Should Elvis really be vilified for liking blues and rock music and playing it himself? How does that hurt anyone?

Like should we be pissed at Django Reihnhardt? Or R.A The Rugged Man? What about Japanese bagpipe players?

Not anyone. You have to be rich.

This guy is such a shitheel but sending him to pre-trial detention for speaking to the media and framing that as “indirect witness intimidation” seems pretty questionable to me.

This should be higher up

This is very cool. My partner works on documenting and preserving languages and I spent a bunch of time recently learning how to create xkbd layouts to get that shit working on Linux. Like the fonts are important but so are the keyboard mappings.

Unicode is a really cool thing.

The question of who gets to decide and what is and isn’t a “News outlet” is seriously problematic. I also think that journalists ought to maintain an adversarial posture towards government and now we’re creating a system in which “approved” journalists are dependent upon official recognition to receive legislated funding.

Indeed. The hyper-consolidated legacy media empires were unsatisfied with the free advertising they were getting and convinced Pablo Rodriguez and the Liberals that they should in fact be paid for visibility they were being given.

Yeah and so do the companies that are lining up at the feeding trough. Look at the pathetic state of the Canadian newspaper and TV news empires. They shouldn’t be entitled to advertising dollars if they don’t have a sufficiently enticing product to sell to advertisers.

Plenty of small-scale and digital independent news companies were doing fine. It’s the Postmedias and the Torstars that are complaining, as they cannibalize journalism to feed their corporate acquisitions and stock buybacks.

I’m no big fan of the tech monopolies but this whole Liberal thing has been so fucking Liberal, it’s like a parable.

Yeah very much so, it’s quite easy to kill plants by over-nitrogenating them. Compost is a good way to safely feed plants, as not only is there a diversity of nutrients in good compost but they are released more slowly over time and so less-likely to do damage. Not the case with manure. Also some compost has excessive salt so watch out for that.

Otherwise a good rule of thumb for giving plants fertilizers is “weakly, weekly”. It’s also good to keep in mind that plants get the vast majority of what they need from the sun.

My raspberries are spreading more than I can even handle so I don’t have the same problem, but what does burrying the tips mean? Like your bending the shoots over and burying the tips as a method of propagation?

What aspects of permaculture have you been incorporating into your garden?

I have two cucumber plants and three zucchinis so imagine what my diet is like.

Wu wei

My garden is going awesome. Third year gardening, first time managing a pretty sizeable garden myself. I’m currently eating probably 50-60% of my food from the garden. Right now I’m harvesting eggplant, tomatos, beans, carrots, beets, kale, kohlrabi, basil, oregano, dill, cucumber, a variety of peppers, and a preposterous amount of zucchini. The zuchs are finally starting to chill out but I’ve got like 7 huge zucchinis taking up all my kitchen space and I eat like 3 a week. I’ve got a bunch of different types of squash coming in. I’m just finishing eating the last of my summer peas. I need to harvest my potatoes, might do that this weekend. The corn will be ready soon but so far I’ve been real bad at getting the timing right for corn.

My cauliflower is not looking so hot. Dunno if my climate is good for it or if I just haven’t been giving it enough attention. Aphids are starting to make their prescence known on my kale, but I find especially with dyno-kale that they don’t really detract too much from the food value, just takes some time to wash them off.

I need to do some work putting down straw mulch around plants and reinforcing the bark mulch pathways I’ve started putting in. Long term I would like to replace or at least supplement the overhead sprinkler irrigation with a drip or even micro-sprinkler system.

I never pruned my tomatoes and so they are kind of a big mess. Getting lots of fruit from them now and they are so good, I didn’t used to like tomatoes but I’m just eating these bitches salad style. Lots of damage from quail and whatnot on the tomatoes but not to an extent that’s really bugging me since I’m not selling the things.

Peppers seem to be taking forever but are finally starting to turn colour. Got lots of green bell peppers, lots of what I think are hungarian wax peppers that are just starting to finally turn orange and get flavourful. Got some habaneros finally coming in, and some kind of skinny chillis. I’ve also got some purple ones that I can’t at all tell when to properly pick. A few that I’ve tried have seen premature.

Got sunflowers all over the place, mostly self-seeded. Garden is also full of self-seeding calendula and dill, which have been filled with pollinators of various types including my own bees.

I really like my garden. Inherited it from my grandmother in law, but she would be really horrified to see how many “weeds” I allow to persist.

If you’re able to find time to do a 10 day vipassana retreat, I highly recommend it. It’s free and they provide good food, run entirely by volunteers and donations and they have centers all over the world. I’ve done it a couple times and I know several other folks who have and it is a very compelling experience. I really think the technique they teach is a real cognitive skill, it’s taught from a buddhist perspective but there is no requirement that you adhere to any particular spiritual beliefs.

I’m sure there are other forms of meditation that may or may not be helpful, this is just the one I’ve had positive experiences with.

I hope this doesn’t come across as patronizing but have you tried vipassana or a similar style of meditation? My wife had really severe anxiety and she found this to be the thing that helped her the most.

respect for elders isn’t really a value among young Americans

I’m sure it’s valued more or less across different sectors of the young American population, but yeah I think it’s pretty widely recognized that our culture doesn’t really treat our elders well. And we should feel ashamed about that.

we know that the idea that old people are inherently wise is a farce

Nobody is inherently anything, but everything is the way it is for a reason. There’s a reason why respect for one’s elders is a nearly universal maxim, to the extent that it extends beyond our species, and to disregard that ancient principle is to invite disaster. Old people aren’t the problem.

To me it seems the United States is heading towards civil war more than revolution. There’s factionalism at play that is deeper than just class antagonisms. I read a book recently where the author was talking about how times when states are transitioning into or out of “democraticness” in when civil wars are most likely to occur. Factionalism and shifting democratic integrity means high risk for civil war. Apparently.

This is why Athenians considered representative electoral systems to be of the oligarchical political type rather than the democratic. It was apparently the understanding then that such a system is one in which the rich and powerful rule by way of money and influence, as opposed to a democracy in which rulership was determined by lottery.