they should have a database set up where people can register existing underlying conditions, so that they might qualify for the emergency financial measures past a point where people are being phased back into society.

the government would no doubt need to implement some kind of verification process, so this would no doubt mean the requirement of some kind of documentation from your doctor. this would be a necessary tool to protect against fraud, because people are assholes sometimes - i get it. they're taught to be that way; it's blowback. but, the process is required. fine.

the legitimate intent of the program would be to allow people to declare if they're at high risk, so that they can be quarantined for a longer period.

of course, such a list would have to be immediately destroyed after the pandemic is over, and with the inevitability of an electronic maintenance of said list, the likelihood of permanent destruction for some time is quite low. so, anybody volunteering themselves to enter data into a list of this sort would have to fully understand the likely near-term permanence of this information, despite any protocols to destroy it. that still may be a preferred option to people in high-risk categories, like heavy smokers or the obese, if they are fully cognizant of the threat of the disease to them, which may be uncommon.

i think the opportunity to opt-out for a while, with the proper documentation, should be provided, regardless.

so, i've got all of the reviews done, now.

the next step is to correct all of the typos for the last two weeks of march.

this is a review of the weeping icon / control top show at deluxx fluxx on mar 12, 2020.

this was a night that was neither supposed to be late nor expensive, but the sudden collapse in the canadian dollar, combined with the closure of the tunnel overnight for maintenance work, meant that going to the show would be more expensive than previously budgeted for, and that there was no option but to overnight in the diner, as the tunnel bus would be out of service from 20:00 on the night of the 12th until 7:00 on the morning of the 13th. once i realized this on thursday morning, i strongly considered skipping the show, but in the end reasoned that the shows at the end of the month would likely end up canceled, anyways, so i'd might as well overpay on one last night out for a long while. so, i caught the last bus of the night over to detroit, which was the 19:00 bus.

all anybody outside wanted to talk about was the virus, and the looming assumption that there were imminent closures coming, indeed that things were being canceled and closing down in real time. people found themselves in the situation where they were just looking for something that was open.

my interest in the show was initially in the second band, control top, but i made sure to get there on time in order to see weeping icon, as well. i strongly considered catching weeping icon the last time they were here, in november:

so, the weather made actually going to this somewhat of a non-starter. i would have had to have dragged myself, and an unknown punk band wasn't going to do it...

it's an interesting proof of concept, but i wish they did more with the electronics than they are. it just kind of comes off as something to distract people while they're tuning or changing busted strings...

purely as a punk act, it's fun enough, if relatively generic.

i actually bet it was fun. but, my impression is that they should be doing more than this, and i hope they do.

https://weepingicon.bandcamp.com/album/weeping-icon

my memory of listening to this record back in november was that i interpreted them as a kind of art-rock band that was under-utilizing it's resources, and seemed to think they had a stand-up bassist for some reason. experiencing them live did uphold my perception of the electronics being used as a tuning distraction, as that is literally what they were used for, but it also clarified the band's intended presentation as very much being that of a punk rock band. it's perhaps worth noting that the band also slimmed down to a bass-guitar-drums three-piece, in noting the minimized importance of the noise and the increased importance of the band's presentation as a punk band.

this is a concept record, and they did play songs from it, but they didn't try to present it conceptually, so my comment that the record is an interesting proof of concept that requires greater elaboration is perhaps not reflective of their future plans - i might expect more straight-up punk rock from them, in the future.

and, as noted, they are in fact intriguing enough purely as a punk band. the guitarist can take up quite a bit of space on her own. it'll be interesting to see what she does with it.

so, i think i caught this band in a state of flux, and less want to make a point of a detailed analysis, and more want to point out what appears to be changing.

control top were an act that i first encountered at the end of the year, via reading through some best of the year lists.

the record is a little generic at points, but this is one of two or three types of music where i don't spend much time worrying about that - it just needs to actually be good and this does that.

they could turn the vocals down a hair. my ideologically rigorous, enlightenment-era approach to anarchism sort of clashes with her post-nihilist anti-intellectualism, but whatever; that's academic, mostly.

that means that i won't grade this too high, but it also means i'd enjoy seeing it more than most of the stuff in the list. 

https://controltop.bandcamp.com/album/covert-contracts

after a few listens, what i found to be enduring about this act is that they actually have punk lyrics in addition to their classic punk sound, which is rare in music of this sort in the current epoch; generally, acts in the punk spectrum with punk ideologies will avoid a catchy and pop-friendly type of sound or image nowadays, while the classic punk rock sound, itself, has largely been appropriated by pop culture and tarnished with bubblegum-pop type pseudo-artistry. perhaps pop culture's recent retreat from rock-era forms has reopened a space for the classic punk sound to be reunited with punk rock ideology. i would welcome that, as i don't tend to get much musical enjoyment from, or have much fun listening to, these hyper-aggressive spins on the style. i miss a more tactile and fun approach to punk culture....

live, the band presented the recorded material without a lot of variation, the high part of the show perhaps being when the singer descended on the floor and directly confronted a number of the male audience members on their hierarchical enforcement of covert contracts by yelling in their faces about it. i hope she wasn't infected, at the time. i was spared this wrath; i received a soft touch on my shoulder, instead.

teener were again booked to play this show, either first or last, and dropped out on the day of.

i didn't really plan the rest of this out very closely; i decided i'd find somewhere open, and kind of wing it. one idea was to just stay at the venue, but it chased everybody out and shut down early under rumours that it might be shutting down for a while - and, indeed, there was a facebook post not long after, indicating the venue would be closing indefinitely.

i had loosely planned to end up at tv lounge until 2:00ish, but they were closed when i got there, also indefinitely. before leaving the venue, i had heard rumours about things being open in corktown, so i took a walk around the corner to ufo and parked out there for the night.

as the concert that was scheduled at ufo was canceled by the band that booked it, the place was mostly empty by the time i got there around 23:00; pretty much the only people that were there were actually staff from other bars that had shut down early for the night and needed to have a drink and chill out and vent.

the people that i'm talking about are reliant on income coming into their respective bars - dishwashers, bartenders. they were rightly absolutely freaking out about what they were going to do if everything got canceled, and simply didn't want to listen to me rationalize with them, they just wanted to vent. so, i backed off a little and listened, and they made their concerns clear, even if they weren't always well-grounded in science, and i had to bite my tongue about it. writing in mid-april, i don't know what steps the government of michigan has taken to help them, but i hope they figured something out.

after however many beers at ufo, i eventually ended up back at the diner, and got something different, a blt, because my usd was running out when i got there. i nodded off for a bit after 5:00, but was out on time to catch the early bus back, make it home before the cold snap hit (again) and make some nachos before getting some rest in.

it would be rather foolish of the americans to essentially abandon the who to the chinese.

let's hope that brighter minds prevail.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-canadian-who-advisor-defends-organization-after-trump-accuses-it-of-being-china-centric

it seems like what he's broadcasting is that what they're going to do is essentially expose different classes of people to the virus at different times, and there will be accompanying spikes with each exposure event. that means that we're essentially staging in immunity. it's increasingly clear that people in the 20-60 age range that have conditions like obesity are at substantial risk to illness. so, get ready for your reckoning.

the hope is of course that reintroducing normalcy in waves will allow the health care system to cope with a series of small crises, in aversion to a great crashing all at once.

so, we're essentially being queued.

i bet a computer science major came up with this.

the counter-argument, which i suspect will be better reflective of the reality when empirical measures come in, is that prolonging sustained exposure in small groups will make little difference in hospital rates for low risk groups, while maximizing the amount of hospitalization that is required for at risk groups. now, the twist is that it might be manageable, but it might also be unnecessary in sum total if the general population can get to greater immunity quicker.

i'm basically pointing out that the government response is ignoring a kind of basic calculus problem, in not actually calculating where the minima and maxima of the curves actually are, relative to a set of overlapping factors; instead, the public health response is basing everything on really one factor, in an oversimplified mathematics that will likely undo it's intended outcome, in the end.

what we appear to be heading for is a long period of sustained minimal transmission, and the health care system will probably be able to handle it relatively well. so, there is some success there, i suppose. but, i insist that the total workload of the hospital system will in the end be greater, which indicates that the number of people impacted will, in the end, be greater than it might have been otherwise, with potentially worse death tolls as a result.

the choice before us is not whether we will have natural immunity, but how we get to it. we're doing it in stages, it looks like.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-return-to-work-will-be-graduated-and-likely-months-off-trudeau-says/

is it possible that covid-19 is some kind of experiment?

i'm purposefully delving into the realm of conspiracy here, with the aim to ask the question of whether it's a valid hypothesis or not. i'm still of the opinion that you need to evaluate questions of these sorts, rather than write them off as "conspiracy theories" off hand, even as i agree that most of the genre of "conspiracy theory", and a genre is what it is, is easily discredited, often by basic logic or appeals to elementary science.

i insist that the evaluation of the question remains necessary, using something approaching the scientific method. let's be sciencey all the time, not just when it fits our preconceptions. so, what evidence do we have before us to support the hypothesis that this is some kind of experiment?

it should be noted immediately that there was actually a simulation performed by john hopkins mere months before this happened, where they ran through a detailed scenario of a global pandemic. now, we're being told that the president ignored warnings created by the simulation, which is somewhat of a tight timeline, in truth. but, to me, that's just curious. so, the institution that is largely managing the mortality statistics in the country did a simulation for something similar to this, just months before it actually happened? hrmmmn.

then, when it hit the country they pretended it wasn't there - they claimed that there weren't any cases because the travel restrictions had kept the cases out, and there therefore wasn't any reason to test anybody, which was immediately blatantly ridiculous to everybody. it is so blatantly ridiculous, that this is maybe easier to explain by assigning an intent to the government to actually allow it to spread before reacting to it. certainly, the actual outcome of their policy failure, intentional or not, was in fact for the virus to spread undetected for quite a long while, before there was adequate testing in place to measure it.

then, in reaction to the onset of community spread, which they seem to have facilitated, they issue a total lockdown on everything, a policy that will actually have the effect of maximizing the amount of harm the virus can do, by slowing down immunity levels. what these economic lockdowns are doing is also locking in the virus' most dangerous phase, allowing it to maximize the number of high impact carriers through the corridors of necessary commerce, and dragging out the effects for months past a point where immunity would have naturally reduced the spread. the result is a more sustained exposure to vulnerable communities that goes on for a longer time and consequently has a deeper impact. again: intentionally or not, the longterm effects of these economic lockdowns is going to be that vulnerable populations get hit harder for longer. so, just measuring the situation by effects, it would seem that the government is actually trying to draw this out.

then, bizarrely, the president shifts his press briefings to being an infomercial for an immunosuppressant used to treat sepsis, which is a common complication during the late stages of covid-19. he's even pushing it as a prophylactic. they're apparently doing trials on young people in detroit to see if it works in warding off the disease, with an apparent intent to ramp up production and distribution. but, this drug is used to reduce the immune response in auto-immune disorders. giving it to healthy people is going to make them more susceptible to the disease, by weakening their immune response, which is what the drug's medical use is. other countries are beginning to fall in line on this, as well. if this gets mass distributed, we'll have another example of the government acting to facilitate the spread and severity of the disease, by incompetence or malice.

it's all adding up to kind of a spooky deduction - it seems like the intent here isn't actually to stop this thing at all.

what are they doing, then? is it some kind of exercise in eugenics, where they're trying to offload a large amount of the health system's deadweight load? if this virus does it's job in drastically reducing the population of very old people and very medically reliant people, you're going to see a different health care system when it's done, one that has a lot more resources, all of a sudden.

is it a perverse experiment to see how we actually react?

is it the beginning phase of a change in how western governments operate?

so, i think these are valid questions here that are worth further examination.