and, likewise, i'm going to ignore the framing around this recent polling and just look at the data, however scant it may be. here's our trend line from campaign research, which is conducting "online research" around voting intentions in the next election:

the immediate response would be "not much movement outside the margin". however, as this "online research" does not utilize random sampling, there is no margin of error to consult.

how have the conservatives changed? well, they're down a point since february, but really pretty much flat since december - and no doubt for months before that. i'm not even sure that the second coming of christ would move the conservative numbers, at this point. their base is rock solid, entirely unreachable, but they're continuing to fail at generating interest outside of it. the data really perfectly represents the stereotype of the conservative supporter as an ideologue that you simply can't argue with it, and the party as having little appeal to much of anybody else in the 21st century.

the ndp are similarly flat. but, the liberals are trending mildly downwards.

so, if the ndp and conservatives are flat and the liberals are trending down, where are the votes going?

to their discredit, campaign did not post a trend line for the other parties, but you can at least find a snapshot of the recent "online research".

looking at this, we don't know if the undecided or the greens or the bloc went up, but the greens are performing fairly well in this poll, and the undecideds are actually fairly low compared to where they were at this point last time around.

it's easy to make a conclusion then - if this "online research" is uncovering anything, it is that people are a little bit cynical about the liberals right now, but don't like the other options. you really didn't need to conduct online research to figure that out....

comparing this to the ridiculous media framing is instructive, as it demonstrates the purpose of what the firm is doing. the headline is that the liberals are in trouble; the data suggests no such thing. but, who reads the data? people read the headline. this "online research" is not meant to measure public opinion, but to create it. so, there is a gramscian caveat to my analysis: while the issue doesn't appear to have harmed the liberals at this point, if the media continues to push the point that it has then it very well may in the end.

the liberals should be more concerned about the companies doing the research than they are in the results of the research.

the substantive point that policy makers should take away from my posts on this topic is that global governing institutions are necessarily going to have a different analysis than local governments, on this topic - which isn't to suggest that self-interest should be dominant, but to necessitate that the issue has to be framed in both contexts to understand it properly, and weigh it out.

so, the ipcc might say something like "the effects of a solar minimum will not alter the trend towards increasing average temperatures, because the effects will be localized in the northern hemisphere". and, if you live in india or something, you might have little reason to think that's important.

but, if you live in the regions that are to be most affected - namely canada and northern europe - then that caveat about the northern hemisphere is not just an unimportant addendum to the global trend, but the actual primary point of concern. in canada, we might say "the continuing trend towards global warming will not overpower the localized effect of solar minima".

but, northerners should neither get disinterested or complacent, because there's no certainty here. a strong cycle 25 or 26 would completely turn the issue on it's head, and lead us to a discussion about how the two factors are all of a sudden amplifying each other. we could easily get fed up by the cold winters and decide this doesn't matter, only to wake up to an irreversible tipping point, and all kinds of feedbacks, within a year or two.

i seek only to balance the narrative. empiricism can never be overruled by ideology, and we must fight teleology and fantasy at every turn. science must remain science; we must always seek the truth, as best we can, however convenient or inconvenient it may be.

but, listen: i don't really care if you understand what i'm saying or not. and, chances are, you probably never will, because you don't have the education to do so - you just want to buy into political narratives around science that are pushed by the fake liberal press, to push an agenda, to fight the bad guys. whatever.

but, at some point you have to look at the actual data, and my analysis - as though it's my analysis, rather than a careful survey of the existing literature - has been accurate up to this point.

to begin with, don't believe people that are trying to predict the upcoming cycle. there is currently absolutely no predictive science around the strength of sunspot cycles whatsoever. the "experts", in context, are little more than clairvoyants, trying to crudely extrapolate a pattern and move it forwards on a whim. and, you can make arguments either way.

so, some people will look at it and say "the cycle has been getting weaker for decades, so we should expect it to continue to get weaker". i've challenged this by pointing out that we have no reason to assume linear dependence, and if the output is actually random (as good a guess as any other at this point), the fact that we have a long streak of decreasing outputs means we're due for a shift - a probabilistically tricky argument that many will reject when articulated that way, but which is correct nonetheless, given that we can't actually count to infinity. it would be more correct to state that the output will eventually reverse, given infinitely many experiments. i'm impatient; sorry. and, while you can't quantify randomness, we're due nonetheless.

which argument is better? that there's a trend, or that the streak is due to break? absent a mechanism, they're both shit shots. the truth is that we have no fucking idea, and don't believe anybody that tells you we do.

so, given that we don't know what the upcoming cycle is going to be like, it would be foolish to try and make a prediction around it's effects on the climate.

what we can say is that we're exiting a local minima, so we should expect some kind of local warming trend - in the northern hemisphere - within a couple of years.

this article is responding to the strawman argument that the clear historical correlation between solar output and temperature - which is extremely robust, and has nothing to do with the maunder minimum - is a consequence of tsi, which is something that no solar scientist has ever suggested. and, in fact, the science around climate change takes this as a given; the purpose of the ipcc reports is to separate anthropogenic signals from the sun, and the ultimate argument in the end is that the warming can't be caused by the sun because it is dimming.

rather, it is well understood - and i've posted dozens of articles to this site - that the mechanism underlying the correlation has to do with ultraviolet radiation, not with tsi. it is essentially a magnetic phenomenon that alters the jet stream by messing with the atmosphere.

so, you don't want to think about it like you're turning the heat down or something. rather, you want to think about it like you're moving magnets around on a sphere, with iron filings inside of it. as you change the way the magnets are oriented, you change the way the filings are arranged, and this is what we're seeing with the jet steam in the northern latitudes. but, this is something that you need a basic understanding in physics to understand - it is not intuitive and not easily explained to scientific illiterates.

as i've stated here repeatedly, this will probably not change the overall average warming trend. we can't really state for sure, but it's a question of rates - we don't think the sun is slowing down fast enough to overturn the accelerating rates of global warming. it could, though. science operates in a realm of probability and uncertainty, not in a realm of absolute knowledge or dominant fact.

but, if the sun maintains it's current trajectory, and you live in the northern hemisphere, what is being called "global warming" could turn out to be rather disappointing, as we enter a period of extended minima that frequently pushes the jet stream to the south.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/the-sun-is-quieter-than-normal-but-dont-panic

that's absolutely outrageous.

she should at least be refunded for the cost of the flight.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2019/03/13/she-wore-crop-top-her-flight-islands-airline-told-her-cover-up-or-get-off/

so, i've carefully filed this properly, backwards, to may, 2003, which is the point where things get messy, as everything for the two-three years previously dates to those burns from before i left. i will need to go through the may folder - which includes thousands of genealogical records - and pull out as much stuff from before it as possible.

i stopped to run a scandisk on the drive, just in case. it's a 2 tb drive; that's going to take the rest of the night.

i've also decided that i'm going to create that music blog after all. i think i really don't have another option at this point, as i'm going to need to cross-reference too much data, and it's the only remaining piece.

in terms of how to do this, i'm also going to move in terms of semesters, anchored by the alter-reality. if i try to do this day-by-day or even week-by-week, it will get impossible. so, i'll start with the second half of 2013, then go back and do the second half of 1993. that just extends the journal launch date that much more, but not by much - this is already done, i'm really just double-checking it. with the music blog - reviews, comments - it should become comprehensive. and, i know that's what people actually want...

my robot book should be here in the morning.

still 403s on the tripod site :(

and, i'm otherwise going to nap.

sending trudeau home from spring break is suggestive of something pretty intense.

even an announcement could have waited; a resignation, an early election....all of it could have waited until monday...

the one thing i can think of it that would require immediate attention is a revolt.

i've been clear that i think the issue driving this is trivial. i've also been clear that i'd like to see him hit the slopes, and fade in with the locals. so, i'm neither going to go along, nor push back.

and, i'm a little concerned that the medicine might be worse than the disease.

i guess that if he storms in with the grenadiers then we'll never know what happened. but, if he's too late, an announcement is likely in short order.

and, again: i am neither a jew nor a catholic. the only time in my life that i've attended services on a regular basis was in early grade school - grades 4-5 - and it was actually as a methodist, with my step-father, who was raised as a lebanese maronite. i have been strictly atheist since about the age of 10.

my mother was raised as an anglican, but never expressed any sort of religious conviction to me, and i don't think she ever had any. in the years i knew her - and i'll point out that we've barely spoke in 25 years - i don't think she attended a church service on her own initiative even once.

my father had near eastern ancestry, and i've been told it was hebrew in origin. however, both he and his father were raised as francophone roman catholics. my father would sometimes make vague references to a kind of vague deism, but i think the actual truth is that he never really thought about religion much. religion is an abstract thing; he was very concrete, very practical. i remember his third marriage, which was a civil ceremony in a community centre...so i was going to say he only went to church for weddings and funerals, but even that much isn't true. i was much closer to my father, and i never saw him go to church even once in the thirty odd years that i knew him.

i have never been to a synagogue or been through any jewish rituals. i was not even aware of any jewish ancestry until my 30s; the first story about the family's tanned skin was that we were part native american.

i was not baptized as an infant. so, i was not christened. my mom's side is very anti-catholic, and she vetoed it. however, i was baptized as a toddler, when i was 3.5. i was baptized solely in order to send me to a catholic school, not out of any actual religious conviction, and in fact only due to the differences in the catholic and public school systems. the catholic school system started kids off at the age of 4, whereas the public school system started kids off at the age of 5. by baptizing me, i was able to go to kindergarten a year earlier. i actually vaguely remember it still; i remember being afraid of the priest, and i remember my mom's cynicism around it.

i attended a catholic school until the end of grade 13, but i did not participate in the other rituals. i did not receive the second or third sacraments. as such, the catholic church would not recognize me as one of their own; the disinterest would be mutual.

atheism is a perfectly satisfying world view; it is the way of the future, and i would recommend it to all.

hey, muslims and catholics have a lot in common.

hating the jews is just the tip of it...

airhead, bernie. get rid of her.

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/sanders-2020-aide-apologizes-for-suggesting-u-s-jews-have-dual-allegiance-1.7019052

american jews are something like 90% secular, and 75% left-of-centre.

as i stated before, the problem with this isn't that it's offensive, it's that it's bluntly stupid. and, what i'm getting from this isn't "this woman is a dangerous nazi" so much as that it is "this woman is clearly incompetent, and shouldn't be involved in a national campaign".

and, do i believe in property rights?

nope.

property is theft.

and, they're largely not an actual thing here in canada, either. we have no constitutional protection for property, and our courts often rule against it.

so, i've decided that i'm going to publish the emails that got me arrested, or at least the ones i have. i'm doing this under the realization that this page is being read by the cops that are currently spying on me, who may not be aware of just how absurd the charges were. i mean, i sat down and thought about it and realized that an officer or investigator picking the case up from scratch would have little concrete to draw upon - there is a vague accusation, no evidence and no plea from the accused. the cops never collected the emails, and i've never denied i sent them, so how can anybody investigating the situation come to a reasoned conclusion about it?

i don't have a complete record of the conversation, for the reason that kijiji only keeps 30 days worth of records and email only kicks in once an exchange is initiated. the situation is that the property owner routinely reposted ads for two apartments to the site. as i was aggressively seeking housing at this point, i would reply to the ads every time they were reposted; after all, the act of reposting the ad broadcasts "this apartment is still available", and there was really no reason besides prejudice that i should have been declined for an apartment being reposted on a daily basis, without even having an interview face-to-face. so, yes: i was being aggressive about this, as is necessary in a saturated market.

these particular units were what i was most interested in, as well, in that they made it clear that they were seeking tenants that were quiet and responsible. after weeks of consistent disappointment in the state of the market - it was essentially impossible to find a smoke-free building, or even a marijuana-free building - these two ads that seemed to be exactly what i needed seemed like the only way out of the mess i was in.

the ad did what ads do: it stated what the apartment was, and what the owners were looking for, and asked that applicants introduce themselves and state what they want. so, i introduced myself as a non-smoking artist with a stress disorder that is looking for a stable, smoke-free environment. i tried this several times,and received no response.

now, you might tell me that if i received no response, i should stop responding - and i would agree, if the ad wasn't being constantly reposted, indicating that the unit is still available. repeatedly reposting the unit is an invitation to repeatedly apply. and, that is a situation specific to housing, where normal rules of civic engagement are not applicable, but a strict regulatory regime is rather in place.

the other scenario - for her to tell me that the unit remains available, and i am not allowed to apply - is prohibited by law in ontario.

that said, one can only type up a lengthy response so many times before they realize that no response is coming. so, at some point, i stopped doing that and simply replied with my vm number. from that point forward, a routine kicked in whenever i found a reposting of the ad - i would quickly type in my phone number on the hope i'd get a response this time, and just move on to the next one.

the documentation that i have begins with the property owner's first response to the ad:

========================

Re: Reply to your "U OF W 2 MINUTE WALK 1 BD ALL-INCLUSIVE ON RANDOLPH @ RIVERSIDE" Ad on Kijiji   Inbox
Add star  ryanmyon<s-hm2k83m2rt0jm@rts.kijiji.ca>    15 August 2018 at 16:49
To: death.to.koalas@gmail.com
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
Are you a full-time student or do you work full time? If you are working, what do you do and how long have you worked there? How many people would be living with you? Do you smoke? Do you have any pets?

-----

as we can see, the person i was communicating with introduced themselves as "ryan", which is mildly gender neutral but mostly a man's name. i was told at the hearing that the complainant claimed this was her. i strongly doubt that this is actually true, and believe that a person named ryan is ultimately going to need to testify at the human rights hearing. this person should expect a subpoena.

my response was as follows:

jessica murray<death.to.koalas@gmail.com>    15 August 2018 at 17:20
To: ryanmyon <s-hm2k83m2rt0jm@rts.kijiji.ca>
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
i work full time as an artist.

it would be just me.

i don't smoke.

i don't have pets.

j

------

i did not receive a further response. yet, the ad continued to be reposted, indicating the unit was still available, so i kept responding to it.

a few days later, i received the following email:

Re: Reply to your \U OF W 2 MINUTE WALK ALL-INCLUSIVE ON RANDOLPH NEXT TO RIVERSIDE\ Ad on Kijiji   Inbox
Add star  Canadian Property<s-gssp7zl8fxqrs@rts.kijiji.ca>    23 August 2018 at 05:12
To: death.to.koalas@gmail.com
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
We are not interested in renting to you. Stop emailing us.

----

again, there is no information about the property owner's gender in this email.

but, what do these people know about me at this point in time? they know i'm a disabled artist that is desperately seeking a low-rent drug-free environment, and learning this is an almost impossible combination to find. are they not interested in renting to me because i don't smoke? not likely. more likely is that they don't want to rent to me because i'm an artist and because i'm disabled, in some hierarchy of prejudice.

i have never met this person, at this point. i have not seen the property. i haven't filled out an application. they haven't examined my credit history, or done anything else - they've rejected my interest flat on it's face, after knowing nothing more about me than that i'm on odsp.

am i a little frustrated? pissed off? stressed out? yeah. it's the last week of august, and i need to be out by oct 1st. in that context, i see that a door is being closed for what seems to be superficial and prejudicial reasons. anybody would be upset by that. so, i respond to this email several times, in quick succession.

Add star  jessica murray<death.to.koalas@gmail.com>    23 August 2018 at 10:32
To: Canadian Property <s-gssp7zl8fxqrs@rts.kijiji.ca>
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
how about we go to the human rights commission, instead?

Add star  jessica murray<death.to.koalas@gmail.com>    23 August 2018 at 10:34
To: Canadian Property <s-gssp7zl8fxqrs@rts.kijiji.ca>
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
i'm keeping track.

there will be a large action within a few months.

this city is full of discrimination towards disabled people, and
towards queer people.

j

Add star  jessica murray<death.to.koalas@gmail.com>    23 August 2018 at 10:37
To: Canadian Property <s-gssp7zl8fxqrs@rts.kijiji.ca>
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
you've lost thousands of dollars refusing to rent to a candidate that
needs access to the kind of housing you're providing. and, as far as i
can tell, you are denying that housing to me for no other reason that
that i have a disability.

that is illegal in this province.

you must treat housing applications on a first come, first serve basis
here. you cannot screen for identifiable characteristics, for job
titles, for income amounts, for gender, for orientation, for ethnicity
or for family status.

and, i will hold you accountable in time.

Add star  jessica murray<death.to.koalas@gmail.com>    23 August 2018 at 10:58
To: Canadian Property <s-gssp7zl8fxqrs@rts.kijiji.ca>
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
i'm a non-smoker with a stress disorder.

i need out of welfare-style low income housing - and away from the
type of people that live in it - for the benefit of my mental health.
you are providing what is a rare escape in a city full of smokers.

your position is both discriminatory and irrational.

but, you have the opportunity to reverse it

or you can keep losing money to uphold your discriminatory views.
because, here's the actual truth: students don't want to live in your
building.

----------

these responses are confrontational, but they are also constructive. i am laying down the law, here - denying housing on the basis of a disability is discrimination, and i won't stand for it, but i need housing more than i need a human rights complaint, so i'll give them the opportunity to reverse themselves.

am i bluffing? out of necessity, yes. that is to say that the situation is such that they ought to face a human rights challenge, but i don't know enough about them at this point to file a substantive claim, do not have an argument for actual damages and would no doubt decide, in the end, that it isn't worth my time. it's not an idle observation, but it's primarily a negotiation tactic from somebody that is admittedly desperate to find a smoke-free environment.

there was no further response; yet, the ads continued to be reposted, so i kept responding to them.

i didn't get another response for almost two weeks.

Re: Reply to your "U OF W 2 MINUTE WALK 1 BD ALL-INCLUSIVE ON RANDOLPH @ RIVERSIDE" Ad on Kijiji   Inbox
Add star  ryanmyon<s-gflwl06rg0n73@rts.kijiji.ca>    8 September 2018 at 15:20
To: death.to.koalas@gmail.com
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
We will NOT rent to you. Do not contact us again.

--------

but, there was still no non-prejudicial reason to not rent to me. and, the ads kept being posted, indicating the unit was still available. so, i kept responding to them.

things began to get ridiculous a few days later:

Re: Reply to your "U OF W 2 MINUTE WALK 1 BD ALL-INCLUSIVE ON RANDOLPH @ RIVERSIDE" Ad on Kijiji   Inbox
Add star  ryanmyon<s-mndzx0w19q0jh@rts.kijiji.ca>    10 September 2018 at 20:33
To: death.to.koalas@gmail.com
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
We have advised you that we will not rent to you and to not contact us again. Despite this, you continue to email us. If you contact us again, we will contact the police and have you charged with harassment.

---

you can imagine that i found this rather comical. the idea that repeatedly applying for housing could be harassment under canadian law would have to be probably the most ignorant thing i've ever heard. i responded as follows:

jessica murray<death.to.koalas@gmail.com>    10 September 2018 at 20:51
To: ryanmyon <s-mndzx0w19q0jh@rts.kijiji.ca>
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
will you explain to them that you are discriminating against the tenant?

you're an idiot.

and you're wrong.

j

jessica murray<death.to.koalas@gmail.com>    10 September 2018 at 20:59
To: ryanmyon <s-77knvwsn5xr0b@rts.kijiji.ca>
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
so long as you have the ad up, i'm free to reply to it. & what the law
actually says, in context, is that you cannot discriminate against
people on the basis of having a disability.

so, it is not illegal for me to continue to reply to your ad, even if
i'm just trying to piss you off. but it *is* illegal to dismiss my
application because i don't have a job,

do you understand, or should i get one of your tenants to explain it to you?

did you graduate high school, ryan? or, like so many of the people in
this city, did you drop out of school in grade ten and inherit your
wealth?

if you want to live in a fascist state where people are charged with a
crime for replying to an ad because of an enumerated ground, i'd
advise moving to iran.

j

Add star  jessica murray<death.to.koalas@gmail.com>    10 September 2018 at 21:00
To: ryanmyon <s-77knvwsn5xr0b@rts.kijiji.ca>
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original
property, in canada, is not something that you hold at your disposal,
but a service that you offer, and are bound to follow a set of rules
around.

j

---------------

at this point, i'm clearly trolling, but i'm also making a point about free expression, and sticking to it.

am i being annoying? sure - that's the point. i'm bombarding them with communication for the purposes of having my interests drown out those of the other applicants. so, if the complaint is something like "she's sending me so many emails that i can't look at the other applicants", then that is an intentional strategy - i don't want them to look at the other applicants. the annoyance is purposeful, with the intent to advance my own interests.

but, is that harassment? not in canada. in canada, harassment necessitates an objective concept of fear; i would have to engage in behaviour that a reasonable person would interpret as threatening to them or their family, and that is clearly not happening, here.

so, why am i responding further? i'm trying to draw them out at this point - i want them to send me a smoking gun that i can use in the human rights trial. but, i'm also simply being insolent. they have no legal recourse to tell me not to apply to the ad, and if they're going to make threats, i'm going to push them on it.

this issue would come up later with the cop. the crown was no doubt going to try to argue that the cop warned me, and i didn't listen. but, this is backwards logic - when a thug shows up at your door with a gun and orders you not to do something that is not illegal, you have a moral imperative to do exactly what you've been ordered not to do.

so, i mention i'm just trying to piss them off - and, at this point, i largely am just trying to piss them off, and insistent on enforcing my legal right to do that, as they have placed this question in doubt. i'm now also a free speech activist, in addition to fighting against housing discrimination. and, listen - you don't have to like that, but you do have to accept the legality of it.

while i continued to respond to the ad for the next several weeks, before being arrested and held over night on sept 24th, i did not receive another response from the property owner.

so, harassment? hardly. rather, it seems as though it is a pre-emptive attack to prevent me from filing a human rights complaint, and if anybody has grounds to claim they were harassed it is me.

a man for all seasons / thomas more's utopia. grade 8. that's clear. but, it was handed out in loose leaf, i think. i also vaguely recall some kind of shakespeare for grade 8. i guess we did shakespeare every year almost - hamlet, macbeth, merchant of venice, romeo & juliet, henry viiii, a mid...yeah. that was eight. midsummer night's dream. i remember the plays relatively well, but i always took shakespeare as a chore, and it's not well-ordered in time in my mind. i think the merchant was 9, romeo & juliet was 10, macbeth was 11 and hamlet was 12, but that could be completely wrong. i have a vague recollection of something atwood as well. and some sherlock holmes, too....

well, that's something, anyways.

it's the old english, that was my issue with shakespeare. i know a lot of people like it for that reason, but, to me, shakespeare should be catalogued with chaucer - it's a mild degree of separation, and well past the point of incomprehension; it's far enough back in time, now, that a translator really ought to be deployed. it just struck me as needlessly frustrating. but, i was a kid that liked to read, so i think i would have enjoyed it much more had they just translated it for me. we'll see how i react to it the second time over...

grade seven is still a dead block, but my teacher got fired early in the year and the class kind of fell through the cracks. after five or six substitutes that were sequentially brought in as babysitters, they finally hired one. we lost at least half the year. but, i'm remembering a grade 7 "english textbook" that was all highlightered up from previous use, and a really boring story by a gordon something that was in the textbook. this was just painful to trudge through - enough to make a kid hate reading for life. this is the consequence of the "canadian content" requirements, and a teacher that didn't really give a fuck. so, i think what i need to find is the textbook. english class at that point no doubt had an actual language component, which was no doubt the focus of the textbook.

was there a grade eight "english textbook" with excerpts in it? i'm thinking that's the answer, and why my memories are so dismal around it. my grade eight teacher was a rather finicky old woman, and she may have photocopied the textbook out of fears we'd spill juice on it.

i wouldn't mind trying to track down the math & science textbooks from high school, while i'm at it.

that just randomly vomited up on me, which is how this often works. i've been offline for the last few days, because i've had difficulties staying awake. i'm still filing; it should be done, but i've been sleeping 20 hours a day. the air quality in here has just collapsed, but it's only in the one room, leading me to wonder if it's mostly the window, after all.

i'm going to get some more coal the next time i'm out and see if it helps a little.

the first asimov text is here from the uk, but dhl made a scan error and is trying to charge me customs on a purchase under $20. it should be here as soon as that is ironed out, so i could in theory get started this week.

but, not with the air quality like this, i won't. i'm going to have to get to the bottom of this - as of right now, i'm basically in the same problem i was in before.

i can't and don't want to live the life of a lethargic drug addict.

i actually haven't left the house since feb 24th and don't plan on going anywhere this week, either.

i kind of suspect that what they're actually doing is spying on me, with the expectation that i'm a drug addict or a sex offender or a russian spy or something. it's maybe a little ironic - i'm asking for an investigation into a cop with a clear anti-queer bias, and the department is just carrying through with it.

whatever absurdity they're insisting on will come out in the wash and just help me in the long run; the fact is that i have nothing to hide.

but, i have to wait for them to finish wasting their time first...

ok, so i got something from the cops extending the investigation until the 18th.

it's clear enough that they're stalling; the evidence of misconduct is about as obvious as could be. but, i have little recourse but to wait them out.

however, i'm going to have to make calls about the prints and the access to information act in the morning.

what have i been doing? i've been sleepy, again. i dunno; i know the weather is finally set to turn within a few days, even if it's lacklustre.

the immediate task in front of me is to finish filing, to make sure everything is organized properly.

disappointing, if not unexpected.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/trump-once-again-requests-deep-cuts-us-science-spending

i actually agree with her.

if time was infinite, sure. but, i'd guess that pelosi is more aware than most that it is in fact not.

they're better off writing legislation, and trying to avoid the perception of being a do-nothing congress, which is what took them out the last time.

it's less that he's not worth it, and more that there's more pressing concerns to deal with.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/nancy-pelosi-impeaching-trump-he-s-just-not-worth-it-n981941

if that's as good as a physical blockade, and that's not clear, then the end is near.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-oil-exports/venezuela-blackout-halts-most-oil-exports-hits-crude-upgrading-sources-idUSKBN1QS1WW

it's not even that they're liars, it's that they're such poor liars.

if they were good liars, you wouldn't even know. the russians are a good contrast, as they are excellent liars - you never know if what they're saying is true or not. flip a coin. who knows.

with the americans, it's just a steady stream of constant untruths, so you can get a decent approximation of reality by just negating everything.

the russians keep you guessing; you know the americans are constantly completely full of shit.

but, i mean, i was making that argument ten years ago...

we're at the surreal point, now, where nobody ever believes anything the american government ever says, ever.

the sad truth is that the revelation around the aid convoys in venezuela (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-aid-fire-video.html) was beyond predictable but entirely obvious. it's to the point where you instantly assume that the americans must have bombed their own aid as occam 's razor.

if you dissect the statement, there are some truths and half-truths to it. it is true that there is a humanitarian crisis in venezuela, and that the government has mismanaged the situation. it is also true that the sanctions have exacerbated a situation of poor management. and, while i haven't looked into it very deeply, i've seen this situation before: the security forces are probably reacting to provocateurs, who are inciting them into violence to generate headlines. then, cnn will run a story about some protestors being shot, but will forget to mention that they were lighting cop cars on fire.

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2019/02/in-trump-era-its-easy-to-forget-that.html

yeah, it's maybe a reminder of how lucky we are to live in a country where politely asking the attorney-general to be reasonable more than twice is about as bad as it gets.


https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/03/11/snc-lavalin-matters-a-lot-but-lets-look-at-some-other-news.html

stephen harper sold our wheat board to the saudis.

yeah.

some separation from government is a good idea.

there is a romanticization of the independent farmer in the united states, no doubt brought about by a variety of factors. i don't want to write this history.

further, resisting the dominating influence of agribusiness has some value, although we need to be a little bit careful about how we talk about this. this is not the 1930s, and these people are not like the characters in the grapes of wrath. what we call "independent farms" nowadays are mostly large scale operations that rely on exploiting underpaid workers, many of them undocumented. the functional difference between the independent farm and the agribusiness is far less than many would imagine. really, i would probably argue that the most pressing difference at this point is in regulating carbon emissions.

but, the reason that agribusinesses do well is through economies of scale, which are more efficient, and the most effective way to counter the financialization of the agriculture business is not going to be through antitrust legislation, which is just going to make the process less efficient.

if the farmers are going to be successful in the long run, they are going to need to organize. what that means is forming boards and unions to determine supply management and set prices. if successful, this is actually going to create larger organizations with more integrated workforces. and, where my heart is in this is really in finding ways to better compensate agricultural workers, who are by far the most exploited workers out there - which is a legacy of slavery.

people might like the idea of the family farm, but it is not a coherent economic proposal in the 21st century. the choice is between financialization and collectivization, and that choice ought to be up to the farmers to make themselves.

a politician of the left should be about organizing and empowering the farmers to make their own choices, rather than having them pushed down to them from large banks on the coasts.

this is one of the biggest misconceptions about slavery. people think slavery was about race; it wasn't, except in a very small time window in a very small area of the united states. what slavery was actually always about was religion.

why did the british enslave the irish? the reason is that they were catholic.

on the other hand, why were the ethiopians never enslaved, and not even colonized until the late nineteenth century? the reason is that when the portugese got there, they realized they were christians, and they consequently had no authority to enslave them. ethiopian christianity appears to be egyptian in origin, and to stem from the middle byzantine period.

why were the indigenous people of the americas enslaved by the spanish? because they weren't christians.

and, why were the slavs and balts of eastern europe enslaved by almost everybody, christians and muslims? because they converted to christianity relatively late. the word "slave" in english is derived not from a word about africans but from the continuing ethnonym for eastern european; slave and slav are the same word.

the history of slavery in the new world begins with a papal bull that gave the european explorers the explicit right to enslave non-christians:

We grant you [Kings of Spain and Portugal] by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property [...] and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude.

that is from a statement issued by the pope in 1452, 40 years before colombus, but well after the circumnavigation of the cape. it was partially directed at africa.

however, what it was really directed at was the turks, who were in the process of conquering constantinople, which fell in 1453. the pope realized he would likely be targetted.

however, there's fundamentally a concept of reciprocity underlying it, as it was essentially a restatement of existing turkish policy. the era of dangerous turkish pirates raiding the european coasts (which ended only with the french invasion of algeria in the nineteenth century) was still a ways away, but (and this is contrary to a popular myth) there was a longstanding practice in the muslim world of enslaving just about anybody that wasn't muslim - and this included africans, europeans, indians, asians and really anybody else they can get their hands on. i think it's well known that there were large slave networks moving from africa into arabia as early as 1000 ce, but there were also networks moving from india and also from the ukraine. those fair-haired ukrainian women were a special prize for arab slave traders, as they fetched good money.

so, european slavery started in 1452 as a consequence of a papal bull, was based on religion (not race) and was actually an emulation of existing muslim practices, not an original innovation.

england, of course, went through a process called the reformation in ways that mainland europe didn't. in the process, it ended up with it's own church. it also went through a period of puritanical fundamentalism that culminated in a short dictatorship under the control of a fascist called oliver cromwell. throughout these various power struggles, catholics faced various types of persecution, over quite a long period; it wasn't the irish that were enslaved specifically, so much as anybody that was catholic, which included the irish. catholic emancipation was still a political issue in the uk until the late nineteenth century. while the authorities and legal statements shifted all over the place, the ultimate authority for slavery in england did come from the papal bull, even if it ended up with protestants enslaving catholics.

so, when the various european countries started transferring african slaves across the ocean, the legal justification for it was never that they were black, but always that they weren't christians. as mentioned: ethiopians were never enslaved, because they were already christians.

and, the reality is that there was a period where conversion to christianity was actually a way out of slavery.

eventually, however, the system began to collapse. there is of course a contradiction between christianity and slavery, whether the slaves are christian or not. the africans were also increasingly being christianized, which put the slave owners in a bit of a quandary. it was actually the christian authorities that reacted to this by citing biblical passages that condemned africans to slavery; there was the bit in the noah's ark story about ham, specifically. now, this was always totally ad hoc, just thrown together to prevent an uprising. in the end, it didn't work, but the long term consequences have been pretty devastating.

so, people can't understand the premise of irish slaves. they were white. what? well, they didn't have the right religion, which is the actual reason that africans were enslaved, as well.

"but, i don't care about white people."

then, why would you expect white people to care about you?

and, no, servitude isn't ok if you sign a contract. a contract requires an exchange of something - you can't sign yourself away. the english legal system would have no patience for that, whether the right argument is unjust enrichment or something else.

i don't think you need a clever analysis of this - bernie means what he says, here.

but, let's think about this. what would actually happen if you handed out a $50,000 check to every black person in the country?

i'm not going to complain about the debt; you can print the money. but, the immediate result of this is that you're going to produce an underclass of poor white people that are all of a sudden at a disadvantage in things like housing.

"but they have privilege."

riiiiight.

worse, you're going to send a substantial amount of money to people that actually don't need it at all, and that is money that could be spent on infrastructure, instead. if the result of the policy is functionally a large tax break, we're essentially talking about a race-based tax cut. that gives progressive taxation a new meaning.

listen - poverty might be correlated with race in the united states, and especially in the south, but racism and poverty are fundamentally not the same thing, and it is wrong to erase the identities of poor white people in the drive towards a poverty strategy. race is the absolute worst way to target a poverty strategy.

the media wants to hit him on this, is reporting it as a liability, is trying to expose it as a weakness...

the truth is that bernie is right, and that most people are going to agree with him.

if we are to be fully fair about this, the descendants of the enslaved irish (and, yes, the british enslaved the irish), as well as the descendants of indentured servants of german and other descent, ought to have some consideration, as well.

and, if everybody gets a check, why not just look at a ubi, instead?

https://truthout.org/articles/bernie-sanderss-personal-reboot-on-racial-justice-may-not-be-enough/

dammit, jim.

no, he's right. that's what i've been saying from the start...


https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/warren-trudeaus-error-was-in-not-picking-loyalists-to-cabinet

they should convert them into homeless shelters.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/losing-churches-canada-1.5046812

i'm not convinced people really care much about this, given the other options.

but, there is going to come a time when the data comes in, and to suggest that the discussion is out of bounds is disingenuous. nor, would this be precedent setting, as it is exactly what happened to chretien, to mulroney and to the elder trudeau, as well - all were replaced due to fears that they would lose the next election.

likewise, there's all kinds of precedent for turfing rowdy ministers from caucus. these women are clearly acting maliciously, and the pmo appears to be too stupid to figure it out.

what i might rather point to is the question of whether the tactic of replacing a pm to save the election was ever actually successful.

john turner got completely destroyed by brian mulroney. while the elder trudeau was clearly in trouble, it's hard to argue that john turner saved any seats - and easy to point out that he no doubt lose a lot of them in quebec.

a few years later, kim campbell got completely ripped apart by jean chretien. there were other factors at play, certainly, but going from a majority to two seats is hardly an inspiring example.

likewise, it's hard to argue that martin saved the government. chretien won huge majorities, and martin eventually lost to harper.

do i think trudeau should go? the lavalin issue aside, which i think is a triviality, i am uncomfortable in the direction he's taken the party and would like to see somebody more representative of the trudeau-chretien years take over and steer it back. i don't care about their gender or background; kathleen wynne would be a good choice. but, i'd like to see a convention and a proper process, not a resignation and ad-hoc replacement.

and, if the bigwigs think going into an election with an unelected pm is a good idea, i'd just remind them of what happened the last three times a party tried that. it's not a good tactic; that's not going to work.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-should-justin-trudeau-resign-thats-not-up-to-you-to-decide/

the future of the left is, of course, also a kickass post-punk band from cardiff.

i've never been sure if this is about condy or hillary.

it may be the case that bernie sanders is the only leftist candidate that makes sense right now, and that he's a kind of necessary stop-gap. the left, overall, is a gerontocracy. i mean, we're just escaping from 40 years of conservative consensus, so we've had an entire generation stolen from us in terms of experience-building.

it seems like he lived a lifetime ago, but michael dukakis is only 8 years older than bernie sanders. ralph nader, who is known for his trolling of the nixon administration, is the same age as michael dukakis. geraldine ferraro, who died at the age of 75, would only be seven years older if still alive. if ted kennedy were alive today, he would only be ten years older, although he would no doubt be wheelchair bound due to the now catastrophic effects of gravity on his gigantic head. and, he is even only 13 years younger than noam chomsky.

the clinton/gore/kerry/obama/clinton years that followed had the democratic party firmly on the right of any reasonable spectrum. but, the dominance of the narrative means there's nobody to turn to except the academy, which is the real reason we've got the left-wing party pushing harebrained academic theories about identity that nobody really actually believes in; if there was any kind of movement on the left at all during those years, nobody would be talking about identity politics.

whatever happens in 2020, something here has to break. even if biden ends up winning, and somehow serves eight years, it's going to be a completely different electorate on the other side of it.

the future of the party is bernie sanders.

but, stated tersely, i don't think that the future of the democratic party is a coalition of teenage girls that are tied to identity politics, are openly religious and think jews run the world.

rather, i think the future of the democratic party is a multi-ethnic, technocratic, post-religion party rooted in liberal concepts of equality.

the actual truth is that these kids are the future of the republican party.

that they would freak out in minnesota.

first, they came for the jews...

did you say anything about it?

why not?

and, i always forget that parenti rewrote the article.

the initial version makes a better point:
http://dissidentvoice.org/Articles9/Parenti_Tibet.htm

periodic reposting of the excellent parenti article:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

see, here's the thing: i actually agree that religion (and islam is kind of the last religion left standing in a lot of ways, so it is often going to get singled out for that reason....) is a mental illness.

so, i don't really have any particular aversion to a social program designed to help the uighurs modernize their society, and discard their religion as obsolete.

further, i know that the atlantic isn't even a good source of information about dissident movements in north america; this is a publication that routinely smears everybody left of hillary clinton. i would expect that they're exaggerating a little bit.

my bigger concern here is whether or not something like this is actually going to work. if you compare the chinese attempt to modernize tibet (which was largely successful) to the russian attempts to modernize the slavic heartland (which was a disaster), you'd think the chinese would learn lessons from their own model - that this is a carrot & stick operation that needs to be carried out very carefully, and not something that can be pushed down too violently from the top. even genocide, as ghastly as it is, would be unlikely to actually be effective as the few that escape are going to attribute their good luck to being chosen.

the left really needs to learn the lesson: you can't wipe out religion with force. this question of if it's right or wrong is tricky, but it largely doesn't matter, because it just doesn't work. you have to actually convince them.

so, i worry that the chinese are repeating the error that the soviets made, and that in the end the religion comes out stronger.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/china-pathologizing-uighur-muslims-mental-illness/568525/

this is what she was talking.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/International_Jewish_conspiracy

ok, so i think i now understand the (bad) logic working it's way through these nazi apologists around ilhan omar, who, once again, is quite clearly projecting a debunked conspiracy theory about jewish bankers controlling the world that was at the core of nazi propaganda.

it seems like almost nobody is actually defending what she said, excluding a few palestnian nationalists, which is not surprising. there is a kind of blanket condemnation, however milquetoast.

rather, the apologism seems to be fundamentally rooted in a kind of hierarchy of oppression. the argument appears to be that, while her views may be toxic, her placement in a lower rung of this hierarchy of oppression means that criticizing her for being oppressive is itself oppressive. this goes beyond a double standard, and is really a different set of rules.

i find this whole "hierarchy of oppression" thing to be so poorly reasoned through that it's hard to deconstruct. it's a fundamentally illiberal way to interpret the world, that places people in these rigid categories, whether they want to be in them or not. so, i'm not going to try to deconstruct this here, because i fully comprehend that i don't understand it well; my claim is that i don't understand it well for the reason that it is incoherent.

but, functionally, what that means is that you can't criticize her on this because she's black.

i have a different take on this. my empirical observation is that the democrats made the mistake of opening up their party to muslims, and the first thing they did was go after the jews. why is anybody surprised by that? nothing could be more predictable. and. the next thing you should expect is for them to go after the gays...

yeah - i'm done with that, now, convinced the pull was comprehensive.

i should have an outline posted here relatively soon....

i'm concluding that the archive.org servers somehow knew how to remove duplicates. this is very curious to me...

i haven't completely convinced myself that the pull was complete, but i'm getting there.

so, what that means is that this is the earliest media list that i've got:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010628155850/http://chat.carleton.ca:80/~jparent2/music/music.html

and, i'm going to guess that this is actually dated to something more like winter, 2001 because radiohead's amnesiac is not in the list, and that would have been a prompt snag.

there's still the tripod site, if i'm lucky. but i've been hitting it for a few days now and it's just 403s. i'm not going to give up on that very easily...

i really need to focus.






.......now.

what this "small business" rhetoric actually does is undermine unionization, and take away the bargaining power of workers. if the company you work for only has a handful of employees, you are at the absolute mercy of your boss - you cannot  push back on anything. the result is a more stratified, class-oriented society with a larger bourgeois class and a subsequent underclass with almost no functional rights.

"small businesses" is code for "class war". it's divide and conquer.

leftists should not be buying into liberal rhetoric about small businesses; they should be pushing for big unions, instead.

in the context of an amazon, what that means is that what sanders is doing - pushing for the rights of the workers - is the better option. if warren has her way, they all end up as unpaid interns in unsuccessful businesses that are unnecessarily competing in saturated markets and that need yearly tax breaks to put off their inevitable collapse.

do small businesses unionize?

do they offer dental plans for workers?

then why would i care about them?

i, like most people, don't go to amazon to buy things made by independent sellers; i go to amazon to buy amazon products.

that's why amazon beat ebay...

i think it's just fundamentally a misunderstanding of what amazon actually is.

ok ok.

so, the argument is apparently that amazon is a "marketplace" rather than an online sore.

uhmm. ok.

who thinks that?

amazon is providing a space for people to sell their products. they don't have to do that. and, if the government is going to get in it's face about it, they should just stop doing it.

i firmly doubt that much of anybody interprets amazon as a "marketplace"; most people just think it's a store.

if i were amazon, i would actually push for the opposite argument, as a compromise, if i had to - i would convert amazon into a brand product, and throw the third party sellers off the site.

i'm just thinking this through.

i'm a musician. is this going to mean i can't sell my own product on my own website - that i'll only be able to sell other people's music?

would a grocery store be unable to sell it's no name products on it's website? will walmart be unable to sell it's house lines on it's website?

it just seems fundamentally backwards. if amazon is going to sell anything at all, it's own products and services ought to be the thing that it sells, not the products and services of others.

https://mashable.com/article/elizabeth-warren-amazon-basics/#HRhAEtYf2gqn

well, they can change the concept of antitrust, in theory - and, maybe it is indeed a little out of date. i think that is the simple takeaway from the discussion: if you're going to be talking about antitrust laws in 2019 in any context at all, the entire theory needs to be updated.

but, again: i don't think this is a step forwards.

there was an article at business insider trying to argue the approach is left-wing because it's focus on local job creation (however disingenuously, however abstractly) contrasts with the chicago school focus on price. this is a weird characterization of the difference between 20th century liberalism and neo-liberalism in the first place, but that's like arguing that churchill was on the left because he fought against hitler. it really restricts the spectrum - but that is itself pretty normal, at this point.

here's an idea - maybe the internet should be approached as a tool to use to better society, rather than as a way to make a profit. maybe we should be basing policy on the use value of these sites, rather than scheming up ways they can make the most money for the most people. so, maybe the government policy around google search should actually be to maximize it's function and use as a search engine. i know: this is radical.

warren has been clear enough that she wants to support free-market capitalism, which means looking at the internet through the lens of entrepreneurialism, rather than through the lens of use and function. a service is about an accumulation process, rather than the service itself. this is happening when americans are rejecting this kind of logic in other sectors. so, it's up to the american people to decide if they agree with her or if they want to align their views on the internet with their evolving views on healthcare and education.

http://time.com/5548262/elizabeth-warren-antitrust-amazon-facebook-google/

it's very early.

but, i'm gong to make a clear prediction.

this group of way-too-young female democrats that cenk uygur is pimping is going to completely sink the democrats in 2020, and trump is going to be easily re-elected. and, because he has money and controls media, they're not going to go away, probably ever.

it's an interesting conflict of interest. a little corrupt, maybe, even.

the msm narrative will probably focus on how trump won by red baiting, but i expect that this isn't going to be a very deep analysis. this is going to be less about trump successfully smearing the opposition and more about the wide swaths of middle america looking at these factions rising in the democratic party and saying "these idiots are worse".

and, frankly, that might be the right call.

the party will primary them, in the end, and win. but, the damage in the short term is going to be pretty drastic.

i want to be clear: i think gender parity is a good idea, and i'm not opposed to racial diversity, in principle, although i think it's largely a triviality. but, this is a pack of rowdy kids looking to cause problems, and it's clear enough that they're going to.

in the end, it's money in the bank for the young turks.

the only thing to do is try to watch something else.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/ilhan-omar-said-aipac-pays-lawmakers-to-be-pro-israel-here-s-how-they-really-work-1.6932302

https://theconversation.com/why-not-nationalize-facebook-93816

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