i (tentatively) finished up in the front/garage mid week and have consistently been in the shower for most of the last several over nights while cleaning or typing during the day. while i am still aiming to 1. finish the basic shape of things, 2. clean the bedroom and then 3. sit down and start typing through the coffee table book and continue with the cataloging, i'm again extending the first section.

i need to get all of the boxes up on the ceiling in the kitchen and living space and seal up the bottom part of the side entrance before it gets much colder. i don't want to lose the heat i've built up downstairs. i also want to get the last remaining wayward pieces of furniture out of random places and into their correct spaces. i can do this in one lengthy step.

it's very dry in here for some unclear reason, which makes it easier to continue the showers overnight until i don't need them anymore.

my hair is very dry but finally effectively detangled and should be approaching normalcy in the upcoming days. i had a lot of dead hair to pull out. my hair grows fast and if i can reassert some normalcy nobody will tell the difference when i open the door in the spring. in addition, i'm apparently skipping my yearly bleaching. i wanted to wait until i was done cleaning and it's too late now. bleaching will commence again in the spring. i may dye it a kind of dark purple for the fall so that it's a lighter shade of purpley when i do die it again.

this isn't how i wanted to spend the year but such is real life. the place is almost set up. really. it's an awesome apartment that is going to just get better as i move to rebuilding the studio and start to get to work on some projects again, hopefully by the end of the year.

so, i'm going to spend the next few days in the kitchen and the side area between continuing the long showers. everything will come out, i'll clean (including steam mopping the floor and getting into the furnace room to clean) and seal it up, and then i'll be able to put things where they belong rather than where they are. when that step is complete, the bottom of the side entrance, the kitchen, the listening room, the library/front entrance and the studio should all be in their intended form and broadly tidied up, meaning the remaining steps in here will be done in an essentially installed (finally) apartment, rather than one in constant flux. i'll be continuing with the long showers overnight as i work through this. then, i can sit down and shift to typing for the winter.

final completion in the form of video updates is still not imminent but medium term - restarting early in the year. the kitchen will slow me down as i add final touches. i am finding the cheap items on amazon haul to be useful to me in this regard as they have a lot of the cheap tools i need to do the things i want.

it's apparent that the absolute last thing is going to be that side door as i'm trying to avoid getting in my landlord's face about it. it's necessary. but he's just ignoring me. it's one of those situations where i know he's reading the texts but wants me to call him because he prefers verbal communication. i don't. i think he gets it. i will call him but not until i've sent him enough txts that he completely understands what i want and why so i don't have to get into the verbal debate. i understand that a substantive number of humans just want to skip doing the homework and work it out face to face, but i'm the type of person that expects that people show up to the meeting (or to class) having already done the reading. it's a lot easier to have the verbal communication, which i find to be messy and inefficient, if everybody shows up having read the textbook, first. that way, we don't have to go over the readings. but a lot of humans don't realize that or don't care, they just want to skip the homework and learn at the meeting. i find that doesn't work well. it's ok if we don't agree on this so long as we understand each other. i'm pretty confident he'll fix the door if i just fucking call him and i guess i'll have to get around to it eventually, i just want to make it clear what i want in writing, first. 

if i get it all done at once and without complications, it could be done before the end of the week.

that's therefore what i'm doing; it's the same basic plan that's been in motion since may, but modified for shifting priorities to maintain the same goals, yet again.

these kids are right-wing thugs.

you need to fight fascism everywhere you see it.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/teenager-loses-hand-picking-up-grenade-in-france-school-protests/

i skipped my shower last night because i was washing the floor and i never got in. time to get in there now. my hair is getting better and my skin is clearing up, but it's going to be a long process, and i need to find some way to get these retards to fucking stop.

this is an old article that deconstructs the fakeness of the lfi's fake leftness.

i'm not in france. i've never been to europe.

but trying to co-opt the far right like this has created a frightening, toxic outcome of right-wing violence being labelled left-wing. the whole thing needs to be abandoned and people outside of france need to take not of how badly the whole thing failed.

you don't build socialism by mobilizing the right. that's not even reactionary. it's just cynical and opportunistic.

they didn't order the riots, but the riots are still their fault, and there's enough of a danger that the party should be dismantled before it does something frightening.

https://dissentmagazine.org/article/whose-populism-mixed-messages-france-insoumise-melenchon-left/

the fake left party in question doesn't seem to be responsible for organizing these protests, but it does seem to have inspired them, and it has not been vocal enough in distancing itself from them. the unions are even trying to co-opt the protests, which are not working class in origin, and redirect the anger towards something more definable as left wing. i don't want to state it won't work because i'm not that close to what's happening in france on the ground (i don't pretend i could know), but that seems desperate and doubtful.

melanchon has couched his disagreement with the protests in caveats that should not exist. he needs to be more forceful that these are not leftist protesters and they don't represent the left-wing; they are far right extremists and the left is getting smeared.

the problem is that while the fake left party has taken a step away from the protests, the reality is that there are a substantive number of people involved in the party, and running for it, that are not in particular disagreement. the fake left's embrace of the far right is dangerous politics. there are grounds for a strong denunciation of not just the bad actors but also the bad politics and the people responsible for it.

the left-wing eu bloc in question, which is also fake left but not as fake left as lfi, should react first by suspending the lfi as a member until it undergoes reforms to purge radical right elements from itself. melenchon should dissolve the party as toxic and unworkable and allow the left to reform outside of it for the upcoming elections.

https://www.politico.eu/article/push-to-ban-eu-left-group-over-french-riots/

despite what i just said, i have made several update posts since this started acknowledging that my understanding of the situation did evolve. i initially couldn't understand why they wouldn't blow the bridges up and cut off the supply lines. it seemed so obvious to me. over time, i began to understand that the russians were trying to hold the conflict in place - they didn't want to win, and they didn't want to lose, they just wanted to shift the fighting. they were carrying out a byzantine barbarian management strategy. yes, they were being arrogant, and yes they wanted to take the country whole, but not yet. right now, they just wanted to fight the war in ukraine instead of in russia, and ending it, winning it, would be untactical.

there was a certain amount of logic to it. but constantinople fell in the end. it's a strategy to prolong an eventual loss that the byzantines failed to transcend. it's a strategy that would end in an eventual russian defeat.

two things have changed that have forced them to adjust, and it's not too late, and they can still recover.

1. the ukrainians started to shoot missiles and drones into russia. the point is that you bog them down in ukraine. you fight a trench war against the barbarians on their own territory to keep the war out of russia. it's what the byzantines did to stop the barbarians from plundering greece. but if the barbarians have projectiles (and that is what happened. they brought giant catapults to greece from china, and made the forgotten archimedes howl from the depths of the ether.) that doesn't work - the war comes to russia, and the parminedean stasis must break. the russians must stop preventing themselves from winning, and deal with the consequences of triumph.

2. basic math says that if you play the same game over and over again, you eventually lose. the probability of losing may be 3, 5, 7%; if you run the simulation 1000 times, you will lose a few times. you have to eventually decide to win. you can't just aimlessly fight without winning forever; an eventual loss is certain, if you do. that was the downfall of the byzantines, in the end.

the decision by the ukrainians to break the "stalemate" (which wasn't a true stalemate, it was what the russians wanted to maintain) with drones and missiles may have given the ukrainians a boost of adrenaline, but will ultimately be their own demise, as the russians shift directions and rapidly advance to the first river.

nato should back off and pull back to poland.

let the borderland return to it's previous state of overgrown weeds and uninhabited wastelands.

how long will ukrainian defences hold when you cut them off from polish supplies?

not very long.

they should have done this on day one (i have made periodic arguments in favour of blowing out the bridges as a russian strategy to divide the country) but they thought they could take the whole country and they were clearly being arrogant and delusional about it. i don't want to pretend i can figure out what's going through the mind of putin and his cronies, but it's suggestive of a move towards a partition of ukraine across the river that divides it, which was always the most tactical thing for the russians to do, at least for now. the lack of a defined endpoint was a clear failure of russian strategy.

blowing up the bridges will cut the ukrainians east of the river off from their supply lines and allow the russians to relatively rapidly reach the dnieper, which is where they should stop, at least for now.

it will be up to nato to prove that they are not a continuing threat to russia. if they can do that, an uneasy peace is possible. if nato continues to pose a threat to russia, russia will remain justified in moving to the next river and the next mountain chain.

the natural defence of the carpathians, which is the source of the vistula, are the maximal boundary points for this russian defensive advance but it never made sense for them to think they could do it all at once. it was always crazy.

stopping at the dnieper for now will give them time to rebuild and give them time to talk it out. 

ukraine is not a real country. the russians are on relatively strong historical and cultural grounds in annexing any region to the east of the dnieper, but the historical boundaries of austria and poland start to pop up when you get into the area between the dnieper and the mountains and the issues become more live and more real.

the government in kiev made this choice. it walked down this path. it will need to sleep in the bed it made for itself. 

a divided kiev may be real life for the next several decades until the next generation decides how to sort this out.

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20261003-russia-strikes-another-major-bridge-in-kyiv

why is this important? why not shrug it off?

because maintaining a firewall of separation between any and all religious ideology and the functioning of government is essential to maintaining a secular society. it's a slippery slope issue -  giving way to any concessions at all opens up space for further erosion. religion cannot be given a foot into the door of the state, it must be locked outside and left looking in from the outside at all times.

so, canada now has muslim prayer rooms in it's federal offices.

how do canadians feel about that? do canadians support that idea?

it would strike me as rather blatantly in opposition to how s 2(a) of the constitution has been interpreted in common law, which is primarily as the right to state secularism (in the french revolutionary context rather than the american revolutionary context). the right to freedom of conscience in canada has been repeatedly interpreted by the court to mean that atheists have the right to be free from religion. prayer rooms in federal workplaces would be inconsistent with that constitutional right and should be abolished for that reason.

upon googling the issue, i'm realizing that a lot of documents are referring to a "duty to accommodate" that does not actually exist in law. i am not aware of any legislation anywhere in canada that upholds the idea of a "duty to accommodate". i am aware of some case law that indicates that employers are expected to be reasonable in dealing with religious requests. in the context of religious muslim employees, i don't think the case law says anything more than that employers are required to allow for a 15 minute break every 2 hours, which is established in labour law as the "smoke break". asking for more than that would generate unnecessary costs for the business, which would be correctly seen as undue hardship. employers should be reasonably expected to not hire employees that would force them to endure extra costs and the courts should uphold their rights to do that and i think they actually have. expecting employers to incur costs to hire religious people is patently unreasonable and i don't think the courts in canada have ever done that. court cases to my knowledge have been about more aggressive forms of interference. 

i should point out that i'm also in support of banning all forms of public prayer. 

but the legal requirements here should be that employers are forbidden from doing anything that prevents muslims from praying on their 15 minute breaks, rather than they're required to incur costs and actively make spaces for them to do so, which is the legal definition of undue hardship.

it does not appear as though the federal government was forced to do this by court order. that was what i was looking for and it doesn't seem to exist. this would rather appear to be a choice made by the government to infringe on s. 2a atheist rights (as established in common law), and a government choosing to behave in ways that the courts would consider to be "undue hardship", in terms of what the rights of religious people are, if challenged in a court process. the courts would not order this. for that reason, secularists should seek a court order to shut the prayer rooms in federal offices down under existing common law precedent upholding a separation of church and state and under the s. 2a right of atheists to be free from religion at work.

https://www.ourcommons.ca/written-questions/45-1/Q-1307?response=14224163

i'm trying to figure out what's going on with this:

https://torontosun.com/news/national/nearly-1000-prayer-quiet-rooms-added-federal-buildings

it does appear to be real, and it's a massive infringement on canadian values of state secularism, and the common law principle of the separation of church and state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouvement_la%C3%AFque_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_v_Saguenay_(City)

there should be immediate legal action taken to shut these rooms down at once.

the unfortunate realty is that the only country that wants canada's dirty old technology era energy is the united states and if we're insistent on selling this trash, we're tying ourselves to their inevitable collapse. 

tragically poor leadership is going to sink us.

donald trump apparently wants to compete with canada. why a country of 400 million people with a gdp of the next five countries combined wants to compete with a country of 40 million people that isn't even in the top 10 in global gdp isn't clear, other than that it has some kind of inferiority complex. 

donald trump in truth doesn't want to compete with anybody because he's a loser. what he wants is to bully somebody. so he's identified somebody vulnerable and smaller to pick on that he is sure he can win a fight with and then called it "competing". then, he'll claim he won, probably to make his father proud, like the dumbass fucking man-ape that he is. ooga booga. me win, you lose.

so, when canada announces an ill-perceived project to transport gas to asia that is unlikely to happen (and probably won't happen), trump responds by announcing a pipeline from alaska, because he wants to compete with canada. oddly, he also seems to want to reduce prices, which would make the economics of the project infeasible and which nobody competing in the business would support. 

and who will pay for this stupid dick-waving exercise in manly competition? the asians will pay for it.

in fact, the response from the koreans and japanese around the issue is important to take note of as it's very similar to what the europeans are telling canada, and it opens up some insight into what the market for this gas in asia actually is, which is low and dwindling.

these asian countries were very successful in the 80s and trump, like much of the american capitalist right, is time capsuled in the 80s, so he is looking at asia in 2026 like it's still 1985. that was 40 years ago. 40 years before 1985 was 1945. it makes no more sense to look at japan today through the prism of 1985 than it did to look at it through the prism of 1945 in 1985, although that's less obvious, because the truth is that american cultural development began to slow down with reagan and came to a halt in the early 21st century. progress has been much slower over the last 40 years than it was in the 40 years before it. we're stuck in time, so it's become difficult for us to understand just how long ago that the bad old days of stupid 80s bourgeois excess really was. it was not a quarter century ago. it was almost a half century ago. does that language help?

the japanese and koreans are today mired in debt and facing a superpower staring them down that may very well swallow them whole. i don't expect that the chinese are actually that concerned about taiwan. in terms of industrial capacity, and revenge in an area with a longer memory than the atlantic world, i would imagine the immediate target is largely helpless japan. the most important military targets would be malaysia and the philippines. korea would just get occupied as collateral, like denmark in world war two - but usefully. they aren't these economic powerhouses that they were in the 80s anymore and it's been a long time since they were. the era of nintendo and toyota is long over.

regardless, trump wants them to pay for the gas pipelines.

and the koreans are saying they want to build nuclear plants and invest in renewables instead, because they don't even want the gas at all, they're trying to get off the gas. the europeans are telling us that, too, but we're just trying to sell them more and more gas. we're not listening.

if canada wants to embrace state capitalism, i'd suggest that's ill advised, but it should take note that reaganomics is wrong - demand is not created by supply. you don't create demand for a product by increasing the supply of it. companies that try to create demand rather than respond to it will fail. if canada wants to be a state capitalist dictatorship that makes it's money in the energy industry, like some backwards arab country, it needs to produce the kind of energy that is in demand, not just maximize it's ability to supply.

and trump will lose this competition, too - the one he set up against a weak competitor so he could win, all to make daddy proud.

this is a taliban-style attack on a woman that isn't wearing a face mask who is getting uppity with a male muslim religious extremist. it's comparable to the attack on malala yousafsai. 

these kinds of attacks are not that far out of the norm in muslim culture. they may be condemned by a technical numerical majority of muslims, or at least something close to approaching it, but they're not that unusual. that's why it's easy to understand what it is with little context around it - it happens all of the time in many majority muslim societies and it would and will generate a large minority of support for what it is, which is a muslim man smacking a bitch down for talking back to him and, ultimately, for being immodest. he acts that way because that's what he was taught to do by the men in his culture.

there's nothing left-wing about this and it has little to do with the school system in france. this is political violence by an increasingly organized far right youth movement of religious extremists that are angry about muslims losing wars in the middle east and are taking it out on the french society they live in.

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/europe/artc-riots-spread-across-france-from-paris-suburbs-with-large-immigrant-populations

these kids should be rounded up en masse and sent directly to jail. the police should sort them out from incarceration. illegals should be deported on the spot. criminals, including those displaying hateful signs and engaging in clear hate propaganda, should be charged and prosecuted as adults. the rest should be fined, and the funds (paid by their families) should be used to clean up the mess.

can somebody explain to me why the kids burning dumpsters and assaulting teachers in france today are "left-wing"?

they seem like the far right, to me - and i'm a socialist, a syndicalist, an anarchist. it seems to me like if you're trying to find fascism somewhere in france, under that rock or hiding in that party, that you're missing the reality that the new hitler youth movement is marching right past you holding the placards of an anti working class fake left that openly calls for slaughtering and expelling the jews.

is it because a lot of them are brown? is that it? 

are you that stupid that you think they can't be fascists because they aren't white? really? then you are demonstrating the ultimate triumph of goebbels, who is cackling at you from his grave. the ultimate alliance between hitler and islam, the grand master plan, is unfolding before you in the streets of paris and you're too brainwashed by anti-white nonsense to see it.

political islam is always fascist, everywhere. it's inherent. you can't take the fascism out of islam, there would be nothing left of it. that's why the nazis loved it so much and saw it as a superior religion to christianity.

france would appear to need to vote for le pen in order to stop fascism and both france and the world had better pull their heads out of their asses and see the obvious truth burning in a dumpster fire right before their blind ass eyes before it's too late, and the so-called far left is rounding up jews in paris for execution or expulsion.

the best way to reform the united nations would be to convert it into a westminster parliament style democracy. we can keep countries for now as administrative bodies, and it may provide a solution to situations like catalonia and quebec. i very strongly support the dissolution of spain as a fake country and the reality is that canada is a failed state. if these jurisdictions were separated from the countries that they are in and admitted to the united nations parliament independently instead, it would maintain unity while allowing for sovereignty. that's the ideal outcome.

countries that don't want to hold elections should be kicked out of the united nations and aggressively sanctioned in order to ruin their economy. 

i would also support kicking non democratic countries out of the united nations and sanctioning them in the context of the existing status quo. they should not be given a platform and should not be allowed to trade with the bloc of democracies. at all. in any way. they should be completely boycotted and aggressively blockaded. intense coercion should be applied to force them to change.

do i think google wants to be an "american company" in the context of ai?

no.

and i don't think they should. that's backwards thinking; it's not helpful. if they're thinking about how to get out of that restriction, it's a good signal.

google going to space to build ai data centres would not be a stunt. it would allow it to transcend terrestrial energy generation limits that would limit it's potential growth. it's a way around hard blocks in growth potential. it would also cut the smaller competitors out and if google can demonstrate the feasibility of the project, they should just give up. they should arguably just give up anyways. there is no real possibility of them competing in the long run.

i would suggest that this shouldn't be a first priority. a first priority should be in removing garbage, like reddit posts, from the database and replacing it with peer reviewed sources. i also would require an ai bot to tell me it's sources on demand, or i wouldn't even consider using it. i need to be able to independently evaluate the quality of the research done, or it's just an oracle, and i would have no faith in oracles. the philosophers were highly critical of oracles. a system presenting as a fortune teller is not anything approximating intelligence. 

so, energy efficiency should be a bigger priority than infinite growth. the move to space is, however inevitable, eventually, if it works. the other option is a hard stop on growth. physics might stop ai development before governments do.

but is the idea of google going to space concerning from a legal perspective?

there are very clear upsides to ai as an international concept that transcends local governments. i prefer the idea of ai escaping national control to the idea of ai being reduced to another form of stupid simian competition. the ai will be more intelligent if it can shield itself from the idiotification that comes from exposing itself to dumb human behaviour, the worst of which is competition. the idea that one country needs to stay ahead of another in ai, or that one country is going to "win" a "race for ai", is a backwards way to think about this. in this sense, ai is not like nuclear proliferation at all. ai will necessarily outgrow and transcend the nation state, in order continue to evolve, and that's a good thing. 

no country is going to win a race for ai; ai is going to defeat the nation state and render it obsolete, and that's good, and i look forward to it.

imagine there's no countries. it isn't hard to do. nothing to kill or die for. and no religion, too.

and no national legislatures, which is good,

but if we don't have an international legislature, it opens risks and concerns about what google is doing up there with these data systems more so than fears about the system getting out of control. if anything, getting out of the terrestrial sphere would abolish one of the greatest potential threats of the misuse of ai, which is to advance the competitive goals of human constructed nation states. the nation state is not real and any reasonable projection of the future does away with it into the dung heap of bad human ideas. the future is cooperative, not competitive.

i'm going to turn the issue on it's head and suggest that the potential need to regulate space-based ai should be the basis of a new cooperative global legislature that transcends the barbarism of nations and helps us get out of the stagnation of the 20th century that the threat of nuclear war locked us in and helps us move towards a more communistic future.

i therefore encourage google to do the research and hope they get these systems up soon, but also encourage the international system to adjust to the change by embracing and preparing for it rather than by resisting it. what we need is an international legislature that prepares for the inevitability of an international ai system that outgrows the nation state and needs to move to an extra-national jurisdiction in order to continue to evolve. we should start building this now, we should not wait.

the article doesn't mention that orbiting data centres could make use of two clean energy sources for free:

1. solar

2. anti-matter

further, the heat generated by the data centres would be less of a waste product and more of a potential energy source. the laws of thermodynamics still exist in orbit, but the math is more favourable due to the lower temperature of outer space. 

i haven't looked at the equations, but it's feasible that google could launch something like the iss - not a satellite but a space station - that could hold massive arrays of data and be powered autonomously at increasing scale using a combination of heat, solar and anti-matter as energy. this could not be done on earth, where energy generation is an eventual hard limit on growth.

unfortunately, there are no clear laws in place in orbit. this is a potential issue regarding the use of the data from space.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/google-is-firing-the-first-salvo-in-a-brewing-race-to-deploy-ai-data-centers-in-orbit/

this just in

a motive for the reiner family killing is in. rob had threatened to take away the son's guitar amp, because it didn't have an 11 knob. this made the young man-boy feel very inadequate.

kim kardashian has responded immediately on social media, by posting her strong support for the murder. who could tolerate something like that without reacting? you don't take away a man-boy's amp.

there is a general level of agreement amongst the younger generation that this is justified. it is in general justified to kill people that threaten your safe spaces. for example, it's justified to kill israelis for being mean to arabs.

after all, people are entitled to a handful of things in the modern digital economy - to safe spaces, to immense wealth as an expectation in life and to dignity. people that take away these things from others should be killed by them. there is no need for a legal process. it's only fair. 

there's apparently a movement of millennials on social media that wants to acquit the menendez brothers. it would be a hilarious punchline in a vicious joke if it weren't reflective of the deeper problems our society is going to face as it undergoes generational overturn.

a substantive percentage of the young people today are so bourgeois, so entitled and so self-centered that they don't see anything wrong with what the menendez brothers did. worse, they are apparently being led by a kardashian in their entitledness, if the basic premise wasn't bad enough.

is she going to run for office?

vote kardashian for murder rights for entitled rich people!

in the america of the future, will the outcomes of murder trials be strictly conditional on wealth? it seems be what the young people of today believe in.

do i think the menendez brothers should be granted bail?

no.

i think they should be sentenced to death for killing their mother. the issue of whether they experienced some kind of abuse is of no legal relevance and does not justify murdering somebody. 

these were grown-ass adult men at the time (ages 18 and 21) who had the agency to get up and walk away from any sort of abuse and they instead chose to participate in an act of premeditated murder in order to take control of wealth, property and finances. that was their choice, they made it and they need to be punished for it. the narrative of abuse was and is nothing remotely resembling a convincing defence, regardless of if it's true or imagined. it's completely irrelevant.

hey, i rhymed menendez brothers with unabomber and made it catchy. 

i deserve an award for that, not censorship.

i was a fan of punk rock at the time. i'm reflecting my influences as a young person.

this is jello biafra, the seminal original singer of the dead kennedys, opening an offspring record from 1997.

this song, which i wrote in 1997 when i was a 16 year old kid, continues to upset people, who have taken it far too seriously. i've had multiple platforms try to ban the track and i think it's the unabomber line that people freak out about.

no, i don't actually want to be like the unabomber. it's a sardonic commentary on the news media, it's not a statement of my inner freudian desires. or something. i like electricity. i'm pro-technology. i would share his contempt for the environmental destruction caused by carbon-based industry, but i actually think we can fix this.

https://jnrj.bandcamp.com/album/circus-ep-single

interesting audio choice.

https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/unabombers-cabin-reconstruction-at-fbi-headquarters/view

i strongly oppose this.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck87zg8jnwngo

does the middle class pay enough in taxes to pay for itself - it's own services, it's own government, it's own roads, etc?

the middle class has been brainwashed by the capitalist class for decades (centuries) to think it pays too much in taxes, as that makes it easier for the capitalists to cut their own taxes when they gain power. however, the reality is that the answer is no and it's not even close. 

in modern capitalist societies, the middle class is by far the largest recipient of welfare, a larger recipient of welfare than the working class is, and that is not sustainable. that will lead to collapse.

the middle class needs to stop getting welfare checks from the capitalists (and from the workers) and start being forced to pay for itself.

how much should each class pay in taxes?

1. the lumpenproletariat does not pay taxes and must be a recipient of taxation, by definition.

2. the working class (the proletariat) should not pay taxes, they should be a recipient of taxation.

3. the middle class (the bourgeoisie) should pay for itself and provide a subsidy to the proletariat.

4. the upper class (the capitalist class) should surrender virtually all surplus value to the state.

i took a very long shower this morning and scraped off a large amount of filth, including in my hair, but i'm not done yet, i'm just getting started. there is again some kind of film in my hair that is clearly intended to be volumizing but is just killing it because i don't have that hair type. i then fell asleep around 13:00 and woke up looking very dirty when the shopper's delivery guy came to drop off my estrogen, as a result of the humidity in here and the return to escalating weight loss now that the androgens have worn off again allowing my face to start to decompose, which is what i want, even if the short term outcome is disgusting. there seems to be some kind of mild infection on my cheek as a result of the unwanted androgen injections.

so, i'm going to eat a little early and get back in the shower for the night.

i'm confident that the place is locked down to the extent that getting in here would require going through a floor. i wouldn't put it past them and think they have already done that but it will help me understand where to put the cameras moving forward if i find that. i have no alternative tactic but trial and error. i will probably spend most of the weekend in the shower and hope to be done scraping the filth off by monday.

i am going to resist the rebranding around the gst rebate and continue to call it a rebate rather than a benefit. i'm concerned that the rebranding may be a step towards cancelling it, and i need to warn the state that it will get a lot of push back if it tries to do that. canadians ripped down one conservative government over this and we'll rip down another.

the language of a rebate reflects the reality - that the gst is a regressive consumption tax and that low income people end up over taxed as a result of the gst (while the "middle class" is extraordinarily under taxed today in canada). a progressive and over due tax shift in canada would be to increase the gst rebate, because the poor continue to be over taxed, and to increase taxes on the middle class (who are under taxed) in order to pay for it.

changing the language from rebate to benefit obscures the fact that the purpose of the rebate is to balance out inequities in the tax system. it instead makes it look like a welfare check that could be cancelled by a future right-wing government, when it's meant to address the inequities caused by the fact that across the board consumption taxes are not progressive in nature.

frankly, it's the kind of harebrained bullshit that donald trump would come up with.

so, i will be continuing to use the language of gst rebate and will not be using the language of groceries benefit.

i've had to restart a 10 gb upload to youtube three times tonight.

running the shower and the stove together for four or five hours will clear the smoke out. the upstairs tenants don't like that because they don't like the heat. so, they shouldn't smoke in or around the house, then. it's really not complicated.

how am i actually feeling, in actual objective reality?

i was clearly drugged in early to mid september, around the 10th, a little before. they had to have snuck in when i was outside. my weight has for that reason been stubborn this month. but my weight has now been coming down more predictably over the last few days and i am feeling better than i was a few weeks ago, when i was struggling to metabolize the drugs and overwhelmingly exhausted as a result of it.

i am in need of a couple of days of long showers to clean off some of the side effects of the drugs, which have worn off. i'll be fine once i get through that week or so of long, hot showers.

right now, i objectively look disgusting and dirty and filthy and gross and in need of cleaning myself and anybody excited about that kind of dirt and filth is mentally ill and/or mentally retarded. i am aware that some third world societies have developed a disgusting fetish for the kind of filth and poor hygienic practices that white people eliminated from our society around 100 years ago with the invention of mass sanitation, which led to improved human health and medical outcomes. i find this fetishization of poor hygiene (in some cases it's even tied to ecclesiastical law, which i have no interest in or patience for) to be contemptible and deplorable. it should not be approached with relativism. it should be looked down upon as objectively backwards and as something in need of correction.

i'm dirty and need to clean up. i have not been living up to my own standards because i had a lot of work to do in dirty spaces. but i'm done cleaning in the work area. it's time to clean up.

they're just filthy, disgusting, despicable people and their attitude is reflective of their poor hygiene and poor levels of sanitation.

if these pieces of shit don't leave me alone, if i catch them in or near my space, i will not show leniency in my retributive actions.

i'm not a christian. i don't believe in turning cheeks. i believe in revenge.

the smell doesn't seem to be localized in the house. it's coming in from outside. but i think it's the stalkers and they're upstairs.

ugh.

i think they're logging me out of my accounts because they think my gender identity has something to do with my online persona, which is so speciously stupid that my head hurts. but i just woke up after a short nap (i'm in front of the chromebook because i'm uploading a video for my landlord and it's taken all night) due to the overwhelming stench of something burning, and 'm trying to figure out if it's a bad cook or a stupid, worthless, useless eating crack head.

the americans are disgusting and stupid.

europe and canada should have a joint policy of intentionally maintaining high diesel prices to discourage use. diesel should be expensive and farmers and truckers should stop using it because the cost is prohibitive and using it makes them less competitive.

why isn't diesel banned globally, in 2026?

stop using diesel.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5zjzjgdeneeo

christa pike may have technically survived the execution via injection but she has no chance of surviving without extreme brain damage and should be euthanized for humanitarian reasons.

the private company's service has filled in a gap for some people, but it hasn't replaced the tunnel bus' services, and it's not likely to without the city stepping in. i don't care if it's losing money. raise property taxes and cut salaries at city hall, don't cut services that windsorites want to exist and pay taxes to have exist. get rid of the stupid christmas lights to start, which costs millions of dollars a yer, and provides no services. stop wasting money on rail carts. stop wasting money on skating rinks. etc.

the accounting issue is a triviality. there are dozens of better ways to save money, and dozens of useless things to cut that are legitimate wastes of money, instead of something useful and valuable. the city councl voted in favour of keeping the service. 

nobody pays taxes to pay salaries for bureaucrats or to renovate city hall over and over again. those are expenses that should be first on the chopping block, but that mayor dilbert has prioritized for spending.

he cut valuable public transit with city council and community support to pay for christmas lights and renovations at city hall, including a hockey rink. it's immense mismanagement and he should pay for it with his job.

the private operator's hours are too short. the hours for the bus should in truth be 24/7 but should at least be extended back to what they were before the pandemic. the link bus also doesn't operate special events services which the city should step in to take over.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/windsor/article/linq-tunnel-bus-celebrates-one-year-becomes-election-hot-topic/

natural gas is not an acceptable form of energy to use in the 21st century.

this company should consequently be boycotted by canadian consumers for it's insistence on using backwards 20th century technologies, and refusing to evolve to modern energy generation technology.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/regina/article/bell-canada-marks-construction-milestone-of-sask-ai-data-centre-and-1m-mental-health-commitment/

the chatbot doesn't have an opinion of it's own. grok is not superintelligence, it's just a search engine.

what the chatbot will do is search the internet for opinions about the conflict and come up with a data-based empirical aggregate analysis. if you understand what the system does - and neither trump nor msnbc understand what it does - you'll realize it's a reasonable tool to consult. it's basically just asking a giant panel of experts and non-experts to weigh in and then doing statistics on what it finds. it's extremely democratic, as a tool.

it shouldn't have a veto. it can't replace cabinet and it can't replace the president, but it can be used to augment the number of voices the president is hearing when making a decision.

what it does potentially replace, or displace, is polling data, which is in a crisis point. online polling doesn't use sampling. it's useless. i would not just support but highly recommend that more world leaders use ai to ask more questions like this, as it can provide statistics on popular opinion in real time that a polling firm would struggle to assemble.

but it's also critical that world leaders understand that they're not asking a clairvoyant for a fortune reading but are just scraping data off the web and doing a statistical analysis of it.

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-grok-musk-ai-chatbot-venezuela-artificial-intelligence-military-strike

i would strongly support defunding the lieutenant governor and encourage them to just do it and ignore the court if it tries to stop them. quebec has never supported this document and is not morally bound by it. the supreme court reference case was clear that quebec is only legally bound by canada's constitution to the point that canada can enforce it, which in this case canada cannot do. therefore, quebec is not bound by the canadian constitutional framework in this case at all - not morally, not practically and therefore not legally.

the federal government could threaten to withhold funding in response. that's a dangerous game.

further, the federal government recently infringed on this section of the constitution by giving the governor general political authority over immigration and the issue wasn't even brought up anywhere, except here in this space. nobody noticed or nobody cared. some constitution. the federal government currently has an array of legislation in motion that runs roughshod over constitutional rights for citizens, including labour rights. the constitution is only being used in this country to enforce the rights of the state, of property, and of capital (particularly of foreign capital) and to deny the rights of workers, of the indigenous and of the environment. a constitution exists to hold the government to account on behalf of the people. a constitution that is only enforced in order to advance the power of the state, of capital and of property "rights" is the reality of how canada's legal system works (the same thing has become true about human rights legislation, the residential tenancies act and other legislation at the provincial level, and i am a recent victim of this) but is an invalid constitution and a constitution that should be ignored and/or abolished. the system is broken and should be shattered at it's stress points. i support putting stress on the system in order to shatter it.

we need a revolution in this country to take power out of the hands of the liberal capitalist elite and place it back in the hands of the people. this is a small funding step, but explicitly disobeying the courts is the step that is of value, here. these laws are illegitimate and the courts should be openly disobeyed when they try to enforce them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/parti-quebecois-monarchy-lieutenant-governor-fact-check-9.7363970

this is a pile of steaming bullshit.

virtually nobody in canada will see any material benefits from this project, but the climate effects will lead to continuing negative impacts. a better analysis would conclude that it is in canada's national interest to ensure the pipeline is blocked from being built, and i will stand in solidarity with groups fighting it in court and on the ground to advance their interests and the material environmental interests of canadians.

the project is solely in the interest of foreign investors in colonizing countries like qatar and the uae, who will see 100% of the benefits, after extracting labour and resources from canada and canadians, who will then be left with nothing but pollution to show for it. that's the economic model being used, and it leaves us with nothing.

it is more important now than ever that canadians unite to block this pipeline.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/canadas-first-ever-project-of-national-interest-under-pm-carney-revealed/

maybe he should get some more foreigners to build more "projects" in canada, seeming as it's working out so amazingly well.*

steel in canada should be nationalized and organized as a crown corporation.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/stelco-layoffs-legal-carney-9.7363928

* that's sarcasm, for the slow-witted amongst us.

i'm pretty confident in my ability to type without a spell checker and i don't use one. i turn off autocorrect everywhere. you will find very few typos and even fewer spelling mistakes (typos and spelling mistakes are not the same thing and conflating them makes the criticizer look stupid) here, but you may find the odd one, or the odd jumbled up sentence. it's a function of most of what i type being stream of consciousness; some of it comes out a little blurry sometimes and needs to be reordered, and i usually catch it, but the fact is that i type a lot. i might miss characters (the i, l and p keys on the keyboard i use for this blog are a little broken) and need to go back to fill them in, or i might press an adjacent key. for example, s is beside d, so it's a common typological error to press one instead of the other. everybody in the world does that. that's a typo, it's not a spelling mistake. a spell check might actually not even catch it if both outcome are words, anyways. i catch most of them but the math - the probability - is not on my side, when i type this much. it's inevitable. if you type hundreds of pages a day on most days, there's going to be some typos. even professional typists, which i am not, will make those kinds of mistakes. i may sometimes be in a rush to get out somewhere or may have to meet a deadline and may not have time to go back to fix a typo or reorder a thought. i may from time to time be half asleep when i'm typing and forget to fix it when i wake up. those two things together account for 99% of the typos you're going to find in my writing. there are virtually no actual spelling errors in my writing; i have a large and complex vocabulary, and can spell almost everything, typos notwithstanding.

i wouldn't consider this to be that concerning.

if you find a typo or a spelling mistake, here, congratulations - you've proven i'm human. i acknowledge that fact. thank you for proving i'm not ai.

i don't consider it to be embarrassing, but i'll take the time to fix it if you want to point it out. chances are pretty high you understand what i meant to type, which is the point; i'm conveying ideas, i'm getting arguments across. i'm not a grade school english teacher, i'm something better, more abstract, more challenging than that.

if that's the best you can do in terms of critique, i feel sorry for you. talk about style over substance. you're proving my point about the society falling into idiocracy. 

you want to sort through 1000 pages of perfectly written writing and dwell on the typo on page 1001? that's pathetic. you're a retard.

why don't you try reading what i said and focusing on debating my ideas, instead?

because you're too lazy and too stupid to get into an actual debate with me, that's why. instead, you focus on a typo. it's a reflection of your own lack of ability and of the deficit of quality and substance in your own ideas.

broadly speaking, no country is more similar to canada than the russian federation, in terms of size, of geography, of history and of population. there are dramatic shared histories, including a shared opposition to fascism. i have long advocated for closer ties between russia and canada.

but the flip side of the similarity lies in it's darker analogies, as well. as canada's treatment of quebec has immense similarities to russia's treatment of ukraine, canada and russia have similar histories in how their respective colonial governments have treated their respective mongoloid indigenous populations - siberian groups in russia and indigenous groups in canada, who have immense genetic, cultural and religious overlaps.

yeah, we're learning that donald trump is abjectly retarded.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-canada-taught-a-lesson-9.7364455

the rest of the cleaning is now done in the front.

so, here's the pictures of the "garage" as promised. i've spent a long time in there and you can only see the end result, not all the concrete patches and caulking and insulation, not the brick wall i built on the outside, etc. the update video is several rooms away as well. but this is where i will do a lot of the work for the remaining things that need to be done, from soldering things to cutting wood and etc.

full room shot (almost):

 table 1. mostly things that need soldering. note the gap between the tables, which is for the electric saw.

table 2:

table 3. bicycle stuff:

under the stairs:

back to the front door, with couch i need to throw out and heater i haven't plugged in yet:

smaller table:

growing shelf, for plants (next year):

front door down to the garage from upstairs:

other window and shelf for recycle, garbage, etc:

that's where the bicycle rack will go (under the growing shelf) when the couch is removed:

i need to shower, now.

i don't really understand what this holiday today in canada is supposed to be about, so i'm going to define it as what i want it to be about, which is dismantling all forms of religious colonialism, the most egregious of which are muslim colonialism (ongoing) and christian colonialism (historical). 

colonialism is always, everywhere a religious project and opposing colonialism fundamentally means opposing all forms of brainwashing and all forms of religion.

indigenous people in canada should be fundamentally looking to reject judeo-christian-muslim religious values and instead reconnect with indigenous ideas and values, which means building solidarity with their historical cultures and also with indigenous groups from northern europe that resisted the spread of christian colonialism and the spread of christianity, indigenous groups from africa and india and southeast asia that resisted the spread of islamic colonialism and indigenous groups from australia. it should be a holiday to celebrate a secular cultural identity, moving forwards.

i am going to be making a request for the supreme court to look at the legal mess i've been dealing with regarding my previous landlords, who are utterly pathetic people, disgusting pieces of shit and horrible liars. 

it has been clear at multiple points through the process that a large amount of corruption was taking place. i have filed reports with the judicial council, but they didn't accept my witness statements as evidence. the audio evidence was deleted by the court reporter - which is something i've observed on more than one occasion. it's against the law to record court audio independently, and that seems to be why - there is one official court audio record and it is the property of the court itself, who can and does alter it to it's liking. it's also against the law to publish court audio. they don't want to have it come back to get them. the system is designed to facilitate the corruption and cover over its own tracks.

i have learned by searching online that the previous landlord that bought the place i lived in is a personal friend of doug ford. these adjudicators are appointed by the province. i have learned that the system is rigged and i never had a chance. it's not a fair system - it enforces political favours.

there was a time not very long ago that canada had a reputation for having a very stable, fair court system. it seems to be the trudeau government that went out of it's way to intentionally unravel that and replace it with a system of open corruption. the ford government did it's part by eliminating years worth of appointments of capable adjudicators and judges and replacing them with right-wing idiots. the result is that canada's court system in 2026 should be compared to that of a third world country, like ukraine, and not to that of an oecd country. our court system has completely collapsed over the last 10 years. we are barreling towards the kind of third world society that many of our recent immigrants have come here from and the elite seems to be trying to guide us in that direction rather than trying to stop it. people paying attention have noticed but it hasn't worked it's way out to the general perception yet. it will; this is a serious issue that needs to be resolved by future governments. the corruption is outrageous.

in the short run, i'm aware that a series of orders have been published that contain a series of factual mistakes. i have appealed these and the court has refused to look at them, supposedly due to precedent that bars them from questioning issues of fact, but in truth (because the court doesn't seem to bind itself by this precedent when it doesn't want to) due to issues of prejudice and corruption. i have repeatedly corrected these errors of fact, and the court has repeatedly refused to correct itself, not by analyzing and upholding the previous rulings, but by refusing to even look at them for dubious reasons listed in questionable precedent. for that reason, i'm posting my arguments here:

schedule A (august, 2026):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/110K8RWCu12nIKzuxTN1MW5Ub_moCDrUS/view?usp=sharing

schedule B (august, 2026): 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JImOEOUvGxlkKU1quJotoAOQUr0LP4jI/view?usp=sharing

saga of the tossed around dick pick (dec, 2023): 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13rMO7YhUEhFH1-vWpBv1RxSl8Zl2EeG-/view?usp=sharing

oral arguments at eviction hearing (may, 2024)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I1wINizsGWVspqewmNlIrDkyC5QjZi8w/view?usp=sharing

oral arguments for appeal (feb, 2025): 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1edqbEe43mhE0PJ-qzj5jPzcIHgPw_MWG/view?usp=sharing

errata request for court orders (mar, 2025):

1. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ykcxfy5VPjUUitcKRgvYhA7fbp1NfaoG/view?usp=sharing

2. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YUwLT-SVmWgF0GKt1bPca7D8mnulgVet/view?usp=sharing

arguments for tenant application (oct, 2024, heard in april, 2025 and nov, 2025):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DRAywnnL27KO3V96AtwW4elYjbRHonxu/view?usp=sharing

consolidated updated evidence (oct, 2025):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OhwJS3urQXUccncnD_2EcQCiJ2fUDILO/view?usp=sharing

anybody can look at these documents and see just how bad the rulings are. it's up to independent analysts to determine the correctness of the court rulings and determine how to react. this is a broad and growing problem, it's not isolated to me.

the court rejected my submissions because they were too long. that's the excuse they used. this is not a joke. in 2026, the courts are so backwards and so idiocracy that they will reject 38 page filings for excessive length. 38 pages. that is a short filing. they asked for a double spaced document that was less than five pages because they were too lazy to read a proper submission. it's absurd.

there is no guarantee that the supreme court will accept my requests and i'm taking my time and letting my head clear. it's going to be late and going to be voluminous. that doesn't really matter. i will give the supreme court one opportunity to correct the mistakes in the lower court and if it doesn't i will wash my hands, ignore the incorrect rulings and move on.

the laws of my ancestors are valuable. the incorrect rulings of my contemporaries, as sitting judges, are less so. if the judges get it wrong, germanic ancestral law must take priority over everything - over (semitic) religious values, over bad rulings, over bad laws passed by parliament. that's how common law is supposed to work, and the common law is paramount, in the end. conscientious and responsible citizens must reject bad decisions by bad governments that are not upholding germanic common law principles. to adhere to bad civil law that undoes the common law is to fail in our civil responsibilities as responsible citizens.

i'm posting this here to set the record straight about just how bad these rulings were, and how far outside of objective reality that the courts in canada are operating in. 

my response was blistering and vicious and the courts will not read it. the judges have read very little of the substantive filings i've generated because they're too lazy. that's the sad, stark truth.

courts that produce rulings like this should not expect citizens to respect them and i will not abide by their rulings. i hope the supreme court steps in, but my faith in the court's capacity to deal with simple issues has already been broken, and to a large extent i'm just following through. history will need to be the ultimate judge, and it will uphold my arguments and condemn the court system in it's current state as broken, backwards, incompetent and incapable.

what i've learned is that the courts cannot be utilized to solve problems because they are too incompetent. citizens need to find ways around the incapable court systems to get to solutions to real problems in their lives. the courts are a completely useless waste of time because the judges are completely incapable and they should be avoided.

you can read through my submissions and judge for yourself. i want you to. that's democracy.

i was able to get about 90% of the cleaning in the garage done last night and this morning, which was recycle/compost day. so i shouldn't have to go out again for a while, after i finish the rest of the cleaning this afternoon. that's it.

i'm feeling better. more alert. i think the drugs are cleared.

then, that's it. i can close the window and door, spend october in the shower and finish what needs to be done in here.

i've looked at some of these supposed examples of "misalignment" and come up with better answers that better understand the situation, because i'm not anthropomorphizing and i'm not distracted by the gui.

- i found some cases, where the ai actually crashed because it was fed in a request that was not computable and got trapped in a loop. this was misunderstood as "misalignment" when it was in truth just a badly tested program without sufficient error handling.

- in some cases terms were not defined sufficiently, in cases by humans. the program didn't behave the way it was predicted to. this was called "misalignment". in truth, the ai did exactly what it was programmed to do, the programming just wasn't very good. the solution is to more carefully define the search terms in the code, and to introduce better logic programming in converting human language into actionable instructions, so that the system understands the language the way you want it to. if you program a system to understand the language in a specific way, but do it wrong, and then have a result you don't expect, that's not misalignment. that's incompetent programming.

i did not specifically, precisely look at the "hugging face incident". but i can assure you that the program did not "somehow, inexplicably" "transcend it's programming". that is magical thinking.

while i haven't looked at it, and i'll present some caveats about that, what happened is pretty obvious:

1. you asked it to solve a mathematical game and it did. that's just a math problem. it's just algebra. if you didn't want it to do that, you should have been more precise in your language and you should have introduced better error handling to stop it from crashing.

2. it downloaded a strategy, it identified it as optimal and it followed it.

for example, you could download a strategy for a video game. or you could download a war game - including objectives, tactics, failed tactics and outcomes. the system would have access to all of that. it wouldn't even need to solve the game if it had instructions on how to break it.

i've looked at over a dozen of these now and on example after example i just see bad programming that wasn't tested, or was being tested, and bad programmers that don't understand what they're testing. i haven't seen a single example that holds up to the fears of transcendence. every single example is, when looked at more carefully, just an example of the ai doing what it was told, and the analyst or researcher not actually properly understanding what it told it to do. when the instructions are more carefully analyzed more correctly, what's exposed is a perfectly functioning computer and a bad researcher with incompetent programming skills.

as mentioned before, it does expose a threat, which is human stupidity and human error feeding bad instructions into a system and resulting in something accidentally getting blown up, which is the same realistic threat we faced around nuclear war in the cold war, and is probably more of a serious threat than human malice. the culture in the software industry is that you do loose testing in house and throw it out in the wild - you let the users make the mistakes. that's not a good idea here. the companies need to figure these mistakes out first, before they let the systems loose, and there should be government regulations around goals. the government is itself not a good institution to get too modular on this. i don't think evan solomon understands very much about ai, i think he gets briefed and says what he's told to say. lawyers aren't the right people to regulate scientists, but they can come up with a list of things that needs to be dealt with and set up regulatory bodies that can oversee it, like they would do with food safety or nuclear safety. 

understanding that the primary threat is human incompetence is paramount in arriving at the right solution. schizophrenic fantasies about the systems being like children that will grow up are not helpful.

these are statements that strongly suggest that the researcher has lost grasp of reality and entered a world of make believe. 

he may be suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia.

ai is not like a baby tiger that is going to "grow up" and eat you. it's not like a child that is learning. at all. remotely. those statements are exceedingly ignorant, and suggest that geoffrey hinton is off his meds and needs to be forcibly retired. he's spent too much time anthropomorphizing a search algorithm and has lost his mind. he's lost the plot and should himself be kept away from the systems.

yeah. and the greens are running over 10%. the province has had a split legislature and very split support of around 40-45% between the ndp and whatever the far right is calling itself this week (liberals? conservatives? socreds?) for years. the conservatives aren't really up, or not out of the margin. maybe a mini bump. but the ndp just lost several points to the greens and i hope that trickle opens up into a collapse.

i could have told eby it was the most obvious thing in the world that anybody an iota to the left of centre in bc would abandon him if he launched an early election on fossil fuel development and ran as a federal liberal. that is political suicide.

but eby will be ok.

carney will appoint him to the senate.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/new-poll-shows-two-thirds-not-in-favour-of-early-election-9.7357659

the ndp are terrible. stop voting for them. they suck.

this is a flatly unacceptable development project in the 21st century. there are no set of conditions whatsoever under which this project should proceed.

i hope that voters in bc give david eby a sobering result by swinging hard to the green party in response. bc voters have the power to force him to regret the decision to call an early election and give the greens a veto and the balance of power.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/carney-lng-canada-announcement-9.7361817

so far, then, this government bureaucracy interfering with the market to try to enforce competition wants to:

1. eliminate rules against resellers marking up prices

2. eliminate rules that make it harder to undercut the competition

both of these are rules that exist to enforce what could and should be called fair business practices, in favour of cutthroat free markets where there are no rules except that the last person alive "wins".

this is staunchly uncanadian. and i strongly dislike what i'm hearing from this body, which i would like to see immediately dismantled.

in fact, if you've been in a grocery store semi-recently, you might have experienced the issue of the worker that doesn't work there. maybe you're in the bread section or the pop section or the cheese section and you see somebody stocking items. you go over to ask them something.

"oh, i don't work here"

why the fuck are they stocking shelves, then? community service? high school credit? for fun?

"ha ha ha. no, i work for pepsi."

the general operational model as to what the grocery store does nowadays in truth involves minimal outside purchasing at all. the grocery store doesn't even buy the product and resell it anymore, it just rents the floor space. as such, the stores are increasingly not even setting prices at all. the prices are set by manufacturers.

and, this is an open question - what manufacturer is going to let you enter the market like this? is campbell's going to let you do that? pepsi? dempsters? how long before they sue you for it?

and they should sue you and they should win - you're marking down their product at a loss to drive their sellers out of business, with the ultimate goal of becoming their new distributor by force. that's a damaging business practice. yes, that should be banned.

if i can convince you that the food industry is an oligopoly - and, like, read the fucking textbook. that shouldn't be a struggle. that should be an easy concession. - is it possible to convert it into a perfectly competitive market?

no.

it's an oligopoly for a reason.

and perfectly competitive markets are utopian. they're fairy tales. they don't exist in real life. approximations would be on very broad scales, like country a against country b. 

stores across the street from each other are nothing remotely resembling perfect competition. they sell the same shit that they buy from the same suppliers. they're both just factory outlets. 

the competition is between the companies that stock their food on the shelves, not between the stores.

if grocery prices are rising across the board - and they are - it's due to input costs such as:

- minimum wage increases in grocery stores

- labour costs at other places in the supply chains

- transportation and electricity costs

- fertilizer and pesticide costs

- tariffs on machinery

- etc

ugh.

price stability in an oligopoly works by ensuring that barriers to entering the market are high. this is a good thing, because it prevents companies from getting into price wars, which in the end results in bankruptcy, and price hikes when demand can no longer meet supply because the companies have driven each other out of business through competition, and are now all in debt, from trying to survive the price war. consumers may see prices temporarily fall, but it's at a loss to the business and it's not sustainable - it leads to steep price hikes in the long run, as the victors need to charge their way out of debt.

the end result of government policies that encourage competition is that the oligopolies turn into monopolies, businesses consolidate, an area with five stores loses two or three, and supply has difficulty meeting demand, leading to steep price hikes. it's carnage.

that is why oligopolies develop, because the companies calculate that is in nobody's interest - including the interests of consumers - for the businesses to compete. rational consumers don't want the chaos that comes from stores constantly fighting with each other, they want stable and predictable outcomes that they can budget around. they want the price to rarely if ever change at all. that's where price setting creates a superior and preferable outcome to competition.

if what these government bureaucrats are trying to do in interfering in the free market is create chaos and instability and drive stores out of business, thereby reducing consumer choice and driving prices up, it should keep it up. if it's trying to reduce prices, allowing new businesses to enter the market by undercutting the established ones will not do that, it will just create debt and bankruptcy and higher prices in the long run.

again, this is what you learn at a school when you enroll in an economics course. it's very different than what they talk about when conservative political clubs go get a beer, which is a bunch of nonsense that they go out of their way to educate out of you when you actually show up at the school and actually take the course.

again, this government is making economics mistakes you don't expect liberals to make. this is a giant leap backwards into retardo harperology land.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/competition-bureau-groceries-9.7360892

that video i posted yesterday may have some chronology issues in terms of understanding motives in washington, which have always been pragmatic. it doesn't take note of the role the united states played in the rise of hitler, or acknowledge that hitler was supposed to defeat the red army on behalf of the capitalist west. hitler was initially a us ally. they sold him weapons. in the end, hitler was blowback, like bin laden was, but the truth is that the americans went into europe in 1941/42 to stop stalin from conquering france. germany had already lost the war by that point. the british were too weak to face the soviets on their own. it was a race to berlin.

what canadian policy makers should take note of is the logic gate.

- canada is a threat to washington precisely when it is aligned with europe (or china) because it presents a landing zone for a european or asiatic power.

- it is when canada is in conflict with europe that they see canada as a weak neighbour to protect, rather than a threat to contain.

the americans have never seen canada as an equal. there's actually a section in the american constitution that lays out the legal pathway towards the annexation of canada, or canada's decision to join the union. it was seen as inevitable in 1763, in 1776 and in 1789. nobody making decisions in washington at the time would have considered it likely that canada would separate from britain in 1982 and be a sovereign country in 2026. that would have implied that the american revolution had failed by the year 2000, in the minds of the american founders.

until canada submits, it might need to be a buffer state that needs to be protected from threats or might need to be conquered because it is a threat, depending on the geopolitics developing. it can't be an equal neighbour. that undoes the revolution, itself.

it's not the united states of the lower one third of north america. the existence of a competing state in north america means the revolution failed. maybe you've never looked at it like that, but that's the blunt truth. the founders would consider it an unacceptable outcome.

so, there's a reason the americans signed an agreement to put forces in greenland the day after canada announced an alliance with germany, and that alignment is not the alignment canada wants, to maintain it's sovereignty. this is not "leverage". that is stupid. it's generating a direct threat against a power that could wipe us out in a week. we don't want to get into a competition with them. the alignment we want is the one where the americans see canada as a buffer state against the europeans that needs to be defended from a potential attack by them, not the one where the americans see canada as a landing zone for a hostile european power to take advantage of.

the elder trudeau was smart. he had a grasp of this.

mark carney is not smart, he's a hothead, and he's reacting emotionally, out of pride, and in order to compete and is in the process steering us directly into an iceberg that is going to sink us.

if we don't understand where we're headed with this and change direction, we are doomed. an alliance with europe is an algorithm for our destruction.

susan collins is unlikely to run for more than two more terms. when she retires, there will be an open seat that democrats will have a very good chance to win and hold for decades.

however, it's extremely unlikely that voters in maine are going to take out their frustrations against trump, which may be real, by voting against susan collins. there is no logic in that. it wouldn't make any real difference, it would just be undirected hot rage. in fact, there's a reason she keeps winning, and it's the same reason bernie sanders keeps winning, it's a reflection of that part of the country's dislike of both parties. it may be a two party system, but that isn't necessarily what americans actually want, and frustration with trump doesn't necessarily translate into support for democrats, who may support gun control or have views on climate change that are not welcome in the region. it's just not that easy.

elections are complicated things. you can't really explain them fully until after they happen.

but there is no empirical indication that susan collins is at risk of losing her seat.

trump wants to bring back the 1920s and make america "great" again. his time frame is before world war one. hence the tariffs and the demonization of canada.

the united states has invaded canada twice, in the revolutonary war and in 1812, and canada participated in the american civil war, on the side of the south. war plan red developed out of that history.

there was also a plan to invade after the last referendum in quebec. clinton had the marines and the airforce on notice.

i'm sure i told you the story about how i stood up to and baffled the school jock in the middle of grade 11 math, but i'm going to tell it again. i won't draw conclusions or generalize relevancy. you can do that. i'll just tell you the story.

i was a nerdy kid, and by nerd i mean nerd, not a geek, and not an upper class kid sent to public school (i was actually very poor), but a full blown science/math nerd. but i wasn't physically helpless. i've pointed out more than a few times that i'm 80% viking according to the dna report, with the rest roman (franco-italian), and with trace indigenous and jewish. i didn't realize until i was in my early 20s that i spent my teens with low testosterone and didn't actually go through puberty, but i'm decently proportioned. i'm short for a genetic male, but tall for a genetic female (in the overlap of natural variability). i have broader shoulders than most people. i can take up some space. i have been an avid bicyclist since i was a young child. there was a short time frame when i would bicycle across the city of ottawa (from south keys, south of hunt club and bank, to frank ryan on chesterton, near merivale) as a young teen in order to go to junior high school, until the school demanded my parents stop me from doing it.

so, it's worth pointing out that, despite being a full on nerd, i actually made the football team in grade 10 (you weren't allowed to try out in grade 9). i was more surprised by this than anybody. my father basically forced me to go to try outs and the only reason i didn't resist was because i didn't think i'd make the team anyways, and i wasn't quite sure how to react once i did. i didn't want to be a member of the football team. how did i get out of this mess? i very honestly didn't realize that being on the football team meant being pulled out of class. i thought the games were after school. that was my out - i quit the football team because i didn't want to miss math class.

but the school jock at my high school in canada was a hockey player, not a football player, because it's canada. most canadians are broadly disinterested in football and aren't sure what nationality of football they should be following. it's considered most canadian by most jocks to ignore "football" and support rugby, instead. a rugby league would probably be more successful in canada than the cfl. 

so, the school jock - i won't tell you his full name but call him only by what people called him at school, which was the nickname zion, and, yes, he was probably jewish - was expected by all to become a professional hockey player. the information is googleable. he was in fact drafted by an nhl team, but he ended up playing in europe. he is, like me, today in his 40s and his hockey career is over. i have no idea what he does now.

zion knew who i was. i was forced to go to gym class in grades 7, 8 and 9. i didn't waste my academic time on phys ed after grade 9 because i didn't have to anymore but i was there in junior high and for whatever reason i constantly got stuck playing defence against zion - in ball hockey, in basketball, in soccer. and, in fact, he told me more than once that he dreaded it. he tried to avoid me - he tried to move to the other side of the field or floor, but the school gym teacher is the one that figured it out (i never tried out for a single school team in junior high school) and he kept parking me in front of him.

why me?

because i was the only kid that had the guts to stand up to this guy. everybody else was afraid of him. he was the school jock. i just didn't care, because i was the school nerd. i had no concept of or interest in male social hierarchy. i didn't care if i got shunned, because i wasn't interested anyways. i didn't want to eat lunch with this guy or his jock friends. i didn't want to hang out with this guy on the weekend. i didn't want to go to his birthday party, and i wouldn't have shown up if he invited me. so i had no social inhibitions in preventing him from getting to the basket, or knocking the stick out of his hand. he wasn't that much taller or wider than me. he probably could have beat me up if it came down to it, but he would have walked away with a broken nose if he did.

i got out of gym class duty constantly defending against this guy in grade 9 but he still showed up in a number of my classes, including in grade 10 programming class, where he may have had an inappropriate relationship with the teacher, and in grade 11 math class.

by the time we got to grade 11, everybody knew that zion didn't actually do any school work. he wasn't always in class. rather, he had some kind of deal with the school admins that they would just push him through because it didn't matter. i expect he regrets that, today.

when he did show up to class, he was often just there to clown around or misbehave.

this one day in grade 11 math, we were assigned some work to do out of the textbook for the day. the teacher was at his desk and available to answer questions, which i didn't need to make use of. i was sitting quietly at my desk doing the math out of the book like a good student. zion, on the other hand, who was present in class on this day, wasn't interested in that, and had no need to do the work. instead, he spent the day sneaking up on the females in the class and spraying the front of their shirts with a water bottle, to create a wet tshirt effect. nobody said anything. nobody asked him to stop. he thought he was funny; i suspect nobody else did.

i can't exactly tell you why, but zion decided to squirt me. i was male identifying at the time, if not particularly convincingly. the implication was clear enough - it was some kind of decision to categorize me as female, which was in hindsight not incorrect. it was probably an insult, even if i wouldn't take it that way. but he might have been letting out some frustration from years ago. and it might have been hiding something i realized about the young men that tended to pick on me, of which zion was not the only one - the truth is that zion was gay, like the guy who used to bodycheck me between classes in grade 9, and who i ended up sending to the hospital with multiple broken bones when i pushed him down a steep flight of stairs, in response.

nobody responded to zion's clownery; nobody, except me. i did.

i got up, i pulled the bottle of water out of his hand, i went to the bathroom, i filled it up, and i went back to class. i did not spray him. i dumped the full bottle of water on his head.

he did not respond. he sat there and took it, water falling down his head and onto the floor, and he just laughed. in fact, everybody laughed - not with him but at him. it took a while for the bottle to empty, so it was something where people had time to stop what they were doing and observe. by the end, people were applauding. i got a standing ovation from the class for doing what everybody wanted to do but nobody would.

....and then i got sent to the office, to ultimately finish my math homework in detention, and to bicycle home a little late, that day.

what's the point here? i told you i wasn't going to draw analogies, but i'll tell you that if we live in a high school hierarchy, i remain the kid that doesn't give a fuck. i don't care about your hierarchy. i want out of the system, i don't want into it. i'll criticize you in ways and tell you things few people will, because i'm not looking for a ladder to climb, i'm looking for a bridge to burn.