actually, i want to be clear on the point that i think it's actually very important for transwomen to respect some boundaries regarding cis-spaces.

i'm never going to take up space in a debate about abortion, for example. i have a perspective, and you might not be surprised to find out that it's idiosyncratic. because i'm an atheist, i'm not necessarily going to uphold the sanctity of life, and if that's the way the argument is being framed, you might not like my response. but, for me to make my own argument in my own space is one thing, and for me to take over a floor is another. i'm good at arguing, sure. but, i don't have a uterus; this is not my concern.

there are other scenarios regarding gendered violence, where i'm going to be quiet. and, i'm not going to push myself into a space like that if i'm not wanted in it. it's just not the right place to make a stand.

these are specific situations and not general ones; unlike other scenarios, the arguments in these scenarios are actually grounded, and i think they should be contemplated very carefully.

the thing is that i've never actually seen an actual human with one of these things on.

meh. probably not as hot of an idea.

this is coming up because i've been considering buying a bicycle and just leaving it in detroit. i'd have to find a safe space for it - and i know it's a matter of time before it gets stolen. i have no history on a skateboard, but i've bicycled very long distances very regularly and could easily handle 20-30 km. i could bicycle to ann arbor, even.

it would truly open up my options tremendously.

i'd just rather have an option i can take home with me...i really don't want to leave anything in detroit on a regular basis...

i've never been on a skateboard in my life.

but, seeming as i can't get across customs with a bicycle...

what i should do is try to find one in a pawn shop and just experiment with groceries. if i get used to it, and find it useful, i should at least be able to take it back and forth across customs.

of course, i could never get into the bar with one. what do you do with your board when you take it to a concert? you probably just don't take your board to the concert.

considering the number of punk shows i've been to, it's actually odd that i've never noticed what people do with their boards. and somebody or other must be transiting with these things...

given that i'm talking about moving upwards of twenty-thirty km on one of these things, an electric one seems like a smarter choice, but they're like $1000.

the thing about trying to block gorsuch is that there are three more open seats coming - probably all of them in the next four years. you can't block all of them. and, if you lose the court, it's gone.

this is a lost battle.

the democrats should focus on an outcome they can actually alter.

and, the country should brace itself for a hard right supermajority on the court. it's inevitable.

i think that if you look at the costing on these items, you can see where the government's head is really at, regarding emissions.

i will at least acknowledge that we need to spend lavishly on mitigation.

so, what i'm going to say about the infrastructure bank is that municipalities and provinces should avoid it.

i mean, it's there. whatever. don't use it. push for direct funding, instead.

ok. this is a little bit more of what i wanted to see: direct spending. just fucking doing it. not "creating incentives". not "providing conditions". just putting the money down and fucking do it.

grossly quantifying projects doesn't say a lot about them, but at least it demonstrates that there's money flowing.

here's a surreal thought to work through: most "entrepreneurs" have no idea how to run a business for the simple reason that they've never been in one.

but, i mean, again: what else would you expect from the dauphin? or his hand-picked advisers, which are either right out of school or maybe had a stint in a previous government, but were right out of school at the time?

when i use the term "bourgeois parliament", i'm not exaggerating. most of these people - including the prime minister - have never had a real job in their lives. so, why wouldn't you expect them to grasp on to these ideas, as absurd as they may actually be? it fits their own life experiences: you just walk out of school, and then you save the world. who needs experience?

if things aren't working out immediately, the workers must need to be retrained. after all, the idea was brilliant, right? you saw it: it was brilliant, right? right? yeah...

btw - fwiw - i actually don't know what the job market is like in windsor, because i haven't applied for one since i moved here.

if i were to apply for a job in windsor, i would be looking at a part-time job in the service sector. at minimum wage, i'd need to work about 28 hours a week to make up what my odsp is, but i could take a substantial pay cut and be comfortable. i'd be looking for around 20-25 hours.

maybe a grocery store, or something.

anything else would require a commitment i don't want to make.

oh, good.

maybe they can finally invent an electric car.

it might upset alberta, though. we can't do that. so, it's probably better just to pretend you're serious by assigning minimal funds to "research" in the budget.

maybe, they can put some research aside into developing a smart phone, too. and, wouldn't it be cool to fly across the world?

the research phase has been done for a decade. they should be funding deployment and transition. obviously, they don't actually want to. but, it's foolish to drag feet on something that the rest of the world is already using - you can't suppress progress, you can just fall behind.

it's funny.

i can't seem to find a number for 2015, let alone 2016.

surely, the data should be in. why isn't it being published?

this document is dated to mid 2016. why doesn't it have data for 2015?

https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/?lang=en&n=FBF8455E-1

from what i can see, you should not just expect the government to fail to meet the conservatives' emission goals, but you should expect emissions to actually increase under this government.

again: this is not what they campaigned on, and not what i voted for.

this is what the conservatives were pushing for their entire mandate.

this is what i voted against.

providing capital for private companies is not a climate change plan. i voted for direct government involvement. when will the government drop the market fundamentalism and take a direct, hands-on approach that will actually work, rather than continue this failed approach of trying to incentivize market capitalism?  

this is admitting that they're not doing anything. they're even trying to change the topic. what does gender equality have to do with climate change?

the budget is full of references to women, and the reason is that that is what the government wanted the news cycle to focus on. but, it's clear throughout the document that it is a persistent attempt to distract from things they don't want you to notice, or to try and get you to change the topic altogether.

the platform promised direct government spending to transition the economy. what we're getting instead is a collection of tax incentives, greenwashing and corporate welfare.

the reality is that this could have been, and perhaps actually was, lifted directly from the conservative party platform.

it's not a lot of money. and i don't believe in money, anyways. but they've got a lot of nerve.

hey asshole albertans: why don't you sell to your own fucking country? and, yes we deserve a discount, too.

or would you rather stay unemployed?

if you thought the days of some despotic oil dictators in alberta running the government were over...

so, it seems like the so-called democrats in the corporate news media got a look at the tax break trump is throwing at them.

i really wish that clinton had picked franken as her running mate. this was spectacular.

so, green infrastructure means building subways and light rail through manufacturing areas? it's maybe not what i was hoping for.

it's easy to make the argument that increasing infrastructure in high employment regions is a good investment. but, the term "supercluster" would have described the auto industry around detroit and southern ontario 50 years ago, and no amount of infrastructure in the world could have kept it there.

i'm usually in favour of infrastructure. i'm not going to argue against building. but, if this is their attempt to fight offshoring, it's pathetic.

in the long run, i would expect a train or two to nowhere.

this is actually priceless, because you can tell it was written by some parasitic "venture capitalist" that knows how to talk the government into giving him money, but doesn't have the slightest fucking clue what to actually do with it.

that's what "entrepreneurs" are really good at, after all - swindling people. they can't actually do anything.

so, what this picture says is something like:

1. come up with some pothead scheme.
2. talk the government into giving me money.
3. ?????
4. profit!

i'm not exaggerating. that's what this says.

and, the government reacts by suggesting we need to train more workers, as though everything else in the chain of logic is perfectly sound. but, you would expect them to, because they're every bit as clueless and bourgeois as the entrepreneurs, right? they uphold each others' delusions. it's surreal.

maybe, we should stop giving money to "entrepreneurs" that have nothing but a barely concocted scheme that they haven't the slightest idea how to actualize without smart engineers, and just give money to the workers in the first place, instead.

fuck entrepreneurs. we need more co-ops.

but, i want to draw attention to this specifically.

nobody is talking about preventing "underrepresented groups" from competing and succeeding in "high wage" labour. in fact, our system is pretty focused on helping marginalized groups succeed. we have a different set of systemic biases, here.

but, the governing party sees it fit to specifically exclude "non-underrepresented groups"...which i guess means white people...from walking into the space opened up by pulling back on imported slave labour.

it is legitimately and specifically and explicitly insisting that low-wage work should be racialized.

in the budget...

i guess you're expecting me to be upset by the obvious exclusion of whites, but that's not actually what they're doing here. i mean, they are. but, it's not because they're secretly muslims or something. no. they're upholding a concept of white supremacism by stealth. they're assigning the low-wage labour as being below the white person. this is racializing low-wage labour, and placing it at the bottom of a hierarchy.

for all their attempts to appeal to a kind of plastic left through hollow appeals to diversity, they fuck up on this kind of thing every once in a while, and expose where their real biases are. so, when i periodically accuse them of being brutally racist by stealth, and pushing down the programs they do because they're racist rather than in spite of it, come back to this post to see what i mean.

and, i've argued in the past that this kind of thinking is actually widespread on the left, even (perhaps especially) amongst activists. what all of those anti-oppression workshops were really doing was inserting a racial hierarchy into your brain and normalizing it in ways you hadn't even previously thought of...

and, this should be abolished altogether as well.

look at the way they word it. they want to make it easier for the mcdonalds to hire mexicans and blacks from down the street, rather than have to import them from out of the country. throughout, the premise of low wage works remains racialized.

or, the bit on "seasonal industries". this is our own backdoor to agricultural slavery. they don't even get a minimum wage.

where is the legislation on introducing minimum wages for "seasonal workers" to go along with the bit about bringing in more slaves?

*crickets*

this program was not meant to be a backdoor for slavery, it was supposed to be a way for high tech firms to bring in skilled workers that were unavailable. but, we've had two successive governments abuse it.

the program should be permanently abolished. the government has proven that it can't handle temporary restrictions of immigration laws without importing slaves.

this is contemptible. forget about fees. i don't care about fees. they should ban the import of "foreign caregivers" (a euphemism for personal slaves) altogether. it's absolutely outrageous that this is not just allowed, but spoken of openly in the budget.

they should ban them altogether, and be willing to defend the legislation in court.

see, this is the kind of non-policy that every government has been pushing forever. they make it seem like the job market is healthy, and these unemployed workers are just too lazy and stupid to get a job. what they need is a better education!

meanwhile, they note elsewhere in the budget that young people coming out of school are facing unprecedented challenges.

we used to have the courage to call this what it is - supply-side economics - and reject it as ineffective.

but, the government is not allowed to create jobs anymore due to competition laws. so, what this is is actually a type of welfare. successive governments have refused to admit this because it puts the entire neo-liberal agenda into question. but, the way i see it is that they're just wasting resources. would it not be better to stop wasting money on retraining and instead use those monies to increase and lengthen the assistance?

the reality is that these people are not going to find new jobs. when is the government going to adjust to the new economy, admit the reality of things and find a way beyond it?

i'd rather cut and paste, but the site hosting the document won't allow it. and i don't believe in intellectual property rights anyways, but i think the budget should be public domain, no?

well, i don't give a fuck what you think, anyways.

they actually admit that it's just politics. "we asked you what you wanted, and we developed a document full of politicized language and empty buzz words in order to affirm your biases with.".

then, they pretend this is "democracy".

i wasn't expecting something different. it's just kind of surreal.

in canada, if you consider yourself a "progressive", you'd probably prefer the conservatives - and if you consider yourself a "libertarian", you'd probably prefer the liberals. we just haven't had these broad spectrum shifts. we kept the actual meaning of the words...

...or, at least, we did up until a year and a half ago.

they've been creeping me out for a while, this isn't news to me....

i've been over this a few times, but i need to clarify a point: the legacy of the "progressive movement" in canada did not end up on the left.

for most the twentieth century, the two major parties were the liberals (on the soft-left) and the progressive conservatives (on the soft-right). this is because the progressive party merged with the conservative party in 1942.

maybe the confusion people will have about this is in not understanding old toryism. but, the conservatives in canada were trade protectionists up until the 1970s and broadly supportive of the concept of christian charity. they were also socially conservative, but so were many progressives. it wasn't some frankencreature - the merger fit, and it created some stable governments.

the point i'm making is that there isn't a history of a progressive liberal caucus supporting sin taxes and prohibition like there is in the united states. there's not a dormant history, there. it's just weird.

i'm not even complaining; i don't drink a lot, and the couple of cents won't matter. but that's just my point. it only makes sense as an unexpected ideological shift to attract a nontraditional demographic. and, combined with a list of other things, liberal voters should be getting a little worried about shit.

it's a weird budget, from what i can tell.

one would think that the liberals should value the votes of young urban professionals. so, why are they doing away with a tax credit for people using public transit? why don't they throw away tax credits for rural farmers, instead?

worse, people that have been building a list of reasons that the liberals are hypocrites on climate change will correctly point to this as another point of hypocrisy.

nor is the government to be expected to save a significant amount of money by taking away the tax credit. it's a rather obvious ideological slap in the face for their own supporters.

but, i suppose you might hear a dim applause somewhere in calgary?

it's simply hard to make sense of the intent.

likewise, it's hard to see what the purpose of raising taxes on alcohol by a few cents a bottle is, other than to take the legislation to church with. it is neither raising any kind of income, nor is it acting as any kind of disincentive. it just seems like an ideological attempt to lure in right-wing voters with literal crumbs.

as an aside, i think that this is the last piece of evidence required to declare marijuana legalization permanently dead. they're purposefully targeting the religious right, with no discernible logic in fiscal or social policy.

the elimination of the canada savings bond is also obviously ideological. i'm old enough to remember my grandmother explaining to me why it was important to hold debt in the hands of private citizens, rather than let it accumulate in the hands of banks. i can't claim that i disagree with her, but i realize that nobody buys the things. still: why shut it down altogether? see, a part of the reason that the green infrastructure bank that existed in the platform was interesting to me was that it was about public rather than private financing. it seems that this part of the plan has been jettisoned, and that whatever infrastructure gets built is going to be done with a "private-public partnership", meaning it's going to function as a revenue stream to large institutions, many of them dominated by foreigners. shutting down the canada savings bonds is maybe symbolic at this point, but it is consistent with the government's move towards a neo-liberal model of infrastructure financing and indicative of this government's broader interests in working for it's high capital benefactors. we will regret this, in the long run. but, we'll regret not buying into the debt, too - this is the end of a process, not the start of one. regardless, it is another shift to the right.

they're also earmarking large amounts of money to give away to capitalists under various schemes, but one expects that, as it is the very purpose of a bourgeois parliament. but, i don't see anything in the budget that will lead to economic diversification, or open up new sectors.

likewise, this "child care" money is just corporate welfare. there's nothing in the budget about changing the way the system operates, there's just a lot of handouts to capital.

we'll have to see whether any of the money for social housing gets spent, or if it gets spent usefully. you'll excuse me for being cynical.

but, my takeaway is that this is a weird document, with confusing priorities. the very little that it actually does seems designed to piss off their own voters, and try and generate support from the religious right.

when you see these kinds of situations arise, they're usually being manufactured.

you can call me a conspiracy theorist if you'd like. but, it's a little weird that i told you this was going to happen, isn't it? did anybody else suggest this was plausible?

they don't want to appeal obamacare.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/22/politics/house-health-care-bill/

i want to add a caveat that the bit about race being fluid is a little bit cavalier, and should have probably come with some qualifiers. race is not necessarily fixed. race is potentially fluid. etc.

this is otherwise an excellent study.

but, you'll note that it isn't groundbreaking. the study itself points out that it's results are consistent with genetic testing and also with the anecdotal evidence that has come down to us orally.

http://aida.wss.yale.edu/~nq3/NANCYS_Yale_Website/resources/papers/NixQian_20150101.pdf

i remember studying this issue at school and concluding it was actually deregulation by stealth, amd would probably lead to exactly the opposite outcome of the one that advocates desire.

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/thoughts/essays/standingtrees.html 

that said, rivers in india are kind of a special case because of the centrality of them to the culture. i remain skeptical. but, it's perhaps the best possible test case, too; if it's going to work anywhere, it's most likely to work in a culture that views the river as sacred.

that said, look at how filthy the river is in the picture. it's the first thing that is obvious.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/03/21/india-court-grants-ganges-yamuna-rivers-same-rights-as-a-human.html

it's not like nobody predicted that we'd be in bad shape if oil prices came down, or like nobody criticized the harper government for focusing on a single industry at the expense of everything else. we have a historical record. the criticisms were pointed, and brutal - and are proving to be astute and forward thinking and correct, while the government's vision is demonstrating itself as narrow and delusional and just flat out wrong.

better ideas have existed the whole time. nobody expected the conservatives to listen. but, we expect better from the liberals.

this budget will save the government, or break it. let's hope it puts a serious focus on diversification, and isn't just full of buzzwords to drive the news cycle.

these articles are starting to pop up, but i haven't seen a single one draw the obvious conclusion that oil is obviously a shitty way to build an economy, isn't it?

maybe we should build our economy on something else?

marijuana? ethanol? solar? wind? hydro?

if you just read the news and take it at face value, we're fucked and can't do anything about it until the prices come back.

what if they don't come back?

and, how did our government become this overtly idiotic? i mean systemically. we've had changes in government in ottawa and edmonton, and yet they're pushing the same stupid line.

the petro-state is failing. do something about it.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/oilpatch-ottawa-budget-morneau-1.4029620

i'm actually really not ashamed to make the point - i've made it before, and i'll make it again.

the reason so many transwomen end up in these aggressive, dominatrix or porn star type roles is that they're actually hyper-dominant, ultra-patriarchal dudes that see female sexuality as the ultimate means of control.

the truth is that the psychology of the thing is supposed to categorize this type of trans person as a crossdresser and try to talk them out of it. what defines a crossdresser is some kind of arousal from women's clothing, which can and often does take the form of empowerment. transgendered people, on the other hand, don't get aroused by crossdressing, they feel normalized by it.

it's just kind of complicated to even have this discussion right now, because you'll get accused of promoting conversion therapy. but, the truth is that there are two different phenomena here, and conflating them is going to lead to false diagnoses.

on the other hand, who's to tell a crossdresser not to do it if they really get that much of a power trip out of it? so long as they're not hurting anybody - and i should point out that this is the precise scenario where there is a nontrivial possibility that they might be hurting somebody - then who is to tell them what to do with their own body?

but, it's important to understand the difference, and analyze it carefully relative to what you see in front of you. one is essentially a compulsion disorder, and may often be associated with aspects of narcissism. applying hormones in this scenario may not be the best idea. the other is rooted in a feeling of social ostracism, and a desire to belong to a group that better fits existing personality traits.

but, yeah - the trans stereotype of projecting sexual power is what it is for the most obvious reason possible. it's so obvious, you probably missed it.

just look what meth does to you.

because what the world needs is more k-tards.

what the actual fuck?

they describe it as a "popular club drug". right. ahahahaha.....

k-tards, in fact, tend to hang out in backyards. they may intend to make it to the club, but never do because they can't figure out how to tie their shoelaces. they may from time to time have such a difficult time that they trip on the way there, and spend the rest of the night in the ditch.

on the rare occasions that they do make it to the club, they can usually be seen congregating in small groups of men (general attire: basketball shirts & backwards hats) and talking about video games.

the article should say "universally acknowledged drug for complete losers".

next, they'll be prescribing meth. because that's what the really, really cool kids are into: meth.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/20/520169959/ketamine-for-severe-depression-how-do-you-not-offer-this-drug-to-people

this is such utter stupidity.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/will-bill-morneau-save-13000-lives-with-a-levy-on-sugary-drinks/article34336836/

i don't think the government has any kind of social obligation to run seaports or airports. i've only been in a canadian airport twice (had to leave and come back), and i'll probably never be in one ever again. there's a large percentage of canadians that will never even take a flight at all.

but, insofar as this is a public resource, i would like to see any money raised from it invested, rather than used for "debt relief" which is just unnecessary. there's no reason to pay down the debt....

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/no-plans-for-airport-sales-in-liberals-federal-budget/article34358267/

looks like putin bought a crappy puppet, if you ask me.

everything i said would happen is happening. it's not my fault. it was just obvious...

i'm not brilliant; you're retarded.

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/8444/israel-warns-it-will-destroy-syrias-air-defenses-without-thinking-twice

the thing that bothers me most about this case is that she felt the need to flee to india in order to protect herself from her family in canada.

how have things managed to get so backwards?

they should be extradited.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/honour-killing-sidhu-extradition-india-1.4032318

i just want to explore the point, to kind of demonstrate the reality of things. i know this isn't a dating site. and, this isn't an ad - don't reply to it. but, what does my ideal partner actually look like?

i should address gender first, obviously. i'm what you call pansexual. i mean, i'm functionally asexual, but it's a consequence of basically hating everybody. my actual position on the matter is that it doesn't matter what your gender is, so much as it matters whether i like you: i want to fuck your personality, not your body. so, i'm not at all driven by hormones; i'm not at all excited by physical sex. you don't go more than ten years without even trying, unless you're just not that into it, right?

but, that doesn't mean i'm interested in both genders equally. i'm not bisexual, or not in the sense that i see boys and girls as equally attractive and things to enjoy in different ways. i'm going to lean overwhelmingly towards a kind of sexless femininity, and i want to be careful about how i describe this.

i consider madonna, for example, to be exceedingly masculine. the ideal of the strong, dominant sexually aggressive female is as unattractive to me as the ideal of the strong, dominant sexually aggressive male. when i say i'm attracted to a sexless femininity, i mean i'm attracted to very submissive people. i'm an anarchist: i reject hierarchy and i reject dominance. i want complete equality. not a pretension towards equality. not "equity". fucking equality.

so, it could be either gender, but it's certainly a non-aggressive, passive, low-key ultra-beta personality type.

attached to that, i would prefer a musician but i would insist on an artist, at least. i would want somebody that i can create with. that would, in fact, be the basis of the relationship - a shared interest in creating. i would even go so far as to say i would be bored with just about anything else.

while the person does not need to actually be unemployed, i would not want somebody that is attached to their career. i know i come off as an introvert, but that's partly due to shielding. i don't want to date. i don't want to be in a relationship where we each have our own lives and just meet up from time to time to get drunk and fuck. i have to be the center of attention at all times (and will reciprocate). so, there cannot be time for a career, because we'll be too busy focusing on creating things. there cannot be time for other friends. there cannot be time for family. we're going to shower and shit together, or i'm going to start to feel neglected. i am absurdly high maintenance. so, this person needs to either be unemployed and on disability or independently wealthy or living through some other arrangement that does not see them disappear for long periods to participate in some useless market bullshit.

i don't want kids. and, i don't want this person to have kids, either. not even if they're adults. obviously, this person has to not want kids.

this person is probably older than me.

perhaps the incompatibilities are more obvious at this point, now that i've told you more clearly about what i would actually want. but, perhaps you can also see some of the points of overlap that existed.

the arabs tried to invade italy repeatedly, but constructing racial arguments around it is anachronistic. the revisionism is not in rejecting the racial narrative, but in constructing it.

the empire was not a roman concept, it was a persian one. the king of kings was the persian emperor. the empire had a kind of feudal structure beneath, where rulers of client states like armenia could refer to themselves as kings, so long as they accepted the king of kings - the persian emperor. when alexander broke persian power, he left a series of weak states that ended up warring with each other. the seleucids often styled themselves king-of-kings but it was never in reality. as the hellenic period fell apart, random despots started using the title - much as random despots today use the term caliph (itself a conceptual descendant of the persian hegemony). a part of the reason that the romans were able to absorb the levant so easily is that they were looking for a stable overlord, and entrance in a stable empire. in half of the persian lands, the roman emperor became the king-of-kings - but the persians never liked this much, and they fought for a thousand years over who got to be the true hegemon.

but, all of this fighting between rome and persia for hegemony over the middle east just recreated the same problem that existed at the end of hellenism. the people wanted a stable empire to exist within, so that they could trade and drink wine and carry out their rituals. islam was maybe not what they asked for, but it was at least a unifying force. and, so, the caliph became the king of kings and the emperor must be forced to submit.

in fact, it is the emperor's refusal to submit that is unique in history. the greeks conquered the persians, and the romans conquered the greeks. the arabs were not able to fully conquer the romans. and, so, what was one civilization broke apart into two.

so, when the arabs were carrying out months or years long seiges on constantinople, and launching their thirteenth invasion of italy or whatever it was, they weren't seeing it as invading a foreign land. to them, they were completing their conquest of the single empire that had always existed.

and, likewise, the crusaders did not see themselves as stealing land from arabs, but as taking what was rightfully theirs - because there was no concept of christianity and islam as separate cultures, but only of a broader western culture seized by civil war.

the consensus amongst roman historians for the first century or so of islam was actually that it was what was called a heresy, which is a very technical term, in context. muslims weren't seen as a different religion, but merely as confused christians that had deviated from orthodoxy.

centuries later, the turkish sultan was still insisting on calling himself not just the caliph, but also the roman emperor and, still, the king-of-kings - as these were all one and the same thing. and, this idea of christians and muslims as culturally separate is really a consequence of the renaissance.

this is really what we need, here.

we could stop giving it away to new york...and potentially drop generators altogether...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5wqzsg1bQY

i'm going to take a different view on this.

"restricted mode" basically means "religious right mode". it's a service that is explicitly designed for a combination of ultra-conservative parents and grouchy old people. this is what they want, and i'm not exactly of the view that i need to cram myself down their throats.

but, conversely, why can't i get an anti-religion filter? and, don't think this isn't an issue.

i've actually installed a plugin called "hide unwanted results" because i got pissed off about "answers from genesis" showing up when i searched for evolution information, or climate denial bullshit clogging my results when i search for climate change info. and, searching for lesser known band names can produce horrific results. the plugin lets me block entire websites altogether, and it's truly a godsend.

i'm sorry, but there is simply no scenario at all when i want answers from genesis in my search results. never. ever. it's not in my hosts file or anything, i can access the site. but, i don't want the christian bullshit. ever....

so, i kind of see where they're coming from. there's shit i just don't want to see, too; i just wish they'd let me block the religious bullshit, which is what really pisses me off the worst. perhaps they could open up the filter to something user-customizable...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/20/lgbt-community-anger-over-youtube-restrictions-which-make-their-videos-invisible

sanger is right. but they should do it anyways.

i just don't find this idea of paying into things to be scary, but i guess i'm leaning more towards a revolutionary left. sanger is basically looking at the situation and saying "this is just corporate welfare". it's not that he's wrong, so much as that i'm willing to support capital investments in the short run, and then argue for nationalizing in the long run.

and, there's not a lot of ways out of this, either. if they gauge badly enough, we seize the assets. there's not another possibility, here - it's an inevitability.

yes: it would be better if we just nationalized it from the start. but, the focus needs to be on building at any cost. we can seize it later.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/federal-budget-expected-to-flesh-out-infrastructure-bank-plans/article34345704/

my actual opinion is that you should let them die.

i mean, there should be treatment centres. this is a health issue, not a legal issue. i support the clean injection sites because it reduces the cost of health care by giving addicts clean needles. if they get aids from sharing needles, it costs for more to treat them in the end, and they become that much more of a burden on the system.

but, this idea that we need to go out of our way to save drug addicts is, i think, wrong. let them overdose....

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/funding-opioid-substitution-1.4032400

"he was a stupid, disgusting, awful human being" - a friend and collaborator of lou reed's, describing him, post-mortem.

i'll show in numbers how truly stupid this is and why it's worth resisting.

suppose that this is the course marking breakdown:

final: 50%.
midterm: 20%
assignments: 10%
participation: 20%

if my marks are as follows:

final: 90%
midterm: 90%
assignments: 99% [for me, this is realistic]
participation: 0%

....then my grade is:

.5*.9 + .2*.9 + .1*.99 + .2*0=
.45 + .18 + .099 =
 0.729

so, you can get an A on the exam, an A on the midterm and ace the assignments....

...and end up with 73% in the class.

does that make sense to you?

it happened. over and over and over...

but, i'm still not going to participate. i'm just going to stand in the back and snicker at how stupid you all are.

a responsible professor would look at this outcome and change their grading strategy. they might think it's impossible, or something. when they see it in front of them, they should abandon it.

participation marks are often attacked as ways to inflate grades, but i don't think that's actually the intent. the intent is to punish students that are independent-minded. it's meant to push out those that are disagreeable more than it is to reward those that are malleable.

i'm introverted, sure. and i have been diagnosed with social anxiety, but modern psychiatry is just a lot of pseudo-science and bullshit - you can't define what it means, to begin with, and there's no objective test to determine it. it doesn't mean a fucking thing to say i have social anxiety. when different "doctors" will tell you different things based on their intuitive perception of you, you're not dealing with science. so, i'm not even going to say i don't have it - i'm going to deny that it's even a real thing (despite actually relying on the diagnosis for my income).

i wasn't afraid to speak in class. i just couldn't be bothered to go there and be forced to talk to the fucking idiots around me. there wasn't any psychological break that was preventing me from going to class and spending the whole time arguing with students - and with profs if they insisted. it just wasn't my idea of a good time. i preferred to avoid the conflict by just not bothering to show up.

and, i would have argued. vehemently. brutally. violently. i was hardly just going to sit there and nod in order to get along with everyone.

it wasn't a psychological difficulty in expressing myself, it was a refusal to sit there and suffer their idiocy. and, i got nailed for it - and i took it out of legitimate protest. you want to knock down a smart kid because she doesn't want to sit around and have tea with you and pretend she agrees with you? do it. i dare you.

they did it....

the system isn't designed to push along the mindless, so much as it's designed to knock people like me down a notch. it's designed to punish those that are disagreeable, that have independent thoughts, that will stand up against what the teacher is pushing.

i preferred to be confrontational in writing. my essays were always combative.

but, i'm not joking or exaggerating when i point out that my gpa was knocked down by at least a point by a conscious refusal to kowtow to the insistence on participation marks.

see, i've build my entire life around avoiding participating in markets. i maybe wasn't cognizant of it until my late 20s, but it was nonetheless the driving force from the start.

at school, i'd avoid participating, even to my own detriment. there were classes that i aced and yet ended up with Bs in because i blew off the 10% participation mark. and, i always felt it was a just protest, and the school could fuck off for trying to force me to participate against my will.

i've spent my whole life trying to avoid labour. i remember going to a job interview, once, where i told the hiring manager that i wasn't there to make friends, and she practically started crying, as though rejecting participation was some kind of crime against humanity. i've always chosen the path of least participation.

and, i've been single most of my life because it's just another game that i don't want to participate in.

so, if the tendency to uphold participation as paramount defines this generation, you really don't want to look to me as a representative. i'm the exact opposite of that. i'd sell my soul to never have to participate in society ever again.

it's really astounding how young people view relationships.

it's, like, the more relationships they have, the more successful they are.

so, the more often they fail, the higher up some stupid hierarchy, they climb.

....as though they think they should be validated on whether they participated in meaningless sex, rather than whether they actually succeeded in relationship-building.

to clarify context: i do not have kids. thank god. that should be clear.

but, the father of these kids (in everybody relevant's minds - don't delve - let it be) is about fifteen years older than her. they lived together for a long time and had two kids, a boy and a girl, without getting married. he may have had feelings for his ex.

she was young.

frankly, she needed somewhere to stay and that's partly my fault.

i'm just trying to put the right context in place; i had removed myself from the situation, and there is no direct comparison to be had.

if a comparison exists, it is to somebody that faded away years before the camera picked up.

they're reporting this over multiple sources like marijuana legalization is a divisive issue.

but, this is not a scientific poll. and, scientific polls put legalization closer to 80%, across age groups. consistently.

again: this reeks of policy reversal, and of the government trying to come up with excuses not to do it.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/half-of-canadians-polled-support-marijuana-legalization-1.4025081

i'm legitimately not sure if this is purposeful scare-mongering or just absolute cluelessness.

it's not up to the government to run your business. i mean, maybe we can talk about that, but i wasn't expecting you to volunteer it.

here's the complicated, earth-shattering reality: hr departments are going to have to learn not to hire potheads, just like they don't currently hire drunks.

but, i mean, i say that like they don't know, right?

if you've never dealt with this before, here's a hint: when an applicant walks into the interview with slightly messy hair, red eyes and a sort of skunkish smell? don't hire that one.

can we get on with it now, already?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/marijuana-legalization-employers-safety-testing-impairment-medical-1.4017539

bunch of fucking peasants, right?

what do i know, i'm just a dumb artist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njG7p6CSbCU

i think the question that you need to ask yourself is this: is the function that you fill within society something that would be carried out by a slave in a system that allowed for slavery?

you might not actually know the answer....

....but, the truth is that most people would have to actually answer 'yes' to that question.

if that is the case, then why do you deny that you're a slave?

is it because you really enjoy your job? really?

is it because you're free to buy your own food and pay your own bills and make your own meals? or is it because you get a day or maybe two off a week, if you're lucky?

is it because you have a one in a million chance of escaping your reality if you work really hard and get really lucky?

i'm not trying to marginalize the importance of any of these things. certainly, a system with slaves that are treated well is preferable to a system with slaves that are treated poorly. and, a miniscule chance out is better than no chance at all.

but, being real about the situation presents a stark truth: there isn't a lot of difference between market labour and slave labour when you're in the bottom 95% of society. and, denying this reality is either being out of touch or being obtuse.

this is right out of zinn.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/how-wealthy-americans-divided-and-conquered-the-poor-to-create-the-concept-of-race/2016/04/19/2cab6e38-0643-11e6-b283-e79d81c63c1b_story.html

again: the capitalists don't care what colour you are. they're just looking for an excuse to enslave you, at any opportunity that they can. race. language. religion. gender. they'd enslave you on the basis of your eye colour, or your opinion of abbey road, if they could get away with it.

a pretty good exploration of this is actually howard zinn's people's history of the united states. one of the central themes of the text is that the core narrative of the history of the united states is the elite's use of racism as a tool to divide the labouring classes against each other.

when you see the capitalist press deny the reality of historical white slavery, and use language that is designed to make black people angry, what you are witnessing is the elite using race to divide workers against each other.

and, you need to see this for what it is in order to truly conquer it. you need to call it out for what it is. and, you need to not just stop promoting it but actively debunk it.

we need the working class to unite, and we need to stop falling into these racialized narratives that are designed to divide us.

read the zinn text, and apply what you learn to what you see in the world around us.

but, listen: if you think i'm trying to win a popularity contest or something...

i know that the revolutionary potential in our society is approaching zero. i don't pretend otherwise. and, i'm hardly interested in swaying public opinion.

i mean, what do you think? that i want to sit in the bourgeois parliament, or something? give me a fucking break. have you read anything i've written?

one of the things about not desiring power, and being interested solely in dismantling the propaganda of the state as a kind of historian for the revolutionaries of the future, is that i'm not remotely interested in what people think of me in the present tense. i mean, i know that i'm right - and i know that people will eventually know that i'm right. but, what that means is that i'm almost an acid test.

after all, you don't be a revolutionary by saying things that uphold the status quo. that's just not how this works. i'm necessarily going to piss people off. and, when you're finding yourself citing the new york times, you might want to take a step back and ask yourself who you're serving.

think of it like this: we'll know we're ready to take the next step when i'm not controversial. we'll know we've progressed when i don't make you upset. and, until that happens, i have an obligation to piss you off.

hey, guess what? i heard a nazi say, once, that the sun rises in the east.

therefore, anyone who says the sun rises in the east is a nazi.

and, that's not a common logical fallacy, either.

in fact, the reality is that there is a longstanding attempt to smear anybody that tries to draw the connection between wage labour and chattel slavery as a "white supremacist". it does not matter if these are the same people that have gone out of their way to abolish slavery. the ability to see through the propaganda must be attacked. this is a classic capitalist smear.

anarchists and socialists have been dealing with this kind of bullshit forever. and, here's the thing: if you fall for this, you're pretty far gone, to begin with. we can have these discussions if you insist. but, let's not miss the point, as they want us to, which is that slavery is about economics and not about race.

if you can't see through this tactic immediately, you're useless to the revolutionary left.

the capitalists don't care what colour you are. they're just always looking for any excuse they can to take away your bargaining power. race. religion. doesn't matter. they'll take whatever is available.

from the conspiracy theorists at jstor....hosting an article written by the unreliable charlatans at oxford, on behalf of the sketchy aha:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1833611?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

if you would like to learn more about irish slavery, you can do so by consulting the work of the white supremacists at the history department of the university of minnesota:

http://library.law.umn.edu/irishlaw/intro.html

anybody that questions the reality of irish slavery should begin by researching the law that repealed it:

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

i heard that the potato famine was also a myth.

the irish were enslaved by the protestant british because they were catholic, and this is mainstream history. there were repeated attempted genocides, as well. the person that wrote this article is an ignorant imbecile and should be fired.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ireland-slaves-conspiracy-theory-debunked-st-patricks-day-1.4028855

this is a noble attempt at spin for a good cause, but the actual problem is that the government refuses to appoint judges. this has been a problem for a while, now.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/dana-larsen/canada-cannabis-raids_b_15292868.html

here is an article that explains the issue:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-appointments-judges-senators-1.3806035

the chief justice has even written articles about it, and i've posted them, but i'm not looking it up right now. it's not something that came out of nowhere: it's a serious problem, and people have been drawing attention to it for a long time.

so, the actual reason that these case are being dropped is very likely as a protest to the government's unwillingness to staff the country's benches. what they're saying is that if the government won't provide access to justice then this is what is going to happen - so it had better appoint some fucking judges, already. and, this is a real failure of government, too. so, what the fuck is going on?

i haven't seen any statements by the government. but, my honest best guess as to what's slowing things down is that it's not a priority because there isn't any payola in it. this government only seems to be focused on things it can profit from. it's not concerned with actually running the government...

it's a sad reflection on the reality of things. but, we need some articles going after trudeau to appoint some judges, already. they're not over-booked, they're understaffed. the chief justice has done all she can. and, should people stay in jail indefinitely without a trial? they should not. the media needs to take him to task for this, and the government needs to get to fucking work on it.

the following reviews now have pictures:

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2010/10/10.html  (hey rosetta, ottawa)
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2011/01/21.html (braids, ottawa)
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2011/05/10.html (nils frahm, ottawa)
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2011/07/10.html (a perfect circle / electronic picnic, ottawa)
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2011/10/05.html (valleys/suuns/ps i love you, ottawa)
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2011/11/05.html (sheezer, ottawa)

there will be more after 2012, as i kind of made it a habit to take shots before i went out, and still do.

i think that, on this file, we're better off just picking up the slack on funding and organizing. this is an accounting issue, it's offloading, he's not going to push back if we decide we want to pay for it. and, these programs should be run locally, anyways. i'd like to see the provinces and states get together and find the right way to step in and fill the void.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/03/17/donald-trumps-great-lakes_n_15430522.html

whatever the value of our intentions, the fact of the matter is that we're alienating ourselves.

the reality is that canada skipped the baby boomer generation. i know that sounds insane, but it's actually what happened.

the silent generation hung on in canada all through the 70s, 80s, 90s and into the mid 00s. chretien & martin were born in '34 and '38, respectively, and ran the country from 1993-2006.

stephen harper is on the x/boomer cusp (born: 1959), but few canadians would argue that he's a baby boomer. he's a dead-ringer for alex p. keaton from family ties, and there's probably a lot of truth in the observation.

canada did not ever have a prime minister born in the 40s and, excluding the '59er harper, did not have one born in the 50s, either.

the reality is that the world is currently run by baby boomers and people looking towards a generational turnover in the last election were jumping the gun. i told you that as it was happening - that the boomers would determine the election, not the millenials. the boomers picked these candidates in their respective primaries, and were going to dominate the vote in the end.

the canadian government needs a reality check: it's twenty, thirty, forty years younger than the governments in the rest of the world. and, these other governments are not going to look forward to the future when they see the canadian delegation. no. they're going to snicker that the canadians are up past their bed time. the canadians may not realize their own lack of experience, but the rest of the world will. and, we will not be taken seriously by these aging old men - aging old white men - that cannot relate to us or understand what we're prattling on about.

we need more old white men in government.

actually, i think that what trump is broadcasting is clear: he sees trudeau as a child who doesn't belong at the big kids table.

so, he's brushed him off on his kids, instead.

if the canadian government is serious in building a relationship with donald trump, they're going to have to send him somebody his own age (or older - he'll respect his elders) that has a history in business. donald trump and his cronies are simply never going to take a 40-something liberal seriously.

the obvious candidate is paul martin. 

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/03/16/daughter-diplomacy-trudeaus-unorthodox-play-for-donald-trumps-approval.html

actually, i'm going to be integrating pictures of show dates in, too, so there's going to be one more update for 2011, soon.

i'm sorting through old pictures. here's another shot from july, 2007, fwiw. i previously claimed i was "male identifying" in 2007, but i guess that wasn't even really true then, was it?

...although, i'm actually not even on hormones, here.

i'm 26.

but i'm coming to a kind of disturbing conclusion: i spent my 20s looking like a 12 year old boy, and i've spent my 30s looking like a 12 year old girl.

maybe i'll finally be able to spend my 40s looking like a woman :\.

puberty has to happen eventually, right?

i really want my testicles out asap.

i finally got up until the end of 2011 comprehensively finished before i slept, yesterday.

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/index.html

i can't remember when i last updated this here, but i've uploaded a lot of videos here:


...and i've updated this list quite a bit, too:


i'm hoping i can get most of 2012 done today. it should be a lit faster, after that.

i suspect she's being constrained by the publication in not being definitive at the end, but this is nonetheless a decent summary of the right way to think about things.

that is, the differences that exist are better explained by plasticity through gender roles than by biological determination. and, what this suggests is that decisions we make regarding how we choose to live are paramount in how our brains develop.

this is strange language, but i feel i need to use it to get the point across: if a boy chooses to socialize with girls and rejects the influence of boys and men around him, his brain will feminize as a consequence of that choice.

the true challenge that we face as a society is in accepting these decisions.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/girl-brain-boy-brain/

brain sex can sell lots of copies of cosmo, and create lots of clickbait on buzzfeed, as it upholds the conservative ideal of gender binaries. but, if you ask an actual scientist, that person will tell you that it's not actually really a thing.

our brains are not planned out by god, or by dna, or by aliens, or by any other mystical force. they are constantly changing organs. this ability of our brains to morph and change - rather than develop due to a set plan - is called plasticity.

what it means is that we are literally the products of our experiences. tabula rasa, baby! our brains can and will and must and do change depending on the environment that they exist within.

when you begin to understand the brain as this constantly shifting ball of plasma, rather than as this fixed identity given to you by god, the idea of a "brain sex" stops even being coherent. how can a brain have a sex if it's constantly shifting and adapting to the environment? what does that even mean?

the abstract suggests that there are sex differences, and we exist on a spectrum, but this is a poor use of language. what they should be talking about is how experiences cluster with gender roles, making it more clear that the overlaps are a consequence of experience, rather than of biology.

transgendered people do not have a genetic abnormality or a psychological disorder. we are merely a product of human variation. a truly liberal society would uphold our rights to make choices, not try and diagnose us with an illness and claim we don't have a choice and don't understand what we're doing.

but, we're coming up to the end of this fruitless search. the science on this is winding down. and, we're going to have to confront the reality that it hasn't found anything, and instead deal with the actual issue in front of us: that we are free to make these decisions and need legal structures to uphold our rights of free expression.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468.abstract

i don't know why people can't deal with the premise that humans are free to make a choice as to which gender they'd prefer to live as.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170117135943.htm

actually, i remember catching a lot of shit for this when i ran it by a friend of mine.

"you don't bring your ex flowers, j. ever."
"well i never bought her flowers when we were dating, it was just a pun i couldn't resist..."
"never. ever. never, ever bring your ex flowers."
"it was harmless. it was cute, dammit. she shouldn't have thought anything of it. i wasn't leading her on..."
"never. ever. never, never, ever, ever...."
"whatever. i mean, what's the use of being friends if you can't be fucking friends?"

see, she asked me to pick up some flour on the way there.

how was i going to avoid that?

this is another serious question: how long after a break-up is it considered acceptable to turn down sex on the basis of preferring friendship?

because we were around two and a half years since the breakup, and it had been something like a year since we'd last had sex (she was actually pregnant for the bulk of the second year). the last couple of times we hung out, it hadn't come up. in hindsight, i guess they were more normal types of dates - coffee meetings, walks by the water - but i didn't really feel that way, i just felt like i was hanging out with a friend and connecting. & there was the awkward dinner with her family like two years after we broke up, when her older sister actually seemed to think we were back together. maybe it was closer to happening in her mind than in mine.

it was just wrong, to me. i preferred her as a friend, at that point, and didn't want to muddy things. but, she was clearly shocked and things were never quite the same.

am i not right on this, though? isn't two and a half years enough time to acceptably refuse sex without it damaging a friendship?

this is a serious question, though: how long after you break up with somebody do you start closing the door when you use the bathroom? because that's not even casual sex. leaving the door open while defecating is strictly a relationship privilege.

six months didn't bother me much.

but, after three years, i was starting to wonder what her long term plans with me really were.

no. stop. listen....

when your previously live-in ex-girlfriend insists on showing up at your new apartment with her young daughter, almost four years after you've broken up, there is no level of naivete that masks the scouting intent behind the operation and no use in fooling yourself into thinking otherwise.

and, when you stop by her place a year later to inform her you're finally officially going back on drugstore hormones, it's hard to believe that she really has any true justification to get upset about it, after everything that's happened over the last five years. that's just base resentment.

no. i wasn't a "nice guy". that's not even close to the reality of things.

example: i insisted that we split the bill, at all times. that's not "nice guy" bullshit. it's actually strictly and brutally enforced egalitarianism.

in fact, i never bought her anything, and i would have been offended by the suggestion that i should have, as though i could have bought her affections or should have wanted to. fuck that...

in reality, i was actually female-identifying for the bulk of the relationship. i spent a lot of energy into trying to make a girl-on-girl dynamic functional. that's what i wanted out of the situation, and has a lot to do with why i was less reactive to her escapades with other men than i could have or should have been. in the long run, i wasn't going to be her boyfriend or her husband - i was going to be her girlfriend or her wife. if she was going to insist on being bisexual, i'd have to get used to that.

in fact, a lot of the guys she fucked around with - including my friends - were into the "nice guy" schtick far more than i ever was. they were the ones with steady jobs and cars and traditional concepts of things and stuff. i was usually unemployed. and, if you want to get into the freudian bullshit, you'll note that i was actually the badass tranny anarchist she went back to over and over again - until i ultimately rejected her. they were offering emotional support for all the conflicts we were constantly in - and we fought. hard.

the scenario was complicated, and i had my own prerogatives. it was a long time ago, and doesn't really matter (although this will eventually come out in the alter-reality, years from now). but, just, don't get it into your head that i was playing the nice guy and got fucked over by it - that's not even close to the reality of it, or even close to what happened when i walked away from it, in the end. we were explosive and dangerous and dysfunctional, and everything that happened was a corollary of that.

remember this point as it will reassert itself in the alter-reality repeatedly: a big part of the dynamics of things is that she had a very strong maternal drive (she ended up with two kids and a daycare job) and i wanted nothing to do with that. and, she told me she wanted kids, but i thought she meant after she graduated university and got a head start on a career, not, like tomorrow. we could talk about that later, right? but, she wanted to talk about it right the fuck now.

if i actually was playing the role of the nice guy, i'd have probably impregnated her like she wanted, and we'd probably have stayed together for years longer than we did. i may have even settled her down. i didn't want that...

....and years later, when all doubt had passed, when all rationalizations had ceased, she eventually resented me so much for not wanting that that she couldn't even talk to me anymore.

the actual role i was playing was the feisty egalitarian lesbian feminist femme punk, and i could be a fucking bitch about it when i got pissed off, too.

once again, let me say this: if trump wants to shut down the world bank, i'm not going to argue with him. might i suggest that he shut down the imf, while he's at it?

the music scene in ottawa seems to have really died after i left. wow.

see, i knew i had a window, and that it would then go back to what it was...

to be fair, the thing with ottawa is that it doesn't actually have it's own music scene, the nightlife there is just driven by what's happening outside of it. so, if we end up in a situation where the broader music scene hits a low point, which is where we're at right now, it just can't weather it - it falls apart. venues close. shows end up in basements. and, when shows end up in basements, you have to deal with a strange sort of democracy that refuses to acknowledge that beethoven is more interesting than a recording of your mom vomiting up your dad's sad attempt at making a meal, last night.

"it's ok....AAAAAARRRRRRFFFFF....you tried, hon-AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRFFFFF-ey....no, i'm ok...what i mean is AAAARRRRRRFFFFF to get the fuck away from me right now, before i accidentally ARRRRRRFFFFFF miss in purpose...."

it's a type of democracy where mediocrity wins every time, and the rare interesting show gets booked on a monday during exams, and nobody promotes it.

"what do you fucking mean that loma prieta played here last night? why didn't you tell me?"
"who cares? they're from out of town. i'm doing a guitar effects noise set tomorrow, you're in, right?"

no. ottawa needs people transiting around it in order to avoid being boring. and, then it needs somebody standing on the 401 near kingston, yelling at people that there's venues in that direction.

detroit was never my first choice. but, it seems like i got out at the right time.

in actuality, this sounds more like what clinton promised, especially the part about the judges; it really just sounds like a continuation of existing policy.

i would have expected trump to come in high and congress to gut it. but, he's not even putting 2 billion down for the wall, when he himself was lowballing it at 4-5 times that - and experts were suggesting 10-20 times it.

i told you to wait for the budget to see if he's serious. the budget is here, and he's not serious.

the extra money on enforcement will likely end up in private contracts, too - private contracts that can avoid serious oversight.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/politics/donald-trump-border-wall-budget.html?mabReward=ACTM3&recp=2&moduleDetail=recommendations-2&action=click&contentCollection=Theater&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article

july, 2007. male-identifying. 26 years old.

i'm only doing this because it actually demonstrates that i haven't changed a lot.

this is a picture of me from a period where i identified as male (it's from 2004 - so i'm 23 in the shot):

i've had at least shoulder length hair pretty much consistently since the mid 90s. i shaved it a few times, but there really aren't very many pictures of me with short hair in existence (because i've basically never had short hair). the few i've seen look like mug shots. i've never styled my hair in any kind of short-haired male fashion kind of choice: never used gel, or anything like that.

there certainly aren't any pictures of me without my shirt on. i wouldn't even take my shirt off to go swimming. and i never went swimming, anyways. over the course of my entire adult life, i'm pretty sure that there's only one person in the entire world that's seen me without a shirt on. the idea that i'd take a picture of myself without a shirt on, let alone upload it to the internet, is insanity.

but, i never developed any kind of muscle mass on the top end of my body (or anywhere else, for that matter). the fact that i smoked aside, i was always in very good shape due to the large amounts of bicycling (2-3 hours a day at points) and walking i did, but it always came out in terms of toned arms and legs and never in terms of muscle mass.

the point is just that there aren't really "guy pictures" of me because i wasn't ever really much of a guy. the reality is that i spent my entire teens and 20s looking like i never really went through puberty. i never weighed more than 120 pounds; i was always stick thin. i always had long hair, often died blonde or orange or red. i tended to wear really nerdy button-ups, or plain t-shirts (or band shirts, but not much after about 2002). if you ever saw me in an outfit that was more bourgeois than that, there was a struggle to get me in to it.

why? because i just didn't want to. i was an outcast by choice: a nerd, a loner, a loser. i both found the idea of expressing masculinity to be boring and to be a poor reflection of how i felt.

the fact that i wore a tie on that day is really, honestly about as manly as i ever got. and i'm sorry if that's disappointing, but it's the truth of it.

that new picture is very temporary. it was taken in early 2011, after i had just turned 30. it's just been a while. something new will come up with the new season...

it's a reminder that i'm finnish. i almost look icelandic, huh? it's pretty heavy-handed. those eyes can get humongous depending on a few things...

it's almost a reminder that, as young as i look today, i've aged a lot over the last five years. even i'm a little taken aback by this shot.

i'm thirty years old, here:

actually, as a general rule, i can't stand bands with male singers that wear make-up.

there's a few exceptions. and, it's not like it's a condition, or something. but, it's kind of a mark of a pretension. it usually signals that the band is about making fashion statements rather than about writing songs.

i mean, i'm not going to judge anybody on it or anything, but it's just not usually the kind of thing i'm going to get interested in...

and, fwiw, most of the female musicians i listen to don't wear much makeup, either.

my laptop is currently badly bogged down with editing concert footage, so the vlogs will have to wait until that gets done.

there will be vlogs for all the days, i just don't know when i'll get around to doing it. it could be a week or more.

when they're one, i'll upload them all at once.

i just only have so many cycles available to me, and catching up on these concert reviews is simply higher priority right now.

yeah.

these missile "defense" systems are in truth offensive weapons systems, and the target is beijing.

we're starting to see a more coherent policy develop, and it's every bit as stupid as you'd expect. these high testosterone man-apes are rejecting anything resembling softpower (ex: the tpp) as effeminate, and instead opting to use the biggest, baddest guns they can find to threaten the chinese to do what they want, or else.

or else, what.

see, that's the reason why them book lerners always wanted to use the soft power. nobody really thinks they'll actually do it.

if the chinese focus on soft power in reaction, while the americans completely abandon it, it will be a superior strategy. i mean, consider the vietnamese capitalist. the chinese are offering free trade, while the americans are offering no trade at all. under those conditions, the vietnamese capitalist is simply not going to want american protection. protection from what? trade? it is in their interests to align with chinese softpower - and the bigger the guns the americans bring in, the larger the incentives are to side with the chinese.

it would be one thing to bring the guns in and utilize softpower. but, they're clearly being driven by the retarded idea that softpower is for unmanly fags. and, this is what happens when you elect somebody that thinks with his cock.

the chinese are not stupid. and, if this tactic takes four years or longer to get reversed then they're going to clean up.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-usa-thaad-china-idUSKBN16709W

the chinese can't reasonably talk about dominating a trade agreement that includes canada and mexico. the americans can project that kind of power towards asia, but the chinese are a long ways away from projecting that kind of power towards america.

even talk of the chinese dominating japan is absurd. in a real sense, what the tpp did was reconstruct the japanese empire - sort of how like the eu has reconstructed a german-dominated europe. as the americans have delegated running europe to the germans, the tpp was meant to delegate control of asia to the japanese.

but, what the chinese can do is talk about essentially absorbing countries like vietnam into it's sphere of interest - at the expense of japanese ambitions. and, that's of course what the deal was intended to prevent and what is now free to happen, with it gone. and, where a strong tpp could have prevented a war between japan and china by the projection of american power, the withdrawal of america from the region could very well embolden the chinese to the point where conflict is now inevitable.

i've approached what trump is doing as irrational, but, even so, at the least, if trump was the master negotiator then he would have sought something like a deal to exchange american withdrawal from southeast asia for chinese withdrawal in south america, or perhaps even asia. i see no evidence of this: he just gave away the farm, for nothing. and, this could potentially be game over for american influence in the region.

sadly, the republicans will likely spin the situation as proof that they were right all along. it's really an absurd point of failure.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/14/china-south-korea-join-tpp-members-in-trade-talks.html

fwiw, if you're curious...

yes, i'm known to drink a fair amount, from time to time - and, yes, i'm as irish as i am anything else (on my mom's side), but i never go out on st. patrick's day.

it's the type of drunk that st. patrick's day attracts that i'll go well out of my way to avoid.

and, fwiw, it's the same reason i prefer to stay in inside on canada day, on new year's and, often, on hallowe'en, too.

how can you miss the incredibly dour and darkly facetious use of religious imagery in the track?

americans are just hopeless with sarcasm. they literally don't get it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Vfp48laS8

i want to clarify my point, because it's the same thing that just happened in the united states and i don't think it's being understood very well.

what the liberals are doing is attaching minority representation to establishment politics, so that when voters see a minority candidate they immediately assume that this person does not represent their interests, but is essentially a pawn of the party and by extension the banks. it's classic blowback, because it's rooted in the racist assumption that minorities don't care about politics, and just vote on identity.

what they thought that they could do is fly in all of these minorities and just use them as a cover to push through their right-wing agenda. the thinking is that they can get away with a lot more when it's being done by asian woman and black men than when it's being done by a bourgeois elite of white men. so, they selected the minorities that did exactly what they were told by the party and then promoted them as replacements for dissenting voices. at the end of the day, the corporatocracy gets it's pipelines and tax cuts, all while voters are patting themselves on the backs for increasing the diversity of parliament.

what they've done, instead, is install minorities as the face of the establishment, and create the perception that minority candidates do not represent the interests of voters, but instead are working for the political elite.

this is what actually happened in the united states during the obama administration (although it started happening during the clinton administration, and the bush administration actually used the same tactics). people started to notice that the government consistently sent minorities to do it's dirty work. so, it came to be that they started voting against minorities, in order to try and protect their own interests.

if the government continues to use minority groups as a way to gloss over it's right-wing agenda and push through unpopular measures, it's going to create the same backlash. we're already seeing this happen, internally, at the riding level. and, while it may be a necessary reaction to bone-headed government policy, it's not a can of worms you want to really open.

the government needs to change it's strategy before it creates a mess - and we need to be clear in assigning blame where it belongs, here, which is in the pmo.

more signs of internal revolt.

it's no secret that yolande james was pushed by the party because of her gender & ethnicity. i guess the riding members were less enthused by the prospect.

the liberals are making all of the same stupid mistakes that the democrats made, and are going to have to deal with all of the same consequences. you can't enforce diversity from the top down, and then go out and pretend it's more representative of the population, as though minority voters only care about identity. people won't tolerate that.

"i know that she works for the bankers on bay street, but look - she's black. you're not going to vote for that white person just because she better represents your views are you? what are you, a race traitor?"

they honestly think that's going to work - because they're actually secretly brutal racists, just like the democrats are.

it wasn't always this way, and there are good people in the liberal party. the liberals don't have the history that the democrats do, and quite the opposite. but, this leadership team is horrific and needs to go.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/emmanuella-lambropoulos-saint-laurent-montreal-liberals-byelection-1.4016891