so, this is my shortlist for the next six weeks, which is really just a peruse through.

24: fly pan am  @ meteor (windsor)
27: blanck mass @ ufo

oct
02: joy formidable @ loving touch ----> defeater @ sanctuary.
03: melvins @ el club.
06: legendary pink dots @ el club.
09: caravan palace @ garden theatre

last weekend:


25: chelsea wolfe @ senate theatre
27: swervedriver @ el club

i wouldn't mind seeing the lpd, but i doubt i'll be able to afford it. rather, that joy formidable / defeater sequence may be it until the end of the month, and that's fine, as it's a more normal month. i mean, i don't normally go out 5-6 times a month like this. it's usually once or twice.

so, i think i'm more treating the show next tuesday as the end of september and then keying in on the last weekend of october. let's hope it's at least pleasant out.

i could find more stuff.

but, i want to plan around getting to toronto to file, remember. that's likely to be in november....

if it's a quiet month, that means i should also be able to do things like catch up on groceries (which i've been sparse about this month.), buy that fan and get that crack filler for the baseboards.

i don't multitask well. let's get those documents done...

just to state the point in clearer detail using simple language...

i was essentially charged with stalking somebody, but i've never met that person - i don't know their address, and i don't know their phone number. you can't stalk somebody like that, so the charges were dropped. now, i want to file a human rights complaint against them for falsely charging me with stalking them, but i don't know their phone or address, so i can't do that. so, i'm going to ask the police to provide the address (it says in the report that they went to her house.) via an access to information request, and enforce it through the human rights tribunal.

there is a fundamental principle of justice that an accused be able to face their accuser, and i don't have enough information in front of me to be able to actually do that.

so, i think they have an obligation to provide the information.

so, what am i doing tonight?

when i filled out the human rights complaint against this "caroline chevalier", i had to come to terms with the fact that i didn't know her address and didn't know how to find it. i can't do this unless i know her address. so, what to do?

the only safe way for me to do this is to file an access to information request. yes, i'm going to file an access to information request to attempt to determine the identity of the person that charged me with harassment, because i know nothing about them. such is the level of absurdity underlying the charges.

but, i'd rather get them to do it, and the reason is that i can maybe avoid learning certain details that way. listen: i don't care about this person. at all. but, she manufactured this stupid situation where she thinks i do, or pretends to think i do, or...i can't psychoanalyze somebody that i've never met. the point is that this is a kind of a good faith gimmick - by asking the tribunal to get the information in confidence, i'm avoiding the delusional appearance that  have any interest in tracking her down.

how, though?

i decided that i would file the complaint and then communicate with the tribunal as to how to proceed further, given that there's no obvious answer. i talked to somebody on friday, who is suggesting that i can file a request for an order from the windsor police.

so, i would essentially be asking the access to information group at the windsor police to file an affidavit with the person's address on it. i need this address to file a human rights complaint against this person for having me arrested. and, i'm not going to be able to contact the person that accused me of harassing them directly, because i don't know how to.

what i'm hoping is that the absurdity of the situation helps me in the long run. but that means i need to milk it - if i have choice between two options, i need to pick the more absurd one, at all times.

this is about as absurd as the system gets, though.

and, what's the update on the smell?

the sewer gas leak is plugged. totally. i get a whiff of something once in a while, but it's not coming from the cleanout. so, that's fixed.

when i left on friday night, it had been cool and dry for most of the last two weeks (but hot for a few days), and the fan was running. there was no smell in the basement at all.

when i came back, the fan was off and there was an ammonia smell in the same corner i had dealt with weeks ago - and always when i was gone. i already knew that it wasn't the amp that was the cause of the smell, but having it come back when....

...when it's hot? no. it was fine when the fan was running, so, when the fan is off? or, when i'm gone, really?

i'm starting to wonder if it isn't dog urine...

i've cleaned in there a few times today already by running lysol around it, but i don't want to dismantle the whole unit to get underneath it, and i suspect i might have to.

on friday, i will need to get the fan, and i will need to prioritize sealing those cracks relatively soon, too. what's the october concert schedule like? we'll do that, soon, too.

listen, pick your favourite axiom.

here's one: do as ye will, harme none.

selling drugs harms people. fatally. therefore, you can't do it, in a free society - you'd need to be expelled or killed for it.

decriminalizing drugs means, at some point along the way, you've decided that the profit motive trumps everything else. you've said "yes, people are making a profit from killing people, but..". and, you can come up with whatever set of excuses you want, but at the end of it they're necessarily bullshit rationalizations: you're buying into the neo-liberal paradigm and accepting their set of rationalizations.

what the people in these affected areas need - and are asking for - is more tools to chase the dealers out.

nobody's actually asking for decriminalization, except the people that stand to profit from it, and these are the sickest people out there.

we need to stop coddling and protecting the dealers.

i'm going to state this clearly and tersely: i think dealers of opiates, methamphetamines and cocaine should be lynched in public by angry mobs.

like, seriously.

that's the actual right way to deal with this.

again: in an anarchist society, we wouldn't exactly have drug laws. rather, the community would mobilize to keep drugs out with extreme force. dealers would know that if they were to get caught, they'd get lynched, and that should be the normal state of affairs, in a free society. in this case, anarchy means that nobody protects the drug dealers from harm, and freedom means a lack of restraint in enacting justice against them.

if you want a society where drugs are just another commodity on the market, what you're looking for is unrestrained capitalism, which is what we already have. it's a status quo process tied into advancing neo-liberalism, and which any resistance party needs to try to prevent.

socialists don't like drugs. we never have, and we never will.

that hot air in the atlantic (which is climate change) is holding steady, and, if we're just that lucky, we might fluke out and get one more weekend out.

but, that cold air coming down from the jet stream (which is the sun, and not climate change) is looking pretty ominous.

i suggested a fast, brutal changeover to winter, and i'm going to avoid it for now, but much of the country isn't, and we might not be so lucky the next time.

i'm hoping that the sun is coming back; early signs appear to be that it won't be until next year.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/classic-clash-of-the-seasons-between-western-and-eastern-canada-with-both-august-and-november-like-weather-ahead

ok, i'm not voting for them, either.

good luck, guys. i'm sitting this one out.

my official endorsement for the 2019 canadian election is to spoil your ballot. don't vote.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/elizabeth-may-election-decriminalize-drug-possession-1.5292817

yeah, i'm withdrawing my support for bernie sanders at this point.

he may claim that he needs to build a multiracial movement to win, but if doing that means morphing into the same neo-liberal candidate that he was presented as an antidote to, then there's not a lot of point in him winning.

i'm concerned about how his views on a number of social positions appear to be "evolving", and it's not for the better. i suspect he's converted to islam and hasn't told anybody; he's a stupid old man.

i'm not endorsing anybody else. and, flatly i'm not likely to even pay much attention.

he needed to attract voters like me in order to win. by doing almost the exact opposite of what he needed to do more or less across the board, he's failed to do so, and he will be lucky to finish third when it's over with.

we're all better off looking for a third party with a good health care policy. that is probably the greens, and it's better to get started now than to keep wasting time on bernie.

i repeat: i'm not spending $50/month on electricity to run a dehumidifier to reverse the damage being caused by his a/c, and dry out all the p-traps at the same time, while making myself miserable.

it's his a/c, it's his foundation and it's ultimately his problem if his a/c ruins his foundation. i just want the smell dealt with.

all he has to do is turn the a/c off. really. it's that simple.

yeah, so, if the issue with the fan is hair in the motor - the only thing that makes sense, without concluding it was vandalized - then i'm not getting it out with scissors or tweezers or anything else. in order to disassemble these fans, you need an obscure kind of screwdriver that i don't have.

the only way i'm going to fix this is to try and spin it out, which means i'll need to run it in the bathtub repeatedly to try and pass it through. the hope is that if i spin the blades strenuously enough then whatever is overpowering the motor will reverse.

in the mean time, it is absolutely gross in here, but it's also too cold to open the window, so i'm just running the hot water all day instead and hoping it clears the shit out from the pipes. so, i guess we'll have to run the hot water non-stop for the next week. i can get the laundry going overnight, too, which should help.

hey, if he wants to be an asshole and break my $20 fan, we can give him a $300 water bill in retaliation. the guy's a complete waste of oxygen. i hope it forces him to sell his car.

and, i had made a lot of progress in cleaning this place up a bit, but i guess we'll have to wait until the end of the week and start again.

and, there is no possibility at all, whatsoever, that i'm going to turn the dehumidifier on. the problem down here is that it's too dry, not that it's too damp. and, if he'd just turn off the air conditioner, there wouldn't be a problem with condensation under the floor at all.

i've been pointing out for years that the liberal party is deeply american-centric, and they're going to run themselves into irrelevance if they don't fix it.

if this doesn't wake them up to that point, nothing will.

so, is he going to get away with this?

the most truthful response is that he wasn't doing that well in the first place, and if it only costs him 2%, that 2% could be his majority. so, don't be glib on the numbers - it seems to only be affecting a small number of people, but if they vote (or don't vote), it could still hurt him.

are canadians racist, then? do we need to look in the mirror.

no.

listen, i think that everybody needs to stop interpreting canada through an american filter, and that's the real takeaway from this. i posted my logic: the make-up itself isn't racist, it's only racist if accompanied by the stereotypes, the brutal performance. and, the video might have been what i'm describing, but it's not clear  and nobody seems to want to imagine it that way. that's more or less what people are saying: it's not racist. why do you think it's racist, it's just make-up. are you racist?

and the answer is supposed to be, "but, it's the history."

to which the canadian would say "in america? i'm not a fucking yankee, that means nothing to me. that's not my history. so, stop americanizing everything and put the thing in a canadian context, in the context of canadian history. that's what they teach us to do in school, right? did we have that here? so, i don't know what you're talking about."

the canadian is not done yet, she just paused. she continues..

"so, maybe if we were in the united states it might be racist, but we're not. so, i guess i don't get it, sort of; i'm not american, so it doesn't bug me. maybe if i was american...but i'm not..."

you might argue we're ignorant of history, but my imaginary canadian is actually right: whose history? it's not ours...that's not our context.

so, you could argue that we don't care, and be right.

but, maybe we're actually on to something, up here, about what we should and shouldn't care about?

trudeau's embrace of democratic-party style political correctness and identity politics might come naturally to him, because he's a member of the upper class elite. but, he's an alien in this country - impossible for the average canadian to relate to on the most basic level, and entirely irreflective of the average voter. the hypocrisy that is striking so many people as so profound is being misinterpreted because there was a general misunderstanding that we mostly agreed with him about all of these things in the first place. as a result, the number of people that are surprised by this seems to be quite small - the majority of canadians either already hated him for the hyper-pc everything, or they could already see through the hypocrisy of it, and didn't care.

again: don't think it won't cost him. it might, where it matters, still.

but, don't expect a mass movement to erupt based on a mis-step in the context of american history. most canadians don't see us in that way, and that should be the real takeaway: we're a foreign country, with a parallel history, and we will interpret things in the context of our own history, thank you.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/how-did-canadians-react-to-trudeaus-blackface-images-with-a-big-meh-polls-suggest

how was the weekend?

i'll write a review, maybe, some other day. tunic were nice and loud, which is what i wanted. i stopped at the trumbullplex for an hour or two and commandeered somebody's bottle of wine (i asked politely, actually), before ending up at the park for a bit, where i ended up with somebody's unwanted remnant 12 of beer, which was two cans. so, it was that kind of night. then, i left the park as it cleared, and went to marble for a bit, and then went back to the park with some of the post-marble crowd.

i hope the windsorite that i met on the way in and caught back up with at marble made it back to canada safely. i did suggest the park, but she wanted to go home.

i never do balloons, but somebody handed me one and i knew i was out for the night, regardless. result: i couldn't walk for like two hours, which meant i got to enjoy the fire fizzling out. by myself. this park is a swell spot and stuff, but i've been uneasy about the way people leave fires going there on more than one occasion; on this night, it worked out relatively well.

so, i didn't get to the diner until 9:00, which meant i didn't have any time to blow in the late morning.

i ended up at a house party, next. i was initially intending to finish my coffee there and get some drinks in the afternoon, but, as it happened to be, a local brewery dropped off 250 free tall cans of beers. well, hey. right place, right time. i think i had five (it may have been six) before i left to go back to marble. i also found some marijuana edibles at some point that afternoon, and it started to hit me a little bit by the end of the night.

this house party had a lot of local djs at it, in a sense it was a who's who of underground detroit djs, and people were pretty much just hanging out and eating and stuff. i don't think i got a chance to thank anybody before i left...

i don't want to say i was messy at marble, because that's the wrong idea. closer to the truth is that i just kept nodding off and coming back; less messy, and more useless. i remember it; i wasn't blacked out or drunk, if anything was hitting me it was the edibles, but i was exceedingly tired and seeking a third wind that never really came.

so, i got a lot of people asking me if i was ok, and i may have gotten a little bit grumpy after the seventeenth time. i think i was well behaved, but i apologize if i was brusque with anybody. it just got a little annoying. there are exceptions to every rule but, generally, when somebody is sitting it out at a club, you shouldn't keep bothering them by asking them if they're ok, you should just leave them alone and let them figure it out. unless they're overdosing on something, which should be obvious when it's happening, whatever they're processing will pass, and there isn't ever going to be much that your glass of water can really actually do.

i can't blame the edibles with 100% certainty, but what i experienced is roughly consistent with other edibles experiences that i've had and i'm willing to suggest that they were probably the dominant factor, overall. they tend to make me extremely tired, or even knock me right out, but it's different than an alcohol black out because you mostly remember it..

so, i was tired, but the night isn't blurry. i remember it quite clearly, actually,

i was predominantly there to see vibert, and mostly just curious about the other sets. i really felt like being outside on this night, as well. i caught a part of his set and remembered thinking he sounded like everybody else, so i went for a smoke, and then he was doing some more warp-y kinds of stuff when i got back. but, then i started nodding and i had to sit down for a bit. so, i didn't get as much out of the set as i hoped for.

however, there was an ambient set outside by dave shettler right about then, which was actually more of what i needed at the time and something i greatly enjoyed. a lot of what he played was actually sort of similar to the experimental side of the stuff that i recently published, the cycles per second and the trivial group stuff. i can't tell you what drug was dominant, right then - the large amounts of alcohol i'd had over the last 33-35 hours, the smoked marijuana, the eaten marijuana - but it was a good combination, and the highlight of the weekend.

i was able to recover after 7:00 for two more beers and a bit more dancing, before finally getting out of there close to 10:00.

so, were the edibles a bad idea? i'm not reacting well to them, but i have no dosage guidelines, i'm not creating controls and my experiments have consequently been a little unfocused. so, i dunno. it seemed to be a little strong on this night...

the best way to ensure that the liberals hold to their promise on the medicare file is to give the greens the balance of power to pull the plug if they don't.

there's no obvious cause, and i have no interest at all in figuring it out.

it was sitting in one spot for a long period, so the cord is not likely to be damaged. and, there's no logic in thinking something exploded.

there was a lot of hair in it, and i've got most of it out as best as i can. but, it doesn't seem like that's the right answer.

there's other signs of somebody being in here, though.

i don't know....i know that i can't deal with the dry air all week.

i'm going to give the fan a chance to completely dry out and try again this afternoon.

i neither have the know-how, nor the tools, nor the interest to actually fix the device. i'll just buy a new one.

but, i can't handle living in the a/c all week. i'll need to open one of the windows, somehow, to undo the a/c.

i can spin the fan with water.

it's not seized...

there's no visible stress point on the fan, no signs that anybody tried to dismantle it, no signs of a cut wire, etc.

it seems like there's no power. it's on the same surge protector as my laptop, and that's fine.

i keep thinking that it must be the hair that's stuck around the spindle, which is proving difficult to get off. but, as the weight in hair and dirt and dust that is slowing down the vibration is slowly done away with, i'm not getting any more evidence that i'm on the right track.

but, how do you break a fan in a way that's not obvious?

a magnet?

the fan refuses to turn back on...

should i be able to hear it trying? i can hear it when it's on, but i think it's mostly the blaades.

and, it's getting cold in here from the air, now, too (.

if i can't get the fan to work this week, i may have to open one of the windows, and improvise some kind of a screen for it.

it is way too early to write sanders off.

but, he's doing everything wrong.

and, it's just getting worse...

...and a social conservative, too.

obama was also a far-right market fundamentalist, after all.

i still don't see where she can win. this is a projection; the numbers aren't there.

but, if the media somehow gets it's way and anoints warren, and the country lets them do it, you're all going to find yourselves incredibly disappointed by what she actually does, which is unlikely to be substantively different from the obama administration.

so, he hires a guy named 'faiz shakir' to be the face of his campaign, turns into a msm talking head (while they beat him up on air over and over), refuses to show up to any kind of queer event and then wonders why he can't get half the country to give him the time of day any more.

bernie does appear to have changed.

i hope he plans on running for re-election in georgia or something, because his days are numbered in vermont. and, that's the saddest part about this - they won't care when he's gone. no memorial. no plaque. no watch. he'll be pushed out without a second thought....

it's either the worst run campaign in primary history, an example of absolutely startling ineptitude, or it's planted with ops, and designed to fail.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bernie-sanders-has-a-problem-her-name-is-elizabeth-warren/2019/09/22/1223d6a6-dd57-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html

so, when you see warren out there acting like she's at a pep rally (brought to you be adderall.), there's actually some reason to look into that a little deeper.

in a real sense, warren would be the cheerleader-in-chief.

the reality that actually existing capitalism has come face-to-face with, and that to an extent is neoliberalism, is one where it's come to terms with a basic, fundamental flaw in the very fabric of it's own existence: competition is unnatural.

you have to teach kids to be competitive, they don't do it on their own. you have to create regulatory bodies to try to force firms into competing, because they won't do it on their own (at best, they might try to undercut to gain market share, but then they're in the cartel in no time. a stable market should have tiers, anyways, so that's usually harder than the simple math in the textbooks allows for.). it turns out that you need so much government to make a free market work, that you'd might as well just redistribute everything, anyways - and that the best approximation to a free market has to be almost the total opposite of the initial abstraction.

so, you don't really have this debate between governments and markets, because markets are just statist constructions that essentially give you back what you gave them (if you're lucky...). what you should have is merely an understanding of the importance of government.

and, a little wisdom should tell you that all of this energy that is created and spent on designing and enforcing markets could be better utilized elsewhere.

so, what happens when you introduce a new competitor into a market, then? do they bring the prices down through competition?

hardly.

they just join the cartel...

maybe we should have a little talk about the historical arguments that classical economics used to advance, why they're wrong and how modern economics corrects for those mistakes. i have a feeling that this is what this cycle is going to be about for me - that i'm going to end up in a lot of arguments with democrats and liberals about market theory.

you may have been told that competition reduces prices because each of the competitors wants to find ways to get the business of the consumer. when this happens, firm a and firm b get into a bidding war (essentially, a race to the bottom.) in order to save the sale. as a demanding and self-interest driven consumer, i bet that sounds like the best idea for you, because everybody wins, right? well, so long as by "everybody" you mean me, then everybody wins, and everybody...else...loses. what i'm trying to get across is that the premise is absurd on it's face: we don't live in an economic reality where the rules ensure that the consumer wins and everybody else loses.

let's have a little common sense here in understanding what actually happens. the firms don't say "competition is bad for us and good for consumers, so let's do lots of it! fuck our shareholders!". rather, what the firms say is "wait a second, you want us to compete? for you? yeah. right. we've got out our own self-interests here, and it's not you, consumer. sorry. rather, us firms are going to get together and set the prices at whatever we want it set at, and fuck you for complaining about it. and, so long as we stand together, what are you going to do, consumer? huh?"

and, i'll tell you what the consumers need to actually do, which is take control of the firm, but consumers lack revolutionary potential, so they never actually say that. rather, what they do is go crying to the government...

"reeeeegulaaaaaaaatoooooooors. these firms won't compete! it's not fair! make them compete. it's good for consumers, like me.". unfortunately, the regulators work for the firms, and they're actually there to prevent the government from forcing them to.

and, that's where we're at - this silly game where the government tries to pretend it can "spur innovation" and "incentivize competition". but, the firms don't want to compete, and the government can't actually make them. what the firms want to do is collude.

meanwhile, prices come up and down based on all other kinds of things, including the costs of mass production. socializing production is efficient. that's why firms socialize as much as they can, internally.

i don't see any snips or anything.

i'm probably being paranoid. but the dry air in here right now is awful :(. it feels like i'm in a bar, with all of the fog. it hurts to breathe....

so, i came home this morning and noticed my fan was no longer running.

it's odd, to say the least. it's not a powerful motor, so i guess there's some chance that some hair is stopping it from spinning, so i'm trying to clean it, but it's not currently helping.

i couldn't imagine that the motor blew. they're designed to be on all of the time.

so, is there some chance that somebody from upstairs came down and ruined my fan? well, if he doesn't want to listen to the fan, he can listen to me cough instead - and he's going to get a lot of it, because the difference with it off is dramatic.

and, it's ultimately pointless, because i'm going to buy another one at the first opportunity, which would be friday.

entering a tenant's apartment is considered an indictable offense in canda. it's trespassing, harassment and vandalism. there's no context where it's permissible.

we'll see if we can get the hair out of there or not. if i can't, it's going to be a long and frustrating week for everybody, as i struggle to fight against the dehumidifier and the smoke.

you might be expecting a discussion about internet costs in canada to be another opportunity for me to completely debunk market theory, but it's more complex than that.

first, anybody arguing that increasing competition will decrease prices should be laughed out of the room. that's not a serious economic position, and nobody arguing as much should be taken seriously. politicians that say things like this need to stop insulting everybody's intelligence and stop wasting everybody's time and go back to school and learn about actual economics, not a long debunked mathematical model from hundreds of years ago. but, it's not as easy as arguing that you need to get the profit motive out of it - although that's at the root of the problem and what needs to be addressed eventually.

i think you should look at data transmission lines the same way you look at roads and waterways, and that the absolute beginning point of any price reduction strategy needs to be in nationalizing the lines. if you let these private companies continue to build their own networks, and you continue to allow them to profit from transmitting data (which is rentier capitalism at it's worst), you'll never solve the basic structural root of the problem here, which is that the private companies have too much power to set the rates.

but, the real reason that the prices are so high is simply that the executives that work in these companies are greedy. they've essentially grabbed you by the pussy and said "pay up, bitch". there's not some nice little tweak that we can find to fix that at the back of the textbook, and it's not drawn out by any kind of scarcity model, you just have to smash their property rights up and put the ownership in the hands of the people.

so, that ought to be the central plank of any serious left-of-centre party in terms of what to do to get costs down. which parties realize this?

*crickets*

so, i mean, i want to come out swinging against the liberal proposal. remember when they told you that privatizing electricity would reduce costs? markets just make things more expensive...

but the other parties suck, too. and, this is a good example of the dead-end we've come to in terns of the policy desert we exist in: this is obviously a situation where we need more government to reign in the greed that markets incentivize, but all we've got across the board is a bunch of debunked neo-liberal nonsense that the smart people know doesn't work. and i want my old, more intelligent liberal party back.

i said it wasn't that simple....

canada is a very big, sparsely populated country, which means that it's going to be expensive to do things like string along transmission lines (or set up cell towers). while the primary reason for high costs might be greed, the costs to maintain the network are at least a good excuse to keep prices artificially high, and this is going to be more of a reality here than in smaller, less geographically diverse areas. that's one of the reasons that nationalizing the lines is a good idea - it'll allow for a socialization of infrastructure costs. we don't normally let private businesses build infrastructure like this, and we need to start understanding what happened as a failed experiment. but, in the mean-time, if you're insisting on a market system, and you want to take costs down, you're going to have to introduce a subsidy. prices may be high across the board due to greed, but they're especially high in hard to get places because the infrastructure is so challenging. the only way to completely undo this is to socialize it...

...but marx himself would have said that you ought to let the capitalists build the lines, and then appropriate them. so, the real question is whether they've build enough infrastructure to nationalize, yet - or if it's best to keep waiting it out.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5908780/canada-election-cellphone-internet-prices/

Police have said the handgun used in the Danforth shooting was stolen from a gun shop in Saskatchewan years ago.

the data analysis is that most of them come up through the border.

i just wish there was a star trek episode where they found a roman colony, and they stumbled upon a crucified jesus, lung protruding from his dangling, lifeless body.

he would require a stethoscope to be sure, of course. but....

"he's dead, jim."

well, i don't think she's going to save the world.

but, i'm not holding my breath on a zombie jesus, either.

he's dead. deal with it.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/raymond-de-souza-elizabeth-may-and-the-rise-of-messianic-politics

but, i want to talk about issues this election, not moderate a schoolyard altercation.

but, yes, he should accept the apology, for what it's worth, over what it is.

- trudeau's cynical ploy should be called out for what it is.

- singh's over-reaction should, as well.

so, trudeau wants to meet singh to apologize.

if he accepts the apology, he broadcasts a willingness to move past it, and needs to shut up. if he refuses it, he can keep nailing him on it, but he looks bitter and small-minded while doing it.

a master tactical decision by trudeau? hardly - it's a cynical ploy that singh was dumb enough to walk into by overblowing the thing in the first place.

what we have here is dumb and dumber; don't let dumber make dumb look smart..

the area was a melting pot, even at the dawn of history.

to an extent, it's an undefined question.

and, just, if you're curious....what is my take on these black history types that think everybody was black?

they're half right.

the initial egyptians were black, but the racial mixing started happening deep into pre-history, and by the time the historical records appear they were pretty mixed.

the sumerians, it is clear, were white. and, they weren't semites, either - they were probably more like modern day georgians or armenians.

the elamites probably looked like dark-skinned indians, and probably migrated into the middle east rather than out of it. the movement of trade seems to be in that direction, and they seem to have been seen by the broader mesopotamians as outsiders. so, they were probably dark-skinned, but not exactly african.

the various semitic language group seems to have had black origins, but most of the assyrians and babylonians and jews were probably white.

the persians and historical indians were white.

the "old europeans" of gimbutas, the danube civilizations, were probably mixed, and may have been initially black, like the egyptians.

again: i have no opinion on banning guns.

i don't like guns. i don't oppose it.

but, i wouldn't expect it to reduce gun violence, and would rather see the government focus on policies that are likely to actually work.

so, i had to force myself to sleep this morning in order to do this weekend. eveyrthing's set.

i made some calls, at least, and have everything in order to get to the next stage. early next week...

there's no deadline, and, considering that i'm going to have to actually go to toronto, i'm looking at probably november at the earliest, anyways. i don't want to miss shows over this...

i need to eat and get ready to go.

no, really.

i know it's nice out, or at least it is, here.

but, it's a better idea to have some kind of a teach-in.

you kids go back to school, dammit.

if there was a measurable migration in this period, it would have been greeks and persians moving into the peninsula, not the other way around.

actually, it's a valid question - was aladdin even black? i saw the disney film when i was a kid, but i wouldn't look to disney to get this right. wiki suggests that...

Aladdin is an impoverished young ne'er-do-well, dwelling in "one of the cities of China".

that might suggest that aladdin would have been some mix of iranic and turkic, similar to a contemporary uighur around the xinjiang area, and consequently probably actually pretty white. i guess disney got it right after all.

the arabs proper appear to have migrated originally from ethiopia, so the initial muslim invasions in the 7th century (and they weren't migrations. they were invasions.) would have been directed by pretty dark skinned people, and that is upheld via both pictorial and descriptive historical data. i'm not going to find an exact quote, but it's well understood by the historians of the time that the arabs were very, very dark-skinned, if not flat out african. but, contrary to the popular palestinian origins myth, the middle east at the time was overwhelmingly white, after years of inflows from persians, greeks and romans. there would have been very little migration from what was then the roman and persian empires into the arabian peninsula, although this increased dramatically after the muslim conquests, which is why you see so many white arabs nowadays, and particularly so many upper class white arabs - they're really mostly persian, genetically. you only really see black arabs in the southernmost parts of the peninsula, and on the far western coast of africa (for different reasons). the arabs proper were a very small group, so the migrations that revisionists want to talk about largely didn't even happen at all - it was more of a process of mass conversion.

i guess it's not surprising that trudeau would get something like that completely wrong, but i don't think it really changes the situation, much.

yeah, this is uncharacteristic of sanders, and consistent with the continuing concern that his campaign is being directed by religionists, particularly muslims. it's this strange string of occurrences that make you wonder who's making decisions behind the scenes, and something that i think is at the ultimate root cause of his inability to gain traction this cycle.

was bernie asked about this?

'cause, it's a pretty egregious tactical error.

and, i'm curious to hear what he has to say about it, when confronted directly - and somebody should do that.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/09/bernie-sanders-democratic-frontrunner-will-skip-lgbtq-debates/

so, i'm in a tough spot, because both of the pseudo-left parties are in a religious orientation, at the moment. i want climate to be at the centre of my voting choice, but i don't want to vote for either of them.

i think singh is done, regardless.

but, is it going to be easier to push may out if the party elects a few more mps?

also, brian masse is a giant douche bag. i'll have to see if i like the local green better or not...

if you want the growing atheist majority to vote for you, or your party, or your movement, you need to ensure that you're not putting religion at the front of it - that you're maintaining a proper separation wall.

and, there will be little debate on this, because it's not really up for discussion.

a rights based society is something we can tweak because rights are human creations, and there's no such thing as god. so, i'll argue for more rights to fresh air and clean water, and less rights to religious beliefs or property. this is ultimately all arbitrary, and subject merely to the shifting popular consensus, and who can get an idea legislated or not; natural rights theory is complete bullshit.

but, one of the very few rights that everybody agrees with is voting rights, which are also a conscience right. what that means is that we all have the right to vote for whatever and whoever we want for whatever reasons we want, and it's not up to anybody at all to second guess that - that is a conscience right, and it's absolute.

now, you can tell me my support for environmental rights is in conflict with your support for property rights, and we can fight over that - it's a legitimate conflict of rights. i think sustainability is more important than property. you can be wrong and disagree, if you want. let's fight. that's politics.

but, voting rights vs religious rights is not an actual rights conflict in the same way, or really at all, because your so-called religious rights are designed with the purpose of infringing on the rights of others.

i'm an atheist, and i don't want to vote for a religious person, and i'm not going to, and that's a rights issue because it's an issue of conscience. the opposite argument - that not voting for somebody because they're religious is some kind of rights violation - would be to erect the right to be voted for, which is ridiculous. that's not a right, that's an entitlement, and one that can only be entertained in a society where the balance towards religious rights is too great, and needs to be pulled back on. i mean, the premise that this is even an issue that is up for debate is preposterous.

so, i'm not going to be brow beaten on this.

i don't believe in god, and i don't want to vote for people that do, and you have no say in the matter - that is an issue of conscience, and an absolute right on my behalf.

so, what am i doing this weekend?

21:00-1:00 - tunic/reverend/teener @ pj's

(note that there is a severed heads show at city club, but...i always found ellard's work to be kind of dull.
it might not be very fun. and, i want to be outside on the last weekend of the summer!)

01:30-8:00 - ???. i don't want to go to marble on friday, it's a false solution for too many reasons. i mean, i wouldn't get there until 2:00, and the show's done at 4:00. i'd rather find an underground show that goes until 7:00 or 8:00, but right now i can't. so, i'm going to be seeking out some known outside spots looking for an outside party.

08:00-10:00 - eat.
11:00-19:00 - house/yard party. local djs.
20:00-21:00 - grlwood (magic stick) <-----maybe. or stay at house party.
21:00-22:30 - man man (magic stick)<------maybe. or stay at house party. it's $20...
23:00-00:00 - terrence dixon (marble)
00:00-02:00 - prefuse 73 (marble)
02:00-04:00 - luke vibert (marble)
04:00-06:00 - dave shettler (marble)
06:00-07:00 - soundmurderer (marble)
07:00-09:00 - local djs (marble)

we're probably not going to get along this cycle.

well.

calling somebody a slave for upholding capitalism from the bottom is called having an analysis. it's not racist, unless you have no historical understanding of slavery.

i mean, it's right out of marx. it's just standard leftist agitation.

and, i'd spin it around - establishment attempts to attack valid class analyses as "racist" are just status quo propaganda.

i don't know any of the names in the list, but i don't have to think hard to figure it out.

the new leadership at wfp are former clinton supporters or employees.

and, that list of people is a bunch of clinton zombies, left over from 2016, out to finish the job.

do the research. prove me right...

listen, i supported kathleen wynne in ontario (for a while), and i might support elizabeth may federally, this time around. i've voted for female mps when they're aligned with the parties in front of me, which hasn't always been the case. that's what i've had in front of me.

i supported hillary clinton over barack obama, but pulled support largely after i saw what she did as secretary of state, which was horrific.

and, i'll remind you that i identify as female.

but, warren is a bad candidate, if you're an ideological leftist.

i actually think i've kept my criticisms pretty grounded and policy oriented, i certainly haven't called anybody any names besides maybe 'neo-liberal', and if anybody's being emotional and absurd, it's you, not me.

but, i ultimately don't care what you think. and, i will continue to rip apart her policies as i come across them, as i feel is reasonable, so long as i don't get bored and tune out.

...but, it won't help her win.

competition is harmful to everybody. that's why firms avoid it - it's why you need a state to enforce competitive markets.

warren is clinton 2.0 - which means she's meaner, more aggressive and has a stronger kill instinct.

and, she does not care about bernie.

at all.

this is how somebody that's a capitalist to their bones acts. get ready for it - it's going to be ugly.

the letter's a shot from the bow, and bernie's campaign needs to realize what's coming next - an organized smear campaign right out of the clinton playbook.

they caught him off guard, clearly - he wasn't expecting this. but, he has to adjust. fast. or get out, and let his movement go to a third party to take her on.

are they willing to publish any specific examples?

it's kind of hard to take seriously, and strikes me more as a bullshit smear against the sanders campaign.

https://splinternews.com/black-leaders-condemn-attacks-by-sanders-supporters-ami-1838259737

what a horrible ruling.

i hope the crown appeals and holds these idiots accountable for what they did to their child.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/david-collet-stephan-ezekiel-trial-decision-1.5288343

i know that there's this dominant christian perspective in the united states that life is "sacred" or something.

and, we're struggling to get past that here, too.

but, this is a taste of how the rest of the world sees the issue:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/eastern-townships-assisted-dying-1.4822787

the best way to understand the language in the ruling, and why the philpot-jwr legislation was so inhumane and flat out terrible, is to ask yourself the following question:

if you suffer from a "grievous and irremediable medical condition", is your suffering likely to be greater or lesser if you can't demonstrate that your death is reasonably foreseeable?

it is the people that can't demonstrate the imminence of their death that are precisely those that need assisted suicide the most!

if you reduce the legislation to saving a few bucks in avoiding keeping people alive longer than necessary, which is essentially what they did, you're essentially putting aside the ruling; you're missing the point.

i may not have explained this entirely.

https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/september-2019/parliament-should-not-wait-to-act-on-assisted-dying-ruling/

this is such a complicated mess, and it's particularly weird due to the fact that the greens apparently rejected them.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/jody-wilson-raybould-elizabeth-may-jane-philpott_ca_5d832ca8e4b0957256b15a5e

the reality is that she was an awful ag, and there's not one but several of her laws that are in the process of being struck down, right now. it was these two clowns that were primarily responsible for writing the botched assisted suicide legislation that got struck down last week, for example.

what is elizabeth may's position on assisted suicide? a strange one for an ordained minister, actually:

https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/dwdcanada/pages/142/attachments/original/1444845232/DyingWithDignityCanada_-_September_20th.pdf?1444845232

that is the correct position, fwiw. i don't think that either of the independent members truly agree, though.

so, if this endorsement isn't about the quality of her legislation, what's it about?

rightly or wrongly, and i would say wrongly, she's seen as a leader in the indigenous community. and, this outreach is crucial to the future of environmental politics in this country.

let's just hope that the greens can co-opt jwr before jwr co-opts them.

so, now that bernie has a million donors, is it time to send them each a dollar?

i kid.

and, hey, you know that warren has even more money, right?

would a young stallone doing a kickass muhammad ali be racist?

i'm not defending trudeau, exactly. i don't want to give him another false majority. and, i understand that this is how a logician thinks, and it's not how most people think. they've done studies that demonstrate that homo economicus is essentially only applicable to economics students; maybe there's a similar idea for homo mathematicus that only applies to logicians.

but, careful thinking is important, too.

the aladdin thing doesn't bother me at all - it was over the top, but you need to ask the woman in the photo. maybe she even thought it was hot. i dunno.

the dancing thing is more questionable, but i'd have to see it to know if it was racist. it's an open question. i'm leaning towards it probably not being so good.

but, that just demonstrates the point - it's about the context of the situation, not the action itself. again, maybe i'm just being eurocentric in insisting on mens rea, but i'm not going to change, and i don't want to.

so, if we have a situation where it's harmless and a situation where it's hurtful, let's take this to it's logical conclusion and try a thought experiment. imagine this...

suppose that we have a film where a white actor portrays martin luther king, and that actor does a phenomenal, over the top job. in fact, let's even say it's the best character actor of our time - let's say it's jim carrey. in order to do the job, he would have to wear blackface, right? let's ignore questions about affirmative action here, for brevity. now, if the portrayal is heart-wrenching and brilliant and absolutely respectful, is that racist? or is it just good acting?

i'm just throwing it out there.

again - i suspect the dancing video was probably pretty crude. but, can we all be subtle thinkers, here, and recognize that the racism isn't in the wardrobe, exactly?

but, do i think he should resign, anyways?

this is where the fact that canada has very different demographics fits in. if a governor in a southern state like georgia or, was it virginia?, did that then he'd be pissing off a substantive minority of the population. it's like 30-40% in some places, right?

downtown detroit is about 80% black. you wouldn't want to do something like that there...

but, canada, overall is less than 5% black - i often say 2%, but i think that's an old number. nowadays, it's more like 3-4%. there are some areas, like toronto and montreal, where the numbers are bigger, and something like this may be a bigger issue. but, the actual reality is that there just aren't enough black people in canada for it to really matter.

what about white voters? there may be a general dislike of it in certain circles, but i expect the general reaction to be a shrug.

the usual suspects on twitter, etc will no doubt be in fits, but if this moves the election, you should only expect it to be in the margins, and it might just end up splitting the vote in a handful of key ridings in the 416.

if one of the parties can really take control of the issue, that might change. but, i wouldn't expect this to be the kind of issue in canada that it would be in the united states, because the demographics to make it one just don't exist.

what about polling?

here's the actual most recent nanos data:

as per usual, the media ignores the undecideds, which is wrong in canada.

once you bring the undecideds back in, it's easy to see that the movement over the last few days is well within the margin of error. while the undecideds have not increased (an immediate assumption when conservative numbers go up), the conservative numbers have actually barely moved, relatively to the margin - the distortion comes in the exaggerated swing by removing that ~15% undecided. so, a 2 point swing, which is in the margin, gets inflated to a 6 point one, which looks like real movement, when it actually isn't.

rather, i might suggest that nanos has been overshooting ndp numbers - he has had them higher than anybody else - and that the real movement in his numbers is a correction of something he was overshooting. it's only a few points, but he was an outlier on that. he was also maybe lowballing the conservatives, by putting them in the high 20s. so, i think this is a polling correction rather than any actual movement.

but, you know how the tory media works with this stuff - it's conditioning, it's not reporting.

if turnout is low, expect the conservatives to benefit from it. that's how they win. but, you're otherwise looking at the same basic reality we've had for a long time, which is that the liberals are mostly in a fight against voter apathy, which means they're largely running against their own record.

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

the way that trudeau uses the term "diversity" is actually quite similar to the way that upper-class, white southerners, usually democrats, always racist, would use the term "colour" before the 1960s.

at 18:30

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

i'm going to line up on the side of people arguing that trudeau walking around in indian robes (do indians even dress like this any more?) is akin to some kind of black face.

as is the case with so much of what trudeau does, this isn't just ham-fisted. it's blatantly racist.

at 19:19

and, i should point out the following as well....

the vast majority of black canadians - i mean like 99% - would actually reject the idea that they have any cultural connection to american history, and thereby reject black history month along with it. that is actually kind of a big deal in canada, rather than black history month, itself. because, the best way to piss off a black canadian is to suggest their ancestors were slaves.

because it's usually not true. and, they want you to know it's not true, so you don't think it is. it's not just an ego thing; black canadians overwhelming expect that you won't treat them as the descendant of slaves. because they aren't. and they'll put you in your place if you suggest that they are.

it follows that trudeau is diving head first into instant death if he thinks that pushing black history month is a way to win votes from black voters. not only is the african american narrative not something that black canadians identify with, it's something that they vehemently reject. it's an insult to them.

trudeau is going to get his teflon suit full of eggs if he thinks he's going to talk about this kind of thing with black canadians and get anything more than a guffaw.

"excuse me. sir, are you implying that my ancestors, and the ancestors of the other people in this room, were slaves? because, if you are, i'm appalled."

and, see, a canadian pr team would know that, too. but, when you go and hire all these american strategists (that may have been born in canada, but are culturally american), they miss things like this.

and, that's the irony, right?

"african-americans, black canadians....they're all the same, right?"

no.

one group descends from chattel slavery and has roots in the united states since the fifteenth century. the other is highly educated, mostly middle-classed and has arrived in canada almost entirely since 1970, either from the caribbean or directly from africa, and largely via scholarship grants.

and, the implication that there is any commonality at all is, in fact, brutally racist, which is what trudeau will be told, when it comes to it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

at 04:13

and, just to be clear: justin trudeau and jason kenney are both racists, but justin trudeau is way more racist than jason kenney is.

jason kenney is actually the architect of the immigration policies that trudeau likes to take credit for. so, if they want to make the election about "diversity", which is such a ridiculously clinical and racist way to take about immigration from the start, it's the language you hear in a $500/plate fundraiser with a bunch of upper-class old money white people that are trying very hard to hide their racism, i'm going to go out of my way to throw that in their faces.

immigration levels are historically higher under conservative governments, who have been using the process as a way to shift the population to the right and solidify their own voting base, and recent immigrants to canada should support kenney over trudeau - they agree with him more on core governing issues, and kenney likes them better than trudeau does, too.

at 16:46

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

kenney has problems with the gays, but his racism is actually quite subtle, as he fully realizes that the kind of socially conservative immigrant that he wants comes from the religious societies in asia and africa, and not the liberal countries of europe or south america. he may be unlikely to accept a coalition with non-white leadership, but he's more open to the ideas that immigrants bring in with them, because they're not very different from his own ideas. so, kenney sees the immigrant as an ally in his quest for a more conservative world, even if he wishes to retain power for himself and his own kind - it's racism lite, a subtler way to be white.

trudeau's racism is more visceral, which is ever the more obvious given that he fucks up every once and again with outbursts of disdain and superiority. there's a list of pretty brutal comments, at this point. the jig is up, really. so, he hides his hate in these choreographed displays of "diversity", using clinical language out of a marketing class. his white supremacy is more absolute, in that he's happy to parade as many different-looking people around him as he can find, but he doesn't have the slightest interest in listening to a word that they actually say, or offering up any kind of position of real authority. how about the bizarre reaction to the raybould resignation/firing, which really had nothing to do with race: diversity only works when it is rooted in trust. what the actual fuck does that even mean? it may appear as incomprehensible word salad on first glance, but it really reveals a fundamentally racist world view: she really was just a token indian in cabinet. so, trudeau sees the immigrant as a voter to control at a distance within a class hierarchy with a white, liberal elite at the top. it's racism with a smile, and you just don't talk about it, because it's not polite.

while the reality is that trudeau is probably defaulting to this because he wants to create a wedge issue with minority voters and can't figure anything else out, that by vilifying kenney as a racist he's essentially acknowledging that he can't compete with him on ideas with immigrant voters and is stuck trying to scare people instead, what you're going to get out of trudeau on this is a lot of projection. most of what trudeau is going to throw out there about his opponents is going to be more true of himself than of them, and it's exactly the reason he's going to throw it out there.

and, a part of the reason that the tories tend to win the immigrant vote in canada is because immigrants can see through this clearly enough. the conservatives are actually willing to accept them for who they are and reflect their actual values; the liberals just pander to them for votes with fake appeals to togetherness, while then passing laws that they stringently oppose.

the liberals are at a dead-end with this. they've tried to build a party around cultural inclusion, only to find out that majorities in all of these different cultures would rather live in a christian society than a secular one, and that the path to multiculturalism is through the destruction of liberalism, rather than the elevation of it. in the mean time, they've alienated swaths of white voters, who are actually liberal and secular in their beliefs.

but, trudeau doesn't live in reality, he lives in a bubble that is curated by his advisors. and, he could very well spend the next six months tilting at these aforementioned windmills, slaying the monster that is the projection of his own inner, racist demons.

at 17:57

the dancing thing is potentially worse than the gala, but it's inconclusive, and, even if you conclude that his motives were nefarious, you have to realize he was a teenager, or maybe a very young adult. who let him go on stage and do that?

again: i'm not sure this is racist, but i'm keen on hoping that the fallout helps take them down to a minority. and, no, it's not a reason to vote for a guy that thinks he has a magic beard.

i am sure, however, that there are lots of far better reasons to call trudeau and his handlers racist, and if you sort through the last four years of this blog, i point out a fair number of them.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5922861/justin-trudeau-brownface-video/

bernie.

bernie.

listen.

call al franken - not to ask him to come back, and not to ask him for support in iowa, although it might help, but to ask him what it's like to get pushed out.

you're not a democrat, bernie. you know that. they know that. and, they dislike you so much that they'd rather pick a republican. ok?

bernie has to get the point and run for a third party before it's too late. fuck that pledge, they've been dishonest with him, and they'll screw him over at every chance.

and, if bernie can't face the facts here, his movement needs to get on with it and organize a third party movement without him.

he needed critical mass, and he's not getting it.

again: i don't care if this guy wants to be a 55 year old pothead. they're all 55, though, aren't they?

but i signed a non-smoking lease because i didn't want to live with a smelly, old pothead.

i have every right to expect him to uphold it.

there's a weak, background of pot tonight. the stench isn't as strong as it was last night, but i'm feeling oozy from it, and i avoided it last night. it's partly where it is; it was on the other side of the apartment last night.

i don't want to be stoned right now. at all. i'm at home. being stoned at home by yourself is boring as fuck.

i'm going to get something to eat and finally get started on what i should have been doing this week.

so, we're going to stop there at the end of period 3.

that is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, but it's a good teaser (and a good plan) for what i've got in front of me for period 3, which was about 08/2003-03/2007.

most of it is mostly done. there's really just the lost symphony, the throatmotor fragment, the crash and the matlab project....

inri11x

inri092?

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/percussive-works

inri11x

inri091?

most of my songs begin as conventional guitar songs before they get ripped apart and demented into various abstract concoctions. that means that a lot of my pieces have two different versions. i've always deferred the raw guitar versions to eventual live performances, but i'm at a space in life where i realize that these live performances are not likely to ever materialize. so, i'm going to compile the live/guitar versions of my larger pieces here.

it's unclear to me at this point where i will space this in my discography, but it will probably be around 2008.

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

inri101

inri090?

this is the introduction of a symphony i started at the end of 2006 and have since placed on indefinite hold.

this introduction is very noisy, and i'm somewhat impressed by myself listening to at the moment.

but, the second - incomplete and unreleased - section sounds like al di meola jamming with the aphex twin, and that's a better way to describe the overall intent.

this might end up as a tetris release and is probably the end of period 3.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-crash

inri093

inri088?

this is the upcoming ninth album. disc 1 is the first two tracks, disc two is the second two.

for now, just fast forward through the three minutes of silence. the lost symphony will be the fourth track; to an extent, xenophanes is just the introduction to it.

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

inri092

inri087?

this extended ep will be a comprehensive exploration of all of the versions of this recording. i've never been fully certain if this recording is done or not, but i'll have to decide sooner than later.

for now, here is the newest version that exists, which is instrumental (there are vocals.) and from early 2007.

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

inri097

inri086?

these are actually rock songs, albeit weird ones. i was shopping them around in the mid-00s, and nobody bit. we'll have a compilation demo up here as i found it, but i'm also going to need to actually finish them up.

i didn't want this to be a studio project, but what do you want me to tell you? i can't find anybody to jam with...and i've been looking for twenty years....

the cd-r from 2005 that i have consists of the first eight tracks, and i'm going to publish it that way, as is. i was considering adding a ninth track that i cut at some point, but decided against it - this will come up elsewhere. there is also a tenth demo in this collection that was dismantled into different tracks, and will eventually come up as a part of a similar collection dated to mid-2004.

there are two different types of tracks in this collection. some of these tracks will be worked into the trivial group or proverbs symphonies, whereas others will need to be completed as standalones in the 2004-2005 space, depending on where i think they best fit.

see, i'm tempted to label this proverbs, but don't actually want to. the tracks that weren't put aside for it don't have vocals. but, they weren't supposed to be trivial group, they were supposed to be a band project. i was using the pseudonym "whore to culture" for a little bit, but, in hindsight, i don't really like it - and i never finished anything under the label. i think that was mostly xenophanes, which is definitely trivial group, now.

on the other hand, were any of the trivial group tracks intended to be studio projects? no...they just all ended up that way...so that's less a difference and more a commonality...

and, are these tracks that different than trivial group? not in the form they're in. if i were to just play the trivial group tracks on guitar, they'd be sort of similar, wouldn't they?

in fact, i could conceivably expand this collection by isolating some of the other guitar tracks in the other trivial group stuff, but i don't want to do that, either. i mean, i could take the style way back - this isn't my first demonstration of impressionist jazz punk. i may consider creating a second companion disc that just has the guitar parts from all of the trivial group material, but i want to leave this specific disc exactly as it is, which is exactly as i found it.

these specific tracks were written at various points between 2003-2005 and performed via a line-in directly into my soundcard, with no effects, in my apartment on prince of wales in ottawa on august 21, 2005. a handful of cds were then burned, and left out randomly at various places around town where i hoped a drummer would find them. ripped back to digital on april 12, 2014. uploaded and published without further modification on sept 19, 2019. as always, please use headphones.

cover art by sarah. 

credits

released August 21, 2005

j - guitar 

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/impressionist-jazz-punk

inri096

is this inri085?

i don't know. i'll need to do something with this, but i may work it into one of the other pieces...

there's about another 15 minutes to this piece, btw.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/throatmotor-fragment

again: i'm pretty sure i'm right on this, but you can be mad if you want, i don't really care.

i'm more excited about the ability of taking advantage of some potential fallout.

racism is when you do things that are intended to harm, disparage or attack people of a specific race.

does wearing make-up do that? not necessarily.

stated tersely: i simply don't see the causal connection between wearing makeup and being racist.

now, if you could imagine somebody wearing blackface and portraying africans as particularly ignorant or backwards, more so than would be considered reasonable by a reasonable person, then, sure, that would be racist. but, it's not the make-up that's racist in this scenario, it's the behaviour. i think we can agree that the portrayal would still be racist if that theoretical person took the make-up off, right? so, why is it still racist if you leave the make-up on and stop the portrayal?

and, i mean, you can be offended if you insist, but it's not actually an argument, and it doesn't mean you're actually right.

i don't know the context of the picture, but it looks to me like he went on a date with an iranian woman and dressed up as aladdin, as a part of a gag. i guess you'd have to ask her how she felt about it. but, the premise of being on the date with the iranian suggests that there wasn't any particular level of dislike going on.

i'm just happy to see an opportunity here that the greens, specifically, can take advantage of.

i want a minority parliament. anything that takes trudeau down a few notches is a good idea, to me.

listen - i certainly don't remember donning black makeup as a joke, but it's because it's something i wouldn't do. and, if i did do it, i would probably defend it as harmless - and tell anybody offended by it to fuck off.

i have been accused of wearing cover-up that was slightly darker than my skin colour, but i'm not going to apologize for not bringing my make-up artist to the drug store. to the extent that there may have been a point, it had to do with it being may rather than august, and not having the money to buy different coloured foundation depending on the exact amount of tanning i'm experiencing.

the reality is that i have a lot of brown-skinned ancestors and i get pretty dark-skinned in the summer. if i used pasty white make-up, it would look pretty awful.

if you want to accuse me of anything in the media you see of me, it should be of lightening my skin by using bright lights, but it's never been intentional when it's happened.

but, the reality is that i think this whole thing is stupid, and i'm not likely to take you very seriously, anyways.

i think these constant kneejerk reactions about wearing blackface are, in general, over blown. i don't really see what the big deal is, honestly.

you're going to tell me "that's racist!", and i'm going to say "no, it isn't". and, we can have that debate if you catch me in the right forum, but, for right now, i'm just going to say that i think it's kind of a trivial concern to get yourself worked up over.

but, those pictures are going to piss people off.

and, the people that it's going to piss off aren't going to vote conservative...

there's something else worth pointing out about the canadian election, and i don't know exactly what the best way to parse it is, yet.

scheer - 30-something
singh - 30-something
trudeau - 40-something going on 12
may - 60-something

it's easy enough to suggest that may is an old woman and should retire.

but, i think a part of the reason that she handily won the first debate is because she came off as the only adult in the room.

inri091

inri084?

the very beginning of a long paused project built around the idea of converting ratios directly into music using matlab.

i'm going to leave this as a one-track single dated to november, 2004 and finish the idea, for release in....2020?

this was created for the requirements of math 4822, a course on wavelet theory, at carleton university in the fall semester of 2004. programmed entirely in matlab over a weekend in nov, 2004. uploaded and published without further modification on sept 19, 2019. as always, please use headphones.

credits

released November 30, 2004

j - matlab programming, digital wave editing.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-spontaneous-combustion-of-leonardo-pisano

inri088

inri082?

this extended ep will be a comprehensive exploration of all of the versions of this recording.

for now, here is the maximal version, which contains a poem that was written in mid-2004 but not added to the track until 2011 (and will be removed for the album version).

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/interplanetary-isomorphism

inri081

inri079. seventh record.

audio needs to be replaced, items need to close..

...except that i think i did replace the audio, already. so, i'm just looking at final sequencing decisions; this is just about done.

it's the sample-free, (mostly) instrumental reclamation of my seventh lp.

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

publishing inri079

an art show demo, uploaded as is. inri079.

it's not a complex story - sarah wanted to have a showing of some of her paintings in her apartment, so she asked me to write some music for it. i just took some of the things i was working on and put them together.

this is the sum total of material worked on in my mother's apartment, where i stayed from about december, 2003 to about may, 2004.

this would eventually become the core of the next symphony.

initially written and recorded over the second half of 2003 and the very beginning of 2004. compiled on january 18, 2004. ripped from cd-r on april 11, 2014. finally uploaded and published without further modification on sept 18, 2019. as always, please use headphones.

released january 18, 2004

j - electric & acoustic & classical guitars, effects, vocals, flute, synthesizers, electric air reed organ, drum programming, piano programming, sound design, noise generators, sequencers, generative synthesis, audiomulch, sounder, digital wave editing, sampling, composition, production

sarah - cover art photo, as taken from the top of the alexandra bridge in ottawa, ontario, during the winter of 2003/2004.

the acoustic guitar played on quantum psychosis belonged to heather.

inri079

an art show demo, uploaded as is. inri078.

it's not a complex story - sarah wanted to have a showing of some of her paintings in her apartment, so she asked me to write some music for it. i just took some of the things i was working on and put them together.

this would eventually become the core of the next symphony.

initially written and recorded over the second half of 2003 and the very beginning of 2004. compiled on january 23, 2004. ripped from cd-r on april 11, 2014. finally uploaded and published without further modification on sept 18, 2019. as always, please use headphones.

credits

released January 23, 2004

j - all sound

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/art-show-demo

inri077

inri077.

these are some demos that i recorded on my 4-track in sarah and heather's apartment on dalhousie in ottawa in late 2003. i still have the tape, but i haven't digitized, yet.

the only thing i transferred was a section that became "like divine amoebas", because i was using it, directly. the non-digitized sections were mostly for the lost symphony, iirc.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/bedroom-cassette-demoes

first inri078 upload

i will finally complete this symphony, soon.

for now, here's a demo that was recorded in the winter of 2007.

inri076.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-lost-symphony

inri075

inri075.

i wrote this song on a beach in kelowna in mid 2003. it looked a lot like the picture...

there's a lot of space in the track, which is intentional. in the final recording, i filled it out with birds chirping, but the initial intent was something out of a john cage piece - listen to what's around you. relax...

that said, a live version of the track at the time would have featured me playing multiple parts at once, which were separated in the recording for tonal variance. i'm hoping that i find a fuller recording, but here's a background track, for now.


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

so, we're going to put some teasers up for inri075-inri???.

here we go...

it's been too long, so i should remind people what the next stage is, once i get all this journal writing done.

period 3 is next and will start in seriousness when i get back from bc in mid-2003.
this period was unstable, and unfocused, overall, but i got a fair number of demoes down, at least.

i've also made some tracks public that were previously hidden, even though it's going to take forever to do it.

1) inri075 needs to be cleaned up, but is essentially done.
it's some demos recorded over the second half of the summer of 2003 in a psychedelic-prog style that document my immediate feelings after getting back.
this should be an ep.
sept 1, 2003.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/kelowna

2) inri076 is the second of four half hour epics that will make up the trivial group 2xlp.
there are rough demoes dated to much later, but i'd be starting this from scratch, and it will be a major project to finish.
there are no serious demoes because i was living on sarah's floor at the time, due to being thrown out of my parents' basement.
i don't even remember why. i think i called my stepmother psychotic (which was just a statement of fact).
this will likely be a lengthy ep that will at least include instrumental and vocal versions.
this is more of a rock symphony than reflections, but the end project will be quite psychedelic.
i had been listening to a lot of 'soundtracks for the blind', and you can tell.
this would be symphony 9.
nov 1, 2003.
note, however, that i may have to extend the inri numbers if i decide to release some singles dated to october, 2003.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-lost-symphony

3) inri077 is literally a couple of four-track acoustic demoes that i recorded on sarah's floor.
these pop up elsewhere, but they're their own thing, too.
this should come up as is, i'm just waiting for inri #s.
dec 1, 2003
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/bedroom-cassette-demoes

4) inri078 is a recording that sarah asked me to create for an "art show" she put on in her apartment.
it's just some rough versions of some things i was doing, but it's it's own document, too.
this should come up as is.
jan 23, 2004.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/art-show-demo

5) inri079 is the ftaa lp, which is my sixth official record.
i'm dating it to june 1, 2004 because that's when i first constructed it, but the audio needs to be replaced with final versions of each of the tracks.
there is an older version of the record there, already.
this should otherwise be quick.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ftaa

6) the tenth symphony is dated to aug 15, 2004. while it is done, a nice compilation will need to be constructed.
no audio here, yet.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/interplanetary-isomorphism

7) the cycles per second ep came out of a course on wavelet compression that i took in 2004.
this ep is done, it just needs an inri #.
it's also the front-end for a noisy matlab project that will be entirely prgrammed and will be my eight or ninth record.
if i ever get through this, it may be the template for further post-discography composition.
nov 1, 2004.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-spontaneous-combustion-of-leonardo-pisano

8) i briefly played bass, as a favour to the guitarist, for an ottawa pop-punk band called throatmotor.
there was some discussion around doing actual interesting music, but it never materialized.
this is an attempt on my behalf to contribute to the writing which was, as always, simply ignored.
i'm not exactly sure what will be done with this, yet.
may 1, 2005
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/throatmotor-fragment

9)  this is the trivial group lp, which i have dated to june, 2005 but will probably move to past the fourth symphony, xenophanes.
the components will be reflections (8th), the lost symphony (9th), interplanetary isomorphism (10th) & xenophanes (11th).
the first and last two are largely done, while i haven't started recording the second.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/e

10) i made an attempt over mid 2005 to start a more conventional rock band by floating some rock songs that i described, at the time, as "impressionist jazz punk".
these tracks were actually written between mid-2003 and mid-2005, but they never got beyond the guitar stage, because i wanted to perform them with an actual band.
the compilation is dated to mid-2005, but we'll have to see what i do about actually completing them.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/impressionist-jazz-punk

11) this is the fourth trivial group symphony and 11th overall, entitled 'xenophanes'.
dated to sept 1, 2005 for now.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/xenophanes

12) when i get there, i'll create an lp of music i created from 1998-2006 for a scholastic reason.
dated to may, 2006.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/scholastic-pieces

13) this is the introduction of a symphony i started at the end of 2006 and had to place on indefinite hold due to life circumstances. this introduction is very noisy, and i'm somewhat impressed by myself listening to it at the moment. but, the second - incomplete and unreleased - section sounds like al di meola jamming with the aphex twin, and that's a better way to describe the overall intent. this might end up as a tetris release and is probably the end of period 3.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-crash

period 4....the bronson years.

14) this is a good way to start period 4.
it will need to compile just the guitar parts for all of the later period symphonies.
dating it to early 2007 makes sense, but we'll see if it's actually right or not when i get there.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/genesis

15) this will need to come up at the end of period 3, and will be a collection of midi percussion renders for tracks composed over 2000-2007.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/percussive-works

16) this is a messy, out of sync demo that represents the beginnings of what was supposed to be the tetris project.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/evil-is-a-human-construction

17) by combining this with the guitar demos, it is possible to get a rough idea of what the first three movements of this lp will sound like. there are five written movements.
dating is unclear.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/proverbs

18) i started writing this concept record weeks before i got evicted from the apartment on bronson, in mid-2011.
it's very much the end point of the discography, at this point.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/orb-symphony

actually, maybe this is useful as a snapshot of where i left off after period 2.

that's the 'music video' link to the side.

there's the link to all 75 records, inri000-inri074:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3JSjmqp0cbvbF58VKPkic-68bkZZ-4pn

if you flip through the youtube profile, you'll see links to specific projects, as well.

so, i'm done with the uploads.

i'm not going to pretend that this wasn't an inefficient use of time, but so be it.

it'll be just a bit longer before i start on this in seriousness.

so, this is what we've come to right now.

1) conservatives. they're not even in contention, they never are.
2) people's party. i don't like their positions on economics or science, and i don't really agree with them on immigration, either. they're not under serious consideration.
3) liberals. under the control of stupid people, they've become the stupid party.
4) ndp. they used to be the stupid party, but now they're just next level. say no to magic beards in office.
5) greens. i don't like her either, but she can't win. is the local candidate worth supporting? that's what i need to figure out.
6) mlm. this is the first election where i've seriously considered it, but, if they win, it might be the last one i'll get the chance to consider it. there's almost no chance.
7) spoiled ballot. that's running a close second, right now.

i've been stating for years that i'm not comfortable with elizabeth may's religious beliefs, either. this is a big part of the reason that i'm hesitating - i don't really want to vote for her, either. but, she's a known entity, and it's a difference of scale.

she's not helping herself by running her mouth off.

i would support jagmeet singh's right to practice his silly religion, or express his cultural homogeneity, or however he sees it, at a private law practice, as he sees fit. i'm not going to bother him at work, even if i might support policies to get to his kids.

and, a savvy lawyer could charge a magic fee for access to his magic beard.

but, there's not a fucking chance in hell i'd ever vote for him - and i know i'm right, so don't bother calling me names about it.

and, for the last time, i'm not running for office, and i haven't endorsed anybody yet.

i'm running to restore some fucking sanity in a world that's losing it's grip on all sides.

and, they give me a check every month for being crazy.

"meh. magic beards, science, what's the difference?"

the guy thinks he has a magic beard, and he wants executive power.

no, i'll just never be ready for that.