Shameful. I hope Charest gets turfed over this, and I _like_ him. This is a potential national disaster: if the Liberals lose Quebec then who’s left? The Parti? The untested soft-nationalists in CAQ?

Hopefully it doesn’t get that far, but it’s really just a matter of time for Charest I think. He seems to have jumped the political shark, finally. But then I know nothing of French politics. We shall see.

Maybe the Libertarians are right. Maybe total deregulation is the answer. In the past people couldn’t organize (inter-)national protests in their spare time, and now the regulatory framework is extremely permissive — streamlined, even: a one-page form and you can accept unlimited anonymous donations and do whatever you want with them (in terms of political media).

And now that the legal system’s been pwnd the raving hordes of grown-up /b/tards have no compunction about raeping the loophole, powertroll-styles.

All media are messageboards, but the spokespeople aren’t used to the public responding, or to having a real conversation. People have been writing on the Toronto subway ads — I assume because there’s no “comment” feature but felt marker. It seems the New Aesthetic is going global, organically — the digital way-of-being intrudes into what was once reality and transforms it.

Placeholder architecture: testPAC. Y’know — for bootstrapping a real online society.

Mulcair’s got great screen presence, great spin control, and a great pitch for hope in the New Left. Last night I watched Living in the End Times According to Slavoj Zizek. Push through, it’s mostly in English, and argues for a radial rethinking of the Left in the West to combat the international rise of authoritarian capitalism (which can be much more efficient than democratic capitalism):

(via)

So there’s some not-being-aired-or-talked-about footage (via) of a bunch of swine cracking citizens’ skulls. You can hear the lack of police force legitimacy in the voices of the people.

I’ve said recently that I would have felt safer with the Fanshawe rioters than with the swine that showed up to stop it. I wonder when the violence started. I’ve met very few nice swine — mostly they seem like people who should be avoided. A large number of Fanshawe students are there doing Police Foundations, and mostly they’re not cool to be around unless they’re smoking weed.

I haven’t gotten to this point yet, but: is a background in policing a negative attribute of a potential hire? I might start factoring that in to my HR decisions — and, yes, I have interviewed ex-swine already. Even they want to escape their horrible jobs.

It looks like they — almost to a pig — can’t deal intelligently with high-stress situations.

• A mind sans entheogenics is henceforth deemed insane.

Wednesday’s JRE is a three-hour interview with one of Joe’s business partners who just got back from an ibogaine retreat in Costa Rica. My new motivation for getting in better shape is entheogenic tourism.