hi.

this is the difficult fax i was hoping i would not have to send, but now needs to be sent. please read this fax carefully.

after some confusion about moving from cyproterone to spironolactone, i sent a fax to the office in june explaining that i did not want to move to spiro due to potential side effects and the apparent lower efficacy of it as a testosterone blocker and would prefer to double my dosage of cyproterone, instead. i was very clear at that time that i had decided to double my dosage of this drug, and did in fact do so, as i said i would.

unfortunately, dr. ===== did not fax an increase of dosage to the pharmacy; i doubled it anyways, as stated, and have been taking 200 mg/day since roughly june 4th. 

i believe this drug should be available over the counter and am frustrated that i both have to ask for an rx for it and am being denied my preferred dosage. this should be my decision, not dr. ===========.

i cannot say that the effects of the increase in dosage were what i had hoped, but that has only increased my resolve to carry through with it. that is, if i was concerned about rising testosterone levels against my will, then the fact that i have in fact been experiencing the effects of rising testosterone only cements the need to increase the dosage, and perhaps even up to 400 mg from 200, the next time i see dr. =========. the efficacy of the treatment has been decreasing to a crisis point for some time and some kind of serious intervention is now immediately required.

as would be expected, my rx has now run out early, which is putting me in that crisis point. this is not a request for an rx update; this is an explanation that i NEED you to carry through with this, or i will end up harming myself, and imminently.

i will not be waiting around for this. i will be at your office when you open on monday morning, and if you do not update my rx immediately, i will transport myself to the emergency room and refuse to leave until i am granted access to the drug at a sufficient dosage. if this is embarassing to your office or to dr. =======, i can only state that this was foreseeable, and that you did not update my dosage, as was requested. so, it is your own fault.

i am not somebody that is going to react well to an increase in testosterone levels. the potential consequences of such a thing are going to be erratic behaviour, probable violence and almost certain self-harm. i KNOW this. i'm not going to sit around and wait for it - i am going to go to emergency immediately.

so, i will see you in the morning at opening. 

so, is this disconnect reflective of a similar perception that the outcome of the election is predetermined, and the deep state has already ordained trump the winner, as they did in 2016?

well, if i'm anything like the rest of the people pulling this out, i'm a little less certain this time around.

basically, biden isn't clinton.

but....i think if they were going to take trump out, he'd be gone by now.

i'm going to throw a wrench into this: in 2016, i thought the election was rigged, and that the deep state picked trump over clinton. this time, i think he might actually end up flat out beating biden fair and square.

but, it's still early....

we actually saw the same thing in 2016 - voters thinking trump was going to win - and i happened to be one of those people, the difference being that i have a math degree and most of them don't.

i didn't actually think the polling was wrong.

what i thought was that the election was rigged.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/30/politics/trump-polling-analysis/index.html

so, i've gone through and updated all of the noise trade links by replacing them with smashwords & lulu links in the other three blogs and am about to start it for this one as well, which was one of the loose threads i left off at in june.

my head is still oozy.

i've decided to avoid weekend shopping so i don't have to deal with the face mask nazis, meaning i'll need to get everything done tomorrow, plausibly for the entire month. it'll be a big run, at least, even if i have to go again mid-month. so, there should be a new fan in here soon, with a backup in case it breaks....

the soundtrack, however, has the odd distinction of being a tangerine dream record.

i'm going to guess this isn't about a young drew barrymore, but it could be.

this minor socal punk band named themselves after the clown in it.

fripp is maybe easing up a little, it seems, but it's still hard to find crimson online.

this reference is reversed; stephen king appropriated the crimson king, and made it a character in several of his works.

years later, stephen king's son would write a book called heart-shaped box.

i guess he dug the salem's lot reference.

but fuck arnie, anyways.

he kind of gets a little wonky about it, but is more or less saying what i am, except buying into the false narrative around it.

if capital is mobile and labour is not, then workers are in a...

prisoner's dilemma.

ah.

if they defect, they screw each other over, which is what we've been doing to each other for decades - playing (D,D) or (D)^n, in more generality.

but, if they co-operate, they're both better off, in the long run, and that's what the enlightened academics need to try to get in place.

does that mean that if you let it go then fascism is inevitable? no - because the fascism is artificial, and pushed down from the top. rather, if you pulled the rug out from under it, the fascism would falter, because that's what it's there for in the first place.

and, because the fascism is artificial and pushed down from the top (read gramsci.), if you try to clamp down on it, the more the elite is going to react and double down. so, top down regulation cannot be an answer. it's like asking a lion to be a vegetarian. it's never worked before and it's not going to work now.

the choice we have, then, is between an international working movement and between a system of financialization ("globalization") that uses fascism ("nationalism") to perpetuate itself.

or, as was said in the past: we can have socialism or barbarism.

https://theanalysis.news/interviews/restructure-capitalism-or-fascism-will-grow/

as for myself, i think i've been clear: i do not believe it is in the wider interests of the left to allow biden to govern, and am advocating voting for the greens in protest.

in the mean time, don't be surprised if trump is reelected precisely because of blm.

the people behind him can't exist without divisive politics like it.

it's for this reason that i look at something like blm and say "this isn't revolutionary. this is identity politics; this is neo-liberalism. this is divide and conquer. this is a waste of time.".

....and why i'm more likely to go after the more divisive elements of the movement in an attempt to wake them the fuck up from this neo-liberal fantasy reality they're inhabiting than to look the other way and claim "diversity of tactics".

blm is exactly what the bankers want, and it must be moved past to get back to a revolutionary politics on the ground.

it's less that the democrats are abandoning unions and more that they're trying to structurally enforce a system where migrant workers and union workers are on opposite ends of the spectrum, in order to prevent them from co-operating.

....because it's when the auto unions start to organize the food producers that capitalism sees a threat it can't stop.

they need us to hate each other in order to survive. and, you probably don't get it.

in the context of contemporary politics, nationalism and globalization are actually exactly the same fucking thing, as you need the nationalist politicians to prop up the globalist policies.

the counter-movement is in building an international working class that rejects the premise that they are in competition with each other and seeks to cooperate with each other in overthrowing capitalism.

maybe this is a relatively good time to backtrack a little and talk about trade and how we got here, and what a really, truly left critique of the existing trade regime really looks like, as the spectrum is currently split between two different kinds of fascism, both of which benefit the ruling class.

the key thing is understanding that the system they've designed is intended to set the working class against itself. the media doesn't want to talk about class, it wants to replace it with anything else you can conjure up - race, religion, gender, anything at all, really. but, it's instructive to look at the central place that class actually holds in their policies before you take too far a step back from it. if the bankers base their policies on class, it can't be too unimportant, can it?

so, let's remember how we got to the point we're at, which was partly through a labour movement. labour politics tends to take more credit than it ought to for a number of things, which came more out of fordism than a labour movement, but the labour movement was nonetheless instrumental in ensuring that we didn't have those things taken away when fordism went out of style, at least. and, let us not trivialize the central place that the dismantling of the labour movement had in the onset of neo-liberalism in the 1970s, which was largely designed to increase the amount of stolen surplus value appropriated by capital, and leave less for the workers, themselves.

and, they did that by setting us against each other, by getting us to compete against each other by working up concepts of nationalism.

so, a politician like donald trump does not exist in opposition to "globalization", but is rather necessary to implement it, as the bankers could never get what they want if we saw ourselves beyond the identities they push down on us. the division and violence and hate is not a threat to the existing order, but a function of it, and something the system requires in order to function at all. and, really, if you look at what trump says about migrant workers, and the policies he's pushed forward, they're not a break with the past but a continuation from obama, who himself continued from bush, who continued from clinton. i could write down a series of quotes on shredded pieces of paper and mix them in a hat and baffle you with their authorship. going from for profit prisons to compassionate conservatism to the deporter-in-chief to building the wall is linear, it's progress - and the opponents in the election rarely deviated much, either.

and, do the fake nationalist demagogues ever do anything that actually helps workers on the ground? no. they just continue to drive competition between workers, which props up the existing system and keeps it in place.

but, the flip side of that is that the democrats treat mexican workers essentially the same way, and it is actually for this reason that you're not likely to see any serious movement on behalf of the democrats to try to heal some of these divisions between white workers and mexican workers, which is so required to actually address the labour disparities in front of us. rather, they're increasingly just becoming the mirror reflection, in their own pro-latino racist jingoism, designed to make white workers seem "uncompetitive" and "left behind". but, this is just the same language, used by different sides of the same divide and conquer strategy...

racist democrats talk about white people being "left behind"; racist republicans talk about mexicans being rapists. it's two sides of the same coin, two articulations of the same strategy to set workers against each other and distract them from uniting against a common enemy.

it follows that when you see fake left news organizations get weird about covering labour issues in the midwest because it's "racist", you should interpret that as a red flag that they're essentially working for the banks. anybody that actually understands this is not going to take a side on the issue, as that's exactly what the fuckers want you to do.

what they want is for workers in one category to take one side, and workers in another to take another, and for them to hate each other to the point that they'd rather  fight than work together. they do this by pushing competition, by pushing racial separation, by pushing identity politics and by pushing religion and other things that tear people apart from each other.

so, understand that - the democrats and republicans are working together on this, within a system designed to keep workers apart, and buying into it just perpetuates it.

the way to break the system up and advance meaningful workers rights is to attack the propaganda from both parties and foster cooperation instead of competition.

so, don't call me a nationalist - i'm not one. i believe in international solidarity within the working class, but i'm cognizant enough of the reality to realize that the party system breaks that down from both directions, and that by picking a side in the working class you're just playing into the hands of the banks.

the fake left press is often the worst on this point, because they legitimately don't understand it. they're often tricked very badly into thinking they're standing up for an oppressed group, and very rarely have a good grasp of what the actual statistics regarding poverty levels, and who is really being oppressed, actually are. and, it's not an accident - it's by design.

just like trump is by design.

this is complicated and difficult, but i hope i got a point across.

you need to adjust to reality, not pretend the government will keep you safe from nearly air-borne particles.

and, if that means swallowing a pill or adjusting your attitude, so be it.

it's the same basic mentality, though - when somebody tells you it's everybody else's responsibility to ensure they don't get sick, rather than their own, they are basically reflecting the lack of individual responsibility that is ruining the contemporary left.

and, you're just as likely to succeed in declaring a virus-free space as you are in declaring a safe one.

i'll let the internet run with this, and am sort of surprised that it doesn't seem like it has, up to now.

it would be extra sardonic if those kids were dressed like witch doctors, or orthodox priests, and were "cleaning" the air with sage (which is highly carcinogenic, actually) to ward the virus out of their safe space.

one of the few things i just can't do at all is draw. i've never been remotely good at it.

but, i'd like to see a cartoon with some activist kids holding up a sign that says

virus free safe space

...and some recognizable health experts looking at each other, baffled, with a bubble caption reading:

"why didn't we think of that?"

i've been saying this for months, and i'm not going to say it every day for the next two weeks.

if you put your faith in the system to protect you from the virus, and insist you have the right to be safe from it (why not just declare a safe space, a virus free area?) and everybody else needs to behave in a way to facilitate it, then somebody you love is going to die as a result of your actions and you'll have only your own stupidity to blame.

you should assume your kids will get sick, and treat them like they're diseased from day one.

responsibility for your health is your own, and if you don't accept it, you'l need to deal with the consequences.

so, stop worrying about whether there's a sink in your child's classroom or not. it doesn't matter. take the precautions you need to protect yourself, or suffer the consequences for it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7306040/coronavirus-b-c-teachers-union-back-to-school-ad/

"life is short, art is infinite"

art is infinite.

you are finite.

submit.

so, i mean it's not about john a and it's not about that statue in that park. i have little but criticism for the man, and would probably support moving the statue to a museum, if it were to come up at a vote.

nor is it about race, or racism, however you want to define it.

rather, it's about the ideology underlying the actions, which positions them as public enemy number one, and something that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society: when the virus of religion rears it's ugly head in this manner, it must be rooted out immediately.

i would consequently call for the maximum possible penalties to be enforced against these people, and for the movement to support those penalties, and to clearly distance itself from this savage, uncivil barbarism.

if you don't want to be labelled savages, stop acting like savages.