the government should make a choice: does it support peacekeeping or does it support fueling more war in ukraine?

it should not try to do both.

and it can't. the world won't let it. we'll be roundly and correctly attacked as hypocrites.

if we can't or won't present peacekeeping as a replacement for active participation in ongoing conflicts, there is no longer any self-interest in supporting peacekeeping, and doing so becomes rather foolish. we're just squandering resources for nothing in return. it becomes a waste of our tax money that would be better spend on building more subsidized housing in canada.

the point of supporting peacekeeping was to avoid involvement in conflicts like ukraine by telling the americans "look, we'd rather contribute like this.".

but, canada is actually essentially leading the offensive against the russians in ukraine. 

so, what is the purpose of canadian peacekeeping, now, then?

we've lost the plot.

canada's quiet support for the cuban position in angola is actually one of the most intriguing and contradictory episodes of the cold war. it's not well understood.

i'd like to remind or teach everybody, as the plot has been completely lost, that the purpose of pearson-trudeauvian peacekeeping at the height of the cold war was to avoid nato war commitments in conflicts we had ideological problems with.

so, rather than send troops to fight alongside white supremacists in angola or anti-communist forces in vietnam, we talked the americans into agreeing with us that it was valuable to stabilize africa by sending them food and textbooks.

from 1965-2005, canada was the most non-aligned member of nato. it's a difficult balancing act, as we had to try to align with the parts of american hegemony we liked while avoiding participating in the parts we didn't. and it didn't always work.

it's not clear that trump will accept these arguments. lbj did. nixon did. carter did. clinton did. reagan didn't.

peacekeeping is not something canada has ever done out of unselfish altruism. it's been a way to avoid harder war commitments in conflicts we conscientiously objected to.

frankly, there are not any such conflicts like angola, or vietnam, or iraq, in which america is currently involved in. canada went to afghanistan as a part of a un mandate, and that was the right choice. i would support canadian involvement in yemen, as these are legitimate bad guys and vicious barbarians that need to be wiped out. the closest thing to an iraq or vietnam is ukraine, and we are taking a very uncanadian position on that conflict, in supporting bellicose war rhetoric and very hot war that the americans are wisely trying to de-escalate. unlike iraq, a war of regime change in iran would actually be a noble enterprise. etc.

it is plausible that we might get asked to participate more in some of the proxy wars in africa, and support brutal parties that we are ideologically opposed to. that is the kind of thing that we invented peacekeeping in order to avoid, but there's a lot less of that in the world today than there was in 1970.

https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2025/05/canada-strengthens-support-and-commitments-following-2025-united-nations-peacekeeping-ministerial-meeting.html

there is no "trade war", it's just an excuse to ram through imf austerity packages and sell off public assets to american investors.

when i get this going in the next month or two, it may seem like the adherence to process is slowing me down, but it is actually going to dramatically increase my productivity by providing me with organization and structure.

i've been trying to do way too many things at once for way too long.

i'm not a twang guitar player. the songs i learned to play on the hondo telecaster included stairway to heaven, black magic woman and squonk - all les paul standards. yes, i was that kid playing the stairway solo at age 12. i replaced the telecaster with an ibanez with a locking bridge that was kind of not very strat-like; it was more like a prs. i have a replacement for that already, too. my hands are too small for les pauls; that's why i bought an sg. however, i am going to need a tele for the period 3 recordings, which are far more focused on live guitars than the period 2 recordings were, and i'm going to need everything to finish the period 4 material, which is psychotically dense and over-produced.

this rebuild consequently isn't going to merely be a performative exercise. i will use this stuff, and i will be anxious to get going, but i need to follow this process, and the mess of the last several years has just slowed me down that much more and made the need to adhere to process that much more clear.

at the least, once i get through 1989-1995, 1995-2003 should be relatively fast because it is mostly done. i will then mostly pick up again at 2003, where i left off in 2017.

i understand that listeners might be frustrated, but i have to get the entire package finished. for me, this is integrated. everything goes together. you'll have to wait, and that is more clear now than ever before.

i'm about 30% of the way through transporting items out of my storage unit and into my new apartment, which is about an hour walk, both ways. i'm a little out of shape, so it's actually good exercise for me.

i have mentioned that i'm going to be refocusing several times, now, and have been trying to kick back into some kind of productive cycle since the start of the pandemic, but keep getting distracted or sidetracked. at this point, trying to pick back up at the start of period 3, or trying to parachute back into the alter-reality would be difficult to even make sense of.

i am instead going to need to just start at the start and work forward. that means starting with the journal, in 1989, and just working through linearly. no alter-reality. no lynchian split narrative. just starting from the start and moving forward.

that means i'm going to be focusing mostly on building the offline writing, but also that i'm going to be restarting a number of blogs in real time, including the diet blog.

something i've been meaning to do since i moved to windsor is sample some of the local restaurants. the last month and a half has thrown me out of my diet and forced me to order food, which has got me back to thinking about that. i am intending on weekly restaurant updates at the diet blog, in addition to the diet blog itself. i've mostly eaten fast food over the last month, but i'd like to expand that to more of the local restaurants one by one. 

i also need to rebuild sections of my studio that were lost over the years, which is something i was doing before the house got bought and i had to deal with the legal fight over housing. i'll be doing that linearly, as well, as i go through the journal. i will get my first acoustic guitar, then my first electric guitar, and need to have emulations of them in my studio, for period 3 recordings. the first electric guitar was a hondo telecaster copy, which i have replaced with a hannah montana mini tele. it's actually a nice little washburn. i could repaint it a solid purple. the thing is that i have freakishly small hands, so i actually prefer miniature scale guitars. i also have an epiphone sg jr and a fender mini squire, both solid red. i will be looking for a comparable acoustic guitar, which my dad sold to buy me the tele. i still have my first amp, from 1992. i also need to get a recorder, as we had recorder classes in elementary school. my younger sister played piano from a very young age, and i also had that around. i'll rebuild slowly from there, and replace everything that was lost. i'll also need to fill in minimal missing sections of the existing discography, inri000-inri100 (1995-2005), but this is mostly a writing project that i've been eating away at since 2017.

i'm basically in the same mental position i was in in 2013. i'm overwhelmed and having difficulty focusing on any one thing. if i pick up somewhere in between, i'm just going to start running around in circles again, like i've been doing since 2017. 2013-2016 was extremely productive, but i started in 1995 and should have started in 1989 and i focused only on the music and have since expanded the scope of the project to include video, writing and other types of media. this time, i'm starting in 1989 and moving comprehensively forward.

but i will also exist. i will eat. i will go to shows. i will have political opinions. i would like to start vlogging again. etc. all of these things will happen in real time, in the way that they must.

what i can't be doing is trying to exist in ten different spaces in time. i'm not a tralfamadorian. i can do two things at once. that is all.

that means that this mass of writing and video from 2013-2025 is going to have to wait until it comes up in sequence before i can finish it, and that's going to be quite a ways into the future. that's fine.

when the journal is done, it's done. 

regarding the stalker,  i don't seem to have shaken them, but the depth of the harassment is clearer now than it was two years ago and it is now crystal clear that i'm going to have to get them arrested and put in jail. that was not clear before. it is now. i'm dealing with a true believer. this person will not stop voluntarily, they must be forced to stop, and i will have to force them to stop.

this is an active combat vessel in the mexican navy:

the reason that trump has been keen on the russians is because - and he's right. i said it myself. - he realizes that the west needs russia in a fight against china. we will lose a war against china if we can't pull the russians back into our orbit, first.

trump is, however, dealing with realizing the unpleasant reality that putin is an asshole and any realignment has to deal with that fact, first, as a pre-requisite.

so, he's dusting off biden's plan, which was to arm the arabs, instead. right. when was the last time the arabs won a war against anybody? if china invades the middle east, they may have to deal with endless arab bombing attacks, but that is not the same thing as fighting a war, and the chinese can avoid the annoyance by not invading. the arabs lucked out on oil wealth, and spend trillions on weapons, but they don't know how to use them. they buy these 100 million dollar planes from lockheed martin and then pay american pilots to fly them. there are american military bases all over the middle east with defensive weapons systems and american military guys operating them. do you think these countries are going to fight for democracy and human rights when they have to? the middle east is a liability to defend, it's not an ally to align with.

where should america align, then?

well, who has defeated the chinese before?

1) japan.

2) vietnam.

3) mongolia.

4) china, itself.

all of these are self contained to the chinese geographic space except mongolia. the last time that chinese siege technology took on arab fundamentalism, the result was 100 million dead muslims. i see no reason to think the same thing won't happen again. 

only the russians actually beat the mongols, although other slavic groups (poles, ukrainians) also fought them off.

the geography determines the destiny and there's not any other possible outcome. yes, you protect the pacific. yes, you try to control indochina. does this stuff sound familiar?

but, at the end of it, we need the russians fighting on our side, or the chinese march straight through to france. there's no other way to parse it.

it is not a bad thing if canada post runs a deficit. it should not be expected to operate on a for-profit basis in the first place, it's a government service, it's not a business.

it should be restructured with the expectation of structural losses and for the benefit of citizens, not profit.

polievre, very strangely, has an upper class massachusetts accent.

i actually agree that carney is more like trump than polievre, and i'm no fan of polievre (i basically grew up in his riding, fwiw.). 

americans take heed: carney is actually very obama-like in a lot of ways, including his mannerisms, his slogans and the fact that he's a conservative that tricked the country into thinking he was a moderate. polievre, on the other hand, is actually more like george hw bush, or perhaps john mccain - he's an older style of conservative that has gone out of fashion in the united states as of late, but is not that far from where joe biden was on the spectrum.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/17/carney-canada-donald-trump-tariffs-far-right

canadians know what equalization is. it's when have provinces send money to have not provinces. if that is how trump wants to lower drug prices, it's good old fashioned wealth redistribution via taxing the rich and would be a better drug system than we have in canada, which americans never seem to realize has the second most expensive drug costs in the developed world.

trump also likes our immigration system.

in fact, trump's family is from canada. 

he likes canada so much he wants to marry it. the problem was that trudeau made him feel inadequate as a male and had to go.

we wouldn't have to go into provincial deficit  - which is not sovereign debt - if he'd levy export taxes on the americans.

we're basically doing exactly what trump wants us to at every level, like the bunch of spineless losers that we actually are.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-budget-deficit-1.7536110

i was able to find a bullshit report by the "canadian independent federation of businesses", whatever the fuck that is, but i was not able to find any sort of legitimate academic study.

the obvious clear losers of removing interprovincial trade barriers in canada would be quebec and ontario, where the winners would be saskatchewan and manitoba.

the police in canada are happy to root out any competition to the biker gangs.

just don't ask them to go after the bikers, themselves.

this is the great open secret in canadian politics that makes everything make sense once you understand it: the hells angels are the single most powerful corporation in this country.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/on-patrol/article/blood-family-mafia-targeted-by-police-operation-in-levis-sainte-claire/

Examples include a requirement that real estate services providers in Ontario have a local presence, limiting trapping and hunting guide licences and mandating the use of locally grown grapes in wine production.

great.

ugh.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/article/ontario-to-loosen-internal-trade-remove-barriers-on-alcohol-and-labour-mobility/

it's not a deal, it's a gift.

i hope manitoba is at least gracious enough to send us a thank you card.

if donald trump is failing at trade theory because he's making it too hard to access markets, ford is failing at trade theory by giving foreign producers access to ontario's markets for nothing in return. he's repeating exactly the same mistake that has hollowed out ontario's economy for decades. ontario's breweries will soon look like southern ontario's shuttered car factories.

the framers of our constitution were correct to erect interprovincial trade barriers and they should not be torn down without academic consultation. we should have studies and commissions before we act, and those studies would no doubt recommend leaving the status quo in place.

but doug ford doesn't care about studies or commissions, he cares about his gut - his gigantic beer gut. who needs to read books when you can drink beer, instead? 

the consequence of the giant beer gut is his shriveled up beer brain. 

we need more intelligent leadership in this province.

what does ontario get in return for allowing manitoban producers access to it's large and wealthy market?

the answer is nothing.

this is a good deal for manitoba, and a bad deal for small breweries in ontario, who will now face greater competition.

doug ford is just not very smart.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ontario-manitoba-internal-trade-agreement-alcohol-sales/

as expected, mark carney's cabinet indicates that the focus of his government will be on advancing the interests of bankers rather than workers.

i don't know why some people were so easily misled. all the guy did was drop some hockey metaphors. it's somewhat embarrassing, as a canadian.

i don't think his government will be very successful or last very long. the ndp, or elizabeth may, could very well take it down to stop them from passing a budget to the right of stephen harper. 

this looks brutal, and it's clearly being driven by elon musk, but it's only because it reflects a reality that is exceedingly uncomfortable in it's unexpected juxtaposition. americans don't want to accept or understand that slavery is complicated, it's not just a black and white issue. a full understanding of slavery in the united states means understanding the depth of irish slavery, it mean understanding the role that black slave traders played in africa and it means understanding that the system was essentially designed by arabs, before being taking over by spanish conquistadors moving south into north africa. we don't want to understand this. white supremacism is easier to grasp, because it entrenches us at the top of a hierarchy.

yes, these people are descended from colonizers that stole land from indigenous africans. that is a fact.

it's also true that those indigenous africans have since risen up and taken their land back, which leaves the descendants of the colonizers displaced and literal refugees.

they will make reliable republican voters.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/may/12/donald-trump-luxury-plane-us-china-trade-deal-tariff-latest-us-politics-news-live

yeah.

there is a mcdonalds across the street. they are open and working. you can go through the drive through. but i don't have and do not want a car.

instead of walk downstairs and open the door and order the 2-for-1 big mac, i have to order it from uber from a different mcdonalds across the city.

everything about this is idiotic.

why can't i just go inside and order a hamburger? 

it's like we're living in a backwards society like iran.

there is a mcdonalds almost directly downstairs, but it closes at 20:00, meaning i have to order delivery. this is utterly moronic

the pandemic is over. can we have 24 hour fast food again now? i'm tired of this bullshit.

i have a new apartment.

i got lucky. i had been unlucky for a bit. i was lucky for a bit before.

life is often more about luck than anything else. you've heard that; i've heard that. you learn that it's true.

i executed as well as possible, but i needed luck to succeed.

clearing items out of the hotel was somewhat challenging because they wouldn't give me the keys until friday morning. i thought they'd for sure give them over on thursday night, but they made me wait. i had to clear the hotel room by 11:00 am and they wouldn't give me the keys until 9:00 am. the only way i could do that - and i did - was by cramming everything onto a shopping cart and trekking it across town. i would have done that anyways, but if i had a headstart on thursday night then i would have done it in one trip; as it is, i had to leave some thing behind and walk back to get them, then bicycle them back in trips, and then do it again today. the bicycle trips that i would have done on thursday night got pushed to friday night and saturday and i lost not one but two days. that is now over with - everything is out of the hotel and into the apartment.

the electricity is on. the heat works. the fridge works; the stove less so. the shower has some problems. it looks like the place got half rebuilt and then halted, due to lack of interest. there are a few things that will need to be finished. it's a nice enough place, though. i'm just high enough up to get clean air from the windows and i'm very excited about that, as it's been too long since i've been able to open the windows in the summer and enjoy it. the internet works. the phone works. i think essentially all of the basics are in order.

the next thing to do i clean in here, and start taking things back out of storage. i should be able to cart out a fair amount of it while i'm waiting for funding from the city, but i'm also going to be focusing on items on a needs basis. for example, the first trip will get my measuring scale and some measuring cups, so i can start eating in my normal schedule again. i've just been eyeballing the cereal recently.

tonight, i need to do some loose ends like call teksavvy,  fill out the oesp form, etc and then get to cleaning, in preparation of the first storage run tomorrow.

this is a bigger apartment than the last one, and is more comparable in size to the apartment on tuscarora, but bigger.

i have actually been thinking about how to reapproach the discography for quite a while and will likely aggressively get back to work, if my conditions are controlled again. i will have far clearer workstations in the apartment than i have had in a while, and it should help me kickstart back into productivity quite quickly.

so, i'm hoping i can get back to work very quickly and that i get a lot of work done very fast. it will be a little bit different than previous, and more comprehensive.

i was actually thinking a little today about how rfk, jr is an am embodiment of the collapse of american society. the kennedys are overrated, but their type of philanthropy has a certain flavour which we call "progressive" and has to do with positioning science at the centre of the political discourse. say what you want about rfk, jr, but he is not a progressive politician, he is the literal definition otherwise. the decline of the kennedy family through rfk is more than real, it has a specific flavour of irony to it.

in other news, windows xp extended warranty was also extended until 2045.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/bill-gates-pledges-his-remaining-fortune-to-the-gates-foundation-which-will-close-in-20-years/

the media blames it on these barbarian yemenis. they took down some f-18s, did they?

the chinese have some giant military installations in the region and they're the ones shooting at the americans in the red sea. they're clearly succeeding in hitting some targets.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/second-fighter-jet-falls-off-carrier-1.7528391

need to dot some is in the morning and it will be a day or two.

they can't rent this place because of the heating costs, but i have oesp. that's the trick. you get these inefficient electric heaters into oesp and it flips right over. i'll be saving up all summer.

that's the thing about oesp: it's not just $100/month, it's a $100 credit per month. so if you only use $30, $70 goes into the credit.

windsor is relatively mild. it's not ottawa. further, this is on the top floor.

i'll be fine.

or i'll sell my kidney.

no, i'll sell your kidney.

*googleyeyed smile*

i'll be fine. really.

it might have been less stressful, but this is how it happened.

so be it.

it's almost over.

it's not that bad. i spent a month in a hotel, not on the streets. i'm lucky, but i'm smart, too. i just need to be made whole for the costs, and you can be sure those costs are coming. 

i mean, this had to eventually happen. there's no way around it.

i was going to eventually have to move out of there, and i'm not dead yet. i might have been. that was very tenuous.

i figure this is life number seven.

gotta keep these near death experiences down, huh?

a few more days.

ok.

this has been quite the fucking challenge.

i'm just about there. i think i got it.

next step: retribution.

why is it that the landlords i've met in windsor over the last several years are consistently the dumbest people i've ever met?

it's startling.

the electric heater in this hotel sounds like it was programmed by autechre. 

or maybe i need to go to a party. like, now.

i had another false start collapse this afternoon and had to stop to sleep it off before i imploded. it's been very frustrating, as it keeps looking like things are coming together and then they don't.

in the next 48 hours, i need to either sign a lease and start moving stuff in or i need to find a room to stay in for a few more weeks, until i can sign a lease.

i'm trying. i'm looking more and more like my girly self self again, and that can only help.

i am exhausted.

i have been recovering from the harassment in a hotel, and it's taking some time to balance back out. it's getting there.

at times, i've thought they followed me here, but i suspect they might have now left. i dunno. see, i do have ptsd, and i it did trigger it, badly, and i will remember things that happened in that basement, randomly, for years, maybe the rest of my life. i don't think that is what happened this week. i don't have the confidence to be certain, and i actually usually do - it is usually not that difficult to figure out what's real and what isn't at all.

i suspect that they got me one of the last nights i was there. i started to wonder if they were swabbing door handles, but i think i settled on them burning something, to create smoke for me to breathe in. there really wouldn't be anything i could do, especially if they fumigated me when i was sleeping. i'd wake up smelling like i was at a campfire sometimes, despite having just taken a shower a few hours earlier, and have stayed in all night. i don't know exactly how they did it, but i was inhaling something, breathing something in.

i would subsequently pass it through my kidneys, and could feel it leaving, it was gross.

i am coming up against a feeling of frustration setting into hopelessness. there are apartments available right now, but the process of securing one has become overwhelmingly bureaucratic. i'm used to dealing with people face to face, not filling out applications like this. i'm finding the property management stage to be almost impenetrable and am increasingly running out of time.

i need to buy more time.

so, i'm asking you to go to my bandcamp site and buy some mp3s, or go to the paypal donation directly, even. 

i don't know how much more time this is going to take. i just know i need more time.

see, i don't quite understand this mentality.

the americans are expressing a willingness, however absurdly, to try to control canadian exports by "economic force". it's like the koalas have taken over the white house and want to conquer the world with the power of the invisible hand. these are frightening comments. however, that's what "51st state" means, right? it means controlling canadian exports.

so, in response to america expressing a desire to control our exports, we scheme up ways to gain leverage against them. then, we get confused when they start talking about controlling our exports some more.

i understand that our oil producers want a better price and are seeking to sell it to a buyer that's willing to pay more of a fair price for it. however, that should answer your question as to why america wants to control it. right?

there's other ways to get a fair price. you could insist on export taxes, as that is where most of the price hike would go anyways. the americans are telling you pretty loudly that they're not happy about you selling that item to those people; they think that item belongs to america.

while being too submissive about something like that is something to avoid, equally undesirable would be being pointlessly argumentative about it. 

perhaps you first might try renegotiating the price?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/one-year-after-the-trans-mountain-pipeline-expansion-why-isn-t-it-full-1.7525284

renting furnished apartments seems to be normal in other parts of the world, and i'm increasingly finding owners that insist on furnishing their apartments and then charging extra for it.

but that's a weird thing here and something most white people would not be interested in. i certainly wouldn't want to pay *more* for a furnished apartment; if i had to, i'd want to pay less for it. i have my own stuff. that's the point.

i don't to borrow your furniture or sleep in your bed. that's gross.

the minority is official, then. did anybody else call a minority?

mark carney just peaked. he called an election at the "honeymoon" stage of his leadership process, where he maximized his bump. don't blame the guy - he timed it perfectly. however, he won't get that many votes next time. at all. not even close.

i would project that canadians actually probably won't like mr. carney very much, and that liberals will like him less than conservatives.

this could actually be a very rough couple of months. when carney goes into the next election, it will be on a downward slope, and he's going to need to hope he doesn't bottom the party out, but he might.

it's a delay. that's what it is. all of the things culminated in a delay towards the liberal party's collapse, which is now scheduled for late 2025 or early 2026.

the ndp need to move quickly because this should not have happened and any other leader would have capitalized on trudeau's unpopularity. the ndp could completely flip this whole thing over if they pick the right leadership team, which doesn't have to be white, exactly, but should certainly try a little harder to fit in to canadian society. most south indians are actually relatively good at integrating and fairly moderate to liberal; they aren't the ethnic group i find myself concerned with. the ndp shouldn't have born the brunt of this, but so be it.

carney should have taken the job as finance minister.

he's not going to like what happens next.

that said, brian masse was not a good mp and i will not miss him. in 20 years, the only thing he accomplished was a bill that legalized government run gambling, which is a terrible idea and which i'm staunchly opposed to. the government should not be basing healthcare or education revenues on profits from gambling, it creates a conflict of interest. i would support legislation to reverse the gambling legalization, or at least to privatize it and place a sin tax on private revenues, 100% of which go to help victims of the gambling industry recover.

i have only voted a few times since i moved here, and it has been liberal, with the explicit intent of trying to push him out. 

the conservatives have never been competitive in this riding.

as a city person, i'm not interested in being ruled by townies riding in from the farms, and especially not by one that looks like an amish person. no thank you.

the real reason that the three ridings in windsor swung to the conservatives is gerrymandering via redistribution. windsor is a small city with a very left wing, union-dominated population. the city itself take up a large space, and is surrounded by large amounts of more conservative exurban or suburban regions, bordering into remnant farmlands. those rural areas vote conservative.

previously, there were two small urban ridings and one big rural riding and the result was two left wing representatives (ndp or liberal) and one conservative, for the rural riding. what redistricting did was blur the rural/urban split, which folded the small urban zones into the larger rural zones. the urban zones are more densely populated but there are more people in the larger rural areas.

i would suspect that this is actually what also happened in hamilton, london and sudbury, but i don't know those areas well.

the ndp have been complaining for decades that the system does this on purpose. what actually happened to the ndp in saskatchewan was that the previous urban zones were folded into the rural zones, in a process that is quite similar to what happened in windsor.

this could create some problems here, as if the population has no legitimate representation, it will begin to act like it's unrepresented, which it now is. however, it might be difficult to undo. i mean, look at the long term result of redistricting in saskatchewan - the ndp have been wiped out of saskatchewan for decades.

this election outcome is essentially a mistake. 

i mused previously if it seemed like the result of dumb kids not understanding what they were voting for, or fundamental shifts in canadian demographics that realign the country's future with a conservative identity, as a result of increasing immigration from conservative societies.

however, i don't think either of those are correct. or not quite so.

for right now, this is a fluke brought on by skewed turnout and weird events. 

the government won't last long, and the result of the next election will undo this one. for right now, i'm not enjoying waking up in a conservative riding and a conservative region and i'm setting hard to work on fighting them as hard as i can.

i need to put a call out to frank at ekos or nik nanos or somebody else to get this analysis out.

the ndp did not fold into the liberals tonight. i can see enough of an analysis in specific ridings like windsor and hamilton to realize that's false.

the ndp vote bolted hard to the conservative party, and you can see that in the age demographics.

the reason the conservative lost is that carney then showed up and swung conservatives to the liberals. 

this was a complex tango, a two way shift, and not just the destruction of the ndp. we will wake up to a completely altered political spectrum, where the liberals represent older and more conservative voters and the conservatives are the party of youth, hope and future. it's a complete spectrum reversal.

if elizabeth may has the balance of power, will she bring back the carbon tax?

long live queen elizabeth III.

i usually beat the models and i did again. we'll see how close i get in the end.

liberals: around 160 

conservatives: around 140 

bloc: around 30 

ndp: around 10

green: exactly 2

i also suggested the following:

what is going to happen is that ndp voters are going to swing to the conservatives in urban areas, and the result is that the liberals will win those seats more easily, because the seats were two-way races between the liberals and ndp (these are seats the conservatives are not competitive in). 

i undershot this, and i want to correct something i'm hearing on the news. the news is suggesting that ndp voters are swinging to the liberals, and the conservatives ended up winning. that is an intuitive analysis and the numbers don't add up because the conservatives were in third place in all of these ridings - windsor, london, hamilton. if the liberals are in second, and the ndp vote shifts downwards to the liberals, the conservatives would not win. that's wrong.

what is happening is that ndp voters shifted to the conservatives in these ridings in such large numbers that the conservatives actually leapfrogged the liberals into first place. the ndp collapse is not from 40% to 20% in these ridings, it's from 40% to 5% and the movement is dramatically to the conservatives, who are jumping in these ridings from 15% to 55%.

the numbers are still coming in and my initial analysis could still be correct in the end, but if these numbers hold they're stark and startling. actually look at them. it's a giant swing from the ndp to the conservatives, and it's young people driving it.

conservative youth movements like this are scary stuff.

looking for an apartment right now isn't the struggle i thought it would be; it's something different altogether.

i was expecting that the problem would be the 1% vacancy rate, and supply is certainly a problem, but not in the sense i imagined. there are apartments available in windsor, but they are either (1) in big corporate buildings, which are overpriced and mostly going to require a guarantor, or (2) too renovated.

too renovated?

so, take an apartment i would want to rent in windsor c. 10 years ago. it probably has older appliances, ratty floors. drafty windows...it's fine. it's big. it's cheap. sign me up. the units coming on the market have new appliances, new floorings, new windows and cost twice as much as they would have, which is either pricing me out or pulling it up to the very top of my price range. i don't care if the fridge is new, i care that the fridge works. i'd rather have a 30 year old stove than a fancy new burner top. etc. i want cheap and run down and spacious, and what the market is throwing at me is expensive and shiny and fancy and new...and cramped. the units have been cut in half. it's the torontoization of windsor, and it's staunchly unwelcome. these property management companies should go back to fucking toronto, and give me back my big, run down spaces for cheap. i don't want your stainless steel fridge.

worse, though, is this issue of credit scores.

on it's face, it seems reasonable enough to demand some entrance requirement around credit scores, but not if it's a rigid rule and there's no independent thought around it. the credit score is being interpreted by almost everybody as a magic number, rather than what it actually is, which in context is a rating of how well an individual pays off credit card debt.

nobody applying for bottom-of-market housing in windsor has ever had a mortgage, unless they've recently defaulted on it as a part of a divorce and few applicants have ever even owned cars in their lives. the exceptions would be the retirees. 90% of applicants have never had or ever will have mortgages and have never had or ever will have cars. so, what informs their credit score? credit card debt.

what is this number, in the context of somebody that only has credit card debt? it's a measurement of how frequently you pay down credit card debt. but, in order to have this score actually function, you'd have to frequently take out debt, and frequently pay it back down.

it follows that a low income person with a high credit score is somebody that constantly borrows large amounts of money via credit card debt and always pays it down, which could only make sense in context if they are extremely risky with their money. the riskier you are, the higher your credit score; the more risk adverse you are, the lower your credit score.

what having a good credit score means, then, for low income people, is that you have a gambling problem, or you're a drug addict, and also that you have some alternate source of income to pay your debts down, like selling drugs or prostitution. you couldn't get a good credit score unless you were constantly pushing yourself into debt, and you couldn't be constantly pulling yourself out of debt unless you were pulling in money under the table. therefore, you're really not low income at all, you're just a middle to high income criminal.

that is what having a high credit score would almost necessarily imply in the socio-economic class that is applying for these apartments - the applicant is a drug dealer or prostitute. insisting on a high credit score as an entry requirement weeds out the honest applicants and elevates the dishonest ones. then they wonder why their applicant pool sucks.

most people in my socio-economic class will have a credit score that looks something more like this:

i have never had a mortgage.

i have never owned a car.

i have never had a credit card and could not get one because my income is too low.

i have never missed a payment, but i've never made a payment on time, either; i've never had a payment to miss or make. therefore, equifax cannot assign me a rating. that should be the norm amongst the type of people applying for the type of housing i'm applying for - no credit history, because they're poor. credit histories are a middle class entity. poor people don't have credit histories because they don't have access to credit because they're poor.

now, why should property managers ask for credit reports? they should attempt to determine if the applicant has a large amount of debt from a previous tenancy, owes money in court or has a history of missed payments. it's reasonable on it's face. but when somebody does the check and it comes back as "this person has never borrowed money, has no liabilities and no assets", that should be seen as the best possible result, at least in this income demographic. i have no debt! no liabilities! that should be ideal.

they don't - they look at a score, analyze it binary and pass or fail. that's what the guidelines written by somebody in toronto say, and they expend no thought on it, they just do it.

as a result, i've actually seen an increasing number of properties just sit on the market, because the property managers refuse to rent to anybody that applies for them. 100% of the applicants get rejected, and told to sleep in a shelter, while these units sit empty, because they don't have a credit history. this is housing that should be low income housing and that can't attract middle income applicants. like me, many of these people can show years and years of rent receipts. i have 6.5 years of rent receipts, but they won't look at my application because i've never qualified for a credit card because i've spent my life poor. these are run down 300 square foot basements in windsor that only a poor person would ever apply for. it is absurd. 

the way out is to find somebody that isn't a retard and actually knows what a credit score is and how to apply it, rather than just mindlessly follow instructions sent from head office, without understanding what they are. 

i found a great spot out in amherstburg but the guy insisted on a verbal lease, and i wasn't interested in taking the risk. i tried to write a basic lease, and he...he didn't get it. he thought that not having a lease would give him the right to terminate a tenancy without a court, and that's wrong. i've found a few things that are overpriced and too small and thought about but pulled back from. i've found apartments that i've been apprehensive about moving into because they smell like ashtrays, and appear to mostly have drug dealers and prostitutes with good credit scores living in them. i've also found a couple of big wood apartments that are exactly what i want, but have owners that don't want musicians, or don't want odsp recipients, and that are still sitting on the market, weeks later - these picky owners want to wait and take their time to find their perfect imagined candidate, which is likely an astronaut that speaks ten languages and works part time as an ambassador to the united nations. i've been very frustrated by all of this, as it's a consistent lack of reasonableness that i'm encountering, mostly at the managerial stage. these useless capitalist bourgeois middle men are just sitting in between the tenant and the landlord and causing unnecessary problems. get out of here; go back to toronto. let me talk to the owner, dammit. i don't want to talk to you, and i don't want to pay your salary in my rent, either.

that said, i think i might have something lined up for monday, and it's actually exactly what i want, albeit a little out of the part of town i'd like. it's in a trendy or hip part of town, whereas i've been focusing on the region near the new bridge, which is close to the student district. the distance on a bicycle in the summer is not very substantive. the place is fairly central, really. i've been reminded of how bad that part of windsor smells this week, as the sewers finish their spring melt and clear out. the place i'd like to move into this week should smell a little less bad and a little more like fermented yeast, as i'm back in the range of the whiskey factory (where i was when i first moved here).

if it works out, i should be out of this hotel in a day or two. if it doesn't, may is going to be a long month for me. i tentatively have a temporary room lined up in a basement, if it flips over into may.

property managers need to be more realistic about what a credit score actually is and how useful it is for low rent applicants. there's a price point below which the concept of a credit score becomes extremely unhelpful, and everything i'm applying for is well below it. if somebody has a very bad credit score, that's one thing. but, if somebody just doesn't borrow money at all, they shouldn't be penalized for it they way i am being. ask for rent receipts instead - they're more useful than a credit score for this socio-economic class, which never has and never will borrow money, except to pay for drugs.

it's hard to really tell if the weird demographic flip in the canadian election and electorate is a fleeting mistake made by stupid children that don't understand what they're voting for or something more nefarious, as a longterm consequence of choices the canadian government has made about immigration. it seems to be that these young men voting conservative are also overwhelmingly from conservative cultures, like cultures in the middle east or africa that are fundamentalist muslim or christian. this is kind of exactly what jason kenney wanted to happen when he resdesigned the immigration system in the 00s.

so, there's two competing hypotheses that will have to work out:

- it could be that the young people are being tricked by social media and have no idea what they're supporting but are rather just trying to be "cool". if that's the case, polievre will go out of fashion soon enough. you have to win on the first try when you do this, or it backfires.

- or it could be that this is indicative of demographic changes in canada brought on by large amounts of immigration from conservative societies - they brought their kids here and raised them as conservatives, and they grew up to become conservatives.

i think it's a little of both and we'll have to let it work itself out to see which is the more dominant truth.

what i will say for right now is that the examples of societies that flip like this are minimal, but alarming. for example, this is a similar political coalition to the one we saw in iran in 1979 or in chile before the rise of pinochet. when the kids swing to the right like this, fascism tends to follow fairly quickly.

canadians should hope option a is more real and be extremely vigilant about the consequences of option b, as it could challenge the liberal foundations of our secular society.

i am a free speech advocate and am in full support of the inalienable right to give people the finger and to verbally tell them in no uncertain terms to fuck the fuck off and i'm actually happy to see the spectrum realign itself correctly around this. i find it extremely frustrating and annoying that conservatives have become the free speech party (it's mostly bullshit) while fake liberals, who are often the real conservatives in disguise, go after people for speaking openly and freely, in an attempt to silence or distort.

conservative people that want to restrict the right of people to tell other people to fuck off can go fuck the fuck off.

i stand in full solidarity with the old man and his rights to free expression.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/brantford-boomer-meme-context-1.7518905

you go to the netherlands and take a picture of the unending lines of crosses and poppies and look a canadian in the eye and tell us we had a free ride.

you ignorant piece of shit.

don't you fucking tell us we had a free ride.

we died in your wars.

you owed us. huuuuge.

canada was not given a free ride by anybody.

what canada earned was respect. it earned respect by dying in huge numbers for what was right and then refusing to be bellicose about it, and by trying to chart a direction in life that had some twinge of real decency. we were the real good guys. the world noticed.

it only really changed in the 00s due to some realpolitik decisions that, in hindsight, were clearly mistakes.

we can undo this and should, but we can't turn the clocks back and we need to work hard to rebuild the respect that we lost under stephen harper and justin trudeau.

https://thelogic.co/comment/carmichael-canada-is-alone-it-has-only-itself-to-blame/

i don't have time to do the kind of in depth analysis i've done previously. i'm going to do this point form.

1) the polling is picking up a big liberal uptick in bc, alberta and saskatchewan. this is probably real, and probably driven half by the fact that mark carney is running to the right of the conservatives and half by immigration to the region, which has been substantive. albertans, particularly, may be waking up to a new demographic reality in front of them. however, doubling or tripling liberal support in the region from the rockies to lake winnipeg won't necessarily result in a single new liberal seat. the primary reason that the models are projecting a liberal majority is due to projections of them winning a dozen or more seats in the west. i would be surprised if the liberals win even two new seats west of winnipeg, but it does look like their vote totals are legitimately going to double in a lot of places, with no actual electoral effect.

2) the liberals might win ndp-liberal races in bc by swinging conservative voters. i think that the idea that ndp voters are swinging to the liberals is an oversimplification, and that a deeper analysis is going to show that potential ndp voters (young voters) are actually voting conservative in large numbers, but the conservatives have had the rug pulled out from under them by carney, who is destroying and dominating polievre amongst conservatives like a tiger eating a goat. carney is just slitting polievre's throat in front of his wife, and eating into the conservative base like a migratory despot. however, this is only going to actually pull itself off if the liberals have an extremely good day. more likely is that the ndp mostly keep all of their seats in bc, but get wiped out elsewhere.

3) this leaves polievre in control of a weird and unstable coalition that will collapse within weeks and carney dominating the centre-right of the spectrum. when the ndp rebound, and they will quickly, unfortunately, it will expose that it's the conservatives that are stealing their base, not the liberals. it's the conservatives that will immediately crash, not the liberals.

4) polievre's projected voters are young and being engaged by their phones. these voters are not high turnout and few will actually vote. polievre may actually have difficulty getting the vote out in ontario, particularly. conversely, the liberals' newfound dominance amongst older voters will result in a strong ground game in ontario and quebec and liberal turnout in these regions will exceed expectations. 

6) while the liberals consequently probably won't win more than a couple of seats west of winnipeg, they could wipe out the ndp in ontario and push the conservatives further out of the cities, and deeper into the farms and forests. but, this is only around ten seats, when you add them up.

7) it looks like the liberals are going to completely dominate montreal. conversely, it also looks like the bloc are set to sweep outside of montreal. i would expect the bloc to exceed expectations in rural quebec and probably get over 30 seats. this is going to give them the balance of power.

8) the polling in atlantic canada is frustrating, but i would not expect the liberals to sweep. the ndp are no longer competitive federally in the east. it's not clear if the liberals or conservatives are the main beneficiary, but eastern conservatives are also the type most likely to embrace carney over polievre. the east has old and young demographics. i actually wouldn't expect the existing map to change much, but the coalitions support the differing candidates are in flux.

i would suggest the outcome then is that the liberals win seats in ontario at the expense of the ndp and conservatives and everything else stays more or less the same. what is going to happen is that ndp voters are going to swing to the conservatives in urban areas, and the result is that the liberals will win those seats more easily, because the seats were two-way races between the liberals and ndp (these are seats the conservatives are not competitive in). however, the accompanying shift from the conservatives to the liberals in rural areas mostly won't have any substantive effect, except in the boundary point between suburban and rural (sometimes called exurban), where the liberals could steal a few ridings.

liberals will win seats in places like carleton, bay of quinte, barrie, peterborough, durham, vaughan, oshawa, hamilton, niagara, brantford, london and windsor, but it won't be enough. the conservatives will be having a very bad day if they lose thornhill.

result:

liberals: around 160 (gains almost solely in ontario, at the expense of the ndp and conservatives in urban and suburban seats)

conservatives: around 140 (gains mostly due to redistribution in rural regions)

bloc: around 30 - hold steadyish

ndp: around 10, almost entirely in bc. they may be shut out east of calgary.

green: exactly 2

there was a speech in the 90s where bill clinton explained that actual quebecois sovereignty, whatever the arguments in favour of it, would be economically moronic and result in a catastrophic outcome.

that's basically my opinion on quebecois nationalism - it's an utterly idiotic idea. it would destroy quebec in a week. in fact, the americans would probably invade quebec, rather than allow it to become a rogue state. there are clear contingency plans. 

clinton had the marines and the air force on red alert in 1995. they were on the brink of going in. they would have.

what happened after in the succession case and the clarity act is that existing canadian law says quebec has the right to declare independence if they can actually do it. this case is poorly understood in media. forget about ottawa - the americans won't let them do it.

it's not a serious issue at the moment. it was previously, and it might be again, but it probably won't be due to attempts by the federal government to reduce the relative number of quebecers in the province by overwhelming them with immigration from french-speaking countries in africa, the carribbean and asia. ottawa doesn't actually deny doing this.

as it is, the bloc are going to be the only social democratic and left leaning party left standing with a substantive number of seats, at least for the next couple of years. whether they like it or not, they're going to be the real opposition and the real left.

carney may find himself more ideologically aligned with polievre than with blanchet, but right-wing parties do not behave reasonably when placed in opposition, they just vote everything down. this is going to give the bloc a tremendous amount of power not just to advance the interests of quebec but to advance the interests of the left, and i'm going to be on their ass from here in windsor to make sure they do this right.

canada is not a nation-state, the way quebec might purportedly be. that is what he meant to say, and he's right - canada is an artificial colonial construction to organize territory conquered by an empire that no longer exists. it's also a failed state waiting to collapse.

but these two guys had better learn to get along, because the ndp is not going to have enough seats to help the liberals pass legislation any more.

what's unclear right now is if the liberals need one, two or three of the opposition parties onside to help them pass legislation, and if the conservatives do get over 140 seats, the answer could be all three. at the least, there doesn't appear to be any other outcome in front of us besides the necessity of a liberal-bloc agreement to pass a budget.

in fact, the bloc would appear to be the most left-wing party in the spectrum at the moment and the party i'd be most willing to vote for, if i could.

i don't plan to vote on monday, but my endorsement is for the green party.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/federal-election-2025/article/i-reject-them-completely-carney-on-blanchets-remarks-calling-canada-artificial-country/

israel should fight and win this in court.

there's certainly plenty of space to criticize israel's recent actions in gaza. i would agree they're distasteful actions, but the general crux of what israel is doing right now is required. others may disagree may forcefully, and there is plenty of room for subtlety.

however, the jurisdictional question is pretty clearly in israel's favour (you can't get out of the circular logic applied by the court and some western states) and the idea that israel has been intentionally starving the population has - at least until perhaps very recently - been entirely without merit. israel should defeat these specific charges, the way they are written, and that is what they should do, rather than something else.

https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-appeals-chamber-reverses-pre-trial-chambers-decision-israels

what happened to the ndp this election?

it's been clear for months - years - that singh was not going to be able to capitalize on the unpopularity of trudeau, which is a catastrophic failure. the ndp should have been the go-to after trudeau's collapse. 

but that is like playing around of the children's game, who made god. god. but who who made god? 

god.

so, why are the ndp dying? and, round and round you go, until you get to this:

this is the cause. this is not an effect.

what is happening to the ndp is that the ndp are sucking terribly at social media and it's utterly destroying them in the polls. this may be the first canadian election where social media truly overt takes television, and just look at that. ouch.

well, look at their leader, spokesperson and mascot.

listen, i've been saying this for years, and i'm not just being mean. i have a vested interest in a strong ndp. they need to exist. and this guy is a pr nightmare.

however, if you're paying attention, you really it's not just jagmeet singh that's tilting the party in this dead end direction. that graph is a cause, and mr. singh is the root cause of the graph. but mr. singh is a symptom of his party, and not the root cause within it.

if the ndp lose party status, they will have to make some hard choices on what they want to be in the future. they may double down, or they may try to refocus, but they'll never be what they were a mere few years ago. do upper middle class canadian migrants need a party of their own? maybe there's enough of them that they do.

the canadian left should focus strictly on the greens.

unfortunately, if the pa tried to take control of gaza, it would just restart the stalled civil war. the palestinian authority has absolutely no democratic legitimacy in gaza, and should have called an election in the west bank decades ago at this point. israel cannot allow a civil war to erupt in gaza, so an attempt by fatah to take control of gaza will just lead to more bombing in the west bank.

gaza needs to be placed under a foreign occupying force - and that force could include egyptians and turks. sure.  - until some very serious de-radicalization can be enforced, and fresh elections can be held.

fatah must be told in no uncertain terms that they are not welcome in gaza and violently kept out of it, if required.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-tells-sons-of-dogs-hamas-to-free-hostages-remove-israels-excuses-for-gaza-war/

my brain does this on me every single time, and it's true. do an a/b.

the term "highway to hell" is common enough in english that you see it relatively frequently. it was also a mega hit by the australian shit-rock or doofus-metal band, ac/dc in...i'm on the internet. i wasn't sure if it was late 70s or early 80s. it was 1979.

this is what my brain does on me:

"i'm on the highway to hell" comes in as the familiar, horrid unison full band screetch and then...

"...and i've been workin' like a dawwwg!"

because it's true.

they're actually the same song.

as far as i can tell, what this report is talking about already happened and it's called thatcher-reaganism, or neo-liberalism.

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/bell-canada-headed-highway-hell-government-probe-warns

the local universities should buy up entire buildings worth of these 100 square foot condos and turn them into affordable dorm rooms.

you couldn't do anything else with them - they have no use value. 

that could in turn potentially open up more actual housing for adults to move into.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11143718/condos-not-good-investment-ratesdotca/

meanwhile, papal scholars are struggling to make sense of the break down in infallibility that occurred when he insisted he would speak further on and and ask questions about the resurrection after he woke up.

i actually think the next pope should be hindu, so he can make history as the first hindu pope.

i've got it.

they should make pete hegseth pope.

he already has the hat-head.

what's my analysis of the election polls?

i think you're going to find it's a mirage. when polievre was running at 40%+ it was mirage, and carney running at 40%+ is also a mirage.

the question that you need to ask when looking at the numbers is if they're going to translate into seats, and it's unclear where. the liberals are actually up a lot in conservative areas, for the obvious reason that carney is a more convincing and appealing conservative than polievre. is that going to get them seats? where?

at most, a 10% bump in alberta might win them one seat. where's ralph? a 15% bump in saskatchewan might get his seat back.

the liberals are also up 5% in ontario, which is a lot of voters, but where are those voters? are they in safe liberal ridings? or is carney going to swing rural ontario?

if the liberals are going to win seats, it will probably be in quebec, but the three or four way split is tricky, and it may be the case that carney is just going to sweep montreal by huge margins.

i have a habit of making non-standard projections based on my reading of the polls, and i have flubbed it a few times, but i usually get it right when the mainstream media analysis doesn't.

right now, carney has nowhere to go but down, he peaked too early.

my projection: liberal minority. it might be a stronger liberal minority, but it will still be a liberal minority.

unfortunately, the ndp appears set to lose the balance of power, leaving it with the bloc, or resulting in an unworkable parliament.

sell it to them, with steep export taxes to generate revenue.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/canada-has-the-critical-minerals-donald-trump-wants-so-what-should-we-do-with-them/

it took them way too long to admit that this is not the time for austerity, and they can't cut their way to prosperity.

you have to invest to build.

this is relieving in some sense, in that they sound more like liberals, but i'm still wary and apprehensive. it is still too much of a focus on the military and not enough of a focus on social spending.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberal-platform-promises-130b-in-new-measures-over-4-years-adding-225b-to-federal-debt-1.7514272

there is no autism epidemic. it's overdiagnosed.

autism is real, but it's not a single disease. rather, it's a description of the process of specific genetic mutations that decrease the fitness of the individual. these should not be seen as mistakes, and are not genetic replication gone wrong, but are how evolution works, by trial and error. autistic people are nature's experiments; this is how our dna does experiments to see what works and what fails. sometimes mutations are good; that's called natural selection. sometimes they aren't and lead to genetic unfitness, and those genes don't replicate. there's thousands of bad genetic mutations that create unhelpful phenotypes and we collectively call that autism. some of the most common mutations, like down's syndrome, have names. they're all fundamentally, mechanistically, the same thing.

this is the necessary side effect of the process in which our genome uses trial and error in order to guess mutations that make us stronger. it's necessary that some must be born unfit in order to have some that are born with higher fitness. this is only upsetting in the sense that it upends the calvinist basis of american christian charitable dogooding. most cultures, historically, would think this is obvious and normal and not be bothered by it at all.

humans are unique. the unfit should be treated with dignity, but they are what they are, and they cannot be cured, nor can they be eliminated. to eliminate autism would be to end evolution. we should not desire genetic stagnation. our genome must continue to experiment, which will produce both failures and successes.

however, 95% of the kids being diagnosed with autism don't have genetic mutations and don't have anything physically wrong with them, they just have shitty parents that abuse and neglect them and are suffering from a deficit of attention and love. what they need is a hug.

this is the cure for "autism" that rfk really seeks - better parenting. more love. more hugs for abused kids.

what america has is a child abuse and child neglect epidemic brought on by lack of access to contraception and abortion and subsequent overworked two income families, not an autism epidemic.

does howard lutnick remind anybody else of hank scorpio?

i'm just saying.

the economic theory being developed by trump is actually sarcastically called "fully automated luxury communism" by cynical post-leftists trying to grapple with the real-world consequences of superproduction within a capitalist mode of production, which isn't how it was supposed to happen. the capitalists were supposed to insist on artificial scarcity and empower us via employment, which would be their downfall. oops.

i'm in favour of reshoring superproduction, but we're supposed to get a guaranteed income out of it, not be told to go starve in the ditch. the proletariat of the future is supposed to be like me - overeducated due to emancipation from labour, and able to focus on esoteric art and literature, instead.

see, this is where you have to bring in some concept of eugenics. like, actually. not dumb racism, but some way to better the human race. so that communism doesn't become idiocracy.

let the robots do the work. great. but we have to have distributive justice. maybe it's not quite as rigorously held to marx as some would like, but we need some way for the masses to take advantage of this rather than be bludgeoned by it.

i didn't think it would happen until it did.

i've slept in a hotel the last three nights. that's it. i'm evicted.

i talked to the new case management judge on friday and he seemed perplexed. he didn't like what he was learning about the case and seemed to want to undo it but there's no precedent for this. if the court in the end rules a mistake was made, as one clearly was, i am not going to get the apartment back. rather, i'm going to get a giant payout for damages, which are now substantive.

there is some tentative preliminary evidence that the gross freaks followed me here, but i need to be careful before i start accusing anybody of anything, in context. i don't have a lease here.

i've seen a few apartments over the last few days and will see a few more this week. i need to get in some where immediately.

i've also finally converted my agptek mp4 player (running android 8) into a wifi phone using voip. it's basically a cell phone without a sim card so i have no network access but i'm able to make voip calls over wifi, if i'm in coverage. chances are pretty high nowadays that you're going to be close enough to a bank or fast food restaurant at almost all times, but i actually bought it because i wanted to be able to do things like scan qr codes. i am going to, for the first time, find myself carrying a cell-like device, even if it's actually a mp4 player running voip over wifi and not actually a cell phone.

i've been busy and i'm going to remain busy but the first order of business when i get this lease signed is redesigning computer setups and network paths.

this is all the more frustrating because i was and am still right and the court has to this point been wrong. it will work itself out in the end, but i've already suffered an extreme injustice, and the only solution at this point is monetary. it's something to look forward to, but the situation right now is pretty awful.

i don't know right now, in the end, if i'd rather go through the bullshit for a bigger payout or if i would have preferred to avoid all of this and not get compensated for the subsequent hardship. if i do end up with 20-30K in total damages, that is going to buy me a house and that will solve this problem of housing once and for all. i'll certainly be better off, at the cost of 2-3 years of torment and hell. it sort of doesn't matter; there's no longer a choice. this can't be undone, all they can do is pay me for it.

the liberals are massively ahead in the polls, but dilbert has repeatedly refused to work them, anyways. this is legitimately not acceptable in canadian politics, but it sort of doesn't matter because the damage is so far gone. unfortunately, dilbert has actually run in the centre to centre left of the windsor mayoral field, which has tended to be pro-business. there hasn't been a good replacement option.

if people were naive, they shouldn't be, and any lingering confusion about the mayor's politics should no longer exist.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/windsor/article/dilkens-voices-robocall-for-poilievre-rally-raising-questions-over-political-neutrality/

i'm telling you - market canadian dairy as growth hormone free in the states.

i don't know why they don't.

(some) people will pay a premium for it.

the houthis are in the middle of a volcanic field.

if we could trigger the volcanic flow, we could literally rain hellfire on them.

that would feel good.

this isn't quite what i'm imagining.

these bombs are like giant icepicks that use gravity to cut through a structure before detonating.

i actually think we should be able to put a robot on the tip of the bomb that excavates through the structure, so that it's less a question of using the physics of mass to smash your way through in a collision and more like throwing a dart at a mountain that can burrow it's way through it when it gets there like a giant metallic groundhog before letting it rip mid mountain.

i wonder if you could actually trigger an inactive volcano using the same mechanism. that would be pretty brutal.

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

empires are sometimes conquered, and sometimes collapse.

more often, the empires that are the most stable and last the longest are eventually overrun by illegal immigration and taken over by barbarians. trump is a dolt, but he's basically right about this - the barbarians are our greatest real threat.

the ongoing barbarian houthi pestilence may justify r&d spending on new weapons designed to direct payloads underground. these weapons could also be used against hezbollah and eventually against iran. i'm imagining something launched by ship that lands at pinpoint precision and burrows into the ground before it detonates remotely. this would be well within our engineering capabilities to get a prototype for almost immediately.

that's right.

these are our enemies. they are barbarians, and we will need to fight them forever. there is no end to this war, and we have to fight it continually, with resolve, or they will destroy us.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/06/middleeast/us-airstrikes-yemen-houthis-may-be-relishing-them-intl/index.html

you're not going to hear this critique from the soft-left.

this article is not left wing, it's boiler-plate neoliberalism, pushing the idea that developing markets get better with foreign investment and more property rights. yuck.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/06/trumps-tariffs-may-be-perilous-for-small-heavily-indebted-countries-in-global-south

if you are a member of the trump administration (and somebody is reading this), and you do care about eradicating child labour, you have an opportunity here. this is in alignment with the administration's goals. the reordering of global trade could very well occur with global standards on child labour, if it is guided that way. it is your responsibility and opportunity to get that done.

this just in: kathy lee gifford is organizing a major protest against trump's trade policy, with a million wive march planned to descend on the capital.

the 50% import tax on goods from vietnam and india might be frightening to people that base their profits on child labour, but there's an upside to that. these are not countries that even import raw materials to north america, their export economy is almost solely designed around the exploitation of child labour.

i would rather see punishing taxes levied on an economy that relies on child labour than free trade with them.

that's not what anybody in trump's administration is thinking, except maybe tulsi gabbard. sometimes you can see unintended upsides in the policies of opponents.

inflation aside, if the us dollar survives that, this might not land badly, after it explodes.

these tariffs are probably the biggest threat to the greenback since the nixon shock.

from what i can tell, trump isn't fundamentally altering anything in the relative trade balances. he put steep tariffs on almost all of east asia, and also put steep tariffs on europe. he put lower tariffs on canada, mexico and most of latin america. that would means that north and south america remain preferred trading partners, relatively speaking.

it's really just a giant, huge consumption tax hike.

and it should result in subsequent giant, huge inflationary effects, although it remains to be seen if it can remain localized in america or not. canada is inevitably going to get hit with the inflation.

there is some possibility of this going zimbabwe-like, but i don't think it's that high. the fear is if the inflation starts feeding back. if that happens, it gets out of control.

these consumption sites reduce the spread of aids and other communicable diseases from needle sharing, which is a net public health benefit and saves the taxpayer untold millions of dollars on unnecessary treatments. to some extent, they also speed the inevitable process of overdose up.

the focus should be spent on prevention. i can't imagine why anybody would choose to take any kind of opiate, given the media around it, but they do.

that said, i would also like to see a national investigation into the conditions in which people become addicted to opiates in hospitals. i've had to push my way out of emergency rooms out of fear of being injected. they are aggressive enough that it opens up a lot of questions about kickbacks. drug companies should not be permitted to pay doctors to prescribe anything, but there needs to be a strong prohibition and crackdown on doctors getting paid to prescribe opiates, and there needs to be much more stringent consent clauses worked into people getting injected with opiates when they're unconscious. apparently, well over half of opiate addicts first got injected when they were unconscious and wake up addicted.

life saving healthcare should not come attached to a life ending addiction.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/election-2025-day-15-campaign-promises-1.7503265

even if the steel and auto plants only idle temporarily in the long run, there's still a great opportunity to retrain hidden in the layoffs, which have already started.

have you recently been laid off due to the tariffs? get a construction hat. you're needed.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/housing-affordability-construction-canada-1.7499260

it's quite the swing in the canadian election polls. why is mark carney polling so well?

canada needed to get past justin trudeau. the country was sick of him. polievre was the guy running, but he was clearly unelectable. a lot of people opined when he was running at 40% that it was a mirage and that would never happen. carney is the escape mechanism people needed.

however, he's also going through his honeymoon phase in the course of an election and that is dangerous. i don't quite understand the movement from the bloc and ndp to carney, other than that..

mark carney is not a politician, so he made the most obvious mistake a rookie politician can make in canada, which is running on hockey. he's not running on his record as a banker or on his ability to fight trump or on what he would do to fix the housing crisis, he's running on hockey. the rookie mistake is actually working.

for now.

it's going to blow up. so, the liberals better hope they do get a majority.

can we get a nice spot in siberia for the gazans?

listen, i actually support this. it's required. what else do you do with these barbarians that won't give up? they think they're going to win, eventually. you have to pack them up and move them out.

as marco rubio would say, and perhaps he ought to, let us dispel once and for all with the fiction that there will ever be a palestinian state in the levant.

the world needs to move on. i want a less insane way, but we've got what we've got.

gaza delenda est.

we all know this is true.

can we say it out loud?

donald trump is a stalinist.

somebody is going to stand up and say,

i think america should make the stuff and buy the stuff. it even kind of makes sense, because you buy the stuff with the money you make selling the stuff. we don't need to do one or the other.

it sounds reasonable. but, it is unfortunately very naive.

in practice, albeit not in theory, that is the system we labeled communism in the 20th century. that was "really existing communism" when it really existed. oversimplified. nobody's expecting that, but it does seem to be what's in the back of don the coyote's sneaky head, and i don't think he fully realizes it.

the president is not supposed to run the economy from the oval office. that's not what "commander in chief" means.

congress would be correct to pare back powers.

the reality is that the president isn't using his authority well, correctly or appropriately.

reciprocal tariffs aren't about reciprocity or even about tariffs, they're about trade deficits. trump is irritated by countries that sell americans more than america sells them, but that's how the system was designed - everything comes to the centre of the empire. trump fundamentally, foundationally doesn't get it, or is at least pretending not to.

if you want to evade the wrath, then, you should sell less items to the united states, and that's what the policy will result in if it suceeds, the united states being removed from the centre of global commerce. i suppose that would most likely return europe to the centre of the global economy, as china's middle class is still far too small to adopt that purpose. trump's attempt to punish europe will re-establish the pre-nixonian status quo. our neo-nixon is going to undo the old one.

this isn't so complicated, really. somebody needs to make the stuff and somebody needs to buy the stuff. for the last 50 years, since the nixon shock, america has bought the stuff and china has made the stuff. before that, america used to make the stuff, and europe bought the stuff (china was cut out). this was supposed to be the postwar order - europe buying the stuff america makes. it did work well for america, but nixon blew it up and there's a narrative in the investor class that americans had become lazy and entitled, which there is some truth to. there was a particular push back on white people, who won reforms in the union era, pushing for civil rights for black people to mirror those reforms; rather than help pull the blacks up, the bankers reacted by pushing the whites back down off the ladder to whence they came. progress was over. go back to the fields, okie; it's feudalism all over again.

we can pinpoint where this whole progress thing broke to a few months in 1971 and it's been falling apart into smaller pieces ever since.

does trump want to bring that back? i don't think his intent is to go back to 1970, but he seems to want to immediately undo nixon first and foremost, and, i mean, that's what american workers would indeed want. this being in the centre of the empire thing benefits the banks, not the workers. the workers want to make the stuff and sell it. 

what's unclear is whether this is a quixotic journey by an individual named donald trump to save the world economy or if the system is desiring this outcome, potentially as it gears up for a world war. if it has already been decided that there will be a war, america needs to reshore. this seems feeble and wrongheaded, but is it a function of incompetence or irrelevance?

we're not used to seeing america or americans act like this. they're supposed to know what they're doing, or convincingly bullshit it. anybody can see that trump has no clue and that nobody around trump has a clue, either. i don't think there's a precedent for this outside of the worst roman emperors.

if america seriously wants to make the stuff again and re-establish other countries - canada, europe south america, the midde east - as export markets rather than suppliers of raw goods and finished products, it is going to need to do more than this to get to that end point. massive government investment to rebuild industry would be a start. they will need to make some kind of deal with east asia to get wages up or get cut out again. if they had an excuse 50 years ago, they don't anymore.

if it is merely trying to create a revenue generating import tax to offset other revenue streams (like income taxes), that, however, might work quite well. after all, americans are reliant on imports.