regarding camus and free will....

i don't actually think that determinism has much to say about free will. when i speak of coercion, i'm erecting my framework in more of a gramscian context than a descartian or newtonian one.

and, i think that's a consequence of quantum physics.

but, that's not to abolish the contradiction, either - because even if this universe isn't deterministic, that doesn't mean we're actually making autonomous decisions, and i'll bring you back to gramsci for that.

where i think camus is more relevant here is in rejecting formal thinking around the topic. this is something where science breaks down, because you don't have a concept of repeatability. you have no controls. but, i think i'm stretching the point.

in practice, i think you want to strive to be free as much as you can, while always continuing to question yourself. why did i do that?

the feds simply can't be expected to negotiate in good faith. they never have.

the court, itself, has a fiduciary responsibility to oversee the process.

by "waste of time and money", what she means is "dangerous because it may provide more rights than the claim is actually asking for".

she's essentially trying to make a deal.

the article is using an activist concept of indigenous title rather than a legal one, and it would not hold up in court. but, they should go through the courts, anyways. from the sounds of it, they will certainly not get everything they want, the court will restrict them to what is defined in the constitution, which is essentially land use, but at the least it will ensure that they're not getting swindled by the government. again.

she's not trying to circumvent the courts out of the goodness of her heart.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/aboriginal-title-rights-elsipogtog-first-nation-mou-1.5132320

ok.

maybe i needed to rant a little.

i do that sometimes, if you hadn't noticed.

can i get to work tonight? let's hope so.

i never talked her into doing any drumming for me. i was apparently too demanding, as a musician.

but, she at least gave me access to a kit over that summer, and i made good use of it, while she was out fucking around.

what she really wanted was to have an open relationship and stay living together and keep being best friends.

what i really wanted was to have a closed relationship and stay living together and keep being best friends.

but, she wouldn't budge on the open, and i wouldn't budge on the closed, so we had to resign ourselves to no longer living together, and consequently drifting apart as friends.

to be clear.

after i got pissy about her sleeping with other people for the 800th time, she came to me in mid-2004 and just laid it down on the table: she wanted to drop the bullshit and officially declare that we were in an open relationship. she was tired of these arguments.

but, she didn't want a break-up. she was very, very clear on that point. what she wanted was for me to accept that she was going to do what she was going to do, and kind of learn to live with it sort of thing. which, i suspect, is what she'd been angling for the whole time. i don't, however, expect that she would have accepted any kind of infidelity on my behalf (something that i was never even interested in - i'm a romantic, i'm monogamous).

from my perspective, i had been hoping, to that point, that she'd grow out of it, basically. so, to have her sit me down and say "this is who i am. i'm not going to change." was a wake-up call, and i did what i always did: i pulled out.

there are underlying factors. i felt insecure about the potential longevity of an open relationship, although in hindsight i could have answered my own question - we'd been in one at that point for two years. why couldn't it last other than me not wanting it to? i was nonetheless fearful that she'd end up pregnant or something, that an open relationship was not sustainable in the long run. and, that itself masked the most dominant underlying issue: at that point it was clear that she really, really wanted kids and i really, really didn't.

but, i didn't hate her for it. i accepted it. and, we stayed friends - in fact, with benefits - for many years after the fact.

we called it a mutual break-up, but i think it was almost the opposite: neither one of us really wanted to break-up, but we both realized there wasn't really a way forwards.

we were living in a one room apartment at the time. she wanted to maintain the arrangement, which in hindsight suggests she wasn't really serious about breaking up. i mean, how do you process somebody that tells you they want to break-up, but wants to keep sleeping in your bed? she expected me to accept the open relationship, and was baffled when i didn't. and, i ended up moving out unilaterally.

listen: i know what side i'm on, even if i know that you don't know what side you're on.

and, i don't go anywhere near these neo-liberal groups masquerading as feminists or leftists. i never have.

the error that liberals and conservatives are going to make in trying to understand a socialist concept of sex is that they're going to create a false dichotomy between religion and "sexual freedom".

what the socialist position is going to argue is that "sexual liberation" and religion are actually both means of statist control. that's what i was getting at in pointing to divide and conquer.

what hedonism does is turn you into a consumer. you're told this is freedom, and if you come from a religious/conservative upbringing you might see it as such (if you don't analyze it) as a consequence of overbearing or oppressive rules pushed down by the religion, but there's no freedom in consumption, no freedom in commerce. it's not any different than arguing that you're more free if you have more choices on the market, you're just conditioned to see it differently.

true freedom is an emancipation from sexuality, from carnal desire, from hedonism and pleasure. emancipation is transcendence.

casual sex is a weird idea to socialists, because it's almost impossible to understand it happening in the absence of coercion. marx famously argued that all sex under capitalism is prostitution. a more contemporary analysis may suggest that the ubiquity and normality of casual sex is just a reflection of the impulsiveness of capitalist society, a way to fill a void left by the emptiness of consumerism, and would largely whither away in the absence of the capitalist relation.

i wouldn't have articulated myself like this at the time, but i don't think my feelings abut the topic have changed much.

so, we're not going to actively prohibit it, the way conservatives will. you can have your meaningless fucks if you really want to. but, we're not going to promote it or live it the way liberals do, either. what liberals call "sexual freedom" is not some kind of emancipation or something, it's just kind of matter-of-fact.

socialists will mostly largely argue for a society where sex is kind of an irrelevance - a necessity to carry the next generation forwards, and a valid expression of emotion when appropriate, but not this pre-occupation that exists as a distraction from more interesting things, the way it is in contemporary capitalism. we'll deconstruct the status quo as more or less a control strategy, and even break apart a lot of the existing narrative as divide and conquer. and, we'll argue that once you're actually free, once you can actually pursue things that are meaningful and substantive, that you'll get bored with casual sex pretty quickly - that you'd rather find somebody to love.

or, to put it another way, yet again.

she was a liberal.

and, i'm a socialist.

i'm a romantic.

and, i hate market theory.

i want true love or bust.

the way i understand is that, in the culture she comes from, the guy with the sluttiest girl has the most prestige. so, sending your girl out to fuck your friends means you're actually alpha.

it's a status thing.

i still don't really get it.

put another way: she expected me to be a sexist douchebag that saw her as property, and then got confused when i wasn't one and treated her like a person.

like, you hear about these orgies happening at the olympic village that sound like something out of saturnalia. if you take that and splice it with standard hip-hop misogyny, that's the culture she was coming from, as built up from a small town on the outskirts of ottawa.

so, i don't just think that she didn't think sleeping with my friends would bother me. i think she thought i wanted her to sleep with my friends, because that's what every other guy she'd ever dated had been like - guys that pass girls around like they're drugs, or otherwise just treat them as property.

i was a total loner in the middle of a halted transition that listened to punk rock, jazz and instrumental classical music. and, i was a feminist, and outspoken about it. she was attracted to that about me, precisely because it was so different than what she was accustomed to, it was weird to her that i treated her like a person, but that learned behaviour transferred over to social situations in ways that just left me absolutely baffled.

and, she always expected me to take her back.

and, for a while i did.

i don't regret walking out; it just didn't make sense. i have to take the good with the bad. and, while a lot of it hurt in ways that she didn't understand, i'm still left with some experiences and memories that most people only experience as fantasies.

i do wonder what things would have been like if i was able to more effectively hold that mirror up, though.

i wasn't allowed to even talk to anybody else, though.

looking back, she existed in this contemporary culture - and she was young, at the time - where she thought being this kind of communal slut was a normal thing to do. i think she thought that it was normal for guys to share girls, or even that she was doing me a favour - that i was showing her off, or that she had to perform, as a kind of trophy, a sort of catch. that i was bringing her home to share. at that age, i had essentially no exposure to this culture, which is built around sports and bad music and to a certain extent also around blackness (although she was white). i reacted terribly to it. but, i don't think she actually realized that i had never lived in that world, that this was so very strange to me. it was almost more like a culture shock.

and, these guys didn't live in that world either, although, unlike me, they may have liked to pretend they did.

we did stay friends for years after. she didn't turn on me until i went back on hormones. and, i tried to avoid judging her, and think i succeeded in doing it in the end. but, i couldn't live in that world, it was not for me, i just had to walk out of it.

if i can't have mutually consensual and intentional monogamy, i don't see the point of it at all.

evidence of the public lavatories in washing-town:

we got to victoria, did mushrooms in a hostel, and hitched out to tofino, where somebody let us stay at a resort for free, before we camped out on a beach, and eventually made it to poole's, before heading back to the mainland.

these stories will be told in their time.

it's funny how a single reference to one thing can set you off, though.

we were hitching up highway 1 from nainamo to victoria, when somebody let us off in the middle of the road, because they were taking a turn in the other direction. so, we walked up the road a little bit, and she suddenly ran off and disappeared into the forest. she was weird like that in strange ways: she seemed to always know where she was going, even when it was completely impossible. she would liken herself to a nymph, or a fairie, irish creatures, and seemed to often behave like one, in purposeful and conscious emulation.

so, i followed her in as best i could, under foliage, through a ditch and out into a clearing overlooking a river. in the distance, we could see and hear natives dancing - naked - around a drum circle, with plumes of black smoke coming out of a triangular hearth. this was my first time in the rainforest.

she wanted to get down there, to join the tribe - i told her that was not the best idea, and tried to talk her down from it.

i had to hop the fence after her, against my better judgement, and follow her on to an old, decaying train bridge, on the other side of which was the reserve. halfway across, she stopped and turned and fucked me right there; she could have killed me, could have killed herself.

and, i then convinced her to come back to the side we came from - that those fences were there for a reason, and they didn't want us there.

we stopped for a smoke before moving on, and an aboriginal cop very tersely asked us to leave and never come back. i suspect he saw the whole thing.

this was a girl that had a basketball scholarship, although she refused to use it. she held every record at her high school. she was captain of her team. she was dominant, aggressive, strong-willed - and she knew how to take control of me, and place me in a submissive position.

i don't meet a lot of women that are like that. but, if there's a way to 'get' me, that is it - you have to take control.

and, people always wondered why we couldn't just casually hang out in public. the fact is that it wouldn't have taken much to lead to a random fuck in a random place, and we both knew it.

even years later, in like 2012, i remember randomly bumping into her on bank street, and she ran into a children's clothing store in a way that made it clear she wanted me to chase her in. and, so i snuck up behind her.

"i think that would match her socks."

she would often communicate merely by stating "j", and it was up to me to determine what she meant by any specific "j" by measuring the length and tone of it. a short, guttural "j" would be of an entirely different meaning then a lengthy, breathy "j", for example. and this was a, "this is beyond surreal, and i'm too overwhelmed to think" j.

but, i behaved myself. perhaps against my better judgement. like i say: it wouldn't have taken much for her to grab me and pull me behind something...even after that long.

....and, probably even today.

there's, like, ten women's washrooms in ottawa....

i don't know if they still let you do it.

but, back in the day, you could walk through the rideau centre from rideau street up to the mackenzie-king bridge in the middle of the night. she lived in the elgin area, so we'd often come out of a bar in the market after last call and walk back to her place through the rideau centre.

and, one night, around christmas, we made a detour into the santa claus area, around 3:00 or so...

like i say: this was all her. i'd never think to do something lie that.

in hindsight, i should have clued in. it was her, not me. she had a thing for weird sex.

some of the places...

...like, the santa claus exhibit at the rideau centre...

...or the bridge, with railroad tracks, overlooking the native reserve in nainamo....

google says it would have been a bad idea.

1) You will have to give your doctor a semen sample to send to a lab. The lab will count the number of ... Do not use any lubricant or saliva.
2) The semen specimen should be obtained by masturbation. Alternate methods may be discussed but are not recommended. Do not use any lubricant, including saliva, when collecting semen.

i went in to leave my sperm there back in 2002. sarah was absolutely insistent on coming with me, but it didn't really click until after. and i, somewhat cluelessly, left her sitting in the waiting room.

i'm not sure i would have let her, even if it clicked. i mean, what's the point, if i'm going to contaminate it with saliva?

i actually never let her do that, although she tended to offer fairly frequently. i had and still have a bit of a complex with it, it just feels wrong to allow it, as a trans person. even when i went off hormones, it was still a non-starter. and, i wonder if she's still dragging around a hate-on for cosmopolitan magazine - because she'd get livid at even the site of it for years, afterwards. for somebody that cheated on me repeatedly (she drank a lot.), she could sure get pointlessly jealous about virtually nothing.

it cost me something like $50 for a set period.

i got a call a few years later, telling me i'd need to pay up, or they'd throw it out. i let them throw it away. did they?

i can't know...

this is actually also the doctor that essentially every trans person in ottawa went to for hormone prescriptions. i knew a dozen people that were seeing him, at one point.

and, i had sperm in the bank, as well.

i can't know....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/health/sperm-donors-fraud-doctors.html?module=inline

there will be a day in the next six-eight months when i smoke my last cigarette, ever.

the reason i smoke when i'm out is that it's a necessary prop to find pot.

if i don't need to find pot, i don't need to smoke.

i'm sure i'll be over at least once before the end of the year, but i'm getting very close to the end.

it's not cold, exactly. but it's disappointing - and dipping on the weekend, again. so, there's a good chance i'm in for the year, or at least restricting my outings to bands i'm legit into.

that means i could go the better part of the next eight months cold turkey, again, by which time i may have legal marijuana options in michigan, and may never need to buy another pack again.

so, i don't want to deal with people smoking.

so, i turned the fan off when he got home this evening, to give him, or his guests, a chance to not smoke.

and, as of about 23:30, i can smell him, or somebody around here, smoking and have turned it back on.

i will acknowledge that it may partly be a consequence of the air conditioning. but, i've never seen anybody outside smoking.

all i know is that it was fine in here until he got home, and now i can smell it, since he's come in. whether he's smoking inside with the windows shut, or doing something else that lets bad air in is secondary to me. my concern is in mitigating the problem.

ok.

i'm done.

let's hope i can get through most of this, tonight.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2013/sep/13/trickle-up-economics-drowns-middle-class/

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/how-the-democrats-can-fix-themselves

https://www.thenation.com/article/rich-and-rest-us/

http://psac-ncr.com/statements/larry-rousseau-inequality

and, the way that andrew yang is using the term is just more evidence that he has no understanding of what he's talking about.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2010/12/28/canada_discovers_trickleup_economics.html

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/thomas-piketty-capitalinequalityeconomics.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/americas-trickle-up-economy_b_2258110

idiots.

everywhere.

trickle up is the status quo.

investing in people is a good idea.

but, then, you don't want it to trickle back up. that's what you're trying to reverse.

worse, the term, as these kids are trying to use it, doesn't actually make any sense.

"trickle-up" implies that money is moving from the lower classes to the upper classes. that's what up means, in context: from the bottom to the top. and, that's how people like stiglitz used it going back to the 90s, at least. it doesn't imply that the money is being invested, or being better distributed amongst different people. if you want to use the stream or spring analogy in context, the right idea that you're trying to get across would be something more like an "irrigation economy".

what they've done is just take some language they don't like, and reversed it in a way that makes no actual linguistic sense.

...because the truth is that they're not very intelligent people.

i bet they thought they were being clever, though. they really did.

unfortunately, all they've done is demonstrate that they've never read anything about economics in their short lives.

they can fix that. but, they need to actually do it.

and, i apologize if i used the term "trickle-up" in a way that was confusing to people, but you can't just walk into a conversation and start redefining terms, as some of the younger commentators are trying to do. you're merely showing your ignorance.

"trickle-up economics" is in fact a very old and understood term on the left, as re-articulated from the previously deployed term "trickle-down economics", that refers to the movement of wealth from the middle classes to the upper classes, which defines the movement of wealth in the neo-liberal period. it refers to an increasing disparity of wealth that is concentrated in the hands of the rich, at the expense of everybody else.

i'll let stiglitz use it in context, as he's done much of the most important work on inequality over the last several decades. this is from 2010, apparently. but, i remember hearing the term during the anti-globalization protests of the late 90s.

the kids that are using this term to refer to something else need to read up on it's use in the recent past, and adjust themselves accordingly.

and, yes - a lot of people voted for his father, who is probably the most important person in the country's entire history.

pierre trudeau is to canada as thomas jefferson is to the united states.

we're not a country without polarization.

we're the most polarized in the western world - so polarized that we don't even debate with each other, at all.

political polarization is more like a form of multiculturalism, here.

so, the pundits are confused about lavscam, for example.

well, your target audience is like 200,00 people.

meanwhile, there's 4 million people that want to talk about climate change.

what would actually be real, meaningful political coverage for the vast majority of canadians would be the competition on the left between the greens, ndp, liberals, bloc and libertarian/people's party, not the competition on the right between the conservatives and liberals.

and, if the media would actually reflect what canadians think and care about, maybe it wouldn't be failing so badly. they don't need a bailout, they need to evaluate the relevance of their coverage.

i will make another prediction: so long as the media refuses to cover what is relevant and meaningful and important to canadians, they will be a minor player in the upcoming election, which will be mostly fought on social media, where people can discuss things they actually care about.

like the climate, for example.

tl;dr: don't listen to aaron wherry, he's a stooge.

so, i will make a prediction: the conservatives will get roughly 5.5 million votes this election.

and, how many seats the liberals lose will depend on how many votes they lose to the greens.

2 million?

3 million?

the change between 2011 and 2015 is particularly instructive.

conservatives: -218 787
liberals: +4 160 101

even if every single lost conservative vote went to the liberals, that was only 5% of the increased liberal vote total.

the actual truth is that the liberal v conservative media narrative is completely irrelevant to the lives of canadians.

and, the liberals want to bail the media out?

these are gross popular vote totals for the conservatives since 2006 - not adjusted, not percentages, actual numbers.

there are reasons why you should start in 2006 and not earlier.

2006: 5,374,071     [36.27%] (lib martin)
2008: 5,209,069     [37.65% (+1.5%), but down 160,000 actual voters. turnout: -6%.] (lib dion)
2011: 5,832,401     [39.62% (+2%). note that turnout was +2%.]   (lib ignatieff)
2015: 5,613,614     [31.89% (-7.77%). note that turnout was +7.2%] (lib trudeau)

it's a very small window of change: 5.2-5.9 million voters. these voters are much older than the population is, too, which means they're much more likely to vote.

these are gross popular vote totals for the liberals in the same period:

2006: 4,479,415 (martin)
2008: 3,633,185  (dion)
2011: 2,783,175  (ignatieff)
2015: 6,943,276  (trudeau)

so, you can see there's a much wider range: 2.7-7.0 million voters that you can't even begin to fit into the swing on the right.

in canada, what you have is a small bloc on the right and a much larger bloc on the left. and, while you get intense competition inside of these blocs, that is intra-species competition, you get virtually no competition between the blocs at all.

it's really a perfectly divided society, in that way.

so, when you adjust properly for turnout, you can see 15-20% swings between the parties on the left. but, you'll never see more than a few percentage points worth of change between parties on the left and on the right.

the fact is that the liberals are not in competition with the conservatives in this election, or any other. they are mostly in competition with their own voting base, which they have developed a habit of attacking. they're losing not to this village idiot andy (can i call you andy? no? fuck you.) scheer, but rather to their own rhetoric, which they've utterly failed to live up to.

if turnout is down, you could see the conservative numbers inflated again, as they were in the mid 00s. don't misunderstand that as a movement to the right - it's a statistical trick, an illusion in the numbers.

when you properly adjust for turnout, you get more normal numbers for 2015 regarding the liberal-conservative swing, which is indistinguishable from any reasonable margin of error - a point or two.

what few conservative<---->liberal swing voters existed did not actually affect the outcome of the election.

to be complete, what happened in 2015?

liberals: +20.5%. yeah.
ndp: -11%
conservatives: -8%
bloc: -1%
greens: -0.5%

so, the liberals were clearly seen as the consensus candidate on the left - they swung large amounts of (potential) ndp, bloc and green voters. and, they won a convincing, if somewhat weak, majority.

"but, they swung 8% of conservatives, too", you say.

this is a key number:

turnout: +7%.

so, that's actually a bit of a trick.

this is what happened in 2008, when dion was running:

liberals: -4%
greens: +2.5%
conservatives: +1.5%
ndp +.5%
bloc: -0.5%

turnout: -6%

result: conservative minority government. and, they should have lost power, due to losing confidence of the house.

you can balance out any marginal conservative increases by observing the decrease in turnout. what actually happened was that the liberals lost a lot of support to parties on their left.

so, don't believe these tory revisionists that want to rewrite history. dion was fighting off a leftist resurgence, and had to compromise, or the outcome would have been worse.

(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Canadian_federal_election)

and, in fact, we did the experiment - the next guy swung very, very hard to the right, and what happened?

this was the result of the 2011 election, after dion had been replaced by the much more right-wing ignatieff:

liberals: -7.5%
ndp: + 12.5%
bloc: -4%
greens: -3%
conservatives: +2%

turnout: + 2%.
note: there were substantive accusations of vote-rigging by the conservative party in this election.

result: conservative majority government. the liberals ended up in third place, behind the ndp.

so, we see what happens when the liberals swing to the right - they bleed dramatically to the left. in 2015, trudeau ran more like dion than ignatieff, and it finally paid off. there's an argument that trudeau would not have won had dion not set the groundwork for it. but, the basic fact is that people voted to get rid of harper, and saw trudeau as the more left-leaning option on the table. in 2019, that bleed is moving towards the greens rather than the ndp as a consequence of factors that are outside of the liberal party's control, but we're seeing the same basic pattern emerge, as the liberals move right, yet again.

and, if the greens get a huge bump, they could very well throw trudeau right out of office.

i think the data is in fact pretty clear - had dion run as ignatieff, he would have had the same results as ignatieff. and, trudeau's abandonment of the left will likewise leave his party decimated, in the end.

i mean, they don't think they're going to lose this election because some people are protesting in alberta, do they?

it's beyond disingenuous.

it's delusional.

the tory media in this country is pretty shameless, though.

it's not interested in facts. it will openly ignore them. it will repeat falsities over and over again, and ignore you when you correct them.

it's just trying to create narratives by telling stories...that's how the media works here, and how it's worked here since the days of vincent massey.

i mean, it's going to be a tricky sort of doublespeak to look at the results of the election, conclude the conservatives are up maybe two points, and the greens are up ten points, then blame the loss on a largely ineffective carbon reduction tactic.

a bigger vote driver, right now, is that pipeline purchase.

that has been incredibly unpopular with left-coalition voters.

this is the narrative that the tory media is pushing in canada, and it's wrong on it's face.

dion was not a poor candidate, and did not perform poorly at the polls. he actually increased his seat count (in quebec) in what was a very tough political environment. as was the case with notley's recent loss in alberta, it's unclear what kind of path dion could have constructed to actually win. he didn't really have a strategy that he could have used.

first, dion had the memory of the cuts to services during the chretien-martin years on his back, which was the primary factor driving the ndp vote. harper was never a popular leader, and only ever managed to increase his vote totals by amounts that are within the margin of error (and could be better explained by decreases in turnout than increases in popularity). but, the liberals were bleeding substantively to the ndp and to the greens in this period, especially west of quebec. what dion had to do was find a way to stop the vote from splitting on the left, a hard task when faced with the reality of defending a neo-liberal party, and while he wasn't able to reverse it, he was at least able to hold the fort.

it was only when ignatieff came in and ran as a right-wing democrat that the liberal vote collapsed, the conservatives got their majority and the ndp were elected as the opposition party.

so, the idea that the green shift fell flat is wrong. it was the right tactic to use at that time in the face of a resurgent left, and it succeeded in preventing the liberals from collapsing, at least for a while. and, when it was abandoned, liberal support fell very sharply - mirroring what is happening right now.

since then, the oil industry has taken over all three major parties in canada, which is the reason that the tory media is projecting this warped messaging around something it still considers to be a threat. they're turning him into a trotsky-esque villain, admonishing him in a ritual of hate. and, it took me not much more than two minutes to type this, too.

in the long run, dion will be seen as the visionary that we were too stupid to embrace. actual historians - not bought and paid for propagandists like aaron wherry - will look back at that period with regret, and they will blame the liberal party apparatchik for not giving him enough time to hone in on his messaging. we could have been ahead of the curve on this, rather than be one of the planet's worst climate criminals.

trudeau had a chance to be on the right side of history, to govern for a long stretch while overseeng a substantive transition in our way of life, and he utterly failed. i told you this in 2015: if he governs on the left, we'll never get rid of him. if he embraces neo-liberalism, he'll be gone in one term.

he has embraced neo-liberalism. and, while he might survive this election in a minority context, he'll be gone, soon.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/08/24/stphane-dions-green-shift-fell-flat-so-why-did-justin-trudeau-think-the-carbon-tax-would-work.html

so, now i'm pretty sure i'm smelling the gas leaking from upstairs, indicating that his own traps are likely dried up from the dehumidifier. and, he seems to be gone.

why am i constantly surrounded by fucking idiots?

unless he's trying to hide the meth lab....

i'm done all of my cross-references and am ready to start posting, i'm just going to take a short nap, first. there is going to be a large difference in size between the documents: the master document scaled up to 800 pages at 5x8 (and has no scripts. i'll use most of it.), but the music document is only starting at 36. so, i could end up with a 100 page music journal and a 600 page politics journal.

there will be some introductory dtk posts, but it doesn't really start seriously until november.

and, the travel blog will be mostly reduced to discussions with nexus.

soon. and, i think it will be fast...

i'm just curious: when you cost things out, and make sure everything is "paid for" in your political vision, who exactly are you actually talking to?

there is really no actual fiscal conservative movement out there, anymore. maybe there used to be, but where is it today, after successive right-wing administrations since the early 80s have run record deficits to line the pockets of investors and shareholders, while neo-liberal administrations masquerading on the left have had to reign them in by cutting access to basic services?

right-wing voters clearly don't actually care much about budgets. if they did, they'd vote for the neo-liberals. and, even the centre-left of the mainstream parties has been complaining about cuts for well over a generation, now.

so, when you hear statements like "if we don't pay for climate change now, it's going to cost us more in the future" who are you talking to?

surely, you aren't talking to the people who stand to profit from inaction, are you?

then, you accuse them of not having a plan. but, this is completely wrong - there is a plan, and the plan is to wait until the very end, because that's how you maximize profit. if you're a company that exists on government procurement like haliburton, or bombardier in canada, then you directly profit from catastrophe, and you want more of it, not less of it.

in that sense, winning the fight requires getting the money out the door as quickly as possible in order to overpower the short-sightedness of contemporary capitalism. and, while i doubt bernie has the analysis correct, he's right in the approach.

if we want to actually do this, we have to throw as much money at it as we can. otherwise, the structural realities of the economy are going to wait for disaster to react - and they're going to reap in record profits from our collective grief, which is the actual climate plan currently in place.

you know what i'm going to do if they put me in jail for not paying my student loan, right?

do i get storage for my stuff? how does that work?

or, this idea that kids will make you happy.

that's hilarious. really.

and, no, you're not happier after a day of hard work. that's ridiculous...

well, unless you're brainwashed.

and i'm not.

and, i know this, and the data is crystal clear regarding it: people that spend their lives focused on maximizing wealth are unhappy.

and, isn't the point to be happy?

we're not happy when we're competing with each other, trying to get more, trying to get ahead. we're happy when we're escaping from that nonsense, and it is nonsense, and focusing on art or just relaxing and having a beer.

i didn't need a study to tell me this, either. it's intuitive. it's obvious. the poor are happier, always, everywhere, because they have less stress and stupidity in their lives to drag them down.

i'm not a zen philosopher, i don't need to be, this is just basic, obvious logic. and, i'll push back as hard as i can, for as long as i can, at a system that wants to make me less happy, so that other people can be less happy, too.

that's called dystopia. and, i don't want into it.

i've been over this.

i don't want wealth. i want freedom from wealth.

my net income is currently around $15,000/yr (cdn) and it's as high or higher than it's ever been.

when you've spent your whole life living with less than $15,000/yr, the numbers required to pay the debt down look astronomical.

like, what do people that make $100,000/yr spend their money on? i presume i'd have to pay some taxes on it, sure. but, at that kind of salary, it'd take me five years to retire.

don't believe me?

$75,000*5 = 375,000.

375,000/15,000 = 25 years.

and, i'm not going to live to 65. my father didn't make it to 60. nor did his.

so, i just can't get my head around this much money. it's not a real sum. whether i have $60,000 in debt or $60,000,000 in debt is pretty much the same thing - it's just a ridiculously large number that i have no chance of even taking a modest dent out of. so, why bother trying?

i'm just a really, really, really bad slave.

sorry.

and, i've done this before.

back in 2008, i took a part-time call center job at $12/hr. they kept trying to schedule me more hours, but i didn't want them - 25 hours/week paid the rent and then some. good enough.

i think i literally watched my dad's heart break when i explained to him that i'd be happier working part time shift work in a call center than in a full time salaried position with the government. but, i didn't want the responsibility. i didn't want to have to go to staff parties, or make friends with my co-workers. and, he thought i'd grow out of it, but he really just didn't understand it.

so long as we're stuck in a capitalist society, i will always do the bare minimum amount of useless labour that is required to survive, because there's no way out of the sisyphean relation. there's no point to it - you'd might as well just kill yourself.

so, expect to have to drag me kicking and screaming, expect me to do the least you can force me to do and expect me to resist to the bitter end.

and, i agree that i shouldn't have gone to school. but, it was better than going to work.

but, i don't actually think washing dishes benefits anybody.

if you force me to do it, that means somebody else is unemployed. and, that person might have kids and might want extra hours and etc. i'm only there because the state is forcing me to do it, and i'm going to take the least amount of hours as is necessary to pay my rent.

which, nowadays, is what?

$14*25hrs*4weeks = $1400. that's more than i make now.

but, what's the point of doing that? i'm not going to be very pleasant when i'm there. it's just maximizing everybody's unhappiness.

and, you could send me back to school, but i wouldn't have the self-confidence to go to class.....

if i'm going to work, i need to be in a closet at the back of the office, where i have as minimal contact with people as is possible.

i can't handle the stress of normal social environments. i will get into fights. i will get fired....

i need to repeat.

washing dishes is about the extent of my abilities.

i can't do anything else. i simply don't have the social skills.

i expect that i'll find a psychiatrist that will fill out my forms for me.

if not, i will appeal the decision as long as i can, with the hopes that i can hold on until ford is removed from power and the previous system is brought back into place.

given that i haven't had a job in over ten years, and don't actually want one, the worst case scenario with the temporary shutting down of odsp is that i might have to get a job washing dishes part-time.

in order to actually start paying down the loan with intent, i'd have to get a job making over $25,000/yr, which i've never had, and couldn't even actually contemplate. that's more money than i could imagine budgeting for. it's well beyond my actual abilities and talents....

like i say: they should not have given me these loans. they should have fast-tracked me on to disability. i simply have no ambition, whatsoever, in the work force.

and, just to be clear on a point.

there's no ads on my blogs. i don't make money from this.

there's ads on my vlogs, but i've made something like $3.00 since 2015. they've never sent me a check.

and, i don't sell enough music to bother claiming it for tax purposes. i haven't sold anything since 2017.

i have no assets. i don't own a car. my guitars aren't worth anything, and my synths are all broken. the newest computer i have would have been built from the factory about 2012.

i literally have no income, and i literally have no wealth.

and i'm happy as a clam about it, because i don't give a fuck about status.

i got a letter from the student loan people threatening to sue me if i don't contact them in the next 15 days. in fact, that's actually exactly what i want, as i couldn't imagine a judge doing anything but giving them shit for bothering with this file.

i haven't made a loan payment since 2008, i think. i've been on odsp since 2012. i last contacted them in 2013 to tell them that i'm permanently disabled, and will never make another payment on the loan. i told them at the time that the interest will just grow out of control, until they cancel it or i die (and wasn't sure what would happen first). they ignored me; so, i ignored them. as predicted, the interest has grown, and now they're telling me i must start paying it because the interest is out of control.

well, you were charging interest on a defaulted loan held by a disabled person. what the fuck did you expect to happen, you fucking idiots?

i'm still disabled, and there's still no way i can start making payments. interest on the loan is actually larger than my odsp check. it's literally an impossibility. and, i still really don't give a fuck - i'll kill myself, or go to jail, before i start making payments.

my position has been clear for years: the state did not due it's due diligence. they kept giving me money. no research was put into how or if i'd be able to pay it. if it was any other kind of loan, the responsibility for the default would lay with the bankers. the fact is that it was an irresponsible decision to give me this loan, that it was predictable that this would be the outcome and that i should have been denied at the source. my recommendation would be that the state should be doing it's due diligence on student loan payments.

as it is, they can't touch my disability check. so, the judge can rule any which way she wants, unless she's willing to throw me in jail, there's no end point besides forgiving it.

so, i'm going to call them to request that they keep me up to date on the court proceedings, so i can make an appearance to argue my case.

i had to update the music and politics journals for 09/13, as i missed a conceptual component, namely the last date of modification of the installation files that were being installed over this month.

the update is minor: it is simply the name of 41 installation files, in the form of isos & exes, as well as some reg and txt files. this should help document the kind of software that i started off with in 2013, or, stated equivalently, that i left off with in 2011.

the documents are updated at bandcamp
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/09-2013-music-journal

and also at noise trade smashwords:
https://books.noisetrade.com//j/092013-dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026603

the master document for october is already done, and it should not take long to get the next entry up.

and, if you missed the context of over 15,000 posts here and are tuning in somewhere late where you haven't read the explanation, i'll clarify: what i'm talking about is decolonization, which means both dechristianization and deromanization.

there's a line in robert newman's history of oil where he explains that the british are easily manipulated by bad propaganda because they are truly uniquely ignorant of their own history.

but, he meant recent history.

there's such a rich legal tradition in the common law, and it really is truly ancient, the last relic of a civilization that was ravagef by conquest and colonialism. conservatives like to be silly and claim we're under ecclesiastical law (which was still roman....) or even straight biblical law, but when liberals point to the romans they're only half right.

the truth is that we have our own damned law, and it's as old as any code is. but, we've passed it down orally over generations, through waves of persecution and destruction.

if we are to reconstruct what we were, tort law is a good place to start.

but, i mean, it's not the disincentive game that i'm focusing on. if bezos wants to kill his wife badly enough, he's going to do it, regardless of the consequences.

to me, there's just little justice in punishing somebody. retribution is some kind of blood lust; it's authoritarian, designed to keep a system in order for the benefit of the rulers. any crime is only wrong in this context because it's upsetting the order, and threatening the king's authority over the people. that's a fundamentally warped concept of law.

the common law, which centralizes tort, is more based on ensuring that people actually right the wrongs they commit. it's about undoing transgressions, about making sure that if somebody is harmed then they're compensated for it.

not retribution, but reconciliation, as best as is possible. just make it right; make it whole.

again: call me a barbarian. but, i know which side of the danube was free and which one wasn't.

of course, not every crime would require abandoning 95% of your wealth.

but, first-degree murder would have to require forking over a very high percentage - and it should be a percentage, not a fixed sum.

well, no, let's think about this.

let's say jeff bezos kills somebody. maybe his ex-wife. i'm just thinking out loud. nowadays, he'll go to jail for a few years, cost society a lot of resources while he's in there and get his money back when he comes out. it might even be worth it, if he can cut a deal for good behaviour.

now, let's say we take away 95% of his wealth, instead, and give it to the family of the victim. no jail time - just bankruptcy.

in which system do the rich get away with murder?

and, i am being consistent, in the sense of the legal system i actually want - let's get rid of the cops and the jails altogether, and reduce everything to tort. it's a traditional, northern european legal order.

today, if you kill somebody, you're committing a crime against the queen. how much sense does that make?

traditionally, if you killed somebody, you'd be committing a crime against that person's family and/or loved ones, and you'd have to pay them directly. you wouldn't go to jail. you wouldn't do community service. you'd pony up to the victims.

so, people think this is nuts, or overboard or whatever, but i'm actually leading by example - this is the society i want, that i'm leading the way on and that i'm willing to fight for.

tort law for all.

honesty would save him a few hundred dollars - two months' rent is $1500. and, that's going to be a better and better deal as time goes on.

20%*(12*750) = $1800. and counting.

and, i'll kill his credit rating if he forces me.

i don't give a fuck,

again: i signed that lease because i don't want smoking in my living spaces, something i have every right to demand. and, it's not a trivial concern - it's a serious, substantive quality of life issue.

he has the ability to pull out, but it's going to cost him.

if i knew he was going to be smoking, i wouldn't have signed the non-smoking lease....an absurd statement, on it's face. but, he set himself up. it's his own fault. and, it's not my problem, at the end of the day.

the easiest thing for him to do would be to admit that he made a mistake, and pay his way out of the lease.

but, so long as i'm convinced s/he's smoking, they're not going to get rid of me without a court case.

yeah, it's this woman he brings over from time to time that's smoking.

i initially thought it might be the daughter. but this woman has been here repeatedly, and i thought i heard her mention once that she was his mother. she doesn't look that much older than him, though. without overhearing that comment, i would have assumed it's his ex-wife.

and, if that's right, and  i understand the dynamic in the scenario, there's no possibility he's going to tell her to butt out.

whoever it is, she's breaking the lease. and, if i catch her...

and, he's clearly still smoking up there, too.

that's tobacco. clearly.

ugh...

so, i'm done the master document for october. it's a little shorter than september, but there aren't any scripts, so less of it will be removed. rather, it's mostly converted html documents - so there's a lot of essays, a lot of web pages. it's consequently going to read off more as a periodical...and it could quite easily top 600 pages.

well, i am calling it a journal. who says i don't publish?

i will also publish my first remaster at the end of the month, so i'll get my first liner notes up, too, for inri000, or at least the first approximation of them. i've resigned myself to this being an ongoing process, and that i'll have to periodically republish. i guess i'll have my first opportunity at a final close for inri000 in 2026, and we'll have to see whether i can actually do it or not. i'll publish this first one at the drive so you can see what i'm doing, but it's going to basically involve going through the music pdf and pulling out everything i can that's related to the recording, going back to the start of the current narrative in mid-july. then, as i publish further monthly journals, i'll go through for each release and add data to it. yes, that's very time consuming, but it's how it has to be, unless i want to wait until the end, and i don't.

but, i skipped a concept: installation files. there weren't any for july or august, but there's a quite a few for september. this won't take long, but i will need to update more or less everything for september before i stop to eat, and then get on to posting for october when i'm done.

i mean, that's the truth of it.

running a dehumidifier = being too lazy and/or dirty to clean.

that was another long sleep. i dunno.

i got halfway through my fruit salad last night and noticed the stink was coming out of the couch. that's a gross reality, but i have to accept it as some progress - it means the smell from the sewage leak has lifted enough that i can smell the consequences of it. but, it got me gagging enough that it may have knocked me out.

i've got the couch disassembled and the fan running. i may need to go over it with some dish soap. we'll try again tonight.

the landlord mentioned that it gets "humid" down here, and seems upset that i'm not running the dehumidifier, but i think he's misunderstood the problem. wetness on it's own doesn't cause musty odours, you need the presence of bacterial growth. that is, a humid apartment is only a smelly apartment if it is also a dirty apartment, so you don't solve mustiness by eliminating humidity, that's just glossing over the problem. you have to actually clean the bacteria out of the space. and, if you have sewage seeping in, the first thing to do is put a stop to it. in fact, the dehumidifier he appears to be running upstairs may be contributing to drying out the traps; it is probably making the problem worse. not only would running a dehumidifier down here at best cover up the problem rather than solve it, it would probably actually just make it worse.

if i've cut off the primary source of bacteria entering the space, that's a good start. now, i have to figure out how to actually clean up the mess....

so, i want to get that fan off, but it's the only source of moving air in the space, and is consequently probably going to need to stay on for quite a while, until i can get the place properly cleaned.

for right now, i've just got a few more html files to add to the master document, and should be posting relatively soon.

hey, all i'm saying is that being a conservative in canada means you can have your poutine, and eat it, too.

through mouthfuls of cheesy goodness

"what's he going to do next, mr. speaker?

rig an election?"

i want polievre to bring a poutine to the house next time he wants to get up on his soapbox and display his moral superiority by yelling at the prime minister over something trivial. if he's going to be a ridiculous hypocrite, he should at least flaunt it with some flair.

what a farce.

parler, mentir, indeed.

i had a weird scare a few hours ago, where the master document seemed to shrink, but i think it was due to a program error with the formatting. i don't think i lost any data.

there's a few extra html files to add, but it's actually done, which was quite fast. so, i'm going to stop to eat and finish up the last little bit when i'm done.

it's going to be a longer document, maybe even the longest, but i'm also going to have a lot less cutting and pasting to do to finish it up. there's already 152 posts here. in the end, there may be around 200, as i add some emails and txts. so, it's not the same kind of rebuild from scratch....

i could actually be mostly done by sunrise.

so, i'll let you in on a secret: there's a major plot twist. but, i'll have to post it here for you to figure it out.

look at these hits for this phrase:

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+america+should+be+in+the+future.&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b

americans see nothing but decline and desperation in the future.

so, no wonder they're obsessed with the past - across the spectrum.

this is the first hit:

Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts

Majorities predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/03/21/public-sees-an-america-in-decline-on-many-fronts/

and, they say punk rock is dead?

no
future
for
you.

everybody wants to make america great again. that's the zeitgeist, right now.

the question is "when was it greatest" - in the conservative post-war era, or in the revolutionary period that followed?

nobody's thinking about what america should be in the future.

i think this is a really profound observation, actually, that's become kind of fundamental in understanding the spectrum in front of us.

maybe, at some point, we had this left v right thing happening, where the right wanted to turn the clocks back and the left wanted to push deeper into the future. so, you had this struggle between people pushing for change and people pushing back, trying to resist it.

that's not what is in front of us, anymore. what we have today is a competition between different concepts of the past - on the right you have the trumpians, who want to go back to the conservatism of the truman-eisenhower years of the late 40s through to early 60s. and, on the left you have these kids that want to turn the clock back to the late 60s through to early 80s and think sanders is the way to do it (even if he actually lives more in the mid 30s through to mid 40s).

there is no future.

is it because we're already there?

do we need to reimagine what the future should be? is that it?

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/10/i-think-im-starting-to-realize-that.html

memo to god: you set the wrong amazon on fire.

infallible, my ass.

the fact is that we don't have 20 years to wait for fusion.

i think people are missing the point about nuclear power. they think it's a safety issue, or they're dealing with luddites that are afraid of technology.

the actual problem with nuclear is that the mining and shipping of uranium is so carbon-intensive as to defeat the point of using it. any issues you have with nuclear energy aside, it's just not an answer if you're trying to reduce carbon emissions.

further, we'll eventually run out of uranium, and then what? we'll need to shift to renewable energy, if we don't find ourselves back on coal in a pinch.

i'm not anti-nuclear; i think there's a place for nuclear power, and i think that research should continue to be funded around the potential use of fusion power. but, it's just simply not an answer to the climate crisis, and sanders is at least right to point that out.

i mean, if you tried to run a democrat here, there's no fucking way in hell i'd vote for it.

it's interesting, though.

because the actual reason that canada exists is gridlock in the colonial parliament. we had an upper and lower canada (quebec and ontario) united in a parliament that just produced an array of tie votes. so, they couldn't govern. to fix this, they brought in the maritime provinces, which were at the time separate colonies. and, then there was a westward expansion, and the final inclusion of newfoundland in 1949. i think the closest we've come to expanding since then are these frequent requests from jamaica.

and, i have to remind america that we have our own history and our own prerogatives, which opens up a set of interesting questions. i mean, i'm pointing out that the american political spectrum would be permanently altered by swallowing canada; it would be more like when the romans tried to conquer the greeks, and the greeks conquered them from the inside, instead. america would find itself slowly conforming to the traditions of it's british origins. might we even redistrict the country into provinces? you'd save a lot of money by getting rid of all of the redundancy in these little states. why not have a northeast, a midwest, a southeast, a northwest, etc?

so, there's a narrative and outcome here that is consistent with the arc of canadian history.

it's just not the narrative anybody is expecting.

this would be the end of the two-party system, and lead to a massive transformation of the american political spectrum.

i used to think that the democrats would eventually do it, and the republicans never would (it would destroy them). but, i don't even think the democrats want us any more.

and, i confidently speak for the country when i say this: i don't want to be an american. at all. sorry.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.5253191/forget-greenland-this-politics-prof-thinks-the-u-s-should-buy-canada-instead-1.5253196

i needed to sleep today, clearly.

after i finished the facebook part last night, i spent the overnight pushing myself to stay awake while sorting through google takeout options over various old accounts, looking mostly for youtube comments. i just wanted to be sure i've got everything, as i move into a final push over the 2013-2018 phase, which i suppose will end up being period 5 in the end. it won't let me download data from two old accounts unless i use a phone, which i don't actually have. i mean, it's telling me to use the hardware i usually log in from, but the fact is that this is the hardware i've logged into from the most over the last two years, anyways, and probably, on the balance, over the last ten years. i think it's the only hardware i've logged into these accounts from since this time in 2017. the fact is that the accounts are over ten years old, and i don't remember what computer i created them on, although i am sure that i created them in ottawa.

a google search indicates that this is a problem for a lot of people, but that nobody has an answer.

i would put out a request to google to stop doing this. frankly, this is stupid: i'm giving you a valid password from a machine i've logged into repeatedly over a long period of time, and you're telling me i can't access my own data because i can't prove i'm not a thief. there's not even anything useful in there. i don't even have a credit card. i didn't sign up for an extra layer of security, and if i could i'd opt out of it. maybe, instead of forcing unwanted security measures on a large number of people that keep dummy accounts for various reasons, google could make enhanced security a paid feature for corporate clients, or something. my concern is not security; i don't have anything worthwhile to secure. my concerns is that i want my data, and i want google to stop making it so difficult to get access it.

as it is, i think i've already cleared these accounts out, so what i'm missing out on is just triple-checking that i didn't miss anything. and, i'm moving on.

in the meantime, i got the facebook data - txt messages. some comments. some pictures. - into the master document.

moving forwards, i'm going to add another redundancy check, just to make sure the data is consistent. this is going to be a cross-reference between each of the blogs as they exist, before updating them, with the master document, from the start. so, i'll be able to pull any stray posts into the master document before i redistribute. that's going to be my task for the evening...

i'll then be able to move any remaining data i have from the filing into the master document, and properly distribute it into the blogs and docs from there.

the humidity and temperature have crashed outside, but it's still a little damp in here, so i'm going to wait until i get through october before i take a serious look at doing a thorough clean. it's hard for me to tell what the background smell is. is it the smell of sewer gas on the walls, and some of my furniture? can i clean it off? is it seeping up from under the flooring? would some cheap rugs help? and, was this the "smoke" i was smelling that was making me sick? if i give it a few more days to kind of settle, i may have a better idea. it might not be obvious what the best approach is for a while, though...

for now, if i can get to posting before sunrise then i think i'm doing well.

good.

this is what the planet needs to hear: america needs to lead on this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/climate/bernie-sanders-climate-change.html

we've seen this before, in world history.

you had the great game for control of india. you had the scramble for african resources.

the arctic is the next piece of the earth that is going to be up for grabs, and, in this case, trump is right: the great powers are going to be vying for control of greenland any day now, so coming in and buying it out makes some sense, if it keeps everybody else out.

i'm not sure the russians would be so polite as to ask.

i just want to remind everybody that the united states has, in fact, illegally invaded and occupied greenland, in the past. further, this discussion has come up before; this isn't as random as a lot of people are suggesting.

one might even argue that it's inevitable. this is prime real estate, moving into a warming world, and it's not clear what role the danes think they can play in the region. it's going to end up american or russian.

but, donald trump doesn't believe in climate change. right.

so, it's becoming clearer and clearer at this point that the plumbing problems in here are not a coincidental or secondary point but at the root cause of pretty much everything bad that is happening down here.

now that the humidity is crashing, probably for the year, i'm going to see if i can clean up around the walls in the morning, to see if i can gain any insight into the situation.

is there a broken pipe under the floor?

i don't expect the landlord to be of much assistance, or even to present an honest response when questioned about the situation, but i'll happily call a plumber and send him the bill, which is my legal right and will likely send him into a fit. he thinks he has "property rights". but, more importantly, i think he thinks he has some kind of dad authority over me, or at least isn't used to being challenged, due to dad status. but, i didn't listen to my own father, and i wouldn't listen to him, even if he was more than 5-7 or so years older than me (i don't think he realizes how old i am, either). so, we may be in court relatively soon, after all. and, he doesn't really have a leg to stand on, if that's how it turns out.

i mean, hopefully he reacts more reasonably, but i expect him to have a hissy fit. he doesn't seem to accept that he has any responsibility as a landlord, here. and, the reality is that that's legally completely unacceptable, and i'm not interested in his emotional reaction to his lease responsibilities - he'll do what he must, or i'll force him to do it via court order.

so, if i find a plumbing leak under the floor, he's going to need to pay to fix it. and, if he fights that, i'll nail him on a rent reduction.

i don't think this string of catastrophic situations is unique. renters across the continent are dealing with one useless landlord after another - this is normal, it's the status quo. what's unique is that i know my rights and i'm not afraid to fight for them.

i'm not certain, yet. but, i'm having a hard time guessing at what else it might be.

i didn't know that pat robertson's father was a senator.

....just like george hw bush's.

mmmmmhhmmmm.

it's especially curious, given just how similar hw looked to his father, prescott.

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

anybody ever noticed that dubya actually looks a lot like pat robertson?

makes you wonder whether barbara was getting around, huh?

this meme exists, so somebody else noticed:

yeah. facebook's updated. i have eaten. and i'm staying in for the night.

i want to be clear that this is why i got off of facebook.

yes, i found the hive mindset to be a little bit scary. and, while i think that the premise that the russians are all over facebook is in truth a lie that the cia paid rachel maddow a lot of money to propagate, i do think there are legitimate concerns about local governments eavesdropping on their own citizens. that feinstein report disappeared about the same time that the russian narrative hit.

but, the real reason i had to get off is just that the site sucks. it's slow, it's buggy, it's impossible to navigate...

i forgot to update facebook last week when i finished september, so that's today's task, and i've been at it all day.

the servers are so slow that it takes all day to make 20 posts.

i've added a forum.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/394519381089546

again: this is just embarrassing.

we're essentially legislating child abuse. and, all of these parents that want to keep their children ignorant and sheltered until they end up pregnant and/or diseased because they didn't know any better should be ashamed of themselves. i may even support a policy that bans adults from welfare if they didn't get sex ed when they were kids: send the bill to the fucking mosque.

what's next? a waiver for science class?

public education is paramount. and, as parents, you should not have the right to control what your child learns at school - that should be a collective decision, and should be shaped by experts, because a big part of what public education is is about undoing the nonsense that is being taught at home.

i'm not even angry. i'm distraught. i'm grieving. rip, ontario.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-new-sex-ed-curriculum-1.5254327

please.

polling is clear that canadians view this as the biggest electoral issue on the table. and, the reason he's going to lose the balance of power, if he doesn't lose outright, is that he has consistently refused to take real, tangible actions to reduce emissions.

the only loser, here, is justin trudeau.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wherry-book-trudeau-climate-change-election-1.5243737

more sleeping.

*shrug*.

i'm back to work, now.

are you confused by this?

there's a reason that most drag queens identify as gay men, and don't have the slightest interest in transitioning. the routine is a way for them to carry out their male desires for control. so, the whole thing is a misnomer; it's not really about men impersonating women, so much as it's about men being men. it's a male thing through and through.

the transgendered side tends to avoid all of that kind of stuff.

no, it's actually not that i have some kind of problem with nudity. almost nobody in this world has seen me naked, and there's almost nothing anybody could do to convince me to undress for them, but i would feel comfortable enough in a nudist colony, or on a nude beach or something, so long as they were matter of fact about it.

and, burlesque actually involves very little nudity, from what i understand about it. it's not about taking your clothes off, it's about keeping them on...

what actually bugs me about burlesque and stripping and other things of the sort is that it's about controlling people. i don't enjoy being manipulated like that, nor do i have any desire to manipulate others in that way. and, i'm not able to see past the basic monetary exchange and erect something exciting about it; i don't fantasize about being taken advantage of, and i'm not naive enough to suspend disbelief and forget it. even if there's not actual money involved, it's still about control, and it's consequently still gross. and, i don't think there's a way to really sanitize it and make it fun without removing it from the public arena.

some people are going to talk about female empowerment, but i think this is taking the wrong approach to equality. i mean, it's easy to understand why a capitalist society would want to focus more on empowering women than it does on emasculating men, sure. but, when your end point is the abolition of all hierarchy and exploitation, this is actually kind of a massive step backwards. two wrongs don't make a right, sort of thing.

like i say: i'm not going to go out and protest it or anything, but i don't want to be anywhere near it.

yeah, it's time to stop to eat, and october should be super fast. i spent the beginning of the month doing a lot of writing, so it's mostly going to be about archiving writing posts to the blogs. no scripts. no files, even. the rest of it is mostly posted, although we're also going to see the first actual dtk posts, too.

i don't think it'll take more than 24 hours to finish the master document. and, it's just going to be pictures, page updates and emails, mostly with the initial landlord. the only other thing to add will be messenger posts, but october is the point where those break up, too.

for what it's worth, as the alter-reality has been rewound from 20 to 30 years as a consequence of getting bogged down with various things, the first half of 2013 will not be posted until 2043, if i even make it that long. i'll be 62 at that point. so, these characters are fading out now, and it's going to be along time before they're worked back in.

if i make it, most of them will probably be dead.

but, i'm over the hump with this, i think, and it should be a lot faster from here on in.

so, i slept a fair amount today, and that's ok. i seem to have developed a habit of not really sleeping when i get back from detroit, and needing to wait a few days to catch up. so, if i'm up and ready for the week then that's a quick turnover.

the rotting smell has at least passed, from what i can tell, although it's lifting has brought back a bit of a musty smell. i'm going to tone it down and wait a few days before i take the next step on this. my old fender bass amp has a carpet around it, and it seems to pick up smells fairly quickly. it's also directly in front of me. so, i might need to air the place out more than anything else. it's way, way, way better.

it's almost time to finish laundry, and make something to eat. but, i'm going to be filing october for the night, and could potentially be posting in a day or two.

indeed, the end is neigh.

tomorrow appears to be the last night of summer

and, i may have to sneak out for a few hours, as a result of it.

the sun will be back soon.

they should raise property taxes and loudly blame it on doug ford.

call it the "doug tax"

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/ontario-cuts-health-care-child-care_ca_5d5a7ac5e4b056fafd0e9295

i think the smell has mostly lifted, at this point. the final test will be to shower, and i'm just about to hop in. i just wanted to wait for the heat to come down a little, and to get my sheets & blanket out of the laundry, first.

how was the show?

i was, as usual, a little late, and missed both the jazz show and the tomato fest. and, i mixed myself a stronger than normal pre-drink, so i was a little bit tipsy from the getgo.

the route i take to hamtramck took me past the russell, which was having a marijuana festival, which was headlined by the wutang clan. they were also having a marijuana festival on the 7/20 weekend, which was headlined by sunsquabi. there's even a section of the complex nicknamed "dab alley". so, i may prefer my russells with a side of bertrand, but this place dispenses with the ert and caters more to the brand side of russellphilism. i think i speak for a lot of the area when i say i'm just glad the complex is actually being used. it's about time they fixed the probably hundreds of windows that were broken in a tornado back in 1999, though. hey, this is why i came here.

i was hoping to just bump into a session as i biked by on the way to the show, but i managed to find some friendly michiganders that gifted me a couple of pre-rolls. so, i knew i was going to be there overnight from the start.

i missed most of the first act, partly because i was just walking in at 20:00 and partly because sitting down was kind of key, and there was only standing room in the place. they seemed to be mixing up some horns with some math-y patterns, but the fact is that i didn't catch a lot of it.

i was most interested in the second act, which came in from boston with an array of vintage 70s synthesizers. there were people in the crowd talking about "elp spliced with santana", but i think a better reference point is something like chick corea; they dabbled in prog and funk, but they were fundamentally a jazz fusion act, complete with a guitarist making generous allan holdsworth references. so, if you've ever enjoyed a record by the band uk, you might have loved this. they're called "space junk forever".

earth engine were a little less adventurous. they had moments, but i actually found them to be a bit generic. that happens sometimes when you take a lot of different ideas from different places without really crafting them into your own ideas. so, you get this shifting array of cliches in an unexpected order. i'd like to hear them build on their sound a bit more.

and, just plurals were, likewise, fairly predictable math, if enjoyable enough at that time, with that beer.

i got to the diner around 4:00, got some eggs and caught the early bus home...

...and then spent the day cleaning. now that the smell appears to be contained, i had the task of cleaning the smell out of the general area. in fact, it seems to have lifted pretty quickly, but i wanted to lysol all around there, anyways.

so, i'll be doing laundry all night, and if i don't get back to work before i sleep next, i should be on it right after i wake up.

there was this one time...

it was my friend's 18th birthday. i'm born at the beginning of the year, so i was always a little older. and, there was a third party driving that was a little older than both of us. he was a weird character; he stayed with several of my friends for long periods, on couches, at the time, and was known for handing out large amounts of free mushrooms.

the older one picked us up somewhere near my place (near pius) after school and initially didn't tell either of us where we were going. but, it was obvious once we got over the bridge and on to the 50.

even then, i didn't feel comfortable about it. so, i pretended i forgot my id and smoked a joint by myself out in the car, instead.

apparently, it's all about what the meaning of if is.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/08/18/spare-me-the-hpony-apologies.html

and, this thing in canada about the ethics commissioner is boring.

sorry.

and, frankly, when they hear these white folks come down from new york, and they be all talkin' about bringing drugs into the community, they have reason to interpret that as a red flag.

because they do know that it's always been white folks from new york that are behind this. some with last names like delano, in fact.

what your average church-going black woman in southern georgia wants to hear is what it is that you're going to do to keep drugs out of her community. she wants to know how you're going to protect her and her family from the pushers and predators.

she might not want her kids or grandkids in jail, granted. but what she really wants is to keep the drugs away from them.

and, while the science is obviously paramount, any policy designed to win southern black voters has to be designed with this in mind.

i'm clearly going to miss the jazz show, which i kind of expected would happen, but i'm still planning on making it out to the prog show...

but, i will tell you this flat out, regardless of what these coastal libertarians are trying to say: you're not going to win in the southeast by appearing "soft on drugs".

i know there's an issue that comes up when it comes to the idea that trafficking crack is punished more harshly than trafficking cocaine.

i just want to point out that i think the proper answer is to make sure that cocaine traffickers are being sufficiently sentenced.

what is the war on drugs?

because if you're going to oppose it, defining it first is important.

where i come from, it's been generally understood that the war on drugs - much like the war on terrorism after it and the war against communism before it - was mostly just an excuse to advance american geostrategic interests, mostly in latin america. to the extent that much of anything associated with the war on drugs had anything to actually do with drugs, the focus appears to have mostly been to control the supply, in order to inflate the price. and, there seems to be good evidence that the drugs were introduced into specific communities by the government itself, in an attempt to control and in some cases enslave certain segments of the population. from that perspective, talking about ending the war on drugs in 2019 is somewhat of an anachronistic position - the war on drugs largely turned into the war on terrorism, in the sense that the propaganda shifted.

i would oppose the war on drugs in this sense, which basically means no longer propping up dictatorships in latin america. i bet bernie could have a long discussion about this, giving that he lived through it and i don't really remember it, first hand. but, if that's what he meant, he may have confused people.

if you're referring to abolishing actual domestic drug laws when you talk about the "war on drugs", which i think is what the term is likely to mean to a contemporary audience, then you're moving into the libertarian right in a way that is going to lose a lot of people. and, it's a strange thing to hear from a guy that's threatened to put pharmaceutical executives in jail as a corollary of the opiate crisis. there are certain drugs - opiates, methamphetamines, crack/cocaine -  that are just an absolute scourge on society and that a war truly needs to be fought against. while i may agree that we should take more intelligent tactics in our war against these drugs, which may require changing certain laws, the idea of ending that war is not something i'm in favour of at all.

i just think this is a language thing: that term, war on drugs, may not mean the same thing to you as it does to bernie sanders, or it does to me. and, some clarification is required on everybody's behalf.

it's the dealers and manufacturers of dangerous drugs that i want to put in jail, not the users of them, whom i would consider victims of an industry that should be shut down with extreme force.

in a single-payer healthcare system, supervised injection sites are useful because they reduce the deadweight costs associated with drug users. and, i consequently support them as a cost-cutting measure. that is the actual reason that liberal governments have allowed them in canada - as the actual reason that we have a single-payer system (as designed by and brought in by the liberals) is that it makes us more economically competitive.

further, the idea of capital punishment is anathema to most canadians. it's not even thought about. it's insane that america still does this.

but, he doesn't think this is going to win him black votes in the bible belt does he? they don't want less incarceration, there. they want a stronger police presence to keep their communities safe, more action to keep drugs off the street and more retribution in the system, to ensure that the evil doers get what's coming to them.

it's a policy that might be popular in chicago or detroit or new york, but it's political suicide in the southeast.

https://www.apnews.com/6d4cf74fef0b4b36a086682780ac8937

i think bernie is probably better off "quarterbacking" in the senate.

he'd be a better majority leader than president...

it my be true that whites are projected to be a minority in the total voting population some time in the middle of the century, but that observation, however relevant it actually is, doesn't help you win the election in 2020. the united states does not elect a president with the popular vote, and i'm not aware of any projections suggesting that whites are going to cede control of the electoral college, the thing that matters, any time soon. so, this democratic strategy of trying to win minority voters in red states is a tentative strategy in the distant future, not a realistic one in front of us today.

this is, in truth, not a controversial point, and the fact that it's being seen as one is just reflective of the delusions underlying the campaign. the entire discourse is stuck in 2008. but, why did clinton lose to trump? it's not because she didn't do well enough with minorities.

and, if you're making a serious run at the democratic nomination in 2020 - not 2070. 2020. - the calculation is crystal clear and obvious: winning minority votes is easy, while winning white votes is hard. and, it's the hard task you have to accomplish to actually win.

but, there's a more cynical problem underlying this strategy i'm talking about of relying on minority voters to overpower white voters. even if it were to work, is that what a responsible politician would want? that's a dangerous path, one that's going to lead to a lot of problems. again: one would expect a politician of the left to try and move past race, not try and exploit it as a wedge issue. this isn't a society i want to live in, and there's good reason that white voters aren't reacting very well to it: it's an algorithm for another civil war.

bernie remains a lesser evil in a field full of pretty evil candidates. his policies are far and away the best on the table and if, like me, you're mostly concerned about policy, then he has no serious competitor in the primary. but, i think i've been clear that i wish he did have one because his temperament and personality is a problem. he has this me v. the world attitude that liberals usually associate with the right, but that i know from experience is a pretty endemic problem on the pseudo-left. these people just don't accept criticism of any sort - you are with them or against them, like politics is some kind of sport rather than a process of consensus building. they've fundamentally lost the plot.

so, i can keep trolling bernie if you want, and i no doubt will, but i think the more important lesson is to realize how easy it is to set him off, and to ask yourself whether you want this guy with his finger on the button or not. a successful president is going to need to be less defensive, less authoritarian and more willing to listen to the views of people that disagree with him. these kneejerk reactions and strong arm tactics don't seem to be that different than the guy they've got now.

guess i'm awake.

it doesn't appear to have rained here tonight after all, in fact it's very nice out, but i'm doubling down on there not having been anything really worthwhile to actually do. i would have had a few beers at villain's, talked about nothing of substance, and then gone out to try and figure out if this place down the street is an after hours club or a strip club (i don't actually know, and it might even be both).

i've never entered a strip club in my life, and don't really want to enter one now.

it's too early to tell if the smell is really lifted or not. there's a faint background, but i don't know if it just means i need to clean or if it's indicative of a lingering problem. at the least, i think i've finally actually identified what the problem actually is.

so, i've got tonight left, but do i actually want to go anywhere or not? i don't want to force myself out if i don't want to actually go.

i've been out a lot this summer, but when the introversion hits, it hits hard and lasts a long time. i will go weeks or months without talking to anybody. i'm careening in that direction, but am i actually there yet?

how's bernie polling in vermont right now, anyways?

....and, while i will often cite dawkins and hitchens, i have actually never read anything by sam harris, who i've actually accused of being a fraud (he's not an atheist.) and a cia agent.

i seek a post-culturalist, post-racial, post-religious, post-capitalist society.

and, my offensive statements here are either about religion or about class, they are never about race.

the fact is that bernie is losing, and he's losing because he's doing everything wrong, and he's doing everything wrong because he's getting terrible advice.

and, at the end of the day, he'll be lucky to finish third in the south, anyways. he's going to need biden to drop, to start with.

no.

it's disingenuous.

if you want to beat trump, south carolina offers you nothing of any value. the reason is twofold. first, the democrats have no chance of swinging the state. second, the party can take at least 90% of the black vote for granted.

if you want to beat trump, you need to focus on states you can actually win, like nevada, iowa, new hampshire, wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania...

...and winning those states means the party needs to perform better with white voters.

so, you need to make that choice: do you want to win or not? campaigning against white supremacism in south carolina is just tilting at windmills.

bernie's made his coffin, he can lie in it.

and, it does not matter who wins the south carolina primary.

at all.

this is just a periodic reminder that race is not actually a scientific concept, and anybody rooting their politics in race is consequently performing pseudo-science.

it's really long past time that america left the idea of race in the past. it has no place in the modern world.

i'm a typical nerd: if you give me a complicated differential equation, i have an array of tools to utilize, but it took me three months to find the p-trap in the cleanout.

we're all like this. really.

well, it seems 100% better, so far.

it seems too easy, though.

this has actually been going on for months. it took me the longest time to even realize where it was coming from. but, everything is clicking at this point.

so, maybe my landlord isn't cooking meth after all.

actually, i think i just needed to understand how the system worked a little bit better. i went to university for a long time, but i'm not a plumber, and i don't actually know anything about plumbing. but that's how you learn, right.

so, there's a p-trap beside the cleanout (i think i said dugout previously) and apparently it can evaporate, thereby releasing sewer gas. and, the guy upstairs likes it cold and dry, so he was no doubt running a dehumidifier down here. and, i like it hot, at least, even if i'm struggling with the dry air. so, the conditions for evaporation were present.

what you're supposed to do is fill it up with water, so i untaped it and then i did that.

but, then i taped it back up again to try and lock the moisture in. maybe i can put a ziplock bag over it or something; crazy glue the tupperware.

i still need to lysol the fuck out of it. and we'll see if it even works or not. but this at least makes sense.

then, why did running the water stop the smell? i guess it must have been blocking the gas from coming back up the trap.

if it works, i'm probably at least mostly right.

ok, so, i left the fan on for groceries, but turned the water off, and i came home to the most disgusting stench i've ever smelled, distributed over the entire space. i had to open up the closet and see what the fuck is going on in there.

is it the gas after all? well, i started by turning it off and draining the tank. what i was experiencing was that the smell came back after i turned the water off, so what happens if i turn the gas off?

there does not appear to be any odor coming from the heater, but there's a dugout beside the main that is just rank. i suppose that the right answer is probably that there is in fact something rotting in there, like i thought in the first place. but, i can't just run the hot water 24/7.

what i'm going to try and do as a stop-gap is just tape the dugout up and lysol the space. if that doesn't work, i'm going to need to get the landlord to call a roto-rooter....