it was indeed automatic.

it's in the mail...

the letter says "you may start using the program as soon as you receive and activate your new card".

that sort of suggests it's in the mail.

i really wish people would be more clear.

the border agent couldn't answer the question, though. she took my number and promised to call me back....

you can call me a media critic.

but, i criticize all media - i'm not aligned with any party or group.

i don't even have a cell phone. i use google to call out.

but, the reason i got off social media is that i got sick of correcting all of the nonsense people were posting. i felt like i was just wasting a lot of time with it. and, i realized it was a bad source of data.

youtube can, in theory, be a source of quality journalism, and there have been some good sites out there over the last few years, but there appears to be some powerful people trying to shut it down and turn it into a source of lightweight commentary that acts as a propaganda arm for the party machinery.

journalists need to try to find ways to evade that as best as they can. and, trust me - if i can track you down, if i can find you, i'll watch you. get yourself out there. i don't want to watch the mindless garbage on youtube, and i won't - that's why i gave up cable in the 90s.

it's very sad to see amy goodman reduce herself to a propaganda outlet for a cfr stooge. but, if you watch her, she seems to get giddy about lying, as though she's emancipated herself from the shackles of honest journalism. but, she's not a good liar - you can see it in her facial expressions.

i don't want to say it's sad to lose her, because she should be retired, anyways.

i think there were some financial transactions behind the scenes, there. it's a shame. but, this is what capitalism does.

i don't actually read social media. i don't have a twitter account, and while i still use facebook for local show listings, i don't actually read any feeds. i have a total of zero friends on facebook. i haven't sorted through a social media feed of any sort in five or six years. these ideas are my own.

...but if you think that i'm aligning with certain personalities on the right, you're actually just wrong. that's just another baseless smear by people that make a lot of money from routinely smearing people.

what does the young turks do? they're not journalists. they don't write articles, they don't do research. rather, their job is to smear people; they're professional gossip clowns that traffic in lies and misrepresentations. and, cenk uygur is an actual, legit rush limbaugh wannabe - something i've pointed out on many occasions in the past.

there seems to be some money floating around behind the scenes that is essentially trying to align all of these other media sources - democracy now, the real news, etc - with the young turks, using a series of shady shell operations like pacifica radio. i've only seen some cursory reports, but i've watched the coverage shift dramatically and i am convinced there's something pretty awful happening.

my best guess is that there's a fear that media coverage leading up to the next election might lead people away from the democrats. so, they're trying to get all of these alt-left sites aligned with the party line.

but, let me be clear - i'm not repeating the views of other people, here. i think for myself, and i produce my own ideas. that is a typical, cynically right-wing (and terribly wrong.) idea of how people behave, and i'm happy to sit here and poke giant holes in your flawed concept of "human nature" all day, if you insist on it.

so, go ahead and read through this, and then read through the views presented by those on the populist right, and tell me if you think they're even consistent. they're not.

why do they key on me, though? why don't they just ignore me? if i'm so wrong...

my hypothesis that the deep state was out to get hillary clinton (and prop up donald trump) started taking shape in early 2016 and is developed in posts to this site over late 2016 and early 2017, when i stepped away from it. i was claiming they'd never let her win as early as 2013. i have accused the nsa of rigging the election in favour of donald trump, and then blaming it on the russians as a distraction mechanism. i have called donald trump a pawn of the deep state, a creature of the intelligence agencies and a front for the cia - all before he was inaugurated.

is that what those other people are saying? or is it actually the precise, exact opposite position?

some of these people are no doubt working for the same groups that rigged the election for him....

think for yourself, people. it's critical. don't let other people define things for you, and when it comes to what these dishonest smear artists say, just consider the source - which does not have a good track record for honesty or fact-based reporting, at all.

there seems to be this movement in jazz right now to kind of over-simplify it and water it down to the level that any musical illiterate can get into.

i don't think this is how you build a wider audience....

personally, i need more than this - when you convert jazz into simple pop, it means i can't get into it for the same reason that i can't get into any other type of simple pop music.

https://luckychops.bandcamp.com/

i gave this an honest chance, and also sorted through some of her older stuff, which i thought i might like better given the write-up, and it's just not doing it for me - it's lacking any concept of verticality, in contrast to some of the other stuff i've heard recently from youngish black female composers. a commonality with the other singers is that this is fundamentally pop music, and it's not entirely fair to analyze it outside of that spectrum.

i want to draw attention to the specific claim that she's drawing from sudanese music, though, because, if i didn't know any better, i might think she's actually drawing rather heavily from the white fiddling culture of the deep south, which would have a heavy celtic slant to it. while i've brought this up before - celtic music is pentatonic, and consequently sounds "ethnic" when compared to church music, which went out of it's way to destroy certain intervals that it considered "satanic", something that was based on the math rather than anything ethnic - i don't actually think this is a coincidence so much as i suspect that the marketing is trying to gloss over the truth of it in order to present more of a "black" or explicitly "african" identity to the music. this is probably a smart marketing decision, but i'm a stickler for actual honesty and i doubt that this music is substantively informed by anything sudanese at all.

i would expect sudanese music to sound vaguely arabic, perhaps with somewhat of a substrate of major keyed africanisms. worse, a cursory google search suggests that the violin was only introduced to sudan during the colonial period.

does that actually matter? well, it doesn't matter much to me, no. but, i know it matters a great deal to certain other people. maybe it shouldn't....

there's also good reason to challenge the idea that she's self-taught.

as mentioned, it's a bit poppy for me, and i wish she'd extrapolate a bit more on the instrumentation, rather than use the violin as a sort of a gimmick. maybe i should leave it at that.

https://sudanarchives.bandcamp.com/album/athena

i wish this was a bit more uptempo.

others will no doubt disagree.

here's some more of that contemporary jam band stuff i mentioned.

it's interesting on the surface, but a little too campy for me. it's really mostly the vocal style that i just can't get into...

if it was, like, one song....but most of these songs have vocals....

https://lespecial.bandcamp.com/album/2019-12-31-rams-head-live-baltimore-md

ok.

all of the centres in the east are closed, and every number i've called in vancouver wants me to leave a message.

i'll have to try tomorrow.

but i'm almost certain that it's in the mail, and that's why there's no way to schedule. i just want somebody to tell me that, though,

i got a very thick package from the human rights commission in the mail, which is the next thing i'll need to check. i'm going to guess that it's either the respondent replying a little late or a rejection of my request for deferral. let's see...

NOTE: If this is a renewal application, you may not have to attend an interview. In that case, there will be a notice that you were Approved and the card will already be on its way!

let's hope that's the right answer.

i'm going to want to confirm that, somehow.

i would have liked to get a new picture, though :\.

argh.

so, i have been approved and i need to schedule an interview within 30 days.

i called the detroit nexus office and they told me i do that online. but, there's no way to do it online that i can see, and the website is telling me that i have no open applications - that the process is done.

detroit closes at 7:30. i'm going to see if i can find an office that's open a little later. voip over gmail is free long distance.

When the applicant receives a letter in their TTP account advising them of their conditional approval, he/she will have 30 days to schedule an interview at an enrollment center of their choice to finalize enrollment.

i like step-by-step instructions to minimize user error.

but, it's clear enough...

ok.

it's vague. but, i'm pretty sure that i need to go in to get a more recent picture taken. i may have to answer some questions, but i think i'm pre-approved.

they're telling me i'm approved until jan, 2025, anyways.

the cbp website uses pop-ups, in 2020.

so, chrome was blocking the popup - by default. i'm logged in as a guest, nothing's customized. it's just out of the box.

firefox let me decide to "allow pop-ups from this site".

but, that was why it didn't work....

i think that the cbp's website is not working on this chromebook, so i can't access the letter. it would be nice if they'd just email it....

let's try firefox.

that was a lot of sleep. that's ok, sometimes, and this was the circumstance where it is.

i got my nexus card approved until 2025. i'm just not sure if i need to get my card replaced or go to an enrollment centre or ...?

i did not get a chance to talk to anybody at villain's last night, so i'm still holding off on the reviews for a bit.

there are some legalish things that i need to do today before i get back to work. there will be some updates.

i otherwise believe that i am likely in for the next 10+ days.

it was an enjoyable show.

but i'm borderline hypothermic...

they told me it was going to snow.

i didn't realize...

i want to get out of the house. i'm feeling couped up. this might get kind of messy...

i don't want to reject the idea of simplifying jazz for the masses off hand, but this is just a little bit too stripped down for me.

also note the blatant floyd rips.

https://themattson2.bandcamp.com/album/paradise

it's been quite a while since i checked out kayo dot, and i'm really not at all interested in the direction they've taken. i was only ever a passive listener in the first place....

so, we can scratch that one off the list, for sure.

my dad would have liked some of this.

https://kayodot.bandcamp.com

i haven't turned the laptop back on yet. i've been dreading it. it should come up out of hibernation, but if it doesn't then i'll have to reimage.

let's hope that i can get the clean-up finished before i crash for a few hours this morning.

i am planning on hitting the grunge show tonight. the damage last night wasn't that bad, because i was able to use the balance on the debit card, and i just avoided buying beer. so, i didn't spend nearly what i said - it was $23 usd for the ticket, $10 usd at the 7/11 and $10 cdn for the bus. yes, it costs me $5 to cross the border and $5 to get back. and, yes, it adds up. it's still cheaper to live here, though.

essentially, my choice to avoid buying expensive beer at el club last night means i'm good to go for cheap beer at ufo tonight. yeah, i didn't set the fucking prices, don't look at me. if it was reasonable, i would have bought at least one..

i'm waiting until i can order last sunday before i do these february reviews all at once. but, there is still a lot of lingering concern regarding the fiasco at el club, with people worrying about crossing boycott lines. personally? i'm a free thinker, i'm not interested in being told what to do by the central committee on ethical consumption in late capitalism, and they can rule on the issue all they want, i don't give a fuck. but, i have to be honest - i didn't find the arguments i heard to be convincing.

and, you can browbeat me on it if you want, i don't really care. what i want is a convincing argument, not a demand that i follow your moral code, which i may or may not agree with.

but, i'll be equally clear that i wouldn't go to a place that i thought was actually horribly sexist or horribly racist. for a bastion of white supremacism, the bar seems to have a lot of black employees (they always did. it's detroit.) and seems to cater disproportionately to the black community. if there was a problem, they made a legitimate attempt to adjust to it.

that said, i don't go there on random nights, either, for the reason that they've largely exited my sphere of interest; this has largely not been much of an issue for me for the reason that the bar no longer caters to my tastes, anyways. so, i haven't been finding myself in this conflicted space, where i'm trying to figure out if i should go or not because i haven't had any interest in what they're booking, anyways.

the bar has a great sound system. it's not likely that random touring acts have any idea what happened, so i'm not going to tar them by association for something they don't know about, whatever the merits of it. so, if a band i like does play the space, i don't see any logical reason why i wouldn't go.

man or astroman formed in the early 90s and have been one of my favourite acts for a very long time. getting to see them was a kind of a bucket list thing. while the sound system at el club really is great, and the band does legitimately have substantive latin influences, i'll also acknowledge that it would have been a lot easier had they played the magic stick, or perhaps delux fluxx. but, for whatever reason, they didn't and i had to make a choice between missing out on a band i've been listening to for most of my life or an empty statement of solidarity with something that i'm not really convinced of the value of.

that's not a hard choice, for me.

i'm sorry if you find that upsetting, but i think you're wrong.

i think everybody wants the temperature to flip over early this year, as we've had crappy springs for a few years in a row. the solar signals are all on our side with that - it looks like we're in for an early spring and should expect to get overrun by tropical air pretty soon. we'll see. if it warms up, i might want to go out and play.

however, i've taken a quick run through the march listings, and i don't see anything obvious, outside of the control top show. what i do see are a lot of iffy shows, stuff i'm going to want to listen to before i make a choice.

that said, it's not a bad month in detroit if you're a fan of generic millennial indie rock. i'm not, though. i'm going to be leaning more towards the jazzier, punkier and more experimental options, as i sort through them. and, i may end up at the dso a few times, as well.

let's try to get this laptop back up and hope it works.

we really don't seem to have advanced much beyond the utopian socialism denounced by marx & engels, in socialism: utopian and scientific.

we still have this mass of people on the ground that insist on operating with their hearts instead of their brains, and have no chance of success, because of it.

and, these people still need to be organized by charismatic planners and tacticians that can convince them that they need to fucking listen if they want to get anything done.

i can write you blueprints, but i'm awful with people. sorry.

"i don't know what you're talking about. profits? concessions? i'm just trying to stand on the side of what i think is right."

well, you're going to lose then.

and, your self-righteousness frightens me.

what are some tactics that can actually work in stopping some of these extraction projects?

yes, i support a diversity of tactics. i've been careful not to denounce anybody, i've just been clear that i think this is tactically stupid - that it's not going anywhere, that it's perhaps even counterproductive, and that it's reflective of a level of desperation, rather than careful planning.

but, if there is a purpose to blocking a rail line in southern ontario, it is to try and spark a broader movement, like a general strike. the way the feds responded seems to have demonstrated little understanding of this, which is something that the indigenous groups should exploit to their advantage. they've been given an opening, here, i'll concede that. so, what they need to do is get as many people out as they possibly can and cause as much havoc as is possible, with the hopes that it spills over. that was always the tactic, and they'll tell you that better than i can, but, as stated, the context is that it's a desperate act.....

i know from experience that these groups want to measure the value of a direct action by it's intent, rather than it's outcome. the mere concept of a "direct action" has this kind of romanticism to it, in contrast to the "peaceful protest" which is seen as pointless and ineffectual. they're not wrong to draw that contrast, and i've drawn it over and over again, myself, but they tend to have difficulty getting beyond the abstraction of romanticizing "direct action", of kind of role-playing revolutionaries by manning barricades, like it's a game in drama class, and actually developing meaningful direct actions that can actually extract meaningful concessions.

so, i've pointed to a sit-down strike, and the factors required to make it effective. maybe i can generalize this. i'm supposed to be the academic, here. what do you need to look at in designing an effective direct action that goes beyond these empty concepts of movement solidarity and moral self-righteousness?

1) the direct action needs to directly harm somebody's actual profit in a substantive way. you have to be able to physically get in between some capitalist enterprise and the expropriation of their surplus value. that is the reason that strikes and blockades are effective - because they cost people money, and that is the only thing that capitalists actually care about.

2) you need to be able to protect the direct action from the police, at least to the point of requiring a blood bath to take it down. if you get to the point where they need to send in snipers to take you down, that's probably good enough (although you might need to be prepared for them to try to psych you out). any direct action that can be dismantled easily by the police is simply a waste of time. the other way around this is to generate huge numbers of people, so that the cops are overwhelmed. but, if you're going to do direct action, it is absolutely imperative that you have a tactic to fight the police off. they will arrest you, if they can, and then you're not hurting anybody's profit any more, and can be safely ignored.

3) you need to have popular support. i'm not making an argument about democracy, here. as before, this is purely tactical - the only weapon that these people really have is the threat that they may get the broader society on their side. essentially, the police and government have to be worried that dismantling the direct action by force will lead to greater losses of profit than leaving them in place. 

once you have these three components in place, you can reasonably start making demands.

but, if your direct action essentially amounts to putting on a balaclava and looking chic in your revolutionary garb, as you yell slogans with ten people in an attempt to try to get laid, and get nailed by the press for doing it, then you're a retard that probably deserves what they get.

the blockades meet the first condition, and we'll see if they can meet the second through mass action or not. it's a passable strategy, at least, if they shift to a large number of ad hoc blockades that can come up and down quickly, rather than try and hold a single spot. if they can get enough people to cause enough mayhem, it becomes impossible to police, leading to greater profit losses and the possibility of the capitalists saying "enough" and making a concession.

i've yet to see any evidence of them actually doing this, but that's the way you do it - you set up small blockades, you move them around chaotically, you try to avoid predictable patterns, and you do it relentlessly. so, you stop trying to confront the cops, and start actively avoiding them, instead - because you realize that your focus is not in defeating the police by a show of force, but in harming the profits of the capitalist class, and you keep your focus on what your enemy is, without being drawn out by distractions or pissing matches. you stay disciplined...

the third condition is more challenging, and they need to spend a lot more time on it. they are losing this debate in the public sphere, and potentially harming the people they're trying to stand with, in the process.

i'd be a lot more likely to argue that direct actions tied directly to the pipeline have a greater chance of meeting these three criteria and actually leading to concessions.

breaking up banks & tech firms to generate more market competition isn't a socialist policy. it's a policy that is capitalist to it's bones. socialists would argue for the exact opposite policy - we would argue that competition hurts workers. 

nor is universal healthcare something that you need to invoke socialism to get to. it's true that it's the kind of thing that the framers of capitalism would have realized should be kept off of the market, and that the fact that it ended up on the market is a part of the socialist argument against the failure of capitalism, but if you want to invoke these "real capitalist" debates that are underlying sanders' economic positions, you should quickly get to the deduction that the health care industry is a natural monopoly, and that flailing against it is just going to lead to market failure. there is a perfectly coherent capitalist argument against market-based health care on strictly classical grounds, and if you listen to sanders closely, it's actually the argument he's advancing.

and we could go on. i won't. 

no.

stop.

look at the candidates for president at the last debate.

- biden is a conservative southern democrat.

- warren was a republican into middle age, and still sounds like one on fiscal issues, which is what she really cares about

- bloomberg was a republican for most of his life as well, and sounds like one on most issues

- buttigieg is what you would call a small-c conservative, and would probably have been a republican if he wasn't gay. i've called him a log cabin republican, and it's kind of true. there are actually speeches where obama openly admits that he only ended up as a democrat because the republicans wouldn't have him due to the racism. one wonders....
- klobuchar markets herself as being appealing to conservatives

- and, while sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, he's more in the tradition of progressive capitalism, and is probably the closest thing to an adherent of traditional capitalism in the batch. you hear this line from the libertarian right all of the time, about how really existing capitalism isn't really capitalism, it's "corporatism" and we need "real capitalism". if you look at sanders' proposals with a sober eye, you can see that he's essentially operating from this right-libertarian ideological position, even when he leap frogs the austrian economics in favour of a literal reading of adam smith, and trying to design a more pure type of capitalism, rather than overturn it or dismantle it. in that sense, there is a comparison to fdr, even if his policies are actually far less socialist than fdr's were. that's really what krugman was pointing out, and he is right to do it.

so, that's a bunch of fucking conservatives running for president under the democratic party.

and, what is trump? he's not a trostkyist neo-con, granted, even if he's surrounded by them. but he's hardly a conservative. he's an autocrat, an authoritarian, a "strong leader". a demagogue. he's almost better describable as a member of the chinese communist party than as a member of the john birch society, which seems to have resurrected itself in the form of adam schiff.

i know i've beaten this horse badly, but it's true.

and, while you can't fault some people for repeating what they're told, and shouldn't expect more from them than it, there are some people that you expect should know better than to use smear tactics, or abuse the language.

nowadays, the trotskyists are all in the republican party. the authoritarians are all on the right.

and, the democratic party is full of conservatives.

but, whatever a "centrist" is must have sat there and watched that reversal happen.

there was a wonkish debate between krugman and sanders in 2016, and the sanders campaign sees the world through an us vs them filter and remembers enemies and holds grudges. so, this is really an old debate.

this is what i said then, on april 9, 2016.

===============
j reacts to krugman's critique of sanders (he's right, but nobody should care)

krugman is right, but who cares?

what's the differences in health care plans? in foreign policy? on climate change?

if you break the banks up, they get captured. regulation doesn't work. we tried this. it failed. so, personally? you give me a referendum on a bank, i stay home. it's boring. and it has no effect on my life. i do not think this is what is driving the popularity of his campaign. and i think he needs to fight the perception that it is.

let's get less teddy roosevelt, and more franklin roosevelt.

the banks are important because that is where he gets the money to do the things he wants to do.

that is all.

the way to fix the financial system is to educate people about where they're putting their money. it doesn't matter if it's big or small, or private or public or anything else - so long as people remain clueless, they will be taken advantage of. you can't protect the ignorant. what we need is financial literacy.

==============

i rant a little more here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBUxjVr4GLQ

(https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2016/04/j-reacts-to-krugmans-critique-of.html)

==============

but, if you want to put this on a political spectrum? krugman is actually the leftist, here. it's a keynesian liberal left, but it's a left. sanders & warren are pushing chicago school style neo-liberal pro-market reforms.

==============

may 28, 2016

some of my video comments over the next few days may seem confusing if you're following the Official Alternative Media Narrative, so i think i should be explicitly clear about this.

regarding the issues of financial regulation and the narratives around the bank bailouts, i may actually be closer to clinton than sanders. i wouldn't really agree with either, entirely.

see, i would take what is called an academic left perspective, which neither of the candidates are taking. clinton is taking more of an academic right position. what that means is that there are certain broad academic points that clinton has been making that i agree with (and are not really contested), but that i'm not ideologically aligned with her so i disagree with her on a lot of details. sanders is taking a populist position that is broadly (and correctly) seen as just flatly wrong by most academics. the people that are parroting him either don't know what they're talking about (cenk uygur) or are acting from questionable ideological positions (elizabeth warren).

i would prioritize careful, academic analysis (clinton/obama/krugman) over populist and misleading agitprop (sanders/pseudo-warren/wolff). pseudo-warren because i think she's misunderstood - she's a market fundamentalist, not a leftist. she's good at the agit-prop, but leftists will be sorely disappointed if she gets any kind of position of power. so, i haven't been shy about this: clinton is, indeed, broadly less wrong about the banks.

so, why am i supporting sanders? because i don't care about the bank bailouts. at all. i see the politicking for what it is: populism, agit-prop, maybe a little demagoguery. frankly, i'm pragmatic enough to see the value in it. what i actually care about is foreign policy, health care, social issues and more data-driven analyses of growing inequality.

and, this is not just why i'm supporting sanders over clinton. it's also why i couldn't possibly support clinton at all.

so, i hope that clarifies the point.

what the upcoming video comments are going to focus on is the question of whether some of this agitprop and politicking, as pragmatic as it may be, may have some unintended consequences - blowback - in it's use.

it's one thing to get people angry at the banks in order to get a tobin tax in. that's politics. it's good politics. it's another thing to wake up in eight years and realize we not only don't have a tobin tax, but now have also lost the lender of last resort because the masses got confused about what they were supposed to be angry about. that would be a tremendous fuck-up.

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2016/05/some-of-my-video-comments-over-next-few.html

=========

august 8, 2016

j tries to react to trump's tax/spend ideas but gets stuck in the ultraparadoxical phase

see, what i'd like is for the democratic candidate to spin this around on him and claim she's going to increase taxes on the wealthy - and also on corporations. i know better. i wouldn't believe it, anyways. but the last thing the country needs right now is lower taxes at the top rate. it needs to be taking in higher income tax levels to spend on crumbling infrastructure and convert the economy away from fossil fuels. the problem with the stimulus plan was that it was too small. they need more of this, on a deeper level - and they need to generate the revenue to do it.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/08/restrained-trump-goes-at-clinton-for-tax-plan.html

a strong candidate would annihilate him on his tax policy, which is clearly disastrous and flat out stupid. it's 2016, and dipshit donald still thinks tax cuts create jobs? of course he doesn't. he just wants a tax cut for himself. if i was the nominee, i wouldn't talk about anything else.

i don't always agree with krugman, but he's kind of an expert on keynesian policies. and, if we're going to implement keynesian policies, he's not just a good explainer but arguably the best currently alive. we're lucky that he spends as much time writing in newspapers as he does.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/how-did-we-know-the-stimulus-was-too-small/?_r=0

ok. fine. so, do it right, this time. i mean, the other option is recession. look at europe. you have to find a way to win this debate on the facts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/krugman-the-stimulus-tragedy.html

see, this is just like the tpp. they both want infrastructure spending. they're both technically right. but, i don't believe either of them - i rather think that they'll both push tax cuts and austerity.

i don't know how i'm going to get through this mess with my sanity. i need to just disengage. i keep saying that...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/us/politics/trump-clinton-infrastructure.html

what a fucking disaster. wow. really.

i ought to be pointing out that it's good that they're both taking the right approach to stimulus. instead, i'm convinced they're both lying, and they'll both do the wrong thing.

and, the evidence is really, truly on my side.

i'm in the fucking ultraparadoxical phase, again. great.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG_iD8epJag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOLC9gELguQ

he's basically right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/time-to-borrow.html

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

==================

nov 20, 2016

j reacts to krugman's take on the supposed infrastructure plan

i think krugman is actually giving him too much credit.

my bet is that the infrastructure plan reduces to a tweet to ask investors to invest more in infrastructure, maybe followed by another tweet calling paul ryan some mean names for supposedly blocking it.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/infrastructure-build-or-privatization-scam/

there's actually precedence for this: whenever obama was faced with doing anything complicated, he wrote a speech explaining that congress should do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH7hvdqPP9U

from the start of this process, i never referred to bernie as anything more than a legit lesser evil, and it was refreshing to at least get that for a while, until the reality started to sink itself in.

in 2016, the military-industrial complex rigged the election in favour of trump and then blamed it on the russians to distract you. if you start seeing them blame bernie's successes on the russians, you should take it as an admission of guilt.

as for dr. wolff...

it's funny to see dr. wolff present himself as a protector of the new deal, because his academic work was actually written largely as a criticism of it. mr. wolff is known nowadays as an advocate of workplace democracy, but his claim to fame was actually a scathing critique of the new deal as a co-option of socialism; his central academic thesis, the thing that got people to notice him, was a series of papers arguing that the purpose of the new deal was to stop socialism, and that it worked. while it comes off as a conspiracy theory on first glance, it is actually mainstream scholarship to acknowledge that fdr intended to save capitalism from itself, not destroy it.

fdr was a capitalist to his bones, and richard wolff made a career out of taking him to task for it.

i've also noticed in several posts during the past that he has a tendency to view facts pragmatically. he's a marxist; they're all like that.

but, the point i want to make is that it seems as though dr. wolff likes to imagine that sanders is far more like he is than he actually is, that he may be suffering from the fallacy of projection and that he would likely be disappointed by what he actually gets.

so, be careful with the way that certain people are going to frame certain things.

and, i'll be here to keep them honest, as best i can.

i think it's a valid question, actually.

is krugman, himself, more of a socialist than bernie sanders is?

you'd have to take some kind of weighted average, as this is a spectrum with more than two axes in it. 

but, sanders has kind of a conservative streak on very specific issues, and krugman is about as big of a government liberal as you'll find.

i would certainly compare krugman to roosevelt before i compared sanders to him.

in fact....

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2015/11/15/democratic-debate-bernie-sanders-eisenhower-tax-rates-vstan-orig-cws.cbs-news

paul krugman is right - bernie sanders is not a socialist at all. 

it was chomsky that pointed out that, while he likes to compare himself to roosevelt, he's actually largely to the right of eisenhower, who is a better comparison, overall.

you centrists and progressives/conservatives can argue with each other all you want.

i'll go vote for the socialists.

i'm just curious if somebody could define this term "centrism" for me?

i've seen it applied to everything from a rooseveltian keynesian like krugman to a neo-liberal like obama to a neo-con like clinton, and i suspect it's most haphazard proponents would even use it to describe people like myself that, unlike bernie sanders, actually openly describe themselves as an anarchist, a socialist and a communist, and are actually several rungs to his left.

so, what exactly is a centrist?

i suppose that if you want to be literal, the best way to make sense of a term like centrism is to start by defining what the right is. then, once you've picked a left and a right, you can understand the centre through a dialectical process. is it centrist of me to resort to hegel like this?

but, then, where exactly is the right in american politics? it's a kind of nihilism, a sort of open fascism, that upholds strong leader politics and increasingly toys with adopting state capitalist economic models. i think you see where i'm going with this.

but, the odd thing about this topsy-turvy reality that exists in the american political discourse is that you can pivot around the centre without altering it - if we're going to have these definitional debates about left and right, the centre shouldn't actually be touched by it.

but what exactly is it, though, this shifting target of "centrism"?

maybe it's just whatever you call the people that you don't like much, this week.

personally, i'll stand over here on the far left and keep slamming people for being statists, thanks.

nobody updated the wiki page, so i actually didn't realize there's new songs.

my impression of the new material i heard at the show is that it is actually a little bit riffier in a grungey or no-wavey kind of way. it had more of a dirty, southwestern sort of sound, at the expense of the scifi or the surf. if they were always morricone-meets-dale-at-a-ramones-concert, the show seemed to stress the morricone and the ramones more than previous work.

but, man or astroman aren't known for evolving, and you do expect it to basically sound the same, and it does. 

i made it home alive tonight, thankfully.

the rain kind of sucked, but i worked it out.

i wanted to stop at villain's to talk, but i forgot that they're closed on mondays...

i'm tentatively planning for wednesday as well, weather dependent. i think it's probably going to be too cold on friday.

i'm going to hop in the shower and probably zonk out, and i'm going to leave the show review until after i can talk to somebody and clarify what happened.

to be clear: i'm not worried about anything, really. i was told they called the police to escort me home for my own safety, because they thought my clothing put me at a risk to get assaulted (which is victim blame-y and weird). the bartender ended up driving me home. i'm not getting any bad vibes, i don't think. i'm pretty sure i was just completely unable to move, and that's really the sum total of the concern. 

but, i don't know if i was out for thirty minutes or three hours, and i need to figure that out before i can order time for the night. and, whether i got drugged or something else, i need to apologize, nonetheless - even if i end up with a negative review for calling the cops during bar hours, if that happened.

they're telling me that i shouldn't expect a letter, after all.

i made a request for one anyways over the phone.

should i buy a ticket anyways? i'm so iffy about this. are the prices inflated due to the blockade? should i wait this out, anyways?

let me get some fruit and look it up.

i napped this morning and afternoon and didn't get as much done as i wanted. i'm at least rested and awake, so i'm either up and in or up and ready to get out.

and, no, that doesn't mean i want to breathe in your second-hand marijuana at home, either.

no smoking in the fucking house.

it's a simple rule. please respect it.

City Councilman James Tate's office says Detroit's extension will allow "additional opportunity to continue to develop a social equity program that ensures all eligible Detroiters have an opportunity" to participate in Michigan's new marijuana industry.

so, they're setting up some kind of affirmative action program or something, out of an apparent fear that white people are going to control the supply. in the mean time, the functional effect of the policy is to continue to arrest black people for selling it illegally, and to drive away people that want to come in to the city.

it's typical detroit...the place is just so badly run it's baffling.....

i haven't decided yet.

but, i'm leaning on staying in because:

1) i don't want to buy smokes, and i'll have to. it will be easier when i can buy a pre-roll, instead, and avoid that.
2) the door price isn't particularly bad, but it's an expensive night when you add it up. this bar has had some accusations of shady hiring practices, and stopped selling cheap beer a while back, when new management took over and, oddly, shifted to a more urban theme.
3) it's looking like it's going to be legit gross out.

if you flip this around on me so that i need to get out of the house to avoid the smoke, then i'm going to end up reading at the library, or something.

please just respect my wishes as they've been articulated. stop trying to make guesses, or think you can outsmart me by appealing to some useless psychobabble.

your psychoanalysis is pseudoscientific bullshit and not even worth deconstructing, and you're a fucking idiot for being dumb enough to take it seriously as an epistemology in the first place.

i will tell you what i want, and i will be very clear about it. please just fucking listen....

these people just can't understand that smoking is not binary.

they seem convinced that you smoke or you don't, and my lifestyle choice to smoke when i'm drinking (two or three times a month, max) means i'm condemned to breathe in second-hand smoke when i'm not.

it's what happens when you reduce complicated issues to simplistic moral questions.

no, the fact that i smoke when i'm at the bar doesn't mean i should have to breathe in second-hand smoke when i'm at home, when i've explicitly made it clear that i don't want to. in fact, the incentives are working in the other direction - i'm feeling less inclined to go drinking because i'd rather avoid the inevitable pack.

you fucking dipshits.

it's also looking like it's going to be rainy and miserable out, tonight.

and, the fact that i basically have to buy smokes is such a disincentive.

so, i'm broadly leaning towards staying in. unless i need to get out of the house to get away from the cop smoking upstairs. ugh.

go.

smoke.

away.

from.

the.

house.

fuck....

yeah, listening to this - and it's not like i was ever a fan - right after the last one makes it clear how much of a jump of abstraction really occurred.

https://telefontelaviv.bandcamp.com/album/immolate-yourself

i've heard of this artist before, but was never particularly impressed by them, rather filing it in a kind of large pile of artsy techno that really only exists on an aesthetic level, and falls apart under any sort of scrutiny.

it's apparently been a while, and half of the project has died in the period since the last release, making this a fundamentally different thing altogether.

i noticed some time in the mid 10s that the technology had gotten over a kind of a hump, and if you were on the other side of it then you'd interpret legacy electronic music as sort of primitive. that seems to be the biggest difference i'm immediately noticing - the primary artist involved in this process has allowed a full embrace of newer technology to dramatically alter the sound, and i'll at least give him a thumbs up for that. i'm always an advocate of pushing the technology forwards, rather than getting stuck with it in the past.

but, if the issue with telefon tel aviv all of those years ago was that it just never broke through the aesthetic, that it never got to anything substantive underneath the effects work, then the same fundamental flaw continues to exist.

this is a great producer that doesn't know how to write compelling songs, which has been the fundamental truth for many years.

i'm still thinking about it on friday, though.

https://telefon-tel-aviv.bandcamp.com/

there's another show on wednesday that i'd like to sneak in, too.

yeah, it's kind of bone-headed, but this is the kind of grunge i actually like.

https://gileadmedia.bandcamp.com/album/negative-sound

https://bummerkc.bandcamp.com/album/holy-terror

i'm going to call the court office in the morning.

i have a pre-paid mastercard that i bought for the bus ticket to toronto in june, but i haven't received a confirmation on it in the mail, yet. i don't want to buy the ticket until i'm sure.

if i can get a clear confirmation over the phone, or something sent over email, i'll feel better about budgeting for this.

this worth $80?

you tell me.

death.to.koalas@gmail.com.

do i want to give man or astroman $23 usd for a 40 minute set?

there's quite a few punk bands in this category - they have enough records to play a full show, but you just don't expect them to. you expect them to play the same set they played as an opening band on their first tour, twenty years ago.

but, the listing says doors at 8:00 and close at 11:00, and there's two opening bands.

one: 8:30-9:00

two: 9:15-9:45

man or astroman: 10:15-11:00

that's just a guess, but it's likely.

so, rip.....or astro-rip?

i may be used to paying $5-10 for a show, granted. but, i don't mind paying $20+ for an older act with a back catalog, if they play a substantive set, dammit.

the night is going to cost me:

$23 tickets
$20 beer (because they only sell them in tall cans for $8 each)
$7 cigarettes (unavoidable, at the bar)
$3 pre
that's $53 usd -----> $70 cdn
+ $10 tickets

for a 30-40 minute set. hrmmn.

let me see if i can find a recent setlist.

but, what i wanted to point out before the machine crashed was that i'm not planning on doing a review for the debussy show just right now, as there's still some open thoughts revolving around what happened.

it's hard to write a review about something, when you're not entirely certain what happened. i think i'm feeling good enough to make it to man or astroman tomorrow.

on friday afternoon, the prime minister proclaimed by decree that "the time has come" to take the blockades down.

the media coverage around this has been bizarre, with several publications producing headlines that more or less claim that the protesters are "defying" the prime minister, as though he has any authority in the matter.

i would suggest that the time has come, but for something else.

so, that was the last one for 2013.

there's another handful of releases i want to get out there for jan, 2014 before i pivot. i'm not done yet....one more month....

i'm going to need to file some things for 2013 locally, first. and, i'm also going to want to create some seeds and otherwise distribute the material for the end of 2013 into the next batch of release notes.

but, if i'm lucky, i can get something for january up by the end of the weekend, i think.

i might sneak out on sunday, but i'm actually planning mostly for monday.

inri023 updated and tested

this is tested and working on the chromebook and on firefox on the windows 7 box.

what's in there, now?

- the 8 songs on the record
- cover.jpg & a jpg of the backsheet for cd-r printing (the insert for the spine)
- a playlist.m3u file stored as raw text
- a 72 page doc file of liner notes over the fall of 2013
- a 72 page pdf file (same)
- an instructions file
- inri023.html.7z.txt is a 1 mb document that must be renamed and unzipped and contains an html version of the liner note package, including an html5 player that can load the purchased audio in the browser.

the full download, in flac, is 155 mb.

there will be further updates to the liner notes as i run through the alter-reality, and as i run through the remastering period that took place over 2015-2016. but, this is likely the last major revision to this collection of glitch remixes from 1998, which is nearing a point of final completion.

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

it's time to stop to eat and shower.

soon.

i apologize for the source, but the other sites that google gave me were special-interest marijuana sites. in terms of useful information, i'll take a site like this over a site like leafly any day.

i'm just trying to get the point across that this is a known issue, even if you've never heard of it before: yes, marijuana can make people faint by triggering drops in blood pressure, and i'm pretty sure that's something that has happened to me several times, now.

but, it usually only lasts a few minutes. what made sunday weird is the amount of time that the reaction lasted, and that's what i need more information regarding.

https://drugprevent.org.uk/ppp/2008/11/marijuana-can-trigger-rapid-drop-in-blood-pressure/

i didn't expect the spanish inquisition....

that was a lot more sleep. i do require some sleep, i guess. but, i'm not used to feeling this tired.

it seems like my neck has finally loosened up.

a stiff neck like that is both a symptom of a stroke (which doesn't fit my medical profile) and a symptom of low blood pressure (which does). and, if i fell off that chair, i may have landed badly. i can't blame that on being drugged with any clarity, this could all, in theory, be the results of the worst green out in the history of humanity.

i haven't got a response from the bar yet. i'm thinking about going in on sunday, just to talk. i did that to the trumbullplex when i got knocked out by the edibles a few years ago, and i've been ok there ever since.

...even though i'm not likely to actually go back to a bar that called the police on me out of concerns for my own safety. that's like burning somebody at the stake to save their soul. it's wacked.

i got 75% of the way through the html file of inri023 before i crashed and should be done before sunset, when i will stop to eat and watch last night's debate.

first liner note release for inri023

when i sat down in late 2013, my intent was just to collect all of the tracks that were leftover. however, it became apparent quickly that i had a pile of these weird, glitchy remixes that i meant to do something with, but just never did anything with. they seemed to form an idea of their own, so i split them off into this inrimixed ep.

i feel that this decision was a good one, and that this collection has now become an important part of the discography - so much so that i am adding some tracks to it that were initially overlooked and then promoting it to 'remix lp'.

i need to be clear that this is a remix lp full of damaged, glitchy mixes. these tracks were left unscathed by the great remastering of 2013-2016. many of them are sourced from 112 kbps mp3 files, or worse. some are sourced from mono. i'm presenting the artifacts in the compression as a part of the glitch aesthetic. but, these are truly sad excuses for waveforms.

example: the cover art is actually the waveform for track 2; similarities to the mirror reflection of the cover of any seminal eponymous records from the late 60s are purely coincidental. waveforms like that do not bear any resemblance to any physical reality whatsoever. they fail, as waveforms. yet, these are the waveforms we have before us, and these are the sounds that such absurd waveforms make.

i suppose that the reason i have all of these glitchy mixes from the period is that i was planning on making a glitch lp. it's not that i specifically recall that as being wrong, so much as it is that my memories of it being right are not of clear strength. i sort of remember wanting to make a glitch record. the evidence exists that i wanted to make a glitch record. now i have the glitch record that it seems like i always wanted to make. at the least, my current self very much likes the idea that i released a glitch record in 1999.

constructed over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. released dec 27, 2013. the first two tracks were corrected to stereo in sept, 2014. the last two tracks were added for re-release as a remix lp in dec, 2016. re-released & finalized as lp003 on dec 17, 2016. first liner note release added on feb 20, 2020. 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 (1998, 2013-2020). as of feb 20, 2020, the release includes a 72 page booklet in doc, pdf & html, with an html5 audio frontend, that includes journal entries from the remastering process over sept-dec, 2013.

credits

released January 28, 1999

j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, piano, drum programming, sequencing, vocals, cool edit synthesis, noise generators, found sounds, sampling, loops, sound design, digital wave editing, digital effects processing, noise reduction, a broken tape deck, production.

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

can you win a blockade fight using gandhian tactics?

well, let's understand what gandhi did. 

there's a lot of ignorance around this, mostly coming from dumb hippies. but, what gandhi did was say "dear british, look at the size of my army! they are not currently armed - for both your sake and mine. but, suppose i were to arm them. would you stand a chance against a force this size?".

and the british, who were rational, which is the key part of the whole thing, said "no. we cannot win.", and moved out.

could a native blockade conceivably make an argument of the sort? it would have to have immense popular support that is willing to mobilize with a credible threat, which is the opposite of the status quo. you would essentially have to have an argument like this: "dear canada, look at the amount of support we have. it is not currently mobilized, but we might mobilize it. and, would you survive if we did?".

if the threat was credible, and our government was rational, which is not an obvious assumption, then a blockade might work on that level.

but, with the reality as it is, what the state is juggling is perception. nobody thinks critical mass is likely, unless you're talking about the potential of counter-demonstrators.

i want to support tactics that can win.

this one might feel good. you might think it's moral, and that might matter to you. but they can't win....

a blockade is in theory an effective action, if you can actually defend it when challenged. what's the logic, though?

the ultimate in effective actions is, of course, the sit-down strike. with a sit-down strike, the company is crippled - it can't even hire scabs. it has to negotiate, or fail. but, what is the key factor in ensuring that a sit down strike is effective? it is that the strikers can actually prevent the police from entering the building. even with a sit-down strike, they're still fucked if the cops can just move in and arrest everybody for trespassing.

a blockade could potentially work for the same reason as a sit-down strike - it can cripple production. it hits them where it hurts. that's what you want, so it's smart in a way.

but, the next question is "can we protect the blockade?", and the answer is that you never can. they can snipe you from the trees if they have to. they can water cannon you from the sky. once you get to the inevitable stage of actual conflict, there is no way to hold a blockade against a military or even a police force. it is a losing tactic, without question.

the protesters would need to build substantive fortifications over the tracks, somehow. they'd need to treat it like trench warfare and have some serious background in how to do it. 

google is just so hopelessly fucking useless nowadays without a good search filter to block out the capitalists and religionists and i can't install anything from this guest account.

so, i can't do anything at all on this chromebook. i keep saying that. but, i'm operating on distractions anyways - i should be focusing on inri023, not looking up proper histories of the christian recolonization of britain, that undo the mythologized official church narrative (which is complete and utter bullshit).

essentially everything at the top of the google results for essentially every topic is just nonsense. and, it's making me understand these arguments that technology is making people ignorant...

if i was forced to rely on the results at the top of the google results, then, yeah, that would be about right. i know better, at least. but, i need the right tools to undo the ignorance of market stupidity, and i don't have them in front of me.

the (re)christianization of britain was a horribly brutal, bloody mess that undid an indigenous revolution, brought on by the tribal invasions that overturned the roman occupation. it should really be thought of as a clash of civilizations. it was a thousand year long civil war with multiple phases, the last of which was the viking phase, when the nobility realized the value of christianity as a tool over their conquered peasants. the vikings initially moved south as a response to charlemagne's genocide of the saxons.

britain itself is actually a little bit frustrating, because it kept getting reconquered by pagan forces, and the fact that this happened so frequently should be indicative of what side the people were really on. when your cities fall to pagan forces over and over and over again....

but, you don't get as brutal of a history there as you do elsewhere, for that reason - the christians really had a hard time holding the island at all. the mythology suggests that the reconversion happened in the 7th century. the reality is that the purpose of this mythology is to gloss over the centuries of civil war that followed, and the fact that the clergy was still struggling with very widespread pagan "reversions" (what a bullshit term.) past the invasion of william the conqueror, into the period of peasant revolts that followed the plague and all the way to the renaissance. we can condemn the inquisition for killing witches, but doing so means recognizing the continued, lingering importance of indigenous european belief systems.

in britain, specifically, it was a slow process of gradual assimilation and passive resistance. like the indigenous people of canada, the indigenous people of britain seemed to give the church a questionable amount of actual authority. they seemed to prefer to avoid and ignore them than fight them. and, in the long run, that was probably a successful strategy - religion is not very prevalent in britain, these days. the pagans have, largely, won the fight.

it's hard to google this, though. i'm just going to get the official line of absolute bullshit from the depository of bullshit that is the anglican church, as backed up by mainstream "scholarship". i need to be able to get around that in order to get to substantive research, and it's very time consuming without these filters i've built up over the years that remove religious sites from the search results. i'm not going to waste my time with it.

i was hoping that the link i posted would be helpful, but it's not.

yeah.

that text is a good example of the kind of whitewashed, colonial, christian-mythologized history that you want to avoid.

i apologize for posting the link.

don't read it. it's a lot of nonsense, and a waste of time.

that link i posted starts off scholarly, but picks up a disappointingly pro-christian tone halfway through and ultimately isn't what i expected it to be, which was an exploration of the violent methods used to spread christianity in britain. rather, it simply repeats the standard christian mythology of terrorizing german tribes, and then attempts to whitewash the violence of the church by blaming it on the germans, themselves - the spread of christianity wasn't violent because of the colonizers, but because of the colonized. this is a kind of victim-blaming and should be properly denounced.

i did not endorse the text, i pointed out what i had searched for and explained that i was going to spend some time sorting through it. i appear to have made a poor assumption about it's contents.

the basic analogy between the indigenous peoples of europe and america is apparent if you read between the lines, though, even if i strongly disagree with the pro-christian, anti-german slant of the text.

there are jungle people, there are desert people, there are mountain people, there are arctic people....

we are the people of the forests.

we should recognize our shared responsibility to protect it. and, we should stick together.

as i've said many times now,

decolonization means dechristianization, deislamification, etc.

and, if we all do this together, we we will see how similar we are, together, up here, in our northern arboreal lands - because we are products of such similar climates.

and, yes, other people are welcome in my proposed indigenous-european coalition, asians would be a rational third partner, and anybody else, but there are obvious historical reasons why pointing to cultural overlap between these specific groups is a particularly fertile proposition for a lasting synthesis.

i'm not saying anything outside of history, either.

in canada, we actually have an entire category of people called metis that intend to be a synthesis of european and amerindian indigenous groups. in america, there is this constant theme through your history of defecting to the indians - because it happened. all of the time. and, the dna that's left is kind of startling, with some indigenous groups being majority r1*, at this point.

but, i'm not the first person to propose an alliance of indigenous and european commoners against the power of the church and the state.

people like me have existed since contact....

i'm not suggesting that we all ought to go back to the dark ages...

....but, i've said this before: the similarities between indigenous europe and indigenous america are actually pretty startling, and there's actually kind of a powerful potential for a hybrid culture if our own tendency towards this kind of post-reductionist scientific atheism hybridizes with their own emancipation of the superstitious into the ecological.

the truth is that we used to be just like them, actually, and that they can teach us how to get back to what we were, as much as we can teach them to evolve out of their shells.

we got off to a bad start. but, a few centuries is a short period, in the broader scheme of things.

i'm going to flip through this tonight while i wait for my neck to heal. it doesn't seem to be bruised, just very stiff.

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1292&context=theses

Clinical trials prior to two years ago have shown little to no significant effects of cannabis in reducing seizures. These trials seem to be underpowered, with a sample size less than 15. In contrast, more recent studies that have included over 100 participants showed that CBD use resulted in a significant reduction in seizure frequency. Adverse effects of CBD overall appear to be benign, while more concerning adverse effects (e.g., elevated liver enzymes) improve with continued CBD use or dose reduction.

In most of the trials, CBD is used in adjunct with epilepsy medication, therefore it remains to be determined whether CBD is itself antiepileptic or a potentiator of traditional antiepileptic medications. Future trials may evaluate the efficacy of CBD in treating seizures due to specific etiologies (e.g., post-traumatic, post-stroke, idiopathic).

==========

in other words, they weren't able to find any evidence of this claim until they started using cbd together with the epilepsy medication.

right.

great trials, guys. really convincing. good job with that.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6235654/

even with the kids, it's like...

does it really cure epilepsy in kids? or does it cure the idea of epilepsy in the minds of their parents?

the claim is the efficacy fell over time, but i wonder if the efficacy wasn't exaggerated in the first place.

i don't have my blocklist on the chromebook, so i'd have to sort through thousands of pop science sites and piles of hippie bullshit to get to some actual, decent research. i'm not going to do that.

but, i would not endorse the claim that cbd reduces seizures in anybody, regardless of their age. sorry.

https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/pediatrics/cbd-oils-effect-may-wane-managing-seizures

i am overwhelmingly skeptical, myself.

but, i support recreational legalization, anyways - i'd just like to see some bylaws around residential use.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cbd-product-boom-science-research-hemp-marijuana

"The relation between marijuana use and epileptic seizures is still controversial. "

that's a polite way to put it. 

i don't think i have late onset epilepsy, and i don't think it's being cause by marijuana abuse, which i've never had an issue with.

but, could pot cause seizures? the answer is that it does actually make sense, unlike the opposite argument, which really doesn't.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4121386/

but, i mean, the place could have also been empty because everybody left because the manager called the fucking cops, too.

i keep saying i'm getting up to eat.

so, it's one thing to call the cops on a green out at 11:00, when you're there until close to 3:00, that would be unnecessary, probably, and another to call them at 2:30, when you're trying to close the bar and go home.

the place was empty when i was talking to the cops....

...but that would mean i got drugged....

data. i need data.

and i need linguine.

when i called the pot smoker below me in a couple of years ago, it wasn't being done with the intent to have her arrested, or with the intent to serve or protect anybody. i was very intentionally attempting to create an occurrence for the purpose of a court process, and i actually told them that when they got there.

if there was some other way i could have proven in court that the person below me was smoking inside, i would have walked down that path, instead. but, the legal precedent is getting a police report, so i did that in order to win the court case.

as i had asked her to smoke somewhere else repeatedly, and she didn't care about my lungs or my sobriety, i decided i didn't care much about what happened to her, either. but i wasn't calling the cops for the sake of calling the cops, i was just doing what was required to get out of the lease. there wasn't another answer - that's what the court wants as proof, in that scenario. that's the sitting precedent....

it's a different kind of argument, and one i can maybe draw a parallel to on the issue of "i just want to go home". and, i guess that's where the generational gap is likely to assert itself - i would actually find it less upsetting to have a call in a situation where she's trying to close the bar and go home than i would in an overbearing situation where she's trying to, like, mother me and make sure i'm safe. i thought i was home at like 11:00, but i'm questioning that, now. is that actually true? it's kind of important.

ok, i'm going to eat.

i'm an anarchist - i don't buy into this idea of the police existing to serve or protect, unless you own property. so, i'm going to kneejerk pretty brutally against anybody calling the police.

but, the bartender drove me home.

and, even if i don't agree with what happened, i can maybe make a better attempt to understand the generational or income gap underlying it, if they really did find themselves with somebody unable to move, at or close to closing time, especially considering that i would have had to have been drugged - if i picked up that deduction right, it was correct, and the same one i'm presenting.

i may remain a little uneasy about it, i may continue to be apprehensive about the safety of entering the space for a while, but i can sort of adjust a little to it. it's like the introduction of a difference of scale, a kind of hierarchy of "noooooo".

the fact is that this is very blurry.

- i finished my second beer
- i went out for a smoke

- somebody handed me a joint and said "this is strong. careful.", and i smoked it anyways. i even said i was done and changed my mind and took more. i take some responsibility here, i'm just insisting on clarifying the agent.

- i asked for another beer, and was told i looked a little rough and to come back in an hour or two. i didn't totally agree, but i shrugged this off. note that i actually would have left at this point if i hadn't been given a free beer, because i had budgeted for two; i wasn't planning on staying much longer. so, the refusal didn't really bug me. as the karaoke was starting, i was thinking about going to the jazz bar down the street instead, anyways. but, i decided to sit down for a few minutes and think about what the best thing to do actually was.
- and, the next thing i remember is sitting a few feet away with somebody hovering over me, giving me juice.

i initially assumed that there was just a few moments in between these two events - that i had a seizure, and then i had people hovering over me right after. this is because this is how this happened before.

but, with the exceeding amounts of tiredness that have followed, and the recollection that i was having such a hard time getting up, i'm increasingly wondering:

1) how much time occurred between when i sat down and when people were giving me juice?
2) just how long was i sitting there struggling to get up for?

it's the time dilation that is messing with me, and, because i didn't check the time when i got in, i don't have the frame of reference. i'm going to need somebody to answer that question for me.

if i was just passed out for a few seconds like i initially thought, it would seem as though i had a very, very bad reaction to the pot.

but, if this process was actually more drawn out than i initially thought it was, if i was struggling with awakeness for a long while, then i basically had to have been drugged.

so, i guess i was up at close to 17:00 and i haven't been sure how awake i actually am. i got some fruit, warmed back up and spent some time ranting, to make sure i was actually awake. and, i think that i am.

my neck is unusually stiff, and i had some kind of migraine on monday morning. no significant bruising has developed. i never developed any sort of nausea. i've just been oppressively, overwhelmingly tired.

i haven't had any kind of hallucinations, if you're wondering about the stiff neck.

so, i don't know. i actually posted at the bar's facebook page, and i'm hoping to get some information about some time frames. i didn't actually check a clock. and, the more i kind of feel it through in my head, the more i'm wondering how long i was passed out for. was the bar even closed when i left? i don't have any recollection of the karaoke.

so, what if i was passed out in the bar for like 4 hours? at that point i guess maybe you either need to call the cops, or an ambulance, if the person can't move - you want to go home. but, in context, i would think that would make a roofie almost certain. i just didn't drink that much...

so, i think that, to an extent, my initial reaction, in a continued slightly confused state, should be taken with a grain of salt. i'm realizing that i maybe don't have a clear enough understanding of what happened to be able to make a choice.

it wasn't the alcohol; i either had a pot-related seizure, or i got drugged. let's hope i can get enough information by the end of the night to figure that out. and, i might undo the nasty review, if i was actually passed out for hours. because what do you do? and, there was some realization of the possibility of a drugging - she did tell me she was calling the cops because she didn't want me to get raped.

maybe, with a little better reflection, with better data, with better clarity, i can put these pieces together differently.

right now, i'm awake enough that i'm going to stop to eat.

after passing out hard for another 10+ hours over what was supposed to be a twenty minute nap, and feeling like i'm going to sleep another 10 hours, i'm left with the need to ask the question i should have asked in the first place.

there's no way at all that the totality of this is alcohol related - i'd have had to have drank at least twice as much as i did. and, while i've had some bad reactions to marijuana recently, this is starting to feel like something more than that, as well.

was i drugged on sunday night? did somebody put something in my drink when i was having a smoke?

there weren't a lot of people in the bar from 7:30-10:00 on sunday night. they have a weekly karaoke feature, and it was starting to pick up when i fell asleep. there were maybe five or six people in the bar, pretty much all male, with the exception of a bartender and a small group of females tucked away on the very far side of the bar, which i didn't make it over to, as it would have been out of the way.

of the guys in the bar, i actually think i've met most of them before and would consider essentially all of them to be exceedingly low risk. i would characterize this bar as a nerd hangout and pretty low risk, over all.

i did not purchase my second drink, though. it was bought for me after i had a conversation with somebody about the native african language they were speaking at the bar. they were impressed by my knowledge of the geography of eastern africa, and my usage of terms like "nilotic". and, i scored a drink out of it. i didn't think much of it.

now, though...

i shouldn't be experiencing this kind of overwhelming effect from a couple of drinks and a few tokes. this is an epic hangover, the kind of thing you get after a major bender. 

so, did somebody put something in my drink?

if not, what exactly was i handed?

i've been asleep since 3:00 this morning and i think i'm going back to it.

so, i have a tentative 72 page document done for inri023, but i appear to have flubbed the process the first time around (this is an lp, like inri015 or inri021, but i treated it like an ep, like inri022. i have to reverse that.) and will need to go through it very carefully to make sure i haven't missed anything.

unlike the last three updates, inri023 only has one html5 frontend in the package and will not include discarded remasters. that's something that was sort of unique to those specific recordings.

in fact, the html5 part of this should be pretty quick, i just have to actually get it done.

i think i'm going to take a nap just right now, though. i hope it's short...

i can measure how much alcohol i'm consuming by reading labels and via experience. that's something i have control over, and that i'm actually pretty good at figuring out. i actually don't tend to find myself very drunk very often, although it happens to everybody sometimes.

however, when somebody hands you a joint, you have no idea how potent it is, or if it's even really marijuana in the first place. 

so, if somebody hands you a potent joint and it knocks you out flat on your ass, did you do something irresponsible? or did you just get unlucky?

you could have controlled the situation by not smoking at all, granted. but, you didn't have control of the pot that was given to you, you were at the whim of somebody else. is it actually your fault, really?

imagine if it was alcohol. if somebody gives you a cup worth of beer, it probably won't do much to you; on the other hand, if somebody gives you a cup worth of vodka, and you swig it, it could knock you out right on the spot. the difference between a cbd joint rolled with mostly tobacco and a pure marijuana cigarette at 30% thc is just as profound. 

if somebody gave you a glass of beer, you'd drink it, if you trust them. you would know better than to drink a glass of vodka, though. with marijuana, you don't have the opportunity to make that discretion, and, if you have low tolerance like i do, you can find yourself passed right out relatively quickly, if you take too long a haul on too powerful of a joint. if you had the ability to understand what you're smoking in the first place, you might not make those mistakes.

the potency of marijuana has apparently come up a lot over the last few decades, and i guess my reactions to the drug are reflective of that. 

again, i don't want to come off as unappreciative or entitled.

but, this was a part of the argument for legalization in the first place, and it would be nice if they could get a move on it. this was supposed to have been dealt with quite a while ago, already.

like, there's a difference between passing out and falling asleep.

i wasn't passed out. i was woken up every few minutes, and nobody had any difficulty getting me up. i was just overwhelmed by tiredness, knocked on my ass by strong pot, and had no option but to sleep it off.

there was one night where i was actually drunk, namely the night before beethoven's fifth, back in october.

the fact that i remember her fussing over me repeatedly is itself proof that i wasn't drunk - if i was drunk, i wouldn't remember struggling to wake up like that, it would just be ejected from memory altogether. greenouts will suck your life force out of you, turning you into a kind of vegetable until it passes. they're not pleasant; they suck. but, you don't wake up the next day and wonder what happened last night. that difference has been important in helping me understand what's been happening to me....

i mean, one of the reasons that i'm blaming this on marijuana instead of alcohol is that i didn't lose any time. there's no black out period.

ignoring the actual amount that i drank, and the obvious reality that it's not going to get anybody pass out drunk, being drunk means blacking out. if you don't black out, you're not that drunk...

there's no question that i was out of it for a small amount of time, i'm not denying that point - i was very, very stoned, so stoned i couldn't move. but, going instantly from full alertness and total recall to being unable to move is a marijuana thing, not an alcohol thing. so, if i had a seizure, or suffered a sudden drop in blood pressure, or whatever else, it didn't erase any of my actual memory - the time i lost is strictly reduced to the period that i was actually passed out. which isn't what happens with alcohol poisoning...

i did not vomit or feel sick, not even when i got home. i did have a headache, and woke up with a migraine.

even explaining it as a thc overdose, a greenout, is, i think, just putting off the point. the marijuana is triggering the events, and i hope it's dose-specific, but i suspect there's some underlying factor.

so, i have slept for most of the day, now. i just finally got out of the shower....

i'm less hungry than i should be. oddly.

i'm told that i fell off a chair, but i just remember sitting down in one place and being teleported to the other and a different bartender giving me juice; i'm going to guess there was no more than a few minutes of time in between. so, i'm guessing i just fell off the chair, maybe seized slightly on the ground, and either got up or was helped up in the closest chair. and, i then couldn't move for about 20-30 minutes until i got up and got in a car and was driven home.

as mentioned, this has happened to me before after smoking marijuana. the amount of alcohol i've drank doesn't seem to be a factor, it seems to be strictly about the pot. i'm guessing it's just too strong for me...

i don't remember falling over. so, i checked my body for bumps or scrapes. the last time i had a seizure like this was back in july, and i ended up with a couple of wounds. i did notice that my hair was a little bit matted, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but the closest thing i can find to signs of trauma is just a little bit of a bruise behind my ear. i can't see anything just quite right there without setting up a sequence of mirrors, which i don't really have in here. there's no other visible signs of trauma from falling...

i've got some final touches for inri022 to clean up, locally. and, i should hopefully have a rough draft of inri023 up by sunrise.

i will acknowledge that the length of the green-out was perhaps concerning, but, the effects of marijuana overconsumption being what they are, the consequence of it should have been realized, as well. this is just what happens when you smoke too much - you fall asleep for a few minutes.

the bar manager is not trained to tell the difference between a green out and a blackout, and just kept coming back to me like an overprotective mother, fussing over my clothing and how it affected my safety, and telling me how "lovely" and "gorgeous" i look, making me wonder who the tranny in the room actually was.

i was actually wearing a heavy red overcoat.

like i say - i don't want to get mad at her, but i feel micromanaged. things would have been fine. it wasn't necessary. really.

how much did i have to drink last night? i avoided answering that question and don't think i did.

- two shots of vodka in my mountain dew, 1:45-2:35.

- one tall mike's hard, 2:45-3:20

- one corona, 3:20-4:00

- one heineken, 4:00-5:00

- one tall hamm's, 6:00-7:00

- two james ready, 7:30-11:00

that is not an excessive amount of alcohol, and i was not particularly drunk.

i was, however, exceedingly stoned, as a consequence of smoking on a couple of joints outside the bar, so stoned that i fell asleep on the bar stool. i was actually warned of the strength of the pot as it was being passed to me, and i have a history of similar reactions to strong pot. so, it's not an unexpected reaction, but i would have been fine in a few minutes, once my body metabolized it.

so, it was the marijuana that passed me out, not the alcohol. and i've been through this before...

i enjoyed the show and ended up at villain's after. i smoked some pot outside and ended up needing to sit down for a few minutes. an overzealous bar manager was convinced i was going to get raped (i don't know whether to thank her or yell at her) and called the police to escort me home, which is, like, the worst thing to do, but that's not how she saw it. you can't convince them you can walk home after they show up....somebody at the bar had to volunteer to get me home.....

i passed out pretty hard when i got home and need to eat and shower.

i don't want to get angry. but, i don't think i'll go back there.

i was not drunk, i was stoned, and i would have been fine, and they should have avoided calling the police, who are not there to serve or protect but to control and dominate.

inri022 updated and tested

this is tested and working on the chromebook and on firefox on the windows 7 box.

what's in there, now?

- the 10 songs on the record
- cover.jpg. this release is download only, because these tracks are thoroughly rejected.
- a playlist.m3u file stored as raw text
- a 23 page doc file of liner notes over the fall of 2013
- a 23 page pdf file (same)
- an instructions file
- inri022.html.7z.txt is a 50 mb document that must be renamed and unzipped and contains (1) an html version of the liner note package, including an html5 player that can load the purchased audio in the browser and (2) deleted masters of the record from 2013, in standalone 320 kbps mp3 and embedded into the html file.

the full download, in flac, is 304 mb.

there will be further updates to the liner notes as i run through the alter-reality, and as i run through the remastering period that took place over 2015-2016. but, this is likely the last major revision to this period 1.2 outtakes collection, which is nearing a point of final completion.

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

it's time to stop to eat and shower.

so, i crashed this morning during testing. i'm up now and have finished testing the windows box. it won't be long before i'm done here and i should have a post up soon.

i'm still planning on getting to the dso, but it depends on timeframes. i might miss it. it's streaming...

the landlord/main-cop is back and the stinky cop seems to be gone. can i make a request to the force, which i know is reading this, to keep that gross, smelly cop away from here? surely, you can find a cop to stake me out that i can't smell from a distance of 100 yards?

very soon, and then i'll get back to inri023 when i get back, if i go.

it's done. 

final testing.

soon.

there's one more after this...