this is actually completely outrageous.

what a horrible mockery of the rome statute.

http://www.oas.org/documents/eng/press/Venezuela-Executive-Summary.pdf

i can pinpoint the exact moment.

it was when optimus prime died.

that's when i lost all hope in this universe, and adopted the cold ways of a distant cynic.

i am in fact not alone. there's a literature on the topic, if you care to look.

a generation died on that day.

the media wants you to believe that this election was rigged.

but, the opposition boycotted the vote.

so, it's quite clear that maduro won - the opposition refused to vote.

a more pressing question is what would have happened if the opposition would have shown up. as this has been going on for years, it's not clear how close it would be.

and, i mean, of course there's going to be some irregularities - there are everywhere. but, you fundamentally cannot claim an election was rigged when the opposition didn't show up; the government wasn't even given the opportunity to meaningfully rig it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/world/americas/venezuela-election-opposition-boycott.html

to clarify a specific point about the elections in venezuela, though.

the corporatist media presents a half-truth when they point out that the opposition doesn't take part in the elections. that much is actually true - and i don't think anybody debates the point. what the media declines to clarify is that the opposition routinely boycotts the elections.

even if maduro were to give in to the ridiculous demand from the eu to call an election (and, can maduro demand a new vote on brexit while we're at it?), recent history suggests that the opposition would be unlikely to take part in it.

there is consequently somewhat of a level of uncertainty attached to the outcome, but it isn't due to state repression. the reality is that it's not entirely clear just how big the opposition actually is, because they've been boycotting elections for the last ten years. marches are a bad metric - they could be representative of a very well organized bourgeois minority, as is generally assumed, or they could be representative of a much larger bloc. but, they don't vote. so, we don't know - we're robbed of the ability to compare what we see in the pictures to what we can quantitatively analyse, and are left to our biases to try and work it through.

they want to make you think that the opposition is outlawed, oppressed, intimidated - and that is a lie. rather, they are holding strong to what are now very old accusations, always presented without proof, to uphold a years-long boycott.

and, we just don't know what the numbers really are, at this point.

cotler's history on speech makes dershowitz seem consistent and reasonable.

the guy's a nut.

oh, i see irwin cotler is on it.

this is a guy that wants to put people in jail for saying mean things to people - and has fought hard to enforce the laws. when i say that canada is somewhat of an embarrassment on free speech laws, irwin cotler is one of the primary reasons why.

some "human rights expert".

but, one may also note how strange it is to see the post pushing talking points by irwin fucking cotler, of all people.

an Organization of American States panel of human rights experts 

how do you even finish reading an article with that line in it?

yikes.

was kissinger on the board? how about oliver north?

they no doubt meant to say an OAS panel of liberal interventionists and neoconservative war criminals...

i have not seen a single credible source criticize the elections in venezuela since, like, 1999, or whenever it was that chavez won. all i've seen is a periodic, if tiring, repudiation of all of these right-wing smear campaigns.

what is "right" here is to stand up for the rule of law, respect their sovereignty and avoid interfering in their country. what is "wrong" here is to intervene in the situation for our own economic self-interest.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/canadian-unions-helped-fund-delegation-that-gave-glowing-review-of-venezuela-election-widely-seen-as-illegitimate?video_autoplay=true

“I think we can do that,” Simons said. “I just don’t think this bill, as currently written, accomplishes what it sets out to do.”

well, then resign your post on the fucking guardian council, and run for elected office on a mandate to change it.

https://nationalpost.com/news/senators-promise-robust-review-of-bill-c-69-as-provincial-angst-deepens-over-trudeau-energy-reforms

and, is bernier a threat in quebec?

well, he has two positions that most people know about - he wants to modify immigration policies (which is likely to do well in the rural areas) and he wants to end supply management (which is likely to do terribly in rural areas).

he would, in theory, make more sense in alberta, but he's a distant francophone. bernier lost to scheer in quebec, remember - and that's in a province with a small conservative movement, and little centre of gravity. in quebec, nobody joins the conservative party looking for career advancement.

so, if i'm a dairy farmer in quebec - the target of his immigration policies - am i going to vote against my economic self-interest to uphold some cultural attachment to quebec? not unless i'm a buffoon - and the quebecois don't vote against themselves like this, like kentuckians do. and, especially not if the bloc are offering the same nationalist policies without the attack on supply management.

he's apparently running around 6% in quebec, but we see this with the greens all of the time - it's a mirage. it's partly the math of sampling. but, you should also read into it as apathy.

regardless, even if he can muster 4%, i would expect that to be broadly distributed rather than localized. quebec is known for close races, so a 2-3% swing could absolutely lose the conservatives a few seats. but, it would be difficult to isolate from the noise.

the media is unlikely to step away from this, as it seems to like the narrative of bernier playing spoiler. but, i don't suspect the numbers will actually pan out - this is just statistical noise, in the end.

in canada, support for the international rule of law - for better or worse, whatever the consequence - is one of the things that makes a liberal a liberal. and, because our right has historically been moderate, it has broad, nationalist support as a model, as well.

if you're willing or eager to act outside of the united nations on this kind of thing, you're in the wrong party - and broadly even in the wrong country.

fuck, do a caucus vote and see where people stand on this.

the liberal party has been taken over by a bunch of fucking democrats.

somebody do a poll on whether donating, card-carrying members of the liberal party support acting outside of the united nations in venezuela. and word it like that. don't talk about supporting one faction or the other, as though we have any business doing so - talk about whether you support the institution of the united nations and adherence to the international rule of law or not.

i wouldn't expect more than 10% of them would support what the government is doing. i wouldn't even expect much more than 40% of conservatives would support this kind of thing. it's completely unheard of, here.

support for the united nations as the basis of canadian foreign policy is foundational in the party base - as important as support for universal health care. it's one of the key, defining issues of canadian liberalism. canada simply doesn't stand with the united states when it acts outside of the un, it just doesn't do this, it goes to the un and seeks an international consensus, then seeks to find a way to moderate america's policies around the edges.

i'm not even willing to get into a debate about the merits of the action, it's too absurd to even bother. the point here is ideological.

this is the kind of thing that got ignatieff completely routed. and, if the party holds to it, it should be looking at 2011 for a baseline, even if it's unclear who steps into the void.

the bloc are at least ready to step in in quebec. the greens might step in a few places elsewhere....

whatever they're projecting, here - some kind of rfk-style anti-communism or something - it isn't canadian. and, canadians are not going to stand for it.

i was initially leaning towards the liberals losing their majority in october.

but. if they continue walking down the path they're on, they're going to lose outright.

it's one thing when the government does this kind of thing behind the scenes, as a part of a careful balancing of various powers. but, there is no appetite for white supremacist imperialist war mongering in canada, especially not as a kind of jingoist electioneering tactic.

it is a ballot issue amongst enough voters to matter - not because of the specific situation, but because of the general tone.

canada is supposed to act through the united nations on situations such as these. and, i would call on the liberal party to stop obsequiously supporting the monroe doctrine and reassert it's party's historical policies on this matter.

why not just write the check to lockheed martin?

this is disgusting. and, they should expect it to backfire - this will be unpopular, here.

it's not the money, it's a tone issue.

unfortunately, there is no opposition in the country that is able to hit them on this.

https://globalnews.ca/video/4922143/trudeau-announces-53-million-investment-to-support-venezuelans

the new york times seems to be more pro-war than fox news, right now.

are we ready for the democrats to be the hawks in the 2020 election?

it seems to be what the "liberal" media wants.

this took far too long, but it's done. sort of.

i still need to organize it to by month and zip it up for later.

it runs from sept, 2003 to may, 2016, with a gap in mid 2004 (when i did not have internet access) and another gap from mid 2008 to mid 2010, but i think can fill in the second gap with an archive put away on a dvd somewhere.

and, that is the last step in the tree i'm building: i'll need to go through all of the physical media i've got lying around and file it by year.

once that's finished, i'll swing myself back around to mid-2013 in order to get back to the rebuild, one more time. i expect to be back to where i was (late 2016) relatively quickly. and, getting to the end of 2016 means getting back to the alter-reality, and ultimately trying to finish the period one disc by the end of the year.

i was hoping for some good shots of sexy eskimos, though.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/02/this-polar-vortex-should-have-been-colder/

Michigan passed a law to criminalise the practice in 2017, following the start of the case, but the law is not retrospective, and Nagarwala and others cannot be tried for past alleged offences.

fuck.

they could charge her with assault, though - and should.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/22/us-is-moving-backwards-female-genital-mutilation-ruling-a-blow-to-girls-at-risk

this is one of those things where canadian law is exactly the opposite - we have no provincial criminal code at all, all criminal cases are prosecuted at the federal level, and commercial issues of the sort referenced are dealt with by the provinces.

if ontario tried to pass legislation banning fgm under jail time, the same thing would happen. so, i understand the ruling.

but, shouldn't the attorney general in michigan immediately take over the case, then?

this is very much the kind of nightmare scenario that leftists imagine when they warn about the dangers of "religious freedom". there has to be some way out of essentially condoning this as an allowable religious practice.

they should have just charged her with assault with a deadly weapon.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2018/11/20/female-genital-mutilation-michigan/1991712002/

trying to prevent another tsunami, i suppose.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/asia/indonesia-teens-publicly-flogged-for-cuddling-intl/

as the situation unfolds, what trump is demonstrating with the border wall funding issue is that the government doesn't operate anything at all like a business, and that he doesn't understand that.

i pointed out that an extended shut down would likely lead to a revolt in the democratic base, which would be unlikely to hold to solidarity on opposition to a border wall in the face of meaningful inconvenience, and the slow understanding that the party's policies on migrants are not in their self-interest. i pointed out that the initial reaction would be to attack trump, but this would slowly lead to apathy all around, which would harm the democrats more than the republicans. trump's best strategy was consequently to hold to his guns until the democrats gave up. if you wanted to compare this to a market transaction, he'd be undercuttting the competition with his superior resources in a more dedicated and ideological base of core supporters.

but, he folded at what seemed like the worst possible moment. now, he's talking about shutting the government down again, which is flatly insane - he just lost the fight, now he wants to do it again? what? he had a clear winning strategy, and threw it away. now, if he follows through with this, he's going to get primaried and lose...

it's taken me some time to clue in, but i think that the reason this isn't making any sense is that he's approaching the situation like a business deal, rather than a government negotiation. this was in some sense obvious, but i guess we all miss the obvious some times, particularly when it's entirely irrational. you would, frankly, expect the point to be corrected by now. i don't remember the reagan administration, but what i've read about it suggests that even the gipper, that old dumbass, had the ability to learn in office. trump's stupidity seems to really be singular...

...and, here we have it: trump thinks the government is just like a business, and that he's carrying out some kind of business negotiation. he's the ceo of the republican party, while pelosi is the ceo of the democratic party. and, he thinks they are both driven by an obligation to maximize profit for shareholders.

it's the last point where the whole thing breaks down as incoherent, and you start to understand what he's doing.

so, rather than wait pelosi out, what trump was initially trying to do was intimidate her. it was some kind of dominance tactic. if they actually were both ceos of corporations, he would be costing her a lot of money by withholding the contract. the temporary re-opening of the government would be intended to remind her shareholders of how much money they're losing, and what they stand to gain by signing the contract. then, taking that away would push the shareholders into pressuring pelosi into making concessions, to prevent them from losing money.

his tactics are anti-social, and in the long-run would no doubt create a reputation that precedes him - donald trump would become a man that you try to avoid doing business with. but, they would probably be effective when applied as necessary, so long as the dominant motive is about profit.

but, nancy pelosi does not have a group of shareholders to pressure her, or at least not literally. what she has are voters that want to elect her - electors in the proletariat. their self-interest is very different; they are not looking to make money by signing a contract, but to keep the government open to access services (and, in some cases, to avoid signing the contract at all). there is no way to apply the model.

opening and closing the government like this is just going to make it clear that the president is responsible for it.

observers are looking at trump and wondering if he's off his rocker. but, this is simply what happens when you let a business person run for office - this is the inevitable consequence of applying business world realities and tactics to political negotiations. he's simply living in a parallel reality.

so, he will no doubt continue to do outlandish things, until this gets resolved, or he gets thrown out. but, try and keep what i'm saying in mind as you try to understand what he's doing - you might find it to be a useful decryption algorithm.

no, you scientifically illiterate idiots.

the polar vortex is neither evidence for nor against global warming, but an isolated event that is occurring independently of the slow increase in global temperatures. it is variation in the climate system. and, it is driven entirely by the sun.

...except to point out that the premise that the media hoopla is based on is actually wrong: the effects of the polar vortex on mid latitudes is not increasing, but decreasing. we're not experiencing colder winters, but warmer ones.

the climate models point out that we should be seeing weaker winters, on average. and, those models are absolutely correct - our winters are getting shorter and less intense. and, this is the consensus view amongst climate scientists: our winters will continue to get shorter and less powerful, over time.

but, again: i'm not arguing with the science. the science agrees with me, or, to be more succinct, i'm simply stating the science.

what i'm arguing with is click bait by the "liberal" media, which is ultimately not helping the movement against the oil industry, by publishing dubious articles that damage their own credibility.

so, to recap. and i'm done with this until next year:

1) the polar vortex is a strictly solar phenomenon that has nothing to do with global warming.
2) our winters at the current solar minima have been less intense than they were in previous solar minimas. that is, the polar vortex is retreating, on the longer scale.
3) the polar vortex is retreating on the longer scale due to global warming - which will lead to shorter, less intense winters.
4) that said, as we are at solar minima, our current cold blast is a consequence of the solar cycle. and, if the sun has an extended minima, this could slow down global warming, with exaggerated effects in the northern hemisphere.
5) the media is pushing a series of strawmen, false dichotomies and red herrings around the topic that are merely serving to confuse the fuck out of people, for clickbait and ideological purity.

you're no doubt horribly confused. that's a shame.

all three of the major parties are nearing rock bottom, here, in terms of historic levels of unpopularity.

the ndp has a narrow path, still.

if they don't take it, this could end up unlike anything we've ever seen, here.

if trudeau thinks he's the most likely recipient of an anti-ford backlash, he's got another thing coming.

the feds might want to take a closer look at the results of the last provincial election. as baffling as doug ford is, he couldn't exist without the liberals being unpopular here, in whatever demographics they're unpopular in. trudeau is very much an extension of the mcguinty-wynne government, and not much of an antidote.

normally, this would be fertile ground for the ndp, but they've evaporated. and, if the ndp can't get themselves in order quickly, ontario is consequently going to be a very serious wild card in october, as the populace struggles to find somewhere to turn to.

https://torontosun.com/news/national/lilley-liberal-mp-says-lets-whack-ontario-premier-doug-ford

listen. i'm not afraid to state what i think about this, and it's that every skyscraper on this continent should be taken into common ownership, administered by co-operatives of the people that live in them and operated at cost, to the point that any year-over-year surpluses should be redistributed to the tenants.

as a society, we should have absolutely no tolerance for the premise of profiteering from housing - just as we have no tolerance for profiteering from health care.

it's just not something that a market should exist in; it's something that should be seen as a right.

i don't expect to hear anybody start talking about abolishing the rentier class.

but, i think it's a valid question to ask: why should anybody profit off of charging somebody rent in the first place? what justification is there for this?

until we grapple with this fundamental question, we're going to have issues with poverty on both sides of the border.

they get to the point close to the end, which is that these bills are really just a subsidy to landowners, and are in the end just going to inflate the rent. then, under the guise of "targeted tax breaks", they essentially impose a values test on who is eligible for the tax breaks. families get the money, single people (and queer people, who are often the ones that need it the most) don't.

this issue has really been studied to death, and it's well understood that the most efficient approach is to just go with a gai or negative income tax, and get rid of the bureaucracy. this both saves money on administration (and the deadweight cost on this is that you're going to end up forking out billions in salaries and benefits to unionized social workers - if you want to be fiscally conservative about it) and cuts out these values tests that just end up as coercive means to enforce socially conservative value systems on the poor - to essentially restrict access to the poor people you like, while kicking the poor people you don't like out on the street. but, even a gai has to deal with inflation at some point, and aim pretty low to avoid being a tax cut for property owners.

you can't really put band aids over the fundamental relationship of property being theft. a society that upholds property as a right is going to have masses of impoverished people in it as a necessary corollary - these things are intrinsically connected, and it can't be undone without addressing the actual point. you can throw money at the poor all day, if you're not addressing the property imbalance, you're not solving anything. there are historical solutions around the idea of government housing, which actually address the issue by socializing property, but nobody wants to walk down that path, as it is in contradiction to the prevailing ideology of the washington consensus.

but, vox missed the point on purpose.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/30/18183769/democrat-poverty-plans-2020-presidential-kamala-harris-booker-gillibrand

and, warren does not support single-payer. at all.

you don't have to ask her, directly. it's clear from where she stands in the spectrum as a pro-market moderate conservative.

you would expect warren to support legislation that breaks up the big insurance companies and forces them to compete on an open market, not a system that monopolizes insurance. 

https://slate.com/business/2019/01/elizabeth-warren-dodges-kamala-harris-medicare-for-all-question.html

see, this is a smoke and mirrors campaign - we don't know where she stands on this.

i said i was open to listening, and what i'm hearing is mixed signals.

can we not find a candidate with a reasonable age that has some conviction on this?

https://slate.com/business/2019/01/single-payer-health-care-kamala-harris-democrats-2020-medicare-for-all.html

what booker and harris face is a classic prisoner's dilemma - they will destroy each other if they don't run with each other. but, the idea of forming a ticket before iowa is pretty unheard of.

it is up to the left to realize that and take advantage of it.

there are still arms treaties left to withdraw from?

all of these systems should be completely shut down - i oppose all of it, across the board. but, these treaties aren't worth the paper they're written on. and, the anti-war movement has been slacking, in the face of a an islamicist uprising that had to be annihilated.

i usually side with the anti-war side (the caveat being that fascism cannot be tolerated, in any form, christian or muslim), but i'm not an idealist, i'm a realist. and the reality is that we may have to get back to a more dangerous type of mutually assured destruction before we can rebuild popular support for disarmament.

so, i'd rather the americans stop pulling out of these treaties. but, i'm not naive enough to think they follow them, anyways.

there's nothing that a kamala harris or a cory booker can do to squeeze out of this, either. if you're kamala harris, you have to sweep the south - that's how you win. so, you have to beat cory booker. and vice versa.

what i'm getting across is solely a tactical consideration. the south is a problem for the left, because they skew towards conservative value systems. and, i'm just being realistic about something that the field won't openly talk about; the tactic for decades has been that you do your pilgrimage through the black churches, gnash your teeth at the social conservatism and gun culture, and hope it works out - all the while trying to avoid saying something that's going to make you sound like a hypocrite to your base of urban liberals.

this has not helped the left achieve it's goals. it has not helped the democratic party. and, it has not helped the united states of america.

the ideal would be to leave the south behind, but you can't. except, now you can.

most of these states are not going to be in play in the general. there's no broader value in winning the south in the primary; it's just a distraction from the more important battle ground states in the midwest.

if you can get the centrist candidates into a protracted fight in the south, that just frees up resources to fight in the midwest. and, as i say - if they're black, they can't avoid that. to them, this is the only strategy they have, and they know it.

the left needs to know that the only strategy it has is to abandon the south, and the only way it can do that is to split the vote. so, it should count it's blessings and get out of the way....

i will reiterate this statement: it is beneficial to the left to have harris and booker running against each other in the deep south, as it will prevent either of them from running up the score in states like georgia. the tactic should be to let them destroy each other. and, in fact this is the only possible tactic that doesn't end with another corporatist democrat.

this is fortuitous - it's good luck. and, a few more strong black, centrist candidates can only help split the southern vote up even more, to the left's benefit - in fact, to the left's requirement if it wants to actually win the primary.

necessary conditions are in place. we should be excited about this.

but, now we need to find a candidate - and the candidate should be under 75 years old, which is not much of a request, is it?

i want to see this candidate be openly atheist. it's time. the demographics are finally here for a strong, youth-driven atheist movement on the left.

good.

i have not been paying attention to concert schedules since around june, and i know i missed some stuff in the fall (i would have liked to see gang gang dance, but i think the rest was stuff i've seen in the last few years; that's something i'll have to backtrack on and figure out). i simply don't know what information the border cops have access to, but i don't think i should have any problems - that's something i'm trying to figure out. but, regardless, the weather since mid october has been prohibitive given the tunnel. even heading out for a $5 punk show would have required me to spend the night and come back in the morning.

if the weather clears up for mid february, and i get a proper response on my information request, i could maybe start being a little more social again relatively soon. 

there's just nothing to do in windsor, really. that one bar i used to go to sometimes has shifted out of an indie demographic and to a more ethnic one; math rock nights are out, soul groove nights are in. i'm not hating, i'm just not interested.

but, it's been a year since i've done anything, now. i'm sure i'll be eager to look around for concerts in the spring, one way or another. there will come a night when i just need to get out of the house...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/detroit-windsor-tunnel-reopens-after-more-than-a-year-1.5000468

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/winter-weather-montreal-1.4466896

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/when-vancouver-had-winter-1.3918910

this is a better article.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cold-climate-change-1.4482497

Like most cold waves of the 1970s, temperatures in January dropped to extreme lows. Wind chills across the plains fell to between −70 and −80 °F (−56.7 and −62.2 °C).

that is a reference to 1978.

that doesn't happen anymore....

what the ipcc initially demonstrated was that the warming observed over the second half of the 20th century could not be associated with solar activity, because they were moving in opposite directions.

that is, the temperature was increasing, while the sun was weakening. so, we couldn't be getting warmer as a result of the sun because the sun was getting colder; it would then follow that we ought to be getting colder, if not for global warming. the second part of this is equally important, but it got largely dropped by the media.

so, missed in the media's take on this was that the correlation between the sun and the climate was actually quite robust up until the year 1900, and especially broke down after the year 1980. there's this oft-repeated line - even by publishing scientists - that the ipcc disproved any connection between the sun and the climate, which is anything but the actual truth; the report actually demonstrated a very strong connection between solar output and the climate up until 1980, and then demonstrated that there had been a break in the connection, which had to be caused by something else. after ruling everything else out, it then pointed to us as the last remaining culprit.

i mean, this is the fundamental breakthrough by the ipcc - that we were interfering with the sun. and, in order to establish that we were really interfering with the sun, that we're really to blame, you had to demonstrate the historical link, first. so, a big part of the study is proving the link between the sun and the weather, not debunking it.

so, the argument in the ipcc goes as follows:

1) the earth's climate is strongly correlated with the sun from antiquity up until the middle of the 20th century. and, much effort is put into demonstrating this, because it must be shown to be true to conclude that carbon emissions are altering the climate.
2) starting around 1980, the correlation breaks.
3) after ruling out many potential causes for the break in this correlation, the last remaining answer is carbon emissions.
4) therefore, anthropogenic climate change.

but, after demonstrating that the sun was the main driver of the earth's climate for the last 6 billion years, the ipcc then forgets about it.

meanwhile, the sun has been getting colder and colder since 1985 - while we've continued to get warmer and warmer.

well, sort of.

it is in fact absolutely necessary that we answer the following question: if the earth and the sun are moving in opposite directions since 1980 because of global warming, what rates of change are required to maintain or overturn the break?

because, you have to understand the following point: if we succeed in stabilizing the atmosphere, we will once again be at the mercy of the sun. and, if the sun has crashed, we're going to crash, too.

it's ultimately a rate game. if the sun cools fast enough, it will overpower the emissions; on the other hand, if emissions skyrocket, the sun's influence wanes. everybody is using statistics to try and figure this out, but it's actually a calculus problem - we're talking about optimizing rates of change, and figuring out how curves intersect with each other. and, if you want a good model, you have to take both factors into consideration, because that is what the ipcc proved - that, in the absence of carbon emissions, the sun dominates the climate.

what the studies i've seen predict is that expected emissions rates will dominantly overpower expected decreases in solar output - that global warming will win this fight. but, what that means is that the global mean temperature will continue to increase, not that regional variation will be eliminated.

we know how the vortex works. we know it's driven by the sun. and, there is little reason to expect that the historical pattern won't reassert itself, even if it's muted.

the last error that i'll point out is the idea that these blasts of cold air are creating an overall cooling effect. it may seem extreme, but that's just because we're not used to it. the truth is that these supposedly brutal winters over the last five years are still mild compared to historical solar minimums. if the thing you're trying to prove is why the winters are getting colder, your premise is wrong - because they aren't, and you can see that once you compare minima to minima. if you plot the average winter temperatures in a city like ottawa or windsor (or moscow) going back 100 years, what you get is an increasing wave function, and you can pull out the warming trend by drawing a line with positive slope (or increasing curve) through the troughs of the wave. at solar minimum, these expanded polar vortices used to be longer and more brutal than they are now.

i'm old enough that i remember the minimum in the 90s; i'm sure you can find somebody that remembers the 70s, at least. it's a 22 year cycle, not an 11 year one. our experience with this vortex is nothing compared to theirs. they'd get this for weeks.

so, we need to ask the opposite question: why don't we have long, cold winters like we used to?

and, in that sense i will concede a different point: the reason you think it's so damned cold is because of global warming.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/5/2/024001

this is from 1959.

the fact is that the factors underlying weakening in the polar vortex is something we understood before anybody even uttered the phrase "climate change".

we don't need new research to uncover something we've understood for decades. we just need to collect evidence and watch the theories we already have prove themselves - which is exactly what's happening.

the fundamental point is this: as the polar vortex is a solar phenomenon, you should consult solar scientists about how it works. and, when the solar scientists tell you "we don't need dubious speculations from people dabbling well outside their field about melting sea ice to understand how this works", that should be enough to put the issue to rest.

anthropogenic climate change is a real thing.

but, it has nothing to do with the polar vortex, which is controlled by the sun.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/JZ064i007p00749

i'm certain that the truth of it is that somebody somewhere got the terms "jet stream" and "gulf stream" mixed up.

you would expect melting glaciers to fuck with the gulf stream - and this would indeed make it colder in europe.

i need to be clear.

this isn't a situation where the original author came up with a bad mechanism that's been savaged by physicists.

absolutely no mechanism to describe this clearly physically impossible transfer of energy has been presented at all.

she has a correlation and a hunch. that's it. but, correlation is not causality.

and, we already have a decades old theory that perfectly describes what is actually happening - we don't need new research, we already understand this.

another example.

this article - apparently written by a science correspondent - has the temerity to link to a document that was not peer reviewed or even published in a journal, but sent to nature as a letter. this is worse than incompetent, but sneaky, as it brings in the authority of nature as a journal, while undermining it at the same time, as the article was not actually published by nature at all, and in fact was presumably rejected by it if it showed up in the letters section.

think of it like an op-ed.

and, the "journalist" then has the stupidity to claim that this widely rejected hypothesis is a "fact". wrong.

but, why does she sink to such an absurd low? because she's pushing an agenda, and can't find a decent source. if she could find a better source, she would have published it. one doesn't exist.

why is the cbc giving the denialist right this kind of fuel? they yell that this is a giant hoax, despite all evidence to the contrary - then the media gives them the evidence that they need to make a credible argument. it's madness.

grown-ups are able to understand that the world is complicated. we don't need to be force-fed lies in order to avoid being distracted. the actual fact is that we're undergoing a decline in tsi, and this decline is weakening the force that bottles up the polar winds, leading to extreme outbursts of cold in the northern hemisphere. and, so long as the sun's output remains weak, we should in fact expect this to continue - whether we reduce our carbon emissions or not.

the theory that this article - and so many others - are citing argues that melting polar ice is elevating energy from sea level into the troposphere. this is in contradiction to the laws of thermodynamics. worse, the author does not provide a mechanism, she cites some statistics and then waves her hands - it's magic. then, she wonders why nobody takes her seriously, except liberal journalists trying to argue that it's cold because of global warming, because they don't want to confuse people that have a grade ten science education as a part of their masters in comparative literature.

the correct theory talks about energy levels moving downwards into the atmosphere, in obeyance with the laws of thermodynamics. as the polar vortex happens in the atmosphere, the correct theory talks about things that affect the atmosphere - and melting sea ice is not one of them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-polar-vortex-1.4998820

and, this focuses more explicitly on the effects in the northern hemisphere.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8535

this is a little older, but it's maybe a little easier to read.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4758621/

this is just one article, and it is exploring just one facet of a complicated thing.

if you really want to understand this, you shouldn't go sorting through periodicals, but should just pick up a textbook in meteorology that explains how the polar vortex is a solar phenomenon - it is essentially a swirling mass of cold air that is kept in check by solar radiation, and that both tightens up when radiation is increased and starts to break apart and expand when solar radiation decreases. as the earth moves around the sun in a roughly elliptical orbit, on an angle, that creates fluctuations in the amount of radiation hitting the earth, an expansion (and subsequent contraction) is something that happens every year, and we've known about it for decades. it's in the textbooks...you don't need need recent periodicals....it's well understood, already...

so, i'm not citing this - which is a recent paper from a very good source - to prove any specific point.

what i'm doing is trying to direct you to what the actual scientific community - not the liberal media - is considering right now to try and understand what is happening in the northern hemisphere, specifically.

this is a starting point for further research, not an authoritative end point.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13351-018-7101-2

the sad truth is that all of these people walking around saying "it's cold because of global warming", because they read a piece in the atlantic or the nation or something, are just as clueless as the people that still think iraq had weapons of mass destruction, because fox still won't drop the lie, years later.

it's the same repetition of lies pushed down from the top, and the same inability to think critically that allows people to fall for them.

these people are mirror reflections of each other - both convinced they know the truth, and both led astray by dishonest media.

see, this is the kind of thing i'm talking about.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/how-frigid-polar-vortex-blasts-are-linked-to-global-warming-climate-change-connection-weather-environment/123443/

this idea is being presented here as though they're providing a science lesson, when they are in fact presenting what amounts to a fringe theory that has been widely ridiculed by physicists. the authors have not even presented a mechanism by which this "amplification" can occur, in contradiction to the basic laws of thermodynamics. it is a theory in the colloquial sense - a hunch, with little supporting data to back it up, and one that has been roundly denounced as incoherent, at that.

even the known climate change sites, like climate skeptic, tend to step away from this as bunk. the publications that are pushing it are not science journals, but liberal political sites like the nation that want to maintain a narrative - all weather on the planet has the same cause.

but, you don't have to choose between what we understand about the sun and what we understand about the greenhouse effect. both of these things are, in fact, happening at the same time. and, in this case, they're acting against each other.

i don't expect to win this argument, because i'm not having it with scientists. but, ask a physicist about "arctic amplification". you won't like their response.

what i'm more concerned about with this is the media. it was one thing when this was a new idea, and we could throw it out there for debate; but that's already happened, now, and it's been discarded as nonsense. yet, the liberal press continues to run with it, oblivious to what the science actually says about it, because it aligns with an ideological perspective. and, that is dangerous - because we've seen the consequences of it on the right.

there have been studies done on people that watch fox news that have concluded that they understand less about the world than people that don't watch the news at all, because all they're able to regurgitate is an ideology that's been pushed down to them. when the left starts pushing debunked science like "arctic amplification" in order to fit an ideological perspective, and oblivious to what the science actually says on the matter, it is essentially just repeating the fox news model. and, we're going to end up with the same problems on the left that exist on the right - if we don't already have them.

on top of that, you're essentially giving the right what it's asking for. climate change is real, and a serious problem that needs to be addressed. but, "arctic amplification" is exactly what the idiots in the right-wing media are accusing the left of - it's essentially a liberal hoax. by continuing to push bad science, you're converting a strawman argument into an actual truth.

we have centuries of data to use to understand how the sun affects the polar vortex. it's not a new theory, it's tested and understood science. and, we know that what we're seeing in the northern hemisphere is what we should expect from an extended solar minimum. there's nothing controversial here.

we just have to understand that the world is complicated, and that the things we experience have multiple complicated causes to them that often don't align well with the kinds of simplistic narratives pushed by the media.

i'm not going to repeat the same thing that i've posted about the weather 100 times already. yes, the oceans and atmosphere are warming due to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide. but, the polar vortex is a solar phenomenon, and these blasts of cold air are a consequence of decreasing solar output.

here on the canadian side of detroit, it's been a relatively mild winter - but was a very bleak fall. the temperature just dropped one day in mid october and never recovered, but it didn't get worse, either. so, we had three months of stasis in the period of the year that usually features the greatest amount of change. what's hitting us this week is exaggerated, but we're at looking at double digits and rain again by saturday, so if we end up with a total of four days of actual winter, no matter how extreme, that's not a bad outcome, overall.

for right now, i'm not even looking outside. i'm happy curled up in my blanket, thanks.

just how much time do you spending fantasizing about sodomizing the prime minister, sir?

i'll take this as the mayor's coming out.

it's ok. nothing wrong with it.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/mbze4q/mayor-apologizes-for-wanting-to-sodomize-justin-trudeau-with-pipeline-pig

this ufo may be full of little green men, methinks.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/south-america/russian-passenger-jet-arrives-in-venezuela-rumours-swirl-20190130-p50uhc.html

if nothing else happens in the upcoming election, toronto needs to get rid of chrystia freeland.

except that we won't - we'll show up five minutes early, looking for brownie points, trying to "mend the relationship".

and, they'll toss us aside like the sycophants that we really are.

mccallum was perhaps the last true representative of the old guard in the liberal party, that argued for multilateralism and saw canada as a middle power that could act as an intermediary. his removal was actually deeply symbolic, which is what i was trying to get at. today, the liberals just want to be the 51st province, just like the conservatives - and he will no doubt be replaced by some american educated sinologist that upholds the cia-backed washington consensus.

we're a client state.

and, canadians need to wake up to this and push back on it.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/29/the-united-states-doesnt-have-your-back/

listen.

the way you have to understand the world right now, and this has actually been true for many years, is that you've got kasparov sitting in russia, and all these short-sighted capitalist idiots running amok with their heads cut off everywhere else, bumping into each other, setting off their guns, for their own self-interest.

it's sort of like one of those guys down in central park, that will play 30 games of chess at once and beat everybody.

i don't think that putin is a genius, it's more like idiocracy, in the sense that russia is the only traditional empire left standing. it's easy to win when nobody else plays.

what's killing america is it's entitlement, it's insistence on some concept of manifest destiny. it doesn't think it has to play. so, it's easy to beat.

i considered being quiet; i desperately want netanyahu removed. but, i decided that he probably can't stop it, anyways - and it's probably in everybody's interests that it's transparent.

iran's language is challenging, and it would help everybody if they'd just shut the fuck up. but, russia's interests are not altered by america's withdrawal, no matter how enticing the bear hug.

conversely, america might want to take note of what sane american commentators have been pointing out for decades - that israel is not a reliable ally in the middle east. did you see how quickly they bolted to putin at the smallest sign of moderation? what kind of ally is this?

i don't think the russians are shifting allegiances in syria, i think they're playing netanyahu for the fool that he is.

expect a substantive change in power in israel relatively shortly. and, good riddance.

great!

i'm not a student and haven't been for a while, so i'll be keeping my distance this time. but, i need to point out that this isn't going to be as easy as it was in quebec.

organizers should be looking at the situation as an opportunity to build a movement. the reason the strikes were so large and successful in quebec is that this movement already existed due to years of organizing. there is no parallel movement in ontario.

that's fine. go out and build one. then there will be.

https://www.marxist.ca/socialist-fightback-student/1480-cfs-votes-for-ontario-student-strike-what-happens-now.html

there we go.

that's what i like to see.

maybe there's some hope for this province and this country, after all.

let's shut this province down until ford is defeated.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/01/27/hundreds-of-students-protest-doug-fords-osap-cuts-in-toronto_a_23654156/?ncid=other_topvideos_cp1pj3fgmfs&utm_campaign=top_videos

well, they're going after the oil in venezuela, and that's the sign i was looking for to suggest this is serious, not a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

did trump re-open the government to start a war?

you could maybe ask the question of why they didn't go after venezuela in the first place; it's clearly an easier target than iraq. but, when america inherited britain's policy on iraq, it also inherited britain's strategic perspective - and a war to steal oil from iraq is certainly the more rational option, from london.

the timing of this is all very suspect. and, frankly, they may regret getting what they wished for - they find that whatever comes next is far worse for their own interests. maduro is completely reliant on america for everything; you'd think they'd want to keep it that way. but, american policy in venezuela is 99% about the oil, so when the sanctions come down it means they're following through with it. i've been saying for years that if they wanted regime change, they'd target the oil - and here we go.

the intent is probably to produce a military revolt, which is more likely to lead to a junta than an election. this kid they've got working the streets is a useful idiot. and, then you get the guerilla warfare for the next 20 years, like in columbia.

it's not very smart, tactically. but, the president's poll numbers aren't very good...

this kind of thing litters roman history, and we see what happened in the end. solidarity with the campesinos. your grandchildren will reap the rewards of their arrogance.

and, i think i figured out how to recover my deleted email, too.

so, what i have is three giant pst files, although i think there's mostly overlap. when you clear the deleted items folder, the data stays in the pst file until you "compact " it, which is something i did not do. the one at 1.9 gb reads about 35,000 emails but there some to be a large amount of inaccessible emails; i know there's 60,000 inaccessible emails in the 1.4 gb one from analyzing it with a commercial software that i couldn't find a key for, and i can't read anything at all with this one in outlook. i also have a 2.4 gb past file that is full of already deleted items that cannot be accessed at all. 

when i was trying to figure this out last week, the first thing i tried was to delete the index file using a hex editor, but i'm realizing i did it wrong. i actually deleted it outright; i should have zeroed it out. i guess that makes more sense, but you follow instructions when you're doing this kind of thing, and the hack said to delete it - so that's what i did. i've gone back and zeroed out the 1.4 one and it's picking up about 37,000 emails, which seems partial, but it's a start.

yeah, we're looking at actual winter here this week, and i don't want to think about going out in it.


i'm not going to actual file anything until i get a response from the investigation into the officer, anyways.

for right now, i'd rather be filing data.

so, i'll start making calls near the end of the week...

well, i have some good news if you want to call it that - i'm back up on the laptop and ready to get back to what i was doing.

the last part of rebuilding the os was reconstructing all of the symbolic links in the user directories. i was getting some weird behaviour, like the start menu not acting right, so i did a clean install to one of the new disks i've had sitting, in order to get a listing of the symbolic links. them, i build them all up from scratch using the command line. not complicated, but time consuming; it is now done, and everything seems to be working correctly.

as mentioned, this mess at least gets all of the stray data from the pc ready to be filed, which i should be able to get back to shortly.

i also found another pst file - 2.5 gb of deleted data. my missing emails are no doubt in there, and i know they're recoverable, it's just a question of finding out how to do it without paying for it.

so, that was the day - copying data around and reconstructing symbolic links. it's done. and, i can start fresh in the morning.

i essentially can't know if this person was really afraid of me or not. the crown agreed that there was no objective basis for fear and dropped the case, but what little i know about this person suggests to me that she has some kind of mental illness, implying that she may have been experiencing real fear without any sort of rational basis.

i mean, it's entirely possible. people are afraid of all kinds of stupid things. i don't have to accuse her of dishonesty - she might be insane.

but, regardless, what she essentially did was conclude that, because i'm disabled, i must pose a threat to her. her fear was constructed solely on the basis of discrimination. the officer should have pointed out that i don't have any kind of criminal record, and there's consequently no grounds for arrest. instead, he played into her irrational prejudices.

i'm a feminist in the sense that i believe in equality across the genders, and to me that means that you don't get to define your experiences differently. a feminist may look at this and claim her experiences are being invalidated - i think the point is that you can't be validating experiences rooted in prejudice, and her experience absolutely needs to be not just invalidated but denounced as wrong.

the irony is that i wouldn't have had a case, otherwise. i was trolling her to get a response, and i got a little more than what i wanted.

i'll call to look into the recordings on monday.

stated bluntly, i was arrested for being a fag.

and, i'm looking to capitalize from it.

just to clarify the point, in case it's not clear - but it should be. the thing is that people are dishonest, and i already know that i'm dealing with known liars.

back in september, i was arrested and charged with criminal harassment. the justice released me without meaningful conditions because she felt that the charges should not have been filed, but i was not able to get the charges dropped until november.

i have never met this person. i do not believe i know their real name(s). i have never been to this person's house, and do not know where they live - nor is there any reason to think i would want to go their house or work place. i have never seen a picture of this person, nor would i be able to identify them if i were to meet them. nor did i know the gender of the person i was communicating with, or their age.

the sole communication i've had with this person is in the form of responding to an ad for an apartment.

the charges claimed that my repeated attempts to apply for the ad constituted repeated unwanted communication. now, you can say what you want about repeatedly replying for an ad, but these communications were solely business-like in nature. as mentioned, i was communicating with what was a faceless advertisement with no information about the owner(s) of the property. i did know how many people i was communicating with or what their role in the business was. all communication was strictly related to the question of renting an apartment, or the legal consequences of discriminating against me on the basis of a disability.

to claim that this is "harassment" or "stalking" is merely to misunderstand what these terms mean. i acknowledge repeatedly applying for the ad, and quite aggressively. i reject that this constitutes stalking, in any way.

so, how did this happen?

well, i indicated to the property owner that i was going to file a discrimination suit. what she did was try to arrest me before i could get the suit filed. i will be filing the suit, and still have several months to do so, but i am waiting for a few things to work themselves out, first. as there was no evidence i posed any threat to her, the entire basis of her report was strictly discriminatory - i am suing her for filing a discriminatory false report to get me arrested, essentially.

however, i primarily blame the officer for the situation. crazy property owners exist, but they require enabling cops in order to be dangerous to the general public. i had had previous problems with the officer that arrested me, related to conflicts with smokers in the building that i lived in. the officer is a homophobe, a misogynist, a transphobe, a drug user and a smoker; he did not like me, and wanted to bring me in for daring to stand up for my rights as a non-smoker, and being openly queer in the process. the people in the building did not like me either for that reason, as it was a low income building full of drug addicts with right-wing social views, and he was essentially carrying through with their prejudices, however powerful his own may be.

i dealt with a handful of cops during this period, and only had problems with this specific one.

i am not under investigation of any crime, at this point. there was no evidence that i posed any threat to anybody, and the charges were consequently dropped.

however, i am awaiting the results of an investigation into the officer's conduct before i file for grievances under a constitutional challenge.

stalking is a serious crime. but, because it is a serious crime, police officers have a responsibility to be very careful in how they approach any potential stalking scenario. frivolous or trivial charges that are filed in order to inflate an officer's ego or carry out the whims of a wealthy landowner are unacceptable in any scenario, but are doubly unacceptable when it comes to charges such as this, as false charges of this nature both degrade the authority and integrity of law enforcement and have serious consequences for falsely accused parties.

to an extent, i walked into this. i fully understood that my behaviour was not illegal, and dared the cop to arrest me. he walked into it. and, now he's going to spend the rest of his life dealing with this - and i'm going to be seeking a large cash settlement for an arrest that shouldn't have happened, and the suffering i've incurred as a result of it.

as mentioned, i'm looking at three major lawsuits this year:

1) i will be suing the cops for breaching my constitutional rights in multiple ways and causing me all kinds of grief, including an infringement on my s. 6 rights to travel
2) i will be suing the person that filed false charges against me for discrimination in housing
3) i will be seeking information about my father's estate, in order to determine whether i have a worthwhile claim or not.

i had a few set backs, but the laptop is back up.

i initially reinstalled to get the bootmgr back up, but aborted it, thinking i wouldn't need to finish it. then, i formatted the partition and copied the data over, only to get a bootmgr error. so, i did a full reinstall, reformat and copy back and it's up and running, now.

i'm now copying data off of the pc and into the filing i was doing for the alter-reality, which was the next step, anyways.

i don't know the details of this case.

but, mccallum is just about the smartest person the liberals have available to them, and what he was no doubt trying to get across was that canada has a responsibility to help her fight the extradition request, which he is at least right about. you could say he got fired, but it sounds to me like he was aiming for it.

i've been clear that i like the old liberals better, and there's a little bit of it hidden in here.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mccallum-out-ambassador-1.4994492

i mean, it's one thing to point out that trump is a racist. sure.

it's another to act like there was some other option.

there were good reasons to vote for clinton over trump, but racism wasn't one of them.

i've actually never challenged the claim that trump is a racist, except the claim that he's an anti-semite, which i've found absurd all around. what i did point out is that clinton is equally racist, and that there is perhaps a better record in the public domain to demonstrate it.

i consequently don't react much to people yelling and screaming about trump being a racist, as though this is some kind of aberration or anomaly. with the exception of sanders, all of the major candidates in 2016 were clearly racists. any of the republicans were, would have been and still are racists. both of the clintons are brutal racists. the bushes are all racists. reagan was a racist. nixon was a terrible racist. even lbj was a known racist - as were the kennedy brothers, and fdr, too.

it's a racist society. what do you expect?

there's this kind of idea - and it's probably accurate - that you can't really end the war, you can just convert it into different forms. so, you can move the war around from place to place - from afghanistan to iraq to serbia and back to iraq again - but you can't extinguish it entirely. and, if you hold to this, you want to take a kind of harm reduction approach, in keeping the war as far away as possible.

this goes back to roman imperial strategy, and a recognition that the barbarians cannot be gotten rid of, but only controlled, distracted, redirected, confused. i've seen the argument made more than once that the fighting in syria and iraq was just necessary as a distraction for these jihadists; if the jihadists want to fight, and we can't convince them otherwise, let's have them fight in iraq, instead.

i've argued in this space that the russian strategy in syria follows from this, and in fact suggested or predicted it. there is essentially no way that fighting in ukraine can end well for the russians, so what they wanted to do was shift the conflict somewhere else, like syria. i argued that a successful russian counterattack in syria would force the americans out of ukraine - and it worked as i claimed it would. but, syria is still in russia's backyard.

for the americans to withdraw would be useful, if the goal is to focus on recreating a peaceful world order. but, for the americans to redeploy in another theatre with russian defenses would simply be to shift the war to a location more favourable to russian interests.

shifting the fighting in ukraine to syria was heraclean in scope, as it was - you almost expected putin to march the true cross back through moscow, or something. you'll note that the empire did not survive heracleus very long, but the turnaround was remarkable - that was a major russian victory, due to clearly superior tactical strategy.

but, for the russians to ultimately shift the fighting in ukraine to far-off venezuela would be a victory of unthought of proportions.

you should consequently expect the russians to staunchly double down in venezuela, as the more that it can distract america in it's own hemisphere, the more it's own security is assured. if the americans think they can just overthrow maduro, they have another thing coming - and any attempt is just an excuse for further russian deployment.

putin really made obama look like an idiot, over and over again, out thinking him in theatre after theatre. it's starting to look like he's doing the same thing to trump.

let's get the troops home and keep them here, and then focus on social planning as a means to improve the economy in the southern part of the hemisphere.

fwiw, i'm sure the russians will be more than willing to shift the war from syria to venezuela, thereby exchanging an existential threat for an overseas adventure.

empires generally want the instability to exist in distant theatres, not in their own backyards.

i've been vocal about supporting the withdrawal from syria. but, if the idea is to withdraw from syria in order to deploy to latin america, this is madness on every level; if the choice is between syria and south america, they should send the troops back to syria.

but, regarding tulsi gabbard being a hindu.

i don't know what that means, exactly. if you're from india, you generally define yourself regionally - you're a worshipper of a certain god or group of gods, because that's what the traditions in the area are. westerners can coherently call themselves buddhists, but in a sense that's exactly the point; buddhism is a kind of subset of hinduism that focuses on a specific thing, so we know what that means. without being able to reference a geographic area in india, gabbard's claim to being a hindu are hard to understand. does she worship any specific gods? actively?

does it mean she leaves milk and cookies for shiva on christmas eve?

does it mean she's an atheist and doesn't want to admit it?

does it mean she digs gandhi?

does it just mean she's a vegan, because she believes in reincarnation?

some of this is trivial, some of it is more important. and, i think she owes the public somewhat of a clarification on what it means when she calls herself a hindu if she's going to run for commander in chief, then let people figure out whether they're ok with it or not.

i would expect, however, that she's going to run into the usual accusations of appropriation, and she should push back on that point. i've made references to this repeatedly on this blog: white people have lost their indigenous beliefs almost totally to the influence of semitic religion, but if we were to reconstruct an indigenous european form of belief, it would actually be most similar to hinduism, which is also a syncretism of indo-european religion and indigenous dravidian religion, the difference being that, in india, the european religion took the dominant role. hinduism certainly has a powerful indigenous substrate, yes. but, it is the only active religion that maintains the superstrate of the indigenous european religions, and thus the religion that cultural conservatives ought to be urging white people to flock to.

our ancestors all spoke sanskrit - or something close to it.

so, there's no justification to attack her for appropriation or anything.

but, i'd still like her to clarify the point. if she carries on for a while, i'm sure she will.

ok, so i'm officially uncomfortable with sanders' age. the question mark in 2016 was about two terms. i can't imagine him serving until 2024. so, if you're going to be voting for the vp, why not just do it directly?

and, i'm worried he's going to split the vote.

so, i want a younger candidate. but, who else is there?

i've already ruled out warren. biden is a non-starter. see, but the thing is that i know their politics, they're understood quantities. the others are less clear.

i'm willing to listen to kamala harris, but she doesn't strike me as being very "progressive". that's a first impression. i'll give her a chance.

i'm a little uneasy with tulsi gabbard's history regarding social issues - she has a history of running as a social conservative - and would be hard-pressed to actively support somebody with military credentials. i think that civilian control of the presidency is kind of paramount. i haven't ruled it out, but it's unlikely.

kristen gillebrandt's takedown of al franken was shameless, and she's consequently a non-starter, in my view.

i'v historically supported people like sanders, kucinich, nader....even jello biafra. that person is currently not on any radar i've seen....

in years past, this is the role that canada was known for.

one wonders if we're in a giant switcheroo with mexico, right now.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-mexico/mexico-says-willing-to-mediate-in-venezuela-political-crisis-idUSKCN1PJ1WV

history doesn't record any migrations into the steppes.

stop.

look at a map of the old world. run a line through the 45th parallel. what colour are the people on top of it?

the luxuries of modern urban existence largely negate this. but, rural canada is about as attractive to your average brown person as siberia is.

if you want to people this region, you need to attract people that can actually thrive in it.

this makes more sense, and aligns more with canada's historical immigration priorities of getting people on the ground to stop the americans from invading. it seems like they're listening. that's good.

the thing is that rural canada is a cold, dark place, full of dangerous animals, eight month winters, angry natives (still.) and minimal access to services. despite our large expanses of forests, we're one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and something like 80% of us live 100 km from the united states border. this is a 200 year old problem that we've had minimal successes in resolving.

the one thing that worked was trying to attract immigrants from similar geographic spaces, which is why we have these spaces in western canada with large ukrainian, finnish, russian and norwegian populations. there's no longer a czar to escape from. russian nationalism is at a historical peak.

the reality is that population density is kind of sparse at our parallel, and in our climate. maybe that might change, over time; for right now, rural canada is a hard sell.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/hussen-immigration-rural-pilot-1.4990875

the x7b error is something that came up a lot when i did vista support, and what i learned is that the training documents don't really reflect what you see in real life. what it means is that something is interfering with the boot process, but it could really be anything. the error codes refer to specific  symptoms, but they say much less about actual causes. the actual truth of it is that there consequently isn't any way to really know what causes a x7b other than to look at the situation critically and take a bunch of educated guesses.

file system corruption was a good guess, because i think i rebooted during a chkdsk that i had forgotten i scheduled, and i've experienced some issues with the drive in the past. and, it did fix a couple of errors. if the laptop boots right up tonight, i may conclude that the chkdsk had some effect, or that the disk was otherwise corrupted in some way (i took the opportunity to reformat the drive, and that itself may have helped), but i'm broadly going to be left with a mystery.

and, the more mysterious it seems, the more that the boot sector virus idea opens itself up, as it would necessarily exist behind a wall of abstraction i can't get at. some kind of stuxnet-like worm could have jumped from the boot sector on the drive to the bios in the pc. and, you'll recall that my bios died on me, apparently randomly. but, a bios virus needs electricity to exist, and if one existed then whatever it was has been drained from the capacitors. the reformats also cleared out the boot sector on the drive, so i think i can state with some confidence that the disk is clear, at this point. is there still something hiding in the bios in the laptop? we'll find out. at the least, it doesn't seem interested in attacking my actual data.

but, i ruled out the boot sector as best as i could, using the tools that existed, as best as i could remember them - both the automated fix (which never works) and the command line tools. there was no sign of anything wrong at this stage.

the next thing to check is a "driver error", but that's an incredibly vague term that necessitates a huge amount of trial and error. i've seen x7bs connected to things like raid setups, sata drivers, video cards, chipsets - essentially anything at all that throws an error before windows loads is going to throw out an x7b. boot logging rarely works properly, and can lead to wrong answers if you take it too seriously. so, what you normally do in this kind of situation is try to figure out what changed and take a good guess that this is the cause. in this scenario, i was taking a hard drive out of a system that wouldn't boot and putting it into a known, working system where windows had access to all of the correct drivers. so, if it isn't booting due to a driver error, it has to be because the driver itself is corrupt or because something is corrupted in the registry - which could have been anything at all. and, the aborted chkdsk produced a potential cause.

so, i backed up the broken install, reinstalled to the questionable partition (to verify that a clean install was capable of booting out of the box - that i wasn't missing a driver, just in case i was wrong), then replaced chunks of the new install with the broken one, waiting for the x7b to come back. this allowed me to check for corruption in the actual drivers by copying them back; it continued to boot, indicating the drivers themselves were not compromised - i didn't have a broken driver, and the error must be in the registry.

normally, a tech agent would tell you to run a system file scan rather than backup, reformat and copy back to find the problem via trial and error. but, that wouldn't tell you what the problem is - and i wanted to know what was causing the issue. on top of that, an sfc would restore all of the system files i had altered or deleted, possibly to old versions from before an update. it's a brute force solution that might fix your computer quickly, but i would advise avoiding it, because it could cause further problems over time.

via a few sneaky tricks to get the right comparisons over trial and error, i was then able to determine that the issue was specifically in the system hive. but, that is narrowing the issue down to a wormhole in a haystack - i found the right file on the pc, only to have that file be a 30 mb database with thousands of entries, any one of which could be the problem. last known goods weren't working; both control sets seemed fucked. so, it's down to trial and error to pinpoint the problem, yet again. i was eventually able to find the problem in the services directory.

now, you can argue that this was obvious, and be right in some way, but miss the point altogether. it happens to be that the end fix was simple enough, and didn't require sorting through all of the more exotic registry keys. but, this is kind of just luck. if i had gone directly to the services key and checked trial and error, and found it was, say, a video card driver i needed to get vga, i would have then needed to check through all of the subkeys that the vga driver calls, which would have created a complicated tree. this is more of a question of approach than anything else. trying to pinpoint the cause using logic may have led me on a time consuming wild goose chase that would have ended with an offline driver install through importing registry keys - a crazily complicated thing to reverse engineer from scratch. approaching the issue with a gauche trial and error probably actually saved me a lot of time. call it the monte carlo approach to finding registry corruption. but, if you've studied search algorithms, you realize this - that a sequential or randomized algorithm can often find something much faster than a sophisticated data-driven model.

in the end, what i found out was that the registry wasn't corrupt at all - that nothing was broken and the computer was doing exactly what it was told to do. there was no way i could have guessed that, or at least not effectively. i mean, i could have set every single driver to ignore on a lark, but then i'd just have to work backwards, anyways. i wasn't looking for a corruption of data, i was looking for careless programming...

again: i still don't know why the laptop didn't boot. it's almost 7:00, almost time to find out. if it was a physical disk problem, or something in the boot sector, it's gone and i'll never know. if it's something else, i'll learn soon enough.

trump caved at the worst possible moment - when the backlash was at the highest point.

i mentioned that the backlash was obvious, but i maintain the view that it isn't sustainable. what i was getting across is that you should have expected the backlash to hit a peak and then fall quickly, at which point the democrats would be facing serious resistance. trump might not gain from it directly, but the democrats completely collapse when faced with apathy - and because trying to equate a border wall with white supremacism is stupid on a good day, it had no potential in the form of a popular struggle. primaries are starting, soon. democrats are going to want to talk about things that actually matter to them, like universal health care. support for immigration reform in a broader sense is a niche issue in a small geographic area that alienates potential democratic voters more than it revs them up.

but, now, he just looks like an idiot for wasting everybody's time, which is a kind of feedback cycle that the democrats can take advantage of in mocking him for the rest of the cycle.

i thought this guy was supposed to be an expert at negotiation?

the capitalists can only break the back of labour when we are divided.

we must stand united across international borders. if we squabble amongst ourselves, the bastards will win.

see, this is the stupid way to do this, because it buys right into the divide and conquer from the top - this is exactly what they want workers to do. competition just results in a race to the bottom, and the more that the unions push for this kind of thing, the worse off they'll be.

i know that canadian workers are angry, but boycotting their comrades in mexico doesn't make any sense. canadian workers are not in competition with mexican workers for jobs, they are in a class war with international finance that wants to maximize profits by slashing labour regulations. the solution is actually to stand in solidarity with mexican workers, and help them fight for comparable living standards, thereby taking away the utility of the mobility of capital.

it is the responsibility of labour activists and union leaders to teach socialism, not to give into fascism.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/oshawa-unifor-gm-plant-boycott-mexico-1.4992989?cmp=rss

actually, i think that muslim women should stop appropriating basic canadian winter wear.

it's called a ski mask. and, if you're going to bicycle in january in canada, you're going to need one.

i was able to track the blue screen down to a device driver set to reboot upon fail, which i'm willing to claim is an error on the manufacturer level, although that might be my microsoft training speaking. it was a driver related to the motherboard.

the thing is that i've taken this hard drive out of the laptop and had it boot in the pc before, so there wasn't any reason to think this would happen. further, the issue was not related to a missing driver - windows was able to find my hardware and boot into it just fine. in a scenario where windows has all of the right drivers available to it, it should be able to find the right ones and correctly boot - and it did. so, you shouldn't have to worry about removing the wrong drivers, so long as the right ones are accessible - and, technically, i didn't have to do that, either. but, somehow, this driver - which is needed to boot the laptop - got set to "reboot on fail" rather than "ignore on fail", and it was blocking the boot.

what should have happened is that the boot process should have found this driver, said "we don't need this" and just tossed it aside, then found the right driver and booted - that was my assumption, and what a properly installed driver does in this scenario. but what actually happened is that the boot process found the driver, said "i can't use this", stopped looking for something it can use and tossed out a blue screen.

the answer was to change a specific value in the registry from 3 to 0. that's it. it boots on the pc, now.

it doesn't answer why the laptop wouldn't boot, though. i'll have to figure that out tonight.

i've filed the complaint with the privacy commissioner online, rather than mail it. so, that's done. and, i'll have to get on with the calls on monday.

trudeau was supposed to be putting a focus on rehabilitating canada's image abroad in the face of so many years of disastrous policy from stephen harper.  and, he had a mandate to do this - it was a key issue in the election, a ballot issue, something that got people out to vote.

supporting the overthrow of a legitimately elected government in latin america - one that is in fact quite compliant - in order to wag the dog for an unpopular american president isn't exactly what people had in mind.

canada's reaction to the situation in venezuela is truly embarrassing.

i am going to reiterate my request for the ndp to focus on ousting chrystia freeland and sending her back to new york.

yankee go home, chrystia.

good news with the laptop hard drive: i was able to get it to boot up into windows 7 from the pc. i'm probably not going to get back online until tomorrow or the next day, but i know how to reconstruct the machine from here. 

i ended up flipping the process over, because i wanted to make sure there was an endpoint; instead of slowly inserting the working system hive into the broken one, hoping for it to eventually work, i copied over the system hive used by the setup disc, which got around the security descriptors and let me figure out where the error is. i quickly figured out that the 7xb error is actually being caused by a broken service, although i haven't figured out which one, yet. just realizing what was happening was good enough. so, i copied the broken system hive back into the config directory and imported the services hive that i copied from the fresh install, which brought me up to that chkdsk i had scheduled (the disk is fine). the thing is booting, but to a generic set of services; at least i know i can salvage it, though. the next thing to do will be to copy each service back into the registry until the blue screen comes back, fix the problem, and reimage the drive with the corruption reversed. the install should be exactly as i left it....

a corrupt service or driver shouldn't cause this kind of mess; windows is supposed to hold your last working configuration, but the error seems to have ended up in both control sets. very strange. but, the important thing is that i can salvage this.

and, i simply don't think that you're going to get this government to agree to tax imports, unilaterally. it's too globalist, in ideology - too neo-liberal.

so, we're kind of playing with fire.

to be clear: i don't think the thing is going to be powerful enough to reduce emissions, not even if it taxes imports. but, if it doesn't tax imports, it's really potentially somewhat harmful.

this is a more responsible article (excluding the silly reference to "what economists say", as though economics is a science, as though it analyzes facts, and as though economists all agree with each other), but it's not addressing the point that i've referred to, and that the american economists i referenced yesterday were pointing out, about the importance of taxing imports.

this issue is less pronounced in alberta or bc because the economy isn't reliant on manufacturing. in ontario, manufacturing is the dominant part of the economy - behind only real estate, by gdp. so, let's consider a manufacturing plant in niagara falls that has branches on both sides of the border, for illustrative purposes - it doesn't have to actually exist in the real world, it can just exist in the imaginations of people in ivory towers.

what a carbon tax is going to do is force firms to make one of the four choices when faced with rising costs:

1) pass the costs on, which it will do if it can remain competitive (ie everybody else does it)
2) move production elsewhere, like to the plant across the river
3) innovate a solution to cut costs somehow, as though businesses aren't already faced with incentives to lower costs, and wouldn't already reduce production costs if they knew how, in the first place.
4) downsize somehow.

as (3) is in truth absurd, and (4) is in most cases alarmist and only realistic in situations where a firm is already dying anyways, the real options are between (1) and (2).

now, even if everybody else does (1), (2) remains an incentive, if possible. and, then, once a few firms start doing it, everybody else has to do it in order to compete. so, what you've really done is create an incentive to move manufacturing to the united states.

further, when a consumer walks into a market and looks at the difference in price, they're really not going to be incentivized to buy the less polluting product, at least not so long as imports are not being taxed; what they're going to be incentivized to buy is the product produced in a different country that isn't being taxed, which could very well be, maybe even probably be, the more polluting product.

the way it's designed, it's really just a tariff on ourselves.

now, this isn't happening in a vacuum. there are other factors to consider, including the tariffs that trump is insisting on. the carbon tax may not be powerful enough on it's own, or it might be the breaking point, or it might not make any difference at all. so, there's no guarantee it will cause a recession.

but, it is a recessionary policy.

and, in ontario, there is some potential for some harm from it - if we insist on refusing to tax imports. so long as we allow foreign polluters access to our markets tax-free, it's simply a tariff on ourselves.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/01/23/heres-how-trudeaus-carbon-price-will-actually-affect-the-economy-according-to-economists.html

but, i mean...

do i want to take a side in a conflict between an entitled middle class and a centralized form of state capitalism?

i'm on the side of the squatters and campesinos.

the general american strategic policy objective is essentially never to install a bourgeois democracy in an area that it exploits, but always to instill a charismatic dictator that keeps the revolutionary elements of society in order, to keep the exploitation running smoothly.

as i said: what is happening in venezuela is rarely what it seems.

despite, or even because of, these movements of people you're seeing in the streets - and they are bourgeois, that is middle class, in nature - what the united states wants in venezuela is a government that keeps the impoverished poor in order, not one that opens up opportunity for the educated to exploit them. and, they're going to be more than happy to let the maduros of the world call them imperialists and gringos, so long as the poor are kept in check, and the oil and food keeps flowing out of the colony, and into the empire.

so, there's this bourgeois analysis coming from the north arguing that the middle classes are being repressed and maduro needs to go to better open the country to exploitation. but, the americans don't want to empower the middle class in latin america, they want to keep the country under their control. and, in a society like venezuela where the poor greatly outnumber the middle class, transferring power to the bourgeoisie is just putting in place another working class uprising - it's not a sustainable outcome.

so, wherever you stand in the class war, the reality is that maduro is the preferable option, from the perspective of american imperialist ambition.

i really think this is just theatre.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/world/americas/venezuela-protests-guaido-maduro.html

if the americans wanted to get rid of maduro, they'd run an oil blockade for five minutes and watch the military take over.

very little is what it seems to be in venezuela, which is in truth just another american-dominated plantation. i don't think the americans actually want a change of government in the country.

whatever you think of the situation - and i would have difficulty taking a side here - the fact is that the current venezuelan election system has been monitored for years, and is freer and fairer than most nato countries. maduro is a dictator in the same way that iraq had weapons of mass destruction - it's an easily debunked lie. on the other hand, it is deeply irregular for the opposition leader to declare himself president like this, and whatever protests are happening are clearly not reflective of an actual mandate. the fact that he's openly calling for a military coup is really rather troubling.

but, this is nothing new.

i crashed this morning while inspecting the hive, so the day is again lost. i'm going to try to sleep most of the rest of the day to get back into a normal nocturnal schedule.

if i don't see an answer tonight, i'll just reinstall and deal with the consequences....

i don't know where the idea that a trudeau government would support something like this is coming from, given that it's messaging has been neo-liberal and pro-market to the core.

i would rather expect the existing liberals to support some kind of market liberalization scheme that pushes that myth that increased competition will lower prices. they'd be more likely to run on cutting red tape, on decreasing regulations.

this is not a government that believes in these kinds of social systems, and without a strong ndp to push for them, i don't know how you even get a government of this type to mention something like this.

if the ndp were a more serious option, you might expect the liberals to come up with a more market-friendly alternative that sounds like pharmacare but isn't. with the ndp out of the picture to the point that the liberals think they can compete in saskatchewan on the strength of ndp defections, this kind of thing is a pipe dream in the minds of liberal activists - and, like talk of a federal gai, merely a scare tactic by the business press.

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/trudeau-spreads-the-big-pharmacare-myth-that-scores-of-canadians-cant-afford-medicine