i'm going to be careful about what i say about this. the important thing to take away is that resistance has been growing for nearly three years. it's integrated with some of the other protests, like some of the anti-fracking protests. the people that keep an eye on these things are well aware of this.

paul is correct about land claims, but for a more jaded (and i think realistic) view of the situation, seek out pamela palmater. in theory, it's a better approach. in practice, not at all.

but this is the argument, certainly. it's not an accident that these lines ran through native communities when they were built. sure, the pipelines are already there, but they either run natural gas or much lighter crude. the reversal and similar lines through the general area will spill, and they will spill in indigenous communities. so, it's natural to think they should have some say in the matter - due to questions of sovereignty or just basic democracy.

the coalition is being built around what could be called progressive community activist groups - the type dominated by white liberals that have substituted socialism as an atheist reaction to what is fundamentally a deeply rooted christian value system. it's nimby to the core, just like in bc.

it's going to come down to the politics, of course. unfortunately, militant tactics - coerced or not - are going to harm the activists on a pr front, even as it helps them in court. beneath the upper crust intelligentsia, canada does not hold up to it's reputation as a social left paradise. the news will talk about development producing jobs and violent savages and most canadians will buy it.

....and i don't honestly think the western pipe is even dead yet. keystone will be approved when it's politically viable. this is all of the above, not one or the other.

something else they'll try and trick us with is the idea that it will reduce gas prices, which of course is not true - it's for export.

worst of all, the ndp is supporting it over the western pipelines because it will create union refinery jobs (and the western stuff would be refined offshore).

the courts may save the day in the end, but the canadian people will certainly not.

also...

the party on the streets was quebec solidaire. everybody in the protest movement saw what was coming.

it's a little known fact that clinton had the airforce on standby back in the last referendum. that wasn't something that was actually going to happen. is peladeau less crazy than bouchard? different kind of crazy. the contingent plan has no doubt changed little.

as for where the pq stands on the political spectrum, the truth is they don't. they're opportunistic. it's a thing in canada, where parties represent the positions they think define the way the winds are blowing.

they're not creating this wave of white nationalism (and that's what it is), but co-opting it away from other forces, like the adq, who took a good run at power. it's horrific, and the liberals are being spineless about it - a really sad show, all around. but this is a reaction to hold the ground to keep the movement together...

...just as their previous swing to the left was. let us not forget that the pq was formed primarily as a split from the progressive conservatives, who (outside of social credit) were the most right-wing of the serious parties at the time.

just to preemptively counter some textbooks that may be overly idealistic or flat-out out of date...

consider the following four combinations:

a) properly written kernel mode drivers written in an os with weak kernel mode security (xp, with most hardware combinations).
b) kernel mode drivers written for an os with weak kernel mode security being run in an os with strong kernel mode security, and that expects almost all drivers to run in user mode. (vista/7/8, with some hardware combinations)
c) badly written user-mode drivers written in an os with strong kernel mode security, and that expects almost all drivers to run in user mode. (vista/7/8, with some hardware combinations)
d) correctly written user-mode drivers written in an os with strong kernel mode security, and that expects almost all drivers to run in user mode. (vista/7/8, by design)

the reality will agree with the textbook in stating that a is faster than d, on the same hardware - meaning xp is faster by design, but less secure (that's the trade-off). again, windows 7 on faster hardware may seem faster than windows xp on slower hardware but that's an apples and oranges comparison that reduces to an actual comparison of the hardware.

but the situation i'm talking about is with either b or c, which are both going to be slow and buggy and which is still the reality with some hardware.

if you think back to '06, vista had a horrible reputation. this is the actual root of the problem. microsoft understood it perfectly well. it's support agents (one of whom was me) understood it perfectly well. the hardware companies understood it perfectly well. but part of my job was confusing people into blaming intel or nvidia instead of microsoft. which isn't to say that they didn't share the blame. but that was microsoft's official strategy - fuck the issue, lie to the customers. they saw it as a pr game.

i can't count the number of times where i nearly broke down and just leveled with the poor bastard on the other side of the line. but, given that everybody understood that the problem had no solution, my job was to ensure that the person walked away from the conversation blaming the person that made their board or chipset or video card, rather than the company that made an operating system that changed all the industry standards without proper documentation or sufficient warning.

again, though, it's eight years on, now. there's no excuse for it still being a problem.

so, that's actually something else to take away from this: if support agents can solve your problem, they will. if they can't, they will lie to you - and get promoted if they're really good at it.

going back to the usb test, i should point out that my pc actually has a faster processor, surprisingly, given that the chip is from 2005. my pc is a pentium D @ 2x3.6. the laptop is an i5 @ 2x2.4. the difference between ten minutes and 30 seconds is still incredible, though, and can't be explained purely by the processor speed. especially given what i know about the way the drivers work...

listen: i worked support for microsoft. i'm telling you the story from the inside. from microsoft training. from documents written by microsoft engineers. it might sound incredible, but it's the actual, blunt truth.

i'm transferring files around right now, and this is a good example. it took almost ten minutes for me to transfer a few gb of files from my laptop (which is running a 64 bit windows 7, with a core i5 and 4 gb of ram - certainly better hardware specs on paper than my desktop) to a usb key. it took 30 seconds to transfer the same data from the same usb to my pc's hard drive, which is currently running an xp x64. if i were to do that on a fully patched vista, it would take ten hours.

ten hours!? yes. ten hours.

...because intel won't update the chipset to conform to the very different driver signing standards. the way windows handles drivers was a huge update from xp to vista.

i'm willing to accept that a lot of hardware manufacturers initially didn't understand how to rewrite their drivers for vista/7/etc. but, they did eventually figure it out. and there's really no excuse for not doing so, other than driving the hardware market.

it's a very widespread problem.

https://www.google.ca/#q=vista+slow+file+transfer&safe=off

all those answers are dead wrong. it's the change in driver framework.

(specifically, chipset drivers)

windows 98 is no longer useable for a number of reasons (for me it's mostly sata drivers), but it would be way faster than xp, too.

generally speaking, the older an operating system is, the faster it is (when compared on the same hardware). of course, it's going to have less functionality. it may be less safe to access the internet with, in theory if not in practice.

this may seem counter-intuitive, but it shouldn't. making something more complex makes it work slower. what doesn't make any sense at all is the idea that upgrading your os will make your machine run faster.

this is a brief explanation.

"If we're only using two isolation rings, it's a bit unclear where device drivers should go-- the code that allows us to use our video cards, keyboards, mice, printers, and so forth. Do these drivers run in Kernel mode, for maximum performance, or do they run in User mode, for maximum stability? In Windows, at least, the answer is it depends. Device drivers can run in either user or kernel mode. Most drivers are shunted to the User side of the fence these days, with the notable exception of video card drivers, which need bare-knuckle Kernel mode performance. But even that is changing; in Windows Vista, video drivers are segmented into User and Kernel sections. Perhaps that's why gamers complain that Vista performs about 10 percent slower in games. "

https://blog.codinghorror.com/understanding-user-and-kernel-mode/

this explains a bit about the actual problem, without getting into it. i don't really want to spend any more time looking around about this. it's something that nobody seems to want to be published. i wouldn't know this if it weren't for reading internal support memos that said DON'T TELL THE CUSTOMERS THIS all over them.

but, as i've stated, this is irreversible on some hardware, without getting the manufacturers to update their drivers. what's happening is that the drivers are running in kernel mode, when microsoft wants them to run in user mode. this is producing huge amounts of security checks (by design) that slow the fuck out of the file operations. what intel needs to do is rewrite their drivers to run in user mode, like microsoft wants them to do. but they'd rather blame it on vista and tell people they have to upgrade their hardware, as microsoft blames it on the hardware manufacturers (at least internally).

https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/hardware/drivers/wdf/user-mode-driver-framework-frequently-asked-questions

the result is unusable hardware, on any windows version beyond and including vista.

but, the design changes in how vista uses drivers make xp faster (by design) anyways.

you can think of it as a trade-off between speed and security. xp is all speed, weaker security. vista is all security. now as the hardware has caught up, it's evened out (in terms of perception). but xp remains inherently waaaaay faster.

i mean, this isn't entirely microsoft's fault. it's as much on intel and others (my problem is with intel, i don't know how much others have caught up. initially, nvidia was dragging their feet on this a whole lot.). but, what the hardware people were saying at the time was that microsoft didn't give them enough warning. their engineers had to go through a lengthy retraining process. it's apparently not the kind of change you can gloss over in a weekend. the retraining required was substantial.

how much of that is an excuse, i don't know. but there's a reason that microsoft is widely acknowledged as incompetent. and the whole driver framework switch from xp to vista really demonstrates it.

even so, there's no excuse for this still being an issue, 8 years later.

just a note that if you're still geek enough to be using xp (and i and others have very good reasons that will not change soon, if ever - i'm more likely to move to linux than a post-vista windows system, because they're really legitimately awful on a lot of levels) - support ends on april 8th. so, it's a good time to track down all the updates. if, for example, you've been relying on an sp2 disc and then running windows update whenever you reinstall, you won't be able to do that anymore.

somebody will no doubt do this and torrent it, but trusting them is another issue. better to do it yourself while you can.

there are hardware issues that jumped up in vista that never got solved. the only solution is to buy specific hardware. i mean, if you're running a pre-built system then you probably won't notice any of this. but, as deep and valid as the criticisms of apple are, you're better off with a mac than a dell or an hp....

there's a lot of fixes that don't work floating around. i actually worked support for vista and i will authoritatively tell you that microsoft's response is to blame it on the hardware.

yet, the same hardware works flawlessly with xp.

so, there's conspiracy theories floating around that probably have a lot of truth to them.

around '06, microsoft started loading it's operating systems up with meaningless services that are designed solely to require faster hardware. there's almost no functional use for any of this, except to coerce people into upgrading their systems. that much is really not debatable.

but you can turn that off. that's minor.

one of the bigger problems is with copy operations, and while it may be true that this is at it's core a problem with user-mode drivers (that is to say that the hardware people never made drivers that work properly with the security aspects of windows, post-vista), there's still this lingering question of whether the thing is by design.

what that means is that people with certain types of fairly modern hardware are stuck with xp, unless they want to upgrade central aspects of their system or deal with cripplingly bad file operations.

that's a very good reason to either stick with xp, or move to linux. microsoft isn't going to make an exception - they're going to blame it on the hardware manufacturers. and the hardware manufacturers are going to tell you to buy new hardware - and you'd better do the research to make sure the drivers work right.

for me, the precise issue is my board. but, i mean, it's a perfectly good asus with sata connectors that can handle up to 16 gb of ram. there's no good reason to upgrade this board. intel just won't fix the chipset drivers to work properly with the way windows does, post-vista.

but if i stick with xp, then i get full use of the board.

worse, the truth is that xp just performs better at core os functions for the simple reason that it's doing less things in the process. getting the drivers to work right will speed up file operations, but it will never be as fast as xp on the same hardware. that would defy basic logic; it would require doing more things in less time. nor does a home user need to care about the security functions that slow everything down...

so, again, it goes back to the conspiracy theory: were the security updates really necessary and were they really buckling to pressure to idiot-proof the os, or are they just driving the hardware market by literally introducing billions of empty cycles?

i'm hoping microsoft decides to do a final platform update or something that pulls everything together. that'll make life easier. but, i suspect that they won't. so...

april 8th.

i'm surprised that i was able to log into my school account, but i was. i was looking for a way to download 7, home premium due to the extra key i have. the links that are all over the internet are all corrupt. i've tried four times, and have given up.

they did, however, have a 64-bit xp, with key. well, that's the best option, really.

i should be able to reimage a 32-bit version based on an old compaq corporate image from about the year 2003. it's all patched up, and ready to be ripped apart.

so, i will come out of this with a 32/64 all-xp dual boot that i will plan to slowly transfer over to 64. first, i need to focus on replacing the dead hd. and i still need to know if i can get the script off.

getting a few more sticks of ram will help act as an incentive to the switch.

probably not today, but almost certainly tomorrow.

bad iso.

ugh.

i won't do this a third time.

i'm going to end up mostly running 32 bit software. 32 bit software on a 64 bit os is a bad idea. i mean, it works, but it's pointless to upgrade if your key programs are 32 bit.

i was going to maintain a dual boot, anyways. but i'm thinking old xp - even broken - will still be dominant for the near future.

i built that machine - and this was many years ago now - to get up to 64 bit xp in time. expandable to 16 gb on the board was pretty advanced at the time, although i've never put in more than 4.

contrary to claims otherwise, moving to 64-bit from 32-bit with 4 gb of ram can get extra resources because 32-bit will inevitably ignore one of your sticks to fit the total (including the ram from your video card) under 4. it's not a max of 4 + bios + video + whatever else. it's 4. max. total. so, if i upgrade then i get another gb...

...but the reality is that setting the pagefile to 10 gb is just as good. the system may have to dump stuff to the drive here and there, but you never have to use more than 3 gb of ram all at the same time and if you did your system would crash because it couldn't.

i'm standing here all these years later and sort of laughing at myself. 64-bit is still a niche market. and i have to admit i don't see any real reason to upgrade, either. there's nothing i can think of that will work in 64 that doesn't in 32.

it's mostly the lack of evaluation software. there's lots of software i could buy. i can't afford to even think about that. so if i'm running everything in 32 anyways because it's all i can find then it's meaningless.

but it may be useful to have a non-broken system, from time to time.

yeah.

the problem with running 32 in 64 is that you're constantly converting it. what you're actually doing is running through a virtual machine. that's a net loss in speed (it may not be measurable, but it's a downgrade). considering the amount of drivers in use in sound production, that's bad news waiting to happen.

i just realized i installed the wrong version of 7 on my laptop. it's a home premium key on the back. i have a pro version i got from school, that resulted from a wipe on the recovery console. i can't swap the keys out without reinstalling, so i'm going to download home premium and try that for my 64 bit escapade, instead.

it's what i should have done in the first place.

(i could call them, but it's not worth it. they never really fixed the copy issues in vista.)

a google search suggests it's still a problem with 7. well, i'll find out.

i highly doubt there are 32-bit linux drivers for my mixer, let alone 64-bit ones. it's not feasible.

currently reminding myself why vista is the wost operating system ever...

i mean, i can handle a little bit of performance degradation from an optimized xp to an out-of-the-box vista, at least for now. but my windows 98 computer (currently running xp) can transfer files faster. it's preposterously slow.

i don't have the interest in stripping it down the way i stripped down xp, but i'm going to try to vlite it before i essentially give up and stick with what is a half-broken xp. the cd install is the broken part. the scripts i lost in the hard drive crash were what fixed them...

....and then this no good, third rate os has the nerve to reject my perfectly valid product key. fuckers...

you are SO getting formatted, windows vista.

i actually worked vista support for a while, believe it or not. i wrote some of those kb articles. it was a fun job with good pay, even. canadian labour can't compete with labour in the philippines, though. and alas...

sssssso, the president just took advantage of a non-situation that most americans don't care about to give himself more power to authoritatively act unilaterally in dictating sanctions.

given that sanctions are an act of war, isn't this the kind of thing that congress should be doing?

then again, yet another power grab by obama is really just a pretty average thursday.

good point near the end.

note that parubiy is one of the people that the russian media has identified as a fascist, and that observers have carefully agreed is actually one.

i'm actually wondering if ukraine was partitioned, ala molotov-ribbentrop.

note, though, that he just gave himself the power to unilaterally slap sanctions on russia. that's a huge power grab. let me see what the order says...

this is actually very weak, on both sides. it's for show.

as for a lack of media coverage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSltb2vzCNI

also, al jazeera and al arabiya are state owned media.

the independent media *does* focus on this.

this is a better analysis. cockburn is a high-end analyst, it's nice to see him on camera. i'm mostly just "newsing" when i eat nowadays...

there's an unusual narrative that is worth at least understanding. back in wwI, there was an agreement between the british and the saudis that the arabs would get a centralized state in return for their aid against the ottomons. instead, they got a lot of little countries and a century of pointless conflict.

there currently seems to be an alliance between the white house, the saudis and what is left of al qaeda. the re-establishment of a caliphate was one of the demands of al qaeda, and while you'd have a hard time getting american or saudi diplomats to use that language, it is clear that they want hegemony over the arab world.

so, this all ties together through that hundred year old promise, in conjunction with the world being broken into trade blocs.

the eu, the sco, mercosur, the au, nafta. these are the types of organizations that really define sovereignty in the 21st century.

there seems to be a view that an arab league type bloc is the right way to set up the area, just as was promised in the great war. for whatever reason, the saudis are acknowledged as the hegemon in this bloc.

ok, so, read between the lines. heist? i think not.

what it exposes is that currency is the root of corruption, not the way that currency is produced.

https://news.vice.com/articles/over-100k-in-bitcoin-was-stolen-in-a-ridiculously-low-tech-heist?trk_source=homepage-in-the-news

this is the kind of doublespeak that's useful in understanding what they're up to.

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/8710/World/Region/Gates-Libya-turmoil-could-destabilize-Egypt,-Tunis.aspx

this analysis is prevalent, and i don't want to say it's wrong, but i don't think it gets to the point.

how can the issue be discussed without mentioning the uprising in egypt? libya was mostly opportunistic. i understand paul's confusion in regards to the timing, but it just had to do with a window of opportunity.

a more interesting question is why he wasn't bombed previously. why wasn't there an invasion as far back as lockerbie? even clinton could have theoretically pulled this one off without a duck in approval ratings. but it was tactically problematic, because removing ghadaffi would no doubt destabilize egypt - something that the israelis and americans alike had no stomach for. similarly with syria.

but with both egypt and tunisia already in chaos, the argument against destabilizing the region no longer applied. rather, the window of opportunity could not be ignored. peace through coercion became secondary to an easy kill. remember: these people aren't liberals that use force as a last resort, but rather predators that resort to diplomacy when force is unlikely to be successful. so, the imminent invasion that had been put off for decades was activated.

the russians have been clear that this pissed them off. the way the americans did it showed a complete lack of respect for their ambitions. as we see repeated in syria and now ukraine.

i think there's also something to say about saudi ambitions. he speaks of france, but we know who france speaks for. the other side of libya is algeria, a country we do not hear much about but that may pose a natural boundary in the western extent of saudi influence.

but, it was mostly an opportunistic kill. like the vultures they are....

a different story than snipers on the roof.

that's pretty fascist sounding, too. pretty much brownshirts...

like, what did they do? run a theatrical presentation?

propaganda or not, nato needs to be doing something about this.

if a big part of the problem is stagnant wages, would it not make sense to tax the corporations that are profiting from it, relative to stagnation?

http://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2014/03/18/tax_hikes_loom_for_upperincome_earners_in_ontario.html

i happen to have one of those cords from an old phone. i may end up trying this, after i swap out the chips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZBsf-5iiDE

i have a .10, though, not a .11. the bug that affects the .11s doesn't affect my model.

regardless, if i can't get it to read, trying to hack in through hyperterminal is a third thing i can try.

yeah. i think if i just download everything from bandcamp, and repeat the process of categorizing all the cd-rs and dvd-rs in the box...

it's not worth the amount recovery is going to cost. sadly.

tools or bust. i'll find out in two weeks.

musically, what i've lost is xml files and transitional pieces. parts to build tracks up, but nothing completed.

for right now, i'd rather spend the cash on a good external backup drive.

on second thought, data recovery is much more expensive than i thought it would be.

there are two further troubleshooting steps i can try at the beginning of april, when i can get the right tools, but i think they're both low probability. i've resigned myself to needing somebody to open the drive up. that could take years to save up for...

obviously, i can't leave myself in suspended animation for that long. so, i'm going to take the opportunity to upgrade as much software as i can.

in the end, i'll have to decide if it's worth it. am i happy with a vanilla vista or a vanilla xp? do i really need to recover a few dozen source files for the sake of having them? or is the iso i'm about to reconstruct "good enough"?

i could see the drive sitting in a box for the next ten years gathering dust.

i absolutely must try those fixes, though. and if they don't work, and i'm happy with the replacement, i might get experimental about it.

of course, i don't have the right sized screwdriver.

...and i just spent my last $20 for the month on fruit and vegetables....

 powerless until april. guess i'll grab a book...

well, i guess i can try the store tomorrow. maybe they'll even let me use a screwdriver.

there's no use in installing on the backup drive, because it's going to be wiped out as soon as i get the data recovered. by the time i can use the os, i'll be writing over it.

i have four identical drives.

i'm going to swap out the circuit board, just to see. surely, i can't damage anything...

on second thought, if i hold it up really close to my ear, i *can* hear it clicking. it's just a super quiet drive. that's not what i wanted to learn, but at least it clarifies the problem. and i don't see why i can't get the info off...even if i have to save up for several months...

i'm hoping it's this easy.

i'm going to stumble out to the local store tomorrow and see if they'll just plug it in for me to check.

i wasn't able to try it from an e-sata 'cause i don't actually have the right cable.

i mean, the data is there. i should be able to get it off. it seems like the power is broken. it's not whirring, it's just not reading.

i need it to bypass the bios somehow to determine if it's the power or not. if it's the power, i'm going to have to pay somebody to replace it...

the only other thing i can think of is that the self-test is failing, and that's why it's neither whirring nor being read by the bios. still reduces to paying somebody to swap it out.

it's not that stalin was justified in shipping the crimean tatars back to their homeland to the east of the caspian, it's that western media narratives do not even concede that their homeland was east of the caspian, and that the indigenous peoples of the region were slavic/scythian groups.

i'm a history geek. i understand most people aren't. but in glossing over this, the western msm is actually glossing over one of the greatest atrocities in human history. race politics and geopolitics, unfortunately, have led to the slavic slave trade being something that most people don't even know about.

but the depopulation and colonization of eastern europe at the hands of successive groups of turkic and mongol invaders is, in fact, a crime on the level of the transatlantic slave trade or the depopulation of the americas. and it should be understood in that context.

over a space of roughly five centuries, millions of slavic speaking people were captured by the crimean tatars and shipped south to the ottoman empire. *the slave trade was the basis of the crimean economy*. within the islamic world, the slavic peoples were not treated differently than african slaves.

you'll notice that slave and slav look similar. in english, they are the same word. our word for slave is the same as our word for eastern european. this is due to the slave trade that the tatar khanate in the crimea carried out.

you didn't know that, did you? that's ok, few people do.

but i did and, knowing that, it's persistently exceedingly difficult to listen to the western narrative of the poor tatars being expelled from their homeland. this is absolute, total fucking bollocks.

imagine speaking of the african national congress expelling the afrikaaners from their homeland, as nearly happened. or mexicans expelling texans and californians from their homeland.

it IS that bad.

again, it's not to justify stalin's deportation. one crime does not justify another.

but read this. please....

http://books.google.ca/books?id=Qjwid7xcOPIC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=tatar+slave+economy&source=bl&ots=A4Zwyz67ji&sig=-HoRTHNvj7BNpoG1bmyoj9vk9o0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=DfIoU6uwOoTCyAHJzIGICQ&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=tatar%20slave%20economy&f=false

comment elsewhere:

"international law is a type of public relations, not a system that governs the behaviour of states. the major powers trot it out only when they have no further recourse on an issue and instead want to turn public opinion against the country that has won the match. russia does this routinely, as well.

this is the first match russia has won in many years. they get to keep their port. the tables will be turned soon enough."

eightgeorge
Was Libya Legal?? As Hillary Clinton Said "We came, we Saw , He Died!! What difference does it MAKE!!!

deathtokoalas
indeed. international law is a type of public relations, not a system that governs the behaviour of states. the major powers trot it out only when they have no further recourse on an issue and instead want to turn public opinion against the country that has won the match. russia does this routinely, as well.

this is the first match russia has won in many years. they get to keep their port. the tables will be turned soon enough.

sounds like a false flag attack. they're going to blame it on the fascists. while i think kiev-inspired (and western-backed) violence remains a possibility, i couldn't see a purpose in them randomly picking off two soldiers like this...

i'd expect the character assassination of putin to increase to comedic levels in the near future, if it hasn't already.

everything i've seen suggests to me that the russians were legitimately concerned about being evicted from their naval base, and that they concluded that the only way to ensure that wouldn't happen would be to annex the region. might the new ukrainian government have allowed them to stay? maybe. but, given their nationalist (and anti-russian) rhetoric and their projected alliances, the russians seem to have calculated this was too risky to allow to happen organically. the rest is propaganda.

i really think it's as simple as that. i don't consider this situation to be at all complex. the russians are simply asserting control over a naval base that they feel was threatened by events in ukraine. that is all.

i'm still irked by the lack of transparency, and not really happy about the annexation, but i can reasonably understand that through the policy not yet being entirely formed. if the goal is to maintain control of the port, is this the most reasonable approach? it certainly is. is there much of a difference between setting up an autonomous region as a protectorate and just annexing it? merely legally.

i do agree with the prof, though, in his view that russia is making it seem like everything follows the law perfectly well. let us recall that the bush administration made sort of a big deal about american sovereignty giving it the right to act unilaterally, outside of the united nations. iraq was completely illegal. obama has softened this, but not retreated from it. consider libya, which was basically a trick (the resolution was to protect civilians in the case of attacks by ghadaffi, but nato used it to invade without demonstrating that such things were happening). so, this seems to be a systemic shift in american policy, one that would give a certain OLD right strain a nice big smile: fuck the pinkos at the un, the americans can do what they want. so said mr. birch to mrs. roosevelt...

the russians have been reacting to this by upholding international law at every opportunity they can. do they really believe what they're saying? well, maybe they've convinced themselves. but, it's mostly been a way to try and rein in american hegemony. and, what else can they do? they can no longer threaten the americans. so, if the question is "or else what?" then the russian response is "or else you're in breach of international law and will be condemned by the international community."

weak? an understatement, but it's what they've got. so, they've been sort of obsessed with it. it's become very routine for the russians to try and follow international law as best they can to set that example.

that doesn't mean they believe in it. "niceties" is the right language. and they'll likely keep it up.

rap news 23

L00NGB00W
Gotta ask, are you guys affiliated with RT?

selvmordspilot
afaik they're based in australia. I'm afraid it's the other way around. RT has gotten their hands on some great journalists - that are worth featuring in the rap news. #powerfulabbymartin

deathtokoalas
they are recently, yes. check their facebook page.

L00NGB00W
I can see no evidence of this.

dangerouslytalented
They have some great journalists, and are not afraid to use them... But only if and when the facts are on the Kremlin's side. The problem is when the facts are not on the Kremlin's side, whoops journalism broke.

selvmordspilot
true, and it's still up to us to decide who to believe in these matters.

dangerouslytalented
... basically, if Russia has a vested interest in not telling the truth, then don't trust them.

deathtokoalas
all media has a motive, otherwise it wouldn't exist. i mean, it's not like rap news is void of bias, either, we just all like their biases. so, i dunno why people have this naive perception that some media is more trustworthy than other media. all media is full of lies; it would't exist if it wasn't. and the other response consequently gets it right. you have to be constantly skeptical....

dangerouslytalented
That completely depends on what the motives are, Take the Guardian for example, their business model relies on their integrity. If they sell that, then there is no more money. Ever.

L00NGB00W
Assuming that all media is lies borders on paranoia.  

One must take the stories with a grain of salt, and realize there is bias. 

The idea of the fifth estate is to report on the actions of those in power. With enough viewpoints, one can piece together the truth.

deathtokoalas
the guardian is one of the worst advocates of liberal imperialistic bullshit and general state apologism out there. their coverage of foreign conflicts often seems written by the british state department, if not by the cia. kind of like the new york times, actually, which markets itself as relying on integrity, but is basically state media. both cnn and fox claim to be "trusted" as well; generally, when "trust" is a part of your advertising campaigns, that's a flag not to trust you. to see how bad the guardian is, all you have to do is read the independent, who is a rare source in the western world. you can at least vaguely trust the general idea of what they're presenting. but, even they have certain lines that they need to be artistic in dancing around.

@L00NGB00W it's not paranoia, it's a type of hypothesis testing. the null hypothesis is that what they're telling me is bullshit. now, can enough evidence be generated to reject that null hypothesis?

i suppose scientists are just a bunch of schizophrenics, living in a delusional fantasy reality.

we need more scientific thinking, to increase the bar so to speak, not vague accusations of paranoia and more pandering to rupert murdoch.

L00NGB00W
There you go. Case in point.  

I'm not pandering to Rupert Murdoch, he manipulates the news. <_<  

Assuming everything is a conspiracy is not a null hypothesis. Even if it were... One true news article would debunk said hypothesis.  

Weigh each story on an individual basis. And skeptically if it is merited.  

Pretty sure I am the one thinking scientifically here.

deathtokoalas
you don't know what science is, clearly.

this is painful: "Assuming everything is a conspiracy is not a null hypothesis. Even if it were... One true news article would debunk said hypothesis."

and i'm just going to request that you stop, educate yourself and come back.

L00NGB00W
Ugh.  

The truth is painful sometimes. ^_^  

I will stop now. But I will not return.   

It's not like I have anything to gain from this conversation, other than enlightening someone.  

Good day to you. ;)

deathtokoalas
can somebody other than me explain what a null hypothesis is and why the statement that it can be contradicted with a single counter-example is hilariously misinformed?

L00NGB00W
Sure, I'll explain it to you with an example. ;)  

Hypothesis: Squirrels are eating my strawberries.
Null Hypothesis: Squirrels are not eating my strawberries.  

Experiment: Set up a camera to see what is eating my strawberries...

Result: squirrels.  

Hence, the Null hypothesis is contradicted.  

LOGIC  

You're welcome. ;)

deathtokoalas
that's right. now, what happens when you apply that to the question of whether media coverage is accurate or not?

(note that i'm being generous for brevity, there's no use in getting picky about the language given that the discussion is circling around an idea)

this is all getting to the point that if you want to approach the question of media truth with a scientific perspective, you begin by assuming falsity and then generate evidence otherwise. that doesn't mean you should be calculating p-values to analyze the evening news and it doesn't mean you need to walk around with a tinfoil hat on, literally or figuratively. it's just a rule of thumb, in context. one could summarize it with the word skepticism.

...and to clear up that loose end (if it's not clear), suggesting that finding one "counter-example" (which in this case would be an honest newscast, and these do certainly exist) proves that all media is correct is one of those classical logical fallacies. i'm pretty stingy with my likes, but i'll +1 the first person that points it out.

L00NGB00W
Same. But your original statement was that 'all media is biased', Not whether 'all media is accurate'. They're rather different statements.

With the former, finding one contradiction invalidates the Null hypothesis.

With the latter, all media would have to be true to falsify the null. Which it isn't.

Perhaps I'm just  being picky.

deathtokoalas
yeah, you very much misunderstood what i said. the statement "all media is full of lies" is not the same thing as "all media is solely lies". and if you could find me a media source that's never lied, i'd be interested in hearing what it is. further, you couldn't do a meaningful test on the question of "is all media solely lies?" because you're not dealing with a specific enough question. i mean, sure, a counter-example would demonstrate it false, but it's an absurd statement to begin with. hypothesis testing has to work in a more specific context than that. i thought that was obvious, but apparently not.

it's again a basic fallacy. x is in Y does not meant Y only consists of x.

what you could do, i suppose, is generate a data set of broadcasts from a single news source and then ask "does this specific news source lie?". but that's about as broad as the method allows for (and perhaps badly (but, with some sources, perhaps reasonably - it's a question) sets all reporters as equivalent), and is something different altogether.

i was working on the assumption of analyzing claims on a statement-by-statement basis by beginning with the perspective that, because all media is full of lies, skepticism is perpetually required.

i couldn't imagine anybody not realizing that.

dangerouslytalented
There are two classes: "trust but verify", and "these guys are full of horseshit, if I want to know about this story, I am going to go somewhere else for the primary source".

L00NGB00W
No I did not, but I'm tired of arguing with you. 

"It's an absurd statement to begin with."  

Yes. Precisely. Some reporting is honest and accurate, some isn't.  

Good day.

deathtokoalas
well, it works out to the same thing in the end. you're presenting a categorization of required rigour, if anything. i think it's largely illusory, and reduces to your own biases. one person will put fox in a and democracy now in b, and the other will flip them around. in the end, you're doing your homework, either way. that's the important part.

personally, i think it's more worthwhile to figure out what the biases are so that they can be actively countered. this whole crimea thing has actually been useful, as it's brought some closet communists out (and hopelessly misguided ones, given that russia is currently the most right-wing of any major country, including the united states. one might even call them useful idiots.).

97%, huh?

sounds just like old times.

actually, crimea was previously a part of the venetian republic.

the "venetian republic" was actually a maritime empire.

so, he's recognizing their autonomy, which is what they were saying. but, i mean, it's hard to square the whole fiasco without russia seeing this as a rubber stamp process....

i've stated before that i have the mind of a 70 year-old woman in the body of a 12 year-old girl. but i was sort of joking.

it's not that strange for people to skip their childhood. childhood is really a social construction in the first place. the truth is it's the parents that won't let go of the innocence; in reality, most of the world is working at ten and reproducing at fifteen. keeping young people juvenile throughout their teens and even into their twenties requires huge amounts of biological and psychological suppression. rather than saying "i skipped childhood", the better idea might be "i escaped the christian cult's attempt to stunt my development to uphold their warped perceptions of purity".

but, i don't expect white liberals to lose their fantasy reality any time soon.

so, skipping childhood is common and normal; it's the idea of childhood that is perverted. but, skipping adulthood is really bizarre.

i mean skipping adulthood as a phase of life, rather than having any cultural affinity with people twice my age. the entire set of goals just seemed pointless to me. property? what for? vehicles? i'd prefer something more ecological. job? status? you know you're going to die, right? what's the point? partner? i prefer my independence and i need to spend most of my time alone, anyways - it's impossible for me to maintain a relationship with the need for that much alone time. children? i'd rather be paraded through downtown by my entrails than become a slave to my offspring, thank you.

it was the goals of retirement that appealed to me directly from childhood: time to read, a space to grow a garden and maybe a pet (at this point, though, i think pets are as much enslavement as children).

i mean, we have some pretty bizarre ideas of what an adult is in our society. the definition of an adult in our society is identical to that of a slave. then, we associate adulthood with freedom. 'cause freedom and slavery are the same thing, here.

but to just skip the entire phase of existence - the dominant phase, the defining phase - is something i'm having a hard time understanding in myself, even as it is crystal clear to me that it is true.

briefly, then:

1) unilateral declarations of independence may be unconstitutional in individual countries. however,
2) international law is that the right to declare independence trumps everything and
3) liberal courts have generally agreed that democratic states should not use force to repress established independence movements.
4) the referendum in crimea is consequently illegal under ukrainian law but legal under international law. further, it would be contrary to international norms for ukraine to react with force to suppress an independence movement.

however, the reality is that neither side cares about national or international law.

as far as i can tell, the western media line that the referendum was illegal and should not be recognized is rejecting international law on the subject, which is that sovereign states have no rights whatsoever in preventing independent movements.

people are talking kosovo, but the example i understand best is quebec. (yes, i've studied this formally).

there's been a subtle supreme court ruling on the matter in canada, which is best to toss in the garbage as utter bullshit. those are strong words and i mean them. it's that bad. really. the succession reference case in canada is actually a breathtaking example of blatant historical whitewashing and revisionism to create a trumped up pretext to uphold state interests. it is now all but illegal for quebec to separate from canada, but if they decide to do it anyways is it legal to stop them?

this is where the ruling becomes subtle. it's all but illegal to separate, yet equally illegal to try and stop them, should they succeed in declaring independence. further, a successful declaration of independence is defined by the ability to assert sovereignty, which is essentially the ability to prevent canada from stopping them. the ruling consequently purposefully states nothing of value about quebec's functional right to unilateral succession (despite being clear it would be all but illegal in canadian law), but it does put restrictions on canada's ability to prevent it by force.

on that point, the court did pick out the more interesting question. anybody can claim anything. who that opposes this is going to stop them? the more pressing question is what kind of rights exist in suppressing independence movements, and when worded like that it becomes clear that these rights must be limited or perhaps even non-existent. regardless of what crimea's rights may or may not be, to what extent is ukraine justified in actively preventing an expression of sovereignty? the reference case's rejection of a right of canada to use force to reassert sovereignty essentially negates the relevance of the canadian constitution, should quebec decide to forcefully declare it's own interests as an expression of it's own will. i couldn't see how a ukrainian court of any remotely liberal lean could rule differently over crimea.

the international law is consistent with this position. in international law, declarations of independence trump everything else. they certainly trump constitutions. i think the above discussion provides some context as to why that is.

now, that's not to deny that something sneaky has become apparent over time. the russians have not been transparent about this. in order to regain lost credibility with me, they would have to reject the referendum and reassert crimea's place in ukraine. this was their initial position, which they've now flopped on. the position is extremely important in the context of them moving military people to the region - it's one thing to temporarily invade to protect a base, it's another to invade with the goal of annexation. rejecting the request to join russia is not the same thing as rejecting the validity of the referendum. and pointing out russian dishonesty is not the same thing as unilaterally rewriting international law. it's consistent to both disagree with the russian position on the annexation and uphold the legality of the vote. that seems to be the correct position.

briefly, then:

1) unilateral declarations of independence may be unconstitutional in individual countries. however,
2) international law is that the right to declare independence trumps everything and
3) liberal courts have generally agreed that democratic states should not use force to repress established independence movements.
4) the referendum in crimea is consequently illegal under ukrainian law but legal under international law. further, it would be contrary to international norms for ukraine to react with force to suppress an independence movement.

however, the reality is that neither side cares about national or international law.

click.
hope.
fail.
groan.

repeat.

i'm getting a rough directory structure, but almost all the actual data is garbled. that's useful in triggering my memory in reconstructing things, at least.

i've decided on the following plan:

1) finish trying to recover as much as i can.
2) back up everything else i might want to back up.
3) while i'm waiting to see if i can recover, upload some things that are already complete. that is, jump ahead.
4) make further decisions based on what i can recover.

so, there should be some new (old) tracks up in the next few days, after all.

93%, huh?

why do they bother?

this really asserts a lot of negative stereotypes.

".....to meet those interests through the unilater-err

shakes head

..international, multilateral legal norms..."

freudian slip of the year?

success with the router...

a small victory in a weekend of bad news.

deathtokoalas
i know they're indignant over an act of barbarism, but why aren't these protest movements seizing factories and farms instead of getting beat up by riot cops in downtown parks?

Michael IV
That would be the best option if their aim was to start a civil war but it isn't. They simply want to be heard by their government, not create a new one on their own. 

deathtokoalas
yeah, there's this impossible problem we've created by not educating our citizens. as a result of living in almost total historical ignorance, they grow up thinking ridiculous ideas, like that there's some kind of culture of democracy in the western world. this leads them into protest movements that demand change from this inane, supernatural force they call 'government' - rather than realizing that government is they themselves, and their inaction (a function of their terrible education) is a function of the system's planned failure.

a better education would teach them that the class war is perpetual. the civil war is not determined by dates and events, but is always carried out between those who own capital and those who do not. there is consequently no solution other than to attack those who own property, and redistribute it to the people.

yet, so long as we are kept ignorant, we will gather in squares and chant slogans instead.

Abayarde718
Yo bro you're the fucking man. That was brilliant. If we gathered to grow public gardens and make abundance the norm it would be 10000X more effective than shouting words in anger. If we grew food and cannabis, our own medicines, to become independent of the need for so much capital and consuming, we could crash the economy. People Dont want real change. They want nanny states. Peave to u.

deathtokoalas
i think it's worse than that, actually. they seem to legitimately want things to change (or, in the case of turkey and many other places, perhaps not change), but they're fundamentally incapable of carrying out that change, which is by design. a big part of the problem is that we're taught all kinds of lies about how our governments represent us, rather than the truth, which is that they represent the interests of capital (banks and big corporations, still mostly resource and extraction based at this high a political level). this leads us to the delusional (religious, really) belief system underlying these demonstrations - prayers to the state will be heeded if they are loud enough and targeted enough. that's less a desire for a nanny state, and more blowback from social engineering.

in truth, demonstrators are doing precisely what they're taught to do, and being beaten up by a demonstration of state force like they're supposed to be. cries of "human rights violations!" exist in some parallel universe, full of rainbow unicorns prancing through fields of money trees. you've all confused the state for an entity that actually gives a fuck.

the handful of examples of large scale successful demonstrations have not been peaceful. in actual fact, gandhi was demonstrating to the british authorities the size of a potential army (and the hopelessness of their position, tactically). it was the threat of force that won him his aims (which were full of far more fail than win). likewise, the civil rights protests would have been entirely useless if the demonstrators weren't armed (they don't teach us that). in order for "non-violent protest" to be effective, it must come with the threat of imminent violence. that is to say that, when effective, it is not truly non-violent at all, but merely a more enlightened type of violence.

but, it's the government's desire to keep us ignorant and stupid that is both at the core of these protest movements and the reason they offer no hope for the future. the reason they sit in squares and sing songs isn't that they don't want to improve their own lives, it's that they don't know how to. they only know how to ask their state deity to solve problems for them - just as they're supposed to.

these protests are consequently the exact opposite of a hopeful youth movement. rather, they are evidence of the impending doom that we face as a consequence of not educating our young people.

"you mean, you shouldn't put gatorade on the crops?"

Michael IV
The people will always be ignorant, there's is a slow change. It's the leaders that are the ones who can bring true change and quickly. Therefore people should study for themselves and learn for themselves and then lead their people. Instead of teaching the whole populace, which seems quite impossible.

deathtokoalas
ach, no. no gods, no masters. smashing the state is the only possible way to bring back history....this just isn't the way to do it.

leaders never represent people. they always represent capital. putting hope into leadership is only possible through not understanding the inherently exploitative nature of capitalism.

Michael IV
There will always be leaders in this world, that's an inevitability. There are those who follow and those who lead. The only chose we have is who are the ones to lead.

deathtokoalas
see, michael is terribly brainwashed. he thinks there are only those who follow and those who lead. that allows him to internally validate an authoritarian system as irreplaceable in one form or another. it may convince him, one day, to pick up a gun to protect a flag, rather than attack those who handed him the gun.

leaders are those who follow from the front. the quality that defines a good leader is an ability to understand the tendencies in the herd, then repeat it back in a way that justifies their use of power. there is consequently no real difference between a leader and a follower, except where they exist in the hierarchy. if we are to be reduced to only leaders and followers, we're destined to stumble around in circles. only the blind may lead, and only the deaf may follow.

there is, however, a difference between those who engage and those who do not. rather than thinking in terms of this silly leader/follower distinction, it would rather behoove you to conceive of situations in a philosopher/actor sort of distinction. actors are leaders and followers - people who take part in the group. philosophers are those who sit back and watch the leaders follow themselves around in circles. from this point of abstraction, they are able to conceive of problems in the way people behave.

it's not that we need more philosophers. we have plenty. it's that we need to start listening to them.

Michael IV
We've had plenty of Scientific revolutions and extreme changes in knowledge over the years. We've all listened to plenty of philosophers and learned from them, but much of the world is deaf to sense and reason. That is why we still have wars, that is why we still have strife, because the populace fails to listen. Like Sun Tzu said, deception simply has a bad connotation. If the deaf populace is led by an enlightened leader, then there is no need to fight the redundant battle of trying to convince everyone of "the right way to think". Only one person has to understand everything, and that is the leader.

deathtokoalas
you're deifying your government leaders; the concept you seek is called "god", and the system you envision is called "fundamentalism". it's the kind of thing that exists in iran, and that once existed in rome. there are three reasons why these systems fail. the first is that human wisdom is not only finite but bounded much lower than our imagination would like. we're dumb apes. the second is that power corrupts; there is no enlightened sage that will reform a corrupt system, it is the system itself that needs to be abolished. removing bush did not end targeted assassination programs. removing yanukovich will not end endemic ukrainian corruption. removing erdogan will not dismantle the turkish military-industrial complex.  the third is that society is collaborative by definition and must function through consent to be stable. hierarchical, authoritarian societies are constantly in rearrangement, perpetually on the brink of implosion and collapse. it's these shifting class divisions, and desires to maintain power within them, that are the reason we continue to fight. there is no way to abolish conflict (this, again, is delusional religious thinking), but only a way to abolish want, making conflict difficult on an organized scale. so long as leaders may raise armies, they may start wars.

i don't wish to write off the masses. i am a member of these masses. i stand with them. rather, i point out that we are losing the fight against the leaders that wish to enslave us by reducing us to ignorant fools that are dependent upon them for survival. this is a created condition, not an endemic one.

i don't wish to continue this discussion.

scrbble
I haven't read a well thought out comment on youtube in a while, thanks for that.

Kim Jong-un 
deathtokoalas please marry me!

deathtokoalas
i'm the biggest loner in the world, it wouldn't work out.

Kim Jong-un
I'd make it work. Just text me if you change your mind.

Cristian Sosa 
I wish people could start to seize government buildings around the world, and rise in an utopian anarchism. But sadly mankind is eons behind to be ready to leave in peace without the need of a government.  And a change of politics in the government, say from Capitalism to Socialism for instance, would be like placing a band aid on a major laceration. We are broken, and fixing our entire society must be one of the hardest things humanity has yet to face.

deathtokoalas
i'm not really in agreement with the idea that we're centuries away from actual freedom. if there's a temporal component, it's in the technology and i actually think that automated production has the potential to revolutionize the mode of production within our lifetime, and the social system will have no choice but to adjust to that extreme economic reorganization.

but, if it's true, the end point can only be accomplished by failing dozens or hundreds of times. there's no teleology in history - not marx' teleology of historical materialism, nor hegel's end of history, nor the dreaded orthogenesis that came out of trying to reconcile darwin with genesis. we will not get to an end point as a function of time, we need to push our way there. and there may be a few messes along the way...

so, venezuela has an excess demand for milk and butter, driving street protests. if you just decrease the demand (by increasing taxes and reducing imports), inflation will go down, thereby stopping the protests.

brilliant!

i'll keep that in mind if we ever have a problem with inflation in the price of water.

less sardonically, this is what happens when you approach economics as applied algebra.

if you ignore the prevalence of the black market (which seems to be the creation of government policy), it might be more effective if the demand for milk and butter was more elastic. but, then there probably wouldn't be a problem in the first place. it's hard to imagine people attacking cops over the price of computers.

as it is, decreasing demand for food sounds like an algorithm for depopulation.

maybe the solution is that venezuela needs to focus more on domestic production of food, including reducing exports? the root cause of the problem seems to be their dependence on food imports.

now, if you could just get somebody out there explaining to people that seizing farms and factories and building networks of food distribution is a better idea than throwing molotov cocktails at riot police...

alas, such a prophet escapes us, the world over.

hundreds of thousands of people on the street there, and in brazil, and in turkey, and in ukraine, greece, egypt and spain - and i'm not convinced that the thought of seizing production even entered anybody's minds.

i have these strange straight edge behavioural remnants that i've never really gotten over.

i won't take anything for headaches, ever. not aspirin, not acetaminophen, not ibuprofen and certainly not codeine. i'll get moderately intense migraines, too: blurred vision, vomiting.

i'll actually mostly just ignore it.

"j, you don't look so good".
"yeah, i'm having a migraine."
"you look like you need some help."
"nah."
"i really think..."
"i'm fine."

in truth, i'm in horrific pain, but it's the kind of pain you get used to. i mean, the only other way to deal with it is to go fall asleep somewhere dark, and that's not always an option.

i'm glad it's an option right now, though, because i'm still refusing myself aspirin.

some bad news with my hard drive, if you follow the comments.

i'm kicking myself for not backing up when i had the opportunity. in fact, i was actually going to do it right at the very moment i discovered the last blue screen. just a few hours too late. ugh. *bashes head against wall*.

i've had a little time to think about it. there's an off chance that i may be able to recover parts or all of the install partition because i was moving a lot of files around from drive to drive. if i can do that, i can reinstall the machine, and i will.

if i can't, i'm not sure if i'm going to let it sit and hope i can recover the data by bringing it to a store, maybe read a bit instead, or if i'd rather upgrade to 64 bit vista (which is what i have sitting around). see, it's going to take probably close to a week to get it up and running. given that reality, waiting might be a better plan.

pretty depressed about it, though. that's pretty much everything i've done since i moved here - as well as the culmination of eight years worth of scripting - that is possibly just kablooey.

well, it connects with a vanilla sp3 install, but i can't run that on the living room machine, it's too old. the image is designed to run a static ip. it worked with the old router, so i'm hoping i can just modify a few things to align it, but it didn't work the first time so i may have to reimage it for dhcp....

minor. it'll be working in a day or two.

turkey is a nato member, us ally and supposed democracy. that's very different than the other countries that have seen protest movements. egypt is the closest comparison, but it's not close.

it'll be interesting to see how this works out, but it's not likely that american or eu interests will side with the protests.

ok, so this is a losing battle.

a winning battle may be to convince local governments to create contracts for flood walls, indoor food growing and other adaptations.

sucks, but that's capitalism.

i like how the russian and ukrainian representatives have equally unhappy looking thugs behind them. really plays into bad stereotypes about political slavic mafia groups.

deathtokoalas
i know it's hugely counter-intuitive, but what the saudis actually want is to prevent democracy in syria. this is the reason they're trying to oust assad.

--

commandoslayer
First they are saying they want Assad out of power and let the people elect a new leader now they dont want an election to be held in Syria.

deathtokoalas
the saudi aim has always been to prevent democracy in syria. that's what this conflict is actually about.

it's the same reason they have a hate-on for iran, and that they engineered the coup in egypt. before the shit hit the fan, assad had been trying to engineer an orderly retreat from power for several years (that's all changed now, as he can hardly hand over power to extremists). the saudis want to get in there and take over the government before populist forces do, so they don't have "another iran" causing destabilization and giving their own people any ideas. the americans and israelis are going along with it because british imperialism has always preferred dictatorships over democracies in the region, for a broadly similar set of reasons. democracies are unstable. properly bribed dictatorships are easy to control - so long as they control their own people in return.

the propaganda is just that. america never fights for democracy, but always in opposition to it.

commandoslayer
The syrian people have two choices a dictator who has a secular government or terrorists who want to impose sharia law. Who would you prefer to run the country?

Assad has a secular government. I never said that he or his family were all good people and yes there are FSA soldiers who are against Assad and against the jihadist but the odds of them winning are very low. How do you expect them to win against Al-Qaeda and Al-Nusra and at the same time fight Hezbollah and Assad? You are the one funny living in the fantasy world where the prince will rescue the princess from the dragon.

I thought the Kurds wanted an independent state in the Middle East, independent from Turkey and Syria. Anyway the chances of the YPG and Kurds in Syria winning is also low because they are not only fighting the FSA, Assad and the Jihadist but Turkey as well. The Turkish Government is allowing foerign jihadist to attack your people in Syria and if you dont believe me watch this video watch?v=p2zxlFQxkQ4

Just asking: So are ok with the Turkish government allowing Jihadist to kill your Kurdish brothers and sisters in Syria? The Kurdish are a beautiful people who I truly understand their cause.

I am watching moderate news and watch video footage and talking to people of Syria from all sides. Kurdish people are fighting the Jihadist and the FSA which part of it is allied with Al-Qaeda and Al-Nusra who want the Kurdish people out of Syria, many Kurds have left Syria because of the ethnic cleansing commited by those forgein terrorists. If Assad loses it is high likley the civil war will continue with rebel factions fighting each other but the hatred towards your people will still continue.

Can you imagine they prefer foregin terrorists rather than the beautiful Kurdish who were born in those lands and have lived there all their lives?

Then you are the Sunni against Shia type? Because if i remember correctly Assad is an Alawite muslim.

I am not claiming anything I never claimed that Assad is a good choice seen in my first reply. What I am saying what will happen to the minorities in Syria like the christians, kurds and Alawites? Will the FSA be able to protect them if not will they join the jihadist to murder them? Will the Sunnis be stripped from their freedom and have a country with Sharia law? How will the FSA get rid of the Jihadist they let enter in the first place and who do you think the Saudis would support?

deathtokoalas
the old kurdish rebel trick, eh?

that's the oldest trick in the book.

not only do i not believe a word you say, i also think you're a cia agent. and am consequently blocking you.

2 million.

hrmmmn.

not sure it's well known.

i agree we need to be careful with assigning too much to monetary policy. but this guy's answer is some kind of ultra-paradoxical position.

there is no "natural cause" of an increase in the money supply. it's a decision made by a bureaucrat because.....who knows, really. it could be anything. a bribe. an academic policy. an electoral mandate. the point is that it's a deliberate decision made by a human, not some kind of naturalistic phenomena. it could be applied in a way that makes sense, or in a way that doesn't make sense - and consequently be either beneficial or disastrous.

now, it's reasonable to speak of things happening as a result of monetary policy. from where i'm sitting, i think debt is artificial, and so long as we have money at all (i am opposed to currency on a conceptual level, but i live in reality) we should be controlling how much we have centrally. simple demographic pressures are enough of a justification. as the population increases, the supply must increase as well. history teaches me that the thing we want to avoid at all costs is shortages, not surpluses.

but these decisions have an effect. that's why they're done. and one of them is possibly inflation, under the kinds of conditions greg points out.

that doesn't mean increasing the money supply will always turn us into weimar republic germany. it's not a single cause. but actions have effects. it's really head-scratching to deny that, then argue that conscious, human-produced actions have easily defined causes.

so, yes, boosting the money supply is a tool that should be used under the right circumstances, and we shouldn't allow people to scare us into thinking otherwise. but we also have to understand that it can be inflationary.

and we certainly can't be thinking that we're just automatons defined by pressures in the global economy, either.

and then there's the stuff about reducing excess aggregate demand by increasing taxes, which is just frightening.

so, venezuela has an excess demand for milk and butter, driving street protests. if you just decrease the demand (by increasing taxes and reducing imports), then the demand will decrease and inflation will go down.

brilliant!

and, what is with this capitalizing Leader stuff, like she lives in north korea?

the conservatives have been doing this for years...

his name is justin. he's a fallible and very flawed human being. i don't think he's that good looking, either. if you punch him in the face, his skull will deform.

i've been ignoring this for a reason. the ignatieff fiasco was a comedy of errors. what a buffoon he proved himself to be! i'm not tuning into this, it's just going to piss me off...

...but i don't, at this point, see any kind of substantial differences between the conservative and liberal parties. they're both hard right, neo-liberal parties in the hands of the investor class. they both want to dismantle the welfare state.

there's no longer any use in caring, except to mobilize a new third party (the ndp is also dead).

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/read-christine-innes-letter-to-supporters-here-1.2571817

"We're not going to go back to the days of the Hatfields and McCoys in the Liberal Party."

well, then you're going to have the party fracture. 'cause chrystia freeland isn't even a conservative, she's a democrat. that's several orders of magnitude too far to the right for a large percentage of the party to swallow.

that should have been what happened in the first place, really. the centre-left would be far stronger right now had the party just faced the obvious and split in half.

http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/justin-trudeau-blocks-candidacy-of-ex-mps-wife-over-bullying-1

found an it company going out of business that sold me four wired routers for $20. at least one of them works. that's some breathing room if one breaks.

particularly, it means finally setting the tv up to youtube, which means not having to eat in bed anymore. it's a subversive habit, to say the least.

too late to recover. garbled characters. ugh...

found some fragments.....

i'm certainly not going to bother rescripting it. that took months. it's not worth it.

well, now that i'm forced to, i'm going to try and upgrade to 64 bit. all my scripts were for a 32 bit xp. some of the drivers have updated over the last several years, too, which was the other problem.

maybe it'll help offset the bloat.

scripted, that machine was super fast. it's only a 3.6 dual core, but it's way faster than this brand new five core hp laptop bogged down by windows 7. i was proud of that...

and, as mentioned, it was supposed to be modular. as depressed as i am right now, i'm really mad at myself for not backing it up yesterday afternoon. i would merely be annoyed right now, had i done that.

*sigh*.

in my defense, it wouldn't have been easy to back this stuff up. the script partition was 40 gb of software, the temp partition was 20 gb of iso files and avis.

further, most of my script partition is backed up in the storage drive, so i haven't lost much actual software. it's the script i lost, but i suspect i may have something close to it somewhere. i couldn't have backed up that much data onto a disc. and the reason it isn't imaged onto a series of ten or fifteen dvds is that i liked the flexibility of a script. who wants to go through 20 dvds every month?

...and the temp drive was just that. it was sitting there awaiting back-up to an external hd, once i got one big enough to hold all my music files. i was going to put that drive away somewhere.

further, everything that was on the temp drive is backed up across a dozen dvds - *except* the videos (some of which are on this laptop) and the remastered or modified files, which are all up at bandcamp. i can redo this, minus a handful of minor differences that if lost are lost. but, dammit...

no. that drive's dead.

but i'm going to have to let it sit until april, anyways. maybe somebody at a data recovery shop will be able to get what i want out of it.

or maybe that's long enough to let it think it's back at the factory. that's ultimately what i think happened to the magically reworking laptop.

until then, i'm going to have to just keep going. i have one more trick to try - maybe it'll read through an external sata in. if not, i'm going to wait until i see if i can recover the data before i start downloading gigs of wave files from bandcamp.

here's some hope: windows knows there's a disc plugged in. it says it's "unknown", but it at least knows it's there. that's more than the bios can say. so, i'm going to throw on a temp install and see if it reads it...

i had a problem with my laptop's hard drive last month that in the end turned out to be a corrupted mbr. regarding the laptop, it was minor in the end cause....just reformat and that's that. but i cannot format this drive under any circumstance. and i even don't care about the hardware. it's almost ten years old. i don't think 250 gb drives are even on the market anymore.

it's doing something very strange that is both worrying me and giving me some hope. it's only reading the empty drive if the failing one is not plugged in. i mean at a bios stage. i've reset the cmos and it's not helping.

so i'm going to start swapping cords around. i don't see why plugging in the failing hard drive should stop me from reading a functional one.

if it's a board problem, that's a bigger issue. but it might mean i can get the info off. which is what's important. i can replace a dead drive relatively easily. i can't replace some of what's on it without a great deal of effort.

i spoke too soon. the drive is not reading at all. i should have taken the data off while i had the chance.

the c: partition is designed to be throwaway. there are two smaller partitions that are not. one is an install partition with reinstall scripts. the other is a temporary partition that currently holds all of my temporary recording material.

i think i can reconstruct the last one, although it will be a lot of work. that's the most important, by far. i can't reinstall the machine as it is without the second, but i can get around that.

it could conceivably cost me a month. so i'm hoping i can get the data off somehow.

lesson learned: a chkdsk may stop a hard drive from whirring, but it doesn't mean it's fixed it. and i should have worried about it.

grargh.

so, i'm going quiet here *again* for the foreseeable future. *sigh*.

that was a scare. hard drive started whirring on me....

it would have mostly been an annoyance. i built the pc to be modular. 1 tb total memory, over four 250 gb hard drives. rather than use something like raid, i've just left one empty. if a drive begins to die, and this hasn't happened yet, the plan is just to copy it over to the empty drive, unplug it and replace it. worst case, i might have to reinstall, but the process is automated.

as it is, a chkdsk stopped the whir and i'm not going to worry myself about it. but i blew the morning on that...

well, i got the stuff printed on monday, then spent 6 hours walking on tuesday to finish up most necessary spring shopping, did spring cleaning (and much sleeping) on wednesday in the midst of a horrific blizzard and should get a start on the track today, after i do my taxes, duck student loan repayments for another six months and fill out some other necessary paperwork.

don't get me wrong. i appreciate the six hundred some dollars i'm getting back from rent. it's almost a month of rent. in theory, that's substantial.

but, if the government thinks it's doing me or the economy a favour by dividing it by twelve and giving me $50/month for the year, it's really sadly mistaken. what i'd like to do is spend the money on furniture. bookshelves and tables, specifically. at $50 a month, it's going to take all year to do something i'd rather do quickly. it's going to mean i'm going to have to save the money up over the course of a few months and probably go shopping every two months or so with roughly $100.

....except that it's a virtual certainty that i'm not going to do that. instead, i'm going to waste it on nothing of any importance, and mostly on items that are not taxable due to repressive laws.

i'm well aware that the idea is to prevent low income people from wasting it on drugs, or beer and popcorn, but whomever thought that up has obviously never been low income or done drugs, or drank beer and ate popcorn. there's not much chance i'm going to spend $650 all at once. that would be pretty much smoking myself stupid. however, there's a pretty good chance i'm going to pitter away what is more or less smoke money, at $50/month. the way to stop me from pissing it away is to give it to me all at once so i can spend it; the way to have me waste it is to give it to me in monthly installments that aren't enough to buy anything with.

as policy, it's just not very intelligently thought through.

i'm actually considering not claiming the energy credit, so the refund is under $360 and it just comes in in one chunk.

now, that's this year, when i just moved into a new place.

next year, $650 might buy me some gear if it comes in at once. if i played video games (i don't) it might have bought a new system, rather than a new game for an old one every month.

some people could use it to pay down credit card debts. $50/month just keeps them on the interest paying hamster wheel. useless.

...all to try and combat the imaginary problem of people blowing their tax returns on beer by budgeting them monthly beer money instead....

the other options are both more economically useful and more functionally useful.

of course if i was a real economist, i'd say something about investing it somewhere. which is probably true of a small number of people. you'd think that would be what they'd want.

but what i'm irked about is the idea that giving me a small amount will help me spend it more responsibly, because i'm too irresponsible to spend a lump sum. i'll even concede that i'm irresponsible, but they've got the whole thing backwards.

at least give me the choice how to adjust to my inherent irresponsibility, rather than trying to enforce a model of fiscal responsibility on me that is alien to what i know my nature is.

that sort of forced fiscal planning always fails.

likewise, regarding venezuela.

you ever helped a bug get from a to b, or maybe moved it out of the sink because you're doing the dishes (but didn't want to kill it because it's a beneficial insect) by coercing it on to a spoon and then carrying the spoon across to a crack in the floor?

might that insect think it just had an experience with god, or perhaps was abducted by an air monster?