so, what am i doing?

there's nothing planned this week. i was considering taking a ride out to royal oak to see bad religion on wednesday, but that's the second show there this summer where the ticket prices are just ridiculous. belle & sebastien was like $80. bad religion is $60. really. bad religion. $60. is this strictly a ticketmaster thing? that venue isn't much bigger than the majestic or st. andrew's, and i've never seen a show at either of those places charging $60 for floor admission. those are prices more in line with day festivals than with concerts. fuck, i can see the symphony for $15 if i'm willing to sit at the top.

needless to say, i'm not paying that. in fact, i'm very rarely going to pay more than $30 for a show, that's kind of my max, so it's about twice what i'm willing to think about. sorry.

i'm really hoping to get the rebuild for september done in the next day or two. i'm then going to need to focus on cleaning a bit, and then on tracking down the oiprd report. again: if they want to drag this out and make themselves look bad, it's their choice. i at least got a response from the ohrc, and they're indicating that they're processing the claim and will get back to me on it.

i think i want to actually put down the goal of getting started on october for the end of the week.

and, i think i'm mostly going to avoid eating for the week, as well. how much did i drink on saturday night? well, i had a 700 ml bottle of mountain dew with two shots of vodka to start, then i split a 500 ml can of mike's for the ride in and the morning lull, i had two small can's of stroh's (355 ml) at outer limits, and i had five cans of various beer at marble. that's over 13 hours, btw. so, that's 355*7 + 500 + 700 = 3.685 L, but the beer isn't as bad, calorie wise, as what i was drinking last week. so, i don't think this week was that bad, calorie wise...

...but i didn't really finish the purge last week. i had a meal on saturday morning, and then i ate when i came back on sunday afternoon, and ate again last night. so, it was really only a three day purge. that means i'll have to hold off on a real meal until friday to cut out a full week worth of calories, which was the initial intent. and, i have two days worth of smoothies to tide myself over as it's happening.

again: i'm not running a marathon on no food, here. i'm sitting in my bed rebuilding a blog from 2013. so, i'm expending minimal energy. and, the logic is that i've drank at least an extra week's worth of calories in alcohol over the last month, so i'm going to cut out a week's worth of calories in food to compensate.

i know what i'm doing, but don't do this at home, kids.

i mostly remember lincoln fields for the small record store they had in it. i hope he found a new location. i also think i had doctor's or dentist appointments here when i was very little, because my dad worked in the ncr building around the corner, but it's pretty vague. otherwise, it was broadly out of the way for me for most of my life, and i only remember stopping in there when i had to use the washroom, or stop to get something to drink as i was bicycling by.

this isn't surprising. everybody's known for years that it's dying. but, that strip up carling is certainly going to be different without it.

https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/end-is-near-for-lincoln-fields-shopping-centre-1.4535838

i will repeat this.

the choice that america has on gun violence is between changing it's gun culture, or accepting it for what it is.

background checks are a reasonable policy that i have no opposition to. but, laws to restrict the sale and distribution of weapons will do absolutely nothing at all, so long as you continue to perpetuate the same gun culture across generations.

and, so long as you insist on maintaining your culture, you'll need to accept this as collateral.

again: i'm not actually opposed to background checks. and, i will at least concede that they may make a difference on a very small percentage of shootings, meaning the policy may have some positive effect, so i'd have to lean towards supporting them rather than being neutral towards them. but, i must insist that they are not a serious solution to gun violence. they're not even a band-aid, really. what they are is low-hanging fruit, and to hear politicians push them as an answer is a reflection of the cul-de-sac that the democratic party finds itself in on gun violence, caught between a small but vocal conservative minority that thinks that you solve complicated social problems by banning things and a fundamentally broken heartland culture that associates gun ownership with it's core nationalist identity.

that's the most aggressive policy you're going to get: background checks.

what the country needs in order to stop gun violence is a deep level of reflection about how it sees guns. politicians that seek to represent the perspective of rural identity voters need to begin to understand that it is the identity itself that is at the crux of the problem, and what needs to change in order to stop the violence. you hear them say this - this is not who we are. but, this is exactly the problem: you need to understand that this is who you are, and look very deep inside yourselves, collectively, in order to come to a solution. it is going to take a deep, critical examination of every aspect of american culture. it is going to require changing what it means to be an american.

or, you can accept that america is an inherently violent place built on a culture of violence, that america is a place where violence and mass murder has been the norm from day one; you can accept the status quo for what it is.

these are your real choices.

but, i will nonetheless ask the question, as people call for a return of the house to pass a bill on background checks: is there any evidence at this stage that either of these shooters would have failed one?

this is a potentially tricky scenario for the british government. i think that all decent people are going to want them to grant the order, but dubai is a friendly state that is in a tactical position when it comes to conflict with iran, and a protection order of this sort may very well involve a need for round the clock security.

is this woman a british citizen? if so, the state will have certain obligations, and likely be forced to do the right thing.

if she's not, the outcome of this could be heartbreaking.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5702466/princess-haya-dubai-ruler-forced-marriage-protection-order/

so, yeah, i went dancing last night. there was an overnight party as a consequence of the mini-movement (charivari) festival, and it might be the last really nice saturday overnight we get, unless we get some more intense hurricanes, which i don't think anybody really wants. i'm happy we got a summer in the end due to the ocean patterns dominating for a while, however short it ends up being; it didn't really click in until the last week of june, and it looks like it's going to fall off about mid-week. so, that's 5-6 weeks of actual summer. we can have nice days lingering into october or sometimes even november here, but the actual summer heat starts to lift at the start of september, so if the long range is saying it's going to dip a little cooler for the end of august then there's not much chance of a return to seriously hot summer weather for the year. don't misunderstand me - it's not going to snow this week. but, that might have been the last late saturday / early sunday where the low is above 20 degrees celsius.

so, we got one more nice weekend in, and i decided not to waste it...

my plan was that i wanted to hit a space rock act early called brujas del sol, then head to the dance party (which ran until 9:00 am). but, i expected the space rock band to be on a little later, so i thought i might check something out down the street, then come back. so, i showed up at trixie's around 22:00, and was told they just finished, meaning they played first in a four bill act (despite being advertised as a co-headliner). this is why you should post set times, bar owners.

so, i went to the outer limits and caught the end of an early floyd style act called astral hand, and the entirety of a set by a band called midas, that was probably trying to sound like judas priest but i think actually sounded a bit more like hawkwind. while i'll take 70s or 80s metal over contemporary metal any day, the reality is that i'm not particularly knowledgeable about metal of any period, and while it wasn't something i'd take an initiative to listen to or check out further, they had a few moments and were entertaining to watch.

and, then i danced until 9:00 am.

hey, listen. there's two famous quotes.

1) "i want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.", often apocryphally attributed as "if i can't dance, this is not my revolution".
2) "'cause your friends don't dance, and if they don't dance, then they're no friends of mine."

so, i watched a small part of the debate. they're talking about immigration.

i indicated that i thought warren was going to come out swinging against sanders, and i don't think i was wrong, despite the msm coverage of the debate; she hasn't hit him directly yet, but she seems keen to interrupt him and inject herself as the replacement for him. i'm not sure if she's figured out yet that she's being used as a prop, but the moderators seemed to be suggesting that they were in the process of pivoting the coverage. and, the recent polls - however meaningless they are - have indicated she lost support after the debate, probably because she's being seen as bernie-lite. why vote for bernie-lite when bernie is running? given that this is coming from somebody that doesn't seem to understand regulatory capture, i should probably be less surprised by the poor tactical decision than i actually am.

but, i highly doubt that they came to a truce before hand; rather, it seems like her goal was to talk over him, rather than talk down to him. and, it seems to have backfired.

unsurprisingly, bernie slayed in the health care section. and, delaney offered himself up as a pinata; he walked right into it. that was what bernie needed, and it's easy to see how and why he got a bump from it.

i'm also still not sure if warren actually supports a single-payer plan or not; all she's really clarified is that she doesn't intend to tell us if she does or not.

on immigration, it's likewise not surprising to see them walk back the decriminalization thing, as that was really pretty much ridiculous. i have a no one is illegal meme on my page, and i believe that, but it's such a complicated debate with so many clauses. see, and this is what they're all doing wrong, here - they're trying to oversimplify a topic with legislation that is going to be full of complicated clauses and corollaries into a vacuous moral slogan, and then getting spun around in circles on it. they need to stand up and state this clearly: immigration is complicated. in the end, everybody stands in front of a judge, which will make a determination on a case-by-case basis. so, it's not about slogans, and it's not about values, and it's not about morals, it's about very detailed applications of a very large body of law. at least they're being more honest about it, but all they can accomplish by oversimplifying this complicated thing is coming off as demagogues, which is not appealing. at all.

so, if somebody is in detention, they should get healthcare. and, if somebody is awaiting a decision, they should get health care. but, no country on the planet extends health care to people that came into the country through improper channels. it's just not real, anywhere. they need to be specific, or at least explain that it's complicated, rather than falling back on these universals, and then getting spun around on them. because, i'll tell you what the truth is - these networks are setting them up.

i'll watch the rest later.

to my knowledge, i don't have ancestry from new york, but my dad's side of the family has both jewish and italian in it, so you can imagine that i'm used to everybody yelling at each other.

and, for all the shit that some people have always given me, and will probably always give me, there' s a flip side to it: when you meet other people that yell, you immediately bond. esa, for example, is also a yeller, and really appreciated that about me - i didn't flinch or freak out, i just yelled back.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a35w3z/bernie-sanders-angry-accent-jewish-brooklyn

so, i actually haven't eaten all week; my diet list is stalled on tuesday. that's why i haven't watched the debates yet.

i drank five litres of syrupy malt liquor (mike's, smirnoff's) in the park last weekend, and i started to notice it on tuesday morning. i can work out the best diet in the world, with the best exercise routine on top of it, but if i then go and drink five litres of beer on top of it every weekend, i'm undoing it all. it's just a process of knowing when to stop, and this is converging with everything else: it's time to lay off the beer for a while, lest a beer belly begin to set in.

those calories just aren't budgeted....

i know that not eating for a week is not the best approach, but i've actually done this before, and it does what i need it to do, so long as i keep the exercise down. i mean, we're talking about five-ten pounds here, max. but it's that extra five-ten pounds that separates me from a body i recognize into one i don't. it needs to be brought under control.

i'm checking the event listings for the weekend, and don't expect to go out, at this point; i want to finish what i'm doing. if i find something, i'll change my mind - which will mean i'll need to eat. but, if i don't, i could find myself in bed and without food for the rest of the weekend.

in the long run, what's the right adjustment? i don't want to get into a habit where i'm putting on pounds via drinking, then losing it via starvation or exercise (see, i don't want to turn it into muscle, so i'm avoiding that just right now). i could just stop drinking altogether, which i would consider excessive - my politics are kind of extreme left in a lot of ways, but i'm a pretty moderate person, over all. i cut down on the smoking, but i didn't quit altogether; likewise, i don't have any particular drive to entirely quite drinking.

i think that easier access to marijuana is the better answer, in the long run. that won't stop me from drinking entirely, but it will cut it down substantively. right now, i buy alcohol and just sneak into joints as they get passed, because i really can't buy it - and it is legal to share your pot in michigan. when i can buy it, i think it will become the primary intoxicant, leaving alcohol to the inferior position. so, i could easily imagine myself heading to a concert or other sort of party and picking up two-three grams of pot instead of two-three litres of alcohol, then buying one beer all night instead of taking a few quick tokes here and there. that should bring me back closer to the energy budgeting process, as i've calculated it...

i don't want to start doing uppers. i avoid them for a reason. and, i don't actually even enjoy taking shots, it's too intense.

....but, i also keep saying that i'm getting older, and the generational gap is starting to assert itself. there is a small rock scene in detroit still, i'm just stuck between older people and younger people, both pushing styles i'm not really into. and, there's going to come a point where i'm uncomfortable showing up at a house party and trying to relate to people half my age; i'm maybe already there, even. you might not realize it from a distance, but the kind of techno parties i'm going to are actually a way out for me in that respect; i'm not going to edm shows full of kids, but am rather frequenting techno and house parties where the average age is close to mine, maybe even a tad older. these are 30-something or 40-something parties, not 20-something parties.

edibles will be legal in canada soon, but i still can't buy them anywhere around here. i should be able to buy in michigan at the beginning of next year.

in the mean time, i'll just need to be a little more conscious of the reality that (processed) alcohol is sugar, and sugar is calories. the fact is that it hasn't really been an issue for me for most of my life. but, i'm a little older now, my metabolism is a little slower, and i need to adjust.

if i go out, i'll need to eat first; if i stay in, i'll eat when i feel i need to.

i actually still have my red square from the student strike.

if you haven't heard this, btw...

sit down, first.

if you have a system, use it; if you don't, at least find some good headphones.

please don't listen to this on your phone.

on second thought, it was too cold to eat, so i just showered.

i'm going to put off eating until a little later, when the air's off.

it's not nearly as bad as the previous apartment, but it is unpleasant during the day, when we're in this middle point of around 26-28 degrees, which is what it's been the last few days. any cooler than that, and i don't really notice it; any warmer than that, and the outside air overpowers it. but, it can get shivery in here at that mid point, when it's on. if i sleep in the day under the covers, take a hot shower in the evening and then stay up all night, i think i can largely avoid it.

it should warm up on the weekend, and i don't know what i'm doing, yet.

so, where am i on the rebuild?

i've posted all of the damaged cds. there's a few more days of setting the apartment up, but a lot of what is left is the scripts, so i think i should run through it a little quicker when i get back to it. i start reposting inri000 at the end of the month, so i should get some liner notes up for the october and november journals, and when that happens i hope you'll see what the actual point of this is.

as mentioned previously, i'm rebooting the alter-reality, so the notes that come up for now will just be for 2013-2018. it wasn't initially clear how i was going to do this, but it now makes sense for me to say that i can and will stop this process, for now, at the beginning of 2018, with the end of the fifth reconstruction phase. i guess i'll want to do a quick archive, but i can stop the rebuild there, until i get done the next phase.

i'm going to get through this before i start making more calls about the report, which should be in the mail.

for right now, i'm going to get something to eat, watch the debates when i'm eating and take a hot shower to warm the place up a little bit.

you're not really pitting left v right here when it comes to this; there's not anything particularly left wing about "new families for all!", and there's not anything particularly right-wing about staying at home until you're 50.

what you're really pitting against each other is a concept of dour rationalism against the irrationality of consumer capitalism. it's logic vs impulse. and, in a way, it's consequently intelligence v stupidity.

my parents were not intelligent people, and i've suffered for that. i would hope other people take more benevolent approaches to their kin.

this whole "leaving the nest" thing is a creation of bourgeois capitalism.

as we live in ubiquitous capitalism, it's easy to understand why self-identified leftists may not realize that they're propping up capitalist ideology by criticizing people who stay with their families past a certain age. but, a thorough deconstruction of capitalism would have to address this as an issue.

why do we insist that kids move away from their parents, using the model of birds? are we not primates, rather than birds? do primates not live in kin groups? do they not practice kin selection? and, what does the individual gain by moving away from their family?

the reason we insist that kids move away from their parents is that it drives the housing market and props up the rentier class; it's a way to maximize the extraction of rent, to the benefit of the property owners and the expense of workers. that's how capitalism works, kids. yet, we are certainly primates, and primates certainly practice kin selection, so this is acting against our nature and our evolutionary impulses. so, why do we buy into it?

it is the answer to the last question that the issue really pivots around, and it depends on whether the specific individual gets along with their family or not. somebody with a very strong, close-knit family relationship would probably not benefit from moving away from home at all, whereas somebody that sees the world substantively different from their parents potentially would. now, if we move very far into the leftist project, we get to the point where we collectivize housing outright, and the debate kind of evaporates. call it a kibbutz. cite plato. whatever. but, the family as a feudal concept breaks down when you eliminate the property relationship, and that does need to be the end goal. yet, even then, you don't necessarily physically move away from your family so much as you allow for people with more distant biological relationships to take on roles that we currently delegate to close family members; it's less a physical separation and more of an emotional separation. in the mean time, if somebody can get along with their family then it would clearly make financial sense for them to maximize their resources by staying at home as long as they can, pooling their resources into the existing family finances (house, car) rather than into a new one and eventually inheriting something that's been paid for rather than buying something new. that's not ideological; that's logical. and, that is of course the trick of the social coercion - don't inherit your folks' house. buy a new one.  then, the bank wins and everybody else loses.

as an anarchist, i broadly reject the idea that i have any right to tell somebody how to live. as my interests lay in art, and i consider paying for shelter to be an annoying burden, i would have rather stayed with my parents until the end; my parents did not care about my art, but rather expected me to go to school and get a job and start a family, things i did not actually want, so i was forced to leave against my will and go out and carry through with this contrived exercise in capitalism that i consider to be a waste of existence. i ended up working part time jobs, just enough to pay the rent, mostly avoiding any kind of social life and focusing as much energy as i could into my art. there was a fundamental breakdown in understanding, there - they didn't understand why i didn't want a good job, why i didn't want a car, why i wasn't interested in starting a family and why i "wasted" so much of my time on art and writing, and i didn't understand why they didn't just fucking support me in what i told them i actually wanted. so, we made no sense to each other. but, if i could have found a kind of benefactor, which is how they did it in the enlightenment, i would have happily moved into their basement. in the end, that's kind of what happened - i live in somebody else's basement, and pay rent with government subsidies. and, i focus on what i care about, and spurn what i don't.

i would have rather just stayed home, and if i had just stayed home then i'd have a lot more work done, too.

if other people have families that they're able to get along with better, then power to them. they have something i don't. and, i have no interest in criticizing them for that or trying to coerce them back into capitalist orthodoxy.

i want to say something about how i ended up in the wrong group of activists, though. it goes back to a kind of common error i've come up against over and over again, which is that i tend to base my primary means of learning on written material, and it often ends up contradicted by reality.

probably the first time i noticed this was when i realized i could spell words i couldn't pronounce correctly, and that this was kind of endemic, actually. i guess it was some time near the end of high school, when i found myself in a social group for really the first time in my life. in the midst of conversation, i would repeatedly pronounce things in ways that would get strange glances, or requests for repetition. "oh, you mean..." and then they would present the pronunciation that they'd heard. this often had the effect of challenging my credibility on the topic, because i was using all of these weird pronunciations. how well could i understand a concept if i couldn't enunciate it?

well, the truth is that these are things i'd been reading about in books and online for years, but that i hadn't actually heard anybody talk about before. my father was a jock, and my mother was a drunk - they didn't and don't have large vocabularies. i grew up desperately poor for the first ten years of my life; when my father remarried, he married into the middle class, but it was into a conservative section of the middle class, and it didn't meaningfully increase my exposure to people using larger words. so, i was reading at a university level when i was 10, i was in the 95th+ percentile on all of the standardized tests, but i had no exposure to anybody actually using any of these words. in english, spelling it out only goes so far, too - you can't just figure it out.

i often found myself explaining this, but it was rarely actually effective, because people are shallow idiots. i more often found myself written off, despite usually being the most knowledgeable person in the room. it's how people are.

likewise, i suspect most people probably end up in a political movement by meeting people, rather than by reading books. if there's much of any intellectual component to it, it's usually going to come after the fact, and have little meaningful effect. the normal way that people are going to do this is that they're going to go to a protest and ask the people there what's happening and determine if they like the people or not.

i did this the exact opposite way - i read up on a bunch of leftist writers, and then i went out looking for leftists, only to find that they didn't really uphold the ideals i'd previously read about. then, we get into this definitional debate: is the left this thing that exists in front of us all that calls itself the left, or is it this thing that exists in these books? and, i want to point to the books, and they want to point to themselves.

if you look at the literature closely enough, it does make some sense. what marx criticized as "utopian" came from conservative origins. in a sense, both marxism and conservatism are reactions to liberalism. and, it's not exactly easy to extricate yourself from capitalism, while existing smack in the middle of it.

but, that's not what you're thinking when you show up at one of these protests for the first time. you want them to be what you read about, and it takes some time to assert the empirical fact that they aren't, and try to figure out exactly why that is.

i would probably start an instagram account, even if it was purely trolly (like the twitter account), if you could log in with a browser on a regular windows computer. but, in order to use instagram, you need to have a phone and download an "app". i do actually have a phone at this point, but i'd have to flash it with a custom image before i felt safe actually using it, and i haven't gotten around to doing it, yet.

i want to be clear about a point.

in 2019, when you start pulling out words like "intersectionality", there's no predicting where you're going to actually go with it. it's a buzz word - it means everything and nothing at the same time. that wasn't yet the case in 2013.

so, i'm going to want to hear what you actually mean before i react. and, i'm ultimately going to want to see what your policy actually is, before i rip it apart as orwellian doublespeak - because i can't know beforehand if you're actually going down the rabbit hole, or if you're just being vacuous and trendy.

but, i will hold by my argument: any legitimate attempt at intersectional analysis that i've seen has in the end been a corollary of burkean conservatism, and has never made any sense in an actual socialist context. and, it's usually trotted out to uphold some kind of neo-liberal identity politics.

i'm sorry, but it's true.

we need political leadership that is going to look these people in the eye and say it.

"you want your property rights? fuck your property rights."

otherwise, we're doomed.

you know who we should get to run?

samuel l. fucking jackson.

because that's what we need, is a bad ass motherfucker that's going to get the job fucking done.

and, he's in the right intersectional demographic for all the zombies, too.

"well, we could have avoided the sea level rise that destroyed the eastern seaboard, but we would have had to break our moral principles to do so, and so decided not to. see, back in the year 2032, they were going to pass comprehensive transition legislation, but it was voted down after it was deemed to be a microaggression against the shareholders of exxon. everybody agreed never to speak of it again. and, the water rose..."

fuck the fucking rules, guys.

we have a fucking planet to save.

we're not going to win the war against carbon with appeals to hoity-toityness, or claims that we have a moral imperative to act.

we need a swashbuckling cowboy that is going to break every rule in the book in order to slay the beast where it lay.

there is actually some unrest around elizabeth may, right now. it's about time...

what i want is to see is a party arise on the left that has no interest in christian morality and is rather willing to do anything it takes to win - and then govern in a way that ruthlessly promotes it's own agenda, at the expense of the parties around it.

i don't want values. i want results.

i was actually excited to see kinsella back in action. he seems to have a chip on his shoulder regarding trudeau, and i'd like to see him given the opportunity to let it out.

this speaks to a naivete in what we refer to as "progressivism" that is really reduced to a conservative moral principle. i am a potential green supporter, and i do not remotely care about "morality" or "decency" or "decorum in politics"; these are bourgeois concepts that belong on the right hand of the spectrum and have nothing to do with actually winning seats in parliament.

in the end, they'll look back on this as a mistake, as all these better-than-you voters end up voting for the mainstream parties, while the scrappers wonder where the fight went.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2019/07/30/warren-kinsellas-green-party-work-is-done-elizabeth-may-says.html

it should be noted that the females of our own species have a very similar reaction to dubstep, especially the varieties known as "bro-step".

https://toronto.citynews.ca/video/2019/07/29/dubstep-a-buzzkill-for-mosquitoes/

this is what is happening, here.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/07/31/news/greens-top-new-democrats-spring-fundraising

what a farce.

as the last three governments have essentially downloaded or cut everything that there is to download or cut, the central messaging of the election campaign appears to be a humongous red herring. health care and education are responsibilities of the provinces, and most canadians know that. what the federal government funds is really left to defense and public infrastructure. so, are they running on increasing military spending?

the truth is that they think you're too stupid to figure it out. and, we've come full circle - this is flat out harperism; demagoguery at it's worst.

that's not to say that i care much about budgets. i don't. but, if you're voting for the federal liberals because you're concerned about cuts to education, you need to read up on how things actually get paid for. but, like i say, most people actually know this, and if they push this kind of cynical dishonesty for long enough it should backfire stupendously.

the truth is that this is a reflection of their record, or lack of one.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/you-cannot-cut-your-way-to-prosperity-trudeau-rallies-liberal-candidates-in-ottawa-1.4531120

i've never liked paste magazine very much, and while i was not signed up to noise trade very long before it got bought, i'm not very happy about what they've done to the site.

*shrug*.

the bandcamp site is superior, anyways. i just wanted a separate place for the writing.

and, i'm posting.

give it a day or two.

i'll watch the debates early in the morning.

loma prieta tomorrow is a distinct possibility, depending on how i'm feeling.

actually, i expect warren to come out swinging against sanders, and for it to catch sanders completely off guard. even if she's mostly benefiting from being the default white woman in the race, it seems clear to me that warren is fundamentally running against sanders, more than anything else. that is her task here, her raison d'etre: to defeat bernie sanders. she is not interested in holding back. at all.

but, i think he should feign surprise, even if he's expecting it.

see, she can benefit rather substantially by taking him down, but he can't win by bludgeoning her. it's just the gender dynamic of the situation, relative to the electorate. something as simple as a few vacuous, stupid comments about him being old and white will likely give her a small bump - albeit mostly at the expense of harris, who is her primary opponent at this stage. but, anything bernie says will be ripped apart for misogyny, however unfairly. this is not a reflection of gender equality, it is a reflection of a continuing system of patriarchy where women are still seen as the weaker sex, and men continue to be judged on their gallantry. but, this is the truth of it - warren benefits by attacking bernie, but bernie loses by attacking warren.

the best thing bernie can do is take the hits, and exaggerate the hurt. and, i suspect this isn't disingenuous, either. this may not help him with female identity voters, but it could potentially make her seem like a turncoat, a traitor, a sell-out to the left-of-the-party lane that bernie should be able to beat her soundly in.

if they get into a shouting match, he's digging his own grave.

Speaking in British Columbia, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in French that it was important for Elections Canada decisions be free from political influence.

see, this is classic justin trudeau.

and, i hope that the court decides that the chief electoral officer has sufficiently shown his work, this time.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/chief-electoral-officer-decides-to-stick-with-voting-day-amid-religious-concerns-1.4528000

funny.

i went from windsor to detroit on this day to take advantage of low drug prices, albeit of a different sort.

i was outside for hours and hours on sunday and loved it. i'm rested up now and should be back to work relatively soon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/us/politics/bernie-sanders-prescription-drug-prices.html

so, this is some kind of reverse honour killing.

these religious upbringings.........they fuck people up.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/menhaz-zaman-discord-chat-messages-images-1.5229187

see, what something like this tells me is that the left should be trying harder to take over the republican party.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/12/20690910/donald-trump-justin-amash-republicans-primaries-conservatives

these are both true statements:

1) the democrats are a substantial, dominant part of the problem and should be removed from power.
2) the republicans provide essentially no practical, workable solutions and should not be considered as an acceptable alternative.

this is one of those situations where the one-party system in the united states turns the discourse into a sick joke. but, if trump wants to have a conversation about inner city conditions in the collapsing industrial north, the actual left should take advantage of it.

sanders is absolutely right when he points out that inner city conditions in many cities across the north are at third world levels, for many of the inhabitants. trump is absolutely correct to repeat these claims, and he is absolutely correct to point fingers at the democratic party as an institution, even if the responsibility lies more at the city council level than at the congressional level. it is not clear what trump expects elijah cummings to accomplish for his city at the congressional level, in the face of decades of republican dominance. but, there is absolutely an under class in these cities of unneeded workers (marxists would refer to this as the industrial reserve army), and it is mostly black. there is rife revolutionary potential within this underclass, and it should be organized, but it should not be organized within the democratic party, which seeks not to improve the living conditions of these people, or to finally free them from capitalism, but to find ways to keep them in order. this is the mandate of the democratic party: to stop the marginalized from rising up. of course, it goes without saying that it should not be organized within the republican party either, as they will seek gentrification and mass displacement; if the democrats want to keep these people locked to their crumbling infrastructure as serfs in a neo-feudal order, the republicans just want to sweep them into the ocean.

a real, grassroots movement within a third party that has an actual socialist program is absolutely required to address these issues, and it should operate largely at the state level of jurisdiction. this decaying property needs to be seized by the people and converted into social housing with money raised by taxing the wealth in the suburbs.

all you will get from the one-party system is the status quo, or worse.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/455116-trump-seizes-on-sanders-past-criticism-of-baltimore

i had to double check the file, but it's really, actually ready to post.

but, the low tonight is 25 degrees celsius.

and, there's an outdoor party somewhere in michigan. for free.

i can't waste that. it's too perfect. so, i'll be back to work on monday.

this is where the actual meaningful data sits - the cause of pretty much all of the health problems we have is not what we eat but how much.

so, if you do a study on meat consumption and conclude that humans that eat a lot of meat are at a higher risk of cancer, you're developing a correlation without asserting a causal force. it may very well be true that people that eat a lot of meat are at a (relatively) higher risk of cancer, but that doesn't mean the cause is the meat - the cause could be the eating. you'd have to figure that out.

what the study i posted this morning, as well as a few others that have been referenced, have demonstrated is that the researchers making this claim haven't done that - they've simply found a correlation and run with it. now, that doesn't necessarily mean their correlation is wrong, it just means they haven't done a sufficient amount of study on it to determine if it's causal or not. it might be, it might not be, we don't know until we can do the proper studies (which are hard).

as it happens to be, it turns out that we have even more research telling us that the eating actually does have a cancer risk attached to it, which has the effect of minimizing the importance attached to eating any one specific thing. we can work this out with a basic syllogism.

1. obesity causes cancer. that is clear.
2. if you are obese, then you have a large amount of food in your diet.
3. meat is food.
4. so, if you are obese, you probably have a large amount of meat in your diet.
5. therefore, high meat consumption is correlated with cancer risk, even though the cause of the disease is over-eating, in general.

if you're concerned about your health, worry less about the what and more about the amount.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27909900

to clarify a point though.

i buy around 300 grams of salami/month, usually a little less. i get them cut very, very thin and slice them up in the spaghetti; i'll take 8 slices, microwave them to kill the listeria, and then cut them up and sprinkle them over it. but, i only eat half of the plate, then put it back for the next day. if each slice is 1-2 grams in weight, that's going to be around 4-8 grams a day, on average.

the studies put down 50 g a day as the point where a (questionable) risk develops, which i couldn't even fathom. with amounts that high, the problem is fundamentally over-eating, and you're going to get stuff like diabetes and heart disease simply from being overweight - which is the actual cause of virtually everything.

i wish that posting this was tearing down a strawman.

sadly, i suspect i'm more on point than i ought to be.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/25/16018658/what-the-health-documentary-review-vegan-diet

do your own research.

don't let the government think for you.

it is true that you don't want to eat meat three times a day.

but, it's also true that you don't want to drink wine at every meal.

so, you want to tone it down a little, yes. but, there is really almost no actual evidence that moderate meat consumption is bad for you at all.

sorry.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25941850

the thing you need to be concerned about is total caloric intake, not the source of the calories.

it's not what you eat, it's how much you eat.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/whats-the-beef-with-red-meat

did you know that the average height in india is almost a foot shorter than the average height in most of europe?

do you know why that is?

it's not genetic. we know that.

it's because the culture creates systemic malnourishment: it's not merely poverty, it's a culture that creates an inadequate diet for people to develop properly.

if you're an adult, you can make your own choices, and nobody is going to care if you malnourish yourself.

but, make sure you get your kids milk.

and, make sure you get them meat, too.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/plant-based-milks-for-kids-pediatricians-dietitians-1.4392857

and, no, i'm not going to get into an argument with some anti-science hippie that thinks milk causes heart disease.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/dairy-health-food-or-health-risk-2019012515849

well, if 55% of the immigrants are economic migrants - meaning that 45% are refugees - and ~ half of them are dependents or spouses then it would actually follow that 45 + 55/2 = 72.5% are dependents or spouses.

one would expect that a dependent is either a child, a retired person or somebody that is otherwise unable to work, as that is what it would mean to be a dependent. and, while we consider it normal for spouses to work in canada, that is definitely not the assumption that a large percentage of immigrants are bringing in with them, and this is well understood by immigration authorities.

the article didn't present any data, and i can't be bothered to look for it. but, if we nonetheless allow for some level of two-income families in the immigrant population, what does that reduce the number to? 65%? 60%? does that change the point?

i'm not going to address the question of whether "immigrants" make more or less money than native-born canadians, as that is a policy question. that is, that is determined by the people crafting the policy, rather than something to be measured in the wild. we don't just randomly let people in, we have a very detailed screening process designed to create a certain outcome. direct empirical measurements of this question would have the effect of determining if the policy is working or not, granted, but it's not something we're trying to figure out from first principles by measuring a natural phenomenon in the environment. and, given that canada's immigration system does in fact prioritize people with higher levels of education, you would expect that recent "immigrants", as a broad category, would have higher levels of income, on average, once they've established themselves - because that's how we designed the system. if that was not the case, we'd have a serious policy failure on our hands. and, trump loves that, by the way, it's what he's trying to emulate. on the other hand, you would also expect that certain classes of unskilled labourers would have much lower incomes, as they were brought here for that reason. a serious and worthwhile discussion of the topic would need to be very specific about these kinds of things, and not just talk about "immigrants" as a monolith, but neither maxim bernier nor jonathan gatehouse want to have a serious or worthwhile discussion about the topic, they just want to sling nonsense back and forth at each other. the tldr is that there is no class analysis here, and that's what is really necessary to get to the point of the matter.

i just want to address another point, though:

Last winter, Statistics Canada published a detailed report on labour trends among immigrants that found immigrants were responsible for two-thirds of all national employment gains in 2016-17.

the labour market is going to consist, broadly, of three types of people: young people, immigrants and people that have been fired or laid off. when you have high immigration levels, they're going to become the dominant force in the labour market. so, to point out that they're responsible for most of the gains is a tautological truth - it's a consequence of the high immigration rate.

verdict: gatehouse's article is badly written and highly misleading.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bernier-immigrants-fact-check-1.5225422

i'm more interested in the comments here than the article.

it seems like a few other people experienced something similar and have come here to relate it. there are commonalities, here: physical exertion, tiredness, not much to eat and in most cases a small amount of alcohol. without doing empirical tests, it's impossible to know what the actual triggers are in each scenario, or whether the triggers here are the same in all the circumstances. but, the basic lesson seems to be that some people can have some pretty violent reactions to pot if they take it when their body is tired or exhausted, for whatever reason.

i take yearly blood sugar tests and have never demonstrated any signs of diabetes. i eat a fair amount of fruit and carbs, but very little refined sugar. there's no evidence that this would be of any concern to me.

i have very low blood pressure, and think this might be more of the root cause of it, but, again, i didn't have any equipment to test me with at the time. my blood pressure was normal - low, but normal - when i went in for observation in the morning.

again: i hadn't eaten since the morning, i'd done a lot of bicycling and i had had one tall beer. the pot was the trigger, but the cause was some combination of those other three things, as it was with these other people.

https://sensiseeds.com/en/blog/what-happens-when-you-white-out-on-cannabis/

i have no direct memory of them, myself.

but, i've heard lots of stories. and, if you're ever in canada, and at a drinking establishment with some people of a certain age, it's something to ask for stories about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros_Party_of_Canada_(1963%E2%80%9393)

how does canada set it's drug prices?

we take an average of the oecd price.

so, we add up the cost of the price of insulin in all the countries in the oecd and then divide it by the number of countries in the oecd. and, i'm going to tell you what that calculation usually looks like.

1) austria   x
2) belgium    x - epsilon
.
.
.
20) turkey    x + delta
21) united states    1000x

so, we end up with something like (25x + 1000x)/26 = 39.42x.

that is, not only is it cheaper in canada, but the lack of regulation in the united states is inflating the prices in canada. by a lot. so, it would be even cheaper in canada if you'd fix your own regulatory process.

canadians are generous and wish well to our neighbours, but this is not a sustainable solution. you have to fix your own system.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/26/politics/bernie-sanders-canada-drugs/index.html

so, the thing is ready to go - expecting posting to begin once i get something to eat.

i mean, the argument itself is kind of broken.

people say "but the tories (liberals) only got 38% of the popular vote. why should they be in government?".

the answer is that they got more than 50% of the seats, and we don't form governments in this country based on how much of the vote a party gets, but on how many seats.

the actual problem is when you look at a specific riding and say "but the tories (liberals) only got 36% of the vote in this riding. why should they get this seat?". that is a more valid critique, and something that needs to be addressed.

if we're lucky, we might be able to avoid a catastrophe from pr in canada for quite a while.

but, it would be instant death in america. if you think the republicans are bad as it is with their pandering and lip service to fundamentalist discourse, wait until the evangelicals form their own party and start holding them hostage.

the error the pseudo-left makes with proportional representation is that it doesn't understand the strength of it's opponents.

to be clear: hard leftists, like myself, don't even really believe in parliaments at all. i mean, if you want my actual answer on this it's that we shouldn't have elected representatives in the first place, we should be operating via direct democracy. every parliamentary vote should be converted into a referendum. and, with the technology in front of us, direct democracy is more possible than it's been at any point since the polis. so, i can change my ranked ballot, if you include direct democracy.

1. direct democracy
2. preferential voting (with a single elected representative in a riding system)
3. first past the past
4. proportional representation

the way your average pr advocate thinks is really trying to advance a tactic that's an end-around majority rule. they start with the understanding that they can't actually win an election, and then scheme up this idea to legislate themselves greater influence than they're able to get at the box, in the existing system. then, they think they can convince people to give them the power they can't get in the status quo, and then they wonder why it doesn't work.

but, it's being driven essentially by self-interest - they think it's the best way to advance their own interests. they don't tend to think about what happens when you open the spectrum to the forces of the right, or maybe they think they can defeat them in debate, or maybe they think they're not really a problem.

israel is the prime example. as insane as netanyahu comes off to even moderate conservatives in the west, in israel he is on the left of his coalition. what proportional representation has done in israel is allow for ultra-orthodox and ultra-right parties to take control of government by holding the center-right coalition hostage. instead of building coalitions in the centre, likud needs to constantly pander to the extreme right in order to hold power. so, that's what they do. conversely, while the arabs can elect a few members of parliament, they're perpetually kept out of any kind of coalition; rather than give arab israelis a voice, the system functions to completely exclude them from the process by siphoning them off into their own block. and, i really wish that more enlightened observers would kind of clue in and recognize that so many of the problems in israel are a consequence of the way they elect representatives to parliament.

in italy, it's a different problem, namely instability. they spend so much time jockeying over power, that they don't have time to actually govern.

and, in germany you're seeing the same kind of problems develop that have essentially destroyed israel.

i could go on...

is this a real issue in canada? well, i want to take you back to the short-lived minority government of joe clark. clark's win itself is an example of how bizarre our system in canada is. clark didn't just lose the popular vote, he lost it by four points. it wasn't even close. but, the liberal vote was too concentrated in too few places (because the ndp ate into it in just the right way to split it), and the conservatives eked out a small plurality of seats.

the results were as follows:

1) conservatives. 36% (+0.5%), 136 seats. joe clark.
2) liberals. 40% (-3%), 114 seats. pierre trudeau.
3) ndp. 18% (+3%), 26 seats. ed broadbent.
4) social credit (-0.5%). 5%, 6 seats. fabien roy.

so, you see what happened.

clark needed 142 votes to pass a budget, and he wasn't going to get it from the liberals or the ndp. he needed all six of the social credit votes to govern.

social credit was an odd party, and what was left of it by 1979-1980 had morphed entirely away from it's initial roots as a christian socialist party. the socreds governed the west of canada for decades in the middle of the last century, and were known for doing all kinds of horrible things. by 1980, they had been reduced to a small number of seats in quebec, and were essentially an extreme right party, known for perpetuating anti-semitic conspiracy theories about jewish bankers running the world.

so, clark is left in a hard position: in order to govern, he needed the support of what was widely seen as a neo-nazi party. and, he refused to do it.

the socreds provided a list of demands to clark, which he was to meet in exchange for support. clark refused those demands, triggering an election. trudeau won his last majority, and the socreds were wiped out - a frustrating result for the conservative movement, but a positive outcome for the country overall.

years later, stephen harper would resurrect some socred economic ideas in his list of boutique tax credits and monthly child care checks, but the party was largely abandoned as an impediment to stopping the liberals.

what would have happened in a pr system?

if strict pr, the parliament would have looked like this:

1) liberals. 113.5 seats. so, 114.
2) conservatives. 101.5 seats. so, 102.
3) ndp. 50.6 seats. so, 51 seats.
4) socreds. 13 seats.
5) rhinoceros party. 2 seats.

there would have been one more seat to distribute to an "independent", but it's not clear what that means.

the rhinoceros party was a parody party, and would no doubt not have actually sat. rather, there would have been a coalition between the liberals & ndp, which was the status quo throughout the 70s.

but, we would have ended up with twice as many nazis in parliament, and they would have been given official party status, including votes on committee. the ndp, on the other hand, would not gain anything they didn't already have, which was the balance of power through most of the 70s. and, in past years, the socreds polled much higher than 5%, too.

if you look at recent elections, you see a spattering of parties on the left and a single party on the right, but this is recent in canada. there was a western conservative party through the 80s and 90s called the reform party, as well as a more recent hard-right party from the same area called the wildrose party. conservatives know that they have to unite to win a fptp system. that would probably not be true in a pr system, which would allow the right of the party to split into it's own block, which could then govern in coalition with a centrist conservative party. this is a recipe for the same disaster that's happened in israel, where centrist conservatives become reliant on the far right to form a coalition. fptp has the opposite force in motion - the centre-right has to constantly try and shut the hard right down in order to appeal to moderate voters. harper was bad enough; we don't want to create a voting system that permanently embeds a reform or socred style hard-right into the parliament, and then forces the conservatives to rely on them to pass budgets.

but, the average pr advocate doesn't even think of that; they only think of their own self-interest.

a proper survey of how this works, which was not done by the committee that studied this, would realize the perils of this kind of system, for this reason - advocates think it amplifies the left, but the evidence in front of us suggests it actually amplifies the right.

what is better about preferential voting?

well, it maintains the riding system, which i think has some benefits to it, but ensures that the candidate actually gets to 50%. it's not ideal from anybody's perspective, and i don't think anybody argues that it is. political scientists and mathematicians will claim it fails a key test (which i acknowledge but think is arbitrary). socialists will argue that it maintains a competitive concept in elections, rather than promote a collaborative one, and that's a valid critique, although it can be blunted using other means. conservatives will argue that you're rigging the field, because they know they'll lose a lot of seats. and, there's a general fear (that i think is overstated) that it will lead to perpetual centrist government, which may in some sense be true but opens up a question - where is the actual centre in this country?

what it is is a compromise, which is also very canadian. it maintains the basic structure of the status quo, while tweaking it to prevent vote splitting from creating false majorities over weak pluralities.

if you're to ask me what the problem is, what's broken, what needs to be fixed, it's people winning seats with 30% of the vote. that's crazy; that shouldn't be. so, it fixes that, and that's really what i'm out to actually do.

but, if you want to talk about direct democracy instead then that's even better...

i should be back to rebuilding september around midnight.

yeah. i'm in for the night for sure and don't think i want to go out for tomorrow. we'll see if i change my mind, but i'm more keen on staying in right now. there's nothing particularly compelling happening - these would just be dance parties.

that said, i'm healing quickly.

it's more about wanting to clean in here, and getting back to doing some work, and maybe even "detoxing" a little; it's more like i'm partied out for a bit.

i'll keep an eye on stuff, but the next show might not be for a while.

i know that the greens support pr, but it's a different calculus.

when i voted for the liberals in 2015, it was because i wanted them to govern. when i vote for the greens in 2019, it's a protest vote against the sitting government. so, it doesn't matter.

i've voted ndp a half dozen times in elections i know they'll lose, because the liberals were not presenting an acceptable alternative to the conservatives; if i thought they were going to actually win, i wouldn't have done that.

in a multiparty system like canada, the protest vote is a real thing, and you can't interpret it as support for everything that the protest candidates stand for. you have to interpret it just as a vote against the status quo.

i repeat: one of the reasons i voted for the liberals is that i liked their ideas about electoral reform better than the ideas presented by the "progressive" parties.

i am actually an informed voter.

i actually voted for the option i liked better.

and, i am disappointed by the about face, certainly. but, i want them to carry through with the ideas in their own platform, not copy the ideas from the parties that i voted against.

if i wanted pr, i would have voted for the ndp. i didn't. i voted for the liberals because i wanted the av.

it is baffling to me that the media still doesn't understand that the liberals never supported or proposed a proportional representation system. the media has been perpetuating this falsehood now for years.

it stated very clearly in the liberal platform that they intended to move towards a ranked ballot system, which was a position defined not by trudeau but by stephane dion. and, yes, there were people that voted for a ranked ballot system, and i am one of them.

this argument is consequently a red herring, as i would have also voted against a pr system in a referendum, even as i voted for a ranked system in the general. i would also support a ranked system in a referendum. while it is clear that canadians don't want a pr, or an mmp, i have yet to see a ranked ballot option put up to a plebiscite.

i can even rank my preferences:

1. ranked ballots.
2. first past the post
3. proportional representation

the reality is that pr has been a disaster everywhere it's been tried. we should not repeat the mistakes made by countries like israel and germany, but rather learn from them. that's a big part of what being a canadian is about: not repeating the mistakes made in other countries.

so, there are three options, here, not two. the liberals broke their promise, but the promise they broke was around ranked ballots, not around pr. when will the media stop posting misleading (or flat out wrong) articles about this and be honest with canadians about it?

cbc gets three pinocchios, here, even if the sad truth is that the reported doesn't actually know what he's talking about.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-electoral-reform-proportional-representation-1.5225616

ok, so i'm finally finished filing the files from september, 2013. there were thousands of them, because i reinstalled the machine over that month, but it worked itself down to around 575 pages. that will increase a little when i work in the txt messages, but flip over when i cut out the scripts.

so, the last step before i start posting again is to work through the txt messages...

am i healed? am i really staying in? well, i heal quickly, because i'm in good shape, but i'm aging just a tad, too. my shoulder is closing up pretty quickly. there's still some marks on my head. at this rate, i'm probably in for tonight....but could conceivably be out on saturday night.

so, let's see if i can get something done in the mean time.

and, let's see if i actually want to go out or not on saturday, once i actually get into it.

i would like to see european activists start saying things like "we are standing today on the unceded ground of the eburones", or "we stop for a moment to recall the icenian massacre that occurred in this space".

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279961274_Fire_and_Sword_The_archaeology_of_Caesar's_Gallic_War

yeah.

i'm going to plan to take the weekend aside to recover. i could change my mind, but i don't want to go anywhere until the bruise is gone.

it's my fault, entirely. it was a brief event, but i was sitting awkwardly and it was really a good bash. also, my shoulder is raw enough that my hair is sticking to the flesh, like burnt meat

so, i'm going to plan around getting through the next journal update, and once i get back into it i could very well get lost in it.

i was talking about pivoting back to doing some work. this is coincidental, but in a sense it may be a blessing in disguise.

it's just a funny coincidence, i guess, that this happens right after sanders launches a review of labour standards at amazon.

i think it's a mistake, both in a political sense and in a functional sense, to focus on one employer. amazon is not a bad apple, it merely plays by the rules to it's self-interest, as they are set. so, you need systemic change, not this idea of vilifying this specific company.

but, let's remember what the actual story is.

and, let us remind ourselves of the power of regulatory capture.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/454783-labor-charge-alleges-sanders-campaign-management-retaliated-against-union

why does the pride committee have the authority to make this decision? if you told me i couldn't march, you can be sure that i would. wow.

that being said, these parties are there to pander, and there's a good argument that the pandering is co-opting the festival.

i would like to see more municipalities take the view that politicians are only welcome at pride if they come as private citizens, and leave the politics at home for the day.

https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/ndp-meeting-with-calgary-pride-in-hopes-of-reversing-decision-to-ban-political-parties-from-the-parade

so, what happened last night?

i made it to ferndale a few minutes after 22:00, thinking the headliner would be on between 22:00 and 23:00. i know it was a wednesday, but i've still never seen a headlining band come on at 21:00, anywhere, ever.

they were done by 22:00; people were walking out as i was walking in.

so, what do you do after you bike an hour to get to a show and find out you missed it because it's absurdly early? i guess you either go home or you find something else to do, and i didn't want to go right home, so i went to hamtramck to catch the tail end of the show there. it's less surprising that they were finishing up when i got there around 23:00. 

i decided to catch a quick beer at a local techno spot and head home. that turned into a big beer, and eventually into being offered a taste of marijuana as a gift. i didn't finish that big beer until around 00:30, and realized quickly i was hanging out for the night.

so, i got another beer and went to the washroom, and quickly noticed that my thumb was bleeding. there is no cut on the thumb; rather, the blood was spurting out of my finger nail, like a blood vessel burst. somewhat baffled, i grabbed a little piece of toilet paper and went back outside to apply pressure to stop the bleeding. i don't know why my thumb was bleeding, but it seemed to be bleeding from the inside rather than the outside.

after sitting for a few moments, i started getting a little bit light-headed from the pot, which is fairly normal for me. i know that the way to deal with this is to sit still for a few minutes and let it pass; i know i'll be fine, soon. why does this happen to me? do i have a marijuana allergy? is it just low tolerance? is it dose dependent, and a consequence of relying on gifts (is the issue not having control over dosage)? i think i should start to get a better understanding of this.

so, i was sitting still, waiting for the intense part of the high to pass, when i fainted, and fell to a concrete floor, where i landed hard on my right side. i have substantive bruising on both my arm and my head.

i am certain that i fainted and fell, that this is what actually happened and not a gloss over some other event. i remember falling, and losing consciousness before i hit the floor; i then remember quickly regaining consciousness and jumping right back up again. so, i seem to have lost a small amount of time between the point that i fainted and the point that i got up.

i do not remember seizing; i'm told i was experiencing one.

let's recall. i took a pass on a j, then my thumb is randomly bleeding and i'm feeling light-headed so i sit down. i then faint, and fall over; i either went into a seizure as a consequence of hitting my head, or a i fainted for the purposes of having a seizure. i know i lost consciousness before i actually fell over.

i felt great immediately before this. in fact, i had just finished bicycling upwards of 15 miles, so i was feeling a pretty strong post-exercise natural high. i was not experiencing headaches, i wasn't tired, i wasn't sick.

the trigger was clearly the pot, and i'm left to wonder if the bleeding thumb isn't evidence that i accidentally inhaled some kind of upper, but i'm increasingly wondering if there's an underlying condition that i need to take seriously.

i was refused further service at that point, and while i had only had two beers and do not believe that the beer was a cause of the fainting or the seizure, i can hardly blame the bartender. so, i got another beer at a different bar down the street, then found myself talking with some people in the park until 5:00.

i stopped at the emergency room for observation on the way home, and just talked briefly to a nurse about the possibilities of a concussion. i was not having difficulty recalling information. my head did not hurt. i was not vomiting. my pupils were fine. so, i went home without seeing the doctor. i just needed somebody to tell me i'm ok....

not the best night, even if it worked out ok in the end.

and, how do i feel?

well, i got some rest. i'm a little tired from 20 miles of biking yesterday, and experiencing a bit of a pot hangover. i'm not vomiting. no headaches. no seizures, yet.

this is not the first neurological event i've experienced, and what i've tied previous events to is the combination of smoking (anything) on an empty stomach. these events are rare, and it's been years now since the last one, but it's not completely out of nowhere. this is the first time i've experienced any kind of injury from it, and i think it's partly because it's been so long that i forgot about it. in the past, i may have sat myself closer to the floor when i felt it coming on, rather then bend over on a bench. a part of the reason i fell over is due to the awkward way i was sitting.

so, i can't explain exactly what happened, but i can point out that it was triggered by the pot, may have had something to do with a lack of recent eating or lack of sleep, has happened before and doesn't appear to have long lasting effects. i just hope the bump on my head clears up soon; otherwise, i may be in for the weekend for that reason.

the event was at 1:00 am on thursday morning. i had last eaten around 7:00 am on wednesday morning. while i didn't feel particularly hungry, i think the direct takeaway is to ensure that i have something - even a piece of bread - in my stomach before i go out partying. and, in fact, i'm usually pretty good about this; i wasn't expecting to end up in a bar overnight last night, i was expecting to hit the show and catch the last bus home. i don't know the mechanism, but i've at least determined the correlation. i was a little sloppy, and need to be more conscious about it.

i've actually made this point over and over again: the idea that the culture of northern europe (the culture of the germanic, celtic, baltic and slavic nations, as well as the historically iranian cultures of europe (alans, scythians, sarmatians, etc)) is fundamentally christian, or erected on a christian edifice, is a colonial lie presented by the christian church. it's complete bullshit.

that is a claim that has more merit when applied to the southern parts of europe, and actually even has more merit when applied to the middle east and northern africa. egyptian culture is more fundamentally christian in origin than swedish or english culture is or ever will be.

the historical truth is that this area was brutally invaded and colonized first by romans and second by christians, who attempted to eradicate the indigenous culture and people and replace it with their own. what the romans did to the celts would qualify as outright genocide by modern standards. but, the barbarian north then spent centuries, and in some cases millennia, fighting back against these roman and christian invaders.

when these germanic tribes moved south to destroy rome, they were in a very large part moving to destroy christianity, and this is as true of the goths as it was of the last viking raids into france and england. they always targeted the churches, above all else; they would plunder and rape, yes, but burning down the church and the monasteries was always the central prerogative of the raids. and, there's a serious body of evidence that interprets this as self-defense, from a reaction to the romans slaughtering celts from britain to switzerland to an allied, pan-germanic response to charlemagne's attempt to eliminate the saxons.

beyond that, this idea of there being a western empire in the first place is questionable. the romans did not build the east, they inherited it; it was built mostly by the persians, and then renovated by the greeks. the romans literally even bought large swaths of it. so, with the exception of the pesky jews, it was less prone to nationalist uprisings, because they all saw themselves as a part of the same culture. when the east did revolt, it revolted together. in the west, there were constant revolts from the time of caesar. at almost no time in history was there actually centralized roman control over hispania, gaul, britannia and germania all at the same time. there were, rather, constant uprisings of celtic tribes, german tribes, various confederations of tribes, roman pretenders and anybody else that could take control of an army long enough to cause a ruckus. in that sense, the very western roman empire itself - the supposed basis of western "civilization" - is largely a mythological construct. the peoples of northwestern europe saw the romans not as bringers of civilization, but as cruel overlords, oppressors and destroyers, and they never stopped fighting them for their freedom, which they eventually won by burning down the cities of their oppressors.

over time, the celts were assimilated nearly entirely and the germans slowly adopted aspects of christianity, but to suggest that christianity was the basis of the culture is backwards. the legal systems in these countries, especially in england, are fundamentally germanic, and then borrowed aspects from roman christianity, rather than the other way around. our religious traditions are fundamentally germanic, even if they have a christian gloss over them. our cultural traditions are individualistic and libertarian, not hegemonic or hierarchical. and, we've struggled from the start to see the logic in treating women as inferior livestock. we are not christians, we are barbarians.

when the dust of the last viking attempts to destroy christianity settles, what is left is a feudal society dominated by warlords that use christianity as a tool to manipulate their conquered peoples. in the end, the barbarian overlords found christianity too useful to dismantle altogether. but, it was never a driving force for any meaningful decision made by anybody. and, the scribes were still reading their latin texts, insofar as they could find them.

so, people ask the question of when it was that christianity began to unravel in the northwest. was it recently, as per nietzsche? was it in the age of enlightenment? the renaissance? the reformation? the black death? while these all mark turning points of victory in the struggle against the church, i might argue that the question is illusory: these areas were never fully romanized, never fully christianized, but have rather spent the entirety of history fighting hard to maintain their identity in strict and brutal opposition to the dominance of the encroaching church.

that is our history, as northern europeans: we are not products of christianity, but victims of it.

the truth is that most people are going to think that these are actually really very moderate, sensible positions that are hard to disagree with in any substantive way. these are not hard-right positions, they're centrist positions, and large swaths of ndp and liberal voters are going to agree with them, outright. the media's framing of this has really never been coherent. immigration control isn't and has never been a strictly right-wing concern.

no sensible person is going to think it's unreasonable to build a fence on a border, and screening criteria for immigration is really a matter of public policy, as a reflection of the popular will. there's nothing outside of the mainstream, here.

the line has to be drawn somewhere around the use of due process. it's when you start talking about restricting or eliminating rights to hearings - which trump has done - that it enters the realm of right-wing politics. it's when you start restricting rights, and mistreating people. that's not the messaging i'm getting from him.

but, i'm still in favour of supply management, amongst other things i would disagree with this party about, which are all far more more pressing ballot issues to me.

https://nationalpost.com/news/build-a-fence-maxime-bernier-announces-plan-by-peoples-party-to-crack-down-on-immigration

so, what am i doing?

i actually didn't really wake up until early this morning, and then i slept again late this morning. i dunno. that was a hectic four-day weekend, so i needed to take some time to catch up on food and rest, i guess. i'm feeling a lot better, now.

it's a little on the cool side for this time of year right now, but it's not too bad. it should be a little nicer on the weekend, but i actually can't find anything to do.

well, i'll caveat that: there's a large number of dance parties, but no early shows. no (interesting) rock shows, no classical shows, no experimental noise fests, no jazz shows. it's just novelty rock acts and boring acoustic nights. so, i'm toying with staying in altogether. or, i may hit one of them. but, i don't expect it to be like last weekend, when i was out for days straight - there's just not enough stuff to do, and nothing substantive to really plan around.

that could change if i find something.

but, for now, it means i feel ok about hitting the screaming females tonight.

no word from the oiprd, yet. i'll have to touch base with them again on monday.

it's going to be like watching an old married couple, both of whom are well past retirement age, bicker about their grocery list.

at least get larry david in to write some lines.

fuck.

and, we've already reached the heady intellectual realm of debating the merits of "intersectional feminism" vs "corporate" or - how about this - "white feminism".

ugh.

this is why people hate this party and wish there was anything out there that was better.

but, what's happening here is that both of the campaigns have realized that warren's bump in the polls is almost entirely attributed to a large amount of women determining their voting intentions with their vaginas. warren's people seem to be ok with that, and willing to create a wedge around it. and, bernie's right back where he started, again.

expect warren's campaign to bring back the bernie bro, and bernie's campaign to go back to subtly undermining his opponent's qualifications.

and, it's all going to be very, very boring. for months.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-war-between-bernie-sanders-and-msnbc-reaches-a-new-peak

why do i eat meat, though?

because my doctor told me i should.

when i was a kid, i was legit anemic. i wasn't a vegan kid exactly, but my mom didn't really feed me. we don't have lunch programs at school in canada because we don't really need them, and it's not like my mom couldn't afford to make me a lunch, it's more like she was too lazy to make me one, and often actually usually more like she was too drunk and/or stoned and/or unconscious from overdosing on something to make me one. when you're like eight years old, your culinary options are a little restricted. when my mom did cook, it was usually kraft dinner (sometimes with broccoli, usually not), and she tended not to keep things like peanut butter or jam in the house, let alone any lunch meat. she'd rarely eat, herself. so, i frequently ended up at school without a lunch.

my dad just didn't know. when the doctor eventually realized i was horribly iron deficient due to malnutrition and got the information to him, he started sending me home with lunch meat. i didn't figure it out for years later, but the reason he sent me home with eastern european salamis was because they had the highest protein contents. and, i've been eating things like "hungarian salami" ever since.

to my mom's credit, she seemed to be a little embarrassed by the situation when it was explained to her, and briefly adjusted by making things like liver, which is pretty iron-heavy. but, the truth is that she was a drunk, and she didn't enjoy doing motherly things. she hated cooking. really, any attempts to do normal mom things were always very short-lived; it was not long before she gave up, and went back to destroying herself.

so, i was never a regular meat eater because i was raised in such a fucked up family. i consequently never developed the kind of meat-eating habits that are considered unhealthy, but have always been struggling to force myself to get enough protein, to keep my iron and b12 up.

i went "vegetarian" briefly around 2002, but it wasn't a big lifestyle change because i kept eating eggs and cheese. and, i'd eat bacon, specifically, at an opportunistic basis, because it's bacon. so, basically, i just stopped eating meat at fast food restaurants. i flopped on this a few years later, but i still never had a steady source of meat in my diet until i moved to windsor and started buying salami regularly.

and, no, i'm not a vegan or a vegetarian. at all.

i choose soy milk over cow's milk because it's nutritionally superior and it tastes better, but i eat a large amount of cheese, about a scoop of ice cream and a (very) small amount of high protein salami on more or less a daily basis. i also eat about 4-8 eggs a week, depending on a variety of things.

the bulk of my diet is fruit (5 strawberries, 20 blueberries, 1 kiwi, 1 bananas, 5 cherries, 1/2 tomato daily) and grains (1/2 bowl of pasta daily, 2-4 pieces of bread weekly). i eat a small green pepper on most days for extra fiber. add dressings (caesar, frank's, mustard) and spices (celery salt, ground pepper) and that's really all i eat.

i've gained a small amount of weight recently, but i actually think it's mostly that i've built a lot of muscle from doing a lot of bicycling. that sounds counter-intuitive, but i guess i lost a lot of muscle when i stopped biking for a few years. it's just hard for me to figure out where i gained the weight (my thighs are a little bigger from the hormones, but i couldn't imagine it's that measurable) because i can't see it. muscle gain is the only thing that really makes any sense, and all that pasta will certainly lead to that end point.

understand that what i'm talking about is increasing my bmi from around 19 to around 22. i'm still underweight by most metrics.

and, i think that removing my testicles will probably cut my muscle mass, although it remains to be seen what my body does to it.

the truth is that the canada food guide is not a substantive political issue because nobody reads the canada food guide.

the reality is that the food guide is trash, but it always was.

the canada food guide is not a peer-reviewed, scientific document. what the canada food guide is is a marketing tool for canadian industry, and if it tells you to eat less meat in favour of more beans it's because the lentil industry successfully lobbied to have that put in the report.

actual peer-reviewed science in actual academic journals is very, very clear that you cannot replace meat with plants, and if you try to do that you're going to end up with vitamin and iron deficiencies. vegetarians are statistically far less healthy than omnivores are.

there are reasons other than health that the scale of beef and poultry production should be cut down, but if we're mostly concerned about health then we should be looking at insects as replacements, not plants.

but, are these things good for you? of course they aren't. the fact is that it's mostly sugar. but, you didn't think that big mac was good for you, did you?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/beyond-meat-burger-beef-health-risks-1.5220777

i'm largely of the opinion that this is very silly, and they should be told to use absentee ballots if they can't show up on the day of the vote, or any of the advance polls. the problem is that the body didn't provide for a solution, thereby infringing voting rights, which are real rights, and it got sent back to find one. that doesn't mean there isn't an easy solution, it just means that the body didn't write it out. and, the judge has to defer to the expertise of the panel as much as possible, so she can't just pull it and scrawl all over it - she has to send it back with a note to do it fucking right, this time.

so, absentee ballots are the easy answer, and the review really just needs to send the complainants the memo around it.

but, i wouldn't be overly opposed to allowing for a special advanced polling day, either, so long as it is also open for the general public.

more chances to vote is better than less chances. right?

but, i would oppose moving the election date, on principle. this is not a good enough reason for that - there are absentee ballots available.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-court-orthodox-jewish-1.5222279

great.

more bankers.

hurrah.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-royal-bank-senate-1.5221960

and, you know what i'll say when he loses, right?

he had his ass handed to him.

so, that spring in his step from the return of his ass is illusory.

i actually don't think that trudeau getting his ass back is going to help him much; ass or no ass, i think he's more or less fucked..

no.

stop.

when somebody says "i can't leave my faith at the door", what does that mean? it means they're suffering from a very large amount of trauma, that this system of control and dominance that they've internalized has left them with so much guilt and self-hate that they can't even function in normal society.

and, you think that letting these people near kids is an issue of their rights?

what about the rights of kids to grow up free from systems of dominance and control and oppression? that's the fundamental concern, not somebody's fucking career.

so, now they want leave to appeal the rejection of the request to suspend bill 21. who is paying for this?

there is a really fundamentally serious misunderstanding about what the law says, in this context. so, you see statements like this: "My faith is not something I can leave at the door. That's virtually impossible." presented as an argument against the bill, as though the law actually does or apparently ought to care. what this statement seems to demonstrate is a kind of entitlement towards employment, as though the purpose of employment is merely to raise money. there's no concept of collective ownership in the workplace here, no concept of labour as a task to accomplish the social good; it's strictly about individual rights, and in a sense it's strictly about consumerism.

what the society is saying is that if an individual cannot leave their faith at the door then they should not be employed in certain contexts. there seems to be a particularly strongly held view that people that are unable to leave their faith at the door should not be allowed to be near children. if this person is agreeing that they can't separate their faith from their employment, and even loudly yelling it, then what they are doing is providing justification for the existence of the law, rather than an argument against it, because they are not the fundamental concern, as individuals. their employment opportunities, and their career advancements, are not what the law is or ought to be most fundamentally concerned about; the fundamental concern is ensuring that the state maintains a fundamentally secular identity, including the need to protect children from the influence of religion or people that can't separate themselves from their religion, as an expression of the popular will.

i don't think they have a chance in hell at overturning this law.

but, if they want to get one, they'd better start by actually understanding it.

all evidence i can see at this point is that the movement to overturn the law simply doesn't understand it, and they're going nowhere until they do.

the reason that we collectively own all of these houses is that we used eminent domain to seize them. we didn't build these mansions with public money, and there's little justification for using public money to fix them.

i'd rather see the state tear these houses down, and use eminent domain to seize new ones.

the money should be spent, but it should be spent on social services.

this isn't a ballot issue, and i won't be reacting to it further, but i'll state the obvious.

i've seen two articles now suggest that the cost of building a new structure would not be much more than the cost of repairing it. the cost of repairing it is around $35 million. it's then suggested that he might as well rebuild, because harper fucked the thing up.

i have a better idea: build the prime minister a $1 million house, and spend the other $39 million on subsidized housing.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-welcome-to-24-sussex-dr-official-home-of-petty-politics/

it was just after 23:00 on saturday night that i made a choice to get out, and while it turned out to be unnecessary and resulted in a long day, i don't regret doing it.

the after party i wanted to go to got cancelled due to concerns about a police raid (and what they're looking for is alcohol, even though drinking at these places is actually usually quite sparse), and i did drive by there and they weren't there, but i found a back up party at a space i won't advertise, although i'll say it was advertised. i'm sorry, but with all the cancellations, i need to be quiet. as is usually the case, it wasn't hard to find. i was a little iffy because i wasn't sure if it was going to be the kind of music i like, and i didn't know how late it would go, and i didn't want to wait around all day for sunsquabi....

i was going to skip the night and head out early for the marching festival, but the more i looked at the forecast, the more it didn't make any sense. they weren't calling for a possibility of rain on sunday, they were calling for steady rain all day and over night, starting around noon. the radar was backing them up, too. so, if i was going to go, i'd have to try to get there early, meaning i'd have to leave at like 10:00.

and, it was going to be a nice, hot night, too.

so, i caught the last bus over - at 00:30 on sunday morning - and hit the after-party, which lingered on until around 8:00. apologies to the people trying to get home, but my plan was to push it to as close as 12:00 as was possible, and it was raining, and those other guys were stuck and not leaving, anyways. and, they kept passing blunts to me, so it seemed like good luck for me, if bad luck for them. i wasn't eating breakfast until almost 9:00.

those other guys...

they got bailed on, apparently. steve. they were very upset with steve. steve was their ride back to a satellite city (and detroit is like that, a metro with a lot of small cities around it), and had, from what they could tell, left without them. i had to caution against this understanding of things as steve had left his phone and who does that? my analysis of the evidence was that it was more likely that steve stumbled off somewhere fucked out of his mind (hence the lost phone) and he'd call them when he regains consciousness, but that didn't make them less angry or less willing to smash his phone (which i didn't actually observe, at least). they were convinced he drove off with a female accomplice, and that made them that much more upset, as they were lacking female accomplices themselves, you see.

they were both complaining about being too stoned to roll, so i think my own analysis is more spot-on. and, they fluctuated from offering to take me out to deep michigan with them and wondering why i was still there, even though i told them....

after some probing questions about my own sexuality and age (you're, like, what? 25?) that got them answers they didn't want, they ended up deciding to try to find some female accomplices of their own at the casino downtown. they thought it would be better if they wait until close to noon, to maximize chances. so, i wished them good luck and bicycled off to get breakfast...

i made it to the russell around 13:00, thinking i was lucky to beat the rain, and just sort of waited for it to come in. and i waited. by 15:00 or so, it was very hot, but it did not rain. so, i waited. and waited. eventually, the band comes on around 20:30 and we're just dealing with little drops by the end of the set, so small as to barely notice. so, was this a huge waste? in some sense, it clearly was, but i'm not upset about it as i got something out of it on more of a personal level. one of those guys knew the space the party was in fairly well, so, through what was somewhat of a tour, i was able to get a bit of a better understanding of my surroundings, which i think will be of good use moving forwards.

the dance party was fun. the wait was long, but helpful in some sense. and, sunsquabi was on enough. so, it was fine.

and, i caught the 23:40 bus back on sunday night.

the actual event was a fundraiser for art supplies in detroit schools, which is maybe a little bourgeois, but more interestingly organized by a large head shop in the region. so, it was a giant pot party to raise money that should really be being raised by taxpayers. let's hope a few of those kids can put the bong down long enough to create something worthwhile.