i had to replace this track.



the deleted mix was actually intended to be temporary; it was done a few days before i finished the main track, and i was going to then go back and re-render it when i finished it. this didn't happen. so, the mix ended up with some synthesizers in it that had to be taken out. it's now also an accurate "guitar only mix" for the final version of the track.

this mix will also appear on tetris. the discarded mix will be moved to the alephs.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

are countries like the united states and canada simply too big to administrate properly? i previously suggested that america's stagnation is causally linked to the rate at which it expanded westward, that it tried to absorb too much wilderness too fast and was ultimately overcome by it. but, what would a more successful rate have been?

well, the geographic middle of the country is still largely closed to civilization. in order for america to have walked down a path that could have avoided collapse, it would probably still have unorganized territories, right now.

if quebec succeeds in annexing new france, that is going to split the united states down the middle, but it might be better off that way.

canada expanded quickly as well, but it created much larger administrative divisions, which allows for more truly regional control. i don't know if the size of the provinces was explicitly constructed as a reaction to madisonian democracy the way that the division of powers was in canada, but it's the same kind of difference: madison's evil plan all along was to create small administrative divisions to prevent regional co-operation, in order to prevent the spread of political ideas that would help the working classes. what america ought to be doing is reorganizing itself in regional divisions that allow for more co-operation between neighbouring states. the country is too big for federal administration, but the administrative divisions are too small for effective oversight, as well. so, this might be best accomplished at this stage by a new level of government that splits the country into 5 or 6 divisions, and three rough categories: urban, rural and mixed. allowing the eastern seaboard to regain some concept of local sovereignty, and setting up the infrastructure to allow for something similar on the west coast, might help america recapture that sense of progress that it lost in the 50s, even as it strands the geographic middle of the country. but, future expansion out of the megalopolises will simply need to occur at a sustainable rate.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

republishing inri058

there are a few ideas in my discography that i've explored from multiple angles, but nothing else at all like this track, which has been through multiple complete rethinks involving multiple people over the course of sixteen years. as the revisions are so diverse, i think that a comprehensive collection of interpretations is a proper entry within my discography.

in the end, this emerges as my seventh symphony.

the collection is to be arranged chronologically in four discs consisting of two 2xcd sets, with the first two discs consisting of mixes that were meant for inclusion in band projects and the third and fourth consisting of mixes that were created after the track was moved into my own various one-person projects. further discussions of the various incarnations of the tracks appear on the track pages.

written over 2001 and 2002 and rethought repeatedly between 2002-2014, with no clear resolution in a final mix. reconstructed from source in late 2014 and then rendered at multiple stages to create a series of snapshots. final mixes were completed over the last week of november and the first week of december. released as a two-volume set on dec 7, 2014. the concept was rethought on nov 3, 2017, which led to the inclusion of five more mixes and an expansion to four cds. re-released in four volumes & finalized as symph007 on nov 12, 2017. the raw guitar mix was corrected on jan 6, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

credits

j - electric & acoustic & classical guitars, analog & digital effects & processing, electric bass guitar, synthesizers, drum programming, orchestral sequencing (12), drum manipulation, vocal manipulation, voice (9), digital wave editing, loops, equalizers, soundscaping, sampling, composition, production, cover art

sean - vocals/lyrics (2,5,7), ring modulator (7-9, 11, 13-14, 16)

greg - drum performance sample source (4, 6-9, 11, 13)

bob - hammering (3)

the rendered electronic orchestra on track 12 includes tuba, saxophone, flute, clarinet, orchestra hit, piano, violin, viola, cello, contrabass and various full string sections.

released july 4, 2002

would an independent quebec have designs on new france? well, it's not so crazy to think that this society could produce a napoleon.

if it's going to claim quebec on some claim of ethnic identity to the land, why not claim new france? detroit. st louis. new orleans. these are all of french heritage, are they not?

one wonders how much separatist sentiment already exists in new france. nobody talks openly about it in detroit. but, i have reason to think it's there, if you could just scratch the surface. they all know, deep down, that they would join the movement to unite quebec with new france.

but, it is the region that i think the united states needs to be most concerned about actual revolt in. they just might be more interested in joining canada than joining quebec.

still. i would advise all american intelligence agencies to be on the look out for quebcois intelligence agents, trying to sow separatist fervour in new france. it's an inevitability.

you're welcome for the tip.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

you know, canada is pretty geologically stable in most places.

i suppose the difficulties in maintaining permanent settlements in canada were always related to the climate; at most historical levels of human development, the cold here would have required migration. the romans couldn't have built cities here. if the germans lived here, they would have fled to mexico. even the norse could only really live on the coast. if the remnants of roman civilization had found america two hundred years sooner, it wouldn't have been able to colonize it. that is the answer as to why the indigenous people did not build cities here: the terrain is uninhabitable for a quarter of the year.

it's really only with the development of technology that inhabited cities in this region of the globe is a real possibility. but, now that this technology is real, i think these cities have a potentially very long life span, given that they're built in such a geologically stable area. large proportions of america's most populated regions are about to be swallowed by the sea, one way or another. but, canada is built on solid rock - the shield - and protected by glacial lakes.

it's funny how what's left of america may end up being basically new france. vive le quebec libre!

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

see, the trump people might think that faking payouts for workers to gloss over the tax cut is a good pr strategy, but let's see them run with that.

"yo, i heard on the news that you're supposed to be being paying out on that tax cut. where's my cut?"

hey, anything to raise workers' consciousnesses has to be viewed as in some ways useful, even as the designs around it seem so perilous. those are arguments that the good guys have to win, in the end.

but, i think a worker revival in the republican party was actually inevitable. the historical roots were too deep. the real tragedy is how liberals let the republican party get so far away from them.

maybe the real lesson to be learned from the uselessness of the democratic party is that the left ought to be trying to take over the republican party.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

another decision: i had included a few 'orchestral' works in the epic rock compilation, because it sort of fit, but i've taken them out. the way i'm going to do this is that the guitar disc for the orchestral pieces will be the orchestral works, and i'll add the slow version of the time machine as a bonus track.

there will be material from the orchestral works in the tetris compilation, but where it fits.

i just felt forced to include the guitar concerto on a guitar works, but it doesn't really fit the description of tetris well - it's an overture and concerto and should be catalogued accordingly.

and, so, i should be explicit, and rename the release to tetris, 1-4.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

on second thought, now that i've put the third disc aside as two further potential volumes, i can release a four volume set, if i include the guitar mixes, and why not, it fits the theme.

four is just permanent.

i still need to determine what i actually am going to create and then order it afterwards...

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the most recent update is that the second tetris disc is sequenced, but the third has been put aside; it may end up as two discs. there is at least one more tetris disc to sequence, but i won't be releasing any of them in the inri069 space. as of now. i think. they will likely have a release date of something like 2011, in something like a 6 disc set. but, i could still decide that it's worthwhile to release a double in this space.

right now, what i'm wanting to do is sequence the guitar collage disc, as it kind of has to be sequenced before the next tetris disc. and, i'm realizing that one of my guitar mixes isn't a guitar mix at all.

so, i'm going to have to update inri058. i wish i would have caught this in november, but so be it.

it looks like this guitar collage disc will be what is published in inri069, unless i get a good 4 disc tetris set, in which case i can release the remaining volumes later.

jameet singh must cut his beard.

so, where am i with things?

i've got the second and third tetris discs created, i just have to sequence them. but, i'm leaning towards not releasing this for a while, perhaps positioning it as late as 2013 in a 5 or 6 volume set.

tetris is the idea of mixing technology with guitar music. the three compiled expressions of this are in the form of a dance music setlist, a psychedelic music setlist and an epic rock setlist. a fourth expression of this in the form of atmospheric guitar music may follow shortly.

the only thing i've put aside for definite release in the inri069 space is the disc of guitar mixes - that is, songs stripped down only to the guitar parts. i'm also going to be getting a head start on a number of mix tapes, with the possibility of a release, but the likelihood of half-releases, to be put aside for later.

what i'm doing right now is sequencing these two discs and taking a look at the fourth volume.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

did phillippe couilliard even fall into a separatist trap, however accidental?

i wouldn't assign that level of foresight to the sovereigntist movement in quebec. sorry.

but, consider the oft-maligned line about "money and the ethnic vote.". there was always a certain amount of truth underlying the calculation that federalist support in quebec was dominant amongst recent immigrants, and that they had a tipping effect over the inclinations of the old stock pure-laine population. in the sense that federalist support was always tied to liberal support, you could argue that both the liberals (and the federalist cause) relied on the support of recent immigrants, and their recent descendants. so, what to make of the liberal party's adoption of the charter - which is adopted by the image of federalism, by proxy? they're attacking their key support base.

if i was a montrealer of recent arrival, and i was looking at the political spectrum, it would seem to me like the only provincial party that is of any interest to me is the quebec solidaire. by extension, this is going to make sovereignty more attractive to the "ethnic vote" than federalism, producing a sovereigntist movement that is more reflective of quebec's existing demographics - and therefore more likely to succeed.

i suspect that remaining support for the pq right now is very soft, and especially very soft around this issue. if the vote is framed as a referendum over the charter, that is if the voting decision (where it exists) between the pq and the qs is framed this way, i would expect the pq to crumble. the truth is that the pq has become a provincial voice for old bigots.

i don't expect this rearrangement to be complete by the next election, but rather that the results of the next election will produce it. the liberals may win their fight against caq, as the left splits and crashes. but, the inevitable result of this realignment is a powerful sovereigntist bloc on the left, in time for 2022.

if that happens, this purportedly tactical move by the liberals is going to appear most pyrrhic. and, it may spill over to the federal election, once these voters are released from brand liberal.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i was talking about how there was some uncertainty around whether the hot air in the atlantic may have something to say about the polar vortex.

that storm on the east coast right now is that hot air in the atlantic getting pulverized by the polar vortex, which is clearly demonstrating itself as the more powerful force. but, this is actually the kind of storm that people around the jet stream, wherever it is in thirty years, are going to have to get more used to during winter, as increasingly concentrated pools of warmth near the equator smash more frequently into these polar air masses.

the latitudes of these storms may push north, or may not. the polar sea may not end up so navigable in the winter, after all. it depends on the sun. right now, the cold is holding it's own at fairly temperate latitudes. but, the onslaught has just begun.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i was just using my compass to pull a piece of lint out of my lighter (it's the worst when that happens...), when i started to realize that the ancient greeks probably used compasses for pretty much everything. if you can imagine this bearded greek old man, using this giant compass as a claw in his daily tasks - holding pita bread sandwiches, swapping away flies, getting that itch in that hard to reach spot. it's almost like that edward scissor-hands, isn't it?

i'm now fully convinced that all greeks lived like this, with compass as primary general utensil.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

what we understand in the universe is largely restricted to concepts of motion. unfortunately, a fairly good understanding of motion may have led us to a false conclusion that we understand the universe well because we understand it's motions well.

most objects in the universe still perplex us at the most basic levels - we don't really know what they do, and if we do know then we don't know why, and if we don't know then we propose mathematical theories about them.

take the sun. we can measure how the sun moves fairly well. and, we know it shines. but, we don't really have any predictive theory to explain how the fluctuations in the sun's strength vary. this is a total mystery.

we may in the end find out that the laws of motion are actually not particularly useful in understanding the universe at all.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, i put my upload of this mix on hold, to explore the possibility of adding another track, to spin inside dull aberrations. this would have required some strategic cuts to fit on to one cd, but it was plausible, and a cut was made. but, the track just doesn't fit the aesthetic on the disc, as much as i want it to.

so, what is this, then? this is the first officially complete volume of tetris, an idea i've been kicking around for a while, since i think 2007. and, it may in the end end up separated from inri069, and placed in a release sequence deep in 2011 instead, as the first part of a two or four cd set. but, this is a volume in a set of some sort, at least.

tetris is an idea that is meant to combine technology with lead guitar work, which i realized around ten years ago is a dominant theme in my work, worth separately cataloguing. many rough lists of tracks intended for a tetris release have circulated, over the years. there will be a tetris release of some sort that documents 2003-2011, potentially several.

the first tetris release is intended to focus on danceable tracks driven with a lead guitar part. spin is just too much of a rock song. i'm considering a second immediate tetris release, focused on trip-hop, but it may be put off until 2007.

i'm considering a third volume of atmospheric guitar music, but that too may be put off - as might the mix tape of solos.

so, there's still a lot of work to do in compiling and organizing the components of this release. but, this cd will be a completed segment, moving forwards.


jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, are we just tiny microscopic life forms in the greater context of a much wider biological entity, possibly with some kind of consciousness?

i'm just struck by the synchronicity of the dimming of the sun with the warming of the atmosphere, almost as though one is acting to balance the other out - and while some may want to interpret this as a sign of a higher power, i think a more naturalistic explanation lies in something mechanistic, like the parts of a living organism. maybe the stars that form this organism even arrange into a constellation of a duck, if you could see it from the outside, which we will never be able to, because we are on the inside of it. well, maybe we could catch a reflection, somehow. or be lucky enough to catch a glimpse into some curvature in space. but, we can't see ourselves in the night sky.

now, you could run a computer simulation to determine the empirical question of whether our mathematical understanding of the universe projects a duck into other parts of the galaxy, if we have anything approximating enough data. you could potentially model it on a computer screen, but you'd have to go to virtual reality to really see the duck that we may or may not project. and, there would always be uncertainty levels.

no, to truly determine the empirical question of whether or not the galaxo-spacial biological entity we exist as a component of appears as a duck to other parts of the galaxy will require travelling there to see for ourselves. that's settled.

but, then, what if the constellations that we see are also galaxo-spacial biological entities? see, as i've mentioned a few times, i'm kind of open to the idea of religion as a ufo cult - and astrology was at one point a religion. contemporary westerners of a liberal scientific mindset tend to scoff at astrology as a lot of contrived nonsense, and they're not technically wrong, but their scorn obscures the fact that these ideas come from a lost religion that acted as a syncretic bridge between mathematics, astronomy and mysticism - that this is actually derived from legitimate ancient science. that doesn't mean that there's any value to the zodiac - this is not my argument, don't misunderstand me. but, it does suggest that there are maybe ritualized relics embedded in the zodiac that remember the relatively advanced science of the babylonian era, which was a high point for astronomy in the ancient world, this period of learning itself spurred by even more ancient stories, such as those told in egypt.

they kept very careful records, apparently. they were tracking things, looking for patterns. but, people don't realize how long this period of early civilization really was, before the languages started to change in the middle east, with the persians and then the greeks. if you're standing in babylon in the year 500 bce, you have 4000 years of astronomical records to draw on. the egyptians had even more than that. our science is based on a few hundred years of observation. so, they had more observations than we do, and more data to infer from. one has to think that inferences were made. if we could retrieve this data somehow, we might be able to predict the next several solar cycles better, if we could see a longer term pattern.

some of these patterns may be hidden in the zodiac, but you'd have to be careful, because it's also full of traps. first, if it finds a pattern, it's inevitably going to project it too perfectly, and project a cycle far less chaotic than reality. second, the mathematical writing that they used was cumbersome, and it produced a lot of error due to crude approximation arising from difficulties using that system. so, their calendar was actually wrong. and, it's been out of sync for centuries. it would require a lot of calculation to resync this, and then it wouldn't even be clear what you're comparing. it seems absurd to consult a source for predictive value when it can't even get the date right, right?

still, there could be useful information in there, if it's calibrated right. we'll never know until we pass through it and look back and reconstruct it. why were they so interested in the stars in the first place, though? and what's with all these stories of people coming up and down from the sky?

if there are living galaxo-spacial biological entities in the universe, then perhaps the movement of bodies in the sky has more to do with how the ancients imagined it than we currently think.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

and, so, the way to terrorize somebody like keith ellison into remembering about issues on the left is to threaten them electorally on the left through the creation of a third party, then yell and scream at them to get policy through when they win.

i think obama may have been more useful to the left than he was, if he had received more pressure from it. those small campaign donations don't seem to have had much of an influence on policy, perhaps because they were so de-centralized and so had no representative body to guide their policies through. i suppose the assumption was that the president would be that body, but that was perhaps a misunderstanding in the body politic. there should have been greater mobilization on the left to see certain policies through - he may have listened. but, the left wanted a benevolent despot.

in order for these small donations campaigns to come attached with any kind of accountability to the ideas used to raise these funds, donors need to organize directly and find a way to lobby the president after he wins.

"have you seen my cat?"

that's twice, this week. and, here's the hard truth for windsorites: your cat ran away to join the colony, and you'll have to deal with it. the feral cats here have a really strong invisible network of scent signals that will lure your cat away immediately, if you let sight of it for even one second, outside. i wouldn't even be surprised to hear about cats darting out when doors are left open a crack, after waiting all day to follow the smell, as it walked by outside.

i've been arguing that the city needs a serious straight out feline cull. i know what they say about how trap, neuter & return is a preferable option, but that presumes a certain level of manageability. we may, unfortunately, be at the point where we require an all out slaughter of feral cats, because their existing numbers are already too much of a problem for a t-n-r to cut down on.

but, the colony will in some way affect your cat, even if it's isolated enough from the aromas that it only gets  the odd sniff of it. the ones that it drags out, zombie like, will be converted to the cause of the colony upon arrival. and, this is simply hormonal - no amount of pleading will change your cat's minds. once assimilated, they are gone - never to return to snuggling, or to the far more subversive kneading, at that. their minds are washed of their existence as slaves to humans, however absurd that formulation is when related to cats, and given a new life of meaning to protect, defend and expand the colony. do not waste your time - they are gone.

as it's purely chemical, and we're both basically the same kind of mammal, of course this is possible in humans, if you can find the right magic password, the right chemical bonds. you can get an idea of how we're sometimes driven purely by hormones when you look at the fight or flight response; we literally don't think in these situations, we just succumb to this hormone that forces us to react. this is a ways from actual chemical mind control. and, the instincts available to program are likely to be biological responses that might not be useful and might even be dangerous - lust, for example. but, i think the chemistry likely exists to turn a human's brain right off in order to accomplish a biological urge, and it would probably be experienced by the conscious host as a blackout in memory. one could no doubt find detailed examples that fit this description.

if you lose your cat around here, though? it's gone. to the colony.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i think i'm done my distraction with the usb key, now. i didn't salvage anything off of it, but i convinced myself that what was on it was routine. i was just paranoid about forgetting something. if i did, there's no evidence it existed.

i still don't know what happened with that; i stopped writing to the key immediately after the weirdness happened, so the files should have been easily accessible. but, they only came up on a deep scan, and they came with some directory corruption, as though they'd been decaying on the drive a while. it's all very strange.

what i remember doing is deleting two files in the root directory, leaving a folder called bd-2 in tact. that's a little blurry as to the exactness of the directory structure, which is what it causing me all of this pause. but, the whole drive wiped. my initial thought was that i accidentally deleted the folder and it should be a quick undelete. but it seems more like that the thing collapsed under itself; it just vanished. do file directories randomly collapse like that, or is it further sign of intrusion?

dude. remember the prime directive. you can't be fucking with my files like this. i actually have no delusions as to the nature of "network privacy", but zapping my usb key crosses boundaries. if somebody did zap me, please don't do it again.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i accidentally deleted files off of my usb key, and i'm kind of dumbfounded as to why they're not showing up in the file system. i haven't touched the drive. it's just full of random dates, almost more like it got flooded with data. but i'm waiting for one more scan to make sure it's not just hiding with a weird name.

i guess maybe the file table could have gone out? is that something that happens? i don't think there was much on there, i'm just going to have this nagging feeling like i forgot something.

something else i read while the internet was down was the gibson classic, neuromancer. i'd read half of it a dozen times and made sure i actually finished it this time. i think it's overrated as a work, even if it was enjoyable enough as basic fiction. but, something i think he got wrong was the idea with the implants. the female protagonist had mechanical implants inserted into her eyes. i think the way this is going to actually work is that people are going to get injections full of hormones designed to rearrange their dna: that we're going to actually reprogram ourselves to use the hardware we have better, not get new hardware attached to ourselves. i think the potentials of this are quite staggering, but it's going to require a difficult period of human experimentation, where people get programmed in disturbing ways, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose.

one medical application i can think of, as a transgendered person, would be actual genetic therapy for transition. you could just reprogram your cells to produce estrogen instead of testosterone. i think diabetics could put this to use, as could anyone else with a problem in hormone regulation - including people with high levels of bad cholesterol.

but, the key futuristic element was in finding ways to use technology to enhance our abilities. and, i think the novel made an error in imagination that was kind of ubiquitous at the time.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

did you know that humans have the dna to understand magnetism, and therefore electricity, as a sixth sense?

i was just thinking about epi-genetics when i was going for a walk outside, and it is cold right now here, as i saw a series of cats cross my path - one very black, and the other very white.

i started to wonder if cats had the genetic ability to change their fur colour. i've never seen a cat actually do this. but, the white cat seemed strangely adapted to the snow, while the black cat seemed equally adapted for the night. i suppose the traditional explanation is that cats are born with variations in fur colour, and that the ones best suited to the environment survive. but, i'm not sure the laboratory conditions provide that as a clear explanation, as this population of cats is only semi-feral, and the snow here is actually unusual.

well, maybe the darwinian explanation isn't so lacking if you explore it carefully - you just have to accept a lot of coincidences, but then you need to have good luck to get the right mutations in the first place, right? let's explore other possibilities, without pursuing the need to debunk anything.

so, what if house cats can actually change their fur colour? the ability to change fur colour, often in winter, is a common adaptation of species descended from the common ancestor of the carnivore clade, and some species with older common ancestors, like rabbits, seem to have these genes, as well. they appear to be very old mammal genes. cats probably have them, cleverly inactivated around humans.

i started to wonder if humans may have even selected specimens of house cats that didn't utilize this adaptation, as it would be alarming to watch the cat transform - perhaps into an evil spirit. and, perhaps that evil spirit was somewhat real - perhaps the change in fur colour came with hormonal changes that made the animal more aggressive. perhaps. perhaps.

but, then, if something like that happened, your cat may have a special power that it isn't using, so as not to alarm you. we identify cats by their colours. they need to project a static representation of themselves to remain identifiable. they don't want to be changing their fur colours.

a semi-feral cat lost outside in a snow storm has a very different set of priorities, and one has to wonder whether the stress is enough to flip the switch.

it led me to thinking about humans, and this sixth sense that we have. we have this sixth sense because our ancestors had it - not our recent ones this geologic epoch, but our distant ancestors, before life moved out of the oceans. our ancestors could intuitively measure magnetic fields - think about that. and, why don't we have this ability any more? because it's an ocean adaptation. the utility of sensing magnetic fields through a liquid medium didn't transfer over to a gaseous one, the sense fell into disuse and, in the end, the more successful individuals were probably coincidentally born deficient of it. if you can imagine an existence so dark that eyes are so useless that the blind outcompete those that can see....

but, that truth might be eroding. our atmosphere is now full of magnetic fields, of our creation. how many humans have been born with this sense, and studied as mystical, or perhaps laughed at as delusional? it should happen from time to time as an error, or a mutation, whatever word you want to use. these people should actually exist. but, then, how many of us could flip it on, if we only knew which collection of hormones to concoct?

i don't know what we would realistically be able to do in reading a cell phone signal or transmitting wireless data. it may very well end up as a terrible way to interpret reality, full of indecipherable amounts of noise at strengths that produce pain. but, perhaps we can order the data quite well, and abstract it relatively easily. this is really an experimental question.

it's a different way to think about evolution, this realization that we have the history of billions of years of adaptations existing in our genetic codes, potentially ready to utilize under the magic chemical password. and it's a bit humbling to realize the power and the complexity of the genome.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

you can carry the parallels of the failed american socialist revolution to the failed russian socialist revolution through the 30s, to the point where they aligned at their common apexes to defeat a common enemy, and into the 40s and beyond. the russian propaganda was, of course, deeply anti-american, and the stalinist show trials went on well through the 40s, aligning with the mccarthyite scare. mccarthyism is often presented to us as a battle we overcame - that, in the end, we didn't become "like them". but, the truth is that we were really alike at more or less the same time. they didn't become like "them", either, they reformed after the death of stalin, which happened at about the same time that mccarthyism fizzled out.

both states exited the 50s seeking to enact a broadly socialist vision for their country, one built on expanding the use of technology to make the lives of their citizens better. both states made real progress on this into the 70s. but, then both states seem to have been overtaken by corruption at more or less the same time.

remember that what actually happened in russia was a military coup, and that this kind of shady manipulation of events behind the scenes seems to also be the norm in the united states, which has also experienced recent coup-like events, both in 1980 and in 2000. it is not clear what the guiding force behind the presidency in either country really is, only that it seems to be some combination of state intelligence services and large financial backers. america and russia are really more or less in the same mess.

if it seems like russia is rising and america is falling, it's because america had such a ways to fall from. in truth, they're both going nowhere but collapse.

and, i think that's the longer view of history, here - a positive comparison of failed american and soviet socialist revolutions, coming from the same basic problem of the society not being advanced enough.

now, we can ask interesting questions - what if america had not undergone westward expansion? what if it didn't annex mexico? what if it didn't buy louisiana? what if it let the south secede? would the greater population pressures amongst workers in the north-east have led to more struggle? it's kind of a sadistic exercise, isn't it?

but, i think we can state this much in the positive: if we are to imagine that the united states is something that we create through collective decision making, and we acknowledge that we wanted it to evolve towards a socialist society, then we made an error in expanding too far to the west and too fast. this is the root cause of the failure of the american socialist revolution: westward expansion at too great a rate to sustain industrial development.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, i've been watching this paul jay special on the undoing of the new deal. and, they make sure to point out that the new deal wasn't socialism - and, they're right, it wasn't - but i want to make a bolder suggestion.

the truth is that socialism simply failed in america, and for the same reason that it failed in russia. there's actually a strong convergence of history here, contrary to the cold war mythology. and, socialism even failed in both of these backwater states at approximately the same time.

but, it was predictable. nobody ever suggested that the socialist revolution would happen in the still largely feudal state of russia, and nobody suggested that it would happen in the deserts of the american midwest, either. remember that when marx suggested the united states for a possible birth of socialism, he was writing in a nineteenth century context - roughly contemporary with the annexation of mexico, and when the united states itself barely penetrated the louisiana purchase. he was referring to the liberal heartland of the country, the bos-wash corridor, and not to the much less industrialized areas of the country that actually produced american progressivism. what developed was a contradiction, with the socialist movement on the wrong side of historical materialism - it's really just a further demonstration that psychohistory is pseudoscience.

there were moments of actual socialistic tendencies in the failed american socialist revolution, but they were tied to actual workers movements in actual factories - and the management decisions around the workers. well, it was a failed revolution. but, the success of american workers in winning the ability to buy their own products is an example of how management goals aligned with socialist visions, for a time. i think that fordism could have at one point been deemed "advanced capitalism".

then, it crashed. and, what happened? what happened is that the wild west won. america was not ready for socialism.

we'll see if their successor is. well, if we're still dragging along this corpse of historical materialism, asia doesn't seem like the worst place to hope for a revolution, does it? the other option is truly barbarism, isn't it?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

purchasing this release does not come with a download.

inri000: originally released dec 25, 1996. remastered oct 30, 2013. finalized june 26, 2016.

inri001: originally released jun 1, 1997. remastered nov 8, 2013. finalized july 3, 2016.

inri002: originally written and recorded over 1996-1997. sequenced and mildly modified in dec, 2013. released dec 11, 2013. finalized on july 3, 2016. lp000.

inri003: created in mid 1997. sequenced and converted to stereo in november, 2013. released on nov 9, 2013. corrected in september, 2014. finalized on july 5, 2016.

inri004: originally written in 1997 and first created in 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. finally reconstructed in the summer of 2015 and extrapolated upon over the first half of 2016. released on july 4, 2016. finalized on july 5, 2016.

inri005: initially written in 1997. recreated in jan, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 1, 2015. deconstructed dec 18, 2015. released on jan 4, 2016. finalized on july 6, 2016. lead track added and refinalized july 20, 2016.

inri006: originally created in 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reconstructed in the summer of 2015 and then manipulated further in the summer of 2016. released & finalized on july 7, 2016. hidden track added and re-finalized on july 18, 2016.

inri007: initially written in 1997. recreated in feb, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 5, 2015. remixed july 12, 2015. electronics added on july 16, 2015. released on jan 4, 2016. sequenced on jan 6-8, 2016. finalized on july 10, 2016. hidden track added and refinalized on july 21, 2016.

inri008: initially written in 1996. recreated in feb, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed june 29, 2015. remixed july 15, 2015. released on jan 4, 2016. finalized on july 11, 2016. bonus tracks added and re-finalized on july 18, 2016.

inri009: initially written in 1994. first full recording in 1996. recreated in mar, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed & remixed on july 18, 2015. released jan 7, 2016. sequenced jan 6-8, 2016. finalized on july 20, 2016.

inri010: initially written in 1996. recreated in april, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 12, 2015. vocals added july 15, 2015. sequenced, released and finalized on july 22, 2016.

inri011: originally created in april, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 4, 2015. remixed july 15, 2015. vocals added jan 6, 2016. released on jan 6, 2016. finalized on july 23, 2016.

inri012: initially written in 1996. recreated in the spring of 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed june 29, 2015. corrected to control for malfunctioning electronics on nov 26, 2015. sequenced on jan 10, 2016. released & finalized on july 24, 2016.

inri013: written and demoed from 1994-1998. initially constructed in this form in june, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. sequenced on jan 6-7, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. released jan 7, 2016. finalized on july 29, 2016. symph001.

inri014: initially written in 1996. recreated mostly in feb, 1998 (schizoid, terrorists) but also partly in june, 1998 (abusive). sequenced in this form in june, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. "terrorists" was reclaimed june 28-29, 2015 & remixed july 15, 2015. the main mix was corrected on nov 19, 2015. "schizoid" was reclaimed on july 12, 2015 & reprogrammed on dec 31, 2015. the main mix was corrected on jan 3, 2016 and remixed repeatedly jan 3-5, 2016. the lead track was sequenced on jan 5, 2016 and split back apart on jan 8, 2016. released on jan 5, 2016. audio permanently closed on aug 1, 2016. release finalized on oct 9, 2016.

inri015: written and demoed in multiple stages from 1994-1998. initially constructed in this form in june, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reconstructed and resequenced jan 6-10, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. re-released jan 10, 2016. audio permanently closed on aug 10, 2016. finalized on oct 10, 2016. lp001.

inri016: created in the summer of 1998. released as a standalone ep on nov 16, 2013. audio permanently closed on oct 12, 2016. release finalized on oct 27, 2016.

inri017: initially written over the course of 1997. recreated and expanded over the course of 1998. lead track first sequenced in this form in feb, 1999. further remixes generated over the course of 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013, and another in late 2015. remastered in november, 2016 from various sources, 1997-2015. finalized & released on nov 17, 2016.

inri018: initially written in 1997. recreated and reconceptualized in late 1998. salvaged somewhat at the end of 1999. remastered in 2013. compiled & released on nov 13, 2016. finalized on nov 19, 2016. final album version added as a bonus track and refinalized on dec 15, 2016.

inri019: written and demoed from 1996-1999. initially constructed in this form in january, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. compiled on nov 13, 2016. sequenced on nov 22-24, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. released on nov 24, 2016. release finalized on nov 27, 2016. symph002..

inri020: initially written in 1993. first full recording in 1996. recreated in dec, 1997 and again in jan, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed on july 2, 2015. remixed on july 15, 2015. reconceptualized & remixed repeatedly over november & december, 2016. released & finalized on dec 13, 2016.

inri021: written and demoed in multiple stages from 1993-1999. initially constructed in this form in feb, 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reconstructed and resequenced over november and december, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2013-2016. finalized & re-released on dec 15, 2016. lp002.

inri022: recorded over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. released dec 27, 2013. corrected to normalize for stereo in september, 2014. expanded incrementally between dec, 2014 and dec, 2016. merged with inricycled b and then finalized and re-released on december 16, 2016.

inri023: constructed over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. released dec 27, 2013. the first two tracks were corrected to stereo in sept, 2014. the last two tracks were added for re-release as a remix lp in dec, 2016. re-released & finalized as lp003 on dec 17, 2016.

inri024: initially written and recorded between 1996-1999 and remixed over the summer of 2015, with a lengthy pause due to malfunctioning electronics. final compilation date is jan 3, 2016. finalized dec 17, 2016. lp004.

inri025: this idea was developed in parallel to the inriclaimed project over the summer of 2015 and first compiled on nov 27, 2016. released & finalized on dec 17, 2016. lp005.

inri026: initially written in the fall of 1997. recorded in the winter of 1999. remixed in late 2013 and again in early 2014. this track was separated from my second record in january, 2016 but the single was not completed until it was remixed one last time in sept, 2017. released & finalized on sept 10, 2017.

inri027: streamed to disk in one take on the afternoon of march 9, 1999. ripped back to wav format from cd-r in late 2013. released as a one track single on nov 21, 2013. release finalized on sept 12, 2017.

inri028: constructed over a few days in april, 1999. ripped back to wav format from cd-r in late 2013. released as a one track single on nov 21, 2013. release finalized on sept 12, 2017.

inri029: recorded over 1997-1999. constructed in this form in june, 1999. published on november 30, 2013. re-released (with new hidden track) and finalized as symph003 on sept 13, 2017.

inri030: initially created in sept, 1997. remixed and reimagined repeatedly over 1998 and 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. partially reclaimed dec 8, 2014. rebuilt and resequenced on jan 9, 2016 out of material that had been remastered over 2013-2016. reimagined again on oct 26, 2016 out of material that was created in jan, 2016, but not released (and finalized) until sept 13, 2017, in order to properly fit into sequence.

inri031: recorded over the spring and summer of 1999. originally released on inrimake in october, 1999 (with an accidental phase reverse). the first section was modified further at the end of 1999. minimally altered and split into it's own ep on january 3rd, 2014. spliced further, appended to and remastered over sept, 2017. re-released and finalized on sept 28, 2017.

inri032: recorded sporadically, and without cohesive intent, over '98 and '99. originally compiled in the fall of '99. augmented and minimally altered in january, 2014. released on jan 3, 2014. finalized as lp006 on sept 21, 2017. as always, please use headphones - but note that they are especially mandatory for this recording.

inri033: written and demoed in multiple stages from 1996-1999. initially constructed in this form in dec, 1999. slightly resequenced in jan, 2014. re-released jan 3, 2014. finalized as lp007 on sept 19, 2017. this is my third official record.

inri034: written & recorded in the fall of 1999. originally released on inridiculous in december, 1999. split into it's own ep on january 3, 2014. remastered, finalized & re-released on sept 28, 2017

inri035: initially written and recorded between 1996-1999 and remixed between 2013-2015. initially released as part zero of a three volume set on may 21, 2015. split into it's own release on june 14, 2015. finalized as lp008 on sept 29, 2017.

inri036: written and recorded in late 1999 and early 2000. these versions of these tracks were sequenced without further modification in jan, 2014. released on jan 9, 2014. re-released on physical media and finalized on oct 3, 2017, with the remainder of hummer added as a bonus track.

inri037: recorded in spring, 2000. released, unmodified, on jan 10, 2014. release finalized on oct 3, 2017.

inri038: written and recorded, 1999-2001. track 3 was reconstructed out of existing sound in june, 2004. initially sequenced on jan 12, 2014. expanded with remixes from 2014-2017, re-released with a newly remastered lead version and subsequently finalized on oct 5, 2017.

inri039: this was constructed over a little more than a month: from 7/7-8/20, 2000. it seems to have been recombined into one track around 2006 but has otherwise not been modified since it was completed. first released as an ep on jan 14, 2014. release finalized as symph004 on oct 8, 2017

inri040: recorded in april, 2000. samples added in oct, 2000. album version reverted to original mix in sept, 2006. released as a single on jan 14, 2014. expanded & finalized on oct 9, 2016.

inri041: recorded over the space of the year 2000. remixed substantially in 2004, 2006 and 2014. existing version released on jan 14, 2014. finalized as lp009 on oct 9, 2017. this is my fourth official record.

inri042: this record was recorded over the years 1999 and 2000, but did not take this form until mid september, 2017. the first track list dates to sept 14, 2017. these tracks are technically outtakes, but did not become outtakes until the remastering process removed them from their respective recordings. released & finalized as lp010 on oct 9, 2017.

inri043: written late 2000 & early 2001. the renders present here are all from after 2013. minor instrumentation changes to facilitate a small wind section were implemented in late april, 2014. live guitars were layered into the final version over may, 2014. released in a single volume on june 7, 2014. four new orchestral mixes were added in late may, 2015. re-released in a single volume on may 26, 2017. this release was split into jazz and orchestral volumes in early oct, 2017. two renders were then added to the jazz volume, while three new mixes were created for the orchestral volume. re-released in two volumes and finalized on oct 12, 2017. a

inri044: written early 2001. drastically rearranged in june, 2014. rendered, arranged and performed over june and july, 2014. released on july 21, 2014. six new mixes were added in late may, 2015. re-released on may 28, 2015. four new mixes were added in mid october, 2017. re-released & put on indefinite hold as to status on oct 15, 2017.

inri045: recorded in the first part of 2001. initially released as a bandcamp upload in august, 2010. re-released on january 18, 2014. finalized on oct 14, 2017.

inri046: written in the spring of 2001. lent out for a different project in jan, 2004. reconstructed in the first quarter of 2006, especially over march. released as a one track single on april 1, 2006. expanded with alternate mixes and re-released on july 23, 2014. the vst mix was added on jan 10, 2015 and the two guitar mixes were added on may 29, 2015. re-released on may 29, 2015. finalized as symph005 on oct 15, 2017.

inri047: written one day in june, 1998. re-created on another day in june, 1999. reimagined on yet another day in june, 2001. a failed remaster occurred at the end of 2013. slightly rearranged and re-rendered at the end of july, 2014. released in a single volume on july 25, 2014. re-released in a single volume with a new string orchestra mix on may 30, 2015. this release was split into two cds on oct 15, 2017, with the first disc being composed solely of the process piece. four new tracks were added to the second disc. re-released in two volumes and finalized on oct 16, 2017.

inri048: written in the summer of 2001. remembered over july, 2014. completed august-september, 2014. released sept 24, 2014. expanded, finalized and re-released on oct 16, 2017

inri049: written and recorded in the fall of 2001. released on sept 6, 2014. expanded, re-released and finalized on oct 21, 2017.

inri050: written in the fall of 2001. rendered, remastered and remixed in late september and early october, 2014. released oct 3, 2014. the string mix was corrected for clicks on june 1, 2015, but unfortunately left accidentally inverted. this was corrected on oct 21, 2017. the lead track was re-rendered with the clickless string mix on oct 21, 2017. disc finalized on oct 21, 2017.

inri051: created in the fall of 2001. sequenced and released on sept 7, 2014. disc finalized on oct 22, 2017.

inri052: tracks 1, 3 and 8 were written in 2001 and reinterpreted and completed in 2014. tracks 2 and 5 were interpreted and completed in 2001. track 4 was written in 2000 and reinterpreted and recorded in 2001. track 6 was written in 2001 and completed in 2006. track 7 was written in 1998, reinterpreted in 2001 and rendered in 2014. tracks 1-7 were sequenced on sept 9, 2014. final completion date is oct 3, 2014. refinalized as lp011 on oct 22, 2017. this is my fifth official record.

inri053: written late 2001 and early 2002. this file is ripped from a cd-r that was burnt around 2002, as that was the option that would produce the most accurate reproduction of the original composition. published without modification on oct 6, 2014. expanded, re-released and finalized as symph006 and lp012 on oct 23, 2017.

inri054: recorded in late 2001 and early 2002. track 6 was constructed in may, 2004 out of files recorded 1999-2001. tracks 1-4 were reconstructed over october, 2014. final mixes were finished on october 18, 2014. released on oct 21, 2014. disc closed on oct 30, 2017.

inri055: written in early 2002 and recorded and mixed in early 2002 and late 2014. released on nov 15, 2014. expanded, re-released & finalized on nov 1, 2017.

inri056: written & recorded in late 2001 and early 2002 and mixed in early 2002 and late 2014. released on nov 19, 2014. expanded, re-released and finalized on nov 2, 2017.

inri057: written and recorded in late 2001 and early 2002. initially sequenced in may, 2002. re-sequenced and first released in june, 2002. re-released in slightly different forms from 2002-2014. resequenced to mimic the original sequencing and re-released on november 8, 2014. except to sequence the record, these files have not been altered since 2002. disc finalized as lp013 on nov 3, 2017.

inri058: written over 2001 and 2002 and rethought repeatedly between 2002-2014, with no clear resolution in a final mix. reconstructed from source in late 2014 and then rendered at multiple stages to create a series of snapshots. final mixes were completed over the last week of november and the first week of december. released as a two-volume set on dec 7, 2014. the concept was rethought on nov 3, 2017, which led to the inclusion of five more mixes and an expansion to four cds. re-released in four volumes & finalized as symph007 on nov 12, 2017.

inri059: written and recorded over 2001 and 2002. mildly remixed in november, 2014 to make the tracks more presentable; nothing substantial was altered, and no new sound was recorded. released on november 19, 2014. re-released on physical media and finalized on nov 14, 2017.

inri060: written in august, 2002. track one was remixed in december, 2014 to turn the rest of the track up relative to the vocals. released on dec 12, 2014. disc finalized on nov 14, 2017.

inri061: written over the summer of 2002 and initially recorded in the early fall of 2002. additional writing, arranging, recording, production and mixing occurred from dec, 2014 to apr, 2015. released as a two volume set on april 27, 2015. this release was expanded to include a third disc on nov 17, 2017 and filled in with eight new remixes over the next few days. re-released as a slightly rearranged three volume set and finalized on nov 19, 2017.

inri062: this track was written in late 2002 and completed over april and may, 2015. released may 11, 2015. disc finalized on nov 20, 2017.

inri063: these tracks are all based on existing demos from 2001-2002 that were initially intended to be completed with vocal parts and were remixed from july, 2014 to may, 2015 as purely instrumental recordings. released may 2, 2015. disc finalized as lp014 on nov 21, 2017. this is my sixth official record.

inri064: these tracks were written and recorded over november and december of 2002 and uploaded, unmodified, in may of 2015. released on may 2, 2015. re-released on physical media and finalized on nov 24, 2017.

inri065: written and recorded in early 2003. transcribed, slightly rearranged, remixed repeatedly and re-rendered repeatedly over may, 2015. released on may 16, 2015. expanded & finalized on nov 25, 2017.

inri066: originally written, programmed and recorded from 1996-2002. reclaimed & remixed from june to december of 2015. initial completion date was december 31, 2015. disc finally released, closed and finalized on nov 26, 2017. lp015.

inri067: written and recorded between dec, 1999 and july, 2002, except the hidden track (which was created in the summer of 1998). none of these tracks were remastered or otherwise modified after 2002. disc simultaneously created and finalized as lp016 on nov 26, 2017.

inri068: originally written, programmed and recorded in varying states of finality over 2001 and 2002, except the hidden track (which was programmed in 1997). the associated tracks were completed between february, 2014 and may, 2015; these mixes, however, were spun off as late as nov, 2017. released as lp017 on nov 27, 2017. expanded and finalized on jan 1, 2018.

originally created from 1996-2003. this compilation is dated to apr 25, 2003. slowly remastered, reconstituted, compiled, reconstructed, released and finalized from 2013-2017. compilation finalized on nov 27, 2017. as always, please use headphones. 

credits

released April 25, 2003

j - guitars (electric, acoustic, classical), analog & digital effects processing, electric mandolin, ebow, electric bass guitar, bass synth, keyboards, synthesizers, electric & grand pianos, electric air reed organ, flute, orchestral & other sequencing, drum & other programming, drum kit, electronic drum kit, percussion, drum & vocal manipulations, pick scrapes, metronomes, vocals, vocal relics, mic noises, vocoders, octavers, films, tapes, sampling, found sounds, paper, strategies, sampling, cool edit wave synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, noise generators, noise reduction, light-wave synthesis, granular synthesis, generative synthesis, generative percussion, soundraider, hammerhead, sound design, soundscaping, digital wave editing, loops, treaments, equalizers, a broken tape deck, coughs, bowls, claps, tables, pens, chance, text-to-speech synthesis, remixes, reconstructions, reinterpretations, production.

sean - vocals, lyrics (inri048-049, inri053-inri059, inri061), harmonica (inri054, inri057, inri063), ring modulator (inri057-inri058, inri067), vocal concept (inri062)
jon - guitar performance (inri048, inri049, inri057)
greg - drum performance sample source (inri056-inri058, inri063, inri067-inri068)
bob - hammering (inri058)

the various rendered electronic orchestras include acoustic bass, electric bass guitar (fingered & picked), synth bass, upright bass, distorted electric guitar, clean electric guitar, bowed electric guitar, guitar noises (fret noises, knocks, pick scrapes), steel string acoustic guitar, nylon guitar, guitar effects, ukelele, banjo, harp, koto, sitar, french horn, english horn, tuba, trumpet, trombone, brass ensemble, saxophone, soprano saxophone, orchestra hit, theremin, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, pizzicato strings, full string section, piano, synthesizers, synth pad, synthesizer effects, mellotron, organ, bamboo flute, clarinet, flute, piccolo, oboe, english horn, bassoon, voice, music box, tubular bells, tinkle bells, agogo, clavinet, kalimba, xylophone, celesta, glockenspiel, woodblock, vibraphone, hammered percussion, mallet, marimba, taiko drums, gong, detuned piano, pc card, drum kit, jazz drum kit, hand drums, melodic toms, timpani, orchestral drum kit, drum machines, synthetic percussion, backwards cymbals and electronic drum kit. they also include choir. 

 https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/flac-bd-disc-volume-1

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

ok, so i'm just about caught up to where i was, i just have some final filing to do.

i've updated the period 2 disc to include the electronic drum kit out for the time machine, as that was really written from scratch in june, 2014.



i'll be reapproaching this guitar works thing this evening.

jagmeet singh must cut hits beard.

but, you're not a real anarchist unless you join the international organization of anarchists.

such silly thinking.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

where'd the week go?

i had to go through every single release to integrate the blu-ray component. maybe there's a bulk edit option; maybe i just demonstrated the wisdom in using it. but, i also wanted to take the opportunity to check for typos and just generally reorder the liner notes, and this has turned into a more time consuming project than anticipated.

in fact, i'm feeling like i'm going to need to do a second run, but i'm going to fill in the details after the blu-ray disc, to inri074 and a bit beyond it, before i go through the sources, separately this time, just looking for problems in a more self-contained way. it's a second pass. i think it will be a bit quicker.

i'm almost done. and i could even get a volume of the guitar project up before i crash, we'll see.

the electricity thing seems to have worked itself out; i got approved on christmas. thanks. and, i had to call in to get the isp to pro-rate, to start - they say they'll do it for next month, and then let's go from there.

it's otherwise been a typical christmas week: full of distractions but ultimately productive, in some sense.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

but, this isn't a winning strategy, though. what it is - and it is this, transparently - is a cynical ploy to try and pry values voters away from the republican party. it's evolved clintonism. and, it keeps failing horribly.

with franken, in particular, it's so transparent that he actually maintains a majority of female support in minnesota, right now. i'm sure the propaganda eats into this, eventually. but, if the intent of the democrats' strategy is to appeal to female voters, and voters concerned about women in general, then this strategy has actually immediately backfired, at least amongst the first voters that examined the situation with any seriousness. this is the predictable actual outcome of clintonism, almost everywhere it's been applied.

but, these are democrats - the conservative party in the system. it was always a strange animal, this liberal democrat - never did make a lot of sense.

liberals in america are going to have to find a way to enfranchise themselves. if organized effectively, they could become an effective third party, with broad influence - by preventing either major party from winning office, and instead sending the issue to a senate that they may have some influence over. it's just the geographic block: the northern part of the midwest has strangely become the country's electoral battleground, but the truth is that this is because the region is so terribly disenfranchised. there is no obvious answer in either party as to how to remedy this. the great lakes are going to need a localized political movement, and it's likely to surprise people just how left-leaning that's likely to end up. i think there's good potential for organizing a third party in the midwest right now, anyways - minnesota, wisconsin, michigan, illinois, ohio, iowa, missouri. even uniting a small block of these states in a third party could cause havoc, with the otherwise locked map.

what if minnesota, michigan and wisconsin voted in a block for the green party, instead of ending up in a virtual tie? that would have prevented trump from getting to 270 electoral votes, and forced the senate to declare a president from the top three candidates. in 2016, the candidates were less than optimal, and so that choice seems less meaningful. but, now, imagine a future where a liberal bloc from the midwest has some power in the congress. they could potentially bring in a vice-president.

but, do i think al franken should unresign? no; they'll just keep throwing more stories at him. you'll note the accusations have stopped. he was just dragged out by his ear for running his mouth off, he wasn't really presented with a real choice. there was no other outcome.

i might have liked to see him fight it a little harder, but i wasn't expecting him to, either.

the democrats have defined themselves clearly, moving forwards. it's up to the rest of the country to determine if it wants to follow their lead or not.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/19/al-franken-unresigning-could-kill-democrats-2018-chances-commentary.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

but, it's about changing the definition of work, or really unchanging it - throughout the centuries, poets and musicians and gardeners have all considered themselves to have been doing work. when were these vocations deemed void, exactly?

we don't have to pull out the engels, here, and explain how the city became full of workers who had migrated in from the countryside, where their lives were far less ordered - about how the existence of the machines created the working class, which is now left abandoned with their withdraw. if you want to talk about morality, that is.

we just need to ask questions about what work is, about how it is defined, about how use is calculated and whatnot. this leads us to questions about markets, primarily. if a thing does not have a market value, is it void of value? so, is it only work if it produces market value, then? this has to be wrong. and, so, if we are going to organize our societies as markets, some counter-force needs to correct this obvious absurdity.

i like a guaranteed income because it's a blind arts grant. it comes with no obligations, no test of value and no requirements to check speech or content for alignment. it allows the artist to access a source of funds without any strings attached, and to then create at will - as much or as little as is felt appropriate.

but, let us have this debate about work. we need to get on the other side of this.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/dec/28/tory-mp-condemns-universal-basic-income-on-moral-grounds

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

and, so, we see the outcome of our religiously organized technocratic colonial outpost in the desert, our hopes for the modernization of the region through the proxy of western influence, here:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-42507968

the jews are going to destroy themselves, anyways, just wait it out. they always do. this religion of theirs is absolutely toxic. it puts useful bounds around their ambitions, but they're never a moment's away from absolute collapse into brutal theocracy. when it comes, they will squander their advantages - the technology will rot, and the people will be at these crumbling walls, howling for it to stop.

the turks don't still do this kind of thing, do they?

this saudi created mess in the middle east may end up with what the saudis really wanted, which was political maps redrawn to demonstrate actual influence. but, the map they imagined wasn't representative of actual influence. and, the map may be redrawn quite counter to their influences.

we're losing turkey at the worst time, right when the historic eastern mediterranean superstate is beginning to reconstruct itself. that was an alliance that the west should have tended closer to. but, i've written a few rants about the turks, and their rejection from europe really forces them to look to their southeast for cultural integration. europe is forcing turkey back into it's days of empire.

the existence of such an east mediterannean superstate is the historical norm. the phoenicians and greeks were initially very different people, but they were united under the control of the persian empire, and the eastern coast then hellenized rather willingly under the influence of alexander's descendants. from this point on, this region took on a fundamentally greek identity, including with the adoption of christianity, which is part of what allowed it to gain independence in the partition of the roman empire, as a greek state. this superstate was split into two by the advancing arab armies, not to be effectively reunited again until the turks recreated it in the form of the ottoman empire.

the saudis clearly had intended to dominate this region with religious warlords that were subservient to their commands, with no foresight as to the eventuality of revolt from such actors. but, they've been prevented from doing this by a coalition of russians and turks, operating in syria. they are going to get to redraw these maps, that do truly need to be redrawn.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the one thing that i want to add to this is that one of those upper level atmospheric effects that determines the location and duration of an outbreak of the polar vortex is how much sunlight is reaching the earth's surface. the current theory of ice ages, which is still young and will no doubt be much revised, argues that fluctuations in the earth's and sun's orbits can trigger the onset of ice ages. certainly, milder and hopefully less permanent fluctuations in the sun's strength are a dominant cause of the weather we experience in the populated regions of canada.

the weak solar cycle is almost certainly the dominant cause of the prolonged periods of exaggerated winter cold that we're receiving, even as the average temperatures keep climbing up.

here's an interesting idea: is there some force that would come and plunge us into an ice age, right when we're flooding the atmosphere with carbon? if you could imagine it: a higher consciousness in the universe, unleashing the cold almost as a means of self-defence. i admit i like the idea of planets as anthropomorphized objects; the ancients got that right. but, is the sun operating in conjunction with the other bodies, or is it a conspiracy of one? is this a universal force, or many forces in conflict? it's just a thought - imaginary. but, interesting, if you could conceptualize it. but, i want to think of it like running hot feet under cold water.

we can still have some hot summers here. maybe. but these cold winters seem like the norm, until the sun warms up.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/polar-vortex-demystified-bitter-cold-next-week-in-canada/75743/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

this article goes on a bit of a rant that i don't think is justified by the comments.

listen, i think that what justin trudeau is saying is what everybody paying attention already knew was true: justin trudeau is a media personality, rather than a political personality. he is the human front on a bureaucratic operation that is a bridge between the liberal party and the civil service. and, that's exactly what i expected him to be when i voted for him as a lesser evil.

talk of ceos is strangely american. the prime minister, today, behaves almost more like a monarch. that is what justin trudeau is, the young dauphin coming into power.

actual decisions are made by the appropriate bodies at the appropriate levels.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/12/26/this-is-how-justin-trudeau-sees-his-job-according-to-ethics-report_a_23317053/

justin singh must cut his beard

but, isn't the lesson taught in christianity that if you try and live a good life and be a good person that you'll be betrayed by your friends and torn down in bloodlust by an angry lynch mob?

there's this story going around amongst jewish historians that maybe the entire history before the captivity was entirely fictional, and that the people that were moved into the levant were an entirely fabricated ethnicity - that the jewish race was a fabrication of the dying sumerian civilization under the direction of it's new iranian overlords, meant to colonize and replace an existing civilization with a colonial outpost. this would explain judaism's apparent connections to zoroastrianism.

and, what would that destroyed civilization be? it would have been phoenician. what happened, then, was that the persians came in, cleared the phoenicians out and brought in this imagined ethnicity, the jews - who were peoples indigenous to mesopotamia, following a newly invented ideology with a totally fabricated history.

but, some source would exist to describe this? well, perhaps some source did, perhaps many did. but, centuries later, the roman destruction of carthage was total - and such histories would have been destroyed in the process, if they existed. hey, that is true, isn't it?

it was the carthaginian connection that intrigued me as i was having a cigarette and wanted to get written down. i like it when disparate parts of history intersect like that, and it just made a connection in my head. hey, it's christmas.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i've actually long been swayed by the hypothesis that religion, as we understand it, is basically an elaborately distorted ufo cult. these stories of contacts with ancient beings in the sky may have an empirical basis, if you allow for contact with extra-terrestrial life. well, it's a naturalistic explanation, is it not? the sky is at the core of so much religion...

i don't claim to be able to rigorously demonstrate this, but i think it's probably actually true, nonetheless. it's kind of unfalsifiable, right? but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong - i'm post-godel, i'm sorry, it really doesn't. errr. bzzzztt. wrong.

it's certainly less convincing if it's unfalsifiable, i'll grant you that - it's not science. it's speculation. but, it might be science one day.

so, i don't find claims of entities in the sky to be particularly absurd or hard to believe - they've happened all throughout history, have they not?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

ok, i'm going to put away my skeptic hat for a moment and put on my marxist cape. 

i just think the marxist article of clothing should be a cape. it just makes sense, some how. i dunno. but it's obvious.

religion is supposed to be this thing that governments use to control masses of people into compliance with. so, it strikes me as kind of weird to speak of it in terms of resistance. now, i need to rip off my marxist cape because my paranoid anarchist heart wants to look for evidence of alliance with power structures, as that is, in truth, occam's razor. yet, the possibility of a simple slick preacher also always exists - and these aren't mutually exclusive.

at the least, any activist on the left should be particularly weary of any kind of religious movement trying to involve itself with politics. there is a 100% chance that they are trying to take over your movement for one nefarious aim or the other.

the problem that marx (where's my cape?...) saw with christianity is that it promises salvation in an afterlife, thereby leaving workers in delusional states of fantasies about life and death. i'm supposed to point out that marx saw this as an obstacle to movement building and leave it at that, but think about the psychology in what he's suggesting. think about how that breaks a human's soul into two, having them turn an active desire for death into a virtue. to convince humans that they should believe that all of the misery and all of the struggle is worth it because it will be paid off in an afterlife, which certainly doesn't exist. this is a truly dangerous cult.

i don't feel that buddhism escapes this general description of a pacifying force, but rather in a way just transcribes it. buddhism also teaches that life is meaningless, and that there is some preferable place in the hierarchy in the next life. this is incompatible with a revolutionary politic.

it would be nice if david frum were actually correct, though. it's the kind of thing you want to be true. even when you ignore the flaws in the analogy - one hopes that publishing media is a little different than testing scientific hypotheses, anyways. still. you'd like the media to in some sense be error-correcting, and to own up to itself when it's caught. 

but, that means catching errors and not catching lies.

this whole thing is such an absurd charade. and, maduro is starting to remind me of the bumblebee guy from the simpsons. 

it's one of those bewildering things you see from time to time in these places: the opposition stands down from the elections. and, you assign ulterior motives to such queer behaviour. yet, you miss the obvious: that the opposition stood down because it's backers didn't want it to win, or that the iraqi military stood down in iraq because they were ordered to allow isis to take up a position.

i've long been convinced that maduro is actually pretty buddy-buddy with the cia behind the scenes, he just needs america as an enemy to maintain control of the country. and, the americans seem eager to comply, as it gives them a bad guy of their own. if america wanted maduro gone, it would just cut off oil purchases for a week; he'd be gone. venezuela is, in truth, utterly economically reliant on the united states. that's going to come with a lot of clout in caracas, "domestic politics" whatever they may be.

the opposition was, in truth, no doubt ordered to stand down. but the reason underlying it is probably the most obvious one.

this is an informed speaker, but what she's describing is the reason that there isn't a way forward in two states, and i think she's stated clearly that she realizes that. israel is indeed very concerned about this demographic problem. and, regardless of what diplomats at the united nations want to imagine exists on maps, regardless, the need for a civil rights movement is critical to prevent upcoming abuses in the name of solving this problem. it's really critical that the palestinians have a path to israeli citizenship, as their only hope is to find a way to be protected under israeli law.

these nationalist visions need to be renounced to a romantic past, all around. palestine is beyond an existential point of crisis. but, here's the thing: the palestinians are mostly genetic hebrews, right? there should be a national reckoning in a people coming to terms with itself as two related wholes, and a chance for it to work these debates out in academia. 

the palestinian leadership needs to be arguing for integration right now, not separation. it is their only chance at survival at all; if they resist for too long, they will merely fade into nothingness.

i said all along that the way to beat the travel ban is to argue that it's ineffective in it's stated purpose, not that it discriminates due to religion. the president gets a lot of discretion; you have to basically prove he's acting irrationally, and so you must do so by taking his claim of needing the ban for national security seriously and then proceed to demonstrate that the ban does not in any way actually do this. they went after him with the wrong legal tactic last time and ultimately lost; this time, they're doing this right and should win.

they could stop the wall that way, too. again: if you want to challenge the president in court, you have to take what he says seriously to start off with. so, the wall is intended to stop migrants from entering without prior approval. a strong legal case can be made that this will not actually work, that it is in truth simply an irrational policy. the law can be struck down on review if you win this case. i'm not sure who gets standing in such a case, though.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-travel-ban-partially-lifted-1.4464042

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

this is consistent! sometimes, i wonder if this shadow government is actually a computer, because the surreality of the predictability defies common sense.

they take what is almost boolean logic past the point of human reason. is it game theory, then, perhaps?

if you want to understand what the shadow government is actually doing, it is easy - they leave a trail behind them. just look to where the establishment blames russia.

absolutely consistent; as though they want it documented, even.

https://www.rt.com/usa/413745-franken-resignation-russiagate-conspiracy/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i have to admit that i was in favour of stricter guidelines for large dogs, but i can accept the criticism that any government's attempts to legislate this by targetting pit bulls, specifically, is likely to be ineffective. if what the new city council is suggesting is that they aim to broaden the restrictions not just to pit bulls but to all large dogs, then i would openly support that amendment.

my pushback was against the idea of abolishing measures taken to ensure that more safety precautions are taken around these animals, as i do think that they are needed. but, if the idea is to broaden them, i am in full agreement.

i guess what the previous city council did was kind of bureaucratic; it recognized that a problem with dogs exists, it looked at a list of statistics and it took specific action against the leading cause. that must have been meant as a first step, though, in order to ease in broader action - or reverse course in a public backlash.

it really seems as though the criticism, then, was that the law wasn't comprehensive enough, as it only focused on a specific breed. if so, that's a fair criticism - and the previous city council should probably recognize it as such.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-pit-bull-ban-1.4458038

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i don't know if what's happening in the united states right now is a targeted purge or a structural coup, but i don't get the feeling that this is short term, and i'm not convinced it's going to be reversible.

america is shutting itself down. scrawl a note over the american flag on the moon: out of business.

i'm trying to think about when the last great collapse of liberalism was. i suppose it depends on how you define the current age: did we start in the renaissance? is that wave form what is coming to a close?

i think there's an argument that part of what created the middle ages was the technological development not in weaponry but in agriculture. it seems crude by today's standards. but, life required a lot of hard work, so there wasn't a lot of time to study. after all, antiquity is full of civilizations being slaughtered, and it just kept on. something else stepped in after the romans fell, and created a much deeper shift in how societies were organized. it wasn't until the technology became efficient enough to allow leisure that it did, and liberal thoughts could be once again entertained.

that's a bad precedent, for us. that process took a long time. but, i told you i just read that asimov text, right? i'm thinking more about inri067, spoke - my eulogy for the civil rights era and secular liberalism as we understand it.

what i'm searching for is a successor, but we're really at the end of this. we can't hand it back to a decayed europe, which in fact merely precedes us in corruption. china and russia and saudi arabia are empires. and, africa remains in disarray.

if there is hope, it is in south america, but it is absurd to suggest they could challenge america at any time in the near future. perhaps the better hope is that the people of the americas can co-operatively work to take back the government in the united states before it collapses.

if we're in a similar technological moment that produced the dark ages, it's not going to be because our lives are too labour-intensive, but because they are not labour intensive enough. some of us are perhaps likely to forget how to do anything at all, but i must push back against the standard dystopic view, as i think a subset of humans would take advantage of such freedom to become scholars and general patrons of the arts. the dark ages produced an aristocracy of management. the new illiberalism will no doubt be an aristocracy of knowledge.

and, freedom means different things to different people. so, the battle will remain the same: fight hierarchy wherever you see it.

but, what if the networks come down? if this witchcraft is destroyed?

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

what i remember from the election was jill stein projecting the idea of being unsure which of the two is the lesser evil, which implied the suggestion that maybe it might be trump, but it was an attempt to put them on par with one another, and have voters question their calculus, rather any kind of endorsement of trump. phrased another way, it was a clear suggestion that hillary was at least as bad as trump.

her perspective has, i think, been demonstrated to be fairly reasonable by the unfolding of events in other places in the world, but i can understand how it may ring hollow for those almost solely focused on domestic american politics. arguing that trump may turn out to be a lesser evil in some ways is not an endorsement of him, but an indictment of clinton.

we're in quite a bit of trouble when foresight becomes conflated with treason.

http://www.newsweek.com/2017/09/08/jill-stein-interview-russia-trump-645722.html?utm_source=internal&utm_campaign=right&utm_medium=related2

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

but, why did trudeau go see the aga kahn?

see, when you talk of lobbyists, you usually refer to a system where for-profit entities bribe politicans to carry out favours for them, exclusively to make them more money. the aga kahn is relevant in context due to money that it is giving away. it's just an incorrect contextual analysis.

you have to wonder if, maybe, it wasn't trudeau trying to bribe the aga kahn, to get an audience in which to get some spiritual guidance. this guy is kind of a weido, i think, actually. he'll be talking to dead dogs in no time.

no, really - i think it was probably trudeau that was buying the audience, here.

and i'm just not swayed by the seriousness of the accusations.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

see, i don't doubt this at all. it was pretty obvious.

but, there's an added complication that she probably doesn't remember the worst of it.

i always found crystal castles frustrating, in that it demonstrated some potential for abstraction but never really explored it. it was clear that the intent was always profit above everything else; you can hear the disinterest in the 'art'.

but, you'll note that there is an accusation, here, followed by charges and an investigation. that's how these things need to operate.

http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/crystal-castles-songwriter-being-investigated-by-police-sex-crimes-unit

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

the government is making a mistake in being meek about this aga khan non-issue. i know they're hoping it blows over, but that's old media thinking; what they're doing by not challenging it is making it seem more substantial than it is. people tend to interpret a humble argument as a sign that a more powerful argument doesn't exist.

democrats make this mistake all of the time, because their voting base is so much more conservative. liberals in canada, however, have not tended to make this mistake. one expects a more throaty argument from a liberal prime minister than this.

what they should do is change the law around private travel to include an exception for situations where the destination cannot be reached in any other manner, then throw it back at the conservatives when they vote against it, as it will make them seem unreasonable.

when you give the tory media in canada an inch, they take a mile. it's going to be framed terribly. and, due to the way that the government has mismanaged it, it actually might do them some serious damage, after all.

i'm curious as to who sophie brought to the island in march, though. the justin/sophie story is kind of unusual, to say the least. i've kind of suspected it as a political marriage for a while, now. his father's marriage was pretty arranged as well; it's going to be interesting to see if justin ages to look like his father, at all.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i want to repeat a point that i made several years ago about syria.

it's less that assad has to go, as an individual. it's more that syria needs a change in actual leadership - in military leadership. and, it's up to the russians, now, to ensure that this happens.

the russians know better than anybody else what it is to experience a serious existential crisis; they are certainly best positioned, of all the major powers, to understand the psychology of the assad regime. on one of the days i spent waiting for the isp, i read one of the foundation texts that i skipped as a child. it was the one where seldon was wrong. so, i have this psychohistory on my brain, and the recognition of it as psychobabble. but, if you leave the assad regime - the regime, not the figurehead - in place, it will necessarily retaliate, which means launching a counter-attack on the saudis.

the saudi regime needs to fall, but not like this - not at the cost of a major proxy war that will draw in the turks and who knows else - israel, america and maybe even china.

the russians, unfortunately, are relying on this regime. when i made those comments, and i realized even at the time that this responsibility is putin's, i did not realize the remaining extent of the cold war connections between the kremlin and the assad regime, nor how easy it would be to reactivate them. the russians, however, are not foreign to purges, not even in foreign countries.

the assad regime does, in fact, have to go to ensure a peace. the americans are right for the wrong reasons. but, it's not likely to.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

if we're going to leave this up to government, the government has to listen.

cbd levels on the marketing is certainly a good idea. some consumers will seek higher cbd levels for medicinal reasons, while seeking to minimize thc levels. it's rarely going to work the other way. so, this is a request from concerned citizens that is absolutely reasonable, and that i dare suggest a market mechanism would more effectively generate. if government is going to control this, it needs to make the extra efforts to be responsive to reasonable requests.

the way they're planning on selling it strikes me as some kind of surreal joke, as though these policy makers determined their concept of the marijuana industry from gangster rap videos. one government representative suggested it would look something like a jewellery store. gotta protect tha bling. and, they're going to pat you down like you're buying from the mafia, or some mexican drug cartel. who is it that often compared the government to the mafia? again, it's like they got their concept of buying from hollywood films.

it's strange how fiction may actually create reality, in this context. well, how would these bureaucrats know any better, really? they have no first hand information, no empirical basis to draw deductions from. all they have is the depiction that is handed to them. and, this depiction is ubiquitous - it is across the spectrum of hollywood. it is not in independent films, but these bureaucrats can't be bothered with those, either. when fiction becomes ubiquitous like this, and government controls the commerce associated with it, the propaganda cannot not become reality. so, the government will create what it understands: an experience like going to see a kingpin.

it's crazy. of course.

they have to listen better. that's how to interact on an empirical basis, in context.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/patty-hajdu-pot-regulation-1.4461879

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.