remember that kid at school that always showed up late to class, listened to a walkman while the teacher was talking, never did any homework and then didn't care when she got a d+, even though everybody knew she was an a student?

that wasn't me. i was a bit of a punk, but i broadly did well in high school. in the end, i graduated with an a average....it could have been higher if i had applied myself, but it was an a, nonetheless. so, i was the punk kid that was maybe a little underwhelming to some, but still got (almost) straight as, anyways.

they say that the kind of student i described at the start is often the kind of student that ends up in management. if you're an a student, your boss will probably be a c student, because you want the smart people actually doing the work. the best way around this stupid reality is to get rid of the fucking bosses.

but, i wonder how prevalent the opposite situation is, the a student that shows up at work and, when placed in an under-stimulating environment, just...stops...caring. as the d+ student may screw around in class but excels at work, how many a students are there that just find themselves lighting blunts on break and throwing paper airplanes at the boss when they turn around, because they're so fucking bored and ultimately so terribly out of place in the office setting?

i don't know. i know that's what i was, and i know that's what i'd be if they sent me back to work. and, i'd have some d+ student boss yelling at me to stop screwing around at work.

but, i've never been a pothead, and i don't want to be one now.

i'm not actually a pothead.

i never was a pothead.

i don't want to ever be one, either. i'm confident i won't become one....

it's a disgusting habit. really. i notice it every time i go through this, and come out of it.

i'm still groggy, but i'm going to wake up soon enough. i might not get my moment of clarity from this pot, that was sitting in a warehouse for who knows how long, but i'm sure i'll know it when it's finally out of my system for a while.

i was a gifted kid; i was supposed to be a surgeon but gave up on it when i realized that i didn't really have the hand-eye coordination, the basic motor skills, to do it. you have to be good with your hands, and i'm really, really not, not at all. they use to yell at me for my bad handwriting, until they realized that i just didn't have the coordination to write on the lines. so, it just kind of clicked with me one day - the fact that i couldn't hit a baseball if my life depended on it (after eye surgery as a child) meant i'd probably have difficulties being an actual doctor, no matter how well i understood the concepts. so, i went through this other list of things.

but, i certainly never saw myself as a pothead.

as much as i might push this starving artist meme to the point of cliche, i've largely chosen this life. i decided that freedom was more important than income, that exploring the individualistic concerns of art were more important than contributing to the collective, etc. i've turned down good jobs. i've avoided academic opportunities. i've thrown away my family to embrace living on disability. i wish i had better options, granted. but, i've opted out as best as i can and i have quite a bit to show for it - and hopefully will have even more relatively soon.

but, i never grew up wanting to be a pothead, and i'll be damned if i'm going to turn into one now.

i just don't want to actually be that person.

i've more seriously considered growing tomatoes inside.

this particular apartment has air quality issues, and the last one had roaches. but, if i ever figure out how to get a tomato garden running, that's something i'd be more able to deal with the excess product of.

i don't want to be in a situation where "i have to use this bud up". i want to buy small amounts in the store when i need it, for specific and purposeful applications, with weeks or months of sober time in between.

why don't i just grow it?

i just don't smoke enough of it. even with one plant, i'd be giving 80% of it away. it's really twice a year tops, here, outside of concerts.

i could smoke more, you say.

that's the actual reason i do not want to grow it. it would be inevitable, and i just don't want to live like a dirty pothead.

so, if trump were to declare marijuana illegal by executive order, for example, would that work?

yeah.

if it's presented using the right argument, it would.

does the president have total authority?

i know that cuomo wants to cite the constitution. the judiciary might not think this is necessary.

it sort of depends on what kind of law that trump is actually citing. the division of powers (to use a canadian term to refer to the concept of states rights, which i've learned that you need to articulate carefully) is really about the legislature, not the executive; it's about deciding which laws passed in which house take precedent when they contradict each other, as they some times do.

the reality is that presidential executive orders are largely going to legally trounce all of that, especially when it has anything to do with security. the president is not a king, but he is a kind of napoleonic military dictatorship. the primary role is commander in chief. domestic priorities are kind of a secondary end-around, and not really how the system was designed. so, a lot of what the president actually does day-to-day should really be being done by congress, it is true, but the question of security is really distinctly presidential, and these executive orders are really not that different than proclamations, when you examine their legal weight.

yes, there are all kinds of arguments to use against an executive order. it has to be rational. it has to be proportional. etc. but, all the president really has to do to wield essentially unchecked authoritarian power is tie the order to security, and make a halfways coherent argument about thinking the policy is going to work.

so, can the president open new york city by executive order?

he can if he can convince a judge that the issue is in the domain of security, and that he really, honestly thinks that the action is safe, or perhaps that keeping the city shut is contributing to security issues in some other way, which may be less absurd in a few weeks, once it really warms up, and the number of homeless people starts to increase due to illegal evictions and as a consequence of mass joblessness.

can he do that? it's a harder argument than the one he made with the travel ban, granted. but, in a real sense, all he has to do is actually make it, because the court is unlikely to second guess him, once it gets appealed.

i guess it's an open question as to whether any of this is desirable or not.

but, i'd expect trump to prevail in court, if it comes down to it.

am i awake yet?

i dunno.

what else did i need to do today?

i called the human rights tribunal, and they told me the file hasn't been touched in weeks, and i'm best to send an email to the registrar. the deadline was the 24th of march and nothing was received, but that's probably not very relevant. i just want to understand what the next steps are.

i need to refill my estrogen prescription and probably call them tomorrow.

i think that's everything.

so, maybe i can get something to eat and focus on catching up with the vlogging. i need to clean in here tonight, too...

i'm very bitchy right now, clearly. that head cave didn't work very well. i'm just tired and grouchy and glitchy, right now. it won't last forever...

once i get my pills, i'm going to try to plan around being inside until the next time i need them again, which is going to be in mid may.

one thing at a time means stopping to eat, first.

utterly hopeless stupidity.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-calls-for-halt-to-us-funding-for-world-health-organization-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/

but, can he provide three reasons why biden is better than trump that are more convincing than something you'd hear on saturday night live and don't collapse into empty partisan statements?

*crickets*.

i don't care who wins this election.

at all.

call me irresponsible. whatever.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/ap-interview-sanders-says-opposing-biden-is-irresponsible/

what about new york? is that a peak or a plateau?

it's still not clear.

but, it had better decide pretty soon.

it's probably going to crash hard within a day or two.

of course, the corollary of that is that if we do antibody testing and find out that only 10% of the population has been infected then the mortality rate of the disease becomes rather distressing.

at 10% infected and .1% mortality, you're looking at around 33,000 deaths in the united states, total, and they're almost there. if the numbers keep going up, you'll need to increase the number of people infected, or increase the mortality rate, or both, to understand what's happening.

i think that the totality of the data suggests that the disease is extremely contagious and not very fatal, meaning you should be increasing the infected rate, rather than the mortality rate, in order to make sense of the numbers.

at 66% infected and .1% mortality, you're looking at 220,000 deaths - 8-9x as many as have already occurred. that is going to take a few months to happen, and much of the damage will be done in the midwest, but if i'm right then you need to shut down everything to prevent it - food distribution, pharmacies, hospitals, everything. my critique is not that it's impossible in theory to sit inside for six weeks, it's that we're not actually implementing enough of a policy to allow this to work and that, furthermore, in reality, we can't actually do it. so long as people are out in the city engaging in commerce, they are spreading the disease, and it's just a matter of time....

but, i don't want to shut down everything, i want stricter controls in place to protect those that specifically need it, and greater freedom of movement for people that don't require that level of protection, that can fight it off on their own.

we'll know when they test, and not before then.

and, if they don't test, we'll never know - although we should draw conclusions about why they aren't testing.

when will we know if these lockdowns were a stupid waste of time or not?

don't fall for their models that claim that we saved thousands of lives by staying inside. it's all a lot of complete bullshit.

the fact is that we won't know until we do mass testing for antibodies. if we find out immediately that 65-70% of the people tested have antibodies, we'll have to realize that this was a stupid waste of time. if we find out that the number is more like 20-60%, we'll have to conclude that we might have slowed it down a little, but the effects of the shutdown were ultimately minimal, except perhaps to make it easier to spread in high risk populations.

if immunity ends up closer to 10%, we'll know what we did actually stopped it.

and, it's not lower than 10%; if we get numbers much lower than that, we'll want to question them, and wonder what we're doing wrong.

conservatives and progressives are really subtle reflections of each other.

and, i hate all of them with every ounce of my being.

it's been a constant from day one that the trudeau government has had this kind of laser focus on these conservative, middle class type of family value systems and, in the process, has displayed an almost randian level of contempt for the poor. they truly don't seem to care much about people that don't want to breed, especially, even more so than those that can't or don't want to work.

it's going to hurt them in the long run if they don't reverse course on that.

all of the media surrounding the gst rebate increase states that your rebate will be doubled. it's just a constant statement, without much elaboration.

what i received was about $100 less than that, so it seemed like some idiot at the call center (and, i've worked in call centers - these people are fucking morons) pressed the wrong button. it happens. fine.

after multiple calls, i finally got through to somebody by refusing to enter my sin number.

the agent on the phone had a very difficult time explaining something that was very simple - she kept trying to tell me it had to do with extra amounts added as a consequence of children, which made absolutely no sense because i didn't have any children when it was counted up the first time, so the fact that i don't have any children now shouldn't affect a doubling of it.

so, i forced her to direct me to the actual web page, where it became clear that what she was trying to tell me was completely wrong. the right answer is that it's not the rebate that's doubled, it's the base amount - which, in my case, was the $290 that i received.

if i was dumb enough to have bred at some point before now, i would have had a higher base amount due to the number of state-supported children i'd be dragging around with me, most of whom would probably at least have fas, because about the only way i'd have managed to breed after aggressively pushing for an abortion is if the mother was such a fucking drunk that she barely noticed she was pregnant in the first place.

but, that wasn't the conceptual problem - it really had nothing to do with that.

it's really just some intentionally misleading advertising from the government. they double the base amount and keep the income constant, which works out to getting a check for the base amount, which is determined by the number of children you have, rather than your income.

i've been clear that i thoroughly reject any concept of "progressivism" as being fully synonymous with the conservative right. but, this government just continues to demonstrate how intellectually and conceptually bankrupt it really is - it's happy to throw the term around, but it seems eager to throw away literal progressive income support in favour of conservative rhetoric about family values at every opportunity that it gets; focusing on family size instead of income is in truth a deeply regressive approach.

so, i tried to call the divisional court, and it looks like i need to communicate via email, instead.

an email was sent. we'll see what's next.

i'm still sleepy...

in order to successfully overthrow and permanently get rid of capitalism, a majority of people are going to need to be able to open up the paper, or log on to the internet, and be able to effortlessly identify how the corporate/government press is lying to you.

this is a pre-requisite.

we're stuck until we can get over that.

am i awake?

i dunno.

i wanted to get the vlogging done first, but let me see if i can pivot into some of these calls today, instead.

this is a general truth - when you open up the newspapers and see headlines blaming things on russia or china, the way to read those newspaper headlines is always to interpret them as a statist tactic to deflect the blame.

so, for example, when the cia rigged the election in favour of trump (the other option was killing clinton. it simply wasn't going to happen.), they then floated fake news through their controlled media outlets - from the new york times to cnn - that would blame it all on russia. this worked spectacularly. rather than serious internal investigations into the relevant intelligence agencies leading to a restructuring and staunch restriction of power, which is long overdue, these agencies need to be seriously overhauled, you had a farcical series of reports trying to blame it on the president, himself. but, the truth doesn't matter to these people. it's all about building a narrative.

and, the fact that it was beyond obvious that the establishment was propping up trump from the start was beyond obvious to any halfways intelligent person is irrelevant. when faced with convincing arguments, they just yell and lie and deflect even louder. cue rachel maddow.

it's not some kind of partisan bickering gone wrong, it's an intentional psy-op to stop you from asking the right questions. was the election rigged? yes. did the russians rig it? no. who rigged it then? the cia. why? because they were afraid that clinton would start a world war. were they going to get caught if people looked into it? yes. so how do you deal with that? you launch a major media operation to blame it on the russians. if nobody asks the right questions, nobody gets the right answers.

has anybody else besides me even suggested to you that it was trump himself that rigged the election? no? exactly.

we'll never get anywhere in overthrowing capitalism, until we understand this basic truth: the media is worse than worthless, in this society. it's a tool of control. you have to be able to deconstruct the lies, and you have to be able to do it on the fly, in real time; media literacy is key. if you don't have it, they'll just keep lying to you, and you'll keep falling for it and we're perpetually fucked. this is so key...

and, that is what this article actually says - it's a (perhaps preemptive.) deflection away from accusations of data falsification in the united states. it says "maybe america is falsifying data, and maybe this is easy to uncover, but we're going to blame it on the chinese to distract from it, so nobody bothers to ask the right questions".

while the numbers from china may not be complete, this is projection and the way to read it is as an admission that the united states is publishing falsified data around the epidemic.

you'll need to wait for better data, granted. but, we've seen this repeatedly, now - whenever they do this, it's an admission of guilt.

i don't know how long it will take for the data to get out.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6814940/china-coronavirus-open-letter/

i warned about this a few times when it started up: these strains are mostly medicinal, in origin. so, they're designed to either treat physical pain (like arthritis) or to treat "anxiety" (as a bullshit diagnosis. anybody suffering from real anxiety would react very negatively to habitual marijuana use.) and depression, by essentially putting you to sleep. i mean, that's one way to do it. but, you'd might as well just prescribe them methadone if you're trying to treat depression by knocking them out; i'd argue this is a type of malpractice, actually. it was maybe the most scientifically illiterate court ruling in a long history of scientifically illiterate court rulings....

but, the result is that the product you're buying here in canada was not biologically engineered for recreational use, or the specific purposes of the drug that recreational users have for it, which are dramatically different than the uses that medicinal users have for it. recreational users want to use it to get high and laugh, to dance, to stimulate conversations - so they want an uplifting high, and a chatty buzz. medicinal users bizarrely actually want a numbing stone that just turns you into a vegetable.

so, i was worried that this would essentially end up as a different drug, and it's starting to feel like it has.

i would consequently be pretty apprehensive about using these strains recreationally. they seem to be producing a dulling effect akin to essentially turning your brain off, which appears to be the point of them. again, that's just not how marijuana is used recreationally. and, i might wonder what the long term effects of taking a drug like this, that is designed to slow you down, actually are.

i've often pointed to labeling as a reason to support legalization, for health reasons. you don't know what you're buying on the street. you don't! but, if they don't eventually get some more energetic, recreational type strains in then the inevitable conclusion is going to be that you do know what you're buying at the store, and it's the kind of pot you probably want to largely avoid.