i might actually argue that a lot of what happens on the internet nowadays ought to be nationalized. and, what does that mean?

well, what does facebook do? it's kind of a personal web space. what the ubiquity of facebook really demonstrates is that people want a little space on the internet that belongs to them, where they can post their ideas and interact with their friends - and that they don't want to pay for that space. while facebook makes a lot of money on advertising, most users that know how to install ad blocking software do so as soon as they know how to. if nationalizing facebook eliminated the advertising motive, it would solve a lot of the data concerns by means of decommercializing it. i mean, a government might have reasons to store your data, but making money wouldn't be one of them.

now, somebody might argue that they're afraid of censorship if the government were to take over facebook, but this is actually completely backwards. if facebook were actually a government owned service, you would actually have free speech rights, and any kind of censorship could be dealt with via lawsuits. right now, the fact that facebook is a private server means it's users don't actually have free speech rights at all. while i'm not really concerned about data collection, strengthening speech rights for facebook users is something i'd actively support.

facebook has, in fact, faced competition. it defeated myspace, and then defeated google+. in both cases, the primary reason that the competition lost was that users wanted to be involved in the biggest network. if the idea is that no competitor exists because facebook is stifling it, i question that logic. it's actually very hard to come up with any kind of benefit that would follow from introducing competition into the social network "market", and even trying to understand it in these terms is really demonstrating a lack of understanding of what it is. it would make far more sense to consolidate all of the networks into a single service - and any attempt to fight against this is ultimately a fight against overwhelming user preference.

likewise, imagine walking into a library and being given the option to choose between competing catalogue systems. you'd quickly go mad - you wouldn't know where anything was. and, while there is currently a competition underway between the dewey decimal system and the library of congress, anybody who's dealt with this knows how frustrating it is. i can imagine no benefit whatsoever in creating competing search engines...

what would be a step forward, though, would be to standardize it. how free is the google search algorithm, really? and, as it has a commercial motive, the results are often somewhat broken. for example, google has for years resisted attempts to remove sites from it's results, fully aware that it would mostly be used to remove commercial websites. the result is that searching for actual, useable knowledge takes a lot longer than it should, because you have to sort through hundreds of people trying to sell you something, first. if nationalization would change the purpose of google's search from trying to sell you something to helping you find information, that would be something i would actively support.

i really have less to say about amazon. unlike facebook & google, amazon doesn't provide for any useful service that people actually want, but is simply a store. on the one hand, i don't really know what the purpose of telling people that they have to buy their food from a different website than their books is. on the other hand, i don't have any real aversion to splitting them up, either. this strikes me as an expensive and frustrating triviality. amazon also has all kinds of competitors as it is, so the idea that they're a monopoly is off the mark. personally, i rarely use it because it doesn't take paypal.

i don't expect people to react well to her proposals, but perhaps a broader discourse around what kind of public policy we should implement here is welcome - and my vote would be to nationalize them, rather than to break them up.

there's a massive amount of spin being produced around this, and you have to assume that people are getting paid for it.

this article is complete nonsense - and tinged with anti-semitism, itself.

to begin with, ilhan omar made two very specific accusations:

1) american foreign policy is bought and paid for by aipac. yes, she said that. i'm not interpreting or implying anything. it's a direct quote.
2) those policy makers have an "allegiance" to a "foreign country". there's no reading between lines, here. those are direct statements.

you put those two things together, and you get a clear picture of somebody that thinks that america is run by jewish spies that are funded by jewish lobbyists. these are direct fucking quotes.

so, to suggest that people are putting words into her mouth is completely dishonest. she did say these things.

and, it should be pointed out that aipac does not actually fund anybody at all, so her statement is not just offensive but, more importantly, completely factually wrong.

second, to suggest that sheldon adelson is running a jewish lobby is exactly what people are reacting against. he's just a guy. he's a rich guy, granted. but, he's just a guy. he doesn't represent israel, he doesn't work for israel, he's not registered to lobby for israel, and nothing else of the sort. so, to suggest that the fact that he's rich and jewish and politically involved means he is therefore a jewish spy is exactly the point that's being reacted against - it's a completely racist sentiment to tie these things together as causal, or important. by that logic, bill gates represents the american government. it's absurd.

and, bafflingly, this is going over the author's head.

thirdly, the attempt to gloss over the allegiance remark is equally dishonest. she was clearly stating - not insinuating, but directly stating - that america is controlled by jewish spies. the author then elaborates on the point, thinking this justifies it, completely oblivious to the blatant racism inherent within it.

what's missing here is a discussion of the geopolitical context in which the united states not merely supports but broadly directs israeli policy. by reducing the discussion to a demonstrably false accusation about financial influence, and a conspiracy theory about foreign allegiance (maybe they meet in masonic lodges, too), the entire discourse is jettisoned into the latrine. this should be a discussion about america's reliance on oil in the context of the continuing cold war. we need to talk about kissinger and nasser and the 1973 oil blockade, and a whole slew of complicated things that require a detailed knowledge of history, of geography and of policy, all of which she clearly lacks.

she is not correct, she is not making a cogent point; she is a fool with a poor grasp of policy and that is couching that poor grasp of policy in racist, conspiratorial language in order to compensate for it.

and, this kind of stupidity is going to crater the left, if it's not dealt with face on.

her fate should be up to the people in her district. but, the party should remove her from the foreign relations committee, if they can.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2019/03/08/ilhan-omar-controversy-is-a-case-of-hate-in-america-but-whose.html

no.

being a liberal is not about "tolerance for diversity". that's largely a tory idea.

what being a liberal is about is maximizing freedom - and brutally savaging anybody that would stand to restrict it.

the guy that lives above me - and owns this place - has a very friendly black lab that he takes with him everywhere he goes. i've now been here over five months, and this might be the first time the dog was left upstairs by itself.

and, it doesn't seem to like it.

it's been running around in circles for hours now, loudly whimpering, no doubt convinced it's been completely abandoned. they say a smart dog is mentally equivalent to a toddler, and this one is clearly having a fit.

the whimpering is rather different than anything i've heard, though; i guess it's a sound humans wouldn't hear often, because it's reserved for a specific type of anguish that sets in after so many minutes of abandonment - and, i say minutes, because a dog's memory is not very long. it actually sounds like scooby doo trying to talk, this arwarwawrawrawraraa.

the dog is clearly heartbroken.

but, we all know they get over it pretty fast.

so, the stack of asimov books from chapters came in - 12/14. the other two are coming in as imports from the uk, and could take a few weeks.

nothing from the cops, yet.

i slept a lot this week, and suspect the air quality is partially at fault, but i did make some progress on some loose ends and disparate concrete things. i went looking for archives to find a media list from the 90s; i didn't quite find what i wanted, but i successfully pulled down some old data that i now need to carefully cross-reference and properly file. if i can stay awake, i can hopefully plan to have a rough outline for the vlog written up by monday, and get to it shortly thereafter.

the weather remains uninspiring, but the cold snap should at least break by midweek, even if it doesn't actually warm up. that should finally help me better understand what's going on.

i don't know why she''s running as a democrat; this is the kind of language you expect from the libertarian right.

i think we need to move in the opposite direction, and stop wasting resources competing with each other. the tech industry, especially, is a series of natural monopolies; the biggest effect of the microsoft ruling was a massive investment by bill gates into apple (and, if you're going to break anybody up, apple should be the first target), and all that did was create a different type of monopoly. so, in response to a failed policy (with arguably valid intentions), she argues that you need to double down on it. it's the definition of insanity. and, it's a constant with her.

she honestly thinks that the solution to capitalism is more capitalism.

forget sanders/warren. how about an elizabeth warren & ron paul ticket? he's not too old, not judging by the field.

and, in terms of pure strategy, it doesn't make a lot of sense. this is surely going to be deeply unpopular with young people, it's going to be a suicide policy in california and it's going to be broadly rejected by the coffee shop liberals who one would think would be her base.

i shouldn't complain; it is probably better to let her drown herself early.

elizabeth warren: a woman, a plan....a collapse.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/elizabeth-warren-proposes-breaking-up-amazon-google-and-facebook/

see, this is what happens when you apply ideas from the 20th century to the 21st century.

i like having my google services integrated.

expect this to go over like a lead balloon.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/yw8kdm/elizabeth-warren-plans-to-break-up-amazon-facebook-and-google

seems like marco just got busted blowing a fuse charging up his fleshlight.

you want to imagine him looking up when the lights unexpectedly come on.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xwbkq3/venezuela-nationwide-blackout-marco-rubio

he's so afraid of the media that they literally sent him to iqaluit for the night.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/trudeau-apology-tuberculosis-iqaluit-1.5047805

the debate is always around a v b.

it should be around 0 v 1.

we can do this using automata theory, too.

0 - homosexuality is immoral
1 - homosexuality is not immoral

a - homosexuality is a choice
b - homosexuality is not a choice

we have four combinations.

0a - catholicism and most other semitic religions
0b - calvinism. calvinists are fucked in the head, but it is a system with a large influence on capitalism. and, this is the error that the pseudo-left activists make; they don't realize that the wide swath of evangelical puritans will send the fags to hell, anyways.
1a - liberalism.
1b - foucauldianism, however ironically. foucault's history of sexuality is a better read than his theories of power, whether you think the foucauldians are misapplying them or not. foucault would have been rather viciously opposed to a "born this way" argument. but, in the upside down reality he created, he can take the blame for this, too.

what are you?

this is a little out of date, now, but my understanding is that it is still the consensus view amongst actual scientists, even if it is not well received by religious conservatives on the right, or by foucauldian conservatives that mistakenly identify on the left.

http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/ViewPage.aspx?pageId=66

i know what allah says.

i don't fucking care what allah says.

so, do i think being gay is a choice?

i think that's what the science says, yes.

but, i don't care about religion, so it's not a bad thing that's a choice. further, it's completely immoral and tyrannical for a group to impose it's religion on non-believers.

it follows that my position is that homosexuality is a choice, and that this choice should be respected in a free society.

and, that's an actual liberal position on the matter.

and, just to address the old "human nature" canard, if i haven't; and, i'm sure i have.

i was not raised in a judaic or christian household, and i do not frame my worldview within a messianic context. so, i have little interest in what the various semitic religions state about the topic of human nature. but, this is perhaps the oldest political debate in our culture, that is the culture of the west that re-established itself during the renaissance. in a very real sense, it defines what the terms liberal and conservative mean, in the first place.

the conservative conception of human nature may be judaic in ultimate origin, but largely comes from hobbes in the modern usage. what conservatism means in this context is that our nature is fixed, unchanging, and rather brutal - that we are a horrible, depraved species because we are created this way, and can't do anything to change this. the modern interpretation of this manifests itself in a poor understanding of genetics that argues our assholery is in our genes, and is transcendable only by evolutionary processes, which the conservative may or may not accept.

the liberal concept of human nature, on the other hand hand, while greek in ultimate origin, mostly comes from rousseau, which argued in favour of a blank slate, a tabula rasa. to rousseau, we are born blind and helpless, natureless, and are able to be shaped entirely be social convention as we age. the modern interpretation is largely gramscian: our nature is pushed down to us from above, determined by an elite or a vanguard, and mostly outside of our control. this is, in truth, not much of an argument for free will at all.

today, this should be an empirical question, although this is only recently true. the science at this point remains speculative, but mostly leans towards rousseau. stated tersely: we understand today that genes don't code for behaviour, although conservatives have yet to concede the point.

my perspective is fundamentally that of rousseau's - i do not think our nature is fixed, i think we are able to change. free will is complicated, and needs to be understood relativistically. so, why are we such assholes then? because we're taught to be assholes.

so, i do think there is a solution in unlearning our assholery and then stopping the perpetuation of it to future generations. but, i recognize the difficulty underlying this, as there is no real obvious starting point.

and, chances are, i don't or wouldn't like you very much.

again: this attempt to turn these war criminals into victims is a good example of the insidious effect of muslim blood money on the western media.

https://news.sky.com/story/death-and-desperation-as-islamic-state-makes-final-stand-in-last-stronghold-baghouz-11658082

give me communism, or give me death.

if we can get out of this mess somehow, it has to be through radical egalitarianism, which means starting with a concept of equal condemnation and trying to better ourselves together from the ground up. we have to hit rock bottom together.

and, i'm not and really never have been interested in anything else.

no, really.

there was a time when i thought that women were the better sex, but i had those ideas rudely thrown in my face when i entered my early 20s, and i really had to step back from it with a fair amount of force. women are just as evil as men are in every conceivable way. in hindsight, i guess i was upholding nineteenth century sexist conceptions of women as more emotional, more even-handed, and then putting them on a pedestal to emulate; i wanted a society where masculinity would be abolished, where these ideals of femininity would become the social norm. but, reality rudely informed be that that the premise was bullshit - that women are just as horrible as men, and need to be treated with the same levels of contempt and derision and suspicion and scorn.

now, i hate women the same way that i've always hated men; it's an equal-opportunity concept of misanthropy, a just total disinterest in the depravity of humanity, in general.

to an extent, that is what this place is for: to act as a daily reminder that this species is probably not worth saving from itself.

i hate everybody the same, though.

and, again: if a member of the house foreign relations committee comes to you and says "american foreign policy is controlled by jewish spies under the influence of jewish bankers", and your only reaction is "that hurts my feelings", you're really not seeing the issue very clearly.

and, wait a second.

when did ilhan omar criticize israel? i mean, perhaps she did at some point, but that's not the issue at hand.

what she did was claim that american policy is being driven by the influence of jewish money, and directed by jewish spies.

so, to suggest that the issue has anything to do with criticizing israel is a ridiculous red herring.

actually, i think that jeff merkley would be a stronger candidate than bernie sanders.

i understand that bernie is raising a lot of money right now...

.....but i might remind people that that there's still a year and a half before the election, and that's a long time when you're in your late 70s. would-be left-lane candidates shouldn't pack up completely.

this is a more genuinely left-of-center analysis, even if it's just some notes on chomsky's writing.

and, it's the right way that you deal with this.

https://libcom.org/blog/the-death-israeli-lobby-29092008

i'm personally less concerned about the idea that her comments are "offensive" and more focused on the question of whether they're correct or not.

unlike arab oil money, which dominates the think tank circuit, "the jewish lobby" is largely a myth. the fact that it's a racist myth is less important to me than the fact that it's a myth. in terms of voting habits, american jews are overwhelmingly left-leaning. so, it's just factually wrong to go around blaming american foreign policy on the influence of jewish bankers. worse, it serves to distract from actual foreign policy discussions, namely the importance placed by the united states on controlling the oil supply.

if she was actually right, i wouldn't care if people were offended; but, she isn't. chomsky is probably the best source, here. even the iranians know who the big satan is, and who the little satan is. but, when you reduce a complicated foreign policy discussion to the influence of jewish money, you let the actual bad guys off the hook.

so, what i would like to see is for the left to essentially skewer her as an idiot - not a racist, even if she is one, but as a simpleton with a lousy grasp on policy, because that's what i actually get out of listening to her speak: that she's a complete idiot that lives in a conspiratorial fantasy reality and doesn't know what she's talking about, and should be denounced as exactly that.

so, the media ran a poll that told them that the three least desirable qualities in a candidate are being a socialist, being a muslim and being over 75.

the next day, all of the top articles on a google news search for bernie sanders return articles about ilhan omar.

well, my tactic for pulling the carleton site down from the archive.org site seems to have finally worked, thankfully. i got 861 files out of it, which is less than i hoped for, but better than nothing. that gives me some bounds to at least start a double check.

i'm still getting a 403 on the tripod site, and am going to try the same tactic for it.

as mentioned several times, this report was due on mar 2, 2019, which was a saturday. it is now mar 7, 2019.

i briefly spoke to kirsten on the phone today around 14:00 and was informed that the windsor police had requested a time extension. this request was neither communicated to me by the department nor by the oiprd. i consequently made a request that this be communicated to me in writing, and was told that it would only be done so once the director approved or denied the request.

i did not see the use of arguing with kirsten on the phone.

but, what does it mean for the director to approve or deny such a request? the report is already five days past a statutory deadline. if the extension is denied, a report does not magically appear; if it is granted, it is simply a gloss over a failure to meet the appropriate deadline. this is an absurdity.

i reminded the police of the deadline several times, so i cannot be accused of failing to perform due diligence.

the important information that i learned from the brief call is the following:

1) no report exists.
2) the oiprd denied my request to document the fact that no such a report exists.

i am rather baffled by this.

i will consequently be treating the situation as though the report was issued on the 1st, and will be filing with the superior court no later than the 29th of march, unless a report appears on or before that date.

j

the fact that bernie is a jew is not going to help him with black southern voters - and don't be naive about that point.

but, at the end of the day, his biggest problem with the south is going to be that the south does not want the kind of policies he stands for - it wants a candidate that is going to stand up for conservative family values and free market economics.

that is the south, whether it is white or black. and, it's not bernie sanders.

i thoroughly deconstructed this during the primaries, and i agree that the primary factor was age....in the north.

in the south, the fact is that you actually didn't see a lot of difference in the results, based on race - that sanders lost badly to white people, too. it was widely reported that sanders badly lost to black voters in these states, but the media forgot to mention that he lost by roughly the same margins to white people, too.

the conclusion that i drew was actually that the south is just a conservative place, and would prefer to vote for the more right-leaning candidate, regardless of gender or race. further, one might forget that this was true in 2008 as well, when obama ran to the right of clinton in the primaries; in 2008, it was clinton that supported universal health care, for example, and obama that didn't. obama ran as a kind of market-driven pro-business libertarian. or, at least, that was the impression i got from him, from day one. clinton was a communist that wanted universal health care, gender equality and the village to raise your kids.

so, you're going to see these surveys and studies come up and they're going to say "x% of black people think...", and they're going to all make the same fundamental error: they're going to treat the black vote in the united states as a homogeneous whole that is determined by ancestry (because the negro is preconditioned, of course), rather than a fragmented collection of geographically-specific interests.

if you look at the data carefully, what you're actually going to find out is that black people in new york aren't that different than white people in new york, and that black people in atlanta aren't that different than white people there, either - and that if you want predictive surveying, you should be looking at geography, not at identifiable characteristics.

but, i shouldn't have to make the argument too forcefully, because this is the same mistake everybody made in 2016: they looked at national polls, then got confused by the electoral college. the fact that hillary won the popular vote nationwide did not help her win an election, and a study that says that sanders is competitive for black voters across the country doesn't mean he's competitive for black voters in the carolinas.

it is far too early to expect polls to be predictive. but, if you're going to have these discussions, you need to look at local polls, and not national ones.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/7/18216899/bernie-sanders-bro-base-polling-2020-president

he's being very cryptic, here. you need to read between the lines. he's saying one thing to the press, but really speaking past them in saying another thing to voters. it's an interesting example of how the press narrative can exist in a completely parallel reality to the dialogue between politicians and voters...

when he talks about a breakdown in trust, he seems to be acknowledging that he made a mistake in putting a noob in a position that should be reserved for trusted inner circles of the party. and, that is the right lesson - even if the mistake ends up fatal.

do i think that jwr did a good job on assisted dying, on cannabis, on drunk driving? i don't, actually.

but, it sounds like he realizes that the actual problem here is that the pmo is too insular, and ended up mismanaging an issue by not fully understanding the legalities around it, due to not having the expertise to do so. it was in over it's head, on this, and shouldn't have been. the adjustment of consulting more widely is a reasonable, welcome reaction; there have been broad criticisms around this pmo for existing in a bubble, and not reacting to concerns in reality. if the result of this is that the bubble bursts, that is good.

but, we're also going to see who he consults. and, i'll say this: this language is refreshing, because it sounds like something the old liberal party would say.

we'll see.

as an aside, i don't think that reacting firmly and decisively to factions that are trying to hurt you is authoritarian. rather, it's self-defence. this might be the correct adjustment, but he's continuing to broadcast his vulnerability to trojan horse attacks, and if he doesn't address that fundamental weakness, you can expect this will happen again.

in the end, atwood might have had her countries backwards.

welcome to ontario: the iran of the north.

i don't think this is going to get better. not here, anyways.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-pcs-teacher-complaints-misconduct-1.5045707

right. because living a life of privilege and then being appointed a cushy job is just like being thrown in jail for leading an armed revolt against slavery.

flat out stupid comparisons aside, i don't really buy this line. i mean, it's clear enough that she didn't want the job, but her daddy has a big mouth, and i recall him referring to it as a dead-end job back in 2015. it was something like "i'm glad she didn't end up in indigenous affairs, it's the armpit of the cabinet".

my guess is that she was primarily concerned about her career ambitions, even if it came out as not wanting to be the jimmy carl black of the party. token indian is not a path to the pmo.

i took a third year course in indigenous law back in 2013 and wrote an essay on the indian act, which doesn't make me an expert, but does make me more knowledgeable than the average bear. majority opinion in the indigenous community has long been to rework this legislation, rather than abolish it. one manifestation of this was the elder trudeau's famous 1969 white paper (actually written by jean chretien, whose career wasn't hindered by his time in this office), which called for abolition and assimilation - and was promptly met with massive discontent. the paper was pulled.

but, the reality is that trudeau-chretien (they're like an egyptian god, very much fused together into a singular whole) was really just dropping the bullshit; the assimilation policy had been being carried out in stealth since day one. the british never had any other outcome in mind, nor has canada. so, when you talk about abolition, you get this predictable kneejerk fear of assimilation, which is in truth well-grounded in historical fact.

the general consensus is actually that the act needs to be reworked, and used as the framework of a new governing relationship, in order to avoid the collapse of identity that will follow from abolition. and, surely, this framework should not be rethought by a bunch of white people...

if jwr felt so strongly about the indian act, it's curious that she didn't take the opportunity to help rewrite it. the younger trudeau has broadcast an interest in doing so.

perhaps she doesn't actually care so much about it at all.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-services-cabinet-shuffle-wilson-raybould-1.5045932

well, it cost me $212.79, which works out to $15.10/book, but it should all be here by monday, with the exception of the complete robot, which should be here within three weeks.

the complete robot was $36, and i got tricked - i had my default address set to the ups store in detroit, which would have been free shipping. i agreed to the transaction, then got dinged on shipping into canada, which ended up as $15. you'll note it would cost me $10 to get back and forth anyways, but i might have found a cheaper seller. this particular text appears to be scarce in canada, but i could have probably taken it down a little. $5-7 or something.

so, if you take that one out, the average is more like $13.65, which is reasonable, considering everything is shipping.

and, the way we'll do this is that i'll have just read through the asimov texts - that will be the starting point of the blog, a total review of the greater foundation series.

yeah. trying to collect these together in windsor is going to mean spending hours sorting through rubbish sales, goodwill donations, flea markets...

it's not like there aren't book stores here, but they're not the type to stock 50 year old paperbacks - they're either the type to stock rare books or the type to stock the kind of pornography that passes for "art" nowadays. if i'm lucky, i'll find a stack of what i'm looking for at the value village; more likely is that i'm going to end up at chapters, anyways.

what i want is one of those big warehouses that i remember from ottawa, but the closest thing to that is detroit, and if i can't get my report to bring to nexus, i can't get over the border. this hasn't been a concern up to this point because it's been too cold to go anywhere anyways, but if i can't get that resolved before spring, i'm going to have a pretty boring summer - as there is absolutely nothing interesting to do in windsor.

again: the longer this carries on for, the stronger my claim for a s. 6 violation is. but, i'd obviously rather have the situation resolved asap.

anyways. looks like i'm buying a few texts new to start with, at least.

.....except that the kind of used book warehouse that i'm looking for doesn't even seem to exist in windsor.

i've walked by a dozen of these things in detroit. if i could get over sooner than later...

and, bizarrely, we're now four days past due on my oiprd report, with absolutely no response at all - despite repeated requests for clarification.

i'm going to have to make some calls tomorrow morning.

asimov and clarke are dead.

king is old and rich.

so, should i be buying physical books in 2019?

well, i still like to hold a book, and part of the point of this is to rebuild the shelf, after years of neglect. i'm not sure that this overpowers the unnecessary environmental effects of actually buying books at this stage in history, though.

i should probably look at this the same way that i look at clothes, and am increasingly looking at cds: i should be looking towards used books almost exclusively.

am i apprehensive about buying used books online? yeah. it's easy to lose a few pages. and, i should also be seeking to minimize transportation costs.

it's been a while since i've hit the used book stores in windsor.

it looks like it may be nice on sunday.

i mean, it goes both ways though, right.

if philpott & jwr are acting like psycho exes seeking revenge for being dumped, trudeau is taking it like the spineless co-dependent that he actually is, and happily allowing himself to be walked all over in the process.

and, if there's any inherent or implied sexism here, it's this - that trudeau still doesn't seem to think they can hurt him.

he doesn't want to engage in a fight with a girl.

if the intent is to let them hang themselves with their own rope, it may work in the long run, but the pmo had best be prepared to expect to incur some more damage, first - because they're not going to go away quietly. they're looking for blood.

because we live in the time of orwell, it might be necessary to change the language - to stop using the term "feminism", which is supposed to mean equality but doesn't any more, and start using the term "egalitarian", just to get the point across that much more clearly.

and, in an egalitarian society, if you're going to act like these women are acting, you're going to need to take some flak for it - you can't demand a free pass for being a girl.

ok, so this is a lot of bullshit, but i'm not going to waste my time ripping it apart.

one has to assume that gerald butts is still presenting the pmo's preferred narrative, so it makes more sense to analyse it in terms of that desired narrative - they are trying to avoid creating a conflict. they're just going to say nice things in public, let them both sit on the backbenches until they got bored, and try and move on without them.

i think this is a big mistake, as these women are clearly both out to inflict maximum damage for being demoted - like your stereotypical psychotic ex-girlfriend that wants revenge for getting roughly dumped. i mean, i agree that the goal should be to move on as quick as possible, but i think they should be rudely removed from caucus, first, to prevent them from causing any more damage.

but, we'll see what happens.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/03/06/trudeau-was-warned-wilson-raybould-would-connect-the-cabinet-shuffle-to-snc-lavalin-issue.html

i only have three stephen king books left on my shelf.

1) the tommyknockers
2) the bachman books (rage, the long walk, roadwork, the running man)
3) the stand (complete & uncut)

but, i had a big list of them, which also included:

- carrie
- salem's lot
- the shining
- night shift (short stories)
- the dead zone
- firestarter
- cujo
- danse macabre
- different seasons (shawshank redemption, apt pupil, the body, the breathing method)
- pet semetary
- the talisman
- thinner
- skeleton crew (short stories)
- it
- misery
- the dark half
- four past midnight (the langoliers, secret window secret garden, the library policeman, the sun dog)
- needful things
- gerald's game
- dolores clairborne
- nightmares & dreamscapes

i never read christine, and regretted it. the only other thing that's missing here is the dark tower series, which i skipped on purpose. that is otherwise an almost entirely complete stephen king bibliography, up to the end of 1993.

i'm not exaggerating - i went through all of this stuff over the years 92-94. that's like 10,000 pages of stephen king, mostly in the middle of the night. the move from my mom's to my dad's was the summer of 1994, and while there were some perks attached to it, i initially had to give up my all night reading habit because he would actually storm downstairs and tell me go to fucking sleep, whereas my mom was herself usually up all night chain smoking and watching tv. i also became much more interested in the guitar after mid-94.

am i going to buy all of those books? yeah. and, i'm going to move through this sequentially.

i don't know how much these cost, nowadays. you used to be able to get them at the drug store for $5. let's see what i can get shipped to me. and, i'll have to hit the local used stores afterwards.

but, i'm going to start with asimov, because that's more primordial for me. even as i'm pointing out that i don't remember doing a single book report from grades 7-9, i know i did a book report on the foundation series in grade five. i was in a split 5/6 class, so i didn't have english class in grade six (and didn't have math class in grade five). in hindisght, it is baffling, but my mom freely sent me to that school solely because it had a large yard. yeah. the foundation series was recommended to me by the teacher, and i ended up reading a bunch of his other stuff. asimov died in 1992 with a massive bibliography, but i remember these specifically:

- the complete robot
- caves of steel
- naked sun
- robots of dawn
- robots and empire
- the stars, like dust
- currents of space
- pebble in the sky
- prelude to foundation
- forward the foundation <----did not read this one
- foundation
- foundation and empire
- second foundation
- foundations edge <----- that was the book report
- foundation and earth

so, i read through that over 1992-1993. i should collect it all, and review it all as a starting point. all i have right now is foundation and empire, and a book of short stories called the martian way.

what else did i mention?

arthur c. clarke.

i had:

- 2001: a space odyssey
- 2010: odyssey two
- 2061: odyssey three
- songs of distant earth
- tales from planet earth

my grandmother bought me these books by accident, starting around 91. she was trying to buy me greek mythology, to have me understand my name sake. i don't think she ever read any homer herself, nor had my mother, but she was trying to give me a story about jason and the argonauts, by giving me what she thought was the odyssey. d'oh? well, i enjoyed them, nonetheless, so she kept buying them. i eventually read both some plato and homer in high school, as well as some aristophanes in first year. fuck aristotle.

the only one i have left is songs of distant earth, which helpfully is dated to the christmas of 1993. so, we can go through that one together for an early '94 post.

bradbury.

- the martian chronicles
- farenheit 451 <----- not actually, but if i'm going to do this...
- a medicine for melancholy
- r is for rocket
- i sing the body electric
- dinosaur tales

i remember the bradbury a lot less. i know i at least flipped through these ones.

i do remember some specific hg wells:

- time machine
- island of dr moreau
- war of the worlds

and also some jules verne:

- journey to the centre of the earth
- twenty thousand leagues under the sea

the wells & verne were probably the result of the influence of my aunt on my mother and grandmother, who was an english major at mcgill in this period.

i'm going to push the clancy, koontz & rand forward a few years, because my memory of it is specifically connected to my dad's house. there was some crichton, too.

there would have also been some twain read over this period, again thanks to nana:

- tom sawyer (daa-da da-daaaa)
- prince & pauper
- huck finn

what else?

we'll skip the shell silverstein. that sidewalk has ended.

i was given a copy of james and the giant peach, but i...i want to say i was too old for it, but i actually probably wasn't. i felt too old for it. frankly, i thought it was a stupid thing to waste one's time with, and didn't bother with it very far. i remember reading through about half of it one night when held physically hostage by my grandmother due to a babysitting task due to not having anything else to do, and i just found myself ridiculing roald dahl at the age of, like, 9. i never found myself immersed in fantasy novels - never went for the tolkien or the lucas or really any of that stuff. as soon as you started bringing in, like, elves and shit, i lost interest.

the purpose of this post is to build a list, and we will probably leave a lot of this behind. i'm going to start with asimov, check prices, and move from there.

the plan that hoskins helped write in ontario was a patchwork, and that's what we should expect from the liberals on this. even so, this is an election ploy - they'll run on it because they know it's populist, but they don't like it, and they're going to try to backtrack on it after the election, and might not do it at all. this is now a libertarian party, at it's core.

the ndp might run on a universal system, but they've never held federal office, and it's unclear how seriously you can take them on it.

if we look at the history of how we got universal health care in canada, it happened in stages and was in the end largely driven by the liberals, who wanted to emulate the nhs in britain. the ndp were a push factor, but the tommy douglas story is actually largely a myth; the liberals wanted this, and they pushed for it, and we wouldn't have gotten it, otherwise. what the ndp actually wanted, and had in saskatchewan, looked more similar to obamacare than single-payer; it was the liberals that pushed the nhs model, which was churchillian in origin, and what we ended up with. in fact, even the conservatives of the time (who were old tories, a very different political idea than the post-thatcher neo-liberal market conservatives of today) supported it based on the churchillian argument - universal healthcare in canada is a rare example of something that the entire spectrum supported: it was liberal policy, based on a british tory model, and supported by the ndp.

the best way to get an effective system in place is probably to angle for a minority. what we want is for the liberals to need ndp support to pass the budget. then, you get a deal.

a majority of either type could very well lead to a lesser system, or a broken promise altogether.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/morneau-budget-2018-pharmacare-1.4555186

that script finished this morning. still nothing. so, i've got it running a second time,

this was just sent to tripod.

until recently, old tripod sites like mine (which was active from 1997-1999) were accessible via archive.org. i vaguely recall reading a newspaper article a few years ago that explained that you had ordered a take down of these pages.

the archive.org server is currently producing a 403 error when you make a request to download this site, which indicates that the data is still there, but that general access is being denied. attempts to have this clarified by the people at archive.org are ongoing, but it may be difficult to take to somebody on the server side. as i'm sure you're aware, this is a non-profit with limited resources.

my end goal is that i'd like archive.org to grant me access to my old site, even if only for long enough to pull it down.

my request is for you to help my understand the conversation you had with archive.org around your takedown request, so that i can address the situation with them properly.

this is a loose end that i intended to have dealt with much more quickly. i don't have a good answer right now, but i also don't see much more that i can do. i'm going to have to try and suck some of the data down from the site manually, even as i try to get the server to react. the problem is that there's 45 snapshots, each with hundreds or thousands of documents. it would literally take months to do this...

still no reaction from the cops. i sent them a third email last night, slightly escalated to increase the recipient list.

i'm going to focus on these loose ends for the day, and see if there's a response by the afternoon. if not, i'm going to have to get somebody on the phone tomorrow morning.

i should be started on the journal soon. promise.

some stranger from youtube sent me a stupid email, and it was really just a pointless troll, but it kind of triggered me.

i never got a dna test. i didn't want one. it wouldn't have mattered; we had a talk, before hand. the intent from the start was that i would act as a donor, not a parent, by mutual consent. i was very careful; it wouldn't have happened without that agreement. but, i was supposed to be around, too. as a family friend...as a secret...

it was foolish, but it happened. she thought she was strong enough, and i let myself believe it, because she wanted me to.

i could have made more of an effort at the start, but it was also important that i kept a distance, as getting too close would have upset the balance. i maybe tripped over that trapeze line.

but, the gender transition turned out to be a red line; unbeknownst, but pretty rigid.

there wouldn't be anything else i could even say, at this point.

canada did recently alter it's involvement in iraq, but the younger trudeau has not put up the kind of resistance that his father did, or chretien did. if there's something to the observation, it could explain canada's insistence on supporting the american line in venezuela....and potentially in cuba. this otherwise seems to not be in our interest.

but, i might argue the opposite point: that if trudeau is being removed, it's a part of the same policy that is trying to remove maduro.

and, as canadians, we might have to get used to losing what was at one time a privileged status in the hemisphere.

there's been big demographic shifts on both sides of the border; this history of being sibling successors of the british empire is increasingly no longer true for either one of us. as the united states becomes more hispanic, and canada becomes more asian, we're going to end up as the third wheel, as we just did in the nafta talks.

i have no evidence, or anything. just thinking out loud.

but, the ambassador seems a little out of place at the table.

the theory is that trudeau was turfed for opposing star wars, while chretien was thrown out over iraq.

it's an open secret in canada that trudeau's father was removed by reagan, and that chretien was removed by bush. diefenbaker also lost an election that some observers have suggested was triggered by jfk, but that is not the same kind of thing.

the republicans simply don't like the liberal party of canada. at all.

if the caucus were to pass a non-confidence motion, it would trigger an election.

generally, true caucus revolts in canada result in the formation of new parties rather than the removal of a sitting leader. examples include the conscription crisis of 1917 when many liberals joined the unionist government and the mulroney collapse of the early 1990s when the reform and bloc split off from the conservative party. while canada has historically had two major parties, it is also a multi-party system with either three or four or five stable factions (depending on who you ask).

that said, there are many examples of prime ministers resigning. in fact, harper was the anomaly, in that sense - chretien, mulroney, trudeau and pearson all resigned while in office. if he wins a few more elections, the younger trudeau will no doubt get pushed out, eventually.

what is unprecedented would be a resignation on such quick order. there hasn't even been a second throne speech, yet.

that said, i don't expect trudeau to have much of a chance against a real uprising, nor for it to need to splinter the party. trudeau has at times stated things like "i was offered this job", making it clear that he knows where he really exists in the party hierarchy. if the party executive decides it's time to move on, justin will have his speech ready within hours. in fact, they'll no doubt already have written it.

but, i don't actually think that this is a caucus revolt, at this time. i don't know what it is, yet - but it's not a revolt.

a question i'd like to throw out there that deserves some serious contemplation is this: why is the us ambassador deeply involved in the discussions at this point?

i suggested that it wasn't clear if this was a purge or a counter-purge. but, there is a third option.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/could-the-liberal-caucus-turf-justin-trudeau-if-they-wanted-maybe-but-not-easily

just to have it written down here.

this appears to have been the first site, launched probably in early 1998. it was very basic - it just held some simple html files.

http://members.tripod.com/~inri_2/

archive.org DOES have this site, but it's marked to hidden. and i don't know what to do about that...

the next thing that appears is a crosswinds site, initially at:

www.crosswinds.net/ottawa-hull/~inri/

and later at

www.crosswinds.net/~inri/

i had some kind of ralph wiggum video game or something up; i can barely even remember. it was funny. besides that, it was the same collection of simple files - a cd list, a few things about some music projects, some links to mp3.com and not much more. this was also in early 1998.

archive.org does not appear to have this archived at all. i'll need to see if i can contact the crosswinds people...

the third site that came up was at fortune city, i believe in 1999. it just carried on.

http://www.fortunecity.com/business/staff/715/main.htm

i was able to get a very small amount of that from archive.org, and think that these servers are dead. the site had been long destroyed by 2012.

the site moved to the carleton servers from there in mid 2001 and stayed there until 2006.

the site has largely been offline since 2006, but has shown up in pieces here and there. i was mostly posting to facebook from about 2009-2013, when the current system took over.

if anybody has ideas on how to find those archives, i'd be grateful.

a 503 technically means it's busy, try again later.

but, that's clearly bs.

nonetheless, let's try this...

for /l %%x in (1, 1, 99999) do (
   echo %%x
   wayback_machine_downloader -s http://chat.carleton.ca/~jparent2
)

yeah, so, i'm convinced that the tool i'm using is working, and it's the server that isn't. 

ugh.

1) the carleton site gives out a 503, indicating the traffic isn't being allowed by the server. but, i can access it from the web portal.
2) the tripod site gives out a 403, indicating that i'm not allowed to access it - which is also what happens when i search from the web portal.
3) the crosswinds site gives out a 404, telling me that it isn't there at all. that's fine.

if i go to something like nirvana.com, though, it lets me download the snapshots.

so, everything is working the way it's supposed to.

the error is clearly site specific.

and, i've yet to find a .ca site in canada that works - not even government sites.

canada.com works.

cbc doesn't. the main carleton site doesn't. the pmo doesn't. canada.ca doesn't.

the bbc works. i tried some commercial american sites, and it's fine.

so, it's clear that the server is allowing some content to be downloaded and is denying it for others.

i'm a prison abolitionist because i'm an anarchist.

but, i recognize that we will need hospitals to house violent offenders and mentally ill people, after we've done away with prisons.

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

i'm a little further left than your average person. i get that.

but, i actually want to abolish the entire concept of criminal law, in favour of a purely tort based system, which is actually the system that the english used before the romans showed up. i fully reject the concept of state punishment. what i accept are the ideas of restitution and the ideas of community safety.

so, jails should not be places where people are sent for punishment, but rather places where we put people that we think pose a threat to public safety that cannot be ameliorated via reintegrative policies. it follows that jails should essentially be hospitals.

almost everything else should be dealt with via a systems of fines, reintegration policies and community service.

so, i'm not cherry-picking on this, actually. i mean, yeah, it's how the system works. but, i'm a liberal on crime - and there's a consistency on the point.

we have two perspectives, here.

1. punish the fuckers to the full extent, with the full understanding that it will have consequences, for the purposes of holding to a set of principles. this perspective demands fire & brimstone, and doesn't care what happens, so long as the evildoers are properly smitten. then they call that "justice".

2. look at the situation critically, and try to come up with a compromise that best suits everybody's interests. this perspective allows for leniency and second chances, while insisting that enumerated damages be compensated for, and lessons be properly learned. this is better referred to using terms like "restitution".

which option is "conservative", and which one is "liberal"?

we're collectively failing this test...

we don't know our right from left, any more.

listen.

i'm not interested in a principled, ethical moralism that is going to result in upholding some abstract set of rules to everybody's detriment.

what i'm interested in is pragmatic, responsible government that is willing to bend the rules in order to put forward a positive agenda.

tell the puritans to vote conservative.

and not to forget to tip at the collection plate, either.

the easiest thing to do, i think, is just to send repeated requests for a while and see what happens.

i'm convinced the waybackmachine is running an extortion operation through however many levels of abstraction.

i asked them to send me my mirrors, and they told me they don't do tech support and sent me to a paid service. that is legally equivalent to stealing a barbeque off of your front lawn and telling you to pay the mafia boss if you want it back. that's my property. there's an absolute legal obligation to return it immediately upon request.

they seem to be maintaining some kind of distance from these companies, but i'm calling bullshit on that - i'd be certain that they're operated by people close to archive.org, if not people that work directly for it.

there is a 0% chance i'm paying anybody for this. so, i went looking for some clis ( i found one over ruby, which i had to install, and one over python, which i had installed for the appspot site), and i found a constant - the server reacts well to government sites like dol.gov but throws out 503s on everything else, including big sites like the cbc.

the server is clearly blocking requests.

so, what do you do? i have a tool that seems to work, but is being blocked by the server. i own this material; that's clearly theft. do i call the cops or file a lawsuit?

will it crispr?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/second-man-seems-to-be-free-of-aids-virus-after-transplant-1.4322367

like jwr, she was actually a terrible minister who got demoted for good reason, and i'm not sad to see her go. i have rightly criticized her repeatedly in this space; she should also be immediately removed from caucus for immense back-stabbing and absolute dereliction. while my confidence in trudeau has never been great, i lost confidence in jane philpot many months ago.

the lottery, for example. the party had to backtrack hard on it. her comments as indigenous minister were often beneath contempt. and, she's partly responsible for the far too conservative assisted-dying bill that the courts are going to strike down.

what we have are two underperforming rookie ministers that are ganging up on a weak prime minister for getting fired from jobs they probably shouldn't have been given in the first place, and the actual lesson to learn from the fiasco: while diversity in cabinet shouldn't be such a hard thing to construct nowadays, it should not overrule merit or seniority.

the people that should really be laughing right now are the likes of joyce murray and other long term party loyalists that got passed over because they weren't the right identity.

the hard truth is that the party wouldn't be in this silly mess if it had simply made more intelligent staffing decisions to begin with.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-read-jane-philpotts-resignation-letter-to-justin-trudeau/

the idiot probably wants to bring her back into cabinet.

i am absolutely baffled that jwr is not only still in caucus, but is actually running in 2019 as a liberal.

the incompetence in the pmo is just staggering.

what trudeau should do is go to her seat in the commons, hold her hand and escort her to the conservative party benches.

"here you go. these are your people. this is where you belong."

and, that is not merely hyperbole - it is ideological, as that is the essential crux of the matter at hand. the problem here is that she found herself unable to overpower her internalized conservative value systems, and mentally crossed the aisle as a result of it.

if she needs some help transporting her body to the same place that her brain exists in, the pmo should step in and help her out.

this shouldn't be an issue of resignation; it should be an issue of expulsion.

and, don't be shocked when trudeau ends up slaughtered by his own foolish naivete around making nice with the noble savages.

so, i sent an email to the oiprd directly, bypassing the "co-ordinator" i'd been using.

i'll try to call tomorrow, if i get no response.

for right now, i've found some snapshots of my carleton site that takes me back to mid-2001:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010616043437/http://chat.carleton.ca/~jparent2/

that would have been the summer after first year, and i'm willing to believe there was nothing there before that.

the site gets increasingly complicated for many years...

there was something at crosswinds before that, something at fortune cities and i think something at geocities, as well, going back to i think 1998.

pulling all this down should help me date things a little better.

this is the right way to do this.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/03/politics/rand-paul-trump-national-emergency-declaration/index.html

the exemption is not carte blanch to discriminate any way that you want, which is how religious groups often want to interpret it.

"i have religious freedom! i can smite my enemies!"

nope. not at all. quite the opposite - these rules exist primarily to stop people from being oppressed by religion. that's really what a bill of rights is, a way to stop puritanical cromwellianism, and by extension any other kind of fundamentalism. but, we live in the time of orwell, so ideas are often mangled and manipulated into their contradictions, and the neo-liberal concept of "religious freedom" is a prime example of it. thankfully, our judicial branch is still operating, even if our legislative branch is slowly caving in on itself.

a religious exemption in the law has to be very narrowly defined as intended to protect the purpose of an organization. there has to be a deeply persuasive argument that the charter should be suspended. and, it is for that reason that the argument almost always fails....

http://www.thechristianleftblog.org/blog-home/premarital-sex-is-it-a-sin-or-not

this is the specific clause in ontario, which is not bc, but nonetheless:

Special employment  

24. (1) The right under section 5 to equal treatment with respect to employment is not infringed where,

 (a) a religious, philanthropic, educational, fraternal or social institution or organization that is primarily engaged in serving the interests of persons identified by their race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, creed, sex, age, marital status or disability employs only, or gives preference in employment to, persons similarly identified if the qualification is a reasonable and bona fide qualification because of the nature of the employment;

(b) the discrimination in employment is for reasons of age, sex, record of offences or marital status if the age, sex, record of offences or marital status of the applicant is a reasonable and bona fide qualification because of the nature of the employment;

(c) an individual person refuses to employ another for reasons of any prohibited ground of discrimination in section 5, where the primary duty of the employment is attending to the medical or personal needs of the person or of an ill child or an aged, infirm or ill spouse or other relative of the person;

(d) an employer grants or withholds employment or advancement in employment to a person who is the spouse, child or parent of the employer or an employee;

(e) a judge or master is required to retire or cease to continue in office on reaching a specified age under the Courts of Justice Act;

(f) a case management master is required to retire on reaching a specified age under the Courts of Justice Act;

(g) the term of reappointment of a case management master expires on the case management master reaching a specified age under the Courts of Justice Act; or

(h) a justice of the peace is required to retire on reaching a specified age under the Justices of the Peace Act. R.S.O. 1990, c. H.19, s. 24 (1); 1999, c. 6, s. 28 (11); 2001, c. 32, s. 27 (5); 2005, c. 5, s. 32 (14); 2005, c. 29, s. 1 (2).

....and it is easy enough to see that a commission or judge would rule pretty easily that an individual's personal sex life has nothing to do with the nature of the employment.

an example of a situation where this clause would apply would be in telling a jew he can't teach at a christian school, because he doesn't believe in the resurrection of christ.

who you fuck, and how often, doesn't have any kind of causal connection on your ability to work in a library, or whether you identify as a member of a faith or not. it's just flat out discrimination - plain and simple.

this article is terribly written, though.

you have to remember that canada's constitution came into force in 1982, so there were no charter rights before then. the charter is retroactive, but it took a while to kick in. citing a 1984 case as precedent is consequently exceedingly bad form. what your supposed to do in a situation like this is point out that the issue "hasn't been tested in the charter era".

that said, i'm not sure that it hasn't been, and i disagree with the opinion provided by the commission. this would be more along the lines of an issue that has minimal amounts of case law around it due to it being so exceedingly rare, but we're also talking about a broad mindset, here, and the idea of religious exemption has generally not stood up to courts in canada, when challenged. i can't know what they were thinking from such a great distance, but it sounds like the commission didn't want to open a can of worms. my own legal opinion would be that any legislation that provides for a religious exemption of this sort would be ruled unconstitutional, if tested - and that's an issue that civil liberties unions should really be trying to pick up on, if there are laws in existence with language of that explicit nature. it's nice to see that alberta is addressing the issue, at least.

i'd suggest actually reading the article on the buterman case, which i've read about before. the offered settlement was an appropriate remedy, if maybe a little low. i'd think something like five years of salary is more appropriate than $80,000, which is probably in the 1-2 year range. but, the applicant didn't bring the case to commission, and it was ruled as abandoned. so, to suggest that the case was lost is both disingenuous and wrong, and the settlement itself is reason to think that the lawyers involved assumed there was reason to think he'd have won.

the trinity case is a better example of a ruling in the charter era in canada, and should be consulted as existing precedent for similar issues, not the pre-modern 1984 case.

i would encourage ms. kraats to file.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/christian-school-forces-resignation-over-community-standards-policy-1.5035804

yeah, that's absurd.

i don't think you can rehire her, but you can write her a large check, and cut off funding to the board.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/christian-school-forces-resignation-over-community-standards-policy-1.5035804

if we're seriously talking about this, there is a tradition in the liberal party to alternate between francophone and anglophone leaders, but it hasn't been a very successful strategy since the 80s. since pearson, you've got:

- trudeau (francophone). pm, from...i think it was 68-84....
- john turner (anglophone). lost badly to the francophone mulroney. twice.
- chretien (francophone). pm from 1993-2003.
- paul martin (anglophone). pm from 2003-2006, then lost to harper, partly due to declining support in quebec.
- stephane dion (francophone). dion was badly smeared for his poor english language skills, but was competitive in 2008, holding harper to a minority.
- ignatieff (anglophone). he was completely annihilated in 2011, even losing to the ndp in quebec. this was the worst showing in the liberal party's history,
- trudeau (francophone). pm, 2015-?.

the tory media will no doubt recoil at the thought, as will certain aspects of the liberal party establishment, but i think that dion would have bettered his 2008 results if he were still at the helm in 2011. i think there's little question that he would have held off the dreaded harper majority, at least.

the liberals are consequently in somewhat of a tough spot, in terms of picking a successor. they're supposed to pick an anglophone - but it's an easy prediction to make that, if they do, they'll end up in opposition.

it would probably be a better idea to let an older politician like goodale or bennett take over as an interim leader, and then run a convention.

freeland is toxic. & mckenna is no doubt in trouble in her own riding.

but, a caucus revolt is also defined by it's leaders. we haven't seen any fracture points erupt in public, so it's hard to tell what's going on.

i mentioned a while back that it wasn't clear to me if we were witnessing a revolt by the chretien faction (the old party, which was borderline social democratic) or the continued primacy of what should now be called the ignatieff faction (the neo-liberal branch, of which freeland seems to currently be the face of). i'm still not sure what the truth of it is, but if there are divisions happening, they will present themselves in time.

https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2019/03/03/who-will-lead-if-the-liberals-toss-trudeau.html

if he tried something like this nowadays, he'd get doxxed.

and, yes - i'll be back to rebuilding the discography soon enough, too.

and, here's a little bit of lost canadiana that i remember very fondly from the period, as well.

i mean, you would have called this "college rock" or "jangle rock" at the time. but, it's a beatles song.

and, it's what i was as a young person - not a grunge kid or a punk or a goth or a metal kid. i liked pop/rock with elaborate or orchestral touches.

it's 3 am.

you're in the back seat of a car somewhere in nowhere, pennsylvania, on your way home from florida.

it's snowing through the pitch black.

and, this song that you've never heard before comes on.

"what was that, tony?"

"i think it was pink floyd."

"do you know the name of the song?"

"no, actually. ask your mom when she wakes up."

i've otherwise got the media i have organized, which is not a lot - a couple of king books, some arthur c. clarke and a few records from u2, rem, bryan adams, peter gabriel, gowan, genesis and the barenaked ladies.

i left a lot of books at my mom's place when i moved out, and sold a bunch more before i went to bc. as i've now sorted through everything, the only thing left is to hope i can get something from the carleton archives, or a fortunecity mirror or something. i know there was a list, i just don't have it.

if i'm going to rebuild the books, i'll need to go through the king, pick up a bunch of science fiction (a fair amount of asimov, a bunch of clarke, some bradbury), some tom clancy, some dean koontz, some mark twain and, yes, some ayn rand. my dead uncle is responsible for that. they told me they found him in the bathroom of a hostel in victoria, dead of an apparent aneurysm; i assumed it was drug related, but that was never confirmed, and i never asked. he was in his early 40s. selfishness as a virtue can bite you in the end, huh?

i'm sure i'll remember some more...

music wise, i'll need to get some michael jackson. what's the status on buying a michael jackson record in 2019? is it alright if it's just going to his...well, it's not even actually his kid, is it? i dunno. see, i got into mj through weird al, though. and, i lost interest after dangerous, for obvious reasons. but, my ten-year old self was really much more interested in black or white than nirvana. we grow quickly at that age, though.

i also had a bit of a bon jovi phase, which i'll defend on the basis that they weren't as bad as their peers. if the criticism is that bon jovi were hair metal, it's actually a bit off the mark - they weren't this pompous, ridiculous, materialistic, nihilistic marketing behemoth, but rather a kind of working class band from new jersey, with a contemporary sound. they were at least as punk rock as springsteen, anyways. and, they actually had a kind of synth pop center, too, which is where i really came from - tears for fears, gabriel, genesis.

i guess that's the missing part of it, stuff my dad or uncle dubbed me. i had a cassette with a day at the races on one side and a night at the opera on the other. i had beatles tapes, genesis tapes, and an out of place dub of animals that it took me years to get into, because it wasn't what i was looking for. i was very young - 8 or 9 - when somebody at chez decided to toss on one of these days for a lark, at like 2:00 am, while i was in the car on the way back from a road trip with my step-father. i was pretty instantly intrigued. the announcer mentioned it was floyd, but didn't elaborate - it was presumably not necessary. tony, to his immense discredit, couldn't identify the track, either. there was a copy of delicate sound of thunder around, but it was missing the second side. so, i asked around for years trying to figure out what the song was. the dead uncle decided i was describing the vocal effects in sheep and dubbed me a copy of animals, which i just found a little too meandering at that age - it hit me like a grateful dead record, just not enough movement for a young mind. my dad never had a copy of meddle, either. it wasn't for years that i found it in a torrent...

"aha! there's that crazy bass part!"

anyways. i have my work for the next little while set aside. it's time to start doing it.

the first post is going to be in the "dear diary, so much has happened..." format. and, we'll go from there. i might be back into the stand by the end of the night.....

this is written like a pravda piece.

ugh.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/venezuela-canada-cuba-1.5040857

you know, i'm racking my brain for actual books that i read in grades 7 and 8 - and even 9 - and i'm not able to come up with anything. i remember being given photographed handouts and asked questions around an ability to prove very basic comprehension, or being asked to read short texts and then produce an opinion piece around it. but, i don't think anybody ever handed out books to us and told us to read them.

i went to both elementary school and high school under the rae/peterson curriculum (harris won when i was in high school, and didn't succeed in changing the curriculum until the year after i'd left), and i'm learning just now that it was kind of an experiment. i did not receive any actual marks until grade 10; my high school transcript, which i still have, simply states "completed" for grade 9. i have records of standardized testing where i scored in the 95th-99th percentile, but i don't have grades for these years.

what i remember about the report cards is that they had a long list of criteria, and you'd be evaluated on a points system, with 1 the highest and i think 6 the lowest. this was just the teacher's arbitrary, completely subjective opinion. i remember getting lots of 1s in english and math, 2s or 3s in phys ed and some pretty low marks in the "shows respect for authority" and "works well with others" categories. even my university profs would have scrawled "does not work well with others" on my report cards if given the chance, and i'm not particularly embarrassed about it - i don't work well with others, and i don't want to, either.

i'm not even sure i can pick out much of anything of shape in these years really at all. we were split into classes that taught core subjects, and then shipped into different rooms for specific topics. so, i remember having a science teacher, a french teacher, a geography teacher, a music teacher, a phys ed teacher, a home ec teacher, a history teacher and then a kind of general "grade 7 teacher" that was tasked with everything else, which i guess is math, religion and english. but, that really meant that the curriculum was focused on the peripheral subjects due to the more rigid scheduling, and that math & english were largely unstructured babysitting periods with a lot of pointless busy work. when we went to geography class, or phys ed, we were there for a short period with a defined curriculum; when we went back to the general class room, the teacher could organize it any way they wanted to, or not at all, which was often the actual reality.

so, the system put more of a priority on learning french or geography than it did on learning math or english. we did regular spelling bees in grade 8 english class. and, i don't really remember taking math in grade 7 at all. grade 9 was more structured, in the sense that there were separate math and english classes, but i still didn't get graded, and i still don't remember reading any actual books. i explicitly remember reading shakespeare, but we read it orally in the classroom. and, there's a text called the chrysalids that i can't otherwise place that i might drop into grade 9.

of course, there's some possibility that i don't remember any reading projects because i was so efficient with them. there's a few texts from later in high school that i remember putting off until the last minute and then reading through in an afternoon. there's certainly some possibility that i just devoured it so violently that it never really got digested. but, the thing is that i liked reading, so i don't know why that would have been true.

i think the truth is that i was mostly baby sat all the way to the end of grade 9, and consequently don't have a lot to report on.

if i remember something, i'll insert it, but i think the way we're going to do this is that i'll be doing independent reading over these years, instead.

i think this is grade two. i switched from st bernard's to uplands for the start of grade three, so it's either one or two.

and, because i didn't carry on my schooling with these kids, i actually don't recognize any of them - except the two girls i'm standing beside, strangely enough. i don't know who arranged us, probably the teacher, but i got a choice spot, didn't i? the blonde actually ended up at the high school i went to, and gave me mixed signals for years - i was never sure, so i just kept a distance. the thing is that she grew up into a very, very shy teenager, so i could never figure it out, and felt the consequences of getting it wrong could be kind of crushing, for her. she seemed like an ornament you don't want to sit on - and i state that with as much gender egalitarianism as i can muster; she was legitimately delicate, right down to a falsetto voice, and i truly feared breaking her. i haven't seen her in years.

i liked the brunette, might even say we were friends, but i never saw her again after i switched schools.

i don't remember any of the other kids, here. at all.

that's my cousin erin and i, who are about the same age.

erin and i were inseparable for a time, but she moved away to saskatchewan when we were toddlers and i haven't seen her since.

that's my best friend gabriella, from chile. early 1985, judging from the candles on the cake.

there came a point where gabriella's dad decided i shouldn't talk to her any more on account of the (mis)perceived gender mismatch.
.

this is the day i finished in the top 10 for the....i think it was 5000 m....at the cities. it was the longest long run. there were like 500 kids running.

the truth is that i went to an absurdly small school (there were six grade six students in my graduating class), and these positions were kind of just handed out at random. i don't remember competing for the spot, and nobody expected me to compete at the meet.

but, even at that age, i spent a lot of time bicycling. what happened is that i jogged with the pack all the way around and then sprinted past 200 people on the final lap. it was clear to everybody, including me, that if i had sprinted a little earlier, or jogged a little harder, i would have easily competed for a medal. and, i actually think that if i had spent any time training at all i could have actually won outright.

*shrug*

today, i'm more concerned about maintaining my health than competing in bourgeois competitions. and, while i wouldn't have articulated myself that way at the time, the truth is i felt the same way then, too.

it would have been the spring of '93, so it just missed the cut-off.

this is an undated shot of me doing a killer thomas pynchon impression.

'92, i think. maybe '91. it's just a little too old.

and, this is the corner unit i inhabited in the public housing project / ghetto that i grew up in.

my dad built that fence in about 1990 or so. still there, apparently.

i have dozens of pictures from a bike trip back that i took in 2012. we'll go over this in the right space...

and, this was at about the same time - and key, as it was the actual gateway into punk rock, for me.

listen. i was 12/13.

the pivot was actually this.

i'd have never listened to anything this loud before this point.

but, i decided that this wasn't stupid, and it kind of was a mind-opener. so, that's mid-94. i need to get there.

so, here's the new link:

https://thejournalofj.blogspot.com/

which is also on the side...

and, we'll say that dad got a scanner for christmas.

so, i've finally reached a pivot point, and there's going to be a slight change of plans.

i have now copied every file that i can find - from laptops, external drives, usb keys, cds, dvds, etc - on to the new external drive, and organized everything by year. it's very rough, and there's a lot of overlap, but it is all in roughly the correct place. so, the next thing ought to be to restart on the rebuild, and quickly run through 2013-2016, with the intent to get back to where i was.

....except that i'm deciding that the process is incomplete, in the greater context, and want to rewind back to 1993. 1993!? yes - 1993. and, why 1993?

i started in mid-1996 for a couple of reasons. it was early 2016 when i decided to switch directions, my first demos were from the summer of 1996 and my earliest memories of internet access were from mid-1996. a lot of things added up with that. but, at the same time, i was picking up a story halfway, one that had undefined bounds. now that the bounds are better defined - the current story begins in mid-2013 when i moved to windsor, meaning the alter-reality ends in mid-2013, with an intended completion date of mid-2033 -  it makes sense to pull the alter-reality back to 1993, to allow for some symmetry in the process.

that would mean the alter-reality will run from the summer of 1993 to the summer of 2013, in the end.

there's some other reasons for this. the earliest files i have are dated to 1995, but i have pictures going back to the 80s, and i wanted to find some way to work some of these things in to the story. starting in 1993 lets me do that. i also wanted to do reviews of records and books from 1993-1996, which was actually the most formative years of my life - starting over again in mid 1993 means i'm starting in the summer between grade 6 and 7, which is of course right before i went to junior high school. if we're going to do a portrait of this artist, that's a better place to start.

but, if i didn't get online until 1996, at the earliest, how am i going to have a journal from 1993?

what i'm going to do is split it off into a separate blog that will run strictly from 1993-1996. i will be sorting through some papers over the christmas break of 1996 and find an old journal and decide it would be neat to put it online. so, the mechanism is that i'll be typing in a journal that i had already written up by hand. when it's done, it will exist in a standalone file.

what that means is that i'm going to be thrusting myself back into the alter-reality almost immediately; i just need to spend another day or two organizing all of these files, first, before i get to posting to the new journal, dated to july 15, 1993. i'll push forward with this as i push forward with the rebuild, until it connects back together in early 1996.

i'm going to try and be as honest as i can as i run through this. i have the benefit of a lot of hindsight, and i'm not going to pretend i can be a 12 year-old again, but people go through a lot at that age, and i'm going to try and get down as much as i can. some of these things will no doubt surprise you. it's been so long, that i may even end up surprising myself.

i am obviously a different person today than i was then, as we all are.

but, in a lot of surface ways, not much has changed - i spent most of the summer between grades six and seven awake at odd hours, in my room reading, specifically through the stephen king catalogue, iirc. i had no friends at all over this period, as i prepared to go to a new school that none of them were going to go to. i'll have to start off with a broad statement around that. i was living with my mother during this period, which is something i haven't talked much about. i played some guitar, but was not really into alternative rock music yet - i listened to a lot of what was called "college rock" during those years, as well as a lot of pop music. there was no computer around, but i had a big tv in my room that was either tuned to muchmusic or to conan. we'll have to go through the process of moving from mom to dad in mid '94. so, that was life and how to live it, and where we're starting over again with this...

i wouldn't be doing this if i didn't think it was going to be worthwhile.

i think that what the russians really want is to get netanyahu out of israel.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/russia-wants-to-get-iran-out-of-syria-netanyahu-says-after-putin-meet-1.6978647

yeah, those poor genocidal thugs that were involved in the most dangerous organization the world has seen since the nazis. awww.

listen: nobody should be surprised by this ridiculous display of "humanitarian concern" for these koran-thumping monsters, given the dominance of arab money in the media. if there was any question about the kind of influence that gulf oil money has in london, ottawa and washington, this ridiculous display of concern for what is truly absolute scum should eliminate any doubts about it. if you can't make sense of this, if you think it's absurd, that's your answer - follow the influence through the media, the think tanks, the institutes, the lobbyists and the banks back to the dirty, blood-soaked, muslim oil money that commands it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-47421627/the-people-fleeing-the-end-of-the-islamic-state-in-syria

you kids nowadays probably don't even know what i'm talking about.

this was supposed to be a kids show, at the time.