yeah.

the option is in the automated system, but there's no connection to the phone there.

what i'm going to do is assume this is a glitch and try again tomorrow. if i can't get through, i'll try the operator, instead.

what the democrats are doing is taking something that has no effect on most people, and converting it into something that visibly affects a much larger percentage of their voting base, forcing them to react in ways they shouldn't have to.

they're taking something that people may abstractly oppose, and converting into something that concretely affects them, forcing them to react in a more visceral way.

the inevitable backlash does not come in the form of "ok, i support the wall, i guess" but in the form of "i don't fucking care about the wall, but i need this service, so build it already, if that's what you have to do to get the service to operate; the service is more important to me than the wall. and who is standing in the way? it's the congress? fuck the congress."

"so, let me get this straight.

i don't get paid this week because the democrats are standing up for undocumented workers? i'm supposed to go to my landlord and tell them i can't pay them because i'm standing in solidarity with something that is undercutting my labour power? what the fuck. and, i'm paying for this, on top of it.

don't get me wrong, i don't like trump, but with allies like the democratic party..."

listen.

it's not a question of what side people take on the wall issue. as mentioned, i actually don't care if they build a wall or not. and, this isn't something that affects 95% of people directly, so that is going to be the broad response.

i've pointed out a bunch of times that i have a math degree, but i've never worked on the data side of a survey firm. i did, however, work as a survey interviewer for many years as i was going through school; my direct experience is not crunching umbers, but asking people questions. and, i know how this works better than most - you have to get somebody to answer a complicated thing with a binary response, and you get all this skewed data as a response to it.

consider the following question: would you prefer stalin or hitler?

and, the person is going to hum and haw and say they don't like either, but my responsibility as an interviewer is to get them to answer the damned question: stalin or hitler. pick. damn it.

and, if we learn that 60% of people prefer stalin to hitler, does that mean that 60% of people support stalin? remember: he's dead. he can't hurt you.

trump may not win this argument directly, but i never said that he would. so, you can do all of this polling and come up with these awful results and deduce he's losing - then end up baffled when he wins re-election with a 30% approval rating, because the democrats are running at 25%. and, this is the danger the democrats are running up against with this: you don't have to actively support the wall to get pissed off that the government is shut down. you don't have to be pro-trump to turn on the democrats for being obstructionist. you don't even have to oppose illegal immigration to get frustrated by not being able to go camping.

the error the democrats are making is in thinking that they're going to be able to deflect this all to trump. they won't - they're going to have to eat a substantial percentage of this. the last time that nancy pelosi was in charge of congress it had a 9% approval rating at it's lowest point, i believe, which makes trump look popular in comparison.

so, i will state what i said previously. the obvious kneejerk is to blame trump, and i don't know how long that holds for. but, the democrats are the one playing a dangerous game here, not trump - the longer this goes on for, the more they risk a backlash. that backlash may not translate to republican support, so much as it manifests itself in apathy towards the democrats, which is probably their bigger threat amongst certain demographics. but, they can't win this, in the long run - they can just turn voters against them.

if it was something more substantive, it could be different. but, nobody wants to suffer to avoid building a wall that doesn't affect them in any way at all. and, people are eventually just going to be looking for the easiest way to get paid - as they find themselves abandoned by a democratic party that is either more interested in questionable abstract symbolism than economic facts, or in undocumented workers than unionized labour.

that's odd.

i used to be able to get through to transcripts through the general line; it's no longer a valid option. hrmmn.

i'll try again after 1:30.

i've decided to wait. again. i just don't want to act prematurely. i got a little eager last month and want to learn from it - i want to be aggressive about this, but careful in my approach. i believe i have a year to file the discrimination lawsuit. but it's really the suit against the cops that i feel is more lucrative, and i'm not acting on that until i get the report against the cop in, which i'm now being told i'll need to wait until early february for.

i want to file everything i'm filing in the court house all at the same time....that would be the constitutional challenge against the cops and the request for original audio.

i have to reiterate the absurdity of what i'm doing: i'm asking the justice to release original recordings, under suspicion of somebody altering the record. it's only not crazy because i'm so sure that i'm right. and, until i can demonstrate my point, i understand that i'm going to be viewed as a loose cannon. i'm really dreading having to walk in and do it. but i don't have a choice, given that i'm certain it was altered.

what i need to do is talk to somebody in the transcript office about how the data is stored, and at least get some information about somebody that i can ask about it - because i don't expect the justice to know, off of the top of her head. i need to be able to prevent a clear and concise request.

so, the way this is shaping up is that i'll probably get this all filed at the same time in late february or early march. for the day, i want to make these calls.

fwiw, daddy went to work today for the first time in a while, and it seems like this kid - who does not appear to go to any sort of school - is sitting upstairs chain smoking.

i initially toyed with just ratting her out, but i can't believe he doesn't know.

so, he seems to have signed a non-smoking lease with the downstairs tenant, all the while allowing his underage daughter to smoke in the house.

i'm going to have to make a complaint at some point, but not until i'm able to follow it through, somehow, and that is going to be difficult, for a while. i'm still kind of hoping i can wait it out - that she goes to school or gets a job or moves out or something.

why is my life such a constant stream of absurdity?

ok.

i'm going to make some calls. at least. here i go...

the s-300 systems are not currently operational, as there is nobody in syria that is trained to operate them.

this is a lengthy process. it could be months, still, before they are operational - over very loud voices of protest from tel aviv.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russias-s-300-didnt-stop-israeli-from-airstrikes-on-iran-in-syria-2019-1

if you want to support an actual indigenous movement in the region, the kurds are not the people to support - they are ultimately aryan invaders from the north, some combination of scythians and mitanni with a deep, if polluted, heritage in the steppes.

as i've stated before, they should probably be relocated to iran, or even sent to siberia.

the indigenous populations of the region are semites and caucasians, specifically assyrians and armenians. and, the kurds were actually complicit in the genocide...

this is the indigenous movement to support, and it requires throwing the kurds out:

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

people pushing for a kurdistan don't really understand the history well, or don't care to as they push their own strategies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assyrian_population_1914.svg

the kurds historically live in a region that is about 20% of the area that they're currently occupying, the balance of which is historically semitic.

this was not and cannot become a war of conquest for the kurds.

that land needs to be returned to some kind of sunni-assyrian confederacy, under broad syrian control.

well, no. the kurds don't have this kind of a say in the matter.

they are occupying an area that they liberated from fascists, but that doesn't give them the right of conquest, or something. and, see, this is why this rojava group gets contradictory reactions from anarchists....when you look under the surface, they're quickly exposed as just another stalinist cult.

the kurds did not conquer northern syria, they liberated it.

and, they need to go home, now.

the correct thing to do here is bring the united nations in.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/01/syrian-kurds-reject-turkey-controlled-security-zone-190116081756141.html

i'm really suffering from a lack of motivation, right now. i have very little energy, very little drive. i just want to sleep.

i called my grandmother on monday, and it took away the entire day. tuesday was mostly spent sleeping. i guess i'll try again today, but i'm just so drained....

i'm almost certain at this point that the problem is that teenager upstairs, but i'm not sure how to deal with it. it remains the case that my best way out is to sue the cops, but i have to get enough energy to fight through the effects of her habits, first.

i signed a non-smoking lease for a reason, but he can't evict his teenaged daughter. i'd have to sue for damages to my health on the way out. but, i'd have to find a way to prove it, first.

i just want a clean, healthy, stable place to live so i can work on my art, and it's very depressing that it's so difficult to find.

are there enough of a russian identity in israel for putin to do the world a favour and take a run at likud by supporting a new political party?

the travel advisory to china was the right approach all along.

we can't be getting into some kind of quid pro quo on hostages or something. it's medieval.

that said, you won't find me shedding much of a tear for meth dealers, either. that stuff is death - and i wouldn't be opposed to charging a person like that with a thousand counts of attempted murder. as a rule, i don't support capital punishment, but meth dealers are a special category of scum, and should be locked up for life with no chance of parole.

it is not safe to travel in china.

i repeat.: it is not safe to travel in china.

the democrats are a bourgeois party, and they don't want to cut off the flow of illegal labour - nor do they want to improve their working conditions. but, there is no body in the american political spectrum that represents the interests of working people, so you're left with this charade, where you need to pick between passive and active repression.

there is no flow of cheap labour from canada; rather, we seem to be acting as an escape route. so, we're a better target for a bourgeois party, such as this.

that said, i would welcome some increased border security around areas like roxham road. and, don't fool yourself - if the democrats decide to switch directions, the point is going to be keep the unskilled labour from flowing out.

i would advocate working with them to erect the appropriate barriers.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4845968/democrats-u-s-government-shutdown-canada-border/

this is actually quite reasonable, even if i think it's something the united nations ought to be doing, rather than the turks themselves.

there needs to be some kind of buffer zone, in the short term. a 30 km buffer is not the turkish invasion of syria that people are worried about....

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/turkey-syria-safe-zone-border-erdogan-trump-withdrawal-troops-kurds-a8729126.html

another approach would be to send some missiles into some israeli airfields, and, that would be proportionate.

but, they have to do something - they can't just let the israelis bomb them with impunity.

i understand that the israelis are trying to pull the russians south, to give the turks easy passage into the north, and that biting is in some sense taking the bait.

but, as is so often the case in this region, it doesn't matter. the primary concern is not in keeping the turks out of the north, but in safeguarding the south. so, if the israelis want to pull the fighting south, the reaction should be to push it very far to the south - all the way to jerusalem.

the best response is probably to focus on a targetted assassination through brute force.

turn his house into a crater.

this idiot netanyahu is going to start world war three, in order to try and win an election.

the russians basically have no choice but to respond. and, whatever they do should be swift and lethal.

it is finally time to teach the israelis a lesson that they will learn from.

why are we using up valuable resources on american senators?

send him back to kentucky.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/rand-paul-hernia-canada-shouldice-1.4978260

what?

it's historical.

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

turkey is dying, and screaming out in pain.

i think this is a lot of talk. i've stated that before. the turks are not so stupid, not now, not today.

but, even if they do succeed in slaughtering the kurds, and are not wrecked by a consequent embargo, it will only be putting off the inevitable. a hundred years ago, it was the armenians, in more or less the same geographic space. a hundred years from now, it will be some other group that will expand into the vacuum. assyrians, perhaps. or, maybe the armenians even come back; they are the region's historical problem demographic, after all, going back to fucking darius.

turkey simply isn't a real country. it never was. and, it can't be - it just doesn't have the demographics to exist.

but, how do you get an army this big to stand down?

erdogan simply cannot be talking like this. so, he now has to make a hard choice: accept a russian entrance into constantinople, or await the inevitable coup.

listen: i think we should abolish marriage altogether, so enforcing the laws strikes me as completely backwards.

what's important is not upholding the sanctity of marriage, but upholding the right to escape it.

so, you don't have the right to dictate to people what they should or should not do.

but, you do have the right to disassociate with somebody if you don't like what they're doing.

and, it's very important that this specification - while obvious to most westerners - is maintained as a constant throughout the law.

in a secular society, we don't generally write laws regulating who is allowed to have sex with who - we leave that to the discretion of the people having sex, whether they're married or not, and of whatever gender combination - so long as the consent is legitimate, and possible to provide for.

so, you can only marry one person at a time, which is a kind of a legal formality, but that doesn't mean you can't have relationships with multiple people if you want. that is a freedom we have in this society, so long as we're willing to accept the legal consequences of cheating on our spouses regarding questions of alimony and child support.

i'm just pushing back against the idea that reversing the sexual revolution is some kind of feminism, because the situation of course works the other way as well - women should not be legally punished for cheating on their husband, which is probably the more pressing issue to concern ourselves with in terms of consequences. that's a freedom we have in this society, so long as you're willing to accept the legal consequences of the subsequent divorce.

what we do, instead, is provide people with the freedom to dissolve the contract - to walk away if they don't like what their partner is doing.

well, ok, but we can't be outlawing infidelity, either - that's a step backwards for everybody.

rather, muslim women need to begin to accept the idea of divorce.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/polygamy-canadian-muslim-community-1.4971971

so, the email is stored in 6 sprawling, overlapping documents full of duplicate entries - it is a huge mess.

i have sorted through the first two and set the third one up, but i'm putting it down for a few hours, at least, and planning on making some calls today.

multiculturalism is, in many ways, deeply reactionary, even.

and, no - the abolition of cultural or religious or racial identity would not make us all the same, but would rather give us the freedom to define ourselves as individuals, against the conforming forces of identity politics.

i've been over this before: this idea that having a bunch of different representatives from a bunch of different religious groups is reflective of a diversity of opinion is laughable. there are few institutions that stamp out independent thought as effectively as christianity and islam do; you walk into a mosque, and everybody thinks the same way, dresses the same way, acts the same way and says the same things, in response to a wide variety of questions - this is the opposite of a diversity of thought, and if you want to increase a diversity of thought, you don't increase their numbers, but break up their system. this panel of religious representatives is reflective of a conformity of thought, rather than a diversity of it.

if we want actual diversity, and actual independence of thought, and actual critical thinking, then we must fight against the conforming and dulling intellectual effects of religion at every turn.

so, it would follow that a world free of cultural and ethnic identity would be an algorithm to maximize diversity, not one to stifle it - and that this insistence on maintaining cultural and ethnic identity is the actual retarding force in normalizing critical thinking.

i might even make the following argument: while nationalism is a rejection of globalization, what we refer to as multiculturalism is the conservative way to embrace it, by maintaining the existence of distinct cultural identities within the globalizing process - and what should be called postculturalism is the truly liberal way to embrace it, by embracing the true abolition of nationalism, and discarding the insistence on holding to cultural identity as backwards in a globalizing society.

there's an abstract for an essay for you, kids.

the lingering effect is a kind of brain fog - a constant lethargy, lack of energy and inability to focus.

again: there's a difference between finding a puff here and there (my usual habit) and chronic exposure to high-potency strains of the stuff hourly for months. habitual marijuana use makes you lazy and stupid - that's not news. what i'm trying to figure out is how long it takes to clear it out.

and, the answer is a long time, apparently.

and, yeah - i'm now 38 years old, apparently. how'd that happen?

i don't really celebrate birthdays. i think it's bourgeois.

but, what i'd like to give myself is the gift of clear-headedness - not sobriety, exactly, as i don't have a problem with that, but clarity, to be free of the effects of the habits of others, and to regain the mental alertness i took for granted until around this time last year.

i'm coming up on eight months of abstention, and four months in a cleaner, if not completely clean, environment. and, yes - i'm still feeling it.

one day at a time.

it can't be forever.

it's a relatively large area covering most of bc and some of the yukon - maybe the last one left in north america.

but, they're real life injuns. really, truly. never conquered. never ceded. just right there, the whole time.

but, i also need to keep pointing out that the duty to consult should only be applicable in situations where eminent domain is legal, which are situations under some kind of treaty, which is not the case in bc.

in bc, it needs to be understood that these are fully sovereign tribes and that acting without consultation is invading and occupying a sovereign territory.

so, the courts can come up with these kinds of rules of thumb, but the more foundational issue in this case is the jurisdictional one - the only meaningful ruling from the court is for it to rule it doesn't have jurisdiction, which it has actually come fairly close to doing, already.

the case law stipulates that you have what is a called a "duty to consult", which is semantically identical to a request to seek consent. that said, the case law does not necessitate that the consultation is adhered to in any way.

it's basically down to the judge. there have been cases that have been overturned on appeal under the claim that the consultation was not legitimate, and i might suspect that this would be the case if the lng issue were brought to the supreme court, as the consultation was not through the appropriate body.

but, it may just buy time, as a meaningful consultation wouldn't be legally binding.

the globe article was frustrating to me because it made it seem as though the issue was being pushed down by a meddlesome international body, when the opposite is actually true: the canadian courts are actually responsible for a substantial amount of the direction and tone of the conceptualized internationalization of aboriginal law.

am i going to get killed if i call for the mass conversion of mosques into planetariums and observatories?

meh.

come at me, bro.

so, what's the difference between a multiculturalist and a postculturalist?

a multiculturalist wants to build more churches and more mosques and more temples and more synagogues, and then have the people that frequent them build networks of solidarity and understanding, whereas a postculturalist wants to empty the places of worship and convert the structures into something more useful, depending on the context - some of them would make excellent libraries or data centres, while others would make good homeless shelters, and still others could be converted into museums, while those domes could be converted into awesome planetariums....

i could go through a dozen examples, bu t i think you get the point.

i want less religion, not more of it.

listen - i just don't think that "multiculturalism" is a liberal concept. it's very tory in concept, this idea that we should accept our differences and try to get along in perfect harmony. that is a deeply conservative vision of how a society ought to operate.

liberalism should be striving for an idea of post-culturalism, which seeks to rip all of these obsolete cultures to shreds and move together as a unified, secular society with common humanist values rooted in empirical, scientific truths.

this just doesn't exist in the discourse. i'm being asked to choose between being accepting of multiculturalism and doubling down on christianity, which is a choice that exists strictly on the right of the spectrum - it's a choice between the tories and the reform party, and i don't want to and won't pick a side on it.

like everything else with this government, the nice rhetoric quite readily exposes itself as a distraction for absolutely naked colonialism, when challenged in any way at all.

it's actually been quite a while since a government has been this blatant about it's assimilation policy.

and, this is just...

It’s an issue that must be resolved within Indigenous communities, but governments are grappling with it, too, especially as both B.C. and Ottawa are preparing to enact the principles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which stipulates that they must give consent to industrial development on their traditional territories. By endorsing the declaration, the federal government has said it will aim to secure Indigenous consent on projects but does not guarantee it.

*sigh*

the obligation to seek consent does not come from the united nations, and is not recent. it comes from the canadian supreme court, and is now many decades old established practice in canada. the federal government is already obligated by well established case law to seek consent....

in fact, the united nations declaration is largely built on existing canadian case law, rather than the other way around.

gotta love the fucking globe and mail. ugh.

the reality is that the band councils were designed to be a rubber stamp for the government in ottawa, and that's exactly what they usually are.

the area that we're talking about is about 20,000 square km and has a population of about 2,000. it's mostly densely forested land, punctuated by rivers and valleys. people live in camps - in tents - and survive by fishing and hunting. i want to hesitate to suggest that jobs don't exist, but the idea of a job is more communal than financial, and the exchange of currency for a task is actually somewhat corrupting to the communitarian basis of the economy.

the 2,000 people are distributed amongst five clans which, if you're scottish, you know is synonymous with a concept of extended family. so, the population is essentially composed of five isolated, extended families living in camps in the woods. they share everything; they're family. and, they broadly make decisions by unanimous consent, not by majority decree. anybody involved in any kind of activism has run across these kinds of decision making bodies and is aware of how difficult they can be in actually getting anything moving; they are perhaps not well suited to activism, and could certainly not be effectively extrapolated to an industrialized, urban economy, where you have a multitude of class-based competing interests trying to take control of a body that is seen as wielding authority (and has the sympathies of law enforcement). could you imagine a city of even 200,000 people operating on unanimous consent?

but, likewise, the introduction of western-style voting to very small, close-knit communities in isolated areas is likely to create conflict where none currently exists, and where there isn't actually any rational basis for conflict. when you take class out of a society, you largely eliminate the concept of democracy, because you don't have interests competing against each other; rather than have different interests competing over control of the community, you have a community discussing what is in it's best interests - like a family does, in the western system.

it's consequently less of an ethnic conflict than it is a difference of scale. when indigenous society has scaled up in the past - as it did with the six nations, or the settlements in cahokia - it has needed to adjust, and adopt confederacies that look something like western systems of governance. it is well understood that the united states took the six nations governing structure as a model when it started off with it's 13 states. likewise, the kind of governing structure that exists in the indigenous regions of bc today is not foreign to western culture, and even still exists today in certain isolated areas of europe - including on certain islands in the united kingdom, itself.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-a-contested-pipeline-tests-the-landscape-of-indigenous-law-who/

the social norm is that that we should go to school when we're young and retire when we're old, but i think this is backwards.

we ought to have fun when we're young, and go to school when we're old.

and, i wish i had figured that out when i was younger...

so, i'm going through these old emails and the most bizarre thing is going through my mind: i want to go back to school.

i say that like it's some kind of shock. it's not, or not exactly, it's that.....

i was such a mess at the time, the archetype of the kid that just doesn't know what to do with themselves. and, i was just a kid. i had no idea at 20 what i wanted to do with myself; i knew i liked music, but i knew i needed to find some way to pay my bills, so i found myself dragging myself through these programs, while daydreaming about how to get out of them, and then, at the end of it, i just completely abandoned everything.

i didn't go to the government interviews because i didn't want a government job, i wanted to work in academia. then, i didn't go to grad school, because i didn't want to be a teacher, i wanted to work in the private sector. then, i didn't finish the programming degree because i didn't want to work in an office behind a computer. then, i didn't finish the law degree because i didn't want to rubber stamp corruption. and, it was just like - fuck it, i'm going to finish my art and go from there...

but, that's just another way to put something off, right? i had an abstract end date of 40 years old: i'd be done the art by my 40th birthday, and then focus on academic work one way or the other, whether that means going back to school or just working on the website. and, i was making good progress until mid 2015, when the shit hit the fan - and, now, 50 seems like a more realistic goal.

i don't feel this is something out of the public discourse, but it's out of a novel or something - real people don't do this, right? real people figure out one thing or another, they don't walk down all these dead-ends, only to retrace the same steps again.

the thing is that i'm remembering how much of a disaster the whole thing was. i wasn't just your typical unfocused kid, i also had anxiety problems that made it impossible to meet people. i had gender issues. i was on drugs. i spent something like five semesters without a fixed address, trying to teach myself group theory from a distance, between jobs, at 3:33 am, stoned, in my girlfriend's stairwell - it was insane. and, i found myself malnourished and underfed half the time, on top of it. but, how do you explain that to your profs, you know?

"i'm sorry my assignment is late, but my parents kicked me out of the house, so i had to spend the week trying to find somewhere to sleep."

i should have dropped courses and went back later, but i was over-confident about it, and decided i could work it out. and, besides - i had no other source of income besides student loans.

the thing is that i had strong semesters of straight As, too. i've been over this before - my transcript is bizarre. it's half As and half Ds, because i either aced courses or blew them - because i was either stable and focused or completely disinterested or often actually literally starving.

i'm alumni, so i can register at carleton. but, the cost is prohibitive. and, it won't be until i finish the discography, however long it takes...

...but, if i find myself back in a legitimately stable position, in the long run? yeah.

what i decided is that if i'm going to teach, i don't want to start until i'm in my 50s or 60s. to me, that's the right age to teach - when you're older. young people should live lives, not just move from the desk to the board. and, students deserve somebody with some life experience - not some kid out of grad school.

i'm not re-evaluating. i'm just reflecting.

trudeau is kind of making a mockery of his party, and of his father's legacy; it's easy to forget that this is really the last remaining representative of the ancient british liberal party - these are the last whigs left standing. they're supposed to be all about science and data and empiricism, not about identity politics or emotional responses to complicated issues.

i don't want to vote for the inter-faith party of karmic unity and cosmic harmony. i want to vote for the science party.

will the real liberal party please stand up?

i think i posted something like this a few weeks ago, but what's my projection for the 2019 election?

there's some signalling that the liberals want to run on islam, which is a complete misunderstanding of the 2015 election - but one that the liberals have repeatedly broadcast that they hold to. they think they won because they stood up for accommodation rights in quebec, which is empirically incoherent. trudeau got lucky; the country didn't want to give harper another mandate, and the ndp, against all good sense, ran a blowhard fiscal conservative with a beard, allowing the liberals to avoid the split. we can't be allowing our election narratives to be defined by these awful tory media outlets like the globe and mail....

it might seem stupid on first glance to try and frame the narrative as christianity v islam, which is exactly what they seem to want to do, unless you buy into this fucked up narrative that seems to be dominant in the core of the party. christianity may be dying a slow and painful death, but even the least generous numbers are going to have christians outnumbering muslims in this country by at least 10:1. you only run on this if you think that the fastest growing and rising demographic, secularist atheists, are driven more by an animus against christians than they are by rational thought, and that they're going to feel some kind of imperative to stand up for muslims against christians. it's a tactic that insults the intelligence of voters.

if they run on this, they're just going to tune out young people, who are going to vote for third parties or stay home.

but, more concerning to me is that it broadcasts that there is an increasingly powerful faction in the liberal party that sees the european heritage of canada as something that needs to be abolished - as something that belongs to the past. i'm not going to stand up for christianity, exactly. but, i'll fight pretty hard for enlightenment values, and see good reason to push back against another abrahamic perversion. what's frustrating to me is the options that are available: in an election being framed as between islam and christianity, with no discernible third party of mention, am i going to have to write-in science?

so, i'm quite certain that i'm not going to be voting for the liberals, this time around. and, i'm also quite certain that i'm not going to be voting for the ndp - who will almost certainly win this riding fairly easily. to me, the decision in front of me is whether or not the green party candidate is going to be able to convince me to get up and vote, or if i'm going to sit this one out.

and, i actually think that my disillusion is going to be defining.

i don't think the fundamental nature of the last election has changed, which is this dramatic 20 point swing on the left. i don't see much evidence to suggest that harper will outpoll scheer in terms of absolute numbers - he may even do a little worse. but, if trudeau is unable to get people to actually vote for him, he could end up in freefall due to apathy.

it's still early. but, the volatility on the left has the potential to produce a wild outcome - if only somebody would step up and actually try to appeal to it.

In May 2007, Anthony Harriman, the senior director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council....

you gotta be fucking kidding me.

so, the debate is over whether heroin is entering the united states via the mexican border or via shipping ports.

"these guys don't tell me anything" - ronald reagan, when asked about iran-contra.

latin america is not generally seen as an opiate producer, but is rather known for producing stimulants, most notably cocaine. i'm not exactly privy to any secret knowledge, here. but it would be news to me to hear about poppy fields in columbia.

rather, it's widely understood that virtually all opiates in the united states originate from afghanistan.

it's hard to know how much of the whole thing is disingenuous theatre, but if the president really wants to get to the bottom of where the heroin is coming from, he's going to have to ask some difficult questions to the people around him.

there aren't any harrimans left are there?

so, what am i even doing?

i've been carrying out a 500 gb transfer across external drives, on a usb 1.0 connection. it's been running for almost a week, and is almost done.

in the mean time, i've filed almost every file on my laptop, by year, going back to 1995. yes: i have a few files from 1995 and 1996 that are timestamped properly. most files, however, are dated to after august, 1997. there is going to be a process to weed out duplicates.

i've also started organizing email, and this only goes back to 2003. i had emails going back further at one point, but i lost them in a reformat before i went to bc in may of 2003. i vaguely recall backing them up before i left, but i don't think i've seen them in years. i will need to scour, but i do not think i have anything older than when i got back from bc.

that said, one of the things i'll be doing for the alter-reality us trying to track down usenet posts from roughly 1997-2002. my isp dropped usenet around that time, and i never went back to it.

there is also some possibility of finding archived posts at places like the rhml, but i will need to do some work in finding them....

the copy process made calling difficult, because i'm calling out over gmail. now that it's almost done, i could conceivably make some calls today or tomorrow.

the "rule of law" is a term intended to apply to governments, specifically those that wish to discard the rules for personal gain. it refers to the fact that the government must also follow the law - that they are not above it.

one example of the rule of law would be the requirement of a colonial government to respect the rights of indigenous people on unceded lands, rather than take matters into their own hands. an example of a breach in the rule of law would occur when a colonial court attempts to enforce an injunction in a territory that it has no jurisdiction over, perhaps due to financial kickbacks from an oil and/or gas company.

the "rule of law" does not refer to any kind of authoritarian supremacy of government over the people, but rather the opposite concept: that the government is to be impeded by constitutional principles (written and unwritten) in it's use of force against civilians.

so, when justin trudeau speaks of the "rule of law", is this some kind of orwellian newspeak, some kind of deep irony? i think that this is to give the man far too much credit: it is a misapplied colloquialism rooted in absolute ignorance of the legal system in the country he's in charge of.

it does appear to be the case that isis was essentially created by nato to justify an invasion of syria with the intent to topple assad. i've offered little dissent on the point; i haven't challenged that narrative - isis is a construction of the west.

and, with the destruction of isis (mostly by russia), it's starting to look like they're just trying the same thing again, with groups located closer to the turkish border. the turks will need to invade syria to kill al qaeda. this is your ground force to topple assad.

now, i need to point out that a turkish invasion of western syria is not the same thing as air raids in eastern syria, and supporting the latter does not imply support for the former. i don't operate on black and white moral principles; i adjust to facts on the ground, and take things on a case-by-case basis. i could support a temporary alliance with imperial forces to blow up isis; i can't support another actual nato-led invasion of a former soviet satellite. the granular details here are important.

but, there is an underlying question that really needs to be asked out loud by more people - if you understand that the islamicists are created by the same people that are bombing them, how can you support bombing them? how can you deconstruct the lie, and then still support it's purpose? doesn't deconstructing the means mean abolishing the ends? what doublethink is this?

unfortunately. this is not a logical position, and in some sense i wish that it was. i wish it was as easy as just calling out the truth of the matter and washing my hands of it. but, if you want to be logical, you need to analyze the outcomes of all possibilities and pick a least bad option, not just the outcome of intervention contrasted to a utopian vision. and, sadly, it still makes sense to attack established islamicist groups in pretty much any kind of scenario, regardless of who is funding or creating them: action more or less dominates inaction under just about all cases. and, the reason is that the islamicists are going to kill a large proportion of the people you're trying to avoid killing, anyways.

it's always dangerous to be utilitarian about war casualties. but, if your argument is that we shouldn't bomb because we're killing innocents, then this is not a rational position, in context, because the islamicist groups are going to slaughter innocents whether we bomb them or not. this is the variable that complicates the scenario, and that the pseudo-left seems so intent on ignoring: inaction will lead to a comparable level of slaughter as action. so, you can't avoid the slaughter by disengaging. it's difficult, but it is what it is: ending the killing isn't a good reason to stop bombing. if we bomb, people die. if we don't bomb, people die. so it goes.

the left used to understand the centrality of religion in all of this, and the importance of undermining faith to eliminate war. but, this has been discarded recently by a post-colonialist theory that is essentially a conservative revivalism. we've been conditioned to stop asking the right questions, and have ended up with all of the wrong answers.

stamping out the religion is a hard problem and, yes, there is a role for wealth redistribution within it. but, there is no way around the basic reality on the ground - so long as there are fundamentalists going around killing people, you have to support a resistance against them as a first step. it doesn't matter who is funding them, or why; you can't ignore them - that's just a formula for blowback.

give a hand of applause for the machiavellians in washington, if you must. but don't tell me to turn a blind eye to religious extremism....

it is even misleading to suggest that the elected band councils have jurisdiction over the reserve lands.

these institutions are a product of the indian act, and are strictly colonial entities. they're funded entirely by the state, so it should be of no surprise that they tend to do what the state says. and, there are in fact massive issues with corruption.

so, the way this works is that the pipeline company asks the colonial body for approval, and then receives it. it then takes that to the court and claims there was consultation. but, the body never represented the indigenous people in the first place, so it only qualifies as consultation if you never intended to consult.

the question of representation is of course difficult. but, these tribes are so small that the councils are essentially extended family meetings. it's not like you have some aloof king ruling over an oppressed mass of people - the kinship is so tight they're operating at a clan level.

if you accept that these lands are unceded, then the parliament has no authority over them, which means the indian act has no force and the band councils are themselves merely a fantastical mechanism by a foreign state to enforce it's will from a distance - they have no more jurisdiction than the courts do, and no more legitimacy than the canadian parliament does.

when it comes to politics, there is a difference between opposition and indifference, and i think this is sometimes lost or exaggerated in the discourse.

personally, i would be opposed to climate change, but indifferent to "religious freedom". i would be opposed to poverty, but indifferent to inequality. so, i can vote for a party that is pro-muslim (to a point), so long as it rigorously opposes climate change. and, i can vote for a party that is broadly bourgeois, so long as it puts some redistributive policies in place to address the worst kinds of poverty. conversely, i wouldn't be interested in voting for a party or candidate that demonizes the rich, but doesn't believe in wealth redistribution.

i am not an american, but i do not find myself particularly opposed to a border wall. rather, i find myself largely indifferent to it. and, i might suspect that this is the case for most voters.

it is true that there's not much of an argument in favour of the thing, but it is also true that there's not much of an argument against it, either. give it a try. try and argue against the wall, convincingly. the best thing you're going to come up with is the cost of the thing, but that's a bad argument: infrastructure projects have high multiplier effects and are good for the economy.

as there is really little reason to oppose the wall to any great extent, i don't expect that the democrats are going to be able to hold support much longer, if it isn't already starting to crumble. the initial kneejerk reaction may be to blame trump. but, the longer this goes on for, the more it hurts the democrats.

trump's base is large nihilistic and doesn't care about the government, anyways. he's not going to lose support over this. but, the democrats are risking a dangerous backlash if they wait too long to cave.

i'm not going to say to build the wall. i'm indifferent to it.

but, i am going to remind people that they need to pick their battles.

while it is not clear how the tribes in the interior of bc are going to react to the enforcement of the court's injunction around the pipeline being built through their sovereign territory, my legal opinion of the situation is that any movement by the police into this territory amounts to an invasion force, and subsequent illegal occupation of the region, which legally and morally justifies the use of force in reaction.

and, i would stand in solidarity with the indigenous groups against any such illegal occupation.

turkey is a bizarre country, because it is a historical power that is universally viewed as an occupier. it has historical power over this broad swath of land, but no historical connection to any of it. none of these areas ever really became turkish, but the turks never really assimilated to the area, either. and, all of these fragmented states around the old byzantine empire, including those that converted to islam, are united only in their opposition to turkish imperialism.

i've written this essay a few times, now. as these economic blocks build up around them, the turks are kind of at the end of their history - they can neither enter into a block, nor can they take control of one, as their geography and history would demand of them. the turks seem destined for some kind of catastrophe, one way or another.

there is an argument that the turks ought to join the eu, as the region has a deep history in europe. this would be a reunification of the empire, in some sense. but, the europeans do not seem to want them in europe, not any more than they did five hundred years ago. there is no doubt some subconscious feeling that the turks will eventually fall, that constantinople will be liberated, but the way that works itself out in actual policy is a kind of distant tolerance that never reaches acceptance. yes, the turks exist. c'est la vie.

there is likewise an argument that the turks ought to join the arab world, but the history here is truly no less hostile - the arabs never conquered the city, but were rather conquered by it in what was really a muslim phase of roman imperialism. whatever role that christian theology played in the egyptian and levantine revolts of late antiquity, it is clear enough that the arabs were eventually welcomed as liberators to end what was a long roman-persian war that had been fought on semitic lands for a thousand years. turkish expansion via the sultanate of rum (after the mongol destruction) was in a real sense the return of the romans from the inside out; in the end, it was more like a long civil war that ended with the muslim faith dominant, and the old regime back in place. and, if it weren't for the inability to convert the greeks, that turnover may have been historically total. as it is, the collapse of the ottoman state was also the most recent liberation of arabs from roman hegemony. whatever historical process exists around this in the long run, one should expect the arabs to give the turks the cold shoulder into perpetuity.

i would suggest there is a far better argument to unite istanbul with moscow, and resurrect the byzantine state. but, the peculiarity of the turkish state asserts itself once again, here: while greeks and slavs are forever historically intertwined, the fact that the turks are muslims is a difficult cultural block in reunifying the east. that said, the future of the region is no doubt in secularism, rather than in islam or christianity. and, for that reason, a new eastern empire rooted in universal secular values is perhaps the most historically correct home for turkey, in the end.

the other option is for turkey to look directly east and try and project some kind of dominance over the turkish areas of central asia. while this may seem rational to a naive observer, there is no history of a unified turkish state, and certainly no history of a turkish state centred in the bosphorus. rather, the idea being projected is of iran - this is the iranian cultural sphere, the iranian empire. and, while the geographic space we call turkey has historically existed within iranian empires, it has never been assimilated within one. there is a line through the peninsula, on the western side of which the idea ceases to make any sense.

the war in syria has maybe made the problem of turkish isolation more obvious, but it hasn't presented any meaningful solution. europe is as hostile as ever, as they carry out a proxy war against the arabs and continue this awkward frenemy dance with the iranians. but, that russo-turkish alliance is potentially the basis for a deep friendship and potential economic integration - whether the current turkish leadership realizes it or not.

for right now, the russians need to be careful not to let them occupy syria, as that's just going to set the whole thing back in motion again.

i admit that there's a lot of historical sense in the turks taking over, and they are certainly well positioned to counter saudi attempts to destabilize the region. i've pointed out repeatedly that the turkish-arab conflict is in many ways the more real conflict, compared to the arab-iranian one. this is a long war of history...

but, there is a recipe for catastrophe in allowing the turks and russians to compete for influence in the region like this, because i'm not sure that the various people that live in syria really want them there. the danger is that if the turks get too aggressive, it could actually produce a response in arab nationalism, which would no doubt be islamicist in nature due to the condition the region finds itself in. there's this idea in the west that turkish soldiers are preferable to western ones because they're muslim, but this is just another example of westerners not understanding the complexity of the history in the region. while there is historical justification for pan-arabism, the idea of some kind of muslim megastate has always been a colonial fantasy; the conflicts in this region have always been less religious and more ethnic. remember: the british were nominally initially brought in to protect the arabs from the turks in the first place.

america's geopolitical strategy is of course to divide and conquer, so these bugs are easily misunderstood as features in washington.

i would like to see the turks pull back.

but, so long as the americans are sitting in the middle of the playground, this is all just abstract discussion, anyways.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/opinion/erdogan-turkey-syria.html

so, it seems as though the syria withdrawal was some kind of political ploy, or some kind of depraved negotiating tactic or something.

but, all it's succeeded in doing is broadcasting that the americans are unreliable in their statements, and can't be treated as serious negotiating partners, if there was ever any question that they could be trusted or treated seriously.

the conditions that bolton has put down will never be met, so the so-called withdrawal is in fact a permanent, illegal occupation, and a de facto partition of the country.

the russians should just start carpet bombing the remaining isis footholds.

this evening's soundtrack.

a brief history of kim campbell, written in an appropriate tone.

http://www.thecanadaguide.com/history/prime-ministers/kim-campbell/

when somebody gets beaten as badly as kim campbell did, it should come with a lifetime ban on any attempt to speak on behalf of the country, however indirectly.

you'd think that most former heads of state would know better than to risk an international incident like that.

but, this particular person has shown absolutely no inclination towards common sense, or common decency, throughout her career.

she does not speak on behalf of anybody except herself.

"but it was sexism".

no.

she was horrible.

she is a vile, horrible person that canadians summarily rejected.

there's some cancer survivors down the street that could use a good taunting, kim.

why don't you get out of the house and give it to them?

tell her to stop wasting her time on the internet, and go make fun of some autistic kid or something.

so, what is kim campbells's legacy?

an analysis of somebody's legacy is no place to have a serious discussion.

twitter is clearly no place for a serious discussion.

she's an idiot.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/former-pm-kim-campbell-calls-trump-expletive-on-twitter-1.4241998

so, socialism didn't really happen the way it was imagined it would, but who should really be surprised by that.

but, communism is automation. and, it's closer than you think.

they're talking about slaughtering us. this is class warfare; entirely rational. the real question is why we aren't plotting a means to take control. but, what i've been saying for years - and i'm sure others have been saying it, too - is that it's the inevitable result of unemployment, which is not very marxist, granted, but literally right out of bakunin.

if you drop the classical marxist narrative around the uselessness of the lumpenproletariat and pick up the classical anarchist narrative around the lumpenproletariat as the essential revolutionary force, the road map begins to materialize more clearly, and the way it works is like this:

1. automation savages the economy, leading to massive unemployment.
2. a mass of unemployed workers finally organizes.
3. ??????
4. communism.

and, the question marks are the point, here - they're the part that is really important, the part we can't write, the part we have to figure out on the fly.

unions were necessary to get us out of the dickensian period, and are still required to help the mass of oppressed workers in asia. but, it was clear to all of the early socialists that were close to the movement that they were inherently conservative institutions, with no real revolutionary potential. i know that malatesta gets a lot of credit for pointing this out.

a real revolution is not going to happen from well fed auto workers trying to seize control of production, auto workers that are themselves the beneficiaries of supply chains using slaves in asia. all they know how to do is march and take bribes. it is going to have to come from desperate, starving people that are looking to take control of these machines to redistribute their produce as a last resort - as was the character of the revolution in france.

the capitalists could pull their heads out of their asses before that happens, and we could end up with another rooseveltian type intervention that restructures the system around a gai - we could write some kind of bill of rights to access the machines, and declare some kind of minimum standard of living. and, for a lot of people, that would no doubt be better than what we have.

or, this could be the catalyst required to overthrow the system.

that's up to us to figure it out.

see, this is where the narrative starts to experience blowback. and, i mused about this in 2016...

was clinton such an awful candidate that she was going to end any serious chance of female political aspirations for a generation or more? well, it was and remains a real fear, but dismantling it is as simple as coming to terms with the reality of it: hillary clinton did not lose because of her gender, she lost because of her politics.

let's say it again.

hillary clinton did not lose because of her gender, she lost because of her politics.

if we don't all finally accept this, we're going to be stuck in a loop - the more women point out actual legitimate problems around sexism in society or in the work place, they more they'll be offering a reason not to vote for them. all of this analysis threatens to become self-defeating. for, having loudly erected this edifice of systemic sexism, the structure now threatens to collapse on the very people who built it.

if hillary clinton did lose because of her gender, then it is a very good reason to avoid female candidates. clearly. however, as she didn't lose because of her gender, it isn't a reason to avoid female candidates at all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/us/politics/women-candidates-president-2020.html

yeah, the thing i saw is here at this page:

https://www.bulkbarn.ca/en/Products/All/Organic-Sorghum-Fusilli,-GoGo-Quinoa

sorghum wheat ought to have b vitamins, though. so, i'm left to conclude that this product is probably unregulated.

it's going to need to be fettucine. i can't cook with fusilli.

i did some shopping today.

i was able to find some grape-blueberry concentrate and some "blueberry cocktail" that had it listed as the third ingredient, both for exorbitant prices. still no orange juice in tetrapacks. so, i went with the pure apple juice (not from concentrate) on sale, instead. i'll keep an eye out for it at the far store, and suspect there may actually be some at the italian store, as they carry weird things like that.

no plums at either store i went to today. i guess they're not in season, and the demand isn't high enough to carry them out of season. those blueberries are lasting longer than i thought, but i'll poke around a few places.

they had some sorghum fusilli at the bulk barn, but i took a look at the ingredient list and was kind of disappointed by it. i know that mass manufactured pasta has a bad reputation, but the packaging for the sorghum fusilli did not indicate the presence of any b vitamins. you'd think if they're there they'd be listed. and, i kind of assumed the sorghum pasta would be enriched. i don't want to strip my diet of b vitamins for the sake of anti-oxidants - that sounds like a bad trade-off. i would also need to change my recipe, if i were to move to fusilli from fettucine.

i'm thinking that the bagels are a better target. i used to make my eggs with rye bread, and my tomato sandwiches with bagels. over time, i ended up using bagels for eggs, and stopped buying rye - as i phased out the tomato sandwiches. that's not something i really sat down and thought about, although i was also getting a good deal on big bags of bagels, which has since disappeared. i should re-evaluate what i'm eating with my eggs, regardless, and probably go back to the rye if i can't find a sorghum option.

i did get some oregano at bulk barn for cheap, and will probably start getting celery salt there, too. let's start with that and see how it tastes before i jump to basil and/or parsley.

and, why exactly do you get these hard-right neo-con hawks standing up for the kurds, anyways?

it goes back to the 80s.

it's because they're mostly white.

don't get me wrong.

my sympathies are with the kurds.

it's just completely delusional to think they can rely on protection from an imperial power.

i can just imagine somebody trying to explain the need to protect the kurds to donald trump.

trump: the kurds. i keep hearing about these kurds and i have to say i've neva hoid of them, these kurds. but we need to protect the kurds. and, i don't...i just don't know who they are. so, somebody tell me about these kurds, and why we should protect them.

advisor: well, they're an ethnic group in the middle east...

trump: but, what does that have to do with us?

advisor: ...that are of iranian origin....

trump: great. they're iranians. why are we protecting the iranians? how'd they trick us into doing that? we're always getting tricked. i said no more of this. what else can you tell me about these kurds?

advisor: well, they're muslims.

trump: great. iranian muslims. we're protecting iranian muslims. i bet they're terrible to their own people, too.

advisor: well, a lot of them are socialists, actually.

trump: so, let me get this straight. you want me to stay in syria to protect iranian muslim socialists. is that right?

(pause)

advisor: yes, sir.

trump: you gotta be kidding me. what are you noam fucking chomsky or something? get 'em out of there.

advisor #2: well, if you don't like the kurds, there's the yazidis...

trump: nope. to hell with it. get 'em out of there.

breaking news just in.

elizabeth warren has officially chosen tom joad as her running mate.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/01/04/elizabeth-warren-billionaires-not-welcome-in-2020-democratic-presidential-race/

real solution #8 had already been tried, i guess.

i mean, what's the relative success rate of stem cells v chemo?

you're a lot better off with stem cells.....

when i think of stem cell research, though, i don't think of cancer treatments, i think of organ and tissue growth. in the end, it might be easier to grow and implant new organs than to try and get the body to clear the cancer out on it's own, but even beyond that the bioengineering applications of stem cells are enormous.

as has been pointed out here on numerous occasions, i lost my dad to cancer in mid 2013. if you haven't already lost somebody to cancer, you will - that's as statistically sure a statement as there is. and, if you have, you know the desperation that sets in near the end.

for my dad, it was mushrooms. my sister had been feeding him some trash about magic mushrooms (not those kinds.) from japan that could cure cancer. he was near death; what can you lose from trying mushrooms? but i'm the more science-y one of the two of us, so he ran it by me first, and i ended up having to talk him out of eating something that was just going to put dangerous stress on his liver. first, do no harm.

so, when you see headlines that reference things like "untested stem cell therapies", you need to be careful with them on two levels. yes, it may be true that the success rate is kind of shady at this point, but that's not the same thing as writing it off as magic beans, like you would with cancer-curing mushrooms. and, i think the disconnect is in not understanding what you're doing - if you're just holding still and taking a needle, what's the difference between accepting the syringe or popping a cap?

the difference is that there is no known mechanism whereby any unknown agent could survive digestion long enough to defeat cancer cells, whereas injecting somebody with antibodies is a tried and tested method to kill all kinds of things. see, and this is the thing about immunotherapy - it is eminently plausible that it will eventually work once we finally get it right.

is it there yet? adamantly not.

but, there's a huge difference between interpreting success rates in the context of a plausible work in progress, and interpreting them in the context of some kind of sympathetic magic - namely, the science under the hood.

i understand that it doesn't always work, but you have to understand that sometimes it does work, and spectacularly well when it does. and, that means we need more research to try and get it to work more often, not less.

so, if you find yourself nearly dead, should you spend $100,000 on immunotherapy injections?

well, it's a lot better than eating magic mushrooms.

if you can, and you want to live, i'd say you should - yes.

so, what are they actually doing?

it seems like they're centralizing funding decisions into the minister's office. these networks had a lot of autonomy; that was kind of the point. science operates best on peer review.

by pulling funding decisions directly into the minister's office, they'll be able to approve or deny projects based on their political interests.

and, we'll see what happens to stem-cell research in the medium term.

https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/government-of-canada-launches-new-research-fund-to-push-beyond-the-frontiers-of-canadian-science-702060001.html

in the mean time, canadians are going to have to get used to things like ending sex ed, and ending funding for stem cell research, as our government is overrun by special interest groups pushing their religious dogma from the top down.

we're going to have to rebuild a left-populist movement from the ground up.

and, it could take a while before we have the numbers to do it.

canada is slowly becoming a very religious and very conservative society.

there is no future for publicly-funded science here; the populace won't support it.

this is something that he had a strong mandate to stop. but, it's pretty abundantly clear that the government operates everything through a pr filter, and it clearly thinks science is unpopular. and, with the way the society is collapsing right now, he might be right.

i've pointed this out a few times before - there isn't an answer to this in the spectrum. the greens might be a little better one day, but they don't exist right now, and the dying ndp is probably even more focused on satisfying the religious and even less science-friendly. when we can't even count on the other parties to be less anti-science than the conservatives, we've really hit a cultural cross-roads.

the reality is that canada is in for a long period of decline.

it's best to try and get out.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-trudeau-wants-canada-to-be-a-global-leader-in-science-so-why-is-he/

i think the example i used in the past was mind-control ray guns from aliens.

let's say the president decides she wants to pass a law that says that everybody has to wear tinfoil hats, to protect us from alien  russian mind-control weapons. i think we can all intuitively understand that this ought to be unconstitutional. but, how do you win the case?

a naive response may be to argue against the premise: you're going to want to prove in court, somehow, that there aren't really russian mind-control weapons. and, you will no doubt be flabbergasted when you lose, as the court really has no ability to interpret national security documents, or otherwise create presidential policy. if the president thinks there are russian mind-control weapons and we need to be protected from them, that is his prerogative.

if you want to actually win the case, you have to start by conceding the point and rather make an argument that there is no evidence that tinfoil hats are effective in shielding against russian mind-control weapons.

it's a function of the separation of powers. and, as crazy as it seems, there's a reason that the president is the president, and the supreme court isn't. courts simply don't have executive power.

i can't remember the exact argument the democrats tried to use with the travel ban, but it was instantly clear that trying to get it struck down because it was discriminatory against muslims was a bad legal argument, and wasn't going to work. i've been through this on this page a couple of times in the last few years; it's up there. was it early 2017? everything's dated.

there were two better arguments. the best argument would be to show that it wasn't a rational means to carry out the policy objective. in order to do that, you'd have to concede that the president would have the right to ban muslims if he really thought it was a national security issue (which, frankly, is not actually even controversial - of course he would), but rather show that a blanket travel ban wasn't going to actually work. broadly speaking, the president has almost no check on his authority in terms of what he decides is valid policy. the courts really have no jurisdiction in setting policy. what the courts can do is step in and declare that a specific action is or is not a rational means to actualize an actual policy. and, i'd like to see the administration argue that a blanket travel ban from iran is going to eliminate a terrorist threat that broadly doesn't even exist.

the other argument is that it was overly broad. again: you would have to concede the presidential right to ban muslims, but then argue that non-muslims would get stuck in a blanket travel ban, and the law should be struck down for that reason. and, i know that people aren't going to like it, but the actual fact is that it's the superior legal argument. that would have actually worked.

but, the reaction was never legal, it was always political; the arguments presented to the court were never serious legal arguments, and never had a serious chance. i have no training in american law, and i could very easily disassemble them as without merit. these arguments were meant to run on talk shows, and to generate rallies, not to win an actual case in an actual court.

they would string me up a tree in a jiffy, if they could.

it was the same thing with the travel ban.

it's not my country, of course. but, when trump said he was going to put a blanket ban on travel from a country like iran, i didn't say "what about about the muslims?", i pointed out that it's unfortunate that atheists and secularists are going to lose an avenue out of the country, and otherwise have their travel rights restricted.


it was overly broad alright - because there are plenty of people from these countries that aren't muslims or even religionists at all.

i know it's an old argument often used disingenuously, for example frequently by the israelis, but in the precise situation of raqqa, there is no such thing as an innocent civilian, due to the support that the population was providing to isis. see, and this is actually a big part of the reason i changed my opinion about this.

i don't normally support imperialist wars, you know. i was initially opposed to this.

it's not like i didn't realize how gruesome this was going to be - and it was in fact my argument against it. religious crazies tend to regenerate, and this particular religion is tribal, and operates on revenge and blood lust. so, to win this war, you'd have to blow up entire cities - you'd have to kill sons to stop them from growing into fighters, and women to stop them from breeding. i disagreed with the experts: we could do it, but is it worth the cost? then, as more evidence mounted that isis was indiscernible from the general population, i realized that they had to be slaughtered - that the cities were going to have to crumble. this wasn't a group of extremists to contain, it was becoming a popular movement - and that's how fascist ideologies spread.

i repeat: the high civilian toll necessary to wage this war was initially the argument against it, but as the nature of the civilian population's sympathies became more readily apparent, the high civilian toll became the strategic objective. if you support fascism, you're a fascist; if you support isis, you become it. it's simply too brutal to allow for sympathies around, and any growing level of sympathy for it had to be eradicated along with it.

and, i've been absolutely clear about this - i am absolutely at war against islam, which i consider to be a fascist ideology with no redeeming qualities whatsoever; the only good fascist is a dead one. to me, the tragedy is not about dead muslims, but about the secularists and atheists that are getting caught up in it; fundamentalist muslims are valid targets here, it's the secularists that are valid civilians and valid refugees. it would be a nice to find a way to avoid killing so many of the enemy's victims.

so, this comes up against a difficult definitional problem in trying to separate between the people doing the literal fighting and a civilian population that is actively aiding and abetting it. and, so, i don't mine giving these civilians this choice: convert or die.

but, my point is that it's a tricky situation, legally. it's not clear that these are really civilian populations, or that they ought to be protected under the law - and, if they are, there is a strong argument that this ought to be an exception to it, given the support they're providing.

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/05/syria-airstrikes-isis-united-states/

it's not some moral trip. it's not even a health issue.

i just actually don't like being stoned on a daily basis. i prefer sobriety, ninety-five days out of a hundred.

i'm on average a couple-of-times-a-month smoker. but, it's going to be a while, still.

i want to use my brain, not destroy it.

but, i mean....how long does it take to get chronic, persistent exposure to marijuana out of your system?

it's been three months, now, and i'm still feeling it.

i'm using the term "detox" as a description, but i'm not concerned about my liver, i'm concerned about my brain.

i just don't want to be inebriated right now - i want to stop being tired and sluggish and scattered (which is what marijuana does to you...) and regain my caffeine-driven focus and wit.

and, it's getting better; this place isn't perfect, but it's far better.

we'll see how life turns, but i'm just not into it right now.

it's really not clear to me what the appeal of apple is to investors.

they make overpriced trash with minimal market share. even the iphone is at around 15%. the profit levels for the company are a result of an absurd markup, rather than strong sales - it's not that they sell a lot of stuff, it's that they repeatedly badly rip off a small, if loyal, customer base. there's really no rational basis for their share price.

there's a theory to look at: that those commercials ten years ago (and the ones 35 years ago.) were more effective at selling stock options than they were at selling products.  how true this is is a question of scale; the stock price is badly inflated.

this is important because the dow is massively skewed by the price of apple stock, and it is going to be in for a nasty tumble whenever people come to their senses about the long term viability of the company.

beta o'rourke.

right.

how about bert?

i like bert.

it's not beta.

why is it so hard to find an electable candidate with a decent platform on this continent?

fuck.

is bob too complicated, or what?

his name is robert.

and he runs under the name "beta"?

what?

something else.

have we all sat down and contemplated what the internet is going to do if the democrats - particularly - run a candidate name "beta o'rourke".

i mean, really.

where is "alpha mcmann" when you need him?

it should be clear that i actually don't want to do any of this at all.

i don't have a lot of choice.

monday.

i'm going to start making calls on monday.

this is good: halfway between obama and clinton, and nowhere near sanders.

again: obama and clinton won the primaries. repeatedly. it's not like there's not a base there. and, if you liked obama, you'll love warren.

but, the actual left needs to be pushing back hard against her, or we're going to end up in the same situation we were in in 2009: a squandered opportunity.

she is the logical successor to barack obama. if that's what you want, great. if it's not, don't be tricked.

it's so edgy and post-modern, i can't find a reference point to modernity any more.

but, it's complete bullshit.

yeah. it's clinton 2.0 - any criticism of her policies, which are broadly right out of the heritage institute, is just being sexist. and, that's not some kind of authoritarian ploy to deflect criticism, it's backed up by a freudian psychoanalysis, which is perfectly valid as science.

you have to wonder, though. 'cause that's exactly what trump wants, right?

it almost seems like they set this up years ago.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/elizabeth-warren-unpopular-it-depends-who-you-ask/579247/

i think i'd rather vote for ed markey...

apparently, warren actually loses to both sanders and biden in massachusetts, itself.

i wonder if she'd even beat ed markey.

or if the end result of running just opens her up to the dangers of a primary challenge from the left.

she also won re-election mere weeks ago. she should have stood down if she was planning to run for president.

this is actually a good demonstration of the differences.

the sympathetic liberal writer at the atlantic is presenting the situation as ridiculous.

bernie is trying to figure out the best way to win, the best way to advance the cause.

"but, what's in it for me?", asks the confounded senator for massachusetts.

exactly.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/bernie-sanders-running-against-warren-president/573529/

"Warren’s team doesn’t like the Clinton comparisons. They see any of that talk as reeking of sexism,"

ahahahaha.

i'm sorry. that was just kind of priceless.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/elizabeth-warren-2020-campaign/579214/

https://www.alternet.org/2018/08/heres-biggest-political-difference-between-bernie-sanders-and-elizabeth-warren/

it's, like, right out of animal farm.

Sometime last year, the progressive group most closely aligned with the senator, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, changed its logo: “I’m from the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party” became “I’m from the Elizabeth Warren wing of American politics.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rubycramer/elizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders-difference

https://newrepublic.com/article/151871/essential-difference-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/23/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-democratic-party-2020-differences

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-29/elizabeth-warren-and-bernie-sanders-aren-t-the-same

i think that a lot of the media presumed that sanders was mostly an anti wall street candidate, and his support for social programs was secondary to the message. if that's your position, then warren is an even better candidate than sanders.

i get it.

but, i think it's wrong.

we'll find out...

no. listen.

it was always an open question as to whether sanders' support came from his get-tough-on-the-banks spiel (which i personally largely wrote off as empty politicking) or his proposals to move towards a scandinavian welfare state model, because he presented the two ideas together. i'm sure that most people reacted to the two things in differing proportions.

so, i was basically willing to ignore bernie's sometimes very silly rants against wall street, in order to support his plans for universal health care.

warren, on the other hand, has no interest in turning the united states into denmark - she is solely about trying to save capitalism from itself, so we can more effectively compete against each other. and, when you take away the socialism, you lose me.

so, we're going to find out who really supports what.

if we ignore the newspeak around it, the actual middle class is a bourgeois layer that should be abolished.

i don't want to save the middle class; i want to smash it.

fuck bosses.

fuck the middle class.

listen.

i'm not middle class.

i'm working class.

k?

thanks.

for that reason, dragging o'rourke through the process would be useful, just to subtract out texas as irrelevant.

there are some southern states where you might not even need to run multiple black candidates to split the vote, but just a number of centrists.

for example, i'm sure that gore would have cut into clinton's vote in tennessee, which, iirc, was about 70-30. enough? maybe not.

but, what our currently unknown leftist champion needs here is a field with a large number of centrists in it, and if we end up going into the southern primaries with 8 centrists and one leftist, our champion could mitigate the damage well enough to win by sweeping the midwest.

the single biggest opponent a leftist candidate is going to have in front of it is these black churches.

so, how does the left defeat the black congressional caucus and win a primary?

well. that's the reality of the task ahead of it. they won't support a leftist, and they control the vote.

the first thing you have to do is stop denying it. you won't convince them; stop trying.

so, what tactics are there? well, you've gotta split the field, basically.

so, if i'm bernie sanders, i'm actually looking at the field rather favourably, despite what the media is suggesting. he has a ceiling of something like 30% in the south - and warren won't do much better. she could easily poll in the low single digits, really. but, if you get kamala harris and cory booker splitting the vote, sanders all of a sudden has a path up the middle.

if it's not sanders, maybe it's jeff merkley. nobody knows yet. but, whoever it is needs to come to grips with this: if they want to win, they have to find a beat to beat the black caucus, somehow.

the point i'm going to want to make is just to make it clear: warren is not on the sanders/kucinich/nader side of the american left, she's inside the obama/clinton axis of the party's centrist wing.

if you support that, so be it.

i'll just want to ensure that you understand it, before you go voting for a mirage and get burned. again.

it's a bunch of republican talking points interspersed with some tepid liberal platitudes. no details. and, you'll likely be disappointed by them when you hear them - her idea of expanded opportunity for the middle class is going to be more market theory, rather than attempts to balance out the violence of markets with redistributive mechanisms.

so, she is many ways projecting what is the next logical step in realignment, after obama. fool me once...

again: i'm curious. are democrats going to get excited by this? is this where the party is in 2019? do people really understand what she's running on? but, i don't expect i'll end up too supportive of it.

i'm actually curious how this goes.

elizabeth warren was a republican into her late 40s. this isn't a case of somebody who was raised a democrat and switched parties as she grew into herself, it's a case of somebody that spent the majority of her adult life as a conservative. and, what was her reasoning?

"I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets." - elizabeth warren

in past years, she'd have been written off as a fringe candidate on the right of the party. but, there's been a realignment happening since 2009, if not since 1993, and in many ways a warren candidacy - let alone presidency - could really flip it over.

much of what she's saying here might sound like far-left boilerplate to a contemporary listener, but the reality is that these are actually mostly recycled talking points from the gingrich-led congressional majority of the 90s. stop for a second and realize it: she sounds like a republican.

it's because she is one.

so, i'm curious. i suspect she'll do well amongst this influx of suburban white voters, who have also been republicans for most of their lives - and that whether she wins or not depends on how many "progressives" and "socialists" she can trick into voting for her with this phony republican populist rhetoric about big banks. in the end, what many are going to project and interpret as the triumph of the left is going to be it's death.

somebody that does not live far from you will die at the hands of a drunk driver tonight.

everything else aside, i don't think i've left the house on any new year's since i moved to windsor.

it's the most dangerous night of the year to drive, and it's usually too cold to transit without transportation. i would usually prefer to stay in and eat nachos.

i'm most of the way through the emails for 2014, and am about to stop to eat. i've been clear that i want to detox right now, but the fact is that i wouldn't normally go anywhere on new year's anyways....

i guess the beer test is too edgy nowadays.

https://www.straight.com/news/1182011/poll-shows-canadians-would-prefer-justin-trudeau-their-kids-babysitter-over-andrew

"but, if you just rely on quantitative easing, wages will stay stagnant, and all the wealth will remain at the top."

right.

because wages have risen, historically, due to market forces - rather than union movements.

a strong economy is not a sufficient condition for distributive policies, but it is a necessary one. crashing the economy doesn't help anybody. but, we've lost the plot - which is that we need to fight for our wages and benefits, not leave it to the momentum of a regression analysis, which has been moving the other direction for far too long, anyways.

if we were to snap our fingers immediately, and democratize the workplace, and eliminate management, and redistribute the wealth, we would still need to keep creating very large amounts of money in order to keep pace with that redistribution, as well as compensate for population growth.

there's really no way out of this, and it's consequently a false choice.

and, i'm glad that trump is sticking to his word and continuing to facilitate the withdrawal of troops from syria.

what i will acknowledge is that the orac count is only one way to measure anti-oxidant levels in foods, and that the effects of digestion are an important consideration in determining whether a food has useful levels of anti-oxidants or not. i was initially going to post a frap assay, but it wasn't ordered. note that all of the assays have some criticism of them, and the results aren't better than each other - these are just different measures. if you can find an ordered list of some other count, i'd want to take it into consideration as well, but i'd expect substantive overlap.

so, the list i posted measured how many total anti-oxidants are in a food per 100 g, raw, using one specific method of measurement. you might not be able to digest all of those. they might be modified by heat. etc.

but, the list pointed these defects out. it's right there in the introduction - clearly.

see, and this is the valid criticism that you hear about the whole thing - that people are easily duped by fancy marketing, don't understand what they're reading, etc. but, that's true about anything, and the solution isn't to attack what is in fact good science but to try and focus on the scientific literacy of consumers; if a company can easily trick people into buying carcinogenic water as a health supplement, it's not the company's fault, it's the fault of the people that are easily tricked. and, likewise, if you think that pomegranate juice is going to cure your prostate cancer, that's your fault - not theirs.

exactly what you can get out of any specific food is going to be complicated, granted. but, what that means is just that you're better off playing the averages.

so, i mean, if you want to make the argument that the orac list wasn't beamed down from the temple mount then, sure, i guess. but, who said that in the first place?

"my friend ate berries every day and she got cancer, therefore it's all bullshit.

#yolo #noethicalconsumptionincapitalism"

note to neckbeards: you don't generally want to get your information from a youtube video called anti-oxidants debunked !!!!1!!!!

i just want to post something on the question of anti-oxidants, as there's as much nonsense "debunking" them as there is in support of them. and, i tend to find myself more pissed off by these "debunkers" than i do by the naive hippies, because at least the hippies don't pretend that they have some literacy in the topic. i recently went over this with the question of what effect tidal drag has on earthquakes - something the neckbeards will instantly write off as pseudoscience, without the slightest idea of what they're talking about. it just looks like astrology, right? but it's a research topic with a lot of potential. and, likewise, these same neckbeards are going to jump all over anti-oxidants as empty marketing hype, as though a few exaggerated claims are enough to throw the entire idea out of the window. like i say: it's the people that misuse science that piss me off more than the people that don't care about it.

the science underlying the issue is not controversial. free radicals are very strongly linked to cancer development, and the reaction involved is one of the most basic ideas in chemistry. i'm not aware of any research that suggests that attempting to maximize your anti-oxidant count is harmful, or even ineffective. the criticisms exist around the honesty of marketing claims, rather than the mechanism, and that is the responsibility of the consumer to work through.

but, you'll notice that i'm not advocating the use of supplements or trying to approach the situation as some kind of irradiation process. i am aware that attempts to protect against cancer growth by taking high doses of whatever vitamin cocktails have proven inconclusive - just as i am aware that tests on diets high in anti-oxidants have demonstrated themselves as having a lower cancer risk. and, there's no contradiction there, either.

the error that the neckbeards (who usually have little more than a high school education, if that) are making is in imagining that anti-oxiodants as some kind of magical potion, and then pointing out that they didn't ward off the evil spirits of cancer. "look", they'll claim, "not everybody who took these supplements of high concentrations of isolated anti-oxidants avoided getting cancer". well, ok. but, maybe that wasn't what anybody really thought in the first place.

we also know that diets that are high in anti-oxidants lead to lower risks of cancer.

i'm not telling anybody that drinking a glass of blueberry juice every day is necessarily going to ensure that they live to be 100 years old.

but, i am going to hold by the claim that there is good science that suggests that maximizing anti-oxidant counts in your diet is likely to lower your risks of cancer.