succeeded in doing is broadcasting that the americans are unreliable in their statements, and can't be treated as serious negotiating partners, if there was ever any question that they could be trusted or treated seriously.

the conditions that bolton has put down will never be met, so the so-called withdrawal is in fact a permanent, illegal occupation, and a de facto partition of the country.

the russians should just start carpet bombing the remaining isis footholds.

this evening's soundtrack.

a brief history of kim campbell, written in an appropriate tone.

http://www.thecanadaguide.com/history/prime-ministers/kim-campbell/

when somebody gets beaten as badly as kim campbell did, it should come with a lifetime ban on any attempt to speak on behalf of the country, however indirectly.

you'd think that most former heads of state would know better than to risk an international incident like that.

but, this particular person has shown absolutely no inclination towards common sense, or common decency, throughout her career.

she does not speak on behalf of anybody except herself.

"but it was sexism".

no.

she was horrible.

she is a vile, horrible person that canadians summarily rejected.

there's some cancer survivors down the street that could use a good taunting, kim.

why don't you get out of the house and give it to them?

tell her to stop wasting her time on the internet, and go make fun of some autistic kid or something.

so, what is kim campbells's legacy?

an analysis of somebody's legacy is no place to have a serious discussion.

twitter is clearly no place for a serious discussion.

she's an idiot.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/former-pm-kim-campbell-calls-trump-expletive-on-twitter-1.4241998