there's also some files in here from 2014/2015 that are...

well, i thought it was my mom that sent the cops here on a suicide call. she denied it, though. i haven't really spoken to her much since. there's a confirmation, though. hrmmn. mom lied to me. sucks. but, what do you do when you confirm a five year old lie that you saw right through in the first place?

i can't get into the details of it, but these reports - by an organization called COAST - are so far removed from reality as to be comical. the way i'd describe it is if you could imagine a child having a detailed discussion with einstein about relativity, and then trying to write a summary of that discussion. on top of that, the agents working for COAST appear to have made things up entirely out of nowhere.

i have never requested medication from anybody, with the exception of the hormones. in fact, i am broadly opposed to the idea of medication in mental health - and have written widely about it over the course of many years. any suggestions that i was ever suicidal as a reaction to an inability to gain access to any medications are completely invented out of whole cloth. in fact, it is exceedingly unlikely that i would fill any medication that was given to me, as i would not want it to affect my individuality or my ability to create art. again: i've written about this extensively over a long time period. my contemplation of suicide during this period of time was a purely rational reaction to my disinterest in labour, and my preference for death over labour.

i do not know why a support worker would write a false report of this nature.

i would like these documents to be destroyed, frankly - not because they say anything about me specifically, but because they have absolute inventions and poor interpretations in them. i mean, what do you do when you get your file and realize the people writing into it are literally making shit up? honestly?

the notes from that period are actually up here, so i'd advise anybody interested in the question to consult my own perception of this rather than that of the COAST workers.

and, is it time to legally change my name to jessica, just to be safe on the border check?

i got my disclosure; it's on a dvd, and we'll see what it says.

but, the information sheet made a few things clear.

they're not seeking jail time, which undermines the entire premise of the charges. i'm supposedly a threat to the public. if that is true, why aren't they seeking jail time?

and, they want to proceed summarily.

so, they want this to be done quickly - they want me to plead guilty to a minor offence, take it on the chin and be on with it. why spends months fighting a minor offence?

i'm not going to do that. i'm going to request an indictment. i'm going to fight the charges with everything i can. there's going to be a witness evaluation. a pre-trial. i'm going to subpoena the cop. i'm going to make a huge deal out of this, and drag it on for months or years.

why?

because the logic is backwards - i don't gain anything by getting this done with quickly. i lose border access, and possibly run into problems with my income. but, if i drag it out, i gain the possibility of compensation, increase the chances of the officer facing discipline, get to the point of charging the woman with filing a false report and get to my end point - which is not even acquittal, but file destruction.

i had a tremendous injustice done to me by a thug that should be in jail and a woman that belongs in an institution. i'm not going to forget about it. i'm going to fight until every single person responsible for this gets what they deserve.

and, they will get what they deserve.

trust me.

first, i'm going to review these files. but, i should be ready to file the human rights complaint in the morning.

no.

listen.

i'm perfectly happy - and in fact somewhat eager - to be the punk in the court room. we've swung far too far to the right recently, and this patriarchal faux feminism masquerading as progressivism is a prime example of how we've taken massive steps backwards over the last several years.

my defense is going to be to appeal to liberal rights theory and libertarian values, in opposition to this fake feminism, which is just a front for authoritarian capitalism.

but, it's not just that my defense requires this - the society requires this.

i've been as clear as i can that i'm on the other side of this argument, and i'm both eager and able to make these arguments in a court of law.

yeah?

well, fuck you and the tipper gore you rode in on.

so, i'm back to stable access and could potentially get back to work over the next few days. i still don't have those shelves i've been putting off getting for years, but everything else seems to have fallen in line over the last few days, so now i just need for the court to disclose so i can take this psychotic, decrepit, senile old dyke to the human rights commission and teach her a fucking lesson in public law. seven figures. i'll let the crown pull me along as long as they'd like, but this is ultimately not in the public interest or a worthwhile use of public tax money or public resources at the court house, and i consequently have enough faith in the court system that somebody along the way is eventually going to say "this is retarded" and pull the plug on it.

the woman at the counter said tonight or tomorrow. i'll need to take a run down this afternoon to see. and, it's going to be interesting to see what they give me.

there's an off chance that they might try to arrest me for filing the complaint, as it's "indirect contact" but if they try that then it will just expose the fraud underlying the charges. you could imagine that bail hearing, right.

"you arrested her for filing a human rights complaint?"
"well, it was a breach of the recognizance."
"and, why was she arrested in the first place?"
"for pointing out that she was being discriminated against, and threatening to file a human rights complaint."
"you charged her with harassment for 'threatening' to file a human rights complaint?"

i mean, i kind of have to do it, to make sense of my defense - which is that when a thug shows up at your door, in a blue uniform or not, and threatens to put you in jail for exercising your rights, you are obligated to exercise those rights. and, if that thug arrests you for standing up for yourself, that thug will need to face the consequences of his criminality, in the end.

one thing at a time.

i need disclosure, first. and, if they give me something redacted or something half-assed, i'll go back to the court and demand they do better. i'm not willing to move to the next step until i'm happy with disclosure, unless the justice enforces it. and, if she does, the pre-trial is going to be a messy affair.

as previously, my wholesale reseller isp is completely incompetent. they insisted on a remote install in a unit with no lines in it, and of course it failed. i have to wait until monday for a cogeco tech. it's cheap when it's working...

i think the kid upstairs is smoking inside and that she might think she can blame it on me. she might be skipping school, too. the reality is that i quit smoking almost three years ago and never smoked inside, anyways. so, she's in for a rude surprise when i point the truth out to her dad. and, daddy's going to have to believe me, too. i'm not yet at the point of bringing it up. but, the situation is incomparably better, and i'm broadly happy with the move.

i want to note here that my netbook was turned off at some point yesterday, when i was in court. that's when i was gone, between 10:00 and 2:00, roughly. i last used the device on the afternoon of the 16th, was home on the evening of the 16th and was home on the evening of the 17th. i discovered it on the afternoon of the 18th. i reset the device as a precaution. but, i'm more concerned about the potentiality of police harassment - it seems like somebody took a look around when they knew i was gone.

i lost tabs, but i can get them back. i'm more upset about the unjustifiable surveillance.

i was hoping the charges would be dropped by now, but i need to check for disclosure again pretty much now. i don't need time to set a resolution date: i know what i'm expecting, which is a lot of contrived bullshit. but, the crown may need time to make sense of the absurdity before it.

if the crown is smart, it will conclude that it will cause less damage to itself if it drops the charges than it will if it discloses. and, while i'm likely to look for a foia request regardless, i should get what i need for the discrimination lawsuit out of the bail hearing.

i reiterate: i was arrested on false charges to prevent me from filing a discrimination suit by a cop that was already out to get me. and, the documentation produced by the process should help me go after them both, if it's released.

so, this is the choice the crown is making: does it want to risk the consequences of disclosure on an extremely weak case that it will probably lose at the preliminary stage, or is it better off backing away from the situation altogether, to prevent the consequences of disclosing the corruption?

personally, i'm in this for the long run and looking to make people suffer for what they've done.

i do not yet have internet. tuesday. maybe.

i'm typing from a brand new chrome book, an ibm thinkpad. this will make blogging remotely a lot more possible, for me. it's a big update. i just got fed up with being non-mobile, and had no interest in learning how to type on a phone....

the move itself went flawlessly, although i'm still waiting on the washing machine. tuesday. maybe.

i had my hearing on wednesday, and found out on thursday that the prosecutor has been removed/resigned due to a conflict of interest. i don't know the details, but i suspect a relationship with the cop. so, they're bringing in a prosecutor from out of town. but, i expect the charges to be immediately dropped. i have to reappear on wednesday, and i'm going to request a stay due to delay on disclosure, if the charges aren't already dropped.

i'm going to wait to type further.

we'll talk soon.

i need to move.

on that old debate as to whether kafka or orwell was the better prophet...

i had to get a few hours of sleep when i got home, as i hadn't slept in custody. they picked me up right before i was going to make spaghetti and take a shower, too, to end what was already a long day. so, i need to recuperate a little tonight. 

but, you are correct: i am a creature of the internet, and i make arguments better in writing. you also tend to take control of conversations, which is a good trait, but i learned a long time ago that i need to write an essay, sometimes, to accommodate for disconnects with certain personality types. 

i was barely awake during our conversation outside of the court, but if i remember correctly, you were going to speak to legal aid and get back to me before the end of the 26th. i'm hoping that this essay can find it's way to a potential lawyer that is making a decision on taking the case, as i don't think this case is really about harassment on my behalf, but more about police harassment against me. this essay should form the basis of my defence. i don't think that a bail hearing was the right time to have this discussion, but, as mentioned, it would have required a soliloquy from me that you weren't likely to grant. 

i got arrested for repeatedly applying to an ad for housing on the internet, and essentially charged with stalking somebody that i've never met. i had a speech prepared, but i didn't need to use it, because the justice didn't need to hear it - how do you get from being persistent in applying for housing (however annoying...) to criminal harassment directed at a specific individual unknown to the accused? and, this was really the crux of the matter from the crown's perspective. the bail conditions were set up to treat me like i was stalking this woman, and she required protection from me, when the reality is that i was being persistent in looking for an apartment, and had no idea she even existed. the justice immediately realized that disconnect. i think you saw the gulf in logic, too. even the crown seemed less than convinced that this was worth her time, frankly. so, how do you get such a ridiculous charge out of such a benign behaviour? 

ockham's razor really suggests something else is at play, and i do believe that the actual issue was that the officer was out to get me. if we need some alternate way to explain how somebody gets arrested and held for 20 hours for replying to a non-personal ad on the internet, this is the answer that seems most apparent. i had not only dealt with this officer previously, he had threatened to charge me with harassment previously, and i had in fact filed a complaint against him with the oiprd. while i do not claim to know whether caroline chevalier's fears are real in her own mind or not, i think the irony of the situation is that her narrative suggests some paranoia or ptsd on her behalf, and that that may require some treatment for her own well being. i don't want to seem insensitive towards people that are dealing with real harassment, as i actually have a great deal of empathy, but i must be adamant that this is not it, and that any attempt to frame the issue as one where a potentially vulnerable female is being threatened by a rejected suitor or aggressive pursuer is not consistent with any evidence that actually exists. i was pursuing an apartment, and under the impression that the person on the other side of the machine was ryan myon. this is a case the crown appears to be pursuing due solely to the nature of the report that exists, rather than any meaningful evidence, which reduces to an issue of framing by the officer. as such, i think this is the real issue before the court. 

i initially had contact with this officer in the summer of 2018 on an unrelated call regarding a conflict between my neighbour and i about the issue of secondhand smoke. i am living in a unit with poor flooring, on top of a very heavy marijuana user. i must keep the windows open at almost all times to prevent being stoned by the second-hand smoke. this is the topic of a suit i filed against my landlord, swt-16361-18. i actually took myself to the hospital at one point and tested positive for thc, from the second-hand smoke. at the start of the summer, a new tenant moved in next door that insisted on getting very drunk and chain smoking regular cigarettes directly in my air supply, leaving me in a situation where if i closed my window i'd get stoned, and if i opened my window i'd get smoked on. frustratingly, there is a very big yard next door, and no reason this person was required to smoke in my air supply. after several polite attempts to ask her to smoke elsewhere, i resorted to more powerful tactics, including blaring loud music and yelling rude things out the window. 

there's no question that i've been very rude to this person, but there's no question that she's been very rude to me, too. she doesn't have the right to smoke wherever she wants, and i don't have the obligation to live in her smoke, but most smokers don't see it that way: they think they do have the right to smoke wherever they want, and everybody else does have the obligation to deal with it. what should have been a polite and neighbourly request to move a few feet away from the building turned into frequent yelling matches with a quite belligerent drunk. and, at some point she decided i was harassing her and called the cops. 

now, this is really a situation without a proper remedy. i believe i should have some legal recourse to prevent her from smoking in my air supply. if these were private houses, rather than apartments, i could sue for trespass; i can't really do that, in the existing situation. i've explored the idea of having her charged with nuisance, and i'll get to that in a second. but, there really isn't anything i can do in this situation besides make the experience unpleasant, and hope she smokes somewhere else - which is in fact what happened, in the end. but, i'm cognizant of the law, too. i knew not to threaten her or make her feel unsafe - just to be irritating enough to get under her skin. i don't expect she had the same subtle understanding of harassment, and consequently felt justified in calling the police for being irritated. 

i believe that the first time i met the officer that pressed charges (an "officer muntino") was on a call from the neighbour that i was harassing her by yelling things out the window at her. and, i actually think that the key bias underlying the charges that were pressed comes from this encounter, directly. while i don't recall all of the mean things i said to this woman to try to get her to smoke somewhere else, i can be certain that i didn't say anything racist, for the reason that i'm not a racist. i'd just never do that, and i'm confident i didn't. there's certain things that you make sure you don't say to a black person, that you very carefully avoid, at all times. but, the smoker does happen to be quite visibly african in descent. i don't know how this information found it's way to the officer. it may have even been coerced by the officer, who could have accidentally framed the issue that way. but, when the officer appeared at my door, he accused me of hurling racial slurs and was quite angry and perturbed by it. again: it's hard to know what the smoker is thinking. but, the thing is that it isn't actually true. i simply wouldn't do that. this officer then reassured this woman that she has the right to smoke wherever she wants, which just fed into more conflict in the space. fwiw, she has no problems yelling transphobic slurs at me, and doesn't think twice about it, but i don't care as long as she smokes somewhere else. 

as mentioned, i am of the opinion that she should not be legally permitted to smoke at such a close proximity to my window, and i should have a legal method at my disposal to force her to move. i couldn't get bylaw to do anything. trespass doesn't make sense in context. i can't sue the landlord next door for reasonable enjoyment. but, in researching approaches, something that struck me as potentially worthwhile was building evidence for a possible nuisance case. i tried exploring these options with police, and was told i need to establish intent. so, i started filming her while she was smoking - and telling her why i was doing it. i then got a second visit from officer muntino, ordering me to stop filming her smoking, under threat of being charged with... 

....criminal harassment. 

i told him that i was building a case for nuisance, and he said there's no such thing as criminal nuisance. there is of course such thing as criminal nuisance, and this behaviour is not harassment, either. i was not charged for this, for obvious reasons. but, there's a commonality in these cases - this cop likes to throw his weight around, and ultimately doesn't know what he's talking about. 

the story i'd like to paint is one of a cop that is convinced i'm a racist, and is essentially out to get me, so jumped on an opportunity to charge me with harassment when he finally could, as trivial as it might actually be. but, i'm not a racist. nor am i even very white, really. i'm just a non-smoker trying to find a healthy place to live. 

the report i filed with the oiprd on sept 16th is based on a different narrative of the events that occurred in relation to this case than the one presented by the crown. from file #E-201809161252432765, 

Your complaint details 

Address 

15-851 tuscarora 
windsor 
there was a phone call & a visit to my door, of a threatening, harassing and frankly simply incompetent nature. 

Incident Dates 

Date 
12/9/2018 
Time 
3:56 
Date 
16/9/2018 
Time 
12:00 

Summary of complaint 
Please note formatting has been stripped for preview purposes - original intact 
this officer has threatened me with arrest for a non-crime on two occasions. the first occurrence occurred by phone, and i have a recording of it. the officer called me at 3:56 am - that is almost 4:00 in the morning - on sept 12, and threatened to arrest me for repeatedly responding to an online ad. the number that the officer called me from was (removed). i txted a response to this number, and was told it is not an officer's number. it must have been a friend or partner's number, i suppose. i do have the recording of the officer identifying himself and can email it somewhere. i explained that my behaviour - repeatedly responding to an online ad for an apartment - is not harassment under the criminal code, and not only would i not stop, but i am preparing a human rights case against the landlord, for discriminating against me on enumerated grounds. the second occurrence happened at roughly 12:00 pm on sept 16th. two officers showed up at my door (the other was a white male officer and said nothing during the encounter), and this "constable mancino" threatened me with arrest a second time if i did not stop responding to the ad. i asked the officer to explain what harassment under the law is, and he failed to do so in a correct manner. he seemed to believe that harassment is merely annoying somebody, rather than threatening to harm them. of course, if that were true, then telemarketing would be against the law, and the jails would be full of call centre agents. it's just wrong. after determining that the officer did not understand the law, i told him i didn't have time for this, encouraged him to launch a report if he wanted to and went to close the door. he then put his foot in the door, preventing me from doing so. i informed him that he does not have a warrant, and yet he still refused to move his foot. he did eventually move his foot after i asked him to several times. he then threatened to arrest me if i reply to the ad again - not if i conduct in threatening or harassing behaviour, but if i merely reply to the ad. on his way out, i asked him for his badge number and he refused to give it to me. he started with "184" and then said he already gave it to me, which he did not. even if he had already given it to me, that would not be a reason to not give it to me again. when a citizen asks for a badge number, an officer should state it slowly and repeatedly if necessary. this officer may have been acting out of bias regarding my gender identity, as i am openly transgendered, but i cannot state that for certain. regardless, he should not have called me at 4:00 am from an unofficial police number that may or may not have belonged to his friend or partner, he should not have threatened me with arrest without understanding the nature of the law, he should not have prevented me from closing the door without a warrant and he should have given me his badge number when i asked. i would suggest that this particular officer has a superiority complex, is unreformable and should probably look for a different line of work. 

i was arrested on the evening of sept 24th and held for 20+ hours before being released. 

while i understand that i am the one on trial, i think that the evidence against me is so flimsy as to dispense of it rather quickly, and i think that it is the officer that truly needs to stand trial here. i believe the case should be dismissed, that this officer should be severely disciplined and that i should be compensated generously for the ordeal. so, i would hope that potential counsel would be looking towards the longer term, in turning the situation over: for the person being harassed here, and quite violently, is in fact actually myself. 

there will be almost no mention of manson in the alter-reality, because i am not and never have been a fan of his.

i was 15 when antichrist superstar was released, a fan of nin and corgan, and deeply anti-conformist, but i don't think i've ever listened to it all the way through. if i ever have, it was by accident, at a party.

first of all, the music is just not very interesting.

but, i don't think the fan base cares much about how boring the actual music actually is.

the flat truth is that i just thought marilyn manson was stupid. i didn't find him interesting or challenging on any level, and what he said was less thought provoking to me and struck me more as just flat out daft.

my opinion hasn't changed at all over the years.

i probably wouldn't have been able to articulate this at the time, but this is the difference: i was an atheist from a very, very young age. not a satanist. an atheist. so, he actually struck me as just promoting another ideology that needed to be broken down. and, if you want to tell me that satanism is not a religion, i'm going to have to take the opposite position in a debate on it.

like, i need to be clear: when i heard him speak, i heard an ideological enemy rather than somebody on my side of things. he wasn't telling people to think for themselves and rely on empiricism and science, he was just giving them an alternate means of brainwashing and trying to work them into another kind of ideology.

i was as opposed to manson's views as i was opposed to any other religionist's views.

i guess i was smart enough to see through it from the start.

my expectations with bjork have been dramatically lowered over the last fifteen years, to the point that i'll consider this a successful release if i deduce it's worth listening to a second time.

it's starting off relatively well. let's see where it goes.

i'm at track two, and this currently sounds like every other time that bjork has tried to be serious since vespertine, which wouldn't be such a tragedy if it were more dynamic. it's less that it's the same thing over and over again, and more that it's the same meandering aimlessness, yet again.

i caught the mt zion sample. did you?

i'm going to let this play, because it's bjork and i can still enjoy what is really brutal stagnation from her on a kind of basic level. and, i might listen to it a second time, too. but, she really needs somebody to challenge her, to take her out of these patterns she's built up around herself, to smash whatever mental chains are keeping her running on the spot and prevent her from going over what is really the same song over and over and over.

the second half of the record seems to be a lot stronger than the first half.

yeah, this isn't fundamentally flawed the way that vulnicra was, in the sense of the arrangements being so ultimately haphazard - i know vulnicra sounds complicated, but it's complicated in the way that throwing a lot of buckets of paint at a wall is, rather than the way that organizing it into patterns is: vulnicra had a lot of paint in it, but it didn't produce much of a picture. i get that the idea of the record is mostly vocal, and you can listen to it, but only from that intellectual distance. and, bjork works best when she's got you by the heart.

this record is definitely much more composed.

but, i'm not yet convinced that it's as compelling as medulla.

deathtokoalas

this may have belonged on a best of list c. 1967, but, in 2017, fifty+ years after this was novel, it just sounds like an untrained child messing around with a piece of gear she doesn't understand - which is undoubtedly what it actually is.

agustin muerto

strange you say this. have you ever had the chance to play a modular synthesizer? it takes a lot of knowledge to make stuff like this, and she's a great arranger. I'd understand your comment from someone who isn't into music very much and for who it is just "bleeps and noises", but you seem some who actually knows and makes music, so I really don't get it.

deathtokoalas

see, as somebody who is into music, and who has written hours of electronic soundscapes, this is what my informed perception is: that it is, actually, just a lot of 'bleeps and noises', and that the only way you could try and assign order to this, which does not really have it, is if you're being overwhelmingly pretentious to hide your own ignorance.

the buchla is usually associated with the work of morton subotnick in the mid 60s. i'd point you in that direction to hear an example of somebody that knows how to use the device.

i just want to address a point about synthesis, though, because the idea that synthesis is something you study, or that it takes some kind of knowledge to operate a modular synthesizer, is fundamentally a misunderstanding of what any kind of synthesizer is. i guess that, for an uninformed person such as yourself, you might just see a bunch of technology, and assume you need some kind of degree to operate it. it's a big, complicated machine, right? but, the sum total of the actual theory behind how a modular synthesizer operates would be about ten pages long: you just need to understand what each of the components do. after that, what operating the machine actually means is a process of experimentation, until you get what you want.

you can study algorithms to get sounds, if you want. doing these steps would produce a bell-like, or string-like tone. but, why use this device for that?

rather, the device is capable of a far broader palette of sounds than she's utilizing here, which is merely scratching the surface. and, that's what i'm getting at, here. she's using parallel computing to play pong.

and, no, the arrangements are not interesting, either.

agustin muerto

you know you sound kind of pretentious yourself, right? and there's no need to insult me.

deathtokoalas

no.

pretension is an idea that, ironically, not a lot of people understand well. people seem to think that pretension refers to a concept of arrogance, or an air of superiority.

pretentious has the same root as 'pretend', and quite literally refers to the tendency of people to fake knowledge, or project a greater air of understanding than they actually possess or a deeper artistry than they've actually accomplished.

it has historically been used in the rock era to refer to records and bands, and fans of those records and bands, that have inflated their own artistic value beyond what is actually grounded in any reasonable argumentation. prime examples of pretension in the rock era have come from led zeppelin, peter frampton and pink floyd around the release of the wall. the entire metal scene was ridiculously pretentious from the start. and, i'd label a lot of what edgar froese was involved with as beyond pretentious, as well.

so, in context, being pretentious would be holding this up as an opus - when it clearly isn't. i didn't point out that there's literally thousands of records of comparable writing and abstraction up on bandcamp, and that this has been true, now, for years.

the record is really defined by how unremarkable it is.

on the other hand, i am not being pretentious because i actually know what i'm talking about - unlike yourself, who just tried to come down on me, before i put your back in your place. so, if you don't want to be insulted, you should watch your fucking mouth, huh?

deathtokoalas

i skipped st vincent, who i've still yet to see play an actual set, a few months ago after giving the record a very brief listen and finding essentially nothing of value in it at all. i'm coming back to it now as a last chance, and it's just really not remotely in my sphere of interest, at this point.

hopefully, she finds a way to put the pills away and get her brain back. but, that's not how this usually works.

that is my takeaway from this record: annie clark's talent has apparently evaporated due to drug use.

three dee melodie

evaporated from drug use? she wrote this song to remind herself the dangers of it. it's about quitting, not consuming. be open minded, this album is very different

deathtokoalas

it's trash.

and, people rarely get their minds back after they've wasted them.

first impressions of the new son lux record

i've been waiting for this one for what seems like forever, and it's actually been a while since i found myself doing anything like that; i've become used to disappointment after a few records, and, in the process, just stumbling upon things, sometimes months after the fact.

the lead singles had me worried, but not too worried, because i went through this with the last record, too - the singles seemed flat when separated out from the record. but, i don't 'get' singles, anyways, unless they're epics. they're just too short. i have a very hard time focusing on pieces of music for less than five minutes at a time...it's done before it starts...and, as an ad, which is all a single can ever really be, artistically, the process of releasing singles seems incapable of hooking me, and may have even turned me off of records i would have otherwise liked.

so, fuck singles. i should really just not bother, and ritually wait for the records. easier said than done, right?

but, any perceived lack of depth that the singles projected when separated from the record evaporates upon a few listens. and i need to stress the necessity to listen. at least five times. son lux has always been a little difficult, that's half of why i'm attracted to it, but it's also always been very rewarding, as pop, once you disentangle it, which is the other half of the reason i'm attracted to it. this record is, at times, just kind of opaque, on immediate first impression. the sound is saturated over the spectrum, and it needs to be disentangled, but it's the syncopation that you need to really get used to before you can mentally decode the songs into something coherent.

if you're not going to give this some time, you're going to get bored quickly enough, and i'll tell you that this will unfortunately happen to quite a few people. but, if you spend the time with it, you're going to uncover a record that is simultaneously a little bit of a throwback to the outsider music of the first record and a kind of a step towards glossier pop, at the same time. the record also reuses a number of themes on the records in between. this makes the project seem somewhat like a summary of ryan lott's career, and i might question his motives in doing that.

if the band pivots after this record into less abstract material, this will likely end up as the normal way into son lux' comparably deeper and more difficult back catalogue. backwards.

as a contained record, this pull between what i'm projecting as a poppier future for the band and the more artistic past that already exists leaves something that is almost existential in scope. while this is where the music i listen to normally lives, i actually kind of liked the sheltered and somewhat neurotic vocals that i'm used to from this band and hope that, at the least, we get to keep this moving forward. but, you can hear that he's interpreted the present moment as some kind of pivot, some kind of paradigmatic shift, some kind of epiphany: weren't we beautiful once?

sure, ryan. back when america was great, right? but, make sure you're careful getting off the cross, because there's another martyr in line behind you.

i don't expect this band to go full boring. if anything, he's projecting a strong palette of pop influences; on this record, the very obvious nods are to freddie mercury and david bowie, and if these are the pop icons he's throwing out in front of him, what's coming is likely to be both ambitious and tasteful.

but, i wouldn't expect another record like this.

https://sonlux.bandcamp.com/album/brighter-wounds

mercurial

"while my sampler gently weeps".

when this first came out, i didn't give it much of a listen, because i'd already heard it. it was just kind of like there wasn't a new record.

i actually had that experience with skinny fists, as well. but, i think this record is the opposite of skinny fists, in that sense. see, i'd been listening to bootlegs of skinny fists material for months before the record was released, and the material is far more powerful live, so the record actually lost out to the bootlegs in terms of listening time. the songs lost something in the recording process, unfortunately. they were of course playing these songs near the end of their last touring cycle in the early 00s, so i was familiar with them from the bootlegs i'd heard, too. it just took them ten years or whatever it was to release the actual record, and by then my head was elsewhere - these were old songs. so, i just put it on ignore.

now, though, this record exists and has existed for a while, so it forms a place within my periodic godspeed binges, so i'm hearing it in that sequential context, rather than just ignoring it, because it's not really a new record. with this record, it's starting to sink in that it's kind of the opposite of skinny fists in terms of recording - these tracks sound better in recorded form, this time, as the detail is brought out in the studio, in ways that draw some continuity with yanqui. 

because i have these tracks mentally placed in the early 00s, though, that it was where i mentally place this record when i do these sequential binges - as their last record pre-breakup, not their first post-reformation. 

and, i think that, in the long-run, it may be where the periodic binges end, too.

jason mccann

Anyone complaining about this album is empirically wrong.  #endofdiscussion

deathtokoalas

this is currently under peer review.well, here we go.

deathtokoalas

first listen.

i'm.....apprehensive.

...

i'm actually interpreting the general feel of the record to be somewhat of a throwback to a component of their first record; one could suggest that this record lacks the variety of emotion that the first record did, but that might be missing the point - they clearly wanted to key in on a specific sound.

but, it sort of misfires.

on the first record, it came off as defiantly hopeful, that is, hopeful in the face of certain defeat; and, considering what the band was at that time, how could they have expected anything besides failure? this is a specific kind of optimism, in that it is understood by all to be futile. what it is is delusion and for that reason was so effective as escape - it was absurd to be hopeful, and that's why it was fun, for a few minutes. the expanded melodic percussion, the xylophones, really aided in this general feeling.

here, it is coming off as an order. BE HOPEFUL, DAMMIT. NOW. HOPE. NOW. 

and, here's the thing: that might work better for a lot of people. it really might.

but, i liked the hope better without the coercion.

i'll probably still go seem them play next month.

"you can't escape the bees." 

cue simpson's imagery. 

"who is this winner, smithers?" 

oh, he's an absolute failure, sir...

"release the bees"

yeah, i know.

you can really hear a mike oldfield influence on this track.

"they're not real christians".

au contraire. these are the realest christians in the hood.

Osmund Cooke

Not sure if I was listening carefully, but can an enzyme split an atom and create nuclear fission?

Something like oxidoreductase or acid base catalysis

deathtokoalas

i believe you can find evidence for your hypothesis in the phenomenon of explosive diarrhoea.

meh. just get divorced.

i think it's a crazy idea. i mean, i don't even want to take it seriously, kind of thing. when somebody comes to you and says "i want an open relationship", what that means is "i want to break up with you, but not for a few more months.". it's the kind of thing that happens when people want to break off a romantic relationship, but not a financial relationship. and, the end result is not actually an open relationship, but the demotion of the relationship to a friendship. partners end up as room mates.

this idea that you can be polyamorous and in a relationship is a consequence of the existing culture, which tells you that you can have your cake and eat it, too. it's a fantasy, in real life. and, i'd suggest to people looking at this seriously that they have to make that choice - that it's ok to be a polyamorous single person, but you shouldn't pretend that you can be in a relationship with somebody, too.

if you're in an open relationship, ask yourself: what does your partner do on saturday nights?

 

that's how you figure it out, right. if you find yourself in a situation where you're spending more saturdays apart than together, you don't actually have a relationship any more. what you have is a room mate.

and, in the real world, things get messy. three or four people might show up at the same concert, or the same restaurant. and, if you're avoiding that, what are you doing? making plans to not spend time with your partner? if you have to avoid your partner on a saturday night, there's no relationship there...

it's fun to be open-minded. but, when you start thinking through the ramifications, it doesn't work. and, it is an empirical question: the arrangement doesn't tend to work.

the prudent advice to give somebody going through this is to try and predict the outcome of such an arrangement in a few months time. and, it's not usually going to be a positive outcome, unless you either have both partners pursuing other options (in which case it's a mutual break-up in disguise), or you have one partner that likes to spend a lot of time alone, and isn't going to spend it thinking about where the other one is, or what they're doing.

in most cases, the person being propositioned with such a thing should take it as a red flag and walk away.

i don't have an issue with the language used. the distribution is the curve, or everything under the curve. it's a semantic point that a statistician would be splitting hairs over in "correcting" you on and most actually probably wouldn't bother with at all. a major hurricane hitting the united states would be a rare event, and whether you want to describe that using a "poisson distribution" or the "curve described by the poisson distribution" is just an issue in language, although i would perhaps suggest that you're misapplying the central limit theorem in a situation with not enough data points to do so, if that's what you're getting at by referencing normality. a misapplication of the clt like this could actually be used to argue for stasis. it doesn't change the point you're making.

and, yes - charting an increase in hurricanes since 2005 is kind of like charting a decrease in temperatures since 1998. or jet stream variability since 1725. 

but, the important thing you pointed out was that global warming is not the only factor. and, if you want to push this on this platform, that's the most important point you can make: the universe is complicated, and this increase in carbon on this planet is just one of the things that's happening in it.

republishing inri074

around october, 2002 i met a friend. i was sort of in need of a friend, and i mean that in the friend sense. but, the mental condition i was in was the explanation of why i needed a friend, if you see what i mean; i was completely unstable in this period and did all kinds of absurd things, which isolated me - and i wasn't getting any better.

i dropped out of school under the realization that i was walking down a path that wasn't getting me anywhere close to what i wanted out of life. i ended up working three jobs to raise money for gender reassignment, and it crossed me paths with somebody that was also trying to think of ways to get out of the box in terms of ways to exist.

she was trying to save up money to go to british columbia. it was some kind of warped take on the grapes of wrath, where everything works out perfectly. but, the rent was eating into her savings, which was making the goal seem impossible. well, unless we stopped having fun.

so, i suggested she should just stay at my parents place. part of it was a hope that she would move her drum kit in, although that didn't happen. and, i might add that this was done with all of the reckless abandon that could be contemplated - we were moving stuff in without even asking, it was really remarkable.

and, it seemed to me that we were getting pretty close over that period.

so, when the time came that she had all that money put aside to go to bc, it was kind of a downer to let her go. and, she initially wanted to go with a friend who dropped out. so, i ended up going across the country with her.

now, i need to be clear: we weren't planning on coming back. we were going to pick fruit or something - we didn't know, exactly, we'd figure it out when we got there.

so, this was meant as a sort of farewell to certain people i hadn't talked to in months and didn't care if i was leaving, anyways. i think it let me work some things out on weird subconscious levels, but the truth is that these songs really aren't about anybody except me, and there's no use in pretending they are - i just liked the idea of a farewell disc.

this disc was initially passed around with a cut up version of the pretentious untitled mix at the end, but this was almost immediately ejected from future burns and is not present on this ep due to the poor quality of the mix. the remaining five tracks became combined into what i now call my eighth symphony.

written and recorded in late 2002 and early 2003. this was initially uploaded unmodified from a cd-r rip in may, 2015, but this was replaced with a version from source on nov 29, 2017 due to clipping due to an unrealized normalization on the burn. disc finalized as symph008 on nov 29, 2017. as always, please use headphones.

the hidden track is the final version and also appears on my ninth record, {e} (inri08x): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/e

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2003, 2015, 2017). 

credits

released May 3, 2003

j - guitar, effects, bass, synth, voice, piano, drum programming, generative programming (sounder), granular synthesis, sound design, soundscaping, loops, bowls, claps, tables, ebow, orchestral sequencing, digital wave editing, sampling, production, composition

publishing inri073

it was in may of 2015 that i first contemplated the idea of a chamber works. i was creating compilations to end my second period, when i realized that a couple of the tracks that did not fit well into the orchestral works might work better as chamber pieces. so, the chamber works was intended as a kind of companion disc to the orchestral works, both to offer a different flavour and to collect the remaining tracks into a compilation of serious music, so they are not left out.

so, i went back and did a systematic evaluation of the period 2 material to see which tracks could or could not be converted into chamber pieces. the last three mixes were created at this time, while the first was removed of clicks.

then, i stopped. i decided that an electronic chamber works was an idea of questionable worth, and i should put the idea aside for a bit and take a look at the idea again upon reconstruction of the period 1 tapes.

what the issue really comes down to is how good the electronic strings sound. does this actually sound like chamber music, or does it sound like a computer creating chamber music? and, if it sounds like a computer, is the issue resolvable somehow?

when i came back to completing period 2 in the fall of 2017, i decided in favour of the release, as the sound fonts are convincing enough, even if one needs to ignore a few relics here and there. tracks two and three were subsequently added to the compilation.

i decided at the end that this format has some future to it, whether it is fully realistic or not. string music will probably never go away. but, composers are going to find themselves less and less interested in actual physical reproduction, as time moves forward. the question of realism in the tracks is consequently somewhat misplaced, as the chamber music of the future is likely to be performed by computers, and sound like it just a little bit.

initially written and recorded between 2001-2003 and remixed and recorded further over 2014-2015. an idea for this compilation was developed over the last week of may, 2015, but it was not finished or released at that time. corrected and expanded from october, 2017 to january, 2018. finally released & finalized as lp022 on jan 14, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017, 2018). 

credits

released May 2, 2003

j - controller input, programming, effects processing, mixing, digital wave editing, composition.

the various rendered electronic orchestras include piano, orchestral drum kit, violin, guitar, viola, cello, contrabass, various string sections and choir.

publishing inri072

an unexpected result of the project to complete my discography, undertaken in late 2013, has been the construction of a handful of orchestral pieces, mostly as remixes of original tracks from the jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj period. while these tracks were initially written out as scored pieces for expanded instrumentation, they were generally written around the guitar and the expanded instrumentation was largely meant simply for colour. the exception to this is the psilocybin symphony, which was written as a piano concerto from the start and previously completed in early 2006.

the ability to expand these pieces into orchestral works is the result of the advances in vst sampling technology that have occurred since 2003. while changes in instrumentation have been accompanied by extra writing (mostly on the guitar), tempo shifts and other general rearrangement choices, the existing technology makes it very easy to rearrange a rock song for an orchestra, by simply multiplying staves and changing the sound fonts.

the condition i've set for a piece to be "orchestral" is that it must utilize the entire orchestra: it must have percussion, piano, horns, woodwinds/reeds and strings. guitars are generally treated like "first violins", whereas violins are generally not considered to be more special than other similar string instruments. some of the tracks also have prominent choral sections. all of these pieces meet this condition, except the last one which does not have a woodwind/reed section.

my delve into scorewriting ended in 2003; the material in my third phase is more focused on live and manipulated guitars and synthesizers. i consequently feel that this is an interesting summary of my second period, taken from a specific angle that is otherwise largely relegated to single-only remixes.

initially written and recorded between 2001-2003 and remixed and recorded further over 2014-2015, except track 2 which was completed in early 2006 and track 5 which was completed in 2017. the initial final compilation date was may 23, 2015, but track five was then added on oct 14, 2017 and the disc was finalized as lp021 on nov 29, 2017. track 7 was added as a download-only bonus track on jan 14, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017, 2018).

* download only 

credits

released May 1, 2003

j - controller inputs, drum & other programming, orchestral & other sequencing, live guitars, live bass, live synths, effects, sound design, digital wave editing, composition, production.

the various rendered electronic orchestras includes violin, viola, cello, contrabass, electric guitar, nylon guitar, guitar fret noise, bass guitar, synthesizer bass, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, english horn, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, saxophone, bamboo flute, flute, piccolo, synthesizers, mellotron, organ, piano, harp, koto, music box, clavinet, kalimba, xylophone, agogo, mallet, hammered percussion, woodblock, tubular bells, tinkle bells, glockenspiel, orchestra hit, melodic toms, electronic drum kit, timpani, orchestral drum kit and choir.

republishing inri071

i've taken to splitting my discography into phases, and my hitch-hiking trip to british columbia is a very important separation point - both in terms of the nature of the material that came out afterwards and what is now a substantial body of work that came before it. that makes it a natural point to look backwards and build compilations of intersecting ideas.

a characteristic of my work is that it does not conform well to genre norms. this is not an accident; when compiling a record, i'm guided more by the late beatles' philosophy of vast diversity in a small space than i am by any kind of desire to collect together nice singles, or by some kind of compulsive organizing into categories or concepts. i write psychedelic music. that means something different in 2015 than it did in 1966, but the commonality is that it's necessarily challenging. i want all of my records to do everything at once, and accomplish everything by their end point. that makes compilations of this sort inherently difficult, because every song touches on every compilation idea at the same time. the jazz record would have the same tracklisting as the punk record, the classical record and the folk record - and none would really be what they're claimed to be.

the one exception to this conundrum is how i interacted with ambient music in this period. i very regularly utilized ideas from the genre, but i tended to interpret ambience as something that is necessarily obscure. in this period, ambient pieces are almost always outtakes or b sides. i tended to interpret covers and remixes as ambient pieces, probably because that was unexpected. when ambient ideas make it on to the record, they're almost always for effect: introductions, endings, connecting passages, that sort of thing.

when i began reconstructing my discography in early 2014, i came across a handful of songs i'd written out into midi format and put aside for later. a number of these ended up reworked into ambient pieces, and released as b sides. i also ended up converting some of the material i wrote in this period into ambient sound collages that are more in the style of music i created after 2003.

the end result is enough bsides and remixes to put together two full cds of ambient music. none of the tracks on volumes one or two are on any official record as they appear here; this is technically a collection of remixes and outtakes.

this package was initially released with a mix tape of fragments from 1996-1999, but it has since been moved into it's own release (inri035): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-works-vol-0

initially written and recorded between 2000-2003 and remixed between 2014-2015. sequenced over mid may, 2015. the final compilation date was initially may 20, 2015, but both discs were mildly updated with some more appropriate mixes of the same tracks on nov 29, 2017; disc subsequently finalized as lp020. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017). 

credits

released April 28, 2003

j - guitars (acoustic, electric, nylon), effects & treatments, bass, synthesizers, electric air reed organ, orchestral & other sequencing, drum & other programming, generative programming (sounder), "projectile synthesis" (audiomulch), granular synthesis (granulab), sound design, electronic and conventional drum kits, sampling, loops, films, voice, digital wave editing, composition, production.

sean - vocal ideas (tracks 4 & 7, disc 1), ring modulator (track 9, disc 1)
jon - background guitar performance (track 4, disc 1)
greg - drum performance sample source (track 5, disc 1)

the various rendered electronic orchestras include synth bass, electric bass, acoustic bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, nylon guitar, guitar effects, guitar noises (fret noises, pick scrapes, knocks), synthesizer, synth pads, mellotron, choir, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, string section, pizzicato strings, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, oboe, english horn, bassoon, clarinet, flute, piccolo, mallet, piano, woodblock, music box, xylophone, tubular bells, other bells, orchestra hit, electronic drum kit, melodic toms, drum machine and orchestral drum kit.

as another aside, the fact that climate scientists use averages at all is kind of...it's not mathematically sound.

averages are good when there's a fixed variable of some sort. you can take an individual's average over a fixed task (exam scores, track times, etc), or you can take a fixed task like exam scores and then average it out over various individuals (joe, sally, etc). what you're really doing with an average is repeating trials over and over, and trying to get a guess on a "test statistic" that exists in some platonic reality - the idea is that the average exists in some cloud somewhere, and if you repeat the trial often enough then you'll reveal it. i'm actually not a platonist at all, but you'd be surprised by the things you hear from grown men with math degrees, behind closed doors.

what the hell are you even trying to do by averaging out temperatures over the entire earth, in the first place? there's no test statistic to arrive at. you're not finding some ideal concept of earthly temperature readings. once you get a sequence of ratios in place, you can find the test statistic for the average of that sequence, but what does that mean if the "average temperature of the earth" is a wonky concept in the first place?  it's not devoid of meaning at all, but it's more of a contrived ratio to determine policy (like the cpi, or the unemployment rate) than it is any kind of reflection of anything meaningful. it only make any sense in the context of itself.

consider the following ten data points...

toronto: -25 
moscow: -20
stockholm: -15
london: -10  
paris: -8
riyadh: 45
singapore: 46
calcultta: 47
cairo: 51 
tehran: 52

my understanding of things suggests that that could very well be a typical january, mid-century.

average temperature: 16.3 degrees. of course, this is a crappy data set, i'm just making a point. but, that's completely fucking worthless as any descriptive measure - it's only useful in comparison to the next data point.

now, suppose that the readings for these cities in 1975 was as follows:

toronto: -13 
moscow: -8
stockholm: -5
london: -2  
paris: 0
riyadh: 35
singapore: 36
calcultta: 37
cairo: 41 
tehran:42

that's reasonable for 1975, huh? i'm not looking it up, i'm making a point; i should have looked this one up. and bullshitted the other. whatever. the average temperature of this data set is also 16.3 degrees

therefore, there was no climate change over these years? eh...

i should be offering a mathematical solution right now, but i'm not entirely convinced that the idea of modelling the earth in this way makes sense at all.

you hear this push-back: weather is not the same as climate, weather is not the same as climate. i end up doing it myself sometimes. it's an easy way to explain away the fluctuations.

i'm not really convinced that you can talk about a planet's climate at all. i mean, the ratio has a purpose, but it doesn't actually physically mean anything. there is no "earth's climate", there is a collection of overlapping systems, and really several different climates that develop where these systems intersect.

and, right now, it looks like the north and south are moving in opposite directions, as a consequence of opposite causes.

i'm not at all interested in a red team / blue team approach to climate change; i won't support a political movement that i think is being dishonest in order to generate a narrative, i will call you out and tear you down with as much vehement scorn as the next liar.

in science, truth is not an abstraction, it's fact. scientists cannot tolerate this sort of post-modern, pragmatic bullshit. and, it won't work; there is no actual end point to this approach besides greed.

sorry.

there's two approaches to this: honestly convince enough people to make it a political issue and then push hard for it (it's the second part that failed under obama), or get lucky in stumbling upon a despot that understands the urgency of the situation and doesn't fucking care what the masses think, anyways.

so, why do we have winter, anyways?

no, if you don't know look it up. if you think you know, prove yourself right. do this. this isn't phd-level stuff; you should have learned about it in grade school. maybe you did, and just forgot.

but, it's because the amount of sunlight hitting the earth fluctuates, causing changes in the upper atmosphere that allow cold air to move from the polar regions into the habitable regions. this 'polar vortex' is called winter. 

so, realizing that, what would you predict is the result of the sun hitting historical lows in output? more winter, right? and, the correlation is there, if you go to look for it - as it was from antiquity until 1980, when it split due to increased carbon concentrations.

you won't find a scientist that contradicts the obvious. this isn't specialist knowledge, it's grade school science. what you'll find instead is a lot of talking around the basic point, because it's been so obfuscated by deniers. what you're doing to these scientists when you bring up the sun in a non-academic context is triggering them into bad memories that they've had of dumb arguments with scientific illiterates trying to pass themselves off as educated. you're forcing them to relive traumatic experiences, and not getting good answers out of them, because of it. they're more focused on not letting bad ideas perpetuate (and there are a lot of them...) than actually getting the right ideas out. so, when you actually bring up good points about the sun's effect on the climate, it gets ignored because they just don't want to talk about it. and, that's a failure that the talking heads need to address, because the sun is actually going through a phase right now where it's output is low enough that it will (regionally) offset the effects of global warming, at least for a while. if legitimate climate scientists don't take steps to address the point clearly and honestly, climate change is going to be seen as a theory that fails to make accurate predictions, and we're going to lose the argument - only to get roasted when or if the sun turns itself up. science cannot operate at a propaganda level if it wants to win public support. it has to be honest, and it has to win people over due to it's honest attempts to understand things as they actually are.

here's the thing: this is not as dire as people are likely to intuitively think. it's a modelling issue. it doesn't require a rethink to solve, it requires a tweak. the reality is that we don't understand the sun all that well, so we mostly model it as constant. we even have a term called the solar constant. but, the sun's output is not constant, and nobody is going to argue that it is.

what legitimate climate scientists need to do is put more effort into modelling the sun and then work those fluctuations into the models. remember: small changes in solar output can make big differences in the upper atmosphere. think of the way the sun hits the earth as a lightning strike on a lake - it ripples. and, that's where the "amplification" actually happens. in this case, what we're talking about is a decrease in total energy entering the system - and we understand how this works fairly well, with the oscillations taking repetitive shapes that are predictable functions of the solar output.

unlike the deniers, i would not expect that a better modelling of the sun would create a substantially different understanding of climate change. it's theoretically plausible, i suppose - only way to find out is to do it - but we understand the greenhouse effect, too, and the solar output would probably have to decrease by a larger proportion than is being contemplated in order to offset the effect. the point is that we don't have this model. because we don't understand the sun. the deniers, however, insist that the models can be improved - and that is tautological. they should be met halfway on this point, to prove them wrong, and to better understand the thing, as a whole. what better models - and this is a complexity issue, not a computing issue - would really help us with is in understanding the weather quite a bit better.

this article is an example of how to misunderstand the point:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/09/the-imminent-mini-ice-age-myth-is-back-and-its-still-wrong

i don't really have any corrections to make on the article. but, the scientific claim here, and mike lockwood, who is cited here in an equally poor but oppositely poor context than he is in the right-wing media, has volunteered to be spokesperson for it, is not that the decrease in solar activity will offset global warming but that it will lead to the kind of regional variations that were seen in seventeenth century england. the article is really an elaborate strawman fallacy, rushing to debunk a claim that no scientist has ever made.

it's all very nice and everything to point out that a regional decrease in northern temperatures is likely to be offset by an accompanying increase in southern ones. why do we have winter, again? but, tell it to the guy that's playing hockey on the thames in april, as india suffers through 55 degree heat.

it balances out, so there's nothing to worry about, right? eh....

deathtokoalas

this research was trendy in the mainstream media a few years ago, but it's actually been thoroughly debunked. and, this insistence that all weather is created by the same factors is actually conspiratorial thinking; what's presented here isn't a counter to denial type thinking, but it's parallel and analogue on the left.

carbon concentrations are not the cause of all weather.

and, the polar vortex is quite well understood as a function of sunlight.

deathtokoalas

the very quick response is this: we don't need to cite carbon concentrations to explain the cold we're seeing. we already have a standard, widely understood model. it's the same model that we use to understand seasons. so, this is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. and, it happens to be that it isn't consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.

i think maybe the conceptual problem people are having is that they conceive of the earth like the ancient greeks did: as though it's in a glass ball, free from the influence of outside forces. the universe is newtonian - predictable - and only gets chaotic when humans alter the natural equilibrium. in fact, the reality is that we're a jagged lump of molten rock, not spherical but only even roughly elliptical, and we're hurdling towards nowhere through an orbit full of bumps. we go through ice ages when we hit very rough patches - that is the theory of ice ages, converted into an analogy about bad roads. and, it's the basic theory of weather, too.

the reason we needed a theory of global warming in the first place was that the movement of temperatures decoupled from the sun. if the weather we were experiencing was caused mostly or solely by the sun, it should have been getting colder, not warmer. yet, it was getting warmer. contradiction. so, the weather could not have been caused solely by the sun....

as it stands, the recent exaggerated expansion of the polar vortex - which most people call winter - is happening in perfect correlation with the sun, which is entering a minimum during one of it's weakest cycles on record. if our science of seasons and ice ages is correct, our recent observations of the sun are predictive; the actual predictive science here is that this should, in fact, make things colder - regionally. and temporarily. and, this is exactly what is happening. there's no reason for what she's doing.

what jennifer francis is doing is really something along the lines of throwing an apple into the air, and trying to explain why it falls using magnetism. it's a nice story, jenn. but we already understand gravity pretty well - or, at least, we do observationally.

mike lockwood. look him up. he did the studies.

jessman9000

Deleting peoples comments only destroyed your own narrative.

deathtokoalas

i'm not interested in acting as a medium for the dissemination of false information, or outright stupidity; your comment is not correct. what deleting stupid comments does is sharpen the narrative, by eliminating the irrelevant, the superfluous and/or the incorrect. it removes misleading or useless information from the discourse.

i don't want to get into a huxley v. orwell debate, but that's where i'm going with this. when we're bombarded with false information, it's much harder to find the actual truth.

that said, i wish i still had the ability to remove stupid comments, but google has removed this under apparent pressure from right-wing extremists.

pk

FYI:   BBC Horizon 2005 Global Dimming

deathtokoalas

it is consistent with what i'm saying to suggest that coal particulates - and other pollutants - should be a measurable aspect of climate modelling. but, this isn't the same kind of long term problem, because the particles don't build up in the same way. it's more of a localized short term thing. but, if i was more interested in southern china than i am in the great lakes, i'd be arguing the point for a short term effect, absolutely.

grindupBaker

Earth surface is smooth, not a jagged lump. You referred to yourself and one or more unspecified persons as "a jagged lump". This seems quite likely but we are not sufficiently familiar with you to have high certainty of your similarity to a jagged lump.

deathtokoalas

apparently, this person is from saskatchewan, because they've clearly never seen a mountain before.

grindupBaker

you say "the reason we needed a theory of global warming in the first place was that the movement of temperatures decoupled from the sun". Correct but also note that the hypothesis of "global warming" was derived by Fourier more than a century before the experiment with coal had been conducted for long enough and measurements had been sufficient for long enough to confirm the hypothesis and make it a theory.

deathtokoalas

google is very bad at notifications. but, fwiw, i believe that what fourier demonstrated was merely the mechanism of the greenhouse effect, rather than any specific warming trends.

charles

Just another Russian troll calling him/herself Jessica. Yawn!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIUN5ziSfNc

deathtokoalas

well, i'm not a russian troll. but, you sure sound like a democratic party stooge.

my arguments do not challenge the climate consensus; francis' theory is not in it, and never will be.

charles

"democratic party stooge" LOL, Jess. I'm not from the US and A, not even from that continent.

deathtokoalas

i have no reason to believe you when you say that, stooge.

charles

I couldn't care less, Jessica. Nice name BTW. You transgender?

deathtokoalas

see, this is when the democratic party stooge reflexively retreats to identity politics to attempt to prove their faux liberalism.

charles

At least we know now what you're after

deathtokoalas

you'll have to fill me in on the conspiracy, stooge.

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wonderpope

This professor couldn't have explained the physics of how AGW affects the jet streams, and by that causes the local weather anomalies we are experiencing, any easier and clearer. She's not talking about carbon tax or one world government. She's basically saying "we're fucked" even if we would restore the carbon cycle to pre-industrial, because the surplus of CO2 we've been putting into the cycle in the past, let's say, 100 years will continue affecting the climate for 100 years more. And yet I read some cringe worthy comments on here, that show that some people have not listened to this video and aren't even attempting to dispute the data presented, but want to present the expert as a shill for some government entity. Don't get me wrong, skepticism is a good thing. But there's a reason why experts in a field understand things better than the average person...it's because they've spent all their life studying it.

We're driving this car called "human civilization" towards a wall at 200 mph...and instead of facing the problem and finding a way to reduce the speed, people seem to just try to turn their seats in the opposite direction to not see the wall coming towards them at a rapid speed.

deathtokoalas

in fact, this particular scientist's research is not accepted by mainstream academics.

you should look that up, rather than rely on youtube videos for information.

wonderpope

Please tell me exactly how mainstream contradict her claims. What, in your opinion, does mainstream science claim? what is the counter claim I need to look for? I can´t just google "debunking Jennifer A. Francis" and hope to find easily what you claim.

deathtokoalas

you have to realize, wonderpope, that most ideas that are not well accepted do not generate a large amount of literature debunking them. they're just ignored and forgotten. with francis' theory, because it was picked up by the msm without vetting it, what you're going to find is a lot of debunking of various validity from what are mostly very poor sources. actual scientists working in the field have largely just ignored it. i mean, these people don't have time for it.

as a consequence, it's easier to direct you to the actual mainstream theory.

you can easily find articles discussing lockwood's work on mainstream sites, like the bbc. he's actually received scientific awards for his work, along with promotions and the kind of titles that scientists covet, like a place in the royal society. this is the existing consensus: while climate is complicated, weather (and the jet stream is weather.) is caused almost entirely by fluctuations in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth. and, he's rather convincingly demonstrated the point that the existing slow down in solar activity will cause the kind of fluctuations we're seeing in the jet stream - thereby producing a predictive theory of more cold winters in the northern hemisphere, around the jet stream, during the existing minimum.

as mentioned, the most obvious problem with francis' theory is that it has heat and cold moving in directions that are not consistent with the theory of thermodynamics.

---

i googled a bit more. i'm kind of bed-ridden by choice, right now.

jennifer francis has, herself, done her opponents the courtesy of compiling a list of studies that contradict her own research (i do not know how many of them addressed her research directly, but probably very few did.), and then attempts to hand wave it away by claiming bad methodology - which is what scientists do when they can't admit they're wrong.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318287618_Why_Are_Arctic_Linkages_to_Extreme_Weather_Still_Up_in_the_Air

dan

I watched a video called "Jet Streams, more Jet Streams, and even more Jet Streams: AGU Science" In that clip he talks about a paper by Mann. When I heard that my BS detector turned up its sensitivity because Mann is the infamous author of the fake hockey stick graph.

To be honest what he says is mostly beyond me even though I understand standing wave theory and resonance quite well. God help those that are completely ignorant of such theory.  He appears to be talking about how modeling of the jet stream works. But the models don't actually emulate reality well and have demonstrated zero predictive capability.

No one argues that the jet streams play an important part in weather events and more study as to how they operate is welcomed.

But the jet stream performs much more like a meandering river than a simple wave function. It is a chaotic structure, not a pure sine wave function. Its path change is caused by minor and chaotic deviations to its flow path restrictions, its width,  and its inertia all interacting simultaneously.

So its apparent "frequency" and "amplitude" can never be more than a very rough approximation. Applying "quasi resonant effects". resonance, amplitude, Q, and R etc. apply only to sine functions. So I conclude wave theory models that use such simulations will never be able to adequately explain or predict chaotic jet stream behavior. 

He goes on to claim that aerosols contribute "hugely" to radiative forcing. If you look at IPCC reports you will see that a) the supposed effects due to aerosols have large error bars and b) as the reports become more refined their effects are being reduced. This fact has introduced a conundrum for alarmists because large aerosol effects have been used to tune models (to provide cooling to force them to agree with observed data) that contain high climate sensitivity values (predict more warming than happened). i.e. they appear to be incorrectly tuned to cancel predicted warming. Even at that, the models all quickly diverge from observed climate, predicting warming that does not occur. That would indicate that their sensitivity values are too high. Yet the IPCC averages 102 knowingly incorrect models and runs with a 3C sensitivity value!

He then goes on to talk about the paleo record reconstruction of the jet stream from ice cores. At best this is a poor proxy of snowfall location that eludes to a possible jet stream waveform. But the observation concludes that warmer periods had larger stream amplitude so he runs with it. To his credit, he admits "it's very difficult to determine what configuration jet streams had based on  (these records)".

The rest of the video sites other possible inferences and he points out that we need more research. I agree.

deathtokoalas

you might want to check your understanding of waves, dan. 

there is a basic theory in algebra that says that all continuous functions, no matter how complicated,  can be decomposed into a series of sine waves, called a fourier series. and, the fourier transform (not the same as the series) has widespread applications across the sciences. there is also a fourier theory, but that is pure math stuff. the question isn't really whether the math is reasonable, it's whether the theory is predictive, and the answer is that it only works when you cherry pick the data. this shouldn't actually be particularly surprising, though, because it's quite physically counter-intuitive.

the empirical question is really whether these waves remain in tact or not, that is the physics being challenged, and the evidence appears to be that they don't. the model then collapses as a result of bad physics, not bad math.

further, we don't try to understand the jet stream in terms of ocean currents, anyways. we try and understand the jet stream in terms of factors in the upper atmosphere. i mean, this is the theory: that the energy from the oceans is elevating itself into the atmosphere, and then wreaking havoc - which is a difficult idea on it's face and requires this clumsy mechanism to take seriously.

the biggest factor in the upper atmosphere, and especially around the earth's tilt, is the way the sun hits it. and, there is actually good science that makes predictive theories about jet streams based on solar fluctuations.

======

deathtokoalas

somebody ought to tell paul that if he wants to focus on climate change, he should hire a science journalist. i can't blame greg for this. and i don't claim anything malicious. it's just that it's wrong.

sertaki

Are you saying that a climate journalist would bring more credible facts to the table than an actual climate scientist who has worked on important studies herself?

deathtokoalas

what i'm saying is that a broader science journalist should have pointed out that this particular scientist is actually not well regarded in her field, and that her ideas are really distorting the narrative. not in those terms, exactly, perhaps, but through a probing analysis. see, aaron is a actually a good example, in the sense that he challenges people, albeit not when it comes to science, because he's not a science journalist, even when he plays devil's advocate. an interview with a very controversial researcher like jennifer francis should be presented as what it is, and should ultimately be about challenging the mechanism she's providing. this is rather presented as a science lesson, but what it's "teaching" is something that is at best extremely obscure - and probably just flat out wrong.

what you're doing is appealing to authority. and, she might be an authority on her own research. but, she's not a good authority on the broader topic.

you could throw a dart in a climate conference and find somebody who both accepts the climate consensus and is willing to challenge this theory on air.

and, it's kind of pernicious. because the reason this theory is getting more attention than it deserve is that it was run by the corporate left media. the guardian. the atlantic. now, the so-called independent media is running with it, because it appeared in the mainstream press, not because of it's actual value. that's not how this ought to work.

grindupBaker

I made an effort and spent some time with searches like "controversial research jennifer francis" and I've come up with nothing after reading NAS & all sorts of sites. So give a couple of links, just so we can confirm that you aren't just a coal/oil shill-fuckwit wasting our time. Just a couple of relevant links.

deathtokoalas

the reason i'm being obscure is that the arguments are technical.

http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/14_february_2014?pg=29#pg29

did the holocaust actually happen?

well, i might be a product of it. my paternal grandmother just kind of shows up as an orphan in the 30s, without much of any documented history. she was raised in an italian family, and one would no doubt make many errors if forced to differentiate between italians and jews out of a line-up, but i think most people would assume she looks pretty jewish. there's pictures of my dad from the 70s, full bearded, where he actually looks flat out arab, although he aged in a way that made him look not dissimilar to chomsky, in that eastern european jew kind of way - although he aged terribly. his physical appearance was described almost perfectly in the term 'italian jew'. although, when i say he aged in a way that made him look not dissimilar to chomsky, what i mean is that, at 50, he looked not dissimilar to chomsky at 70. i got my mom's genes, on that one; i remember bringing her to a field trip in the fourth grade, when she was almost 30. and having the entire school think she was my teenaged sister. this deduction, though, is ultimately not phenotypical - the two rumours on that side of the family are that she is in some unknown way a product of the holocaust (smuggled in, maybe?) and that she's the product of a mob hit, and sometimes these stories intersect in a tale of starcrossed lovers and racist slaughter by catholic mob bosses that couldn't deal with the interracial, and interreligious, eloping. my grandmother is a catholic. my aunt claims she found them in a newspaper clipping of young lovers tied to railroad tracks (and subsequently annihilated) in ottawa in the 30s, but the evidence is circumstantial, at best. my grandmother doesn't know.

between the time of her adoption and the time she was married, my paternal grandmother's last name was zito. and, ottawa was known to have an international mob presence, at the time. you can find pictures of the big bosses, i think including capone, existing in ottawa. it actually does add up. the fact that she seems to have no known history has led to the speculation that her adopted parents probably knew what happened - perhaps even knew the killers - and just didn't tell her. there is literally no trail. her adopted mother could have been her mother's sister, or something.

or maybe her parents managed to get her out, despite the attempts of north american governments to prevent jews from arriving. certainly, if you wanted to get your jewish infant or toddler child out of germany in 1937, you'd have had to have done something like smuggle it out. and, you wouldn't want a paper trail, because if it's found then the kid will get sent back.

maybe i'll look into it one day...

anyways, whether i'm the result of it or not, did the holocaust actually happen?

i run across this question from time-to-time, and i'm going to provide somewhat of a dodgy response: the holocaust is as well, or better, documented and convincingly demonstrated as any other event in accepted mainstream history. so, i can be as sure that the holocaust happened as i can be about any other event in history.

but, look at the words i'm using, the language, the context: event in history. history.

that is not the argument that my grandparents would provide. they may have been born as it was happening, and not remember it, but it was a part of their lives. this is not even the argument that my parents would provide, as they lived with people that lived it. three of my grandparents are even still alive, and all three of them could very well outlive my mother, between the heroin and the alcohol and the cigarettes, not to mention the half of a dozen duis.

but, the boomers are passing, and this is going to be the new reality around the holocaust: we are approaching the point where no living people have any connection to this any more, and it exists purely as history.

this is the situation that the holocaust memorial people have been preparing us for for the last 60 years, the point where the question is no longer about forgetting, because we don't have memories to forget. you can't forget what you never knew. instead, you need to ask the question: can you trust history?

well, can you?

punk?

it's exceedingly well documented. i understand this. but, so is the life of jesus.

a part of the problem is how central the holocaust story is to the western founding myth, at this point. it's intrinsically interconnected with the ascent of american hegemony, so it is consistently intertwined with narratives that are otherwise blatantly false. turning on cnn, you could very well have a holocaust memorial set sandwiched between a fraudulent expose on the syrian government gassing children and a jaw-droppingly bad interview with kellyanne conway that goes on for twenty minutes without managing to say a single true statement at all. association doesn't produce guilt, but it's a little unsatisfying to come to the conclusion that the only accurate information provided by the media is related to a historical event, even as they misrepresent every other kind of history on a hourly basis. the importance that the media places around it really does make the whole thing seem kind of fishy.

it's exceedingly well documented. i understand this. but, i think there will come a time when nobody really thinks this happened - or that the scale was exaggerated.

"6 million is an exaggeration. maybe it's an error by a scribe. i mean, look at the way that herodotus exaggerated the size of the persian army, for example. they probably added a few zeroes."

so, it's as well documented, or better documented, as any other event in history, sure.

but, analysing history is fundamentally different than analysing the present. this is something that's changing.