and, just to clarify a point, for people that like imagining things. because i know you do.

sarah was not a high maintenance, prissy girl in any way. she came from a decidedly lower class family in a small town outside of ottawa, and was home schooled by christian parents up until grade 6 or grade 8. she then went to either junior high school or high school. hey, i can't actually remember that, because i wasn't there.

the stories she told me about her childhood included doing things like acting out lord of the rings in the forest. she told me stories about animals that she befriended as a child, when she had more of a farm. she had a strange, almost disney-esque kind of concept of wildlife, but she wasn't living in a princess delusion.

she would sometimes wear eyeliner in patterns on the side of her cheek, or otherwise play with makeup in unexpected ways, but she was actually morally opposed to things like cover-up and lipstick, and she'd give me shit for it if i put it on. she thought it was fake.

her hair is naturally light, but she often darkened it. she at times had extensions or dreadlocks.

she was staunchly pro-life when i met her; at the time, it wasn't very important to me, but i didn't particularly disagree with her, either. i didn't really have a defined opinion on abortion until years after we broke up. well, i never really had to think about it - to me, a part of supporting female autonomy meant i avoided taking a position on something i'd never have to deal with. i just respected the concept of complete agency, on this. but, it's also a different type of issue in canada, because it was never really up for serious debate. i guess my position was that if you don't want an abortion then you shouldn't have one, and if she said she didn't want one, i didn't push her on it.

i mentioned that she had a basketball scholarship. she had a muscular, athletic physique with minimal curves and almost no breast growth. there was a time when we had the same hair cut and dye job, and were consequently frequently mistaken for sisters; but, she was also from time-to-time mistaken as my trans girlie bf, kind of thing. i could outgirl her without a lot of effort.

in short, sarah was a tomboy that was just coming into herself during the period we were together. she got what she wanted not via vavoom voluptuousness or piles of goopy make-up, but via sheer insolence and outright aggression - she would just grab people and start fucking them, in ways that were often borderline assault.

so, don't confuse yourself, here.

a part of the problem is that she was insecure with me, because she thought - perhaps correctly - that i was a more attractive female than she was.

and, a big part of our relationship was that role reversal. she dominated me. unapologetically.

i'm sure if somebody saw us duck out here or there, they'd be imagining certain things, because that's how guys are. but, you need to have the right mental image: i was an effeminate trans girl at the very start of my transition, and she was a pretty dominant bitch.

i'm sorry if that's not what you wanted to imagine.

but, you could always find somebody else to jerk off to.

i have enough data at this point to be pretty clear about it: this place only stinks when he's home.

yet again: he's gone all weekend, and the air in here is fine. he gets home this morning, and i'm coughing and wheezing within an hour.

he's obviously smoking upstairs - or somebody is, anyways. and, no, i can't knock down his door and take a picture.

but, what a fucking coward though. somebody tell the piece of shit to man up and be honest. he comes in and hides behind his curtains and pretends he's not smoking, because he's too chicken shit to deal with the consequences of it. what a loser.

i have nothing planned this week, and am probably staying in next week, too. there's actually a good chance i'll be in until the 21st. man man + luke vibert is pretty certain. before then, less so.

that means i won't be smoking this week, again. or next week, probably. and that means i don't want to smoke other people's second or third hand smoke, either.

i am, in fact, very predictable - i never smoke once i get home. and, three weeks between shows is more normal than what i did this summer, too. i needed it, but it's over.

there's an off chance i could hit the jazz fest this afternoon, but i think i'll probably want to focus more on grocery shopping. right now, i'm planning out the month and want to work it through pretty quickly. i obviously want to get back to rebuilding october so i can publish it. but, i'm also going to need to make some calls on tuesday.

if you want to understand how sin works, you'll get more out of orwell than you will out of freud.

there isn't a biological explanation for sin. it's just a system of control that the aristocracy implants into your mind, to ensure you're kept in check.

so, if we stop brainwashing our kids with this shit, we'll let it go very quickly, because there isn't a deeper component to it.

again: i didn't go through a religious upbringing.

i wasn't brainwashed.

so, i don't need to undo the programming.

and, you wish you were that free.

it's not a question of what's "right" and "wrong", even. i'd have trouble defining these things, but that's not why sin needs to be ejected from humanity, as a concept.

the problem with sin is that it creates guilt, and guilt is self-defeating and toxic and destructive. the reason that we need to get rid of sin is actually because we need to get rid of guilt; nobody should find themselves in these situations where they are trapped by their own self-righteousness, and unable to act logically due to a fear of upsetting some kind of unproven force. it just turns us into wrecks, and it needs to stop.

i never, ever want to experience somebody that is lost in guilt and uncertainty over an obvious triviality ever again. we have to conquer this, and leave it behind.

but, that doesn't mean that we can be utility monsters, either, as that will also destroy us. the idea is to place logic in the transcendent position; the same faculties of reason that can help us discard sin as childish can help us understand when we need to behave socially for the benefit both of our selves and of those around us.

and, that is kind of the actual point: learning to truly think for ourselves.

the espresso in my coffee at about 5:30 kept me up a little later, and i consequently slept in for much of the day saturday. i expected to get rained out, too. it wasn't until close to 19:00 that i convinced myself i could get out on time.

so, i took a heavier than usual pre-drink and made it to phog for about 22:00, hoping i wasn't going to miss the early band, which ended up playing late.

i did no research into the headliner, and wasn't even sure i'd stay to catch it; they came on, first, around 23:00. that's one thing about phog: they don't play early there. you won't miss the set, if you're a little late. they had a stand-up bassist and a drummer with a small kit, leading me to think it would be some kind of jazz, but they were fronted by a cowboy in jeans doing jangly country music on an acoustic. they may cringe at that, but so be it. again: my first thought was "yikes. this competent rhythm section should really find a sexy, black female vocalist to front itself. send this guy back to the farm. ouch.", but it started to make a little more sense after the first couple of songs. i overheard them talking outside, and they were name-dropping jeff tweedy (of wilco), silver jews and some other stuff that i'm vaguely aware of but just don't ever listen to. so, in the sense that it was completely wrong, it sort of made sense. i'm not convinced that it was compelling, exactly, but i'll give them some space for being bloody weird.

it didn't capture me, though, and i snuck out halfway through the set, to go over to the other bar to see if i could sneak in on a joint, which did happen. we had a nice little talk about death, where i managed to clearly boggle them, as i explained to them how the acceptance of death is healthy, how sin is a childish concept that should be abolished (and that i'm actually not at all interested in replacing a collectivist concept of sin with an individualistic concept of one - no, that's not enough, sin needs to be intellectually dismantled and discarded altogether in order to prevent it from stunting our potential and limiting our progress), how religion is only universal because it's the easiest and least challenging approach and some other equally heavy shit, before abruptly ducking out.

"i don't want to miss the band i came to see."

and, i didn't.

i was expecting a drummer, and a bit of a louder presentation. they presented themselves as a kind of a shoegaze act, and very much sound that way if you check out their bandcamp site. but, i didn't check the fine print - they were using a drum machine. so, you're looking at a guitar/bass two piece act, and it kind of fell apart in the process.

it's not like you can't be a two piece with a drum machine - it's possible to do compelling music that way. but, there are certain types of genres that sort of require a live drummer, and noisey-shoegaze is really one of them, because it's so fundamental to breaking through the feedback. when you rob this kind of band of a live drum sound, it tends to rather quickly get muddy and aimless, no matter how exciting the guitarist and/or bassist is. further, you have to take control of your instruments or vocals to compensate - something neither of them seemed interested in doing.

if you're going to bother trying to perform live as a two-piece with a drum machine, it's probably a better idea to try and do something a little more ambient, something that doesn't rely so much on the dynamics of the drum parts. that means delving into the sonic possibilities of your guitar, it means focusing more on interesting bass patterns, it means slowing the temp down a little and it means relying more on the voice as an instrument. they didn't exactly fail at this - they had moments where they clicked - but there were too many moments where the sound was clearly relying on a drum machine section that didn't cut through the mix.

it's not so easy as to tell them to find a drummer - i'd rather encourage them to open up their sound, and make use of what they have rather than pretend they're something they're not.

by the end of it, i'd had six beers in four hours (after a heavy pre-drink to start), and it was best for me to just get home and make some eggs and get to sleep.

how were the shows this weekend?

i missed the first set on friday night, and showed up right when unnatural ways were plugging in. i bumped into this show listing at the last minute, but if you go to their bandcamp site, it seems like a who's who of contemporary no new york - mixed by colin marston, produced by jason lafarge, signed to john zorn's label and featuring one of lydia lunch's bassists. where's the thurston moore guest spot? saajtak were also on the bill, so i had to take a run out to the beach for the first time, to enjoy the armageddon induced by the sound, if not by the venue.

they were a sort of a strange set, in that i'm not sure how organic the sound actually is. i just dropped a lot of stuff, and you can hear bits and pieces of it in the sound, but i actually get the impression that what they'd rather be doing is some kind of demented blues that is strictly vocal driven, and they're kind of just throwing out some flashy stuff here and there to hook people like myself. so, i kind of came to see the production flourishes on the thing, rather than the thing itself, and i'm not sure i actually like the thing itself. so, what i'm initially thinking as i'm watching them is "they'd be better if they sang less and jammed more", but by the end of the set i'm realizing that they'd actually rather be singing more and jamming less. so, there's not any point in arguing for a reversal of their agency - it won't be compelling if it's fake, either. but, then, it's not really sustainable, is it? it's a decent racket while it's broadcasting, even if it's kind of scattered and disconnected and even if it doesn't last much longer.

saajtak tend to mix their sets up, which is nice for people that see them semi-regularly. hey, they're just often the best show in town. i've learned that they sound better in small rooms, and that if they want to play in larger rooms that they'll need to get bigger amps. it was otherwise a mix of new and old material, and while i can't claim that i know their tracks inside and out, i did recognize a few bits, and did enjoy the talent as it was coming out at me.

i spent the rest of friday night at the goth club; it was fairly empty, as it usually is, but the cover was cheap, and the other spots weren't going to be late enough. it was too cold for the park, if there was anybody there. and, those 3:00 closes at marble are iffy - especially when the cover ends up being $20 after midnight. i suspect people were sent home fairly early. i would have rather found a later party, but there wasn't one. rather, the parties this weekend seem to have been all set for saturday, and that just didn't make much sense for me. i was out of there a little before 5:00, which is actually a bit on the late side for goth club, and caught the 5:55 bus back over.

this article has some unfortunate nationalist undertones in it, which are anti-socialist in tendency. the antonym of socialism isn't really capitalism; socialists see capitalism as a primitive stage in a holistic development, and largely reject breaking these ideas apart. the real opposite of socialism is actually nationalism.

but, it takes the pakistanis to task, as it should. so, it's a decent history from a marxist perspective.

it's just the stuff about kashmiri "awakening" that should be expunged from the document.

http://www.socialismtoday.org/67/kashmir.html

or, try this:

by comparison.

so, the population density in most of canada is about the same as the deserts in nevada.

from the racist imperialists at statscan:

if they just want to dumb it down to gods and guns, i'll sit it out.

again: there's a lot of stupid people out there.

and, there's a lot of very, very bad sources of information.

and, no - the forests in canada aren't teeming with indigenous groups. they've largely been rounded up and settled into "nature reserves", and broadly treated like animals.

the west is more populated than the east, granted. but, broadly speaking, the forests are actually uninhabited.

look up the stats on population density.

this is more along the lines of what i'm thinking about the whole thing: let's find a way to unite workers in india, pakistan and kashmir together to overthrow the bourgeois class, and take control of their own production.

fuck religion.
fuck ethnicity.
fuck nationalism.

https://www.marxist.com/socialist-kashmir-conference.htm

so, i will support the socialists and the anarchists on the ground, not the fundamentalists that want to govern from the extreme right.

and, if there aren't any, or they are too fearful to organize, then i'll have to stand with an imaginary projection of them.

i will not support an ethnic, religious or nationalist struggle merely for the sake of it, or on those terms.

i mean, do i think that the militants represent the population?

do i think the jihadists have actual popular support?

not at all.

so, it's a false narrative all around.

what you have in kashmir - as you had in syria, and in iraq and almost everywhere else where there are these kinds of wars - is a group of well-funded violent extremists that are largely acting on behalf of foreign governments and care little for the people that live there, fighting against a state that is overreaching it's bounds. both sides claim to represent the average person, and both sides are completely wrong.

self-determination would necessitate free elections, which are impossible under the conditions that the militants would set up.

i told you the same thing about syria - that i had no interest in taking a side in a conflict between a failed state and a bunch of jihadists.

in the end, i felt compelled to support the bombing against isis, because it was a reflection of the actual popular will. but, it was an almost singular situation, where imperial might could step in and uphold what people actually wanted.

it's far less clear how that can happen in kashmir - but i know that supporting islamic militants isn't the right approach, never has been and never will be.

so, yes - it would be nice if the indian government could tone it down a bit. they don't need to kill as many people as they are killing.

but, if you're looking for support for violent nationalist insurgencies that want to set up fundamentalist governments, you're not going to get that from me.

my solidarity is going to lie with the people caught in between the struggle, the people that don't want to live in a muslim theocracy and that just want to find a way to get away from the violence and live their lives.

and, yes, i'm sure you can find me some questionable article about some atrocities by the indian military.

it would take me a few minutes to find you a comparable article about similar atrocities being committed by islamic militants.

so, yes: the truth is that both sides are terrible, and have been for years. but, moralizing about it and picking sides doesn't help anything, it's unproductive.

it's the problem with bernie: he has the best policies, by a wide shot, but it's increasingly clear that he's just not that bright.

there's nothing better out there.

don't expect me to endorse somebody else.

i'll just sit here and bitch about how flawed the only actual lesser evil in years is.

i mean, maybe somebody needs to remind bernie that he's running for commander-in-chief, because he seems to be pretty clueless when it comes to any kind of tactics.

i mean, i had no choice but to play it when i was learning as a kid. so, i list page as an influence. but, i never liked it.

if they could have ejected robert plant into outer space, or something, they would have been far better as an instrumental fusion band.

but, as it is, they're amongst the worst things that came out of the period.

also, i've always hated led zeppelin.

the issue in kashmir is, in fact, quite clearly internal, and up to the local actors to work out. that is not debatable.

everything else aside, i don't think it's very intelligent for sanders to come out and take a side on an issue like this, which has been going on for decades and requires careful diplomacy, if the united states is to involve itself at all. if the intent is to go for specific demographics, i'll remind you that the number of non-muslim indians in the united states is not exactly trivial, and that this isn't an issue where their "side" can be discounted or ignored. the indian government does, after all, control the region.

i want to hope that what bernie was trying to get across is that he recognizes that lingering instability in the region is not in the interests of the united states, due to concerns about migration (in the event of a serious conflict) and the deadly possibility of nuclear war. unfortunately, what he actually got across was that he's taking a specific side, which is neither likely to help his own poll numbers (he's increasingly coming off as a tool of muslim blood money) nor make him look very good, internationally. further, if he was going to take a side, he's on the wrong side of the greater geopolitical situation, as pakistan is more or less allied with the chinese at this point. the better tactical decision would be to come in on the side of the indians with the intent of containing the chinese; when you come in on the side of pakistan, here, you're just playing into the long term strategy by beijing.

the indians have long memories, and they don't take too kindly to this kind of thing. so, what he's accomplished by running his mouth off when he shouldn't have is having the most important power in the conflict interpret him as an unfair mediator, which is just going to further harm the people that he's nominally trying to protect. i would be equivalent to calling for an international presence in the west bank - something that's just going to get you seen as an adversary in tel aviv.

so, right or wrong - and this conflict is messy. there's no clear outcome. and, nationalist uprisings are passe. - what he did was pretty dumb, all around. it will probably cost him more votes than it gains him, and it restricts the ability of the united states to actually mediate, if he happens to win in the end.

he should have said something along the lines of that he regrets the loss of life and looks forward to working with both sides of the conflict to end the violence.

in terms of political issues, maintaining support for supply management is a hundred million times more important to quebeckers than immigration levels (whether you want them higher or lower) or state secularism (whether you support or oppose it).

and, that is my actual opinion of maxime bernier: i am strenuously opposed to his economic policies.

so, these are more believable numbers coming out of quebec. note that the margin of error here is quite high, but what i'm more interested in is where the movement is happening - what is fixed, and what is fluid.

conservative and liberal numbers are essentially at historical norms, and would represent minimal movement. as quebec tends to vote against the ruling party whenever possible, those liberal numbers may be a little higher than anybody ought to expect actually happens in the end, especially given what's actually happening on the ground. if a tipping effect comes into play, and the province makes a clear choice, it's going to take the liberal numbers down.

but, it would be an accomplishment of incredible futility for the ndp to poll lower than somebody that is threatening to dismantle supply management in quebec. supply management is very popular in quebec, so a policy to dismantle it would not be very popular, and a party running on a promise to do such thing would not be very populist.

so, where are these ndp votes going? as predicted, a lot are going to the bloc. that makes sense - it is, in many ways, these voters going back to where they came from. but, it's also consistent on a policy level. if the vote is strictly about the turban - and i don't think it is, although it's clearly a factor - then the bloc is the only federal option that would align with their views on such a thing. but, the blunt truth is that the bloc quebecois, like the ndp, is a social democratic party, which was a huge a factor in the movement from the bloc to the ndp in the first place. it wasn't exactly a shift left - these were long-time leftist voters. quebec might be the only place on the continent where you have actually recently had not one but two nominally socialist parties in competition for a large number of seats.

but, even at it's bottoming out in the late 90s, i doubt the ndp ever polled as low as 3% in quebec. they never won any seats there, and weren't considered a relevant force, but they polled at 7%-8%, most of the time. and, who were these voters? they were left-leaning voters that wanted quebec to stay in canada. they were never going to vote liberal, and rather seem to be bolting for the greens.

so, the struggle for the ndp vote seems to be happening primarily between the bloc and the greens at this point.

and, the evidence simply will not dispel with the possibility of an imminent tipping point for the greens in quebec.

i'm not exclusively into men, and gay men are generally not attracted to me, for good reason, either. i'm like most women, really: i'm bicurious enough, and open-minded enough. so, there is potentially a place for a woman in my life.

but, i really don't like prissy, self-centered females that think the world revolves around them and it's everybody else's responsibility to deal with it.

and, maybe if you notice that i am falling asleep in front of you, it's because you're boring me to death?

actually, here's an idea to think about: maybe if you're talking to somebody at a bar for a lengthy period, and they stop responding, or even start staring into space, it's not because they're too stoned to react, or because they're falling asleep. maybe they actually just think you're boring and are trying to find a way to get you to stop talking to them without being rude or confrontational. and, maybe the better reaction is to get the hint and go away, rather than to call them names or question their sobriety.

i know that this is probably something that certain types of women don't experience very often. they're used to everybody thinking they're oh so very exciting, and falling all over themselves to get the privilege to speak to them. because they're so very, very special. but, those are exactly the types of women that i'm likely to find to be the most boring, because all they're really interested in is talking about themselves. and, i'm not generalizing, i'm correlating. so, be the exception. i dare you.

i'm just continually confused as to why these women think i want to talk to them.

and, if you're paying close attention, you realize that i tend to gravitate more towards men in these circumstances.

i'm sorry - but i'm obvious. and, people just aren't getting the hints.

i'm feeling better, actually. but i'm going to have to venture out for some mountain dew. my stomach's unhappy with the coffee.

it seems like i'm rained in today, anyways, so i'm not going to really have to have this debate about whether i'm feeling good enough to go out or not.

imagine if it didn't, though.

suppose you woke up hungover  and it just never went away.

how long would you survive for before you ended it?

so, i just realized something profound....

i didn't get hungover all summer. it's been, like, two years, and then some, since i had a hangover.

thinking it through, i guess the reason i've avoided hangovers is due to the overnights - if i buy my last drink around 2:00 (and finish it a little later, probably before 6:00 anyways), and it takes an hour or two for the bus, and i get something to eat, and it takes however long to get home, then i don't end up falling asleep drunk due to the sheer amount of time it takes to get home.

but, i stayed in windsor last night, and did in fact fall asleep drunk.

so, now i'm hungover, for the first time in ages.

and, it's a little uncomfortable. somewhat unpleasant, even.

but, this, too, shall pass.

but, the thing with warren, specifically, it's that it's not organic. she's a creation of msnbc, and being propped up by the msm. her polling numbers are not real, but adjusted via careful manipulation of demographics. that's what i learned in 2016: in the united states, this kind of media deception is commonplace, and you have to read the polling from a good distance. i want to apply what i learned, not forget it.

in the end, the media might succeed in creating a candidacy out of her. she's what they want. she's their creation.

but, they're up against a difficult problem around the fact that the numbers on the ground just aren't there for her.

if she wins the nomination due to media bias, she'll get trounced in the end as a result of poor grassroots support.

so,

1) there is no actual evidence that biden is fading.
2) while i acknowledge that she is doing very, very well with her own specific demographic, i still don't think that warren actually has a serious path to the nomination.
3) i still think that sanders' only real path to beating biden was to rely on splitting the vote in the south, and running up the score in the north and west - something i don't think warren can actually do. sanders cannot displace biden as the christian conservative candidate in the south, although warren perhaps could if she were to run in a certain way, and the idea that he ever could was always stupid. so, i still think that sanders is being badly blocked by biden, and that, while there are some things he could do to try to get around him, he's not doing them - he's instead trying to fight a losing battle head-to-head. the south is just a conservative place.
4) i still think that booker is the most realistic dark horse, although i pointed out a while back that there may be a class disconnect between himself and his intended voting base, that they may actually not see much of themselves in him at all.
5) harris is terrible. she's fading.

the others were never really serious candidates.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/6-times-obama-promised-to-cut-the-deficit

people think you need to run to the left in the primary, then pivot to the centre to win the general.

closer to the truth is the opposite - you need to run in the centre to win over the party base (which is more conservative than the general public), and then swing away from it in the general to mobilize independents and non-voters, which also means doing things intended to avoid alienating moderate republicans.

but, that means that it's really hard to beat strong, centrist candidates in the primary.

and, let's remember a point: obama did not run as a leftist. obama told us from the start that he was a conservative, ran as one and won as one - and governed as one. obama was the most conservative president of the last 50 years. the iraq war vote was a major issue, but his argument was not anti-war - he just thought iraq was a bad tactical decision made by a dumb commander-in-chief. he beat clinton by running to her right on social issues - he ran to her right on health care (she supported single payer at the time. he didn't.), he was broadly less supportive of queer issues (across the board), and he promised to cut spending and reign in the deficit. and, he had a penis. so, he was more appealing to the conservative, christian base of democratic primary voters than she was.

so, looking to 2008 as a model for biden's decline by pointing to these "progressive" candidates and suggesting they'll do what obama did, however left they actually are, is a completely false projection and a completely warped narrative (mostly told by very untrustworthy sources of information, all around). to start, biden was a lower tier candidate, at the time. i barely remember his campaign. the front-runner was clinton, you'll recall. the third candidate in closest contention was not biden, but john edwards. that was the guy that was supposed to win in the south, not biden. so, there was never a time in mid-2007 where biden was dominating the polls like this. he wasn't the vp in the last administration back then, either. nor was clinton seen as the dominant front-runner in 2007/2008 - everyone expected she'd be a given a run for it.

rather, what happened in 2007/2008 is that clinton ran on the left, and got beat by a strong centrist to her right. if history is to be repeated, this narrative would be brought out to explain the decline of bernie sanders.

and, if through some twist of history, a candidate like buttigieg holds on and gets a direct face-to-face with sanders in a field of two or three, we might have a tragedy on our hands.

if biden had anybody else his own age to compete with - gore. kerry. even clinton, again - they would probably beat him.

but, with an aging voting base, and a younger field, he's the last one left standing, and is going to get huge amounts of votes more or less by default.

and, it could be another 20 years before these voters finally die off.

i suppose there's still an opportunity to reshape the actual party members.

but, so long as the actual people voting in the actual primaries are the same old democratic primary voters, it's hard to see who is going to challenge biden for the centre.

see, and whether that centrist voting base kills them in the general or not doesn't negate it's existence. if these swaths of general election voters can't cast ballots in the primary, they may never get to cast their vote for who they want in the general. as a result, trump may win again, sure. but, you're never going to get this across to them. biden's the last old guy out there, the last member of the generation of leaders they recognize.

so, this isn't a debate about tactics - it's a reflection on voting demographics in the primary, and a realization of how different the primary is than the general.

biden is still winning. comfortably.

....and, for all of the talk of biden crashing, there's no actual polling evidence of this, yet.

actually, i still think that warren's support is probably quite weak and prone to deep collapse.

the one strong group she seems to have picked up is wealthy, educated female identity voters. i'll acknowledge underestimating this, and that i should have seen it. and, that group might cling on to the end, a major asset given that it is so well distributed.

but, she has challenges with non-white voters. she has no real actual base, either. in the end, all of the groups are going to pick sanders. so, it's hard to see how she can build a coalition, without becoming the centre, ie. pushing biden out of his spot

that means that warren has to win black voters in the south, for instance. how?

what we're going to see soon enough is that her numbers are being exaggerated. i wouldn't be surprised to see her polling at 12% everywhere, while other candidates come up around her in different areas.

her prognosis to make it to iowa remains sketchy. she will need biden to pull out, i think. she will need harris to collapse. otherwise, she may poll third or second nationally without winning a state.

so, she's doing better than i predicted, and sounds like a serious candidate when she speaks. but, it's still not at all clear that she has any potential path at all.

i know it sounds like she thinks i provided the sperm. how much more obvious could she make it, right?

you don't get sarah.

it's more like a type of sympathetic magic. out of all of the "signs" she gave me to get my attention, it was the pregnant sex that was most important, as it represented a replacement process. and, she was, in essence, actually admitting that i wasn't - but that she wishes i was.

it was all a kind of ritual, for her.

i always approached her like an anthropologist: i found these kinds of behaviours to be interesting. and, on a level, i guess they were experiments, right? but, the reality is that she was the kind of person that would pray, and expect it to work. i think she grew out of that around the time we stopped talking, and my decision to go back into transition may have had something to do with that, as well.

so, she might have been trying to send me a message, yes - but not the one you're thinking of.

and, i really don't think i am.

but, there's a lingering non-zero possibility, absolutely.

and, i assure you that i am telling you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me, me.

despite it's flaws, i'll take my oath on the principia.

some other people may remember some things a little differently in terms of context or perspective, but i'm not making thing up. my stories are real. legit.

if you wouldn't vote for clinton, you shouldn't vote for warren, either.

what is it that the silly christians say?

she's a "wolf in sheep's clothing".

and, fwiw, i think a biden/warren ticket is probably a losing one, too.

a biden/warren ticket is a more likely outcome.

i will make a bold prediction: warren will endorse biden before she endorses sanders.

remember when everybody was upset with warren for not endorsing sanders?

you all thought it was obvious. but, it's because you don't understand warren very well. if you did, you'd know it never was.

and, now you're doing it again - even as she runs hard against him.

there's a definition of insanity, guys.

i'm just trying to think back to what warren said when she endorsed bernie in 2016, to glean points on her perspective about this.

oh.

that's right.

she didn't endorse bernie, did she?

she lobbied to be clinton's running mate, though.

reality check: elizabeth warren would neither want to be bernie's vp, nor would she pick bernie as her own.

but, if the two somehow ended up on the same ticket, she would subtly work to undermine him. because that's her mission, as determined by head office.

so, those arguing for disaster are right, but not for the reasons they think.

bernie does not know who his friends are.

the reality is that, so long as biden remains in the race, he remains a longshot candidate. but, he needs to be looking towards somebody that is a little closer to him, ideologically.

it's just surreal.

if you were to force a basic intelligence requirement on seeking this office, it's pretty clear that this guy would fail it.

“if you put money into our hands in a dividend, we’re going to spend it right there in our economy — it’s going to be trickle up..."

see, he really, really doesn't understand the words he's using.

technically, he's actually right - if you give everybody a thousand dollars a month, it will trickle up to the 1%.

but, what the fuck kind of policy is that?

who the fuck wants that?

if you want trickle-up economics, why not just pass more tax cuts for the rich?

so, we're not doing a crazy weekend. there's just not enough to do, and the weather's not going to be very good. so, there's no reason to push myself. i may actually get mostly washed out.

these are my picks this weekend:

fri - likely
20:00-00:00 - saajtak / unnatural ways. art of amageddon beach beach party. $5.
??:??-??:??. if really early then try teener @ ufo. $10.
??:??-04:00. if still early then go home else goto leland. $5.

sat - will likely skip first part and stay in windsor for second
16:00-23:00 - city sculpture extravaganza @ alexandria park. free.  <-----does not fit into my schedule
21:00-02:00 - palm haze @ phog. no list price. assume $5 (cdn). <---weather dependent

sunday - strictly weather dependent, as they are calling for rain all day. i will probably just stay in.

option 1:
15:30-17:00 - pat metheny & ron carter. hart plaza. free.  <-----super pick.
18:00-20:00 - stanley clarke. hart plaza. free. note: no billed guitarist in band.
home?

option 2:
13:00-02:00 - ambient festival. outer limits. free before 21:00, $5 after..
late party?

monday - depends on what happens on sunday.
15:00-17:00 - pat metheny. hart plaza. free.
19:00-21:00 - stanley clarke. hart plaza. free. note: no billed guitarist in band.

and, these are some tentative picks for the rest of the month, the stars being the almost certain shows.

06: big business
12: massive attack
13 & 14: strange beautiful music festival  (*)
16: ride.
21: man man ---> luke vibert (plug)  (*)
23: pig (raymond watts)
24: fly pan am (windsor)  (*)
27: blanck mass  (*)

oct
01: melvins
02: joy formidable ----> defeater.  (*)

for now, i need to force myself to get a few hours of sleep if i'm going out tonight.

hey, kids.

check this out.

it's fucking corea + di meola.

you going to tell me i'm too young for beethoven, too?

this shit's timeless.

and, i did actually see return to forever once at confed park in ottawa.

though, that was all about al.

of course.

stanley clarke actually isn't nearly as old as i thought he was.

i thought he was like 80-something. well, davis would be 93.

he's only 68.

the arthritis might be a little bit of a problem, but i'm sure he can still walk and stuff. hrmmn.

i don't think she's my daughter,

but, i'm not completely sure.

and, we had a previous agreement that i would not actively parent, if i was.

but i was supposed to be around - a friend.

i was supposed to teach her how to play guitar, one day.

none of that happened.

i know.

sad.

there will always be an emptiness, a void, so long as i can't have her as a friend.

but we couldn't fulfill each other's needs.

when she told me that she named her first-born after me, i initially thought it was some kind of a joke. the name is synonymous with "oracle", "guru" or "wise person".

a couple of years later, she fessed up and told me the whole story.

after we left tofino, we spent some time in the okanagan valley. we were outside of oliver, when we got into a big fight and i stormed off; i guess i just needed to get some air, to take a walk by myself, but at the time it seemed like i wasn't coming back - i was halfway to kelowna before i turned back, and she was in shock.

so, she sat and picked wild herbs, for a few hours, convinced she'd been left in bc by herself.

until i came back.

so, the idea was that i was supposed to come back - like i came back, back then.

but, the fact was that, this time, i didn't want to.

or, at least, not like that.

it's a bittersweet story, all around.

actually, given that the joy formidable are opening (and i care not for devotchka), i could potentially catch defeater after.

i'd just have to get to ferndale very early.

but again: these are the same old bands.

*shrug*.

it's at the beginning of october, but defeater is the same day as the joy formidable.

ugh.

i might end up skipping defeater. i haven't been that impressed by them in a while, frankly. but i need to check out the new stuff, too.

if necessary, i may have to take a road trip somewhere i've never been before.

on second thought, there is a lot happening in hamtramck this weekend.

it may be hard to avoid a long weekend.

also, i've cut another week of calories out, this time more or less by accident.

i just haven't been that hungry.

i really *did* blow this....this week, really.

i didn't even really do a proper sort over the last week or so. i stopped at last thursday, and then found myself listening to music from 2013 over the last week. i just decided that it was too cold out to bother and that was that. and, i actually wanted to get much more of this done than i have. ugh. it's really, truly been completely wasted.

i kept telling myself that i'd get this finished and then (...). but i've just spent the time ranting and haven't finished anything. it happens sometimes, i know that. i need to get to the next step, now.

in fairness, it *was* cold last friday & saturday, but it hasn't been that bad the last few days, although it was a little bit rainy monday and tuesday. did i miss something? i doubt it, but i'll have time to sort over it, backward, eventually.

i was honestly just in a rut.

for right now, i'm sorting through september as a month, rather than just focusing on this week. as mentioned, i'm not going to be looking at crazy weekends for the rest of the year because i'm not expecting it to be close to warm enough. but, i'm hoping i can get some more normal nights in, with shows that are a little closer to the border, and for bands that i actually legitimately want to actually see. i'll get a short list up soon.

if i go anywhere this week, it looks like it will be centered around the jazz festival. but, it's not obvious that that will actually happen. i've never seen stanley clarke, but...i doubt he even can play that old stuff any more. i'll make space for it, if i go over for something else, though. i might be looking more at next week to start.

and, if she wanted to, she could then go after all of these corporate executives and greedy suits for lost wages using a concept called unjust enrichment.

i mean, there's this kind of cultural misunderstanding of contract law, as borne out in decades worth of hollywood film.

"did you read the fine print?"

but, it's a nineteenth century concept of law, it's not reality, and it hasn't been since before the emancipation proclamation. there's all kinds of rules about what can and can't be inside legal contracts, and judges rip them up all of the time.

you can't sell yourself into slavery.

and, you can't consent to much, as a child.

what i'm saying is that there's a pretty good chance that a judge might look at the situation and say something like:

"sure, she signed it away. it's true. and, the law let her do it. but, she was a child, and how can a child consent? what legality is there in a law such as this?

what should have happened is that the adults in the room should have realized that they had an obligation to do what was in her best interests, which was create a trust in her name that she could access at a certain age, because she wrote these songs and they must belong to her.

so, i therefore rule that the fiduciary obligation of the parties overpowers the existing contract, and give her the rights to her own songs."

and, because she's taylor swift, it just might work.

and, there's a really positive upside to this, as well: if she can get a judge to make that ruling, and it can withhold a few appeals, it will become the new legal reality. so, it will stop people from preying on child artists in the future - they will be legally required by precedent to carry through with their fiduciary obligations.

hey, i'm an advocate of self-ownership all around. but, i'm an artist, too. i'm in support of people owning their own songs, certainly.

if she was 14 or 15 or 16, she would have needed to use some kind of power of attorney, and essentially relied on a concept of fiduciary obligation. they should have put the rights for her into a trust that she could gain access to as she aged. that they didn't would be a breach of the fiduciary obligation they had to her.

this is an over-simplification, of course. and, i don't know the relevant case law. but, given the context, it's worth taking a shot at this - because she could get a novel ruling.

https://mentalfloss.com/article/85007/how-michael-jackson-bought-publishing-rights-beatles-catalogue

i'm reminded of the time that michael jackson bought out the rights to paul mccartney's work. and, he wasn't happy about it.

taylor has something going for her, here: she was a minor. that means her rights to consent are questionable.

i think she should sue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/arts/music/taylor-swift-rerecord-albums.html

The study found that genetically related people tend to be similar in their behavior, which tells us that sexuality has influences buried somewhere in the DNA.

no, it doesn't - because genetically related people tend to share conditioning as a consequence of being from similar, or the same, families. it baffles me that this assumption is still kicking around, all over the place. 

i've been clear for years that i think you want to look more to pavlov than mendel if you want to understand this, which isn't even to suggest "nurture", as though it's something that is taught. the plotline to gravity's rainbow is a kind of a twisted joke, but i actually think he got the right idea about it. the result is that sexuality occurs mostly by accident, mostly by chance.

but, at the end of the day, i also think there's a choice involved - and i do think we can control our conditioning if we want to, although i think it's immoral to enforce it.

they point out that people want to resist a genetic explanation because they don't want to be clinicized, and i think this is a valid point, but i'm ultimately more interested in what the truth of the matter is. the flip side of the debate is that people want to insist on biology as the answer so they can get around religious objections, but this is a bad argument because it shouldn't actually matter what religion says in the first place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/opinion/genetics-sexual-orientation-study.html

how would a thrill kill kult / ministry concert go over in the middle east, do you think?

see.

i'm sorry.

it's true.

christianity is, at it's core, a perverse zombie vampire cult.

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

and, let's make sure we understand this, too.

this isn't about christians v muslims.

christianity is dead and buried in europe. and it's not coming back from the dead - there will be no zombie jesus ransacking the european parliament.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/report-shows-highest-percentage-of-atheists-in-former-east-germany-a-828526.html

like i say, this is tricky.

because i want them to organize and represent themselves, if they are here....that is, i don't want an apolitical mass of recent immigrants, i want them to participate....and, yet, i know i'll end up fighting against them if they do.

harmonious multiculturalism is just a burkean conservative fantasy reality. their religion is going to guide their politics, and i'm going to end up on the other side of it - if not brutally targeted by it.

so, what we're left with is two choices: either try very hard to pull them away from their faith and identity and all of the oppression and hate that comes with it, or put up barriers to entry. once again: what doesn't work is laissez-faire neo-liberalism on immigration policy.

in canada, the population is still quite small. we can talk about spending more money on integration, still. in gemany, they let the issue get out of hand, and it's created a mess.

the first step is for the political establishment to take responsibility for creating the problem via insufficient attention to integration programs.

my biggest enemy is not any of these other things, but religion.

that is the thing i wake up every day and need to fight.

everything else is secondary.

and, i don't want you to misunderstand my points.

muslims are people, too. so, they are entitled to all of the same civil rights i'd give to everybody else, including rights of due process and even freedom of assembly. and, i'm certainly not advocating physically removing their clothing - they deserve bodily autonomy, like anybody else.

but, where i draw the line - and what makes me different than a conservative - is that i reject the idea of "religious rights", and am especially vocal about it when religious belief comes into conflict with other rights. while i insist that i am consistent about this, that i am merely applying the same standards to muslims that i apply to christians and jews, i also recognize that there are differences of scale, because, in the world we live in today, islam poses us challenges that the other religions don't pose us, or at least don't pose us anymore, or at least don't pose us right now.

so, i do not think that you have the right to oppress people because your religion says it, whatever your religion, and whoever you're oppressing.

further, because my end goal is secularization rather than multiculturalism, i am willing to support policies that slow down the rate of immigration for the benefit of social cohesion - partly because i realize that the other alternative is a lot worse.

if forced with a binary choice between (1) living in a society where religious muslims are participating in the political process and potentially fighting for laws that uphold their beliefs while challenging the secular nature of the state and (2) not having any muslims at all, i would find the second option more appealing. see, this is the trick - i ultimately don't particularly care what the people around me think or believe, but i really don't want to have to deal with fighting them off in the political arena, because i've spent the better part of my life fighting off christians, and kind of want to leave that behind and move on. it's deflating to find yourself victorious in the battle between secularism and religion, only to have your own side cave in by bringing your enemy all of these fresh recruits.

reality is not a binary choice such as this; this is a thought experiment. but, it demonstrates where the limits of tolerance exist, and where the actual fears lie. because, in the end, i'm not going to obey their laws. and, of course they're legitimate - because any sizeable group should be politically represented, as well.

as mentioned, the ideal is to let them come and then convince them to abandon their faith when they get here. but, that means that we need to have programs designed to integrate them, and it means that the rate of immigration cannot be so large as to overwhelm them. there are legitimate questions around both of these things, today, here in front of us.

is it because god made us unique or something?

that's bullshit, obviously.

yeah, i don't think there's any value in seeing life as sacred or unmodifiable or something. i don't even know exactly what the argument is; it just seems reactionary, either way. it's a very conservative position, which is kind of uncharacteristic for this county.

i wouldn't just support liberalizing these laws. i would argue for substantial public funding into the field.

https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/gene-editing-in-canada

the thing about these guys is that they won't tell anybody what they're actually doing. so, it's fashionable amongst science-y types to just write it off as nonsense, but that's actually not very rigorous. the more science-y approach is to point out that they can't be analyzed, so we can't know whether what they're doing makes any sense or not. that's fundamentally different from a clairvoyant or a fortune teller, or even a magician, where we can break it down and explain how it works.

they might have a great scientific model. they probably don't. but...

that said, i don't think that this is something that public dollars should be funding reports on, either. cbc should really be embarrassed for running a story like this.

can somebody at wikileaks or somebody get this out there so we can figure it out?

my analysis is not based on a secret formula, and i don't have a crystal ball, so i'm not trying to predict the future. i'm just looking at broad trends around the solar cycle, and what are at this point quite rigorous correlations from ancient  ice core tree ring samples.

we are bottoming out right now. so, that means that the conditions for a very cold winter do in fact exist. but, we can also be sure of something else: things will be getting better, soon. the cycle will be clicking back in, and when it does we should expect it to get very, very hot and very, very fast.

so, i'm going to split the difference with their secret wisdom. i'm expecting an early fall, and a brutal start to winter, yes - in this part of the world. it may be very different elsewhere. i'm not talking about global average temperatures, i'm talking about local weather.

but, i think there's a lot of uncertainty around what happens at the beginning of the upcoming year.

if the bottoming out clicks in, and gets stuck for a long time, we could indeed have a late spring and one more shitty summer before it flips back over. but, none of us should have any kind of confidence in that actually happening. given that we don't actually understand the physics of this - all we have is an observed pattern - it's actually just as likely that the cycle could click back in very hard. and, we would then want to expect an early spring and a scorching summer.

so, we should expect to get hit early, but we should also have some hope that this is the end of it for a good while. and, we should get ready to exit this little blip we're in, and be prepared for a much warmer future, as it is coming. soon.

so, we might have one more crappy spring left. or we might not.

it'll be clearer what's going on as we get closer to the solstice.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/farmers-almanac-winter-1.5262555

what it means is that there aren't any meaningful boundaries.

or, that they're so clear as to not need to be stated.

as it was with the furniture...

when your ex pees with the door open, it's because she feels utterly safe and comfortable around you, and completely trusts you.

like, she wanted me there when she was giving birth. i didn't go, i felt it was not my place. but she invited me repeatedly and was a little upset when i didn't go.

but, it didn't prevent her from peeing with the door open when i did come over.

like, up to five years after we broke up.

she just really doesn't like the idea of me being on hormones. that's all. and, when she admits it, things will get better. i just hope it doesn't take another ten years...

it's the same thing with the bans on the headscarves at work.

if you see that as an attack on a minority group, i can understand why you might oppose it. but,  i rather see it as a way to prevent a repressive system from attacking actual repressed minorities - and people that are pushing back against it as upholding a system of oppression.

we can have definitional debates all day, right?

but, i'd ask you to sit down and be honest about it.

muslims, like jews, and east asians, are actually a pretty well-off group. the data's pretty clear on that point. and, islam is a pretty shitty system, too - all you need to do to realize that is to educate yourself about it.

it's ultimately a definitional question.

i'm not interpreting muslims as a repressed minority; if i did, i might see the situation differently. queers are a repressed minority, certainly. native americans are. african-americans are. i tend to stand with them, against the systems that repress them. but, muslims, like other asian groups, actually tend to do fairly well. who is oppressing the muslims?

rather, i'm interpreting islam as a system of repressive rules that wants to oppress people. like christianity. or capitalism. or, yes, fascism. so, i'm pushing back against the ideology on that level - this is a system that wants to hurt people.

to draw an equivalence between queers and muslims would consequently be to draw a parallel between the oppressed and the oppressors. and, i won't do that.

because i'm not phishing for votes.

i think we should be enforcing these laws, myself.

but, the way i'd want to articulate it is: i think we should be standing up for civil rights, which often means pushing back against religious authorities that want to restrict them.

you're tolerating their intolerance.

but, should you?

or, how much should you?

why?

because queer rights are a civil rights issue - these are positive rights.

but, tolerating islam is about turning a blind eye to civil rights due to cultural relativism, it's allowing them to uphold their systems of oppression via these processes of intellectual acrobatics. that's what you're tolerating.

you simply can't draw an equivalence between "tolerating queers" and "tolerating islam".

that actually is trumpian - it's like drawing an equivalence between anti-fascists and nazis.

wow.

what a blown night.

i gotta get up, eat, shower and then pick it up.

afaik, no serious inquiry has been called into the question of ballot stuffing in the 905 and 416.

but, i do think the data would support such an inquiry.

i mean, much has been made of his 20% approval rating, which set in mere weeks after the election.

little has been made of the fact that he also had a 20% approval rating a few weeks before the election.

and, no - i'm not going to retract....concerns....about the legitimacy of the last election in ontario.

i don't want to do the research right now and find the sources - i'm too far behind on what i'm doing - but i will draw your attention to the curious fact that ford's approval rating a few months after he was elected was essentially the same as his approval rating a few months before he was elected.

if you were to collect this data and graph it, you'd get this weird normal curve, or parabola, depending on your analogy.

so, we're left with two ways to analyze the situation.

1) ford managed to dramatically increase his popularity exactly where and when he needed to, and then lost all the support he somehow gained immediately after he gained it.
2) bullllllshiiiiiiit.

given that he brought in the same people that were accused of doing this in the 2011 federal election, and it happened in the same places, i'm leaning towards 2).

and, i wonder.

what are these guys up to just right now, anyways?

i'm an openly trans person walking around in a city with a sizeable muslim minority.

i understand these numbers. they mirror my own experiences.

and, the left needs to stop ignoring them and start coming up with tactics to address them.

"but, it's his house."

yeah.

and he signed a fucking lease.

like, i just want to...

he smokes with the windows closed, and the shades drawn. he stays inside for days at a time. i see a stray butt here and there outside, but i can't prove anything. i'd have to do something stupid to get in and take a picture or something, and i'm obviously not going to.

it's just an absolutely absurd situation.

but, at least the gas is clearing out. before he lit up, all i could smell down here was the orange air fresheners. it was a pleasant change.

i want to stand with the people that are trying to get out of islam. my solidarity is with the apostates. fully. unwaveringly. that leads me to a position where i shouldn't oppose immigration itself, so much as i should actively work to convert muslims to atheism when they get here. and, in practice, that's how i actually act.

but, i know enough to be mindful of the possibilities of muslim voting blocs, and the threats they may pose to freedom in a secular democracy. and, at the end of the day, the people will speak, and when they do they must be listened to.

it's a careful line to walk.

and, it would be very helpful if the more responsible parties would take more responsible positions.

and, it's not a question of tolerating queers, either.

there's nothing wrong with being queer. what are you tolerating, exactly? consensual sex? that's not tolerance, it's the absence of oppression.

i mean, it's like saying that letting women vote is being tolerant. it's an abuse of language.

with islam, the language is properly defined, and you're talking about tolerating this huge list of things that are actually illegal in virtually every liberal democracy. you're talking about turning a blind eye to basic human rights for entire classes of people. i know that the newspeak is increasingly being indoctrinated, but it's incredibly challenging from an intellectual standpoint; we want the laws to be universal, to apply to everybody, to be void of these exceptions that harm people. and, it's a struggle to come face to face with it, and turn away from it, often on a daily basis.

and, no: i don't have an obligation to tolerate smokers, either.

i was actually going to point out that it seems like the air is finally clearing out, but then somebody lit a smoke.

i'm going to eventually catch him. and, it's going to be an exceedingly messy scenario, when i do.

one of the non-crazy parties in germany (in france, in the uk) needs to run on a platform of decreasing immigration from countries with right-wing value systems.

this game of chicken that they're playing is running it's course. and, somebody's going to get killed.

the people are speaking. and, the rulers need to listen.

the fact is that people don't like them because they're actually terrible.

i want a post-cultural society.

"multiculturalism" is just an algorithm for violence.

we need to stop pretending we can just air drop millions of these people into these secular societies and think it'll work it out.

well, what would the saudis do if five million german techno deutsche bags showed up out of nowhere and decided to party outside the mosque in mecca?

"c'mon, barbie, let's go party..."

the end result would probably look a lot like a concentration camp.

the germans have an opportunity to demonstrate that they've evolved a little, but i'm not interested in jumping around the fundamental point. i think they have a right to self-determination, and in a non-colonial society like germany, that could very well mean putting up walls and telling people they just really aren't welcome there.

because they really might not be.

and, they don't have an obligation to get colonized.

now, i know - it's a fraction of the population. it's not a horde of muslims, banging on the gates of vienna - or at least not yet.

but, the mainstream narrative needs to adjust itself to the reality of the situation, which is that there's an integration problem, and this keeps happening over and over again for a reason: islam is a very difficult culture to be tolerant of because it crosses lines that arguably shouldn't be tolerated.

google threw this at me. i didn't look for it. i guess i recently posted about journalism, and about the hell's (in the rebuild), and it constructed it for me via the magic of algorithms. great.

but, it's an interesting thing to watch re: the question of google stealing profits from journalists.

i guess what's underlying this, really, is a question of a division of labour. and, i suppose a fast way to summarize my position is to simply state that the accounting process is so reductionist, so difficult to calculate, that doing so is virtually impossible. and, again: that's a standard position on the left.

i think i'd expect warren to push through a policy based on a reductionist concept of the division of labour. sanders, less so.

i mean, there's a reason i can have all of these debates.

i went to school for a very long time, and i studied a lot of things.

- math
- math-physics
- math-economics
- computer science (and math-comp courses)
- law

also: courses in english, biology (and some math-bio, but mostly in game theory), music, history, philosophy, psychology...

philosophy is another course with big overlaps with math, but i'm mostly self-taught / dabbling on that front. it's an experiential thing, though. like, math and physics and comp. sci profs will tell you stories about liebniz or newton or descartes or whatever. you don't get credits for it, or get quizzed on it, but it's a part of the process.

if i had stuck around a little longer (or shown up a little later), i'd have probably ended up with enough credits in "mathematical biology", which is the mathematical study of dna sequencing, to get a minor in biology, as well.

having a math degree means you take a lot of interdisciplinary courses that also count as credits in other fields, like physics and economics. and, as such, i would also qualify for a number of minors, almost by accident. i'd have to look into it to be comprehensive, but i know i have enough for physics and economics, to be sure.

it was really not clear to me which one was going to be worse.

and, trump is not as bad as i feared.

but, i mean, voting for a republican is not an option for me, and can't be. it's more like that i'd end up voting green, with the understanding that it would help the republicans win, and either be apathetic about it, or actively hoping for it.

there are obvious reasons why i can't support them, directly.

specifically regarding white voters in midwest states, i would suspect that bill clinton's support for nafta was probably a big factor in voting against hillary.

so, these studies and polls that are trying to...

the premise is that people are voting for things they believe in, that they actively support. and, i think that is wrong.

it is probably the case that most trump voters did some kind of calculation that led them to conclude that he wasn't as bad as clinton, rather than found some kind of policy that they actively supported. and, it is likewise the case that most clinton supporters were mostly acting out of fear at what trump would do if he were to actually win.

in hindsight, the biggest measurable differences are twofold.

1) trump has been terrible on the climate. clinton may not have been very good, but trump is clearly worse. i think that much is not controversial.
2) trump has been better on foreign policy, clearly. it wasn't clear how he'd govern - he said a lot of things that didn't make sense. but, he's largely withdrawn from syria, which is good. and, he's mostly avoided starting new wars anywhere. clinton was crystal clear that she would have been far more aggressive in using force.

obviously, you want an option that is better than either - you want a better climate policy than trump's, and a better foreign policy than clinton's. but, that didn't exist, or at least not in the form of a major candidate.

and, if we're debating which is worse for the planet in the long run, it's not an easy answer; they're both bad, granted, but somebody has to govern.

obviously, i don't like the options on the table very much: i neither like clinton nor trump. i didn't want either to win. but, one of them was going to...

and, in weighing lesser evils, i do not think that trump comes off nearly as poorly as others would suggest - or, in hindsight, that clinton would have offered much of an actual improvement.

if you actually look at the evidence, clinton's positions are largely aligned with trump's on the vast majority of topics that he's criticized for the most loudly. so, if you're angry about immigration, it's not clear that clinton would have been more to your liking. if you're angry about abortion, it's not clear that clinton would have been more to your liking. etc.

on the other hand, it is likely that clinton would have been a belligerent commander-in-chief, and a war-time president, by her own making.

as mentioned: i don't exactly think that trump has had a good presidency.

but, i don't think he's had a horrible one, either. i would rather rank him in the middle of the pack over the last fifty years - he's been about average.

he's not as bad as either bush, he's not as bad as nixon and he's not as bad as reagan. and, he's about a coin toss with the clinton that actually governed.

i understand that, if you want to run against him, you want to exaggerate how bad he is. and, he'll do the same thing in reverse, too. but, the fact is that the economy is not so bad right now, and he hasn't started any wars - low bars, granted, but relevant in a reality where his immediate predecessors were pretty shitty.

also, i did endorse clinton.

weakly.

but, i'm not sure it was the right choice.

i probably would have voted for jill stein, if i could. but, if i had voted for clinton, i might have been in the group of people that did so, and regretted it.

and, no, i don't think there's anything wrong with religious animus.

rather, i think that religion is a virus of the mind that needs to be eradicated as we move towards an entirely godless, fully secular future.

further, i've been as clear as i can that i don't have any animus towards race, but have a strong degree of animus towards religion.

so, to be clear.

- i do not want to be a mathematician.
- i do not want to be a computer scientist.
- i do not want to be a lawyer.
- i do not want to be a politician.
- i do not want to be a school teacher.

- i do want to be a (studio) musician.
- i do want to be a blogger.
- i do want to be a polemicist.
- i do want to be a social activist.

- i don't care if i have money or wealth or status or family.
- i do care if i have a safe, healthy environment to create in.

i was at some point planning on becoming a school teacher, i suppose a high school teacher, but i've since developed a strong aversion towards spending time with young people.

it's been a slow process of rejecting a lot of opportunity...

so, yes - i spent a lot of time around wealthy people when i was in school.

and, rather than integrate, i developed a pretty strong hate-on for them.

i graduated with a four year honours degree in mathematics in 2006. it's neither a b. sc nor a b.a. but a b. mathematics.

i went back to school from 2008-2010 to complete a similar 4-year degree in computer science, which would have been a b. sc., and because i had a lot of overlap from the previous degree, i walked away with 19.5/20 credits towards that goal. i decided, in the end, that i did not want to work in the industry.

during my second stint, i also brought my number of math credits at the graduate level up to more than enough than is required to earn a masters degree in mathematics. however, i neither registered for this program, nor applied for the degree. i had decided long ago that i did not want to work as a mathematician, in any context.

rather, i went back for three further semesters over 2012-2013 and in the process completed the requirements for a three-year b.a. in the sociology of law. this is not law school, and i was not training to be a lawyer. rather, they were undergraduate courses in case law (civil and criminal), as well as in constitutional law. i decided a third time that i did not want to work in this field.

i am a white person with a university degree, and then some.

i do not believe that i have ever made more than 20,000/yr, although there was one year where it may have been close or a bit above it. but, i haven't tried very hard, either.

i identify as a struggling artist, and a member of the lumpenproletariat.

can we primary gillibrand, now?

what happens on twitter should stay on twitter.

it is an absolutely miniscule slice of the voting public.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/the-case-of-al-franken

i didn't take this still shot, steve.

this is from a paper in your own state.

i know, i know, steve.

it's your opponents' ideas that are half-baked, not yours. that's your message. i get it.

and, maybe i'm exposing a bias towards people from the geographical area you're from. maybe it's just your accent. maybe it's not your fault.

but, it would really help if you didn't come off the way you do, which is as somebody that has a done a lot of drugs.

speaking of which, i would like to draw attention to kristen gillibrand pathetically removing herself from the race, today, in complete and utter miserable failure.

the answer to bernie's age problem was always al.

and, he would have beaten trump into the mud.

alas...

dude, i got the perfect running mate for you.

he can use al franken's staffers.

"woah, man, like.

what happens if you push this button, anyways?

they said it was fireworks. woah. fireworks. i'd like some fireworks right now.

you dare me?

you think i'm man enough?

fireworks. yeah. rad."

no, really.

i was just trying to figure out if he's a cokehead, or if he did too many hallucinogens growing up.

and, mr. bullock.

steve-o.

dudiolly.

what are you running for president for, anyways?

don't you know you can take a trip without leaving the farm?

*wink*

actually, i want to hope that the germans can figure out how to restrict immigration, subject to what is a growing popular consensus, without resorting to gassing people.

there's a lot of space to operate, between concentration camps and complete amnesty.

but, the mainstream parties need to pull their heads out of their asses.

https://news.yahoo.com/far-vies-lead-german-regional-130010332.html

and, we need to stop sending our kids to school in america.

they leave as liberals, and come back as democrats. that needs to stop. it's destroying the country.

i just wish i had something better to work with, in terms of pointing to alternatives.

so, sure.

if they want to run as american democrats on a harper-redux foreign policy, we can make sure everybody understands what they're saying.

and what the implications are.

in hindsight, we see that that is what really happened in the ignatieff soft coup that stabbed dion in the back - the party got taken over by democrats.

the left is not going to win power this election, but it could position itself to take a serious shot at in the next election - whether that is in four years or, more likely, in two.

but, it needs to get rid of may as much as it needs to get rid of singh.

the country is currently being run by a bunch of upper class snobs that went to elite american universities, and are only here to take a job.

they're a bunch of centrist democrats.

and, they keep proving it.

the liberals used to be the smart party, too.

they really did.

ok.

so, we can start talking about how trudeau's foreign policy is harper-redux if you really want.

because it clearly is.

the trudeau campaign seems to literally be intent on repeating every single mistake that hillary clinton made, in an environment where those kinds of errors are likely to be more costly (because we have a multi-party system) rather than less costly.

it underlies the basic point about this government: the people running the country right now are just flat out stupid people. and, i mean the lot of them, all of the staffers and people in the pmo. regardless of what you think about politics, the main focus in the election should really be in finding some way to get rid of, or at least put a check on, the stupid.

so, i have a better way to steal clinton's campaign slogan:

what is the best way to ensure that independent media can survive, uncorrupted, in the digital age?

let's not pretend we have the answer before we have the debate.

let's work this out.

i mean, this is a novel topic, there should be a town hall on this, not a ready-made policy from head office.

debate is healthy.

we shouldn't agree from the get go.

let's work this out.

"so, how would the media survive?"

through donations.

"but, it's unfair that the congolomerates are making ad money from this."

then ban it.

if you don't think your politicians should take money from corporations, then it stands to follow that you shouldn't think your media outlets should, either.

an independent media will be far more robust, far more independent, far more valuable, if you completely remove their dependence on ad revenue than it will be if you try and game the system so they get a bigger cut of it.

it's a weird thing to hear from bernie sanders. it's like he's undoing himself, swallowing himself whole. would he apply the same model to himself? no - he doesn't take money from corporate sources, he operates on crowd funding.

i'm going to have to pay close attention to this, because if this policy was written by who i think it was written by then it's aim is not to promote independent media, but rather to enrich the author. and, that's what i've been saying from day one.

if you really want to eliminate clickbait, then you take the profit motive out of it.

because that's their business model, and they can't and won't exist if you destroy it.

advertising is a horrific source of revenue. it promotes horrible things, at the expense of user enjoyment. it destroys us, as individuals. it eats away at our brains. it's an awful business model.

i'd much rather hear a candidate tell me that they want to completely ban advertising altogether, even if it's not entirely possible. pander to me that way - don't tell me you're going to share this dirty money around more.

because, i don't want it.

and this is what i do.

just cut me a check and let me do what i want. don't make it dependent on clicks or views. and, don't allow a collectivist system like a market to tell me whether it has value or not.

http://libcom.org/blog/meaningful-work-appeal-young-08102013

regarding this wang v sanders thing, though.

it's a false debate.

wang claims that his thousand dollars a month will create jobs, which is just silly. the only jobs it's likely to create are federal jobs in sending out the checks. sanders wants a job guarantee, instead, and claims people want to work - as though a thousand dollars a month is offering them any kind of serious way out of employment. it's less than i get on disability, actually, which is currently roughly $1260/month.

and, the ideas are not in contradiction with each other, either. socialism in it's purest state would see these ideas as working together, rather than against each other.

so, post-work anarchists will flip the question on it's head - we'll argue that it is precisely because we want to do meaningful work that we want the escape from market forces that prevent us from doing so. so, i'm not exactly opposed to a federal jobs guarantee - sure, i think that anybody that wants a job should be able to have one - but i am opposed to a system that tells you that you don't have an actual choice in the matter, and that opposition to what the left calls wage slavery is pretty foundational, as well. so, jobs if necessary, but not necessarily jobs (sorry.).

and, this is why it's important to point out that yang actually isn't doing this right. if he was presenting his policy in terms of an actual guaranteed minimum income - rather than a universal handout of what amounts to a pittance - then it wouldn't seem like there was a debate. sanders could present his jobs guarantee for those who want it, and still support minimum living standards for artists and other people that want to get out of the wage system.

i'm a musician, but i do a lot of writing, right? and, i don't want to charge you for this. i don't want to get paid per word. i don't want to sell this to a bourgeois layer. and, i don't want to bother you with stupid advertisements for useless garbage, either. i just want a nice little monthly check that lets me write what i want, when i want and how i want - and then lets me publish it where i want, too.

i understand that i'm not everybody. lots of people want to get up to go to work and get a pay check for it. that's fine. but, lots of people don't...

yeah, it's going to be a few more days before i do any sealing, but i've convinced myself that the smell from the baseboards is real and at least a major secondary source of the problem.

i'm actually convinced that the primary cause of the smell remains lingering effects of the sewer gas. it was pretty intense at the end, but it had lingered for a long time. so, there's a lot of residue in this space, and there's no real solution besides cleaning everything.

i'm clearly having some difficulty focusing but i'm plugging away, too. i should be done; as it is, i'm about a third of the way there. i just need to focus.

also: i would rather watch two nights with five people each than one night with ten people.

they probably weren't expecting ten candidates to qualify.

maybe they might want to ask around on that.

i'm not predicting this.

but, i'd like to see a final four of sanders, biden, warren and booker. those are the candidates that i would consider serious, at this point.

so, where does the support for all these failed candidates go?

hey, they're all posting low numbers, but when you add them up, you could get 10-15% in some polls. if they're all gone soon, some of the other candidates might get a bit of a boost.

i should add the caveat: i really hope that steyer doesn't get another poll in, but he probably bought the first three, so it's probably just a question of what's for sale. that's not good for anybody.

gabbard's supporters will probably go to sanders, even though that doesn't make any actual sense. getting rid of her should give bernie a mild bump.

of what's left, williamson, gillibrand and de blasio supporters are probably leaning more towards the leftier side, and perhaps the femalier side for the first two at least, of the remaining field. and, the other five will probably give biden a bump.

so, this is probably the debate stage:

i don't see anything surprising in the results, except maybe klobuchar qualifying. she's come off absolutely terribly in the first two debates. like, dumb, terrible. and, while what yang is calling a universal income actually isn't a universal income at all, it's not hard to understand where's he getting support from; i would nonetheless call on him to stay home. i'm not going to call for castro to stay home, but i do hope it's his last debate. the longer he sticks around on that stage, the more likely he seems to be to force the candidates into awkward positions that they'll have to walk back. he doesn't really have a serious shot at either president or vp at this point.

i would actually like to drag o'rourke around a little while longer. it's curiosity, mostly. and, i think booker belongs in the top tier more than buttigieg does - and would ultimately like to see him overtake harris, who is just digging herself a deeper hole on a daily basis, it seems.

so, it's just the bottom three that i'm questioning the relevancy of, at this point.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5471379/planting-trees-climate-change-theory/

i'm essentially proposing a carbon offset, and, as is the general case, the government here is just kind of doing a bit of it, just enough to get the headline it wants.

but, canada is really mostly a giant, uninhabited forest.

yes: we need to keep the tar sands in the ground. and, our per capita use is as bad as anywhere else. but, that's about not making the problem worse.

the biggest thing we can do to actually reverse the problem is to plant as many trees as we possibly can.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-federal-government-pledges-to-spend-15-million-to-restore-ontarios/

given that ford cancelled the cap and trade system, aren't there even already good ideas where to plant?

we should be able to push the treeline north, right?

regarding the burning rainforest, and political ambitions by the liberal party of canada, here's an idea:

what exactly are we doing to plant trees in the expanding boreal/tundra zone?

so, putting people in jail for vaping probably isn't the best reaction to this.

but, we don't seem to learn, do we?

i've hit a few thc vapes at parties, not to mention a little bit of shatter, and they definitely hit your lungs in a way that is a bit heavier, a bit different. i hope that they do a proper autopsy and actually figure this out.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5806783/respiratory-illness-vaping-death-health/?utm_source=Homegnca-national&utm_medium=MostPopular&utm_campaign=2014