i think it was her poor debate performances, myself - especially her attempts to go after buttigieg, which brutally backfired.

there was also the fiasco with sanders where she tried to play the victim and nobody bought it.

but, there may have been a misconception about where she was on the spectrum, too. she seems to have initially done well with suburban, white liberals. in detroit, she seemed to be trending in the hipster-y ferndale area, primarily, as well as in the counties around metro detroit - so, oakland county, and ann arbor. these places usually vote for the leftmost candidate, so this was a little bit weird, given that she's kind of a moderate. these voters may not have realized that she was on the fence on healthcare, that she's kind of a market fundamentalist or that she used to be a republican. and, people may have just gotten scared off by her, the more they actually learned about her.

this was my position on warren from the start - i never really understood why she was being presented as a leftist in the first place, when she was obviously actually sort of a conservative.

and, i think the solution may be as simple as that people rejected her when they realized they didn't agree with her as much as they initially thought that they did.

https://www.vox.com/2020/2/11/21131657/elizabeth-warren-new-hampshire-trouble

i guess the obvious question is - "should this be proportional anyways, or should it be winner take all?".

i mean, a lot of people probably don't realize that the thing is proportional in the first place. there were people grumbling that "but, sanders won the popular vote" in iowa, clearly desiring a winner take all formula.

generally, leftists prefer proportional strategies, although we argue about how to do it. i don't like proportional representation at the parliamentary level (i prefer a ranked ballot), but i prefer a proportional process at the primary level to a first-past-the-post one, certainly. the caucuses are maybe kind of a dumb way to do ranked ballots in the 21st century. i'd rather see both the primaries and the caucuses move to ranked ballots, while maintaining the proportional delegate system.

but, i can imagine the pushback.

"it's not undemocratic to get all of the delegates if you win, because you won!"

....but you'd be more cutthroat of a person than i am, and i suspect you'd contradict yourself pretty quickly if we actually had this debate, properly. chances are that you don't actually believe that....

so, like i said - (klobuchar, warren, biden) will be lucky to get one or two delegates, total, between the three of them.

sanders will probably get around 25% of the vote, and buttigieg will probably get around 20% of the vote. remember - buttigieg doesn't get a second chance in new hampshire like he did in iowa, so it's the first ballot that is more likely to be predictive, and a bigger win is consequently more likely.

but, between the two of them, they will get nearly all of the delegates, despite getting less than half of the vote.

and, this threatens to be the norm moving forward, if the field doesn't narrow.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/breaking-down-our-new-hampshire-forecast-district-by-district/

this idea that you know exactly who or what you are when you're like three years old is....

i think it's bullshit.

and, i think a lot of trans people are just telling doctors what they want to hear.

this whole thing is fluid, and people can and do change in either direction.

what i say is that i realized i was more like a girl very young, but, i don't pretend i had some kind of early childhood schizophrenia or something. i was a nerdy, bookish kid. i understood which genitalia i had, and wasn't confused by it.

so, i didn't go through this process that trans kids are supposed to go through, where you refuse to accept your birth gender. frankly, i think the literature is kind of lacking, and probably mostly bullshit. but, you have to feed the doctors a certain line to get prescribed, so you end up with a lot of bullshit in the case studies.

i'm willing to be honest in stating that i resigned myself to what existed, and internalized it. i didn't think i was a "girl trapped in a boy's body". rather, i just realized i had more in common with the girls than the boys, and then accepted myself as an effeminate boy and left it at that.

so, there are these songs - confused, screwed up - that were written and recorded when i was roughly 14-17 and are explicitly about gender identity, but they take this perspective of existential angst and dour resignation about it. i didn't think i could actually do anything about it. maybe i wished i was a girl, but i also wished i was rich, and wished i lived in a warmer climate and ... and these are just things one deals with, as reality is that you don't get everything you wish for, in life. and, i thought i could deal with it. maybe i even thought i'd grow out of it.

all i really was sure of at that age was that i wasn't really attracted to girls very much, and that i liked to spend a lot of time by myself.

i was 20 years old when i finally decided i had to deal with it somehow and took steps to transition by contacting a psychologist through the networks at school. i started taking hormones at 21.

i was basically completely emotionally stunted at this point, as i'd never had any kind of meaningful relationship with anybody, romantic or platonic. the best way to describe me is as suffering from extreme arrested development - i never went through the emotional development that most people experience during puberty. i had the sexual, emotional and romantic maturity of a 12 year old girl.

and, that lack of emotional maturity put me through a rough couple of years that dramatically altered the course of my life.

in the end, i decided on a solitary existence. and, i'm not particularly unhappy, i don't think.

but, don't misinterpret these songs - i had absolutely no sex life, and they just aren't about sex, and shouldn't be interpreted as though they are.

we all write about the things that are relevant to us in our lives.

and, sex and romance and relationships have broadly not been relevant ideas to me in my life.

actually, the truth is that the closest thing i had to any kind of sexual or romantic encounters until i was in my early 20s was a series of avoidance attempts.

i didn't tell anybody i knew in real life; i went to a catholic school, and if there was a group of gay kids, i never figured out who they were. i think there was maybe one kid that was openly gay, but he was also....he didn't take very good care of himself.

if you talked to the people i communicated with online during high school, and these were mostly older people that i knew through mailing lists for bands, people that were university aged or older, they would have told you i identified as a homosexual male, which in itself wasn't even quite right, but was what i was sort of resigning myself to at about the age of 16 or so.

so, i was actually the kid that identified as gay and didn't want to tell anybody, which meant i found myself constantly avoiding the girls around me, who interpreted me as a straight, single boy. i just didn't want to deal with it.

the point of this post is to explain why my songs have nothing to do with the kinds of things that kids usually write songs about. there are some songs that are explicitly about identity, but i've never written a song about love or romance or sex from any perspective at all because these simply weren't things that were relevant to me. i had precisely zero girlfriends or boyfriends in high school; i wasn't even interested in the premise. i was a virgin until my third year of university. i hadn't even experienced a first kiss until i was 21.

so, these songs broadly have absolutely nothing to do with sex or sexuality in any way at all, whatsoever, for the simple reason that i had absolutely no interest in sex or sexuality in any way at all, whatsoever - and broadly still don't. my gender identity is transfemale, but my orientation is asexual. i haven't had consensual intercourse in almost 15 years, and don't feel i'm missing out on much of anything.

what the songs are about are personal struggles with identity, social and political commentaries about things like war or religion and other literary or philosophical topics.

i would never be caught dead writing a song about love or sex.

yes, it is very weird to grow up in ottawa, and have a father that was drafted by the 67s, and to have never learned how to skate. just about every kid around me, of both genders, was playing hockey as toddlers.

but, my dad found himself with a busted body, a lot of shattered dreams and no discernible future in his 20s, and he made a conscious choice to teach me how to read, instead.

i didn't play hockey. but, i went to pre-school.

this had a set of unintended consequences attached to it, i think. i ended up at a working class elementary school, and had difficulty relating to the other kids. if you're going to teach a kid to read instead of to play hockey, it makes sense to follow up on it, and they didn't - they kind of left me stranded due to finances. and, i ended up a floater. but, the early decisions were the right ones.

it was my mother that made a lot of bad choices...

but, i'm a socialist to my bones.

and, this is the sort of thing that baffles me about capitalists. we're going to watch them destroy each other and all lose because they're too stupid to cooperate for a common purpose....

i actually wasn't that bad at sports when i was a kid, it's more that i wasn't very interested in playing them, i was more interested in doing homework - i was a nerdy kid, and i preferred spending time by myself.

on my father's prodding, i actually made the high school football team in grade 9. even with his prodding, i wouldn't have gone to the tryouts if a friend of mine wasn't there, and when he didn't make the team i largely lost interest in going. i just didn't like hanging out with the jocks. it was when they tried to pull me out of math class to go to a game that i decided my schooling was more important.

yes: i actually made the football team, but then quit it when they tried to pull me out of math class to go to a game. i picked math over football. because i'm a nerd, and i'm proud of it.

but, my aversion to the people involved aside, i grew up with a very athletic father, and i had little choice but to engage with sports in some way in order to relate to him. i think i've mentioned here before that he was actually drafted by an ohl team, and was on his way to the nhl, but he blew his knees out and had to end his career. and, that had something to do with the fact that i never learned how to skate.

what my dad told me about sports was that it was about teamwork, and what he always tried to get across to me about it was the importance of being a good team player. if i learned anything from him on the topic, it was that.

if you take a course in economics 101 nowadays, it's probably going to be new keynesian economic theory, and they will actually teach you that a basic deduction of contemporary market theory is that competition is stupid.

we have this social tendency to lean towards competitive behaviour as some kind of ideal.

but, a rational economic actor will avoid competition at all costs. really. it will pay fines, it will escape markets - anything to avoid a competition. and, the reason is that competition is devastating to everybody that engages in it, it can completely destroy you.

any economist would tell you that the fact that these politicians are out there trumpeting the benefits of competition is just proof of how utterly idiotic and mentally deranged they all are. it's beyond irrational, it's child-like.

but, if you needed another example of the stupidity of competition...

even in new hampshire...

sanders is going to get 30% of the vote (at most) and upwards of 50% of the delegates because the field insists on competing instead of cooperating.

i'm not supporting him this cycle, but, if forced to pick, i would still pick sanders over the field. so, the pragmatist in me is willing to shrug that off.

but, the anarchist in me wants democracy.....and is frustrated by the stupidity in front of me.

(although, as mentioned, i need to suspend my naivete, and not pretend this is an accident)

the right lesson is this:

when actors compete, everybody loses. when actors cooperate, everybody wins.

democrats are notoriously poor at understanding election math.

they're going to have to figure it out somehow, or they're going to wake up with something they don't actually want.

and, we'll see if democrats are better at solving a prisoner's dilemma than republicans, too. i'm not counting on it....

this is a recent poll from california:


sanders 29%

warren 16%

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

buttigieg 14%
bloomberg 13%
biden 11%
klobuchar 5%

if that actually happened, they would recurve the results like this:

sanders: 64%
warren: 36%
buttigieg: 0%

bloomberg: 0%

biden: 0%
klobuchar: 0%

ok.

there have been some polls released recently in south carolina, specifically, that suggest that steyer may be running higher than 15%. 

why or how, i'm not sure, but, they appear to exist.

i'm skeptical, to say the least.

there's been no data at all from nevada in weeks.

if warren can't get to 10% in new hampshire, she's not going to get to it in nevada or south carolina, either.

or, really, anywhere else.

maybe not even massachusetts.

so, amy klobuchar might come in third place.

but, if she only gets 14% of the vote statewide, she could end up with 0 delegates - they'll just curve bernie & pete up by the difference.

then, she could end up in third in nevada, too. but, if she only gets 13% of the vote, she's still goose egging.

and, it's hard to see how candidates like wang or gabbard or steyer are going anywhere at all, even if they consistently run at 5-10%. again: bloomberg isn't clearing these hurdles, either. and, how does bloomberg solve any of the problems biden presents?

you have to get to 15%, and if you can't then you're wasting your time.

who can do that in the big states? sanders, certainly. biden, probably, if he doesn't cave too much. buttigieg, likely, if he gets some momentum from these early wins - but the numbers aren't in yet.

and, right now, nobody else. warren is in free fall. klobuchar has never gotten close to those numbers. and, neither bloomberg nor steyer have generated them yet, either.

so, they got my package in toronto.

and, i think i just need to wait for them to send me stuff, now. i may have little to no work to do on the file until june.

i need to end talk of a contested convention. even 538 has "nobody" as the second most likely winner. this is all based on a misunderstanding of the way the delegates are awarded.

you need to get past 15% to get awarded delegates.

so, if we have a situation with a lot of candidates running around 10%, which is what we have now, that will not lead to a split field or a contested convention. rather, that will actually help inflate the totals of the frontrunners, who will get curved up.

as the threshold is 15%, the worst-case scenario would be if you have 6 candidates all running at just over 15%. any more than 6 competitive candidates, and the numbers just don't allow for that.

in reality, as sanders is running at around 30% pretty much across the board, he takes up two of those slots and you at most have space for four other candidates to be running over 15%.

but, neither klobuchar nor warren have much chance of getting to and staying over 15%. and, whether buttigieg is a serious candidate in the south or not is unclear - if he can't clear 15% either, then he's just going to add to the mess. i suspect that he will, though.

and, the reality is that i haven't seen a poll with bloomberg at 15% anywhere, either.

there are really only three candidates that are likely to get any substantive number of delegates, and biden's viability is itself an open question. this may end up as a two person race very quickly, even if the other candidates refuse to actually drop - and if they insist on sticking around with 5-10% of the vote, the party will award their delegates to the frontrunners, leaving them with the choice between dropping out and sticking around and whining that it's not fair.

so, don't trick yourself into thinking that this will balkanize and end up at the convention. the rules make that almost impossible. if the field splits, and it very well might, they'll just give all the delegates to the at most three candidates that can actually clear 15%.

expect four more years of trump.

the democratic candidate is just meant to be a clown to be gooned up, and the election is just a mock charade.

again: i don't know if they told bernie or not. 

http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2016/11/its-not-first-military-intelligence.html

back in 2016, i spent months agonizing over how the republicans could be so daft as to allow themselves to be defeated by this buffoon donald trump - even while realizing that he was winning because he was the more moderate candidate, and a lot of the basis of him winning was an anti-cruz and anti-rubio vote, as those candidates were actually more extreme than he was. i criticized them from every direction for being unable to pass a prisoner's dilemma. i didn't get it.

i could see what was happening, but i couldn't believe it. and, i will remind you what my prediction of the election was: i said "if the election is fair, clinton will win. but, i suspect that it is not going to be fair, and trump will "win".".

i even suggested, sarcastically, that trump would win pennslyvania and michigan; that is, i suggested that that was going to be how they'd steal it. i said something like "they're going to try to tell you he won in pennsylvania, which is ridiculous.".

it wasn't until the day of the election, and i actually saw the tv tell me the republicans had won in pennyslvania, that it really clicked - the reason that these establishment candidates were running around like idiots, unable to organize a basic prisoner's dilemma, is because trump was actually the establishment choice. this wasn't some kind of mistake. this was what the fuckers decided on months ago, and i surmised that it was explicitly to keep clinton, who the deep state despises, out of power.

and, then i suggested (half sarcastically) that they'd change the topic by blaming it all on russia - that they would erect an imaginary russian bogeyman as a projection of themselves, and then train you to direct your hate at it.

it's all there. on the side. why do you think the cops are trying to shut me down?

i make mistakes like everybody else, but i try to learn from them as best i can, so i'm not going to be confused by the democrats running around like trained seals, bumping into each other, in order to facilitate a sanders victory. i don't think they're all in on it. but, if you see the senators campaigning into may without a chance in hell, and bleeding votes away from a biden or a buttigieg that won't quit, then you shouldn't get frustrated - you should realize who they're working for.

i'm not nearly as worried about bernie winning as i was about trump winning, and i'm not really convinced that he's not being set up as a patsy, anyways. does the president actually get to pick his opponent? is that the actual reality? because that's looking to me like what the game here, is - an opportunity to campaign against socialism. even as bernie's being handed the nomination, he's being stabbed in the back.

i've pointed out that bernie will lose a two person race against pretty much the entire field, and that the only way he can win is to split it like this. that may be exactly why it stays split.....because it's the only way he can actually win.

and, trump will get the pinata he wants, by the mutual consent of everybody involved.

and, i don't know how much he knows about it....

my point is not to get confused when these actors do things that don't make sense. they're making far more sense than you think, you just don't understand what they're doing.

is there some threat of the americans using low level nuclear weapons?

well, i'll remind you that they used depleted uranium in iraq and afghanistan which is equivalent or worse in terms of the radiation - and intentionally so. the radiation from an h-bomb is a secondary effect. with depleted uranium, you're dropping the birth defects on purpose - like agent orange.

but, it's worth pointing out that the conventional weapons they used in afghanistan were actually in the same power level as a small scale atomic weapon, so the difference between conventional and nuclear is not as profound as is generally imagined. it's really not as big a deal as you're imagining it is.

actually, it's worth ruminating a little on this idea that the weapons are directed at iran, and how the empire has used that claim in the past.

so, when the americans put these missiles in boats around the north and black seas, they had the nerve to claim they were putting them there to protect eastern europe from iranian missiles. the north sea is a funny place for an interceptor system to protect germany from iran, don't you think? and why are the missiles pointed at moscow, then?

likewise - as pointed out in the al jazeera report - the americans routinely justify deployment to the south china sea by claiming they're protecting the south koreans from the north koreans, but the chinese have tended to suggest that the target is actually them.

so, this is a longstanding tactic, actually, and i'll thank the talking head on al jazeera for reminding me of it.

also, look up stephen cohen's comments.

a couple of years ago, the russians announced a new sea-based nuclear weapon that they claim can evade american defenses. this was seen as a major break in american hegemony, and a potential return to an arms race and mad. it seems rather obvious to me that this is an expression of that arms race, and i'm left wondering how democracy now could publish something like this without even mentioning that, and even suggest it has more to do with iran.

i passed out in the evening, and i got distracted this morning. i'm about half done.

we're continuing on with this through the day. but, i'm stopping to eat and shower.

warren and klobuchar both have absolutely no chance at all, and are simply propping up sanders by staying in the race.

buttigieg is going to face a reckoning by the end of the month. we'll see if he clears these barriers or not.

and, biden needs to put up or get out.

what if we end up with the following in some large state?

sanders - 25%

biden - 14%

warren - 13%

buttigieg - 12%

bloomberg - 11%

klobuchar - 10%

steyer - 9%

wang - 6% 

do you know happens?

sanders gets 100% of the delegates.

that's not democratic.

i've been searching for post-iowa polling in nevada and can't find any.

the 15% threshold exists to force failed candidates that don't get it out. right now, that would appear to apply most directly to warren and klobuchar, who may fail to clear 15% in almost every state, or literally in every subsequent state. the party can't force them out, but it can stop them from balkanizing the vote and forcing a contested convention.

but, is biden going to clear 15% in nevada? if he has a dozen other candidates to siphon votes away from him, it might be harder than appears obvious. 

and, is buttigieg going to clear 15% in nevada or south carolina? if he doesn't, he's in trouble.

nobody should be happy about sanders getting 60% of the delegates with 25% of the vote. but, if things stay the way they are, if these awful-across-the-board candidates can't get over themselves, that's what might happen.

who's going to win new hampshire?

this was always going to be one of sanders' best states, however he was doing. i haven't seen a poll with him higher than 33%, which is not very high, given the totality of the circumstances, but the field appears to be split badly enough that that measly 33% will be more than enough to win. i doubt he even gets to 33% - 25% is probably closer to the final tally - but that still looks like enough to win a plurality.

it's not a lot of delegates, though.

if 25% is a weak delegate haul, the ~20% that buttigieg is going to get is even weaker.

but, is anybody else going to clear the 15% threshold? this is important. it does not appear as though biden or warren are going to. klobuchar is the media's new favourite, but she's still a long shot to get to 15% in new hampshire, or much of anywhere else for that matter.

if you don't get to 15%, you don't get delegates, and the candidates that do get over 15% get curved up. so, sanders is all of a sudden getting 25%/45% = 56%, and buttigieg is all of a sudden getting 20/45 = 44%.

and, everybody else gets zero.

this middle tier of (klobuchar, warren, biden) may manage to clear 15% at the district level, here and there. but, they are going to be fighting to get on the board, and some or all of them might fail to do so.

so, you're looking at a likely outcome of something like this:

sanders - 12
buttigieg - 9
klobuchar - 1
warren - 1
biden - 1

that would put sanders and buttigieg basically tied going into nevada, with the other three falling back. but, we haven't awarded a lot of delegates yet, and there's still a lot of voting to do.

first liner note release for inri021

the second record was always a...second record. see, the phenomenon of the underperforming second record is actually well-established. i just think it's worth thinking about what a second record actually is, in order to understand this.

a second record is necessarily the tracks that did not make it on to the first record.

i actually tried to resist this, but i was swayed by the argument (with myself) that the tracks would otherwise be lost because i was shifting in a direction away from the electro-grunge sound, and i would eventually go back and compile them anyways. i had enough raw sound for a full record, so i released a full record.

something that is common of second records is that they are uneven because the tracks are recorded at differing levels of attention. demos that were forgotten tend to get promoted without cause, while the tracks that show evidence of attention tend to seem overproduced, in comparison. in recompleting this record, i've paid attention to the uneven nature that the tracks initially existed in and taken an effort to close the gap where it was needed.

i've also removed two tracks from the initial recording due to a combination of technical and artistic incompatibilities.

while most of these songs have defined concepts underlying them, i have ejected these concepts from the final recording and left them in a series of singles, or behind altogether. i would prefer that this album be understood solely as the instrumental recording of electronic music that i am presenting it as.

written and demoed in multiple stages from 1993-1999. initially constructed in this form in feb, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reconstructed and resequenced over november and december, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. re-released & finalized on dec 15, 2016. first liner note release added on feb 9, 2020 to also include the deleted masters from 1999 and 2013 in 192 kbps mp3 only. this is my second official record; as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1996-1999, 2013-2020). as of feb 9, 2020, the release includes a 126 page booklet in doc, pdf & html, with an html5 audio frontend, that includes journal entries from the remastering process over sept-dec, 2013, as well as the deleted masters from 1999 and 2013 in 192 kbps mp3 only.

credits

released January 25, 1999

j - guitar, effects, bass, bass synth, synthesizers, piano, octavers, drum programming, sequencing, found sound (paper crumpling), noise generators, sound design, cool edit synthesis, light-wave synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, sampling, mic noises, digital wave editing, loops, a broken tape deck, chance, production.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched

so, it only ended up 126 pages because i removed a couple of images to be consistent with inri015.

and, it will be posted shortly.

so, the doc file for inri021 is done. it's 128 pages, and 90 of them are overlap with inri015, so the html frontend for this should be much quicker.

i just need to do a quality control check, and then the first liner note release of my second record will be up within an hour or two.

are the cops big fans of beethoven's sixth?

did i offend them?

well, that's too fucking bad, isn't it?

so, that's twice in the last few days now that the chromebook has strangely reset on me.

i'm logged in as a guest, so there's not much they could really do. and, there's nothing on the device, at all. by design.

the persistence is ridiculous, though. like, i'm literally sitting here listening to beethoven and typing. if i could understand what they're thinking, what their motives are....

broad takeaway from the debates....

- wang looked a bit more serious this time, but he seems to....i got the impression that he saw himself as out of place, and he doesn't like being the token nigger, you can tell. i wonder how seriously he would consider an independent run.

- steyer seems to see himself more as a moderator than a candidate at this point. it's not at all clear what his purpose is, other than to try to directly influence the discourse by standing on stage. how long is he going to carry through with this for?

- buttigieg was clearly trying to come off as "presidential". that's a term i don't think i've heard this cycle. i've heard repeated appeals to "authenticity". but, i think "presidential" sells better than "authentic", in the end. he just keeps doing everything right. he's going to be hard to beat. this was a strong performance, and while it won't convince the party's left (or people further to the left than the party altogether, like myself), it was likely quite compelling to the core of the actual party. i keep pointing this out: for all the revulsion that buttigieg creates on the left, he's exactly what your actual card-carrying, dues-paying, fully registered member of the democratic party actually wants to vote for - and they're the ones that actually vote for who gets to lead their party.

- the abc anchors argued that klobuchar had a breakthrough performance, but that just struck me as the latest iteration of the media shilling for her. they like her, clearly - and, on paper, as the only competitive candidate between the ages of 40 and 70, she should have a lock on this. but, her policies suck; her politics are, broadly, flat out awful. and, she's getting upstaged by a charismatic young male that doesn't really deserve to be there, something i bet she's been through before. the media saw a breakthrough; i saw a last gasp, and a desperate plea. i suspect that was the last we've heard from amy klobuchar as a major candidate, this cycle.

- warren seemed to acknowledge that she's having funding issues along with her sagging poll numbers, and, to me, that was the most interesting thing that she said all night. i think she checked out quite a while ago, around the time that buttigieg bludgeoned her for being a hypocrite. she's kind of going through the motions. and, if she has some kind of a chip or a grudge, her passive aggressive attacks on sanders are just going to get more bitter, as she sputters out further into total emotional collapse. the people that care about her need to sit down and talk to her in an attempt to avoid her from hurting herself.

- i've become less and less impressed by sanders the more i hear him talk, and there were a few points of absolute cringe. his argument against assassinating soleimani by invoking the slippery slope canard was pretty awful, for example - the right answer being that you don't change the direction of an organization by killing it's leaders, and you'd never think that unless you were a corporatist fascist like trump; they'll just replace him with somebody else, it was tactically pointless, and not worth the problems it caused.....if they were going to do something like this, they should have done a massive strike that took out the entire leadership class, not just one guy they can easily replace with somebody else - but he also has this tendency to avoid answering questions that makes him come off as sort of a bot. who's writing these scripted lines of his, anyways? there's reasons his support is stagnant to declining, and i don't think he did much to help himself on this night. there really are a lot of things about him that you have to put aside in order to vote for his health care plan, at this point.

- what i'm going to say about biden is that it would be hard for me to understand why anybody would go with him over buttigieg when presented with the kind of contrast we saw in that debate. where buttigieg looked young, confident and in control (things these types of voters like), biden stumbled over words, was unsure of himself, and came off as flat out ancient. a debate between biden and sanders is one thing, but buttigieg has this guy dominated, and all he did was cycle himself down the drain. there is finally some evidence of polling decline, and the only thing saving him right now is that the south doesn't have an obvious candidate to move to.

winners:
buttigieg, wang

losers:
the rest

i'm still endorsing the greens.

i had a big meal and passed out.

i'm going to have a second bowl of fruit, get in the shower and get to work on inri021.

notwithstanding perpetual concerns about corruption, sending money to africa for mitigation is a smart barbarian management strategy.

one of the biggest problems that we're going to face here in canada as a result of climate change is an unorderly flow of illegal migrants from africa. this presents some opportunities, sure, but many, many more challenges than opportunities. so, it is in our self-interest to fund mitigation programs that aim to reduce the outflow of migrants and prevent them from overrunning the systems here. i'd support that.

we need to be able to measure how many refugees we can take in based on the infrastructure that exists, which is actually relatively limited due to decades of underfunding. it's a big, empty country. but, the land is bought up, and there's not enough housing to just open the gates.

likewise, health is a global issue in the 21st century. i would prefer to see us direct our funds through international bodies like the who, but this is something that is apparent, and we need to see ourselves as actors in a global system, moving forward.

i'm a little wary of bribing african leaders, given that the political systems in these countries are systemic corruption, across the board - something that this government actually seems to be ok with. 

but, mitigation for climate change and funding to help integrate africa into a global health network are two things that all developed countries should be actively engaged with.

that's right.

in many ways, norway is the country that canada imagines itself as, but actually isn't.

i would vote for norway over canada, myself. sorry.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-norway-africa-security-council-1.5457183

there's this debate they're having over whether they need to appeal to the centre or the fringe, and it's something i'm kind of qualified to comment on.

the actual, technically correct answer is that the debate suffers from definitional problems; the kinds of voters that klobuchar is imagining are purplish swing voters are actually historical democrats, through and through, who feel the democrats have turned on them. and, they're not wrong. it follows that the best way to appeal to republican support is to campaign on the left.

i'm talking about voters in pennsylvania, in michigan, in wisconsin...and also in minnesota and in ohio. these people didn't vote for trump because of his messaging on immigration, because of his evangelical phoniness, because of his tax policies or because of any of the other things that we associate with the republican party. they voted for trump because they thought he was less dangerous than clinton - on trade, on foreign policy, on health care and on other issues that historically are associated with democrats.

and, on some of these issues, they were stupid, and they need to be told as much. on others, trump has arguably been less evil than clinton would have been expected to be, and the arguments you hear coming from biden, and sometimes even from sanders, just exacerbate the point as to why they lost.

but, the party has been so out of touch with these voters for so long that they can't even define them any more, and it's an open question as to whether they're even still in play.

the flip side of this is that the voters they need to win in the south - blacks, catholics, and disgruntled whites, too - are actually much more in the description of what a klobuchar imagines exists in wisconsin (and in truth doesn't). if you want to win the south, you run on the right. that should be obvious...

so, there's this weird disconnect where you have the sanders people arguing that you need to run on the left, and then going after demographics that are dominated by conservative values, and you have the klobuchar people arguing that you need to run in the centre, and then mostly going after white liberals. but, it demonstrates the broader point - wherever you are on the spectrum, you need to convince people beyond your base. that's what the job is.

what's the answer? well, you want to maximize your vote totals, which means avoiding thinking in dichotomies. these propositions are not mutually exclusive, you can and must do both at the same time. and, there are challenges on both sides of this, but i might point something out - it's easier to convince a registered voter to vote than it is to register a new voter.

if you want to win back the trump-obama swing vote, the key is to focus on union issues. 

so, i've got inri015 filed away locally, now.

i'm going to make some pasta and watch last night's debate.

and, then, if i'm lucky, i might get the first part of inri021 up before midnight.

i've been clear for quite a long time, actually, that i would support hefty fines for smoking in residential areas, and paid to the people affected by the smoke instead of to the state.

and, i would hope that would act as a disincentive.

go smoke in the woods...

in fact, a lot of anarchists - and i'm one of them - will argue that not only is it the case that we don't need laws to force us to behave, but it's the process of writing and enforcing laws via the state that makes us behave so shoddily. look at isis, for a demonstration of this theory at it's most extreme. in the west, the state often coddles and protects antisocial actors from any sort of meaningful justice. so, the idea is that abolishing the state should lead to more virtuous behaviour, not less virtuous behaviour.

it's not some kind of empty rebellion, it's a critique of the foundational basis of the social contract, and a rejection of the conservative concept of "human nature". the state doesn't keep us in line, it keeps us out of line.

"the policeman is here to preserve disorder".

but, we need some way to right wrongs, then, to undo transgressions, to fix problems. the socialist critique of policing is actually just that it doesn't actually work; putting people in jail is an intimidation tactic to advance the interests of the powerful, it's not a way to advance any sort of actual justice. nothing is undone. nobody is compensated. but, the king has his rule enforced with violence, in the hopes that it will scare people into line. this is simply barbaric, there is no other way to describe it. a tort process may often be incomplete, but it's usually a good start, and generally the right way to think about how to fix antisocial behaviour.

i admit having an affinity for the civilization of northern europe, even more so than that of southern europe, and the legal system is something that i think that british civilization got uniquely right. my anarchism is very rooted in common law. and, i've suggested before that we can perhaps look at the situation that developed in britain after the withdrawal of the legions to get a precedent for the challenges that anarchy would face, in it's initial years - and look at the subsequent development of british common law for some guidance in how to move forward.

we were always anarchists, up in the north, after all.

a good anarchist should agree that if you're going to harm the people around you then you have a responsibility to "make it whole" and undo the damage.

anarchists aren't generally nihilists, in fact we tend to have more developed codes of behaviour that we bring in to replace the state, which, for me, includes a reliance on tort law. we have things like the non-aggression principle that we try and base our ethics around. the idea isn't that we can just do whatever we want and fuck anybody that doesn't like it, it's that we don't need a government to pass laws to tell us how to behave responsibly, we can figure it out on our own.

a good anarchist would know not to smoke in a residential area where there are kids or non-smokers, and they would abide by the agreements they sign to not smoke inside, if they do so. 

i've stated here many times that i'm a strong advocate of tort law, and would like to see the function of tort expanded to take over large amounts of the criminal law.

so, i support a type of tort reform, but the type of tort reform i support would be to implement more tort law.

it's the criminal law i'd like to get rid of...

if you want to smoke for the express purpose of pissing off your neighbours or tenants, they can't physically stop you from doing it.

but, they can sue you for disturbing them. and, if you're intentionally intending to bother them, it's going to cost you a lot of money to do it...

i'm starting to conclude that he made some sort of change to something after i sued him, and he's unchanged it now that the lawsuit is stopped. it's not coming from under the floor any more, but the stench from upstairs is both complex and ridiculous, and a component of it is clearly somebody smoking.

what do i do to attract these kinds of assholes in my life?

if i convince myself of this, i'm going to have to reopen the suit. if he's going to act maliciously, i will make him pay for it.

if that's what has happened, then what we've learned is that he is able to reverse the smell and has decided not to, and/or or has decided to make it worse to upset me. and, i'll gleefully hold him liable, as that would be landlord harassment, if i can convince myself that that's actually true.

it's only been a few days. it could be a coincidence. and i can't really identify the source, clearly. it's something burning, mostly....

inri015 updated and tested

this is tested and working on the chromebook and on firefox on the windows 7 box.

what's in there, now?

- the 19 songs on the record

- cover.jpg & a jpg of the backsheet for cd-r printing (the insert for the spine)

- a playlist.m3u file stored as raw text
- inertia.mp4

- a 125 page doc file of liner notes over the fall of 2013

- a 125 page pdf file (same)

- an instructions file

- inri015.html.7z.txt is a 200 mb document that must be renamed and unzipped and contains (1) an html version of the liner note package, including an html5 player that can load the purchased audio & video in the browser and (2) deleted masters of the record from 1998 and 2013, in standalone 192 kbps mp3 and embedded into the html file.

the full download, in flac, is 626 mb.

there will be further updates to the liner notes as i run through the alter-reality, and as i run through the remastering period that took place over 2015-2016. but, this is likely the last major revision to my first record, which is nearing a point of final completion.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-3

it's time to stop to eat and shower.

there is no such thing as happiness, and, the sooner you figure that out, the happier you'll be.

so, the frontend is finished. everything is slower than i want it to be, but i could still conceivably get done inri021 by the end of the weekend. finishing inri015 actually gets me through the bulk of the work of inri021...

i had to fast forward a little to jan, 2016 to get the actual release data in, which means these releases will come packaged with three versions and three subsequent front-ends. they're about 125 pages, each. so, these are major release updates for the first two official records.

i need to dot some is before i upload this, including doing a good testing, but it's coming. soon.

no, really. how did i get those numbers?

i took a look at recent polling results for sanders, buttigieg, warren and klobuchar and then awarded biden the balance, due to the fact that all of the polls had him ahead. i completely ignored the lower tier candidates, thinking they might get 5% between them and it'll come out as error. i gave them 4%. i posted a poll the day of that suggested that large amounts of lower tier candidates had biden as their second choice, which usually means they're strongly considering it.

in hindsight, i should have paid more attention for two reasons. the first is that they got roughly 15% between them, which is a lot. it's basically the difference in the results - if i had given biden 15% instead of 25%, and "other" 14% instead of 4%, i would have nailed it, despite the fact that nobody nails caucuses.

the other is that biden didn't actually win, and, in hindsight, that wasn't completely unseen. if i had instead reasoned that he was just coming up second due to name recognition, and the large amount of people leaning towards nonviable candidates was a warning sign...

but, i'm a mathematician, jim, i'm not a clairvoyant. i work with data, not with feelings. i follow my brain, not my gut. this is an analytical process, not an emotional one.

that's how you put together the actual right prediction, though. and, the data was there.

nobody nails a caucus.

but my basic logic was (buttigieg OR biden) AND (sanders) and (NOT warren) and i got the thing right.

in new hampshire, buttigieg is going to beat biden, and whether he wins or not depends on how badly.

and, we need data for nevada. but it's the same uncertainty.

actually, i think i got the right idea.

i suggested that, if warren ends up viable more often than not, the results in iowa would be:

sanders - 26
buttigieg - 25
warren - 20

i also pegged biden at 31. but, you'll notice that those four results add to 100, and that's what i really did wrong - i wiped all of the nonviable candidates out and folded them into biden as error, rather than string them along.

who else was this close?

http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/02/there-going-to-be-wide-variability.html

i also presented three likely outcomes, and two of them worked out:
http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/01/this-gets-right-idea-across-but-i-think.html

you would have to tie me down and inject me, kicking and screaming, to get me to take that shit.

there's no way i'd volunteer. ever.

the "field" that jordan peterson "works" within was debunked as complete and utterly nonsensical pseudoscience decades ago.

i know he sells a lot of books. but, he doesn't really deserve to be taken seriously enough to dedicate much time towards rebutting him.

ahahahahahahaha.

no wonder he needs those benzos.

wasn't it common knowledge that his writing was kind of, umm, subpar? i mean, he's pushing freud and jung in 2020. that puts him on about the same level of academic credibility as your average creationist. it's a lot of fucking bullshit.

i've been asked to address his writing a few times, and i won't even bother with it, it's just a waste of time.

it's funny how they all end up addicted to painkillers though, isn't it? 

i'm a bit of an existentialist, and am convinced that we're better off coping with the tragedy of existence than pretending there's some path to some concept of happiness that doesn't actually exist. so, you won't see me smile very often, and you won't hear me pretend i'm ass-slappin' happy all that often. but, i don't intend to show up in a hospital bed in russia, strung out on benzos, either..... 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cambridge-uni-peterson-1.5066342

ahahahahahaha.

what a loser.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/jordan-peterson-treatment-russia-1.5456939

but, like i say.

this is only relevant, in context, in the question of a systemic abuse of power.

i'm not actually accused of doing anything. 

leftists would never argue that women are incapable of lying.

leftists would argue that empirical studies should demonstrate the expectation that men and women are equally dishonest, and if they do not uphold that expectation then they should be examined closely for bias. we may need some explanations in terms of social conditioning in order to smooth out the data, but that is the ideological left.

these arguments that you hear from these fake feminists, and that are masquerading as the pseudo-left, are actually reactionary and culturally conservative.

if you think that girls can't lie, you're very conservative.

women are perfectly capable of telling horrible lies.

and, they do.

i did try to call the court office on friday, and the person i want to contact was not in the office. they claim the package did not arrive, which is...it should have. it might be on her desk, waiting for her to come back.

i want to clarify a few points if they weren't clear.

i pointed out that this is the kind of case the mras warned us about, but this case is not about women's rights, and i don't feel i'm being attacked by a consortium of fake third-wave "feminists", although it may be the case that some dumb people that call themselves feminists may have fallen for the line of argumentation (something the court has yet to fall for, and i don't expect it will fall for, in the end). i have not been accused of any kind of sexual misconduct. rather, it is agreed by everybody that i have never met this woman, and it is clear from the emails that i didn't even know she was a woman (i thought she was a man named ryan.) until she filed charges.

that's not what what i was charged with. i was charged with "repeated communication" which, in context, is repeated application for housing. they put me in jail for applying for an apartment over and over again. the charges do not claim any sort of sexual behaviour or motive on my behalf at all; nobody has accused me of any sort of sexual harassment, and it is clear that none took place, that i was strictly interested in the apartment. that sounds absurd, and it is - that's why i'm launching a human rights complaint, and trying to get the arrest declared to be illegal, for preparation of an eventual constitutional rights challenge and an expensive lawsuit. but, those are the actual facts in the case. 

- i have never met this woman.
- i do not know what she looks like. still. i've never even seen a picture of her.

- all communication was with a ryan myon that later claimed he was the property owner, caroline chevalier. this ryan did not identify himself as female at any point in the application process. i am not certain that this is actually true. there may be a dude named ryan myon out there that was the actual person i was communicating with. that will come out in the human rights case.

so, if i don't think i was being attacked by a feminist cabal, what do i think was happening?

and, i think the answer is clear enough - i informed the property owner that she was discriminating against me and i would be taking legal action, and she had me arrested as retaliation for it. the police then used a transphobic pretext to build a case that was immediately thrown out as complete bullshit, and the oiprd repeated it in their factum last week (to their great discredit). but, it's not what the appeal is about, it's not what the charges were about and it really has essentially nothing to do with the situation.

the precautionary component of the case is that this is what happens when you buy into conservative narratives about the inherent honesty of the weaker sex. i'm not sure that i can prove that she explicitly lied to the police, but the premise that i might go to her house was invented completely out of thin air (i couldn't pick this person out of a lineup - and i literally thought it was a dude named ryan), for the apparent purposes of preventing me from suing her.

when you eliminate the need for evidence-based reasoning, you open up the system to these kinds of abuses. and, we can't allow ourselves to go down the rabbit hole like that - we have to insist on the primacy of evidence, regardless of the genders involved in the conflict.

i had to sleep. it wasn't a choice.

it's almost done. soon.

so, this liner note release is actually going to have two discarded versions of the record attached to it, from 2013 and also from 1998. i had to take them down to 192 khz to get the package under 300 mb. remember: these are deleted masters, so this is material i've deleted from my discography. it's here for historical reasons, and it's buried in the download on purpose, but i feel it's necessary to include it - in one file format, in relatively low quality. if you want these deleted items in high quality flac, you'll have to get the aleph discs. even accessing these 192 khz mp3 files requires purchasing and downloading the item, and unzipping an html package. the files are there, but it's meant to be streamed via the html frontend.

that means i have two player controls in this package. i'm done the first one. the second should be minor tweaks on the first, and then it's just typesetting the rest of it. so, it should be done relatively soon.

as the purpose of this is for the files to interact with the front-end, the way i'm going to do this is to drop a folder of mp3s inside of the existing html folder.

so, you'll get a file called inri015.html.7z.txt in the download. you'll need to rename it to remove the txt. when you extract it, it will create a folder called inri015.html, inside of which will be an html frontend, a lot of pictures and a new folder called "2013" which will contain 320 kbps mp3s of the discarded 2013 masters, for integration with the apparent html frontend.

got it?

i'll need to do something similar for inri021 and, in the long run, for the other recordings that have discarded mixes like this, including inri000 and inri001.

let me actually do it, now.

guys, if you make this too hilbertian, you're going to lose the plot.

it can't just be a game with symbols. you have to think about what you're doing.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-what-the-first-few-post-iowa-polls-say/

so, it's not going to be surprising if buttigieg catches sanders in new hampshire, and, if he does, it won't be at his expense. warren & klobuchar are both falling into the lower tiers more generally, and buttigieg could badly beat biden in this state, too, even if that doesn't kill him. this is the first evidence we're seeing of biden explicitly losing to another candidate; it's been a while coming, surely, but it's just finally actually happening just right now.

keeping in mind that sanders got like 70% of the vote in 2016, you'd think polling at 35% should be sort of disappointing. and, given that the centrists are, together, polling closer to 70% right now, that means buttigieg has some space to grow.

but, sanders and buttigieg are not running against each other right now so much as they're running beside each other, and the outcome of the race is really going to depend on how much support buttigieg can pull from these other candidates, and how much of a frontrunner he's erecting himself as.

if he badly beats biden, it's going to open questions about the south, but he certainly hasn't demonstrated that he's challenging biden, yet. he will obviously need to. and, it's not at all clear that he can.

for now, don't be surprised if buttigieg does manage to coalesce a lot of support in new hampshire, even as sanders does well, too. they won't really get into one-on-one's until the field narrows, a few states down. but, that could be the end result, here.

klobuchar & warren both had to break through, in these early states. they're not going to break through in south carolina. if they poll below 10% in the face of voter preference elevating sanders & buttigieg, they're going to need to face the facts and get out.

and, then it's open warfare between biden & buttigieg for who gets to hold the center against sanders, and his ridiculous amounts of money, and all the things he can buy with it.

so, i'm not going to make a prediction, so much as i'm going to erect a function: as more centrist support coalesces around buttigieg, he will pull further ahead of sanders, notwithstanding fishy last minute absentee ballots that tip the race back to sanders when nobody's paying attention. if warren makes a strong case, or he produces a gaffe, or he just can't close the deal overall, you could see a small sanders win. but, with each passing day, as he builds more momentum, the size and likelihood of a buttigieg win increases, until he gets to a maximum point where the other centrists, with the exception of biden, are convincingly defeated and need to go home.

then, everything evaporates as none of this matters in nevada, unless nevadans decided that it should, which they might. biden is supposed to be electable...

if buttigieg can get to 30 at the primary expense of biden, i'd expect to see the fundamentals in the race start to shift.

i'm most of the way through the frontend for inri015 and we're going to keep going because it's a friday and, with any luck, i can be done with this by sunrise on monday.

these html5 frontends will eventually end up in the aleph discs, where they will crossreference to all of the outtakes. right now, the liner notes are only interacting with the files in the download, and presenting external links to files that aren't. inri015 and inri021 present somewhat of a challenge for this model, because the files uploaded in 2013, where these updates exist in chronological time, have actually been replaced. so, the frontend should actually be interacting with files that aren't there.

and, i'm wondering if i need to bring the files back in.

for inri000 & inri001, the files are 2013 remasters of tracks from 1996 and 1997. for inri002, it's a new 2013 reconstruction of shorts of that remastered material. inri003 & inri029 are new eps of unaltered material from early 1997. inri016, inri027 & inri028 are revisionist singles dated to 2013 of material from 1998-1999. inri022 & inri023 are 2013 compilations of material from 1998-1999.

so, i can convincingly date everything to 2013.

inri015 & inri021 were created in 1998/1999 and withdrawn in 2004, then remastered and rereleased in 2013, but that remaster was itself withdrawn in 2015 in favour of instrumental reconstructions, which were finalized over 2016. for inri000 & inri001 i have to leave the 90s stuff for the aleph discs, but the 2013 remasters still stand. everything else is actually coming to you straight from the 90s, except inri015 & inri021 which have these lost remasters dated to the chronological space that i'm releasing the first remaster in.

so, if you download the liner notes today in 2020, you'll get the front-end connecting to the instrumental 2016 release, dated to the 2013 notes. this is kind of disingenuous on my behalf. i really ought to have this frontend connected to the 2013 releases..

i've been toying with the idea of releasing the 2013 remasters as a bonus download for awhile, and i'm going to need to chew on that this morning. it would be the correct way to do this. i'm just not sure what the best way to do it that makes the most sense is.

the frontend for the current version of inri015 is dated to jan, 2016 and the frontend for the current version of inri021 is dated to the fall of the same year, with a final release in december. so, that will need to wait until i get there.

what i want to avoid is uploading the tracks as "bonus tracks" in the bandcamp ui. i want them to come in silently over the backend. and, i'm actually ok with uploading them in fairly low quality. so, the best way to do this might be to upload all of the tracks as mp4 files and stream them over the video container in the html5 frontend.

i'll have an answer in a few hours.

it's coming together; it might be done for noon.

hi.

when i first signed up for onedrive, i was very explicitly looking for a way to convert .doc files (that is, office 2003 files, specifically) to .pdf files in a way that maintained formatting, including hyperlinks. so, a pdf printer would not be good enough, i need full conversion.

your competitors (google, adobe) kept breaking the formatting, so i tried here on a lark, hoping that office would be best at converting office. and, it did actually work - i was able to effortlessly convert up to 1600 page word 2003 documents with flawless formatting. i was impressed.

unfortunately, something changed over the last two weeks that has broken the conversion, and it appears to be specifically that the server is now forcing an extra conversion step to .docx. when you converted directly from .doc to .pdf, your results were flawless. but, the introduction of the extra conversion step has left your results about the same as your competitors, indicating that the issue in conversion is probably xml related.

i don't want to use the .docx format, or the underlying xml architecture. i want to be able to convert directly from .doc to .pdf.

there is a workaround in uploading as .doc and then viewing the version history, which allows for a direct conversion, but this seems unnecessarily awkward.

i believe that the reason i was able to directly convert initially is that the server was opening the files in protected mode. for some reason, it is no longer opening them in protected mode, and is now defaulting to the conversion step to docx "so i can edit the files". but, i don't want to edit the files, i want to convert them directly to pdf, in a way that bypasses the conversion to docx step.

it would be very useful if i could tell the server to always open all office files in protected mode, by default. i do not believe that this is currently possible. if it is possible, i would appreciate some guidance. if it is not, please accept my feature request.

so, this is what i think happened.

i think that when i uploaded the files to the server last week, they were initially interpreted as coming from an unsafe source and sort of quarantined as read-only, and opened in 'protected mode'. this allowed me to convert the files to pdf without having to deal with the conversion in between to docx.

now, the server is no longer interpreting the files as dangerous, and automatically converting them to docx for editing, which is actually the default behaviour.

but, the conversion to docx is breaking the formatting and needs to be avoided altogether. so, i actually want it to default to the quarantine.

there is a work around, which involves opening up the file's "version history". this converts it directly from doc to pdf.

i'm actually going to send them an email requesting default protected mode as a feature. and, it might exist in the paid version. but, like, i'm not paying for it...

i think it was opening it in something called "protected view". that's actually what i want. but i can't figure out how to make it default.

*sigh*

it seems to have been previously logging me in as a "guest user", which is actually what i want it to do. now, it's recognizing me and trying to convert the file for me.

at least it works, though. i just have to stop the conversion.

ok. moving on to the html5 frontend. maybe they'll even unbreak it for me.

so, opening up a new account didn't undo the forced conversions to docx to "edit" the file.

i don't want to use the service to edit documents, ever. i strictly want to use it to convert .doc files to .pdf. so, it's not necessary to convert the file to edit it because i don't actually want to edit it. in fact, converting it seems to run the risk of breaking the formatting, and that's why i've come here for the conversion in the first place, because this system is better at converting .doc files to .pdf (so long as it doesn't try to convert them to .docx files first).

it would be very useful if i could tell the server to open everything read-only, and never convert to docx. if microsoft changed something for my supposed benefit, it backfired and i would appreciate it if they would change it back.

i don't seem to be able to turn off the automatic conversion, but i can get around it by opening up the version history instead of launching the file directly. that did actually fix it.

it's typical microsoft, though. i point out that their service actually works, when google's and adobe's both don't, and they promptly break it by trying to force a proprietary format that i don't want on to me. fuck.

i'm actually going to delete the account and start again and hope it undoes the unwanted forced conversions.

so, it was the conversion from doc to docx at the server (something that didn't happen on my first dozen conversions.) that introduced the typset error.

and, i seem to be able to avoid it by going out of my way to avoid the conversion to docx at the server...

the original file seems to be fine.

this docx format has been nothing but disasters for microsoft, and i really wish they'd just get their head around the reality that there is going to be a subset of users that just refuses to migrate to it, ever.

but, let's see if it's fixed. if it is, i can move on to the html5.

ok, the machine is back up.

i'm going to try to work through this.

you wake up every day, you work hard, you play by the rules....

....and then you lose.

because you're too dumb to realize you need to cheat to get ahead. and, realizing that is a part of growing up.

maybe that's a commonality in his voting base, but i'm not going to begrudge him for being more intelligent than his voters are and understanding how to break the cycle of well-intentioned failure.

and these self-righteous, moralistic zealots that follow him so closely and are so worrying to me are not likely to see the irony in it.

in case i wasn't clear....

would i criticize bernie for stealing the election? no. that's how the game is actually played. if he doesn't cheat, he'll lose, and somebody else will cheat and win. that's reality.

what i'm concerned about is the nature of the coalition he's built, and it's questionable commitment to actual minority rights, not these kinds of false minorities that you see dominating the discourse. this is actually the usual list of reactionary groups - religious authorities, cultural conservatives, bourgeois academics. it's like right out of the textbook.

again, if i had a better idea, right? i don't. broadly speaking, leftists may still be better off trying to influence the discourse. but, i'm too wary...

i'm not going to get normative on him, though - you have to cheat to win in this system. that's fine. 

and, this headache is making me feel like i'm on drugs. it's very unpleasant; hard to focus.

.....but i may have to make some pasta tonight to fight it off.

i'm dehydrated. that's the root cause. i'm sure of it.

it would make sense for it to be about video card drivers.

i can't reinstall them, though, that triggers the collapse.

speaking of which, here comes another migraine.

seems like the reimage is necessary.

i wish i knew why hibernation wasn't working.

ok, i'm up, let's get to work.

i am five years younger than justin bieber's mother, and 14 years older than he is.

if you're curious.

so, i'm not quite old enough to be his mother. but, his mother did have him fairly young.

i'm going to have to reupload tonight because the file appears to be out of alignment. that's fine. let's hope it gets done pretty quick, and the testing process is smooth.

i'm going to take another nap...the nap this morning was kind of short....

there has been a rank smell in here over the last few days and i don't know the source of it. i have smelled this smell before, but i'm not sure exactly what it is. it might be straight up pollution from outside. if so, it's kind of curious that it set back in immediately after i cancelled the hearing.

if i'm able to tie it to something upstairs...

for now, i can't do anything about a smell that i can't entirely identify the source of. i don't think it's from below me, though, i think it's from above me.

*shrug*.

let's try to get back up again for around 17:00-18:00.

first liner note release for inri015

it took eighteen years and multiple attempts at a construction, but this record is finally permanently completed as an instrumental electronic work and i am finally proud to refer to it as my first record.

while most of these songs have defined concepts underlying them, i have ejected these concepts from the final recording and left them in a series of singles. i would prefer that this album be understood solely as the instrumental recording of electronic music that i am presenting it as.

written and demoed in multiple stages from 1994-1998. initially constructed in this form in june, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reconstructed and resequenced jan 6-10, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. re-released on jan 10, 2016. audio permanently closed on aug 10, 2016. finalized as lp001 on oct 10, 2016. first liner note release added on feb 6, 2020. this is my first official record; as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1996-1998, 2013-2020). as of feb 6, 2020, the release includes a 125 page booklet in doc, pdf & html, with an html5 audio & video frontend, that includes journal entries from the remastering process over sept-dec, 2013, as well as the video for inertia, from dec, 2013 .

credits

released June 20, 1998

j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, orchestral & other sequencing, sampling, vocal relics, cool edit synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, found sounds, strategies, soundraider, hammerhead, sound design, metronome, digital wave editing, production

the rendered electronic orchestra includes piano, organ, electric guitar, orchestra hit, pizzicato strings, synth pads, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, electric bass, sitar, tubular bells, tinkle bells, synthesizer effects and flute.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-3

i'm just trying to figure out if i should date the inri015 liner note release to today or not, and i'm going to, even if the html5 update doesn't get up until tomorrow morning.

i've got the pc off altogether, but i'm hoping i don't have to reimage tonight, and, if i don't, it might be fairly quick.

so, i'm going to get that all in order. and i may have to test overnight.

if the tables were reversed, and bernie had lost at the last minute like this, what would you immediately deduce?

but, the tables have turned.

go look up the fundraising totals....

you've seen fundraising totals recently, right?

what we just learned in iowa, and we learned it much more quickly in 2020 on the democratic side than we did in 2016 on the republican side where it was a slow process that didn't really flip over until the very end, is where the establishment is, now.

you need to follow the money. you should know that. 

bernie's the boss, now - he's the one stealing elections, this cycle. get used to it. this is what's coming for the next several months - startling sanders victories snatched from the jaws of defeat.

he seems to have won at the last minute via a conservative catholic vote through a satellite caucus that was about ten times larger than most districts. that doesn't pass the smell test. it's like when hillary won via absentee ballots, or early voting. but, nobody will challenge it.

i am a little bit concerned about bernie's coalition, which seems to be a mishmash of reactionary forces. i don't see a better option in the party.

but, can bernie win this? well, that's the wrong question, isn't it? one does not "win" democratic primaries, one buys them. and, right now, he's got all of the cash.

the sneaky thing about bernie walking into this role of establishment politician is that nobody's going to believe it. the independent press is convinced that buttigieg tried to steal it. no; he got robbed. but, they don't actually care about truth any more than fox does, it's just the mirror image of the same ideologically enforced deceit.

meet bernie sanders, establishment juggernaut, democratic don. he's your daddy, kiss his ring.

and, watch him steal this election in front of your eyes, without anybody even suspecting it.

i don't want to rally around anybody else. as mentioned, his coalition worries me, but there's not a better solution in the running. i'm endorsing the greens...

i didn't get as much done as i wanted to last night, partly because i passed out around midnight, but i have to stop now to shut down. i hope to be back at it close to 19:00.

i at least finalized the actual notes. so, there is a 125 page booklet in doc and pdf uploaded to the bandcamp site.

i will need to finish the html5 frontend for it tonight and get it up by tomorrow.

so, the content is done. i'm just missing the third format.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-3

so, i just wanted to do a quick update on the show listings.

i'm ready to go, now. let's try to get most of inri015 done before the sun comes up.

see, this is why buttigieg hasn't won yet, and why biden isn't screwed, when he should be - forget about whether the results are representative of the country, are they even representative of iowa? and, i don't think that anybody really thinks that they are.

the candidate that really got nailed was warren, because she lost across the board. you really have to give her consolation delegates. she lost. everywhere. convincingly. even klobuchar won a handful of counties.

if the disconnect between the polling and the outcome is as wide for biden in new hampshire as it was in iowa, there will need to be an understanding that his numbers aren't real. i keep arguing that there's no evidence he's faltering, but that relies on the assumption that the data isn't bullshit. but, if the numbers in the primary align with the polling predictions halfways decently, it's hard to argue that iowa really matters much - not due to the demographics, but due to the process.

would biden have done better in a primary?

well, i don't want to frame the question around biden's performance, as though that's the primary concern. but, there appears to have been a disconnect between the polling and the outcome.

the question i want to ask, and that is important, is if the outcome of the caucus was really reflective of the democratic will of iowans or not, and the fact that there were no polls that had buttigieg at 27% suggests that it perhaps wasn't.

you could maybe erect a reverse-bradley effect around buttigieg's sexuality to explain the polling discrepancy, but that could only really get you half the answer. at some point, you have to acknowledge that the difficulties associated with caucusing would have disproportionately affected older voters, and voters that worked in the evening, which would have been biden's core demographics..

the caucus is supposed to be transparent and aid the democratic process. you could probably increase turnout that much more by scheduling it on a weekend, right? but, when you look at how low turnout was, it really does open up a lot of questions.

as mentioned, the primary question should be whether the views of iowans were accurately recorded in the results or not. were they? 

what did i do today?

i napped until around 13:00, got up, ate some fruit, did dishes, took a shower, read the news.

i believe my case is scheduled for june 23rd. i'm waiting on a letter. the coordinator has gotten exceedingly bitchy with me as a consequence of proving her wrong repeatedly, which isn't even my fault - i'm just trying to get the fucking case scheduled, and she keeps being wrong, and i keep having to correct her in order to get the case scheduled, which is enraging her. like, this is supposed to be a customer service job. if i was her boss, i'd probably fire her for the way she's been talking to me, and i can only imagine she's just as bad with everybody else. it's not worth it to me, but she's really awful, really. i'm at least pretty sure that i succeeded in the task at hand, despite her best efforts.

i left a message with the motion coordinator, which is somebody else, and will follow up tomorrow.

so, today was really largely wasted on purpose.

but, now i want to get some work done.

alright.

let's get some coffee brewing, and let's get the pc up, and let's get to work on inri015.

i'm going to do a quick february lookahead first, as i promised i would.

see, these are valid points and everything, but i still think the constitution puts too much power into the congress, here, and even this is overstepping the congressional bounds, if the end goal is actual removal. and, to me, that's the more fundamental question.

the congress should be investigating this kind of thing, of course. but, the maximum extent of it's actual power should be to trigger an election...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/a-tragedy-noam-chomsky-slams-democrats-for-narrow-focus-of-trumps-impeachment-trial/

removing the democratically elected president through a bureaucratic process is kind of authoritarian, don't you think?

wouldn't you expect an anarchist to bristle against that, even as she's not the biggest fan of the presidential system in the first place?

...if she takes her politics seriously, that is - if she's not just looking to pragmatically align with a partisan outcome.

like, you don't have to tell me i'm not in the progressives club.

i will volunteer that i'm not, and state clearly that i don't want to be. i'm extremely critical of progressives; i tend to consider them to be interchangeable with conservatives. rather, i'm a couple of rungs over to the left, in the anarcho-communist club.

i volunteer this. every other day, in fact.

you don't have to tell me, i'll tell you.

i'm not going to fault anybody for voting for removal.

but, i don't think it was their place to do so; i think they overstepped their bounds.

and, i would not have voted on the measure, myself.

remember: i'm not a democrat. i'm not a "progressive". i'm a left-anarchist.

while i'm usually ok with governments interfering in markets (because i don't believe in markets anyways), i'm usually very much not ok with heavy-handed governance of much of any sort.

so, i don't want to say i'm in line with small government, because i'm not - i'm in favour of very large government, larger than just about anybody that you'll meet.

but, i am in favour of government that has a hands-off approach towards the actual process of governing.

and, i think this whole fiasco is as much of an abuse of power as the thing that set it off was.

my basic position is not about whether what he did was bad enough to warrant removal from office. i actually think that's a secondary question.

rather, my basic position is that the decision should be up to voters, and not up to congress; congress' power should be restricted to the ability to trigger an early election, only.

and, that is the status quo position in the canadian system.

so, is what he did bad enough to warrant removal? i would argue that that is a decision that voters should make. 

now, as a voter, i would actually vote for removal. but, as a member of congress, i would abstain.

i hope that that's clear.

and, it won't broadcast the wiki link, so here's the post:

http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/02/if-there-any-confusion-about-where-i.html

if there's any confusion about where i stand on the impeachment trial, i can clarify the point: i would have abstained from voting, under the argument that the congress ought not have the legal authority to remove the executive power without an intervening electoral process.

i would then immediately attempt to introduce recall legislation into the body i sat within.

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

but, i'm from a different country, with a different set of governing traditions.

i just simply don't think it's democratic for the parliament to remove the executive like this, and that would be the status quo position in the british-canadian parliamentary tradition - i'm simply reflecting the viewpoints of my own country's legal tradition.

i'm sorry if you find that upsetting, but i don't really give a fuck.

i'm awake, but i'm floating and planning to waste the day. i could nap a little more.

i've decided that i want to finish what i was doing before i try to fix that laptop, so i'm going to boot back into the pc after 19:00 and work it out from there. but, i'm going to want to be saving electricity during the day, so i'm also going to be shutting down between 7:00-19:00, starting tomorrow. let's hope i get a productive weekend in.

i don't see any reason why i'd leave the house again until next weekend at the earliest.

i just want to get these projects done without having to worry about doing troubleshooting. it shouldn't be too much longer once i sit down to do it.

that means i'll be running through inri015, inri021, inri022 & inri023 first and then building seeds from december, 2013 and then finishing up january, 2014 and running through the releases from that month. it will only be after i'm done all of that that i will boot back into the laptop and try and figure out what i'm doing with it. i guess i'll leave the chromebook on for streaming.

i think i have everything worked out with the court stuff, and that the last thing to do is check up on the motions. but, i'll be making some calls throughout the day to check up on that.

and, that means we're over the hump and back to work soon, hopefully.

i would like to call on parliamentarians of all genders the world over today to bare a shoulder in solidarity.

this seems silly, but these attitudes need to be attacked head-on so they don't fester or spiral out of control.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/04/i-am-not-a-slapper-labour-mp-tracy-brabin-defends-her-commons-attire

i guess you shouldn't expect too much in terms of discourse from a collection of geriatrics that should be living in homes and eating gerber's out of flying spoons.

i don't know which one is worse. really. trump. pelosi. mcconnell. sanders. bloomberg. biden. they sound like a bunch of little kids bickering with each other.

reminds me of this old floyd tune:

google owns these servers. i understand that. i can find somewhere else to host a blog if they don't want me here. and, they have to obey the relevant laws, too, whether they agree with them or not.

but, i am within the bounds of adult discourse to expect transparency and honesty in communication regarding any concerns about the content of my posts.

if you don't like my posts, tell me. i don't really care what you think. but, i can close down and set up elsewhere.

i'm obviously not interested in being censored or moderated or screened in any way. i want anything of the sort that exists to be turned off. i want full control over this space.

however.

at the very least, i would expect that google put forward a transparent process rather than merely delete or withhold posts. it could be as simple as an email stating "your post was rejected". that would allow me to understand what's happening and make an informed, adult choice about where to move my platform to.

doing this via stealth is childish and beneath the dignity of whomever is doing it.

ok.

no.

i'm going to spend today catching up on sleep.

i'll be back at this tonight after 19:00.