there's an old saying, "wouldn't even harm a mouse".

i have some rodents in my ceiling. they appear to be eating out of the kitchen in the apartment upstairs and nesting in the crawl space behind my laundry area, which i can't really get at, and which has a tremendous draft. rodents are pesky, and i can't say with certainty that they aren't coming in here, but i have all of the food sealed quite tightly and i haven't seen any traces of them in here. i've only seen the droppings in the laundry and i only hear them in the ceiling. there's no signs of chew marks on anything, and there's nothing missing.

i have gotten a few glimpses of them crawling around in the ceiling; i think they're large mice, but they might be small rats. i don't know. i'll have to catch a few to be sure.

however, if it's a mouse, and i think it is, this mouse is not afraid of me. it runs right by the taped over hole in the ceiling when i'm in the bathroom and seems to be nesting exactly where i spend the most time. it even squeaks when i come in to the bathroom, as though it's happy to see me. it seems to think i'm it's friend.

this is making me wonder where these rodents came from, as they seem more like domesticated mice than sewer rats. or, maybe it's a psy-op jedi mind trick by the sneaky rat, to trick me into thinking it's a cuddly wittle mouse, so i won't kill it. whatever the truth is, i have to get them out of here.

i'm unhappy about this. i don't want to kill them; they aren't brainless roaches or mind-hive ants, they have some level of intelligence, as i'm experiencing. but i have no option. they're truly disgusting, filthy creatures.

would i not even harm a mouse? the mouse seems to think so. and i wish i could just scare them off, but that's not going to work.

there are some glue traps set in two places and i'll probably know what i'm dealing with in a day or two.

trump just bought a fusion company.

is that based on insider information?

this demonstrates the problem in letting market advocates deal with carbon pollution.

there is no market or corporate friendly solution to the climate crisis. you have to make rules and order businesses to follow them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/methane-regulations-canada-9.7017132

i am not an expert in psychohistory.

there is no such thing as psychohistory.

it was clearly a tactical/strategic mistake for canada to avoid levying export taxes on the united states in an attempt to appease them. our liberals are appeasing donald trump. why would anyone have expected otherwise? we might have had leverage to trade something with the united states, to gain concessions and preferable outcomes. now, we have nothing to trade, so they're just going to bully us around and tell us what to do, instead.

carney has bent over backwards to do everything trump has ordered him to do, including changing domestic legislation, and it has had no effect on donald trump at all, other than to embolden him.

but, if we just give them the sudetenland, like they ask for, they'll surely behave more reasonably.

as the old saying goes, it appears as though we've been playing checkers, while the americans are playing a game of chess against us.

we don't just look weak and easily manipulated. we look stupid. 

and we don't even realize it.

it's not too late to levy export taxes in an attempt to gain leverage, but it won't have the same effect, it will look weak and desperate.

that being said, there is a smart analysis, here. what does donald trump want out of this? i think that if you're careful in your analysis of his behaviour, it's to conclude that the outcome isn't really the goal. trump is not driven by results. that is the part of this that the too rational liberal party can't get it's head around. if we're rational why isn't he rational, too?

logically, you ought to be able to give a lion hunks of meat everyday, and have a happy well-fed lion, but it won't act that way. the lion needs to be a lion; it needs to hunt.

for donald trump, this is all performative. he doesn't care if he gets the best deal for america, in the end. it doesn't matter if carney does everything ordered of him. trump wants to negotiate. that's why he likes the arabs so much, under the facade.

i am highly critical of middle eastern religion, and i am also highly critical of market economics. in fact, these things go hand in hand. it was carthaginian markets that ruled the mediterrannean before the romans showed up and burned them down. the romans intentionally destroyed their history, so we know much less about this than we should, but we know that if you show up at a market - a bazaar - in northern africa even today and you offer to just buy something at an advertised price, they will throw you out. paying an advertised price for something is insulting. no - they want to barter, they want to negotiate, they want to trade, they want to make a deal.

we need to stop appeasing donald trump and start arguing with him.

if we give him a good argument, a good tussle, a good fight, a sporting competition, but to be clear are sure to let him win in the end, we're much more likely to come out of this ahead than if we show up and prostrate ourselves and make ourselves look compliant and weak. 

trudeau's mistake is that he won the debate. carney's mistake is that he's not debating with him at all.

we have british liberals as our natural governing party in this country but we're not taking advantage of it and don't even realize that that's what donald trump is. we need to look at it like a good sprightly dog hunt.

send them john manley as the new ambassador and tell him to play his surname up a little.

the caq is on paper the right-wing version of the pq, or the pq's right flank forming it's own party, but that is misleading, as they would be considered centre to centre-left by most global metrics. they are secularist, oppose oil pipelines, are pro-abortion (and unusually feminist by any standards, as that is a cultural assumption in quebec), etc. calling this a conservative party is awkward, even if they are the most right-wing party in quebec's spectrum, which nobody disputes. they are not particularly fiscally conservative, and didn't run on it; they ran on secularism and on fighting religious authorities to expand rights for women and queers.

quebec is a very left-wing place, in a more traditional left-wing context than you see today in europe or the united states, where the spectrum has turned on it's head. for that reason, the ndp doesn't do well in this unusually left-wing district, as it has abandoned socialism and embraced identity politics.

it was very weird for this right-wing flank of the pq to win in the first place, and it was more of a refection of internal collapse in the pq, and a general consensus amongst quebeckers that the liberals are unacceptable at the provincial level, partly because they are too pro-immigration (which is a right-wing/capitalist position in a traditional socialist discourse, which argues for low immigration levels, degrowth and sustainable birth rates). the party swung to the caq to give the pq time to rebuild itself, without bring forced to elect the liberals to do it.

what's developing is an isolated spectrum in quebec, but that's not unusual in canada. bc, alberta and saskatchewan have political spectrums that are unique to them and the liberals basically don't exist west of winnipeg at this point, while the conservative parties are all distinct from the federal conservative party. that is because canada is a collection of smaller colonies from three main sources - indigenous, english and french - that are spread out across the country (much of manitoba and saskatchewan was french, too, although not in the louisiana purchase) and united for security and economics, and not a nation state in the sense that england or france are.

it is likely that quebec will alternate between the caq and the pq for the near future, with the liberals being the party that falls off and is banished, unless it's able to redefine itself as being a party of quebeckers instead of a party of foreigners, which is how it's seen by most quebeckers right now. this march of the liberal party to obscurity in quebec at the provincial level will mirror it's obscurity in the west, and may foreshadow similar outcomes in manitoba and ontario in the near future.

manitoba seems to be on the same path as the western provinces, while ontario is in a bit of a contradiction. ontario is not a conservative jurisdiction, which is the reason the liberals can't beat out the ndp to win an election and the conservatives are currently in power. but the ndp scares a lot of the canadian left, for the reason that it isn't a traditional left, it's an initially christian left populist party that has become a kind of bourgeois party for the canadian nouveau riche. a raging socialist like myself really sees almost nothing of value in the ndp at all and, if you understand the history, the reality is the liberals have actually often been closer to traditional socialism, and pushing down socialist options to fight the free market alternatives pushed by the ndp, which is the reason we're so much more socialist - the liberals were, for years, a democratic socialist party in disguise, while the ndp were a progressive capitalist party and often on their right. people were generally confused by how this worked, but content with the outcomes, so they held with it. what took it down was a corruption scandal in the early 00s led by an rcmp investigation, which always stunk of political interference, but was never seen that way by naive canadian political analysts. the liberal party has emerged from this early 00s collapse and purge as a much more right-wing version of it's previous self, and carney has taken the final plunge, re-aligning the party with classical liberal style thatcherism. he has yet to face a verdict on that, but i don't think canadians are going to be happy about this, once they understand it better. the problem, right now, is that there is no alternative to thatcherism.

one example is healthcare, where the supposedly socialist ndp was actually pushing this group insurance model and building support for it, which forced the liberals to step in and say "look, this is bullshit. this won't work. we don't want this obamacare before obamacare. this solves nothing. if you want healthcare, we kind of agree, and we'll just build an nhs, instead. that will actually work, and will be a better use of public money than just pooling insurance contributions to get lower premiums. we're an advanced economy; we won the war and we can build a proper healthcare system like the homeland did. we shouldn't be hobbling together premiums like a third world country, and we won't allow that. we have some pride in ourselves. so, you can have your healthcare. it will be good for the economy, which is what we care about, and something which we understand better than most.". 

ontario may need to create a new party to get out of the funk it's in, as the liberals decline in the west, and the ndp declines in the east, leaving it stuck in between.

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2214606/pq-lead-in-polls-wont-last-referendum-promise-will-turn-off-quebecers-legault-says

yeah, and the next step is to identify the diploma mills, identify them as such and shut them down.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/fanshawe-enrolment-9.7018222

i'm an advocate of moderate de-growth. global population levels should certainly be less than 5 billion and canada's population should be less than 25 million.

this is a good thing.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-population-falls-9.7019359

have you ever noticed that donald trump often looks like a grouchy ostrich?

this is the other reason, which nobody talks about, that exporting oil to asia is a bad idea.

the reasons are:

1) no business case

2) environmentally harmful

3) it will enrage washington and put us under threat of something far worse than tariffs.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gej5ezyypo

is figure skating an area in particular need of fair rules for trans participants?

it probably is.

as norm macdonald famously asked the world from the weekend update desk,

if elvis stojko is such a good skater, why doesn't he just play hockey?

this is an interesting development after the swimming bodies took the opposite position.

i don't like competition. i'm not going to follow this. but i am trans, and i'm beginning to view this consideration as a litmus test regarding whether society is behaving rationally or not, given that there are a lot of issues in determining what's fair and what isn't and reducing it strictly to birth sex is the least rigorous way possible.

i have in the past suggested eliminating the gender category and focusing on tiers like weight, height and age instead.

https://edmonton.citynews.ca/2025/12/16/skate-canada-alberta-transgender/

doug ford is infinitely worse than ron desantis.

the rdsp account i opened isn't quite what i thought. i wanted to open an account that would let me buy individual penny stocks, in addition to mutual funds (or etfs) and would give me maximum flexibility to move money in the account around a bit. the bank i went to only sells mutual funds with rdsps. it turns out that what i want is a "self-directed rdsp", and the options for that are slim. the only institution that has something more like the account i want requires a 20K minimum balance to avoid a $100/year fee, which is coming soon, and still less than the difference in management fees.

i will need to make some calls in the morning. however, i'm probably going to switch banks immediately.

this reflects a bias in the white house and longstanding reaganite policy to prop up arab crazies to fight the communists, who they see as trying to restrict their "religious freedom" and are therefore seen as reliable allies, but negates history and empirical reality on the ground.

remember that jared kushner said the administration doesn't think history matters, which is the most retarded thing i've ever heard.

the reality is that gaza has almost no history inside of the arab world, as it's been under turkish rule since the crusades and was a key part of the roman empire until the 7th century, at the latest. the region was periodically under some kind of arab occupation for a few centuries from about 700-1000 that ended over a thousand years ago. the gulf monarchies have had no control over this area for many centuries and really have no business trying to decide it's future.

the problem is that most decision makers in washington just don't know that; they think the region must be arab because it's muslim, which itself is even not really true. they're also propping up the arabs to keep the iranians out. unlike the arab peninsula, persia actually has a long history in gaza, and that's not going to work due to the geography, specifically the massive desert, which we should not forget is partly manmade from overfarming. the fact that the gulf monarchies have all of this money all of a sudden doesn't open up a royal road from the desert to damascus.

if you don't understand history, or don't care, or understand it poorly, you're likely to create the same mistakes over and over. 

at some point, the fact that recent attempts by monarchist gulf arabs to colonize the levant with radical versions of islam are the cause of most of the problems on the ground rather than the solution to the instability needs to be understood to get passed this. 

take solace in the realization that the oil is running out, the temperatures in the area are climbing to uninhabitable levels and the small area of the region that is fertile after millennia of desertification is falling into the sea. this attempt to make arabia great again won't last much longer. their towers will fall, and their cities will crumble. the people of the levant need to tough it out.

our society's reliance on oil will cause it to make bad decisions and align with bad actors. i've said many times that if you want much of this to end, you should start by boycotting, divesting and sanctioning the oil industry as best as you can.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-hosts-forum-in-qatar-on-international-gaza-force-with-turkey-reportedly-left-out/

The group is on a sponsored travel trip organized by a Canadian registered non-profit charity organization, the Canadian Muslim Vote.

that sentence describes a large amount of what is wrong with canada, right now.

why doesn't canada just become the eighth province of rhodesia?

introducing the new prime minister of canada.....

....lord milner!

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2214382/ottawa-approves-merger-of-teck-and-anglo-american

there are not more than two people in canada that want to suffer through jenny kwan's analysis of israel's settlement activity in historical judaea, and the canadian parliament has no jurisdiction over the region and can do nothing but play politics with the situation, which should be seen as unwelcome by both sides. it is not clear to me that anybody in palestine wants to talk to jenny kwan, and i wouldn't be surprised if she found nobody to talk to there. on that level, israel was correct to deny entry; these people were in the region solely to cause problems. they have no mandate, as canadian representatives, to comment on domestic issues in other countries; it's a performative behaviour directed at a subset of their voting coalition that has no relevance to their job description.

the recent history in canada is pretty clear: politicians that publicly side with palestine are constantly punished for it. don't be surprised if a majority of those six mps lose re-election as a consequence of this botched pr stunt, which has no valid purpose in the context of the canadian parliament. canadian voters are correct to ask why their representatives are flying around the world and meddling in foreign states instead of representing their constituents in canada.

that said, my understanding is that they would be surprised by what they found. the people that live in the west bank have deeper ties to israel than gazans do; a large percentage of them know their ancestors were hebrew and jews, and many families only converted to islam in recent memory, partly as a part of the arab revolt in world war two. gazans are less hebrew in ancestry, and have a lot of african slave admixture, due to the region being a part of egypt and being on the coast, where more slave trading happened during arab and ottomon occupation periods. that is the reason that so many gazans are dark-skinned; indigenous jews should be light-skinned to olive-skinned, but gaza is mostly african in ancestry, and so it is much darker than the west bank, israel proper, lebanon or syria. the violent resistance movement in gaza is almost entirely absent in the west bank, where many people see israeli annexation as a way out of exclusion and segregation, and are more interested in integration than "resistance". hamas is not popular in the west bank and the general position is that fighting the jews is stupid and self-defeating. they want jobs in israeli cities, they don't want more bombs and violence.

if you speak the language, you can converse with these people online, if you are interested in them in a non-professional capacity,  which should be the level of interest broadcast by the canadian mps. the west bank is not cut off from the world the way that iran is. if they were to talk to people over facebook, they might get a different perspective than what state-controlled media in the unfree dictatorships in the gulf countries are trying to manufacture.

they may have found that a surprising number of inhabitants in the west bank, which i will reiterate largely have hebrew ancestry, are actually in favour of annexation by israel. because how else can they improve their material conditions? bombing israel is stupid, and the west bank seems to have figured that out, while gaza is still struggling with it.

that would be utterly retarded and a giant step further into the backwards free market dystopia we've been suffering through since thatcher.

library books should be shipped entirely at taxpayers' costs, at no cost to the library at all, and it doesn't matter if canada post runs at a loss to do that. the problem in front of us is this utterly idiotic idea that canada post should be profitable. canada post should not be profitable, it *should* run at a loss; that is the reason we have a publicly owned post system, and why it was determined as a necessary government function in a working society several hundred years ago.

removing publicly owned mail delivery is a giant step on the road back to free market feudalism.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/2025/12/15/ctv-national-news-will-canada-post-increase-rates-for-shipping-library-books/

in the not so distant past, the british intentionally used opium - manufactured in british india - as a weapon of mass destruction against the chinese, and it worked extremely well. it essentially destroyed the chinese revival after the mongols in it's tracks, leaving the chinese insular and unable to keep up with a changing world. the british just wanted hong kong as a trading colony; they almost got wiped out by the russians and japanese in succession.

the chinese have no doubt learned from this, and would have reason to weaponize opium, or synthetic opium, and use it against the british, which are now the americans, as a tactic of revenge. that actually makes sense.

but there's no real evidence of this. the chinese are exporting the precursor materials, but they're made for cleaning supplies, and the chinese export everything.

this is not in the realm of fantasy, but looking into the eyes of nicolas maduro and seeing a plot to dismantle america with addiction is not real, and the data's just not there.

assad was worth standing up for, as he was the only moderate in the area, and the alternative was the bloodthirsty islamic fascists that biden let walk into damascus. the venezuelan opposition is not so scary, and maduro is as big an asshole as they get.

trump's behaviour is illegal, and he should be called out for it, but you won't see me lift a carpal tunnel damaged pinkie to stand up for the dictator of venezuela. this guy is a doofus. bolivarianism died with chavez.

this isn't greaser slang, it's self-deprecation.

so, scat is apparently 60s greaser lingo for "fuck off".

i'm still not sure how that makes sense. it's better than calling it a pile of shit, but it just puts words into the lady's mouths for them, because you will be told to fuck off, repeatedly, if you buy this car.

are there enough aging boomer fonzis at this point to justify a vehicle line?

or is this exhibit a of why north american car manufacturing is in an existential crisis?

introducing the brand new dodge scat:

it's every bit as shit as you remember it!

The Windsor Assembly Plant recently launched production of the new SIXPACK-powered, two-door 2026 Dodge Charger Scat Pack. 

everybody has known for years that dodge vehicles are shit, but i never thought they'd market them that way.

what the fuck is a scat pack? because it reads literally as a pile of shit, which is the perfect description of a dodge, which dodge would presumably want to avoid.

that third shift at the assembly plant keeps businesses open late in this area. when they shut the third shift, they closed the 24 hour grocery store, the 24 hour drug store and a handful of all night diners, which pissed me off because i sometimes like to go shopping at 3 am, if i'm coming home late from somewhere, or if i'm just taking advantage of the weather to get some exercise. hopefully, those stores will bring back their old hours, now.

we only tend to get about a weekend of winter all year in windsor nowadays. if we got it early this year, that's probably it. 

i'd expect a warm january and spring by early february.

i've been very loud about how disgusted i've been by nato's position in syria for decades, as it aggressively funded conservative, religious terrorist organizations to overthrow a secular democracy because it happened to have russian backing. the position that nato took in syria exposes every lie about western democracy that there is in the most brutal manner possible.

my solidarity is with the secularists, the apostates, the socialists and the democrats on the ground, which represent an overwhelming majority in syria, and which backed assad as a lesser evil. the reason assad did not fall is that he was popular and represented syrian popular opinion, which was and remains in opposition to religious tyranny, theocracy and autocracy. syria, unlike lebanon, is an arab state, but it's history is older, and syria was deeply tied into the persian, greek and roman worlds. it's people are mostly white, there is a large christian minority and the culture is moderate and secular and believes in democracy. syria is not a religious society and the syrian people do not want to live under theocracy or to be oppressed by islamic fascism. in fact, syria would be a more likely candidate as a european union member state, in the long run, than as a member of the arab league.

however, a false dichotomy in nato military doctrine going back to jimmy carter that is fundamentally about supporting islamic fascists as a bulwark against communism led to the collapse of the middle east's only arab democracy (i don't consider lebanon to be arab), and the region's most moderate state, in order to advance the goals of bloodthirsty autocrats in riyadh and try to steal a deepwater port from the russians.

it bother me that liberal media buys into this so fully. assad was not an ideal figure head, but he was a popular leader and he was effectively preventing the country's collapse into backwardsness. it is very sad that he failed to prevent the saudis from destroying the country, but you can't fault him for trying. in the end, the russians gave up - assad and syria got traded for something, but it's not yet clear what that was.

my solidarity remains with the secularists on the ground as they seek to overthrow the fascist nato-backed government and return syria to democracy.

it would make sense to shop at dollarama if you lack somewhere to store your food, and are just going meal to meal. that is a lot of people, admittedly - couch surfers. people camping out, the actual homeless or people living in their cars. anybody with a kitchen should go to walmart and look for items in bulk.

dollarama's business model is based on shrinkflating everything and then tricking you into thinking it's cheaper, when you're actually paying more for less.

so, you'll walk in and buy a can of soup at dollarama that is 10% less than retail and think you got a deal, without realizing it's 25% smaller. they do this for everything they can package, and it is rare that you're saving money; you're usually actually overpaying.

but you can't tell that if you lack grade school numeracy and cannot do basic math in your head, which is the sad truth for many canadians.

what it shows is that consumers aren't very good at math. that's why the company is seeing record profits.

when it comes to groceries, dollarama is actually usually a brutal ripoff, and what it sells has low to zero nutritional value.

the cheapest grocery store in canada for almost everything is walmart, but i also buy specific items at freshco, superstore and food basics. giant tiger is worth shopping at. if you can buy in bulk at wholesale or get into costco for free, you should. you want to avoid dollarama, shopper's drug mart and zehr's, usually, although they sometimes have sales. bulk barn is also often a brutal rip-off.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/consumers-are-suffering-why-more-canadians-are-shopping-at-dollarama/

i've been utterly exhausted for weeks and think it's more psychological than physical.

i don't want to waste any more time on this court fight, but i have no choice. i have documents to write and don'y want to.

i have shape around these investment decisions now, which is something else that i more have to do than want to do. i shouldn't bitch and complain about the free cash, really. planning for when you get older is something you have to do at some point, and the government is making it easier for me to catch up, which i should be appreciative of, even if i'd rather be pulling my fingernails out.

i made a conscious choice to avoid having children, which makes it that much more important to ensure i put some money aside for when i'm older, and i'm about to get on that. i want my life to be about me. i don't mind relying on state systems, but i despise relying on people. this fell into my lap without even thinking about it, but it's actually kind of ideal, for me.

so, what cheap stocks should i buy with the free money? send me an email.

no, i want to get as much in as fast as i can.

4500*1.1^5 - 4500 = 2747.295

that's the potential growth on the dropped 4500 if i only get $6000 instead of $10500 up front.

even if i put $3000 in, and get $9000, the loss is still:

1150*1.1^5-1150 = $700.

i might not be able to get the full $3500, but i should put as much in as i can and recalculate on jan 1st to ensure i'm hitting the max and not over contributing. that said, i'll also want to get in as much as i can, as fast as i can, to the max.

i'll call in the morning.

starting in early 2027, i will be switching to putting minimum $450/month in, until 2030. this will be roughly what they give me for the cohb and probably maximum potential contributions.

in fact, this account should open with $11000, not $10,000, and i'm going to be able to get $16000 out if the max $20000, not $15000. i should get $1000 for every year back to 2015 plus the $1000 for 2025 and, because it's the end of the year, i should get it all right away.

i'm pretty sure the carry forward doesn't run out after ten years but i'm going to cal to make sure.

nonetheless, if i only put $2000 in by the end the year, which would be $500 each for 2015-2018, and subsequently only received $6000 immediately, how would i recalculate?

the max for 2026 will then be 500 for 2019-2025 (7*500 is 3500 multiplied by 3 is $10500). 3500/12 ~300. that may be more attractive to me to start if i can't get a lump sum in from family.

the max for 2027 will be 500 for 2026 ($1500) plus 1000 for the first four years (2015-2018) (4000*2 = 8000) plus $500 more for 2019 ($1000), which is $5000. 500/12 ~ 420.

the max for 2028 will be 500 for 2027 ($1500) plus $500 for 2019 ($1000) plus $1000 for the next four years (2020-2023), which is again $5000 and again ~420/month.

the max for 2029 would be 500 for 2028 ($1500) + $1000 each for 2024-2027 ($8000) + $500 more for 2028 ($1000). same contributions.

the max for 2030 would be 500 for 2029 ($1500) + 500 for 2028 ($1000) + 1000 for 2029 ($2000) + 500 for 2030 ($1500) + 1000 for 2030 ($2000), which is an additional $3500 to get the last $8000. 3500/12 is ~300 again.

total grants wold remain $6000 + 4*10500 + 8000 = 56000.

that seems more attractive to me, i think, unless i can get a sum in immediately.

my immediate task is getting $3500 cash into the rdsp by the end of the calendar year. i have close to that in cash.

if i miss the target, i can recalculate the max amount for 2026, which will likely end up being a little less. it will rollover to the next year.

...although, i also want to make sure it all rolls over, and not just the last ten years. i assumed they'd take the first 7 years at $500, but i i lose the $1000 for 2015 then they won't do that. instead, i'd have to use the $1000 for 2015 right away and the new max would be:

$1500 for 2015 (500*3 + 1000*2 = $3500 in matching grants) + 2000 for 2016-2019 (2000*3 = $6000) + $333.34 for 2020 (333.343 = $1000), which is

1500+ 2000+ 333.34 = 3833.34

but if i just put the 3500 or the 3000 or the 2500 in, the rest will rollover, and i may just want to make sure i get the $1500 for 2015 in, and then start chipping away at it in january.

i will get a $1200 cdb transfer on dec 18th that i was always intending to move into the rdsp.

the bulk of it will go into aggressive mutual funds, to start. i've looked over this more closely, and it's by far the best choice. over time, i may divest and reinvest in ways i've identified as better than the mutual funds, but i don't expect i'll beat the funds without a learning curve, first.

i think it would be stupid to, for example, just buy $10000 of amazon stocks and cross my fingers, but the money may get slowly taken out of the mutual funds and directly reinvested in stocks, so that i may end up with something like that in the end.

...but i'm going to do the research and make some oddball buys, too, and hope it works out, and i will actually do that first, not last.

i mean, i need to be clear: i'd be highly unlikely to fund this account on my own initiative. i'm really not very interested in buying stocks or tending to investments; it's just not something i'm very interested in.

however, the government is giving me $70,000 in grants and putting it in an account that is singularly meant for this purpose. i can't do anything else with these funds; the money has to be invested.

so, i'd might as well make the best of it.

the truth is that my family owes me quite a bit of money.  i actually lent my father several thousand dollars in 2008 when the market crashed, and he seems to have lost it gambling, as he had an addiction to gambling. i've had an extremely hard time recovering those funds from his estate, because he doesn't appear to have told anybody, but rather told everybody that he gave me the money he lost gambling to pay my rent (he never paid my rent even once). there was an agreement that my stepmother would transfer me a small amount of money on a regular basis for a large amount of time, but she didn't transfer me a dime and when i moved out of ottawa i just walked away from it. as an odsp recipient, i had strict asset limits that have since broadened. at the time, it wasn't worth it. it has since become worth it, and i tried to go after a bit of the money they owed me when i realized i was going to have to move in 2023, and realized i was going to have to sue them for it, as they weren't intending to be honest about the money intended for me that was stolen.

i'm looking to transfer funds into this rdsp fairly aggressively; if i can move $3500 in before dec 31st and $4500 in in the first week of january, i will be eligible for $21000 in grants in addition to the $10000 it opens with. if i can get $30,000 into an aggressive mutual fund package before the spring, that could start to grow pretty fast, over $5000/yr, and i can continue to dump upwards of $15K of grants into it for the next five years. it could be at 50K in two years, and then i'm pulling in over $5000/yr fairly reliably. i can live on $10,000/yr, if i can get the housing situation dealt with independently.

i'm hoping i can talk them into transferring some funds into this account to take full advantage of the grants and in order to evade the imminent lawsuits that are coming, but they've become stubborn conservative idiots, and are leaving me with no choice but to sue them, which is something that shouldn't be necessary for me to do, and something i don't want to do.

i bought $10,000 worth of medium risk mutual funds on the strong suggestion of the advisor to open the account, and that's reasonable, but i'm going to want to diversify a little. as mentioned, if i'm aggressive about this, i could get $20,000 in grants within a few months. i might decide to buy more mutual fundsi n the end, but i may want to buy some stocks directly, as well and, over the long run, manage this myself. 

i have never purchased any stocks before, so i agree that buying mutual funds is the smartest thing to do immediately, but i could see the value in doing something like buying $500 of penny stocks in canadian mining companies set to ramp up production for critical minerals. i have time to do that research and i'm capable of doing it.

the fact that my father was bad with money and had a gambling problem is something i've tried to learn from. i don't gamble; i'm very financially conservative. however, i'm getting roughly $70,000 of free money from the canadian government in the next five years, put into an account meant to buy stocks and bonds with. i should figure out how to put the bulk of into stable investments, and make sure any contributions i make for myself are in the safest place possible, while taking some moderate risks with some of the free money, and some higher risks with a very small amount of it.

if i buy $500 of penny stocks out of the $70000 i get in grant money and $100 worth of those penny stocks get to $100 each, well, i'm an instant millionaire. that's worth it.

i've criticized carney's infrastructure plan as a ploy to manipulate the stock markets. i should take advantage of that, if i think i understand it.

i got my rdsp yesterday afternoon.

this is the equivalent of an rrsp for disabled people, so i can buy stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc with money transferred into it.

- the account opens with $10000

- the government will deposit $1000 per year for the remaining five years, for an additional $5000.

the maximum amount of matching grants i can get are as follows:

- the first $5000 (500*10) deposited into the rdsp will be matched at 3x (for 2015-2025)

- the next $10000(1000*10) deposited will be matched at 2x (for 2015-2025)

- amounts for 2026-2030 will be an additional 500 per year matched at 3x and additional 1000 per year matched at 2x.

but there is a maximum matching amount of $10500 per year, to a total of $70000. it will carry forward each subsequent year.

that means that the max for 2025 (i deposited before dec 31, 2025) will be $3500. the government will match 500 for the years 2015-2021, that is 7 years at 500. so, if i can get $3500 in the account somehow by dec 31, 2025, the government will deposit an additional $10500.

the max for 2026 will then be 500 for 2022-2025 (4*500 is 2000 multiplied by 3 is $6000) plus 1000 each for the next 2 years, 2015-2016 (2*1000 is $2000 multiplied by 2 is 4000) plus $250 more for 2017 ($500). that would be a total of $2000+$2000+$225 = $4225. so, if i can somehow get $4225 in the account between jan 1-dec 31, 2026, the government will deposit an additional $10500.

the max for 2027 will be the $500 for 2026 (500*3 = 1500) plus $750 for 2017 ($1500) plus 1000 each for the next three years (2018-2020) (3*1000 is 3000 multiplied by 2 is 6000), plus 750 for 2021 ($1500). that adds up to 500+750+3000+750=$5000. so, if i can get $5000 in there over 2027, the government will deposit an additional $10500.

the max for 2028 would be 500 for 2027 ($1500), plus the 250 left from 2021 ($500) plus 1000 each for the next four years (2022-2025) (4*1000 is 4000 multiplied by 2 is 8000) plus 250 from 2026 ($500). that adds up to 5000. so, if i can get 5000 n there over 2028, the government will deposit an additional $10500.

the max for 2029 would be the $500 from 2028 (500*3 = 1500) plus 750 from 2026 ($1500) plus  $1000 per year for 2027, 2028 ($2000*2  = $4000) + 500 from 2029 ($1500) plus $1000 from 2029 ($2000).  that adds up to $4750 to max out at $10500.

the max for 2030 would be $1500, and the government would deposit an additional $3500. 

the government would stop contributing when i turn 50. so i would max out at 56000, less than $70000. however, with the extra 15000 in bonds, it's over $70,000.

that means i'm currently looking at getting $3500 in there by the end of the year to get the $10500 for 2025 and $4225 in there next year to get the $10500 for 2026.

4225/12 = $355.

i could do that.

canada eliminated pennies about 20 years ago.

the truth is that you buy 98% of things with debit cards or online nowadays, but you will notice that retailers will change prices to round things up. we have 13% tax in ontario. so, rather than see things advertised for $0.99 + tax, you see them advertised as $1 or $1.25 including tax (so, $0.89 + tax or $1.11 including tax). we don't tax food in ontario, so we see items advertised as $4.00 now instead of $3.99.

if you just use your debit card, though, it won't matter.

hey, i remember when kristi noem had emo hair, c. 2005.

the media is going after her pretty hard, and the truth is that she has become pretty gross looking. i'm almost 46, myself. i'm looking very slightly older (that isn't the reason there's been so few pictures, lately. i've been struggling with a lot and my overall hygiene has continually suffered since early last year. i'm stabilizing and i'd expect some pictures up by the spring, if things hold.), but i would never consider trying to undo it with massive botox injections. that just always results in yick. it has an almost 0% success rate.

the empirical evidence is pretty clear that plastic surgery almost never works.

if trump does end up dumping her for her looks, it won't be the first or last time. she probably should have toned it down a little.

if penny oleksiak doesn't take testosterone, then why does she look so much like a male rock star, c. 1990?

she looks like a dude. why do you think that is?

then, they go after the transgendered swimmers, who are the only ones not on male hormones. it's absurd.

the thing that drove up rents was interest rate hikes. 

i think that there should be a law passed that says that you're not allowed to rent a property that you own less than 80% of, unless it's a new development. this would prevent people from buying second properties by getting second mortgages on the houses they own, then using the income to pay their banks. it doesn't make sense for middle or upper class people to expect low income renters to pay their mortgages, but that is what is driving up the rents - people just buy houses at whatever the costs, then pass it on to renters, without spending the time doing the math, or really caring.

the result is that the person working at the tim hortons ends up paying off the government worker's overpriced mortgage, which that government worker couldn't otherwise afford, and just in order to have shelter. that's not logical and that's not fair. that shouldn't be allowed. the system should be telling the middle class workers to pay their own fucking mortgages, and helping the wage slaves escape from the tyranny of serfdom. there should be far greater protections in place to stop the middle class from exploiting low income workers and students.

the purpose of housing is not to generate income. housing is not an investment. i'm not even arguing against capitalism, which is supposed to be critical of idle rentiers. deregulation has led us back into feudalism, and put us on the road to serfdom. 

it would also help if they just cut interest rates, but that's going to take a while to go through.

i went through some volatility, but then i got lucky. i got into a program that's going to subsidize my rent. i could technically afford over $1500/month for rent at this point, but am currently paying $1000 and don't want to move again.

not everybody is going to navigate the system or get into this program. there's currently a problem with people buying properties as investments instead of as places to live that needs to be addressed by the federal government. 

it's one thing to rent an old house you're not using because you inherited it or moved somewhere else, or your situation changed, or whatever else. but explicitly buying old properties in urban cores at high interest rates to immediately rent them at high prices to poor people is not good for society and is driving up rents and should be banned by requiring a certain level of ownership before you're allowed to rent. this will ensure that the property owners are getting more of the rent and the banks are getting less, so that property owners are not dumping the cost of their over-priced mortgages that they cannot afford onto the working class, which can afford it even less. that will open up more affordable properties for people with lower incomes to buy, instead of be forced to rent.

something else that is driving up rents is the recent near ubiquity of property management companies, which are introducing an unnecessary bourgeois layer that needs to get paid. there are very few rental units, at least around here, that are just run by somebody renting their basement, anymore. everything is run by a management company, with some absent owner behind it that just gets a cut, and which is increasingly hiding ownership concentration. what we see are these dozen or so management companies; what we don't see is that they're managing portfolios of dozens or hundreds of properties, all owned by the same person. the state needs to step in and break up these hidden ownership conglomerates by passing rules on how many single-family houses one entity can own, and how far they can live from the properties they own.

the city and the province can only do so much. it's the feds that need to step in and start breaking up concentrations of ownership, but they have broadcast that they are more interested in maintaining high property values. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-cmhc-rental-vacancy-rate-9.7012565

*quack*

*quack*

*quack*

waddle over here, donald duck.

i'll save the descartes for later. it's coming.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republican-led-house-votes-overturn-trump-executive-order-bargaining-r-rcna248767

i voted for trudeau's liberal party in 2015 because the local representative in windsor, who lost, campaigned on pushing the liberals to re-open nafta and because i strongly supported the green infrastructure bank, which was supposed to use the bank of canada to print debt-free money to finance the public infrastructure required for carbon transition, but that the liberals eventually converted into this horrible public-private thing to build pipeline infrastructure, like it was run by joe fucking clark. i regretted that vote, and wished i had voted for the greens.

i was a supporter of stephane dion and a very loud critic of michael ignatieff.

i did not vote for trudeau to legalize pot, and really didn't have a lot of support for the idea. at the time, i was indifferent to it; i figured it didn't matter. there's some convenience in being able to buy the odd quarter once or twice a year at the store, right? it's not like my life revolved around it. i didn't really actually care. in hindsight, the ndp and thomas mulcair probably had a better marijuana policy than trudeau did, but i would not be somebody that would be likely to determine my vote on marijuana policy. mulcair was running on new labour thatcherism and was a non-starter for that reason. as it is, i have purchased essentially no legal marijuana, after trying it and realizing it was engineered to create dependency. for me, the result of legalizing pot in canada is that i've started to strenuously avoid it.

i want my low key, underground, quiet neighbourhood hippie grow-ops back.

i have not voted for the liberals since, but have voted for the greens a couple of times.

there is no possibility that i would vote for or support mark carney in any way at all.

progressives used to talk about fining marijuana users for smoking, both tobacco and marijuana. trump might actually like that idea, i think. the fines should be intended to stop people from smoking in places where it bothers people, both in public and private. i would strongly support the ability to fine people for smoking in their own homes. an upside is that it might weaken property rights, which are a terrible idea.

as for responsible users that smoke in reasonable places like outside bars or concerts, or in recreational areas away from residential housing, it is better for us to keep it underground than to sell it in storefronts. if you ask around, that's actually a consensus position. most people support various decriminalization schemes rather than outright legalization.

you want to protect the marijuana plant from the drug industry, which will ruin it. that's what has happened in canada, where we now talk about Big Canna.

i would like to see the united states classify tobacco as a schedule I narcotic.

that would be truly progressive.

i would be more like to argue that ketamine should be classified as schedule I than that marijuana should be classified as schedule III. i actually think that marijuana should remain classified as a schedule I narcotic because it clearly has absolutely no medical use.

marijuana should be treated the same way as tobacco or to a lesser extent, to alcohol - it's a carcinogenic scourge that creates mass dependency and kills scores of people, but it does it slowly via cancer and heart disease, rather than via overdoses. it is possible to use it responsibly or irresponsibly. where marijuana is far worse than alcohol and on par with tobacco is in it's second hand smoke phase, and it's ability to create nuisance and public health emergencies for people that don't smoke it habitually.

the data is abundantly clear that legalizing marijuana in canada has been an absolute catastrophe and a total failure, from any analysis point - from a public health perspective, from an addictions perspective and also from the perspective of a casual user.  i have generally enjoyed smoking very small amounts of marijuana on an infrequent basis and have preferred low thc levels so that it's actually fun. nowadays, it's mass marketed as a drug for addicts and is 5x as strong as it used to be. it's not fun anymore, it just knocks you out like a retard on heroin. i would rather buy periodically from a hippie with a grow op in his basement making low potency pot, but that market is wiped out. you have to buy it in overkill packaging at potency levels designed to create dependence and bad experiences. as a casual user, i would rather it was illegal again.

it's led to extreme difficulties finding non-smoking housing in the country's urban areas and it has almost entirely reversed decades of progressive health initiatives to reduce indoor smoking. people have stopped caring, and started looking at you funny if you complain that they're smoking inside. it's a complete embrace of anti-intellectualism and scientific backwardsness.

the latter point would make it fitting for trump to be the president that is actually dumb enough to make this mistake, where every other president has thought about it and looked at the data and stopped. data is of no concern to donald trump.

for a substantive period of their rule, the nazis actually banned emigration because they wanted to enslave the inferior races. no escaping; that's not fair.

the nazis consequently didn't really have a problem with immigration, as not many minorities were interested in moving to nazi germany, but were rather trying to stop people from fleeing.

the nazis at no point ever argued that immigration was ruining european society. 

in fact, the nazis were very pro-muslim and built military alliances with the muslim world, across the middle east. the most obvious answer, a common hatred of jews, is the most correct one, but there are a number of angles. 

it is true that the arabs were in revolt against the british, which is how arabs usually explain the situation today, but that doesn't explain the nazi alliances with muslim groups in eastern europe, or with turkey. 

one of the few intellectual sources in nazi "theory" is edward gibbon, who claimed the roman empire (the first reich, which nazism was trying to rebuild) fell because it embraced christianity, which made the romans weak. gibbon contrasted that to the arab societies, which remained militant because they converted to islam. the contrast was between the slave-morality christians and the master-morality muslims, and gibbon decided the muslims were superior to the christians because they did not have a slave morality (to interject somewhat anachronistic language). gibbon argued that the first reich would have survived if it had converted to islam and the nazis picked up on that and tried to model their militarist christian society on muslim culture. does that sound like what donald trump is saying?

the basis of nazi expansion was that the aryan race was superior and therefore needed more space, liebensraum. the inferior slavs, the russians, were to be exterminated to make more space for the aryans. does that sound like what donald trump is saying?

what trump is saying is that the europeans are weakly, inferior and in the process of being colonized by stronger races, including the arabs. he's disappointed by this, but he's not arguing in favour of white supremacy, but rather in favour of white inferiority. it's essentially the exact opposite position taken by the nazis.

trump is therefore abandoning europe as inferior weaklings not worthy of an alliance with america and seeking to build alliances with stronger, more dominant societies that are not in decline, like the russians and the arabs.

there is some truth to trump's position. europe is clearly in decline. immigration is more of a result of that decline than a cause of it. the major cause of european decline has been it's acceptance of it's role as a us client. europe is weak precisely because america decided it ought to be weak, because it identified it as it's only serious competitor.

is europe still worth protecting? it's less clear. the resources are dwindling, and they've become an import-reliant economy. they're no longer the global centre of research or education. if europe thinks it's still worth protecting, it should make the argument a little more forcefully.

but, this is not nazism; this is the exact opposite of nazism.

factually, i think he's incorrect. europe is actually still recovering from world war two. the immigration will dry up when the wealth collapses and europe will be able to refocus on itself again when that happens.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/dec/11/us-extreme-rightwing-tropes-1930s-british-mps-donald-trump-keir-starmer

a million dollar fast track around an h1b wouldn't be a policy i'd have come up with.

but i'm having difficulty criticizing it.

this looks psychotic on it's face, but it's a form of progressive taxation.

trump is an asshole, no doubt, and some of his policies are horrific. he's neither as polarizing or as substantive as a napoleon, a stalin or a genghis khan, and i hope he doesn't get there. but future historians may have some difficulty with this guy.

is this...conservative?

right-wing?

it kind of almost seems a little...

wait for it.

SOCIALIST.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/trump-us-gold-card-visa-launch

were indigenous europeans religious?

it depends on what your definition of "religion" is.

we lack good sources because they were destroyed or written over by christian propagandists, but the sources we have suggest that the celts and germans were pretty similar to the very ancient greeks and that the reason is that the greeks ultimately came from the same origins as the celts and germans, before they migrated into greece. for that reason, the greek literature, in conjunction with very old literature from india, is the best information we have about what indigenous european culture was actually like.

we know that the europeans believed in democracy, which is why europe still has democracy; the christians were not democratic, and would have done away with it if they could have, but they couldn't and they failed. we know that germanic legal systems mostly followed processes that we still have remnants of in tort law, rather than civil law codes written by kings or churches, or the perpetual authority of the king.

we know the german and celtic gods were very similar to the greek gods, which is partly why the germans and celts let the greeks in to trade and largely avoided conflict with them but then fought the romans, years later. a lot of the cities in france were built by greeks and you can see the remnant overlap in the architecture, particularly in the cult of dionysus/diana, which is considered foundational to the spread of christianity.

it's no more clear that the germans or celts really believed in god, per se, than it is that the greeks did. when you have gods instead of god, you have magic and you have mysticism, animism and the sort. that is superstition, but it isn't clearly religion.

i think there's no clear answer to that question, and whether you should call indigenous european culture pagan or atheistic or superstitious or spiritual or animistic is not clear, but it is clear that europeans could never accept monotheistic belief or middle eastern legal codes, and never did.

i also have to reiterate my position that the idea of a historical christian europe, let alone a white christian europe, is a nonsensical myth. it never existed. it is strictly a fantasy of conservatives, and of the christian upper classes that have held to it for centuries, as the entities that wrote (or rewrote) the histories, that engaged in the genocides, and that wiped out the indigenous cultures of europe in a process that started with julius caesar and did not truly end - firmly - until napoleon.

it is more accurate to talk about a failed attempt by brown romans to colonize white europe that went on for thousands of years and ultimately failed than it is to talk about "christian europe". we universally condemn the inquisition, but fail to stop for a minute and realize that there were still enough pagans in europe at the dawn of the enlightenment to justify a crusade in the form of a witch hunt against them. the church was still launching crusades against white pagans in northern europe in the 17th century. it's christmas; you are still worshiping odin and not christ and should realize it. what do reindeers and  christmas trees have to do with a barn in israel, where it almost never snows? that's north germanic pagan iconography. the romans spent centuries trying to pacify white tribes in the north and were eventually first thrown out of europe in the 4th and 5th century by pagan indigenous groups (the roman sources call it the great barbarian conspiracy; it was an indigenous uprising), in a process that repeated over and over again in waves of pagan revolutions, culminating in the last viking invasions. england itself, the alpha culture of north america, is based on a pagan law code that was introduced to the island by saxon pagans, who were still in power in england in the 11th century, when a warlord from france named william invaded it under the direction of the pope in order to re-implement christian rule. we gloss over the fact that the norman invasion of england was basically a crusade against the furthest fringes of roman/christian colonial rule, and against an island that refused to christianize. the brutal despotism that followed was the last serious attempt to enforce christianity on england, and it failed to even establish a christian legal code, as the saxons would not let go of their democratic institutions, but instead enforced a magna carta on the norman nobility that ultimately returned power to parliament, that constructed the common law and, within a few centuries, had thrown the romans out for good. the english kings were so unchristian by the late dark ages that they didn't even believe in monogamy, and figured a serial philanderer could run an english church just as well as the fucking pope.

but if there was any christianity in europe at all it was restricted to the nobility. the regular people of northern europe were never christians and spent centuries evading taxation from the christian aristocracies and fighting their feudalism, while returning to their indigenous belief systems whenever they could and suffering immense persecution and cultural destruction for it. they actually teach you in school that indigenous european cultures were illiterate and had no history, which any cursory investigation into the matter will expose as a brutal lie, but these histories were destroyed by the christian aristocracies in a process that did not significantly differ from what they did to the aztecs centuries later.

it is the fact that white europe emerged from this process of cultural destruction both uncolonized and as a cultural tabula rasa, with no history of it's own, that allowed it to make such a clean break from the past, when it did. europe had no choice but to start from scratch, because everything it used to have was taken from it by brown christians from rome and lost in ruins and engulfed in flames. europe wouldn't be what it is today if it hadn't been thoroughly destroyed by christianity, while simultaneously refusing to accept it. all the christians had to show for their efforts in the end was a pile of rubble and a population no more willing to accept it than it had been in the first place.

the result is that while white europeans won - we defeated christian colonization - the victory was deeply pyrrhic. we lost who we were in the process, and had to redefine ourselves by reading greek mythology, but we did it, we dd the homework, and we emerged as a new society with new institutions that had little to no cultural baggage tied to the past.

there are few constants through history, but one is that white people make shitty slaves. we can't be broken, and they've tried, over and over. we don't want your religion, we don't want your slavery. we'll burn your cities down, in the end, if you won't fuck off and let us live in freedom.

it follows that there is really no likelihood that muslims are going to succeed in taking control of this power vacuum left open by the forced retreat of christian colonialism, and if they try to do so, the same thing will happen. the danger is not in the uncertainty of the eventual outcome, but in enduring the hardship of struggling against a new type of middle eastern colonialism. it's a shitty way to spend the next thousand years.

europe will win in the end, but it may have to do so the hard way, and may have to endure a new dark age, if it doesn't learn from it's own history, and allows these middle eastern groups to try to walk into this vacuum and continue to try to colonize it. it's up to them how they want to do this.

it should be clear that white europeans will not, in the end, accept middle eastern religion. it spent a thousand years defeating christian colonialism and won, and it will spend the next thousand years defeating islamic colonization, if it must.

i want to be clear that, as an atheist, i have no interest in taking a side in conflicts that are developing in the west between christians and muslims. dawkins' position on this question, for example, is disappointing and wrong-headed; i would prefer to take a marxist class analysis, which dawkins would not do, but which hitchens might have, especially when he was younger. i've found dawkins to be greatly disappointing in recent decades.

due not to any enlightened social attitudes in the upper classes but due to the fact that white people fought against our aristocracies and reduced their power in law via a series of revolutionary movements going back to the collapse of rome but picking up after the fall of constantinople, the white aristocracies have largely retreated from trying to enforce christian dogma on their populations, until recently. this is not out of their own volition or choice, but because we forced them to stop, and we took away their power. this is the great victory of modern enlightened/secular european society over medieval christianity (a mostly brown-skinned religion from the middle east that remnant roman/jewish groups tried to colonize white europeans with, and mostly failed at doing) that created the modern world. this great victory of the white european masses over colonizing brown christians from rome opened up somewhat of a power vacuum, and islamist groups that are basically the same things as christians are now trying to walk into that power vacuum, which is scaring the remnant roman christian aristocracies into thinking they're being replaced by muslim aristocracies, who never faced that revolutionary back lash, and continue to viciously enforce what is really exactly the same religion on their own people using violence and coercion. that is the reason the christian aristocracies are trying to fight back now, as they are trying to protect what they see as a threatened position in society; they withdrew from enforcement, because we forced them to, which is allowing these other religions to walk in and take their place. you can in fact see that in the statistics they present, which appear to me to be valid, that show that religious belief amongst nonchristians in north america and europe is increasing at a rapid pace, while christian belief continues to decline, which is something that is being brought on by immigration policies authored not by the aristocratic elites but by the bourgeois political establishments. the bourgeois political establishments are trying to do things like increase gdp and really aren't concerned about religious belief, or the role of the religious aristocracy, that has never truly gone away, but has continued to exist in the background. this isn't an intentional attack by the bourgeoisie on the aristocracy, but rather an unintended consequence. the aristocracy is nonetheless interpreting it as an attack and responding to it as one and trying to retake control of that power vacuum before a new foreign born aristocracy manages to wrestle it from them. up to this point, the bourgeois class has largely responded to this by calling the aristocrats insane and accusing them of perpetuating conspiracy theories, but i think that a solid marxist analysis should show that the concerns of the aristocrats (from their own perspective) are very real, even if the capitalists don't really comprehend what they're doing.

but i'm neither a christian aristocrat, nor a bourgeois capitalist. i'm an anarchist, an atheist and a proletarian. the aristocracy and bourgeoisie can kill each other off all they want. i don't give a fuck; if anything, i'd egg it on, as it weakens them both, which makes it easier for an eventual proletariat overthrow of both of them.

my atheist position on the increasing tendency towards conflict between muslims and christians is really that we should step back and let them kill each other off with an eye on divide and conquer, while keeping the following things in mind:

1) our position should not be in protecting one of these communities from the other, but in ensuring that neither of them are able to project violence towards atheists or is able to mount any kind of attack on freedom, individuality or reason and

2) that our greatest threat is not this or that religionist group, but the haunting spectre of religious integration, of communalism, of syncretism and of inter-faith collusion and cooperation. our real concern should be in preventing christians and muslims from aligning with each other against us, not in taking a side when they fight each other.

the religionists, like any other groups, are stronger when they work together, and weaker when they fight against each other. the atheist position should be to step back and let them fight each other and not to try to bridge differences; it should be to get out of their way and let them kill each other off, while protecting our own from their violence as best we can, which means self-defense when required, and it will be required, eventually. for now, we're better off getting out of the way than trying to intervene.

likewise, the proletariat has no position to take in trying to protect white aristocrats from brown aristocrats, or in taking a side in a conflict between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the remnant christian aristocracy, at all. the proletariat should focus on advancing it's self interest, and avoid getting involved in these conflicts which they have no part in and no interest in. but it should also ensure it understands what is going on and is able to react to events as is required.

it is obviously true that islam is a greater threat to freedom than christianity is, in contemporary western society. but we should address that truth without getting lost in class conflicts that we have no stake in.

conservatives will always approach new things by trying to ban them. that way, things can stay the way they are now, or go back to the way they used to be, which is always the goal - identifying what has made things different, and trying to reverse it.

kids need more exposure to technology at a young age, not less. they need education, not protection. this is real life and they'll have to learn how to exist in it. those that fail, and many will certainly fail, will not succeed in reproducing or in thriving as individuals.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/expert-warns-of-unintended-consequences-if-canada-implements-youth-social-media-ban/

what a disgusting eyesore.

there used to be a nice green space here, and they ruined it with a stupid hockey rink, like a bunch of immature eight year-olds.

as soon as we get rid of mayor dilbert, we should bulldoze this over and plant some trees.

https://citywindsor.ca/residents/recreation/arenas/rinks/city-hall-square-ice-rink

if trump doesn't want to negotiate with canada, we shouldn't push him to, we should shut up and wait for the next guy.

the bible and koran are just regular books, like any other books. they contain words authored by humans and written down onto paper. they are no different than political pamphlets, fictional narratives (they should clearly be categorized as fictional in the dewey-decimal system) or any other type of written texts. there is nothing special about them. they are not above the law.

while i would rather see these hate crime laws abolished altogether, having special exemptions for a specific political position is legislating that position above the law, which is an affront to the rule of law. the law must hold everybody equally accountable.

i consequently strongly support the legislation but, more importantly, i welcome the debate. we need to return to a more open discourse about religion in this society, and stop being afraid of offending people.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/biblical-passages-canada-could-list-as-hate-speech

while it's predictable that the kids that grew up in the 00s, the oughties, have a more nuanced perspective about it and are re-evaluating it, i align with the gen x consensus that the 00s fucking sucked in terms of popular music. you had to look to some pretty obscure corners of the music world to find something exciting going on.

this record is one of the few counter-examples and one of the few albums i keep coming back to for that reason. it's one of the rare classic records released so far this century.

it's certainly a hysterical over-reaction to the situation in the united states in 2006, which is why it's fun. we are closer to this point now than we were then, but it's still a great distance away.

a society where these concerns are not hysterical but are very real is the middle east and levant and i would, today, mostly recommend this record to syrian or iraqi refugees fleeing isis, hts and al qaeda (including the current syrian regime), hezbollah or hamas. it is mostly arab refugees of islamic fundamentalism that would be best able to relate to this record as something very real, in 2025.

this wasn't the most popular punk record released c. 2005, but it was one of the best.

https://thethermals.bandcamp.com/album/the-body-the-blood-the-machine

the ndp needs to make fighting these kinds of cuts the centre of their political movement, but they won't be incentivized to do so until it involves fighting the jews in some way. who has time to fight for the civil service when there's jews to fight, instead?

it is these kinds of absent priorities that pushed the unions away from the ndp, which had stopped caring about unions because they were too white, and even because they were too jewish. what does unionization have to do with immigration?

but the public service walked into a trap in doing this, as the liberals have begun to govern on the hard right again (as they always do) and the conservatives offer no way out. these are not blue collar union jobs; these are educated workers. they're not going to be swayed by social conservatism, or scared into thinking the socialists are out to eat their children. 

it's not clear if the socialists or the jews are more likely to eat your children, at this point.

so, what do they do when they correctly walk away from the ndp for shifting it's priorities away from labour politics and then get stabbed in the back by the bourgeois capitalists for it? the ndp isn't running on this.

the answer is the ndp has to be running on this. this is canadian labour politics, and something the ndp can legislate on. the ndp cannot legislate on gaza, whatever you think of it.

and if the ndp will not run on fighting these cuts then the unions need to reorganize and leave the ndp behind, to follow in the footsteps of the social credit party to oblivion.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/12/05/news/cuts-natural-resources-canada-wildfire-flood

i would hope that anti-terrorist authorities in the united states are keeping a close eye on canada as a transit point for money laundering. this change in the law effectively allows canadians to legally send money to an al qaeda affiliate, and functionally legalizes al qaeda in canada.

this is not an isolated change, it's a part of a general embrace of islamic fascism by the canadian government.

i may find myself supporting regime change in canada on the basis that we're supporting islamic fascism, and have become a state sponsor of terrorism. if canada insists on walking down this path, i may find myself eagerly inviting american tanks in to overthrow the state.

this is utterly disgraceful.

it's a sad day to be a canadian.

what an embarrassment.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/canada-drops-terror-sanctions-on-syria-and-its-interim-government/

i have officially been a non-smoker for ten years, as of this month.

i have a lot more money, and i'm in better health, but have found it a lot harder to find housing.

what have i been doing the last several weeks? i stopped posting updates about redesigning the apartment on nov 14th.

- on nov 3rd, i received the video intercom in the mail, which was one of the last things from the october purchases

- on nov 6th, i got an email from the cra indicating my disability tax credit was accepted and i can apply for the cdb.

- there was supposed to be an eviction to remove the crackheads on nov 7th, but it got stayed. that's what i've been told, anyways. i'm a little skeptical that that is true and am following up on it today.

- on nov 7th, i filed an appeal with the court of appeal.

- i spent the weekend of nov 7th-10th finishing with the kitchen and updating the kitchen chapter, cleaning, typing and trying to understand google's decision to break search on expired chromebooks, eventually deciding to buy two new chromebooks over kijiji that have not yet expired.

- on nov 10th, i bought two tables on kijiji for $25 each.

- i last updated the kitchen and laundry chapters (1 and 2) and the two appendices (notes and budgeting) early on the morning of nov 11th, but these are still left open for further edits and are not done. 

- i was in the process of combining previous posts into an introductory narrative but stopped early on the morning of the 12th to focus on more court writing before the end of the week. 

- it was at about this time that i realized the stalkers were upstairs with the crackheads and have been noticing the overhang of drug use upstairs get worse since that time. i've been struggling with my health ever since, as they are intentionally drugging me in order to knock me out to try to perform pseudoscientific "dream therapy" on me when i'm sleeping. they are not driven by the scientific method and do not react to evidence, but are rather driven by "theory" and "philosophy" and freudian or lacanian circular logic and pseudo-science. they already know the result of their experiment before carrying it out, so evidence gathered during the course of the experiment has no value and will not effect how they analyze their results. to the philosopher, all knowledge is theory, and the experiment is merely a performative show trial to demonstrate the truth of the theory, whether the theory is actually true or not; if it isn't, you ignore or doctor the experiment so the result aligns with the false theory. these people don't believe in truth; their epistemology is utterly relativistic, empty nihilism.

- it turns out that the owner, who lives in toronto, has put this despicably gross bearded furry in charge of the property, who looks like the result of a dog impregnating an ape and is without question the most disgusting loser i've ever seen. this guy looks like he has enough bacteria on his face to relaunch the bubonic plague. he has the only key to the apartment; therefore, he seems to have let the stalkers in. it makes sense, as he looks like he fell out of a phone booth directly connected to the dark ages, and would have the kind of backwards, retarded, conservative/religious viewpoints that are in line with those of the idiot stalkers. if i ever see this disgusting, gross loser again, or he goes anywhere near me, i'm going to pepper spray him and call the police.

- on nov 12th, my nitrile gloves (the last remaining item in transit) arrived.

- i then spent the rest of the week on legal writing. i wanted to get to the courthouse on the 14th but got hit with a migraine and had to put the issue off until monday. the 14e.1 was essentially done on the 14th, but i wasn't yet done with the application record.

-  i mostly spent the weekend searching for online purchases, as setting up the apartment is my primary concern and not this annoying and lingering competitive legal bullshit, before starting to work on the application record on the morning of the 17th.

- on nov 14th, i bought two chromebooks for $155 (total). these don't expire until 2029. i now have five chromebooks, three expired - a lenovo x131e, two dell 3120s and two hp g8 ees. google is getting aggressive in taking these out of service, so i'm going to have to convert the first three to linux, while keeping the last two as chromebooks. the plan from the start with these devices was to transition them to linux, but the reality is that the chrome os is the best linux distro for the kiosk mode i want, although i'm looking at fyde for the x131e, which i believe should retain all of it's functionality. i'm going to lose sound on the dells, so i need to use them in ways that don't need sound. this is disappointing because these devices have relatively good sound, for what they are.

- later on nov 14th, i bought $45 worth of dried dill and had it delivered to use up the $10 credit i got from instacart

- still on nov 14th, i purchased a circular saw to use to cut the wood i was buying for shelving, for $70, which was about half-price. this was delivered on the 15th.

- still on nov 14th, there was a $200 walmart grocery order for mostly non-perishables. this was delivered on the 15th.

- on the 15th, i bought two usb to rj-45 connectors for wired internet on the new chromebooks. this was delivered on the 16th. this was $23.

- on the 15th, there was another $200 walmart grocery order, this time mostly produce. this was delivered on the 16th. two items arrived on the 18th. one item, two boxes of kleenexes, is still in transit.

- also on the 15th, i bought some wood at home hardware that had to ship to the store for pickup. the cost was $145.

- $10 more worth of adhesive pegs were also purchased at this time, but amazon has not put the order through yet. as of dec 2nd, it's scheduled for delivery on the 3rd.

- together, this was most of the food i needed to get through the rest of cycles 5-8, but not including the caesar salad, the garden salad, the fruit salad or the fruit and ice cream bowls and almost completely filled out the pantry, with just a few small items remaining.

- i intended to get to the courthouse on the 14th or 17th but did not get there until the 20th due to some delays in writing and then a migraine attack that lingered until the 20th. i got a fee waiver signed for an appeal to the court of appeal in toronto and asked some questions about filing a 14e.1 in ontario, which the court staff didn't immediately understand. however, i sent some emails out and am awaiting a response. 

- i tentatively served the 14e.1 on the 17th and then realized that the process is backwards under rule 38.

- i have also been working on a large application record for the 14e.1 since the 17th and was slowed down a lot by the migraines over the week and weekend. i was hoping to finish this by the afternoon of the 24th, but i had to stop to sleep. i am still working on this, as of dec 3rd.

- the 17th-20th was consequently spent struggling with migraines and trying to finish the documents. nothing really got done.

- on the way back from the courthouse on the 20th, i stopped at food basics for $60 worth of mostly produce.

- i spent the weekend of the 21st-24th in the laundry room cleaning.

- i listened to some music when i was cleaning.

- i needed to take a shower so i had to clean out the bathroom, but i had to clean out the laundry room in order to clean out the bathroom. then, i wanted to do normal cleaning in the kitchen. i didn't finish cleaning the laundry room, but i got very close.

- i bought an extension cord for the laundry area for $15.81 on the 22nd, which was delivered on the 23rd. that's it so far, but i am going to need to get a second extension for that extension because the extension was only 3 ft (it was advertised as 3 m). it's easier just to get a 5 m extension. i will also need some insulation, some lights and a chair and i think that's it, besides the dresser.

- it took me all weekend to clean the laundry; i was expecting to be done by saturday and spend sunday working on the application record so i could be done by the 24th and get in the shower in the morning. i did spend some time on the 24th working on it, but fell asleep before i could finish it.

- on the 24th, i went to sign up for the cohb, which is a housing subsidy that will send me another $400-600 a month. 

- i need to apply for an rdsp very soon, by monday at the latest.

- i was able to finally get my appeal filed on the 24th, and need to schedule a stay motion, next, and then try to get the 14e.1 and application record filed right after that.

- i stopped at food basics to get some cheese on the way back ($50).

- i went to home hardware to get the wood order and got a lift back, which was appreciated. so, i can now cut the shelves.

- later, i went to the mall and bought some caulking at canadian tire, some tape and tupperware at dollarama, some yeast at food basics, some wheat bran at bulk barn, some hemp seeds at freshco and a pizza on the way back. i'll have to add this up in the budget document. 

- on the 25th, i set up an appointment with a social worker to get a second reference letter for a vaginoplasty to finish the srs. i was not initially going to follow through with this, but i don't feel like i have any other choice, given that these disgusting faggots won't stop harassing me. that should schedule me in for surgery some time next year. after i get the operation, they won't be able to harass me any further.

- on the 25th, i was charged $10 for a month of amazon prime. i will use it this month.

- near the end of the day on the 25th, i got a callback and set the srs appointment for dec 5th. so, i'd better be able to shower before then.

- i needed to catch up on some sleep on the evening of the 25th from the walking on the 24th. it wasn't that much, but i guess i'm a little out of shape.

- i woke up in the evening and mostly spent the night brushing my hair. i sat down on the morning of the 26th to start writing and just completely passed out and slept all day. i may have been triggering into another migraine, but that didn't happen,  just slept.

- i was able to re-serve the stay motion this afternoon and should get a confirmation by the end of the week. that will be on the 8th.

- i am noticing a dusty, dirty smell from upstairs that appears to be smoke and is probably what knocked me out and might be what's been making me sick. i don't know.

- i'm also noticing an overwhelming smell of onion that is masking the smell of the drugs, and i don't know if it's on purpose or not.

- i lost both the 27th and 28th

- i needed to finish updating this, and did, but then i got behind on it again.

- there was a leak in my bathroom on wednesday night and i had to cut the water off, preventing me from washing or cleaning overnight. i instead spent the night online planning out further purchases for the weekend.

- the leak was fixed by noon but i passed out almost immediately afterwards

- the heat was off all night. i made a note of this in an attempt to understand what was happening and properly document it. i believe the crackheads are intentionally cutting the heat because they don't want to overheat when they're fucked up on drugs, but i have little concern about the well being of drug addicts. the world would be better off if they all died up there, anyways; these are garbage, shithead people. i made some progress on the application record but did not finish it. 

- i (largely against my will) slept all day on the 28th and finished the purchases in the evening when i woke up. in total, i bought three small lamps, four more extension cords (two wall plugs, a 5 ft extension for the one i bought last weekend and an extension cord for the incoming makeup table with usb cables), a three pack of usb wall plugs, a 30" makeup table with a bench and a mirror, a small usb-powered magnifying mirror and two strings of paste-on led lights (12 bulbs per string). i was hoping to get some chairs and mirrors over facebook or kijiji but did not get a response and that will need to wait, apparently. total cost is going to be around $350. everything arrived on the 29th, 30th or the 1st.      

- i got something to eat after i made the purchases, then passed out again, and i was not up again until after midnight. 

- i spent the overnight on saturday morning (29th) cleaning in the bathroom and kitchen, planning out what was left to do in the kitchen, bathroom and laundry and continuing to search for online purchases, including purchasing pantry items and searching kijiji and facebook for mirrors and chairs. however, my difficulties staying awake continued into the weekend.

- i have ordered insulation for the laundry room, as there is a nasty draft in the space and i can't really finish up in there until that's addressed.

- i made two further pantry purchases at walmart for $160 on the evening of the 29th, which arrived on the 30th and the 1st.  a small amount is coming for the 3rd or 4th. some toothpaste was also purchased on amazon. i also bought a large mirror over kijiji that came by car on the 1st. i continued to struggle staying awake on these days.

- there are rodents in the ceiling. i haven't seen any in the apartment, but i've seen evidence of them in the laundry room, only. my focus is on blocking them from getting downstairs, as i think they are more interested in upstairs and are just hiding in the floors. the main floor tenants are easier targets and i suspect the owner will be more likely to deal with the issue if it's upstairs, so my focus is just on blocking them from getting in. i suspect the insulation will help dramatically. they keep coming back to a hole in the ceiling in the bathroom that i taped over and have been bugging the owner to install a fan in. i don't think there's another way in. they are repeatedly trying to get in but can't. if i do catch them in here, they can expect to get bludgeoned with a broom and thrown outside.

- i spent the overnight of the 30th & into the morning of the 1st cleaning in the bathroom and then continued to struggle with staying awake throughout the day on the 1st. the remainder of the amazon purchases for the 28th arrived on the 1st, along with the kijiji mirror and one of the boxes from walmart. 

- i meant to finish purchasing items for the makeup table on the 1st but i instead crashed hard on the evening of the 1st and then woke up on the 2nd at about 2:15 eastern time.

- very early on the 2nd, at the last minute for cybermonday, i further purchased the following, mostly for the makeup table in the bathroom: a new shaving head for a usb razor left here (i will just throw the existing head out), a usb electric tweezer, a usb eyebrow plucker, 5 64 gb usb keys and some shelves and soap holders for in the shower. in total, this was a further $160ish. the bathroom is mostly done now, except for the bathroom mirror, the fan and some pending decisions about the light and window over the sink. i'm going to need to get some clear answers about this next week.

- i made some eggs early in the morning and then fell asleep against my will again.

- on the afternoon of the second, i briefly woke up to confirm the cdb was processed and set an appointment to talk about the rdsp on the 5th.

- i then crashed hard again and i wasn't able to wake up again until close to midnight. i had some salsa, and ultimately spent most of the night in the bathroom washing my face. i made a second bowl of salsa in the morning and then crashed extremely hard, again.

- the shower shelving came in on the morning of the third and the remaining pegs for the bedroom shelving came in in the afternoon. 

-  i was struggling very hard to stay awake all day, from 7:00 am until 21:00 at night and lost the whole day to sleeping, again. i think my iron crashed as a result of being drugged by these useless fucking retards that won' leave me alone and it's the reason i can't stay awake. 

- the heat was also off when i woke up and stayed off all night, which is against the law in canada.

- i made some eggs around 22:00.

- something was trying to get in here this morning at about 3:00 am but i don't know if it was a person or a rodent.

- as of 4 am on the fourth, i needed to finish the application record for the supreme court (eventually) next. i wanted to do some cleaning in the kitchen, bathroom and laundry room, first. i am extremely behind schedule at this point, due to all of this unwanted sleeping, which i'm tying to these retards drugging me.

- unfortunately, i had to deal with an annoying and pointless fire inspection on the 4th which forced me to waste most of the day. the remaining walmart package with the vitamin c and soap came in. i was also still barely able to stay awake all day and, after sleeping in the afternoon, wasn't able to wake up until almost 21:00 again.

- the property manager confirmed himself as the singularly most disgusting perverted loser and gross freak that i've ever seen in my life and somebody i want to have minimal contact with as he's fucking gross.

- i tried to clean myself up over night and get in the shower for about 5:00 am, but i was much filthier than i thought and i'm going to need to approach this in two or three or four installments, instead. i put this off for too long, over two months, and as a result had layers and layers of caked on dead skin. i wanted to start this yesterday, but the stupid, useless fire inspection forced me to lose a day, and it threw me off. 

- it was truly disgusting. i had piles and piles of dirt to clean out of this filthy basement (it will be great when it's done, but it was utterly disgusting when i moved in) and didn't want to get in the shower until it was done. i was wearing clothes that are so ripped they're garbage, but i wanted to finish the cleaning first before i dealt with anything, and it just got absurd.

- the bathroom itself was so filthy it was unusable, but it's fine now, except for the fan.

- i will need that dealt with soon and will have to tell the owner i'll do it myself and send him the bill if he doesn't want to do it.

- unfortunately, i ran out of hot water and i wasn't able to stay in the shower long enough to finish washing my hair or cleaning myself. i have made some adjustments so that that shouldn't happen again.

- my hair has taken a hit from the last year of poor hygiene due to repeated moves. it was already in need of some attention as a natural consequence of having shaved it in early 2023 and not cutting or trimming it since. in the long run, removing all of the dead hair the hard way was a necessary process one way or the other (the hair was dead.), it just looks a little thinner than i wish it did, for now. 

-  unfortunately, i had to cancel a number of appointments for today as a result of the fire inspection making me lose a day and consequently being unpresentable to attend them. i look terrible and feel disgusting and gross; i can't be seen like this, it's embarrassing. it was too cold to go outside today, anyways.

- three out of four amazon packages came in today - the electric tweezers, the usb eyebrow shaver, the unused head for the electric razor left here and the 5 64 gb usb keys.

- i have to finish the court documents over the weekend, before i do anything else, at this point.

remaining items in transit are

- $23 worth of kleenex, which might be lost, but which fedex is saying is delayed. it was a black friday deal. i'm requesting a refund from walmart because it never showed up.

- further shower shelving.

remaining grocery/pantry items to purchase:

- just some shoppers' items, now, hopefully on my next day out. then, that's it; i can go back to normal shopping.

when i finish the court documents, i will post some more pictures and update the budget documents.

- i think the laundry is done, once i get the insulation in there. it's available for pickup.  

- i may still need to make some purchases for the bathroom, mostly on kijiji

- i think the kitchen is done, except for the shelves, which i have in the unit and can cut an install.

- the bedroom would be next, and i'll need to clean in here, first.