squirrels.

i've been saying for years that squirrels will eventually become the new rats - they will transport a disease that will cut us down by half, and we'll be almost powerless to stop it. eradicating squirrels is a hard job.

what if coronavirus gets into the squirrels?

it's effortlessly passing between mammals, right now.

yeah.

this is a feisty little piece of rna, alright. wow.

that's four species jumps, we think - from the bat to the civet cat to the human to the tiger.

they may not have measured it repeatedly yet, but this thing is reactive enough that i'd be concerned about your pets, if they're mammals. your iguana is probably fine, although wouldn't it be remarkable if it did hit a reptile? it's reactive! so, i wouldn't want to get nonchalant with mammalian livestock, either - i'd be taking some precautions around that. we have no evidence for birds, but again....it's reactive.

this thing is evolving rapidly; waiting for it to strike before you react is foolhardy. they should be assuming it's potentially transmissible to really any mammal at all, at this point, and maybe even to birds, too.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6781671/tiger-bronx-zoo-coronavirus/

my take on the 3m thing.

i agree that it's not a great idea to retaliate in terms of cutting off the supply of pulp; that's easily recoupable, and largely pointless. but, i'm sure there are some items that we export to the united states that could be rationed for internal use.

i think the more pressing concern is trying to find a way to manufacture the damned masks.

why is trump doing this? because he needs a bad guy, and canada's an easy bad guy. i think he may have been insulted by the request for a border closure, as that's when he started acting erratically; regardless, we're just a pinata, an illusion, something to kick around. it's enraging, but there's no strategic logic in it, it's just lashing out. so, escalating directly isn't a rational choice, when faced with that kind of psychology, which is just looking for easy meat. it's better, perhaps, to respect the assertion of sovereignty and plan around it, as is necessary.

perhaps we could eventually find ourselves in need of the currently exported pulp for use in a domestic factory, and see fit to redirect it there.

*sigh*.

is this actually a parasite, not a virus?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/malaria-drug-being-studied-on-the-list-of-possible-covid-19-treatments-tam-1.4883377

ok, i want to get back to work now.

yeah, i got a deposit in motion for $290.

but, it should have been for $390.

i'm going to have to call them on monday.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cra-gst-credit-arrives-a-month-early-1.5520007

it's one thing to point out that it only affects people under 60 with underlying conditions.

it's another thing to point out that 70% of your population under 60 has the underlying condition of being obese or overweight.

higher in some cities.

it's the middle of the country that's going to get hit the hardest.

if new york city is over 3,000 deaths, now, you're potentially looking at over 3,000,000 actual cases, which is over a third of the population.

if you're over the age of 60, going outside in new york right now is a dangerous, risky task.

P(x1 or x2 or x3 or x4 or x5) =
P(x1) + p(x2 or x3 or x4 or x5) - p(x1)*p(x2 or x3 or x4 or x5) =
.33 + 0.67[p(x2 or x3 or x4 or x5)] =
.33 + 0.67[0.33 + 0.67(p(x3 + x4 + x5)] =
.33 + .2211 + .67^2[0.33 + .67[p(x4 + x5)]] =
.33 + .2211 + 0.148137 + .67^3[0.33 + .33 - .33^2] =
.33 + .2211 + 0.148137 +  0.1657504893=
0.8649874893

so, if you interact with five people every time you go out in new york city right now, you will come into infectious contact with the virus four out of every five times you go out.

mortality rates over the age of 60, and certainly over the age of 70, are consistently higher than 10%, pushing 20% in people over 80.

that means that your elderly relative has a roughly 10% chance of dying just by going to the grocery store in new york, right now. if they're really old, it's pushing 1 in 5. how many times will they go shopping this month?

please do everything you can to keep them inside.

the rest of the city needs to wait it out. it won't be long before it burns through the population, which will end the rapid spread, but then you need to stop the lingering cases from getting into these homes, potentially for months.

as for long island, note that it has a large percentage of elderly people, so a higher percentage of contracted cases will need to seek treatment. so, cases may be growing faster there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the virus is spreading faster there, it just means that a higher percentage of the population there is more vulnerable.

that seems to also be the case in new orleans and also in detroit, where serious underlying conditions like obesity and diabetes are actually quite prevalent in the general population.

so, i was just thinking about the last time i got sick (i'm actually feeling just fine right now), and i referenced the giant joint handed to me at the party where i got attacked by a vcr. it took a few days to feel it, but i picked up something fairly virulent that night.

and, then i remembered back to the write-up i did about the seven seals, and joked about the oncoming apocalypse.

i also recently posted something about locusts in africa, suggesting that they just eat the damned things.

well, maybe i did get the seventh seal, which means what, exactly?

i was never particularly religious, but in my pre-teens found myself with the conundrum of all of a sudden having a born-again christian (ex-alcoholic) stepfather who dragged everybody to church with him, so i took the step of sitting down and actually reading the bible, top to bottom, at around the age of 10 or so.

even then, i was actually approaching the thing as an anthropologist. when i was very little, i had a fascination with dinosaurs, as so many young people do. that managed to develop itself into an interest in ancient civilizations, i guess you could say the humanities, well before i turned ten years old. this was still before the internet, so i took advantage of the tools i had before me, which was mostly an encyclopedia set. i would read through the articles on the romans and greeks and follow the footnotes out to the carthiginians and scythians; i especially enjoyed reading about the punic wars, or that's something that i have a clear memory of, at least. when i got a little older, i could take books out of the library, and these compendiums of ancient cultures were the thing i tended to head for.

so, the jews were an ancient civilization, and the bible was their book. to me, it was just like reading any other history book.

i think this also fed into my interest in the game civilization, which i first played on my stepfathers old computer, in the middle of the night, as it was stashed away in the corner of the basement, just outside my bedroom.

i did actually read the thing, though, and it is what it is - a genealogical saga adopted from a variety of sources. but, i didn't actually believe any of it, not any more than i believed in romulus & remus, or in any other origin myth. i've often remarked that i dispensed with christianity fairly promptly by simply reading the source material; it was just impossible to take seriously, even down to the vicious portrayal of god, which was just nefarious.

despite my rationalist tendencies, though, i have to say that it was immediately clear to me that the revelation is an eschatological text; that is, that it is intended to be a description of the end times, however inappropriately, and not a prophecy that has already happened. i would have to assume that any theologian that is attempting to assign the revelation to an already existing historical event, as realized prophecy, has a strange interpretation of the apocalypse, relative to accepted pan-christian dogma.

that said, if this is an end times prophecy, then it leaves it's exact meaning open to interpretation, especially considering how many times it's been retranslated.

so, i'm going to just be literal about this - the seventh seal is when the eighth angel comes in and destroys, or at least severely damages, the earth with a sceptre full of fire, which is so very pagan, isn't it? these trumpets appear to me to be part of this angelic ritual sacrifice of the earth, rather than any message of any sort. really. what the passage describes is a ritual destruction of the earth by the gods, articulated here as angels. see, and i'll let you bring in the neoplatonism here, even if i won't let you assign the events to the neoplatonic period.

if that's my seal, i can work with that.

"oh, the earth? it will be gone, soon."

metaphorically, is that what i'm actually doing, though, in my analysis of the situation?

actually, this would be an excellent time to conduct telephone polling.

everybody's bored at home.

i just checked my usage stats, and it's the same thing - the dates may be out of sync, but the usage is back to normal.

what's my take on the issue in china?

my immediate analysis of the data was that there must be many more cases than were documented, and that if that were the case then it would be hard to believe that the situation was really under control. it seemed to me that the tactic they were following was to declare a kind of false victory, then blame any second wave on contact with the outside world, as they slowly released more accurate numbers. so, i realized and stated that the truth was probably that there were many, many undocumented cases, due to the high published mortality rate. i don't recall taking a position on whether there were also undocumented deaths.

the story about the urns is plausible on it's face, but it has a kind of familiar feel to it, and could be outright disinformation. i would like to see some independent reporting on this before i jump to believing it. but, note that my disbelief is not strong - i would just like to see the case made a little bit better. for now, some skepticism is really required.

what i do think is clear is that it will not be long before china begins releasing numbers documenting further spread in the country. whether those numbers should be taken at face value or interpreted as a creative narrative for their own domestic audience is going to be an empirical question, in the end.

at some point, they will need to make the numbers add up properly, even if they're creative in how they do it, in order to fit the politburo's nationalist messaging.

it's a constant: marxists think facts are pliable, that truth is meaningless, that maintaining actual knowledge in the public sphere is secondary to maintaining worker morale, in the face of whatever delusion or absurdity. it simply doesn't matter what is true.

but, expect the numbers to add up, eventually. somehow.

i can't stop reading these poorly written covid-19 articles.

i get some useful information out of them, i guess. numbers, mostly.

but, it's really most comparable to the kind of reaction you'd associate with slowing down at a car crash to observe the wreckage - this is a catastrophe in every way, and i'm not sure people really realize it, yet. there's been a flurry of propaganda recently to insist that the measures are working and the authorities are in control, but it's obviously a gloss over the reality that the measures aren't working and they got caught flat-footed, due to putting too much faith in an unrealistic model (the idea that social distancing would effectively slow the spread of the disease) that utterly failed.

we're going to have a longterm mess to deal with, now - a mess in social services, a mess in housing, a mess in employment, and it's going to get worse the longer this continues on for, with little evidence that it is working - despite loud declarations to the contrary by politicians at all levels, which seem to be operating under some kind of centralized plan.

people right now are probably preoccupied with their day-to-day concerns, and that's reasonable. i'm broadly taken care of, so i'm not blinded by this.

right now, it's the people that are sick that are the priority. but, the near future is going to be very difficult for a much larger number of people that didn't actually get sick. and, i don't think we've collectively clicked into this, yet - i don't think we've fully fathomed what has just happened.

so, i'm sorting through these articles, trying to get a handle on the spin, on the official story. it's proving hard to let go of.

no. wait.

this is the koolaid.

drink up, sheep.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-trump-says-he-may-take-drug-to-treat-coronavirus-questions-states-2/

if i'm up, as i hope i am, i should get to writing that sunsquabi review fairly soon.

i've been quiet.

i've been tired....

at the end of the second day of shopping, which was the 1st, i took a walk downtown in search of soy milk and found two cartons (fwiw, the repackaged organic vanilla soy good has the same stats on the side, but has lost it's distinctive vanilla hue. i initially avoided the rebranding because it looked like they weren't fortifying it as well, but they seem to have fixed that. first, we lose strawberry, now we lose vanilla.....ugh.....and, this stuff was truly the most deliciously healthy elixir you could imagine, too. you should be forced to drink three glasses of this stuff, daily, by law. instead, there's no market for it. because we're collectively a bunch of fucking idiots.). while i was there, i picked up a gram of marijuana at the new store that was downtown, and a small pre-roll for the walk. this was actually mostly medicinal - i know from experience that walking substantive distances with a limp is a lot easier when you're a little bit stoned. so, i smoked through the rest of that on friday, but the combination of things - the panic attack, the overexhaustion and then the marijuana - meant i was mostly using it as a sleep aid. i'd go for a walk, and be out for three or four hours within minutes after coming back in.

on the one hand, i think that i clearly needed some sleep and rest in general, and if it helped with that then great. on the other hand, the day felt sort of wasted overall - i wasted the time, i wasted the pot.

so, i went back on saturday and got myself my biyearly quarter, a ritual i haven't observed since the beginning of 2018. there was no head cave over the summer of 2018, as i was in a straight edge phase, as i sought smoke-free housing. there was no head cave over the winter, as i was still living straight edge. by the summer of 2019, i found myself more interested in partying in detroit than hermiting with a head cave. and, we skipped that this most recent winter solstice as well - partly because i was sick, but mostly because i was laser-focused on trying to get a lot of work done.

i was very sick with a weird pneumonia in october after beethoven's 5th (something i attributed to smoking cigarettes the wrong way due to being handed a 40 of vodka earlier in the night) and again after the plaid/armed weekend in december (something i attributed to a massive joint that was handed to me). i was around a lot of people that had recently traveled, on both weekends. who knows; what i want is an antibody test. it could be a while before we figure out where this thing really came from.

i was planning on getting a small amount for 4/20 and maybe headcaving in july. but, on friday, they announced plans to close the stores indefinitely, so i got my quarter in while i could. it cost me $65 cdn for a quarter of 15% thc marijuana, which is a little on the high side, but not terrible. i'm used to paying $55-60 for a quarter. in fact, it was $59 + tax.

after getting a lot of rest on friday night, i got some cleaning done in here early on saturday morning before i headed out to the store to get the quarter. my knee is better, but it's still bugging me, and it's developed a lot of bruising around it. i don't explicitly remember anything happening, but i must have smashed it into a shopping cart or something. my feet are getting better, but the walk was still a little bit challenging.

and, i was able to locate four more cartons of soy as well, bringing me up to 8, meaning i probably have enough until mid-may. a carton lasts me about 5 days, on average. so, i go through around 6 a month.

i guess i was still exhausted, because i didn't last very long after my first roll on the quarter, and slept more or less the entire afternoon.

what about internet usage?

when i checked yesterday morning, it was the second that had no stats, not the first. oddly. reasonably low stats came in for the 3rd, but they seemed to be offset by a time frame at the server, as it logged 0 hours in off peak (and i know i was online in the morning). so, the numbers have gone down to something more reasonable and expected, but the server and modem also seem to be out of sync. i'll have to check again soon.

am i awake now? let's hope so. but, i may need to sleep this off a bit more, too.