yeah, i'm in tonight. it's a combination of things - i am actually feeling a tad better (i'm at like 95%, now), but it didn't warm up quite as much as forecast, and, despite feeling a little better, i still don't really feel like smoking anything at all tonight.

i'm kind of happy in my blanket tonight, actually, and don't really want to leave it. it happens. i'm more interested in getting through 2013 - as it will be final when i do. like, that's the end of that. forever.

i wanted to start the journal off in mid-1989, as well, and was hoping i'd already be there. but, i'm going to wait until christmas before i get antsy about it. i may do the full six months at once, and start off in 1990. or, i may get a journal for christmas and reflect back a little, just starting fresh in 1990.

i don't think i can put aside the time to live full time in my 9 year old self, so i think i'm looking at infrequent alter-reality updates for a bit, anyways. i will need to plan this out by looking at things like release dates, and trying to figure out specific life events. christmas...

i could be done november by monday, anyways. really.

for right now, the update is that the master document is entirely synced and finished. and ready to cut up. it's 350 pages, smaller than the last few, and will shrink even more because a lot of it is email relics. there's 70 html files to deal with, but i think this is the last month like that for a good while.

i also wanted to get january, 2014 done before i fire up the music pc, so let's hope i can get through this by the end of the week.

and, if i'm in for most of the winter, let's hope 2-3 days turnover time is realistic for most months. can i get to the end of 2017 by christmas?

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

byzantine history is really truly surreal and fascinating and horrible, all at the same time. any would be prince, or dauphin, should be far more well-versed in it's intricacies than i am.

i think the best way to describe it is like something out of star trek, when you periodically had kirk and the gang run into these creatures that were so far ahead of them that the humans couldn't even recognize the truth as it was. the byzantines existed past the initial fall of rome, all the way through the dark ages and into the beginning of the renaissance, although they were drastically reduced by the time the latter started. there is even a theory - backed up by evidence in the form of migration - that a substantive underpinning of the renaissance, as it existed in rome itself, was a consequence of the collapse of constantinople as a major power. but, i digress.

the period we call rome "byzantium" is pretty much exactly the period where the remnants of roman and greek civilization were defending themselves against a multi-directional onslaught from the barbarian world, a process that took a thousand years for the romans to finally lose. and, in that period, the theme that constantly reinforces itself is just how much more advanced the romans really were. if we had a modern concept of species at the time, we may have been tempted to label the romans superhuman in intellect, at that junction. there really was a substantive difference, then.

so, the thing that comes up over and over again is these roman generals that just effortlessly treat these barbarians in their complicated configurations as figures on a risk board. if you look at maps from the period, it restricts the roman empire, proper, as greece, turkey, the balkans and (usually) southern italy, but the actual reality is that they were the hegemonic power all the way around the black sea, and they had the ability to project power all the way over the steppes, and far into central asia. the generals in constantinople no doubt had a better understanding of the intricacies of the tribal allegiances in the steppes than the tribes in the steppes did, themselves. i mean, they kept histories, to start with - the barbarians didn't. the difference between understanding reality in segments of centuries or millennia, or understanding it in segments of decades (at most), is pretty daunting in managing the world.

this wasn't without consequence. by the end, the barbarians saw the imperial throne with contempt, and spoke of little more than treachery in the context of alliances - in the end, nobody trusted the emperor or his generals anymore. but, that was a process that took centuries, and there wouldn't have been an empire to defend had these manipulations not run their course.

i tend to have little patience for people that want to understand history through a lens of morality, and i actually find it scary to hear people talk about geopolitics in these moralistic terms. if the byzantines had stuck with their allies without reference to changing facts on the ground, they would have been raped and slaughtered in no time.

america likes to pretend it has a history in roman civilization, but it constantly demonstrates that it doesn't understand the subtleties of it. moscow is the true third rome, not washington. and, we should let the empire govern.

if america seeks to be the empire, it needs to throw it's bible away and read more machiavelli.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

stop.

why do we have public education?

why do we spend all of this money and expend all of these resources on this?

surely, it's primarily because we understand the importance of an informed populace for the maintenance of democracy, right?

or, at least, we used to, anyways.

nowadays, we seem to be content with the premise that people are too stupid for democracy to work, and they need to be brainwashed in order to be told what to do. and, if we hold to this mentality, if we continue to refuse to educate our kids, we will have a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it is at least true that a society that can't work out what is true and what isn't cannot be a democratic one.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

actually, there is something we can do about it - we can educate our kids to be smart enough to know how to process information intelligently.

this kind of thing shouldn't work on an educated and informed populace. and, this is the actual question we need to ask here: how did we let our education system devolve to the state where people can't figure this out?

https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2019/10/18/theres-little-canada-can-do-to-stop-the-flow-of-false-viral-stories-from-buffalo-website.html

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

you think i'm being facetious?

so, for a while the late romans had these bulgars, initially a turkic tribe, sitting on their border, who were a threat to their well-being. unruly bulgarian barbarians could interrupt trade routes, or even threaten civilians around the danube. but, there were always barbarians in this region, and the romans learned that you have to just fucking deal with it.

so, what they did was study the tribal configurations and try to find ways to divide and conquer the barbarians, so they would fight against each other, instead. and, they learned a valuable lesson - there was a powerful nation to the north of the bulgars, namely the rus, that could be brought into imperial service.

so, this is what they did, for hundreds of years - whenever the bulgars got restless, they'd send money to the rus, who would threaten the bulgars from the north. this drew them away from the danube, thereby securing the roman areas.

in the mean time, they would send emissaries to the bulgar areas in an attempt to civilize them. and, over time, the bulgars would be romanicized, christianized and even slavicized, which brought them into the empire. yet, as had happened for centuries, they were merely replaced by a new barbarian threat, the moment they were assimilated. so it goes.

this barbarian management strategy is actually what led to the alliance between the rus and the romans, which is arguably still the dominant geopolitical reality in the region, today.

trump is an idiot, we'll agree on that point. but, be careful who you're calling ignorant. you might see that backfire.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

the romans referred to this kind of thing as "barbarian management".

there's a very long history of it and a very rich literature around it.

and, it's a necessary part of running an empire - there are going to be irrational barbarians that you have to deal with.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this

"but, that's exactly what putin wants".

well, he's the responsible actor, here.

he wants what's best.

continuing the war is exactly what the saudis want.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this