Article 21 of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government".

well?

how do you give the house of saud crime family legitimacy as heads of state, in context?

you can't.

they aren't.

here's the good stuff, here:

The Enlightenment-era British social philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) said that political legitimacy derives from popular explicit and implicit consent of the governed: "The argument of the [Second] Treatise is that the government is not legitimate unless it is carried on with the consent of the governed."

i mean, what is legitimacy?

it's rooted in the ability to demonstrate the public will; that's legitimacy, that's what it means. this guy is just about the literal opposite of that.

and, if he has no legitimacy as a head of state, then removing him from power is to be seen as a part of a legitimate revolutionary process, and not an illegal assassination of a legitimate ruler.

he's really more like a mob boss than a head of state...

isn't it illegal to bomb a head of state?

i'd look the other way, just this time. call it an exception.

but, what legitimate grounds does the saudi monarchy have to call themselves heads of state? there's no election, no constitution - not even a pretense of democracy. the closest thing they have is a kind of "right of kings" type argument, which has been debunked as nonsense since the end of the dark ages.

so, i'd have a hard time calling mbs a "legitimate head of state"; he just isn't. he's an aristocrat that assumed power, and there's no legitimacy in that.

that's putting aside the fact, of course, that he's only an acting head of state just right now.

well, actually, i guess he's a disaster unfolding in slow motion....

as it is, it's hard to see how he avoids an eventual american bombing campaign unless he magically grows a brain, very fast.

he's a disaster waiting to happen.

the flip side, i guess, is that if he goes full retard (and he seems to be consistently on the brink), it could put enough strain on this old anglo-saudi alliance of convenience to help break the bond in half. in the end, if what you want is to see the saudi state dismantled like iraq was (and are we not funding them for the same reasons we funded iraq?), letting it play out may be a better course of action than taking him out before it happens.

but, you'd probably save a lot of lives in the long run if you just got it over with and got rid of him now.

i mean.

what if they had offed saddam in the 80s?

it would have prevented a lot of problems.

mbs doesn't strike me as having half the brain power as saddam, but he seems to be every bit as horrible. and, when you put together stupidity, power and wealth you get nightmares in the end.

if we can get rid of him now, it's probably a good idea.

a nice precision strike would do the job...

we haven't seen this level of despotism much of anywhere in really centuries.

it's truly alarming...and he's clearly going to cause massive amounts of problems if he's not removed sooner than later.

this despotic moron really needs a date at the hague sooner than later.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/saudi-hit-squad-aljabri-1.5676650

if we're going to make a statement, if we're going to push back, this is the time to do it, now.

if you don't fight back, if you treat people how they want to be treated rather than how they deserve to be treated, they will just continue to push you around...

you have to stand up to a bully, and this bully is currently at half strength - meaning it's a good time to pounce.

so, with the border closed and commerce down anyways, this is the time to hit them as hard as we can, in the hopes that it slaps some sense into them.

how about a major tariff on softwood lumber?

there's a point where we have the right to get fed up and just bludgeon them.

i mean, there's a pattern here.

you wanna go, donny? come at me. let's go.

at this point, we should actually be escalating.

if trump wants to pick a stupid fight with canada before the election, make it backfire. make it hurt.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/trump-aluminum-tariff-1.5677036

ahahahahahahahahaha.

hope it gets him.

https://torontosun.com/news/world/former-u-of-t-prof-jordan-peterson-contracts-coronavirus

"she sounds like...."

i sound like a socialist.

and, i'd be happy to party like it's paris, 1793.

we need to get past this.

it will ruin us, if we don't.

the biggest threat to individual liberty has, throughout history, always been religion. that's just going to get worst, until it's finally defeated.

and, in the end, we can place our martyrs in the shrine where they belong, to remind us of our victory over this great threat to our freedom.

the hebrew nation has produced some great minds. don't get me wrong. some of our most important advances....

but, their religion is quite simply an abomination, and it's offshoots have been, without question, the single greatest retarding force in history.

if you're serious about decolonization, attacking organized religion should really be at the top of your agenda.

i mean, you realize that, don't you?

that's how they really get you - that's how they colonize you: they send you to church. it's what colonization is.

and, if colonization is essentially the same thing as christianization (or islamification, in some areas, like the middle east), then decolonization is the same thing as dechristianization (or deislamification).

and, i will assert that you will never truly undo the colonization if you don't address the centrality of religion in the process.

for me, as a self-identified european pagan, dechristianization means going back to the old ways, before christianity existed - which was the literal project of the renaissance, and it's flowering in the enlightenment.

for you, it might mean chanting at rocks or something.

but, the point is to throw christianity away, part and parcel, not to try to adjust it to fit modernity.

we don't put combustion engines on horses, and we shouldn't try to put science on religion.

the golden rule is garbage.

throw it away.

it's trash.

decolonization means dechristianization.

it's not just about saying "they were wrong about heliocentrism and evolution and homosexuality and ..., but they had a sound moral system, and are fixing the problems".

no...

decolonization is dechristianization means overthrowing the entire order, and reversing the system at it's most critical points.

it's not just about leaving the theology behind, or filling in gaps. it has to be a total revolution in thought, to a more enlightened way of seeing reality, as driven by data and evidence.

stated differently: if you're going to treat adults like children, you shouldn't be surprised when they act like it.

"We have to behave with other people as we would want them to behave with us"

well, i don't agree with this idea, in principle. rather, i think we need to treat people in a way that is reflective of the way they've already treated us - we should not be naive, and allow people to take advantage of us, in the hopes that they may change. they probably won't.

a statement like that coming from somebody that's supposed to be a socialist is actually rather disconcerting; it's an almost literal statement of the hard-right "golden rule", as pushed by backwards idiot christians.

that said, i would want those bar staff to accommodate my request for a larger seating area. by not treating me how i want to be treated, the bar owners are opening themselves up to reciprocal behaviour. it would follow that if the bar owners want to be treated with more respect, then they should treat their customers with more respect and cater to their requests to put the tables together.

if i was in that situation, i would not blame the staff, though. the staff are just doing their job. rather, i would bring the manager over and yell at them, as it's their behaviour that is not reflecting how i'd like to be treated.

in all likelihood though, given the circumstances, i would probably choose to avoid conflict.

here's what you do if bar owners want to get pushy and enforce bullshit laws on you.

1) ask for the manager.
2) calmly and tersely explain that you are taking your business elsewhere for the precise reason that they are enforcing the rules. that way, they know the reason for their loss of revenue; they understand why they're losing business.
3) write an informative review on the company's website that this establishment is enforcing questionably valid rules and if you don't like that to go elsewhere.
4) find somewhere that is more reasonable.
5) tell your friends about the more reasonable spot.

yelling at staff, who are underpaid and overworked, doesn't help.

go after the bar owners, and go after them where it hurts.

https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/b-c-premier-calls-restaurant-patrons-idiots-for-abusing-staff-over-covid-19-health-orders-1.5053892

mathematicians don't tend to have a lot of respect for epsilons. they are the weakest members of the real field - discarded as irrelevant, and often even multiplied or even squared and set as equal. a million epsilons is no more a threat than merely one. but, they're tenacious things, too - like the virus itself, always there.

cantor was a lunatic, but at least his ideas hinted at a new mathematics. we don't have the language to properly articulate it, and the mathematics is even in it's infancy, but we realize now that when we say there's an infinite number of numbers to count to and an infinite number of points on a real line that these are two different orders of infinity. we're not really there with infinitessimals, yet; we just produce epsilons and throw them away at will.

to you, an epsilon may be a person, and that's fine.

but, i can't and won't think like that. epsilons are to be thrown away and discarded.

i mean, we could plug in an epsilon, right?

but, people are going to look at you funny when they tell them that epsilon percent of the population under 40 are really just the walking dead, right now.

so, i went looking for an official ifr for kids, and it seems to be a standard practice right now to refer to the ifr for not just kids but "young adults" in general as "close to zero". here is one example:

The estimated IFR is close to zero for children and younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching about 0.3 percent for ages 50-59, 1.3 percent for ages 60-69, 4.6 percent for ages 70-79, and 25 percent for ages 80 and above. 

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v2

that appears to be about as close as i'm going to get, right now.

so, 0.05% is probably a high estimate. but, when you start pushing the ifr much lower than that, you're just competing with error for results - it's effectively 0%, statistically.

no, that doesn't mean that the odd kid won't die; so long as the ifr is non-zero, which it clearly is, at least one kid will die. and, i'm sure the cameras will be on it like vultures on a carcass.

but, it's a number, and you need to plug in numbers if you want answers.

but, what have i learned in sum?

1) they tend not to broadcast posts that include links, with the exceptions of links to this site and links to my commercial sites (sometimes). as they don't appear to discriminate about the kind of link to a broad degree, i'm suspecting that there is probably a filter somewhere along the way. but, this filter appears to be being monitored by a live thug/pig.

2) when i try to get around this by posting a "post not broadcast" post (which does broadcast, and thereby broadcasts the link to the post with the link that wouldn't broadcast, effectively bypassing the censors), they will shut down broadcasting altogether within a few hours. so, they don't like that.

but, they're not communicating with me. i've tried opening this channel, which is clearly being read by the people that are trying to censor the broadcasts (which are only going to me, afaik), and i've received nothing at all but enigmatic behaviour that i'm left to try to interpret.

one of the principles i use in engaging with the thugs/pigs is to try to be as transparent as possible. i'm more law-abiding than most; since they legalized pot, they're going to have to bring me in on j-walking to get me. really. there's nothing to get me on, and they've tried, clearly. so, i'm all about being as honest as i can, to eliminate any ambiguities. the most dangerous armed people in any society are always the pigs in it. i am fully cognizant of that, and want to ensure that these dangerous thugs in our midst are not confused about my nature or intentions. this is consistent with my views as a free speech activist - the best way to get your head around something is via open discourse. so, by taking this approach, i can be confident that if i'm ever found dead via suspicious suicide, or if the cops ever brazenly just shoot up my front door, that they are not acting proportionally. this is in contrast to an approach that involves hiding information from the cops, which has the potential to lead to miscommunication.

it would be useful if that communication was two-way.

at the end of the day, it is likely that i will choose to disagree with any decisions made by censors and seek to find ways to evade them; it is not very likely that i will just abide by the rules. but, it would be useful to know what these people are trying to prevent, at the least. i may project otherwise, but i'm not an oracle. i need data to process before i can react, and in the absence of it, i can only make guesses.

so, that's what i know.

but, i don't fully understand what's happening.

they shut the broadcast down again...

see, i really don't understand what they're doing. they allow it, then stop it, then allow certain posts, etc. so, allow me to explain this yet again.

the only reason i have the broadcast set up at all is to archive the posts.

as it is not working, i have been archiving the posts using other means. but, ideally, i would like a copy of every post i make to this space to appear in my email, so i can eventually reconstruct it in a linear ordering, and reproduce it as a readable document.

i have no direct audience. there are two addresses that this broadcasts to - deathtokoalas and the koalacentralcommand. in both cases, it's simply intended to be back up. that's all.

so, the only audience that the pigs are stopping from getting these posts is, in fact, myself. there are no further recipients, afaik.

further, afaik, the posts are freely available at the actual blog, which is what i actually care about.

i guess i'm kind of struggling to articulate myself using concepts that i don't really understand well. i was very late to get on to social media, i never really liked it very much and i was very quick to get off. i do not interpret this space as "social media", and in fact have moved here explicitly so that i'm not interacting with a concept that i don't have a lot of interest in. i got on social media late, but i got on the internet early, so i still interpret the internet from the eyes of a 90s kid; i like simple web pages, i don't own a touch screen and i still use a mouse and keyboard. so, i'm getting the impression that i probably wouldn't even properly understand any of the accusations directed at me.

i do want people to subscribe to the feed, and get updates in their email. but, i don't want to interact with this space, or any other space that i create in, with any of the framework of "social media content". i don't see this as a "blogspot account", i see it as a personal website. and, i don't want you to log into a feed and interact with me in that way; i want you to come to the website and browse it.

so, i think they're approaching this with an intent to reduce potential virality of these posts, but in doing so they're trying to shut down an internet 1.0 site using internet 2.0 tactics. and, i'm just left confused.

i'm just trying to archive my posts, guys, and all you're really doing is just being pointlessly annoying.

as a parent, you will not be able to tell if your kid has a cold or has covid-19.

in fact, the testing might not be able to determine that with any clarity, either.

and, when your kid does get covid (and they will.) and beats it, you won't know, in the end, if they had it, or if it was just a cold.

so, yes - some fraction of a percentage of kids will die when they open the schools. if ifr for kids specifically is .05% (a high estimate), and 40% of the kids get it, then you should expect that 0.02% of the kids will die. very simple math.

but, that's a not a high number, and only the most ridiculously risk adverse people would see it as a reason to halt.

kids get sick from something they caught at school and die every year. kids are robust, but they're fragile; they die easily.

listen, nobody is saying the kids won't get it. if you send your kids to school, there's a good chance they're going to catch something or other - the cold, the flu, covid-19, whatever.

the point is that, as far as we can tell at this point, it's not going to affect them very much. so, as long as the kids aren't living with elderly parents...

of course, if you had children very late, or you live in a large extended family that includes old or infirm people, you might want to avoid sending your kids to school. in general, those are scenarios where families have extra responsibility to protect the people around them. in reality, great-grandma probably can't handle the regular old flu very well either, and you really want to keep her away from that, too.

so, yeah, your kids'll get sick. but, so what?

https://globalnews.ca/news/7254294/coronavirus-student-tests-positive-georgia-school/

or, maybe this is a good example of the kind of people that the feds are going to end up targeting with their most recent poor law.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7253174/calgary-identity-fraud-cerb/

because you want them to keep partying without being able to wash their hands, right?

stupidity. flat out.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/los-angeles-can-cut-off-power-and-water-at-properties-hosting-parties-during-the-pandemic-1.5053648

while they're maybe even past due for experimental treatments, i wouldn't expect a safe vaccine that you can actually hand out until some time next year.

that said...

at current growth rates, they may reach herd immunity by october - and months before anybody else.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7254536/coronavirus-possible-us-vaccine-before-election-trump/

while some of the posts started broadcasting again in the last few days of july, there were no posts between july 29 at 2:15 and aug 1 at 6:26, the first post for aug 1st.

while i would like to create a "not broadcast post" for each of the 170 posts created over these three days, i already have these posts archived in my records, and doing so would screw up my record keeping.

posts for july 29th:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020_07_29_archive.html

posts for july 30th:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020_07_30_archive.html

posts for july 31st:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020_07_31_archive.html

the following sequence was also only partially broadcast:

july 28, 2020

fat people have a genetic disease that cannot be cured.

therefore, they should be prevented from breeding in order to eliminate the disease from the genome.

discuss.

4:01

so, do i think that weight regulation is determined by genetic factors? that is, do i think that obese people are "born that way"?

no. not at all.

well, not really.

what does the science actually say? it's not what the media wants you to think, but that's normal - the media almost never gets the science right. generally, when you read a report about science at the cbc or cnn, it's been so distorted by the obscene religious censors that you essentially have to run through every clause with a giant not operation. their journalistic integrity is beyond atrocious.

so, forget about the nonsense you've read in the news - it's just that. nonsense.

so, let's ask a question we've asked a few times, now. what is a gene? and the answer is that a gene is a protein that regulates the production of hormones. so, in order to demonstrate that an issue is genetic, you have to show that it's regulated entirely or at least dominantly by hormone production. so, is obesity determined solely or even dominantly by hormone production? if it is, then you've found a genetic defect that should be targeted for elimination from the genome. if it's not, then you can't blame obesity on genetics.

so, is weight determined by hormones? this is the actual debate here underlying the media obfuscation, and the answer is sort of. two people standing side by side can eat the same meal and metabolize it differently, and that difference in metabolism will be caused by different levels of hormonal regulation (which, remember, is all that genes do), but at the end of the day they consumed the same amount of mass, and it's conservation of energy that is going to predominate in the end.

so, these news reports (which are designed to ensure nobody has their feelings hurt, first and foremost, and not as the cold, rationalist scientific explorations that they should be designed as, to discard emotions as meaningless subjective opinions) constantly want to bring up genes as this kind of black box explanation. our understanding of genetics is slowly pushing past the point where you can get away with this kind of lazy journalism, but for right now you can still throw just about anything in this pile of magic called "genetics" using tricks like "studies suggest" or "scientists estimate", and get the answer you expected out of it by designing the question that way. to call that a perversion of science would be an understatement. but, if you want to understand this properly, you're better off starting not from the assumption (and that is still all it actually is) that genetics are paramount and unalterable (as though god decided, right?), but rather from the conservation of energy, which we can use newtonian approximations for, in context.

energy stored = energy consumed - energy burned

so, if you're fat it's because you eat more than you need, and it's the most basic physics in the world to understand it as much.

it is consequently the case that if your fancy genetic model contradicts that simple equation then you can throw it in the trash - it's garbage. genetic/hormonal complications may affect the amount of energy your body burns, but the issue of stored weight is ultimately determined by how much one consumes and not by how much one burns and you simply can't store more energy than you've consumed. that's not biology; that's physics. you can't gain weight by not eating, and if you burn calories you will always lose some weight, even if your hormonal regulation is particularly defective and prevents you from burning fat like a healthy person in a particularly invasive way.

given that truth, hormonal regulation brought on by gene expression can at most be an annoyance. it's friction. it's a complicating factor. but, to say that you can't lose weight because of your genes is wrong. rather, people with poor hormone regulation due to defective genes will simply need to work harder and eat less to maintain healthy vital statistics.

that means that the issue is not genetic, at it's core - and that people with defective genes should be paying more attention to lifestyle, not giving into fatalistic assumptions, or giving up on life because god.

as an aside, do we want to conclude that obesity is a genetic defect? because, i can tell you that i'll never accept it. the unavoidable conclusion of trying to clinicize an issue that is in actual truth almost entirely about lifestyle would be that we need to find a way to eliminate the genetic disease/defect of obesity from the genome. i mean, we can't be walking around talking about accepting inferiority as normal. actual diseases need to be targeted and expunged. so, this intelligent design recast as liberalism thing only gets the religious people to the end point they want if it's rooted in religious assumptions in the first place; if you find the fatalism of these religious arguments laughable, i'm talking about the "god made me the way i am" crowd, you're just going to take the knowledge as an argument for eugenics. the idea that being fat is a choice and can be reversed is consequently a lot better than the alternative, which is that fat people have a genetic disease that cannot be cured and should be prevented from breeding.

4:25

and is it just natural variation?

no.

these people would be eaten instantly by lions. no chance at all.

4:41

it's been the sporadic efficacy of the conversion process at the one drive site that's screwed me up over the last few days. i'd be done by now if i wasn't stuck waiting and trying over and over to get the server to convert the file properly.

it was yesterday morning that the third trimester file refused to convert properly from doc to pdf (the error is that they introduce a conversion step, from doc to docx, that breaks the formatting). so, i fell asleep waiting for it to work, and was up in the afternoon. it converted, eventually.

then, i was ready to post the 2013 combined (final) updates yesterday afternoon when the machine rebooted on me before i got the chance to save the downloaded pdfs anywhere (after trying to get the conversion to work several times), so i'll need to go back to the one drive site and hope it works. this is the chromebook, and it's designed with this in mind, but it's a process to set back up, and it threw me for the day. i was going to wait until i was done, but i ended up eating for the first time in a few days, and that just knocked me right out, in the end, after however many days without eating or sleeping (which is what i actually prefer, fwiw. fuck eating. fuck sleeping. but, i don't have an energy source to plug into. not yet, anyways.). the warm & humid temperatures finally overpowered the a/c down here yesterday as well, which was highly conducive to sleep after however many weeks of the frigid air from upstairs making it so hard to sleep. i sleep best when the temperature is in the high 20s, and can't sleep at all when i'm even a little bit cold in the summer - even at 22 or 23, it just feels like somebody is dumping cold water on me.

 i was up a little after midnight, when it cooled down, and have mostly been focusing on catching up on eating this morning.

i uploaded the 2013 deathtokoalas file to smashwords yesterday, but i didn't get a chance to catch the conversion before the reboot.

that means i have the following left to do:

1) check the july-dec 2013 deathtokoalas file at smashwords. the formatting there is bad, i just need to check that the file actually updated.
2) there is no travel blog for january, so i will need to upload just the dtk update to the january bandcamp archive. i will need to upload that file to smashwords, as well.
3) i will need to get the full travel blog file up to smashwords
4) i will need to get the full travel blog file and the full deathtokoalas file both up at lulu
5) i'll need to update the google drive share as well.

these are minor edits and should take an afternoon, but i want to prioritize cleaning for today.

the 2014 run through should be much quicker because i've got the parameters better set, now. i won't be adding any new posts, but i will be likely removing a lot and maybe transferring quite a bit. the major change is that the politics blog is likely to become a little more focused, as specific concepts get moved entirely to dtk.

will i do a combined blog one day?

i might, in the end, but likely only as a total update. so, you might get it all thrown at you in one ridiculous 100,000 page file, in the end. for now, i'm not planning on that.

so, for the day, i'm doing a lot of cleaning (including of myself) and i'll get back to this when it's done.

7:22

 Genes contribute to the causes of obesity in many ways, by affecting appetite, satiety (the sense of fullness), metabolism, food cravings, body-fat distribution, and the tendency to use eating as a way to cope with stress.

i'll accept metabolism, primarily. body-fat distribution is a consequence of metabolism.

but, if you're going to tell me that you're fat because you have genetic factors that affect your appetite and there's nothing you can do to stop it, i'm going to laugh at you. yet, that seems to be what a lot of the argument is based on.

"well, sure i ate the entire cake. i was hungry! it's genetic!"

go take a holiday in africa and come back and tell me how you feel about that, now.

7:29

no, really.

the fucking retards think i'm some kind of spy. it's clear as day.

so, they've started letting a few posts through, but are blocking broadcast with anything with a link in it.

gotta stop me from repeating russian propaganda, i guess.

in actual fact, they've mostly blocked much needed deconstruction of worthless msm articles, and a lot of links to products that i have for sale. which is annoying...

...because the purpose of this page is to sell things.

so. pigs...

i'm trying to sell something, here. can you stop making it more difficult to do that? thanks.

is social media a religion?

so, i mean, i'm not going to knee-jerk into the kind of reaction you're going to get from a lot of american libertarians, very few of which seem to have a good grasp on the legalities around speech issues.

but, let us all remember that twitter is powerless, if we stop using it.

they only have as much power to control and subjugate as we give them.

“This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19, which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation,”

that's a thought crime.

that's where we are.

will you tolerate this?

while he may have been characteristically loose with details (immunity is the wrong term to use in context for children that have yet to see the virus but can be expected to defeat it very easily), as far as i can tell, trump's statements about children being virtually unaffected by the virus, up to statistical noise, are absolutely correct.

these people own the servers, they can do what they want. but, they're consistently wrong, and are consistently labeling correct information as false.

so, we need to make a choice whether we want to let them continue to do that or not.

i only use facebook as an update service; my facebook page is a cv, essentially. a link dump. and, this is a good example of the reasons i stopped using the site - i was unhappy with the content i was receiving, and felt the time i was spending arguing with people about it was just wasted. i make a conscious attempt to avoid any substantive discourse at all over facebook.

i have a twitter account, but i have only used it once or twice since i signed up in 2008. the reason i've avoided twitter is actually the character limit, which you might guess from sorting through this is something i'd find highly restrictive. but, watching it's restrictions on free discourse develop into an authoritarian body that deletes post for being wrong (but is usually wrong itself), i'm glad i never bothered with it.

but, i mean it's up to us to make a choice, here. the reality is that the "fact checkers" at twitter and facebook have an absolutely abysmal track record of actual fact-checking, to the point that you may want to assume that the opposite of everything they say is true. they're always wrong, to the point that they've become a great representation of paul krugman's "very serious people".

they're serious, alright. they're seriously wrong.

given all of this evidence against them as a fact-checking service, do you want to continue to use their sites? do you want to log in every day and have your opinions subject to alteration at the whim of people that don't know what the fuck they're talking about?

it's hard to get off the network, i get it. everybody's there. so, how do you get out?

i dunno. set up your own page. start a blog. there's ways out...

but, if it was predictable that a site like facebook would turn into the thought police, it has now happened, and we are now here. and, it's up to us to stop using it if we don't like it.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/article-facebook-pulls-trump-post-over-coronavirus-misinformation-presidents/

no solidarity for christians.

crucify them all.

i mean, that should be a hard case for me, as it pits two values i hold strongly against each other: anti-religiosity and free expression. even if these are really kind of actually the same thing, the law is pitting them against each other.

except that i don't actually give a fuck.

and i won't stand up for christians, ever.

now, here's a case that nobody should give a flying fuck about it.

technically speaking, i'm far more likely to stand up for the religionist's rights to free expression than to enforce any kind of health laws, even if i might cheer on the sidelines for anything that harms the faithful, in general.

but, i'm not actually going to stand up for a fucking christian.

let him rot.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canadian-pastor-guilty-of-defying-myanmar-s-coronavirus-law-1.5053162

i woke up shivering, but i at least got some sleep over the last few days. i didn't sleep much over the weekend, and i'm known to move in extremes like that - sleep 20 hours a day for a week, then sleep 2 hours a day for a week. and, yes, it's weather-dependent - i sleep less when it's nice and hot, but i get cold easily and can't sleep in the presence of any kind of refrigeration, at all.

so, today is legitimately a clean-up day. and i'll get back to finishing up april tomorrow or late tonight.

i had to take a detour yesterday to add a number of categories to the travel blog. i also had to fix a few typos. but, i'm going to wait to upload until i get through 2014, first, so i don't have to do it more than once.

it's very chilly in here :(

it's downright cold outside. 16 degrees, in august. what the fuck?

we should get some more seasonable, pleasant, summer-like weather for a few more days on friday, after all. my fears of a falling down to sub-30 degree temperatures so early in the season seem to have been unfounded, in the end. the last week of unseasonably cold weather (we've had some days that have struggled to even get to a barely t-shirt acceptable level of 25 degrees) should lift temporarily, at least.

although it was true - there were really no summer days in the forecast at all, at the time. i think the hottest day was a decidedly spring-like 28, without humidity.

but, as long as they don't change it, this weekend should be a little bit more comfortable than this week has been. it's been unpleasant, here. it's been cold....

for the day, and probably tomorrow, i'm going to have to find ways to generate heat. i've got some dishes to do, as an excuse to run the hot water. i'll probably take a few showers. i just used the stove. i'll do some laundry later. etc. anything to try to generate warmth....