great.

expect mandatory prayer services and public flagellations for sinners.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51654494

viruses mutate. so, i don't want to be too smug about this. but, the global response to this appears to be a dramatic overreaction, enough that it is making me wonder what's really going on.

i suppose there's some possibility that they're hiding the death toll.

but, what i'm actually concerned about is the possibility that western governments are going to use it as the most recent excuse to ram through another round of restrictions on our civil liberties. and, as i keep an eye on this in the upcoming days and weeks, it's going to be in keeping a critical eye on what they're doing, to try to point out unnecessary attacks on our rights.

the virus, itself, does not appear to be much of a serious threat and i will not be drawn into alarmist rhetoric about it.

my honest opinion about that debate is that there were too many people on stage, and it prevented everybody from getting their point across. i think that's part of the reason that they interrupted each other and talked over each other - there just wasn't enough time to split up for that many people.

bloomberg & steyer both needed a platform to get a message across, and neither of them had time to do it. warren & klobuchar both needed to be able to convince voters they're not done and are serious competitors, and they didn't have time to do it. buttigieg needed to present himself as a superior alternative to biden, and didn't have time to do it. biden needed to convince people he's still worth voting for, and didn't have time to do it. and, sanders needed to defend himself against the attacks, and didn't have time to do it.

a couple of them - sanders, klobuchar - seemed to realize the importance of appearing animated. sanders was his old kranky self for the first time in a while, which was nice to see, and might help a bit.

but, i think that if you were walking into this without a clear idea of who you were voting for, nobody really had the opportunity to make a convincing case, and it probably didn't really help much.

winner: advertisers, who bizarrely got the last word in

losers: candidates, who were mostly denied the ability to get a word in at all

ok, i'm alright.

let's watch this debate....

+ mmmm. nachos.

it was an enjoyable show.

but i'm borderline hypothermic...

yeah.

i just want to make it abundantly clear that i think that carrying arms is a terrible idea - from an indigenous perspective.

a couple of guns might extend the length of the blockade, but at zero net benefit and at great cost to the public image of the band. these people need to remember that their success is greatly dependent on public opinion, whether they like it or not.

i understand the desperation.

but there are ways to evade the cops, and impose a financial cost. trying to get into a shooting match is just stupid.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/mohawks-blast-quebec-premier-for-false-dangerous-claims-that-kahnawake-protesters-are-armed-with-ak-47s-1.4828838

i will concede that neo-liberalism is popular, and i may take unpopular positions in pushing back against it.

but, i won't confuse it for socialism.

the closest thing to what they want is actually buttigieg.

but, he's gay.

none of those candidates represent black southern voters at all.

regarding the polling, though.

i don't think nevada is going to have much of an effect on south carolina. i did think that iowa, particularly, would have an effect on nevada, and i'd argue that it did.

it is true that sanders seems to have done well with most groups in las vegas, including culinary workers. but, it is still the case that the reason that biden did better here than elsewhere is because he had that union to prop him up - these aren't contradictory statements. remember - biden only got 25% of the ccds in clark county. so, getting 30-35% of the union vote gives lots of room for sanders to crush him, while still explaining why he did better here than elsewhere.

and, buttigieg may have done poorly with black voters, but that was expected; the reason he undershot his target is that he seems to have done poorly with white suburban voters, as well. that's the thing he needs to be worried about, because if he starts losing these white suburban voters in the next couple of states then he has no path forward.

in south carolina, the unions get replaced by the churches, and it's a lot harder for me to get my head around sanders doing well with these conservative black church goers. remember: blacks across the country are not all the same, and it's racist to argue that they are. but, the polling, which is intrinsically racist, does this all of the time.

so, some of the polling is suggesting that biden's numbers are weakening, and that does make some sense, but it makes a lot less sense to think those numbers are moving to sanders. the only argument you can provide for this is herd mentality, and the thing about south carolina is that it has a history of not doing that.

i know that sanders wants to pretend he represents these people, and he may legitimately think he does, but he really doesn't - these people are deeply, staunchly conservative and overwhelmingly directed by their faith. they should be republicans, really. i may criticize their apprehension of voting for a jewish candidate, but i won't trivialize it - it's real. they legitimately don't like him...

so, they're kind of stuck - disenfranchised, even. his numbers have come down in recent polling, but how else do you explain how a tom steyer can come out of nowhere and poll so high in a black state? they're frustrated. they don't like any of them...

this might change soon; this might be the last cycle like this. but, for this election, the black church vote will decide the outcome of the election, it is going to show up to vote in force and it is not going to pick bernie sanders.

the open question, however, is how many younger black voters are out there, right now, and how many of them get out to vote. the sanders campaign is delusional, and will reject this narrative, but it is true nonetheless - sanders is running against the church, and essentially needs to beat it with increased turnout, which is an almost impossible task.

the race does seem to be tightening, though. and, these are the faultlines and the open questions - after squandering so much time and so many resources trying to appeal to southern black conservatives and failing, can bernie pivot effectively and get enough young people out to beat the church, if it schisms, in the end?

but, if steyer is truly fading, and biden consolidates the church vote, sanders doesn't have a chance. and, we may be in for another nightmare, where black voters force the country to deal with yet another subpar candidate that has absolutely no chance of actually winning.

i think that's the overlooked slant here, though. there's been so much focus put on projecting the importance of what they pick, that people have forgotten to ask them what they want. they are disenfranchised, right now, but they almost certainly won't stay home.

i'm going to wait to watch the debate until i get back tomorrow night.

hey catholics.

i've got an idea for something you can give up on lent.

your faith.

we really don't seem to have advanced much beyond the utopian socialism denounced by marx & engels, in socialism: utopian and scientific.

we still have this mass of people on the ground that insist on operating with their hearts instead of their brains, and have no chance of success, because of it.

and, these people still need to be organized by charismatic planners and tacticians that can convince them that they need to fucking listen if they want to get anything done.

i can write you blueprints, but i'm awful with people. sorry.

"i don't know what you're talking about. profits? concessions? i'm just trying to stand on the side of what i think is right."

well, you're going to lose then.

and, your self-righteousness frightens me.

what are some tactics that can actually work in stopping some of these extraction projects?

yes, i support a diversity of tactics. i've been careful not to denounce anybody, i've just been clear that i think this is tactically stupid - that it's not going anywhere, that it's perhaps even counterproductive, and that it's reflective of a level of desperation, rather than careful planning.

but, if there is a purpose to blocking a rail line in southern ontario, it is to try and spark a broader movement, like a general strike. the way the feds responded seems to have demonstrated little understanding of this, which is something that the indigenous groups should exploit to their advantage. they've been given an opening, here, i'll concede that. so, what they need to do is get as many people out as they possibly can and cause as much havoc as is possible, with the hopes that it spills over. that was always the tactic, and they'll tell you that better than i can, but, as stated, the context is that it's a desperate act.....

i know from experience that these groups want to measure the value of a direct action by it's intent, rather than it's outcome. the mere concept of a "direct action" has this kind of romanticism to it, in contrast to the "peaceful protest" which is seen as pointless and ineffectual. they're not wrong to draw that contrast, and i've drawn it over and over again, myself, but they tend to have difficulty getting beyond the abstraction of romanticizing "direct action", of kind of role-playing revolutionaries by manning barricades, like it's a game in drama class, and actually developing meaningful direct actions that can actually extract meaningful concessions.

so, i've pointed to a sit-down strike, and the factors required to make it effective. maybe i can generalize this. i'm supposed to be the academic, here. what do you need to look at in designing an effective direct action that goes beyond these empty concepts of movement solidarity and moral self-righteousness?

1) the direct action needs to directly harm somebody's actual profit in a substantive way. you have to be able to physically get in between some capitalist enterprise and the expropriation of their surplus value. that is the reason that strikes and blockades are effective - because they cost people money, and that is the only thing that capitalists actually care about.

2) you need to be able to protect the direct action from the police, at least to the point of requiring a blood bath to take it down. if you get to the point where they need to send in snipers to take you down, that's probably good enough (although you might need to be prepared for them to try to psych you out). any direct action that can be dismantled easily by the police is simply a waste of time. the other way around this is to generate huge numbers of people, so that the cops are overwhelmed. but, if you're going to do direct action, it is absolutely imperative that you have a tactic to fight the police off. they will arrest you, if they can, and then you're not hurting anybody's profit any more, and can be safely ignored.

3) you need to have popular support. i'm not making an argument about democracy, here. as before, this is purely tactical - the only weapon that these people really have is the threat that they may get the broader society on their side. essentially, the police and government have to be worried that dismantling the direct action by force will lead to greater losses of profit than leaving them in place. 

once you have these three components in place, you can reasonably start making demands.

but, if your direct action essentially amounts to putting on a balaclava and looking chic in your revolutionary garb, as you yell slogans with ten people in an attempt to try to get laid, and get nailed by the press for doing it, then you're a retard that probably deserves what they get.

the blockades meet the first condition, and we'll see if they can meet the second through mass action or not. it's a passable strategy, at least, if they shift to a large number of ad hoc blockades that can come up and down quickly, rather than try and hold a single spot. if they can get enough people to cause enough mayhem, it becomes impossible to police, leading to greater profit losses and the possibility of the capitalists saying "enough" and making a concession.

i've yet to see any evidence of them actually doing this, but that's the way you do it - you set up small blockades, you move them around chaotically, you try to avoid predictable patterns, and you do it relentlessly. so, you stop trying to confront the cops, and start actively avoiding them, instead - because you realize that your focus is not in defeating the police by a show of force, but in harming the profits of the capitalist class, and you keep your focus on what your enemy is, without being drawn out by distractions or pissing matches. you stay disciplined...

the third condition is more challenging, and they need to spend a lot more time on it. they are losing this debate in the public sphere, and potentially harming the people they're trying to stand with, in the process.

i'd be a lot more likely to argue that direct actions tied directly to the pipeline have a greater chance of meeting these three criteria and actually leading to concessions.

breaking up banks & tech firms to generate more market competition isn't a socialist policy. it's a policy that is capitalist to it's bones. socialists would argue for the exact opposite policy - we would argue that competition hurts workers. 

nor is universal healthcare something that you need to invoke socialism to get to. it's true that it's the kind of thing that the framers of capitalism would have realized should be kept off of the market, and that the fact that it ended up on the market is a part of the socialist argument against the failure of capitalism, but if you want to invoke these "real capitalist" debates that are underlying sanders' economic positions, you should quickly get to the deduction that the health care industry is a natural monopoly, and that flailing against it is just going to lead to market failure. there is a perfectly coherent capitalist argument against market-based health care on strictly classical grounds, and if you listen to sanders closely, it's actually the argument he's advancing.

and we could go on. i won't. 

no.

stop.

look at the candidates for president at the last debate.

- biden is a conservative southern democrat.

- warren was a republican into middle age, and still sounds like one on fiscal issues, which is what she really cares about

- bloomberg was a republican for most of his life as well, and sounds like one on most issues

- buttigieg is what you would call a small-c conservative, and would probably have been a republican if he wasn't gay. i've called him a log cabin republican, and it's kind of true. there are actually speeches where obama openly admits that he only ended up as a democrat because the republicans wouldn't have him due to the racism. one wonders....
- klobuchar markets herself as being appealing to conservatives

- and, while sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, he's more in the tradition of progressive capitalism, and is probably the closest thing to an adherent of traditional capitalism in the batch. you hear this line from the libertarian right all of the time, about how really existing capitalism isn't really capitalism, it's "corporatism" and we need "real capitalism". if you look at sanders' proposals with a sober eye, you can see that he's essentially operating from this right-libertarian ideological position, even when he leap frogs the austrian economics in favour of a literal reading of adam smith, and trying to design a more pure type of capitalism, rather than overturn it or dismantle it. in that sense, there is a comparison to fdr, even if his policies are actually far less socialist than fdr's were. that's really what krugman was pointing out, and he is right to do it.

so, that's a bunch of fucking conservatives running for president under the democratic party.

and, what is trump? he's not a trostkyist neo-con, granted, even if he's surrounded by them. but he's hardly a conservative. he's an autocrat, an authoritarian, a "strong leader". a demagogue. he's almost better describable as a member of the chinese communist party than as a member of the john birch society, which seems to have resurrected itself in the form of adam schiff.

i know i've beaten this horse badly, but it's true.

and, while you can't fault some people for repeating what they're told, and shouldn't expect more from them than it, there are some people that you expect should know better than to use smear tactics, or abuse the language.

nowadays, the trotskyists are all in the republican party. the authoritarians are all on the right.

and, the democratic party is full of conservatives.

but, whatever a "centrist" is must have sat there and watched that reversal happen.

there was a wonkish debate between krugman and sanders in 2016, and the sanders campaign sees the world through an us vs them filter and remembers enemies and holds grudges. so, this is really an old debate.

this is what i said then, on april 9, 2016.

===============
j reacts to krugman's critique of sanders (he's right, but nobody should care)

krugman is right, but who cares?

what's the differences in health care plans? in foreign policy? on climate change?

if you break the banks up, they get captured. regulation doesn't work. we tried this. it failed. so, personally? you give me a referendum on a bank, i stay home. it's boring. and it has no effect on my life. i do not think this is what is driving the popularity of his campaign. and i think he needs to fight the perception that it is.

let's get less teddy roosevelt, and more franklin roosevelt.

the banks are important because that is where he gets the money to do the things he wants to do.

that is all.

the way to fix the financial system is to educate people about where they're putting their money. it doesn't matter if it's big or small, or private or public or anything else - so long as people remain clueless, they will be taken advantage of. you can't protect the ignorant. what we need is financial literacy.

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

i rant a little more here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBUxjVr4GLQ

(https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2016/04/j-reacts-to-krugmans-critique-of.html)

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

but, if you want to put this on a political spectrum? krugman is actually the leftist, here. it's a keynesian liberal left, but it's a left. sanders & warren are pushing chicago school style neo-liberal pro-market reforms.

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

may 28, 2016

some of my video comments over the next few days may seem confusing if you're following the Official Alternative Media Narrative, so i think i should be explicitly clear about this.

regarding the issues of financial regulation and the narratives around the bank bailouts, i may actually be closer to clinton than sanders. i wouldn't really agree with either, entirely.

see, i would take what is called an academic left perspective, which neither of the candidates are taking. clinton is taking more of an academic right position. what that means is that there are certain broad academic points that clinton has been making that i agree with (and are not really contested), but that i'm not ideologically aligned with her so i disagree with her on a lot of details. sanders is taking a populist position that is broadly (and correctly) seen as just flatly wrong by most academics. the people that are parroting him either don't know what they're talking about (cenk uygur) or are acting from questionable ideological positions (elizabeth warren).

i would prioritize careful, academic analysis (clinton/obama/krugman) over populist and misleading agitprop (sanders/pseudo-warren/wolff). pseudo-warren because i think she's misunderstood - she's a market fundamentalist, not a leftist. she's good at the agit-prop, but leftists will be sorely disappointed if she gets any kind of position of power. so, i haven't been shy about this: clinton is, indeed, broadly less wrong about the banks.

so, why am i supporting sanders? because i don't care about the bank bailouts. at all. i see the politicking for what it is: populism, agit-prop, maybe a little demagoguery. frankly, i'm pragmatic enough to see the value in it. what i actually care about is foreign policy, health care, social issues and more data-driven analyses of growing inequality.

and, this is not just why i'm supporting sanders over clinton. it's also why i couldn't possibly support clinton at all.

so, i hope that clarifies the point.

what the upcoming video comments are going to focus on is the question of whether some of this agitprop and politicking, as pragmatic as it may be, may have some unintended consequences - blowback - in it's use.

it's one thing to get people angry at the banks in order to get a tobin tax in. that's politics. it's good politics. it's another thing to wake up in eight years and realize we not only don't have a tobin tax, but now have also lost the lender of last resort because the masses got confused about what they were supposed to be angry about. that would be a tremendous fuck-up.

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2016/05/some-of-my-video-comments-over-next-few.html

=========

august 8, 2016

j tries to react to trump's tax/spend ideas but gets stuck in the ultraparadoxical phase

see, what i'd like is for the democratic candidate to spin this around on him and claim she's going to increase taxes on the wealthy - and also on corporations. i know better. i wouldn't believe it, anyways. but the last thing the country needs right now is lower taxes at the top rate. it needs to be taking in higher income tax levels to spend on crumbling infrastructure and convert the economy away from fossil fuels. the problem with the stimulus plan was that it was too small. they need more of this, on a deeper level - and they need to generate the revenue to do it.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/08/restrained-trump-goes-at-clinton-for-tax-plan.html

a strong candidate would annihilate him on his tax policy, which is clearly disastrous and flat out stupid. it's 2016, and dipshit donald still thinks tax cuts create jobs? of course he doesn't. he just wants a tax cut for himself. if i was the nominee, i wouldn't talk about anything else.

i don't always agree with krugman, but he's kind of an expert on keynesian policies. and, if we're going to implement keynesian policies, he's not just a good explainer but arguably the best currently alive. we're lucky that he spends as much time writing in newspapers as he does.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/how-did-we-know-the-stimulus-was-too-small/?_r=0

ok. fine. so, do it right, this time. i mean, the other option is recession. look at europe. you have to find a way to win this debate on the facts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/krugman-the-stimulus-tragedy.html

see, this is just like the tpp. they both want infrastructure spending. they're both technically right. but, i don't believe either of them - i rather think that they'll both push tax cuts and austerity.

i don't know how i'm going to get through this mess with my sanity. i need to just disengage. i keep saying that...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/us/politics/trump-clinton-infrastructure.html

what a fucking disaster. wow. really.

i ought to be pointing out that it's good that they're both taking the right approach to stimulus. instead, i'm convinced they're both lying, and they'll both do the wrong thing.

and, the evidence is really, truly on my side.

i'm in the fucking ultraparadoxical phase, again. great.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG_iD8epJag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOLC9gELguQ

he's basically right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/time-to-borrow.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpowqpwNOnE

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

nov 20, 2016

j reacts to krugman's take on the supposed infrastructure plan

i think krugman is actually giving him too much credit.

my bet is that the infrastructure plan reduces to a tweet to ask investors to invest more in infrastructure, maybe followed by another tweet calling paul ryan some mean names for supposedly blocking it.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/infrastructure-build-or-privatization-scam/

there's actually precedence for this: whenever obama was faced with doing anything complicated, he wrote a speech explaining that congress should do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH7hvdqPP9U

from the start of this process, i never referred to bernie as anything more than a legit lesser evil, and it was refreshing to at least get that for a while, until the reality started to sink itself in.

in 2016, the military-industrial complex rigged the election in favour of trump and then blamed it on the russians to distract you. if you start seeing them blame bernie's successes on the russians, you should take it as an admission of guilt.

as for dr. wolff...

it's funny to see dr. wolff present himself as a protector of the new deal, because his academic work was actually written largely as a criticism of it. mr. wolff is known nowadays as an advocate of workplace democracy, but his claim to fame was actually a scathing critique of the new deal as a co-option of socialism; his central academic thesis, the thing that got people to notice him, was a series of papers arguing that the purpose of the new deal was to stop socialism, and that it worked. while it comes off as a conspiracy theory on first glance, it is actually mainstream scholarship to acknowledge that fdr intended to save capitalism from itself, not destroy it.

fdr was a capitalist to his bones, and richard wolff made a career out of taking him to task for it.

i've also noticed in several posts during the past that he has a tendency to view facts pragmatically. he's a marxist; they're all like that.

but, the point i want to make is that it seems as though dr. wolff likes to imagine that sanders is far more like he is than he actually is, that he may be suffering from the fallacy of projection and that he would likely be disappointed by what he actually gets.

so, be careful with the way that certain people are going to frame certain things.

and, i'll be here to keep them honest, as best i can.

i think it's a valid question, actually.

is krugman, himself, more of a socialist than bernie sanders is?

you'd have to take some kind of weighted average, as this is a spectrum with more than two axes in it. 

but, sanders has kind of a conservative streak on very specific issues, and krugman is about as big of a government liberal as you'll find.

i would certainly compare krugman to roosevelt before i compared sanders to him.

in fact....

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2015/11/15/democratic-debate-bernie-sanders-eisenhower-tax-rates-vstan-orig-cws.cbs-news

paul krugman is right - bernie sanders is not a socialist at all. 

it was chomsky that pointed out that, while he likes to compare himself to roosevelt, he's actually largely to the right of eisenhower, who is a better comparison, overall.

you centrists and progressives/conservatives can argue with each other all you want.

i'll go vote for the socialists.

i'm just curious if somebody could define this term "centrism" for me?

i've seen it applied to everything from a rooseveltian keynesian like krugman to a neo-liberal like obama to a neo-con like clinton, and i suspect it's most haphazard proponents would even use it to describe people like myself that, unlike bernie sanders, actually openly describe themselves as an anarchist, a socialist and a communist, and are actually several rungs to his left.

so, what exactly is a centrist?

i suppose that if you want to be literal, the best way to make sense of a term like centrism is to start by defining what the right is. then, once you've picked a left and a right, you can understand the centre through a dialectical process. is it centrist of me to resort to hegel like this?

but, then, where exactly is the right in american politics? it's a kind of nihilism, a sort of open fascism, that upholds strong leader politics and increasingly toys with adopting state capitalist economic models. i think you see where i'm going with this.

but, the odd thing about this topsy-turvy reality that exists in the american political discourse is that you can pivot around the centre without altering it - if we're going to have these definitional debates about left and right, the centre shouldn't actually be touched by it.

but what exactly is it, though, this shifting target of "centrism"?

maybe it's just whatever you call the people that you don't like much, this week.

personally, i'll stand over here on the far left and keep slamming people for being statists, thanks.

i made it home alive tonight, thankfully.

the rain kind of sucked, but i worked it out.

i wanted to stop at villain's to talk, but i forgot that they're closed on mondays...

i'm tentatively planning for wednesday as well, weather dependent. i think it's probably going to be too cold on friday.

i'm going to hop in the shower and probably zonk out, and i'm going to leave the show review until after i can talk to somebody and clarify what happened.

to be clear: i'm not worried about anything, really. i was told they called the police to escort me home for my own safety, because they thought my clothing put me at a risk to get assaulted (which is victim blame-y and weird). the bartender ended up driving me home. i'm not getting any bad vibes, i don't think. i'm pretty sure i was just completely unable to move, and that's really the sum total of the concern. 

but, i don't know if i was out for thirty minutes or three hours, and i need to figure that out before i can order time for the night. and, whether i got drugged or something else, i need to apologize, nonetheless - even if i end up with a negative review for calling the cops during bar hours, if that happened.

yeah, we didn't get quite the distortion that i was hinting at. i mean, i correctly picked out a trend, but it's not as strong as i projected.

biden did come down almost 5 points, in the end, rather than the closer to eight i suggested, and this is due to the reporting issues i pointed out, but it just simply looks like buttigieg did particularly badly in the suburbs around vegas (which are majority white.), and that hampered the effect i was hinting at. if he had done better with white suburban voters, he would have climbed up that extra few percent.

i'll repeat: it looks like buttigieg actually badly underperformed with suburban white voters in las vegas, and that's really what the difference in the results is. all other things considering, if he'd have matched those numbers with how he did in the first two states.....but he didn't. and, you would generally have expected him to win that demographic, that's not a stretch. why did he do so poorly with them in las vegas?

they're telling me that i shouldn't expect a letter, after all.

i made a request for one anyways over the phone.

should i buy a ticket anyways? i'm so iffy about this. are the prices inflated due to the blockade? should i wait this out, anyways?

let me get some fruit and look it up.

i napped this morning and afternoon and didn't get as much done as i wanted. i'm at least rested and awake, so i'm either up and in or up and ready to get out.

i also suggested that nevada wouldn't really be that different than iowa, and it actually wasn't.

the difference is more in the size of the urban centre relative to the rural regions around it, and in the way the state is districted.

i do expect south carolina to be a legitimately different game, though.

again: i suggested biden would miss viability almost everywhere, and he actually did.

i suggested that buttigieg would be viable in most places, and he was.

it's just that that the margin of error happens to take up 70% of the population, in this state.

yes, i knew that, and i should have looked at it more closely.

i know it seems like 96% in nevada should be enough to post a summary, but the results are actually coming out more or less like i said they would, relative to a reasonable margin.

biden's one big county is at 98%. all of the remaining results are in areas where he did poorly.

so, are there enough ccds left to pull biden down under 20 and buttigieg up over 15? i want to wait to see.

it does, however, seem clear enough that buttigieg will miss viability in clark county, and that is a blow to his campaign. you wonder, though. as mentioned, you expect a little cheating in clark county. if buttigieg ends up missing viability by 2-3 points, and biden's numbers seem inflated by that much....

what the experts will tell you is that nobody really focuses too much on these things because they don't actually really matter, it's almost more of a psychological thing to rile up your opponent. but, there are some elections that have been stolen - like jfk's theft of chicago, or bush' theft of miami. clark county is one of those counties.

let's not forget that the actual winner of the county is sanders, by a good margin.

so, i can bring in these issues to try and salvage my mathematical analyses, and it might be good enough for that reason. but, it doesn't change the outcome.

i don't think that biden should be particularly impressed by coming in a distant second in one county. biden lost every single county in nevada, guys. he was only even viable in 2 of 17. that's pretty awful, actually.

but, buttigieg should be particularly concerned, because how different is las vegas to san diego or el paso?

and, sanders should avoid popping any corks until he can break 40% somewhere. he's not winning nevada in the general with 35%.

i'm also broadly disinterested in movements that try to channel hate, regardless of the topic of the hate.

so, these "progressive" movements that push for judaic concepts of retribution tend to leave me cold.

i would support the elimination of the incarceration system, and it's replacement with a system of hospitals, tort rulings and schools.

i believe that the best way to eliminate antisocial behaviour from society is through education and, most importantly, the elimination of competition - not through putting people in jail for breaking the rules that are pushed down by the bourgeoisie.

the intent is to get arrested, to draw attention to the brutality of the state. you're supposed to be indignant.

in context, the argument is kind of weak, even if you're broadly on their side.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tyendinaga-mohawks-removal-blockades-1.5473490

on second thought, i'm ok on the quick reinstall.

listen...

i don't know who you are or what you want. i know you're reading this. i don't know know why. i suspect i've been drugged in public recently, as well.

all i want to do is log on to this machine to fix the typos from the last week of posts. i essentially will be doing nothing at all until this project is completed.

i appear to be powerless to stop you. that does not make me feel subservient to you, but rather makes me hate you, and makes me want to defy you even more. there is no logic in oppression - oppressed people never love their controllers, and i will never love you, i will merely hate you more and more and more and more.

so, you can sit there and knock me offline, apparently at will, if you want.

but, i'm just going to reinstall over and over and over and over again until i get done what i'm doing.

yeah, that lasted seconds before it shut off. they seem to have gone after my boot sector, again, meaning i'm going to need to do a full reinstall, this time.

i will need to get the chip out at the hardware level to really get this out and i don't know how to do that.

but, i need to clean this blog up from that machine, so we're going to do this over and over again until i'm done, which might get very frustrating, but is necessary. 

this chromebook is simply not intended for local use and never will be used for that reason.

so, i just activated a machine with a disabled network card, no "network connections" service (or other services) running, no installed network adapters....

?

either this is operating at like a bios level, or i've tricked myself into thinking it's connecting, when it's actually rebuilding something locally.

it sort of doesn't matter just right now, but it's very weird. it's telling me that it's connecting remotely - either it's lying, or the connection is essentially impossible for me to get at, with the the broken backlit screen, and my subsequent inability to get into the bios. maybe that's why that happened...?

also, the weird remote access drivers have mysteriously disappeared.

i'm left with no greater faith in the sanctity of the situation, but i have to carry on, for now.

let's hope i can get this cleaned up in a few hours.

it seems like the coronavirus is reducing air travel, which means less emissions. score.

but, what's going on seems to be rather absurd; they're quarantining people for weeks over the flu.

it makes you wonder what's really going on.

so, again - they seemed to let the clark county results through first, which has redistorted the results. i'd expect them to balance back out again as the results finish up.

it appears as though biden will be viable in 2 out of 17 counties, whereas buttigieg will be viable in 15 out of 17, and there is precisely no overlap. so, my projection was actually correct.

the exact results in clark county were pretty dramatic, though. 25% isn't exactly a barnstorming result, but it is better than his polling, and that's a first this cycle, if it holds (and there's still reasons to think it will weaken). and, if buttigieg was going to miss viability in just one out of 17 counties, the one with 70% of the population is the worst one for it to happen in. he could still sneak over 15%, but this seems to contradict his kind of steady-eddy results. he really does about the same across most demographics.

is it possible that biden stuffed some ballots? well, clark county is one of the counties that people cheat in rather frequently, so it might be the answer to the shape of the data, and it might be the difference in the outcome. i'd be surprised if he didn't try a few times. but, the truth is that you probably want to criticize buttigieg for not cheating, when sanders and biden knew you had to. that's a lack of experience, maybe. it's not the red flag we saw in new hampshire, and i'm not willing to point any fingers. but, understand that this is a county that establishment democrats tend to stuff ballots in, so the burden of proof is probably the other way. and, i didn't really think that through carefully enough, either.

so, i'm standing by my analysis, but i'm conceding that i didn't extrapolate deeply enough.

sanders is running about where i suggested, buttigieg is viable almost everywhere and biden only made the cut in two counties. it's just that the population skews in such a way that the outcome is a little different than such an analysis might naively project, even if the spread between biden & buttigieg does shrink a little in the end.

sanders clearly did very well with latin-speaking voters, and that's not a surprising outcome. but, did biden manage to finally get over 20% in one county because of the "diversity" in it? i think that you might find a correlation, but that's probably not the cause.

rather, i suspect that an analysis of the data will show that biden did well with what you might call the rank and file, and that the fact that they showed up this time is really what the difference is. the rank and file would include certain types of unionized workers, seniors and other people that exist within the nuts and bolts of the democratic party machinery. again - 25% and a distant second place is hardly a show of force. but, that's what has made vegas a little different, the actual party machinery.

if buttigieg can't get to 15% in vegas in the end, he should be disappointed by it. this is vegas, specifically, literally. the ready-made excuses aren't going to work, here.

i'm a little surprised, but we could still see the numbers normalize.

i believe that 13 delegates will be awarded statewide, and they will mostly go to sanders. of the rest of the delegates, i believe that only 6 of them will be awarded to candidates that are viable in las vegas. the rest will be distributed to candidates that did will in the other districts. i think there's actually 18 of 36 delegates to award in the three districts that biden failed to reach viability in, and buttigieg succeeded to do so in.

that means that buttigieg will probably still get more delegates.

but, what i wanted to point out before the machine crashed was that i'm not planning on doing a review for the debussy show just right now, as there's still some open thoughts revolving around what happened.

it's hard to write a review about something, when you're not entirely certain what happened. i think i'm feeling good enough to make it to man or astroman tomorrow.

so, there's my bluescreen driver error.

"apc_index_mismatch"

i have never seen that before, i have absolutely no idea at all what it means and i have absolutely no interest in learning about it or looking it up. i have absolutely zero interest in this topic, whatsoever. but, i'm going to presume it's the same basic bullshit - that they're trying to install something remotely, and can't.

like, fuck off.

but, i wasn't done what i was doing, so i'm essentially going to need to instantly reimage, and get back to it within a few hours. i need to be using that machine for a few more days, still.

i'm going to stop to get some fruit, first.

on friday afternoon, the prime minister proclaimed by decree that "the time has come" to take the blockades down.

the media coverage around this has been bizarre, with several publications producing headlines that more or less claim that the protesters are "defying" the prime minister, as though he has any authority in the matter.

i would suggest that the time has come, but for something else.

i've been up since friday morning now, which is a good sign. and, i guess the question of whether that's due to something i did, or something they did, is potentially answerable by any response to this post, although i would request that they at least let me finish cleaning up this blog....

i had the thing disassembled for almost a month, so i'd think that it thoroughly drained anything from any volatile memory.

but, i dunno. i know i've taken the hub out, along with all of the wireless devices. i know i've taken the battery out. i know i'm down to one stick of ram instead of two. and i know it's been more stable than it's been in months...

...but i also know that certain measurements of surveillance seem to have reversed, so maybe they pulled back. or maybe they figured out a less invasive means of spying on me.

let's hope it stays up for a while, and i'll have to slowly bring the devices back in. but, none of this is changing my perception that i was being shut down remotely...and what i actually think is that they've adjusted their tactic, or given up.

it's kind of an overlooked point.

i live just outside of detroit, which i would think is being targeted. i've seen zero ads by tom steyer, zero ads by mike bloomberg, zero ads by bernie sanders and zero ads by anybody else.

i also use an ad blocker on the internet.

you'd be more likely to reach me by putting an ad in a bus shelter, or on a billboard, and proving that buying an ad there works.

so, they seem to have allowed just enough of some of the vote to trickle out to let biden back into second place in the second alignment, by a fraction of a percent, and then froze it in place. this is essentially allowing the sunday television coverage to run with the party's racist narrative.

we don't actually have ordered results. we don't have a delegate count. this is all nonsense.

and, it is foolish, as it is blunting the will of their own voters.

why do they do this every four years, if they just consistently ignore or distort what their own voters want? isn't that supposed to be the point?

we'll see how long this takes, but i wouldn't expect the results to pick up until after larry king is over, or whatever is on tv, nowadays. i don't even know.

i'm not a millennial, but i'm too young to watch tv.

ok.

i waited all night in new hampshire for the numbers to make sense, and they never did, leading me to be very skeptical about the whole thing.

but, buttigieg has, for the first time, overtaken biden on the final vote alignment in the published results, with roughly 50% reporting.

and, i'll remind you that there's supposedly 75,000 uncounted preferential ballots to sort through, which is more than the number of votes that have been counted, so far.

with south carolina, though, the field is badly split, and what that means is that nobody wins, but nobody really loses.

- biden needs to actually win, and he might
- steyer needs to get above 20% to even think of being competitive on super tuesday. but, i'm happy to let him hang around and split the black vote up...
- black voters in nevada are not quite as liberal as black voters in illinois or michigan, but they're nowhere near as conservative as black voters in the south. i wouldn't read much into how sanders did in nevada in terms of it being predictive in the south. he did well with northern blacks in 2016, too. he needs to focus on his 20-25%, and rely on the split in the field to limit the damage.
- buttigieg needs to try to play up the religious slant with rural democrats, mostly white ones, and hope it gets him some delegates at the district level. he's just looking to stay viable, though - he's just trying to get through it.
- neither warren nor klobuchar have a serious chance at delegates in south carolina, meaning they're both going to be a good ways behind the pack by the end of the process - 50, 60, 70 delegates out. it's far from insurmountable, but very challenging in a field this size.

ok, back to what i was doing...

what were my projections?

1) sanders will do well in most districts, often getting close to or a little over 30%

he's currently running at 34% and appears to be running pretty stable in the high 20s or low 30s pretty much everywhere.

2) buttigieg will be viable in most places, and will cross 20% in strong districts

that was accurate.

3) biden & warren will mostly be unviable, but may get a small number of delegates.

right now, it looks like the only place that biden is going to clear 15% is las vegas, and warren may not get anything at all. 

4) klobuchar & steyer will run flat, and below the threshhold essentially everywhere

they're both running under 10%.

the media coverage has almost entirely shut down on a saturday night.

there's nothing of much interest to me happening in detroit, tonight. i'm leaning towards staying in tomorrow, as well. there's a show on monday i want to hit. but, it seems like everybody wanted to make it to the party, wherever that is, and dropped the coverage like a screaming infant. "shut up. i need to get drunk.".

i really only go out to see shows, i don't care much for people, so here i am.

the new york times site has a paywall, so i've got a javascript blocker, and i can't use it. so, i'm resorting to the nbc site, which is more functional - until they read this and break it. fucking capitalists.

if i must be the lone nerd that actually looks at this closely and realizes just how warped the early results really are, then so be it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-primary-elections/nevada-results

biden is basically doing well in clark county and terrible everywhere else, which is actually not that different than iowa. biden did get six delegates in iowa, and he got them by doing well in des moines. i don't think there's anything shocking about him running in the 20s or higher in downtown las vegas.

but, you might want to compare clark county vs carson city, which is the only other place with any results coming in.

clark country - 30.5% reporting:
Sanders    46.7%   
Biden    25.8%   
Buttigieg    13.1%   
Warren    8.6%   
Steyer    3.3%   
Klobuchar 2.2%   

ok. great night for sanders in vegas.

carson city - 57.7% reporting:
Sanders    46.2%   
Klobuchar 16.9%   
Buttigieg    13.8%   
Steyer    10%   
Warren    9.2%   
Biden    3.8%   

seriously.

these are the other counties with more than 15% reporting:

churchill - 47.4% reporting:
Sanders    41.7%   
Buttigieg    20.8%   
Warren    12.5%   
Biden    8.3%   
Klobuchar 8.3%   
Steyer    8.3%   

douglas - 40.5% reporting:
Buttigieg    33.3%   
Sanders    26.9%   
Klobuchar 21.8%   
Warren    7.7%   
Biden    5.1%   
Steyer    5.1%   

elko - 41.5% reporting:
Sanders    39.3%   
Buttigieg    23.2%   
Klobuchar 16.1%   
Biden    10.7%   
Warren    10.7%   

there are 12 other counties, all with less than 15% reporting, most or all of which are likely to continue the trend seen in these other non-clark counties.

this matters dramatically, because if he can't get to 10%, let alone 15%, in three out of the four districts, then those numbers in las vegas are not going to translate to a lot of delegates.

i understand that las vegas has something like 70% of the state's population. so, what does it mean if he gets 25% there and averages 7% in the other 30%, which is about in line with the numbers? then a final projection would be about .25*.7 + .07*.3 ~19%. but, that is ignoring the effects of rural over-representation, as well, which i can't eyeball, i'd have to look up, and i'm not that nerdy.

his numbers will probably be around 17-18% of ccds in the end, and he'll end up with no more than a handful of delegates. that's only better than iowa because vegas dominates the state; if des moines dominated iowa, he would have done roughly as well there, too. so, i maybe underestimated the dominance of vegas on the results, and maybe should have known better. but, this is not a good night for joe biden in nevada at all.

buttigieg, on the other hand, will do well in these rural counties, and will see his numbers come up. if he beats or ties sanders in 3 out of 4 districts, he will nearly catch up on the delegate count.

again: i understand why the party is doing this. but, i'm not doing politics here, i'm doing math homework, and i insist on getting the process right.

when they get the numbers for the rural counties in, it will help buttigieg dramatically, and he will probably leapfrog biden into second, at around 20% of the ccds.

the math that they're using to predict remaining results from a sample of the early results relies on the remaining results essentially being the same as the early results, and that's demonstrably flawed.

that's why they're delaying the results - they don't want you to see that until the party narrative has already been beaten in via the media coverage.

sanders will get something like 20 delegates, buttigieg will get something like 10 and biden will get the rest.

the tv coverage insisted that sanders won a blowout win (i think everybody realized he would win by a good margin, even if it comes down), that biden had a strong second place finish, that warren was a clear third and that buttigieg was a distant, also-ran fourth.

that's the narrative the party seems to want, right now - that buttigieg is failing with black and brown voters, because they're all a bunch of terrible homophobes.

however, according to aaron bycoffe at the 538 liveblog, the current partial results actually suggest the following delegate count:

As the results stand, with 4 percent of precincts reporting county delegate results (the number used to determine how many national delegates each candidate will get), Sanders would get 20 delegates, and Buttigieg and Biden would each get eight. Of the other candidates, Warren is closest to 15 percent — she has 13.6 percent in the 1st District and close to 12 percent in other areas.

in other words, while sanders is leading, buttigieg and biden are actually in a tie for second, and it is warren in a distant fourth. nevadans don't seem to hate the gay guy all that much after all - although they're a little apprehensive about the female.

why are they resisting this and insisting on pushing down this awful narrative instead?

because they think buttigieg is death for key demographics, and they understand the importance of winning college-educated, suburban white woman. nevada was supposed to push down the party line, not sink the establishment's ship. their gramscian conditioning isn't working, and they don't know what to do.

what are they waiting for?

my guess is that they're waiting for enough results to come in to maintain the party line narrative. there are probably results ready to release, but they don't align with what the party wants you to see, even in partial results. they don't want you to see biden slip, even for a second, so they're waiting for enough results to come in to ensure he maintains his place in order, or gets better.

and, it's taking hours and hours because it's not happening.

we'll probably get the results all at once to shocks and awws. and, everything will change, just right then.

i don't blame anybody for holding on until the results come in. i wouldn't drop right now, either.

so, i think it's starting to be more clear what they're doing.

what they've done is freeze the numbers at a specific point, to create a certain order in the results, to generate a specific type of coverage. i just watched the local las vegas tv station declare the order of the finishers, with 4% reporting. it's a farce. this is allowing the media to present their racist narrative, about "diversity".

we'll see what the numbers say in the end, but it will matter less what the facts are after the election has been framed the way the party wants it framed.

it's an old trick. the new york times does it all of the time - it posts a blatant lie on the front page, and then posts a two-line retraction on page 37 two weeks later, which nobody reads.

i think everybody expects sanders to win this thing, but to suggest he'll get 40%, let alone 55%, would be to overshoot all of the polling. and, while biden's numbers are not unbelievable in terms of polling averages, it defies belief to think so many nevadans were so stupid as to vote for a senile old man.

it's at 4%. c'mon.

you know, it's funny.

the numbers being reported on the tv don't seem to be the same as these ones:
https://nevadacaucusresults.com/

it would seem as though biden is running in third, and buttigieg is running in second.

what's going on?

i think we need to let this play out a little, but it seems as though the party is essentially trying to push a specific media narrative, and what little media is covering this is playing along with it. so, biden is bizarrely producing what appears to be a victory speech.

i remember this kind of thing from the clinton years.

but, what are they doing? are they trying to basically trick people into thinking that biden won by gaming the coverage? or are they just giving a broken old man a chance at a spotlight he doesn't actually deserve before they turn off the lights for good?

i'm a compassionate person.

but, they're going to have to get some accurate numbers up on the screen soon enough.

the party clearly doesn't like any of this. it doesn't like sanders. it doesn't like buttigieg. it doesn't like what's happening. and it seems to be reacting very badly.

we'll see how this plays out.

but, why are the results on the tv screen inconsistent with the results at the reporting site?

so, i'm struggling to stay awake as i clean up the last month's worth of posts on this blog.

i'm about half done.

so, i'm getting some fruit and watching the caucus...

no, i don't expect biden to finish in the top two.

American voters should decide American elections — not Vladimir Putin.

as far as tautologies go, that's a grand one.

but, the discourse here is getting retarded. this is hilarious. really.

so, i'm going to throw down a final nevada projection before i hop in the shower and pivot for the night.

the last couple of polls i saw had sanders jumping to a commanding lead, and warren kind of falling back. see, this is sort of a reflection of part of my apprehension about the coalition of reactionary forces that sanders has been building. you'd have to think that warren would have at least held her ground, right? not when the underlying electorate is holding to a more traditional concept of gender roles than you see throughout much of the country. it's these conservative latinx groups that are making me squeamish, and they do appear to have broken hard for sanders.

what's perhaps more concerning for sanders is where the rest of the numbers are.

if he's running at 35%, and that's roughly the size of the latino population, and he's at 50% in the latino population, then he's running at roughly 25% in the non-latino population. and, if he's actually running closer to 70% in the latino population, then those numbers come down even further. the persistent concern has been his low ceiling, and dominating latinx groups - who are not a majority, anywhere - isn't going to get him out of that.

as it is, all evidence does suggest that sanders may actually get to 30% this time. is that a strong showing for a frontrunner in february? if it's by dominating a single ethnic group that does not command a majority, anywhere?

i've also seen some further corroborating evidence that buttigieg is indeed rising, and am now willing to firm that up with some confidence.

this is a caucus state, so expect it to be messy. local results could be weird, and minor candidates may get propped up.

but, here's my projection for the state on the first ballot:

sanders will do well in most districts, often getting close to or a little over 30%
buttigieg will be viable in most places, and will cross 20% in strong districts
biden & warren will mostly be unviable, but may get a small number of delegates
klobuchar & steyer will run flat, and below the threshold essentially everywhere

in the end, sanders will get most of the delegates.

we can phrase the question like this, and i think it's what you need to think through before you pick a side on this, and at least be able to articulate a reply to, whatever side that you pick: what is the greater threat to sex workers, predators on the street or the managerial class in a capitalist society?

i would lean towards the latter.

if they are not in fact the same thing.

the smell was so brutal yesterday that it never really cleared out, but it hasn't come back, yet, so i need to measure my response.

alright.

so, i didn't get anything done today. too much sleeping. & distracted by some censorship issues on facebook this afternoon.

i'm going to make some fruit, take a shower and get to it.

...you might get it.

"sex work is work."

"prostitution is a job like any other."

be careful what you wish for.

on the other side, i think i do agree that prostitutes ought to pay payroll and income taxes.

i know you're going to tell me that won't happen.

but, you need to read some marxist economic history. that's what always happens - that's capitalism. it's not preventable.

what's inevitably going to happen is that the capitalist managers in that escort agency are going to siphon out all of the profit, and the girls are going to get a check for their labour.

minimum wage here is currently $14/hr. canadian.

sex work is kind of the perfect example of what i'm talking about when i point to the ubiquity of neo-liberalism in the younger generation.

they call themselves socialists, and think this is a left-wing prerogative, but they all sound like milton friedman on this topic, and don't realize it.

the marketization of everything is the neo-liberal project! it's not some socialist fantasy.

socialists would broadly argue that prostitution is a measure of oppression and would cease to exist in a truly socialist society. i'm basically in agreement, i'd just adjust the argument to make space for the primacy of agency in the matter, even if i can't grasp it, or think it's irrational.

well, i guess the feds get the chance to get this right. let's hope they don't screw it up like....they've screwed everything else up.

i think that what everybody wants is for these women to have real agency, the ability to make real choices and the ability to be safe from harm. where the debate comes up is what that actually means, and i'm, personally, exceedingly skeptical that opening this up to the free market is going to do anything but turn people into sex slaves. i have absolutely no faith in the market to protect people's rights at all.

so, this kind of escort agency is actually exactly the kind of thing i'd worry about, as they would no doubt reduce their workers to salaried employees with poor benefits, if they could. that is a model that should be rejected. they need to find ways to avoid being reduced to wage slaves, which i fear is the inevitable result of a corporatization of the industry.

the other thing i'd point out is that if the supply of sex workers increases faster than the demand for sex work, that will lead to decreases in prices, which is supposed to be the draw to the thing. so, if you're on the side of a sex workers union, you'd think the focus would be on restricting supply.

like any other job, you want to put the power in the hands of the workers.

but, given the economic status quo, i worry that these workers are in for a terrible surprise.

there it is, though. here's your chance...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/ontario-court-judge-rules-parts-of-canada-s-prostitution-laws-are-unconstitutional-1.5471207

it's about managing perceptions and making the government look like it had no other choice.

they know that the things they're offering are insufficient, or even just sneaky ways to advance the project. that's the lie, here - the idea that they're acting in good faith. they aren't.

i don't know how much longer this will continue on for. it will depend on when the government thinks it's convinced it's own voters that they've done everything they can.

what is a real solution here?

it has to go through a treaty process in the region. without a treaty, we don't have a clear understanding of the proper jurisdiction, and the role of the courts will remain unclear.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-incident-response-group-friday-1.5471095

so, excluding the short amount of time in between, that was more or less 15 more hours of heavy, can't-move kind of sleep.

it's enough to make me think about starting up a cocaine addiction.

or starting smoking cigarettes again.

i was initially hoping to do some testing, to see if i could narrow the issue down to some other thing. so, i've got this machine down to the minimum i can get it to - wired usb keyboard & mouse and one stick of ram and that's it. no battery, even.

but, the fact that i just connected to microsoft's servers on a computer with no working and connected network card is making me realize the pointlessness of this, if i didn't already know it.

i've convinced myself the drive is fine. there was an off chance there was an issue with ram or a short in the board. but, this backdoor is more consistent with all of the evidence...

i don't know what they want or why they're doing this but this machine has no long term future. sadly. 

i've said over and over again that i don't actually care if the cia hacks my machine, because i don't break any laws, anyways. it's not that i like that argument - obviously, i'd rather they didn't - so much as i'm cognizant of what the internet is and how it works and the reality you are signing yourself up for when you use it.

this has been run by the military from the start...the first person that showed me the internet was my retired step-grandfather, who worked as a signals interpreter in alert. and, he died skeptical that the internet would ever be used by civilians; he didn't think the military would really open it up. lol.

what was pissing me off was that the surveillance software was slowing the computer down. 

if you could write better software for older machines, i wouldn't care. but, when you take surveillance software that is designed for modern machines and install it on a 15 year old laptop, it makes the computer unusable.

and, i'm not buying a new computer so that the cia can spy on me more effectively.

so, on some level, i don't even fucking care, so long as it doesn't interfere with my work. but, once you hold that mirror up, it's also unsettling - it's one thing to say you don't care, and another to realize you really can't turn it off.

i may end up moving back to the pc relatively fast, but i need to do some things online with this image, and i don't want to connect to the internet from the pc, ever.

but, maybe if i write it out on my screen i'll believe it: there's a hidden wireless card in my computer that is connected to a surveillance network on the backend, and is not otherwise displayed by the operating system.

i promise you they didn't get a warrant, either.

if i go in there and just rip the wire out, i could short the board.

why don't i just do what i want to do to start and see how far i get. i have a lot of things to do before i even get to the point of opening up the master document.

the machine shows no network device. at all.

and, yet, i am connected to some kind of remote access wireless network that i can only detect indirectly. like, i know the connection is there. but, i appear to be completely blocked, somehow, from figuring out what it is.

obviously , i don't like this, and i don't like the idea of using this computer under this scenario. but what do i do, then?

am i suggesting that some kind of law enforcement came into my house and spliced a wireless chip into my laptop's system board in order to prevent me from uninstalling their surveillance software, because they insist on spying on me while i'm writing liner notes for 20 year old records?

i can only react to what i see in front of me, as baffling as it might be.

they really seem to think i'm some kind of russian spy. the fucking idiots...

i got the laptop back up, without the wireless keyboard, and two bizarre things showed up immediately:

1) there was a remote access server driver that i'd never seen before.

2) i was again able to activate windows, in a machine that does not have a network card and now has no known bluetooth device.

i need to be clear.

i have removed the wireless card from this device, and have dismantled the bluetooth keyboard. the rj-45 is not plugged in. and, yet, i can still activate windows.

i could not activate the same image from the pc.

so, it's increasingly becoming clear that there's a very serious backdoor hardwired into the board, and that there might not be anything i can do about it besides throw the computer away. taking a look at the wireless compartment, it almost looks like they spliced something.

the level of effort put into this is just baffling. i'm just an artist. for fuck's sakes.

i don't know what to do next. if i start working on this machine, are they going to reboot it on me?

what does marijuana do to jessica?

marijuana makes jessica extremely tired, lethargic, unmotivated and sort of depressed. however, it can make her more talkative in public, as well. that's why jessica only really likes to smoke marijuana at bars, and explicitly seeks to avoid it at home, by herself. 

jessica has never smoked marijuana habitually and never will.

jessica prefers drugs that make her more alert, focused and upbeat - like caffeine or nicotine, although she quit smoking, as a habit, many years ago.

so, i was going to get started a little after 23:00, when the overwhelming stench of marijuana from upstairs started pouring in from what i think was the porch, and i had to stop, make some coffee and take a very long shower. and, it was so bad that i think it knocked me out. i slept for a little bit, regardless...

somebody seemed to come in midway through the night and shut it down. and, i wanted to wait until after 4:30 to post.

that smelled like a group of people smoking, which is something that i'm not going to be able to tolerate if it happens on any sort of regular basis. i've been crystal clear: i don't care what you do to your body, but i expect to have total dominion over mine. if people want to smoke out in the forest, or at the bar, where it doesn't bother anybody, then i have no argument against it - in fact, i'll do it myself from time to time. but, on the issue of cleaning smoke out of residential areas, i align strictly with the rights of non-smokers to fresh air and a healthy, smoke-free environment over the so-called "rights of smokers". and, i insist i'm the one taking a libertarian position on this, as the right to fresh air is a real thing that is enshrined in all kinds of human rights literature. there is no such thing as the right to smoke anything, and there is nothing libertarian about smoking a foot from somebody's window, and pissing them off - that is randian, it's selfish, it's nihilistic, but it's not libertarian or socialist or anarchistic.

the way we deal with issues like this is that we (1) write city bylaws and enforce fines on people that break them and (2) allow for civil litigation, so that people that are harmed by the behaviour of others can be compensated properly for it.

we don't say "mah property, fuck you.". that's barbaric, really.

so, the idea of somebody smoking outside my window on a regular basis is a non-starter. i signed a non-smoking lease, here. i will film them smoking on their own porch, take the video to court, and sue them for thousands of dollars over it - and insist i'm in the right to do it, because it's my rights to fresh air that are what is substantive and must be enforced above all others, here.

i don't want to move, but i can't handle that.

after taking a nap, i was able to get the local parts of inri023 finished up and decided against building seeds for the other files, because i know i'm just going to redo it all, anyways. there are ten releases dated to january, 2014, two of them "lps", so i will have a fair amount of work to do when that comes up.

but, that means i'm now jumping directly to building the master document for january.

...if i can stay awake. fuck.

like, i just passed out in public from a marijuana attack, which i haven't fully recovered from. it's clearly having a horrific effect on me. what the fuck are they doing?

my understanding of the russian mentality is that what the russians would want from america is a partner - somebody that sees them as an equal, and is willing to focus mostly on diplomacy.

trump would have been preferable to clinton, certainly. but, clinton would have been particularly bad, perhaps worse than bush, from a global security perspective. she was a legit war monger.

but, that was a rare reversal. in the modern era, the candidates mostly likely to see the russians as equals exist on the democratic side. currently, i would have to expect that the russians would consider bernie sanders their best option - and not because he's a socialist, but because he's most interested in human rights.

the american narrative, across the spectrum, is essentially utterly ridiculous and pretty much complete nonsense to the core. you should know better than to take memos from the nsa at face value.

so, do i think the russians are trying to interfere in the primary on behalf of trump?

that is preposterously laughable, and you're frankly a complete moron if you believe it.

so, like...

will the results in nevada legitimize the results in new hampshire, after all? 

i'm sure the people of new hampshire appreciate that they have the approval of nevada in their voting choices.

it was a ridiculous, bigoted narrative from the start, and i'll be happy when the results bury it. but, i'd like to see some people held accountable, too.

when nevada basically ends up the same as iowa and new hampshire, will we call out the major networks and the dnc for their homophobia, their anti-semitism, their mccarthyism, their racism against blacks and latinos, in talking down to their voting preferences and, finally, their anti-white bigotry in writing off white people as different than everybody else?

there has been a fiasco, here.

and, it's been in the media coverage.

...but that poll i just posted is the first evidence of the expected bump for buttigieg. it's the data i've been referring to. i'd still like more, but thar she is. garr.

my stomach will be relieved that it no longer needs to direct adp away from digestion and towards oracular prediction mechanisms. it's enzymatic, i hear.

i find these results believable.

this cycle, sanders and biden have tended to have trouble matching their polling (it's much worse for biden) and buttigieg has tended to overperform. so, this might suggest something like 

sanders 25+%

buttigieg 20%-

biden 15% - maybe

nobody else viable

on the first ballot, with a slightly closer spread on the second.

also note that the early ballots are preferential. i like that. and, it introduces a level of unpredictability into the race, as these are voters that may not have participated in caucuses in years past.

https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/8-news-now-emerson-college-poll-shows-bernie-sanders-is-the-front-runner-in-nevada/

and, realize this - steyer could very well come in third.

well, this debate is certainly more lively.

- bloomberg is getting slaughtered.

- warren is making the kind of "i know i'm done" plea that klobuchar made in the last debate, that i thought was a sign of desperation there, and i think is one here, too. maybe she surprises me....

- bloomberg is exactly what sanders needed to focus.

- biden looks dazed and confused, and barely there at all.

- buttigieg continues to come off as "presidential", even if his policies suck.

- klobuchar was not given as much time to speak as she was in previous debates. she got hit a little, but i don't think it was too bad.

is that the end of bloomberg? i don't know.

i think it's the end of biden.

i'm going to hope to see a snap poll or two before i make a final projection, but the question here isn't about who is going to win the first ballot. sanders will. that is clear.

who else ends up viable? i'd put my bets on buttigieg, and i'll at least acknowledge that warren gave herself just about as good a chance as she could have, even if she doesn't actually get there.

this could be the first in a long list of states where sanders gets 70%+ of the delegates with barely or less than 30% of the vote.

i guess that what i am is a representative of the radical queer agenda.

you didn't think we existed? i wasn't so sure myself. but, here i am.

if i tell you "i don't want to support bernie sanders because i am skeptical of his commitment to queer solidarity issues", and your response is "you must be a trump supporter" then, i'm sorry, but you're a fucking idiot.

i'm supporting the greens this cycle. 

so, that was the last one for 2013.

there's another handful of releases i want to get out there for jan, 2014 before i pivot. i'm not done yet....one more month....

i'm going to need to file some things for 2013 locally, first. and, i'm also going to want to create some seeds and otherwise distribute the material for the end of 2013 into the next batch of release notes.

but, if i'm lucky, i can get something for january up by the end of the weekend, i think.

i might sneak out on sunday, but i'm actually planning mostly for monday.

inri023 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 8 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
- a 72 page doc file of liner notes over the fall of 2013
- a 72 page pdf file (same)
- an instructions file
- inri023.html.7z.txt is a 1 mb document that must be renamed and unzipped and contains an html version of the liner note package, including an html5 player that can load the purchased audio in the browser.

the full download, in flac, is 155 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 this collection of glitch remixes from 1998, which is nearing a point of final completion.

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

it's time to stop to eat and shower.

soon.

i think it should be clarified that the rcmp's offer to remove itself from the unceded area in bc is under the condition that the chiefs will allow construction of the pipeline to continue.

this is obviously a non-starter, and should be interpreted cynically, especially given the media's dishonest reporting of it, which seems designed to manipulate public opinion.

they're not looking for an extra couple of blankets, or something.

so, what do these protesters want?

they want you and me to rise up and march on parliament hill and tear down the government. maybe, maybe, it might happen this time? hopefully? with the creator's blessing?

and, they won't leave until we do.....or they're removed. 

the issue in bc is more specific, and more detailed negotiations are likely to be more productive - that's an actual process around an actual concern.

and, don't confuse yourself as to what the protesters are thinking, either.

there's this media narrative that they're carefully trying to extract concessions. listen - i've been in these actions, and you're giving these people too much credit.

what they're actually thinking is that they're going to generate an uprising in the working class. they're not aiming for anything particular. when they tell you they'll be there until the end of colonialism, they're talking literally - that's exactly what they intend.

but, they also know they'll get arrested. they're waiting for the cops to come in, and that's a part of the intended optics of the action.

in their minds, it's something more akin to a race against time. they're hoping, and some of them are maybe even praying, that they can get to critical mass before the cops smash through and send them away. they know better, but they hope otherwise. it's not game theory, it's base desperation. and, recognizing that is the actual reason why it's so important to show restraint.

this isn't a group of savvy negotiators trying to extract concessions, it's a group of desperate poor people that don't know what else to do.

and, when they inevitably fail, as they expect to, they'll come back again later. 

because you can't kill hope with logic.

again: this is the subtle, psychological trick that they use to push through the perception of difference - they present this as though it's a question of if they'll use force, rather than a careful determination of when they will.

by the end of this process, you'll be carefully lead to conclude that they had no other choice and these groups did it to themselves, which, in context, is mostly true. but, they still think they need what is essentially a psy-op to get the point across....

https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/set-a-deadline-to-dismantle-rail-blockades-legault-tells-trudeau

http://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/02/i-apologize-for-source-but-other-sites.html

i apologize for the source, but the other sites that google gave me were special-interest marijuana sites. in terms of useful information, i'll take a site like this over a site like leafly any day.

i'm just trying to get the point across that this is a known issue, even if you've never heard of it before: yes, marijuana can make people faint by triggering drops in blood pressure, and i'm pretty sure that's something that has happened to me several times, now.

but, it usually only lasts a few minutes. what made sunday weird is the amount of time that the reaction lasted, and that's what i need more information regarding.

https://drugprevent.org.uk/ppp/2008/11/marijuana-can-trigger-rapid-drop-in-blood-pressure/

i didn't expect the spanish inquisition....

that was a lot more sleep. i do require some sleep, i guess. but, i'm not used to feeling this tired.

it seems like my neck has finally loosened up.

a stiff neck like that is both a symptom of a stroke (which doesn't fit my medical profile) and a symptom of low blood pressure (which does). and, if i fell off that chair, i may have landed badly. i can't blame that on being drugged with any clarity, this could all, in theory, be the results of the worst green out in the history of humanity.

i haven't got a response from the bar yet. i'm thinking about going in on sunday, just to talk. i did that to the trumbullplex when i got knocked out by the edibles a few years ago, and i've been ok there ever since.

...even though i'm not likely to actually go back to a bar that called the police on me out of concerns for my own safety. that's like burning somebody at the stake to save their soul. it's wacked.

i got 75% of the way through the html file of inri023 before i crashed and should be done before sunset, when i will stop to eat and watch last night's debate.

first liner note release for inri023

when i sat down in late 2013, my intent was just to collect all of the tracks that were leftover. however, it became apparent quickly that i had a pile of these weird, glitchy remixes that i meant to do something with, but just never did anything with. they seemed to form an idea of their own, so i split them off into this inrimixed ep.

i feel that this decision was a good one, and that this collection has now become an important part of the discography - so much so that i am adding some tracks to it that were initially overlooked and then promoting it to 'remix lp'.

i need to be clear that this is a remix lp full of damaged, glitchy mixes. these tracks were left unscathed by the great remastering of 2013-2016. many of them are sourced from 112 kbps mp3 files, or worse. some are sourced from mono. i'm presenting the artifacts in the compression as a part of the glitch aesthetic. but, these are truly sad excuses for waveforms.

example: the cover art is actually the waveform for track 2; similarities to the mirror reflection of the cover of any seminal eponymous records from the late 60s are purely coincidental. waveforms like that do not bear any resemblance to any physical reality whatsoever. they fail, as waveforms. yet, these are the waveforms we have before us, and these are the sounds that such absurd waveforms make.

i suppose that the reason i have all of these glitchy mixes from the period is that i was planning on making a glitch lp. it's not that i specifically recall that as being wrong, so much as it is that my memories of it being right are not of clear strength. i sort of remember wanting to make a glitch record. the evidence exists that i wanted to make a glitch record. now i have the glitch record that it seems like i always wanted to make. at the least, my current self very much likes the idea that i released a glitch record in 1999.

constructed over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. released dec 27, 2013. the first two tracks were corrected to stereo in sept, 2014. the last two tracks were added for re-release as a remix lp in dec, 2016. re-released & finalized as lp003 on dec 17, 2016. first liner note release added on feb 20, 2020. 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 (1998, 2013-2020). as of feb 20, 2020, the release includes a 72 page booklet in doc, pdf & html, with an html5 audio frontend, that includes journal entries from the remastering process over sept-dec, 2013.

credits

released January 28, 1999

j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, piano, drum programming, sequencing, vocals, cool edit synthesis, noise generators, found sounds, sampling, loops, sound design, digital wave editing, digital effects processing, noise reduction, a broken tape deck, production.

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