if, in the end, the care industry becomes more powerful than the suicide industry, you'll see the opposite outcome - people subtly coerced into continuing to live through their suffering, rather than left to freely choose to decide to die. religious groups may see that as preferable, but i don't; coercion is coercion, one way or the other.

so, the key thing is to minimize profit.

one thing you could do is mandate that the suicide industry remain a part of the care industry, so that there isn't a financial incentive to push one over the other. further, regulating the prices of care and suicide as services via an insurance monopoly (as exists in canada.) can help take away the profit motive. regulating suicide as less profitable than care could help ensure that these choices are being made by people and not by bureaucrats.

i believe this is the status quo, here - you can only get these services in care facilities that have the option to sell you things that will keep you alive, too. that should remain enforced.

i understand this argument - i've made similar ones in regards to prostitution.

so, is it possible that providing for suicide on demand may create a society where you have a suicide industry that overpowers access to services? is it possible that governments might cut services to the disabled and increase funding for the suicide industry, instead?

sure.

with prostitution, you can sort of decriminalize it and look the other way, while rejecting the commercialization of it. and, with drugs, you can bring in bylaws that restrict smoking in certain spaces. so, you can do things to mitigate the effects. we're not doing that for smoking pot, yet, but it's the right answer, and we should get there, eventually.

assisted suicide is a little different, as you can't look the other way and the externalities don't need to be mitigated because they don't exist.

my best response to this - and it's a legit critique and something that needs to be carefully monitored and adjusted for - is that the right to death is one of many rights, and the court needs to uphold all of the rights, including all of the other rights, while maintaining the right to access death. so, if the argument is that the right to death will undo these other rights, i can accept that the concern is valid, and will argue that it's important that we stand up for these other rights - to shelter, to care. 

the canadian jurisprudence is supposed to do that - it's in the precedents. 

but, do i think it's an argument against suicide-on-demand? i don't - and i couldn't imagine somebody erecting a convincing argument that people don't have the right to access death, relative to whatever choice they choose to make. it is an argument to remain vigilant, and ensure that the struggle for access to these other rights continues, and i see little reason to think it won't.

at the end of the day, there are some people that will embrace their disabilities and want to live with them and there are some people that won't. the system can't really change who wants to live and who doesn't, it can only provide equally for both options. 

providing for only one choice cannot become the status quo - and we'll have to make sure it doesn't.

the other thing to ask is if i think this is a realistic concern, and i think my response here is more mixed. it could be. but, it's not an economic inevitability, the way that corporate prostitution is, it relies on a confluence of government and industry aligning in a specific, unfortunate manner. the care industry could become more powerful and profitable than the suicide industry, if the conditions allow for it; there's not any inherent power imbalance, or any inevitable social conditions that lead to the dominance of the suicide industry, over time. and, courts can and no doubt will rule on the rights of the disabled to live as well, whereas they'll never rule on the rights of prostitutes to self-organize.

so, i guess you could say that i think we can handle euthanasia better than we can handle prostitution, at this time.

but, yeah - some careful thought is required.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.5896324/as-bill-c-7-reaches-senate-un-watchdog-raises-concerns-about-maid-for-persons-with-disabilities-1.5897749

i tend to resist nailing politicians for corruption scandals, but this is different - this needs to take this government down, and the government that replaces them needs to come in with policies that brings back the country's economic sovereignty.

so, where did all of this money go, in the end?

who got paid for vaccines that never showed up? who orchestrated this? 

we contributed nothing to the production of the vaccine, and expected to be first in line to take orders.

we resisted calls to participate in production, and insisted on buying imports, instead.

and, we're getting what we deserve for that kind of policy.

but, i've said this a few times - if this isn't the death knell of "free trade" in canada, the country has no future.

if we can't figure out that the alter-globalists on the street were right after this, and realize they predicted all of this, we never will, and we're doomed as a consequence of it.

justin trudeau is ideologically attached to the idea of canada as a consumer of products purchased elsewhere in the world, rather than as a producer of goods. in terms of canadian production, he's only ever indicated any interested in the automobile sector, which includes oil. that's canada, apparently, in the mind of trudeau - a country that builds cars and imports everything else.

so, it's less that he's this rank, globalist elitist - although that's true - and more that he's legitimately ideologically wed to this concept of canada as a link in a set of supply chains, in a global economy dominated by "free trade". i put free trade in quotes, because it's the kind of concept of free trade that you sell naive, dumb union workers in order to advance a mercantilist global order that places investors at the top of the hierarchy. worse, his deeply racist concept of the world inverts to reject anybody that challenges this mercantilist order as 'racist'. he comes from the highest aristocracy that this country has, but he's really a true believer, in ways that are supposed to be reserved for the ruled rather than the rulers. and, you can see this in his life decisions - this is a person born with millions in trust fund dollars, that thought it was necessary to get jobs working as a ski instructor, or a high school teacher. if you had millions in the bank, would you get a job as a ski instructor? 

it says something about the way the guy thinks; he seems to believe the lies that were written for the masses to facilitate the ruling classes to rule with, from the fake free trade mythology to his apparent embrace of multiple world religions, rather than interact with and understand theory from the perspective of a dauphin. if machiavelli were grading our dauphin, he would fail him, indeed - he does not act like a prince ought to, but only has the capacity to understand things the way a slave does.

this is of course the kind of figurehead ruler that the elite wants. but, it doesn't help the rest of us to be dealing with this guy that consistently comes off as a brainwashed agent in an inspector gadget episode. "uh, ok boss."

so, when everybody from every corner of the country yelled at him that he has to ensure local production of the vaccine, if we can, his insistence (via his captured, elitist ministers - that he seems to think he's giving a helping hand to, because they're brown. it's better to give the coloured folks a hand up than a hand out.) to rely on supply chains was rooted in an ideology that was constructed inside of him by the ruling elite, and not on any evidence - and he believed in it, just like all these other low information idiots are tricked into believing it, with the same propaganda intended for the dumbest workers around us. 

the collapse of these supply chains in the building of the virus - which he should have seen with the end of the sinovac deal months ago, at the least. - and the flip-flop in policy towards domestic production, only after we've bought millions of doses from companies that will not or cannot deliver, is consequently a legitimate governing mistake, and a reason to remove this government from office. obviously, you need to produce as much vaccine as you can, and the rest of the world is right to see canada as a laggard for deciding to just let everybody else do the work and buy it from them, in the end.

this is legitimate incompetence and there ought to be electoral consequences for it.

so, i had to sleep today.

and, now i need to wake up and pick up where i was.

i would argue that marxism, socialism and anarchism, as consistent ideologies, are all fundamentally incompatible with collectivism, to the point that they cannot co-exist.

but, you get the exact opposite - from both sides of the spectrum - when you survey people on the question, and, you hear academics speak in equally confused ways about it, too, because it's so culturally ingrained - almost as though it's a consequence of some kind of hegemonic power confusing the idea for it's benefits.

"Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy:  political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority ... a century of Fascism.  For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State."   - mussolini

i know that you can't take these people seriously when they use words that have been translated from different languages. but, mussolini's use of the language was accurate, here.

fascism, as a term, develops from corporatism. and, corporatism itself develops out of the collectivism described in hobbes. this philosophy of the far right - fascism, collectivism, corporatism - is then contrasted against the ideals of the left, which are socialism, liberalism and democracy.

this is an insightful statement by benito mussolini, in truth.

so, how we got to this idea in america where collectivism is thought of as on the left is very strange, but no doubt has to do with the spectrum reversal that took place in the united states, where the democrats became the left, after representing the right since andrew jackson. you get this weird, confused confluence of terms.

but, it's a fundamental point of confusion, in truth.

americans legitimately and readily identify the left with collectivist ideas, rather than legitimately socialist ones. i mean, you hear it all of the time - socialism means big government. right? no - that's wrong, actually. but, it's what americans say when asked over and over and over...

it's important to realize that when marx attacked human rights as "nonsense on stilts", he was referring to ecclesiastical law, in the form of natural rights (something derived by a handful of christian theologians, and that re-emerged as a sort of liberal theology). i mean, i don't disagree with what he said, which was an attack on the idea that rights come from some magical place in the heavens, rather than from human beings. 

that doesn't suggest he was opposed to rights, or thought that the rights of the individual were unimportant; to the contrary, he would have always self-identified as a liberal, and argued that the entire point of socialism is to maximize individual freedom by collectivizing production - that should create more freedom in the end, not less, and that was the idea that bakunin and proudhon and the rest ran with, even as marx attacked them as lacking the organization to get anywhere (and was right.) and they attacked him for being a pseudo-monarchist authoritarian (and were right, too). there's a real underlying connection between marx and the idea of "enlightened despotism", which is counter-revolutionary in scope. he often agreed more with the benthams than the paines.

it just means that he thought that rights were something humans create, and their value is subject to what we assign to them.

unfortunately, this has been misunderstood primarily for the reason that the american left tends to conflate socialism with collectivism or corporatism, without really grasping the contradictions in doing so. mussolini was a true collectivist in the corporatist sense; if we saw that kind of movement here, the first thing they'd do is wipe out any real left (just like the bolsheviks did, too). it's tied into the whole marginalization of economics on the american left in favour of the social sciences, because marx is seen primarily as a social scientist like weber rather than a political theorist like, say, james madison. it's the old cliche about what you like and don't like about marx, which seems to be less about class, exactly, and more about the enforcement of capitalist hegemony in the academy - even marx is stripped of his marxism, and those who study him are stripped of his praxis. it's a silly joke. but, it explains how the left has come to embrace these ideas that the left has always seen as on the far right, to the point it's taken up arms against them - the conflation of collectivism with the left.

if you really believe this stuff, you might want to read up on mussolini; you might find you want the trains to run on time, too.

but, you can't take rights out of the left and call it a left, it becomes incoherent and nonsensical. what's the point if you're not fighting for rights?

i may have to bring back tomatoes for lycopene, in the end. i need to do the research on it, but the sources are pretty obscure, beyond tomatoes...

the white guavas are nutritionally superior, as far as i can tell, but i am skeptical of the claims that they contain lycopene in any measurable amount.

but, i haven't looked into this at all and need to wait.

so, once i get mustard, cayenne & paprika, i'll have the spices i've picked out, except turmeric, which i'm going to hold off on. the basis of adding turmeric is twofold:

1) it's why mustard is yellow.

2) curcumin

but, you can't absorb curcumin, apparently. like, they suggest snorting it. i'm not snorting mustard - don't snort mustard, kids. 

there's nothing else in there that seems useful...and i'm not convinced that turmeric adds to the taste, not until i try a bit, first. if the mustard seed tastes strange and unusual to me, maybe i'll add a little turmeric, for bourgeois reasons. but, to start, it seems pointless.

the mustard is there to mimic the caesar taste, but it should have some b vitamins, too. the cayenne & paprika are for cartenoids, with the intent to replace the hot sauce. i should hopefully get boosts of those other carotenoids as well, stuff like lycopene (lycopene was a bad randomly chosen example. there's a lot of lutein, though). ground capsicum is actually one of the healthiest things you can find, but manufactured hot sauce is full of salt & vinegar, which i'm getting too old to consume casually - i need to cut shit like that out.

i'm still holding off on the anchovies, for now.

and, i need to rebalance the wheat bran source, so i'm getting more wheat bran than all bran, i just want to have all of the data first so i only have to do it once. i think i'm getting enough selenium in the other bowls to balance, for now. 

the other thing i need to do at the bulk barn today is get powdered mustard and powdered cayenne pepper. this will dramatically reduce the amount of vinegar i'm consuming, which is a problem for my teeth.

i picked up some limes this month, but probably won't next month. i'm looking at green beans instead, but i haven't done the research and need to finish the fruit component first.

so, the real reason i was out on sunday was to pick up a small amount of generic estrogen. yeah - generic. here we are...

i should have called on friday, but i knew i wouldn't be able to find anything and instead tried to distract myself from it. i called a few places on saturday, before resigning myself to the reality and asked the spot that had it to package a small amount of generics, so i could get through the weekend and try on monday...

i tend to avoid biking in the salt and snow, so i took a walk on sunday afternoon that worked out to 19.3 km - from here to the pharmacy, to the walmart, to the metro, to the superstore, to the freshco, home, to the food basics, and home again.

the price for the red peppers at the whole sale club wasn't that impressive this time, although it has been previously. i wanted to check the walmart for soy, and they didn't have it; they had cheese and yogurt on sale, though. the metro at devonshire didn't have my soy, so i won't go back, but i got some strawberries at a good price. i wanted limes or red peppers at the superstore and was disappointed; i got both at the freshco, instead. and, then i got some chicken for the eggs, as mentioned - plus the kiwis were on sale.

you're excited.

when i got in at around 20:00, i took a deserved nap, got up and made some eggs and posted a few things on the internet, intending to make some calls..

.....and then fell asleep before i could. grargh.

so, i wake up around 14:00 and start making calls and i've got to the end of the list, now - i have called every pharmacy in the lower peninsula (and bicycled to the outlying towns of leamington, tilbury and amherstburg - something i greatly enjoyed, as it let me see and understand this area, which i didn't grow up in, quite a bit better) and am simply out of usable estrogen. there's no more, and what's left is probably expired.

to recall, the brand name estrace is imported by a company in mississaugua called acerus that buys it from a distributor in britain. that's the only distribution where i live. but, that company in britain has lost it's british license, meaning the drug cannot be imported any longer. due to the sad realities around property rights and pharmaceuticals, this has created a mess that may make it almost impossible to find this drug here for a very long time. what remains is the generic.

"but, the generic should be the same thing, just cheaper, you idiot."

see, i wish that was true, but it isn't in this case.

the generic uses a different delivery mechanism, which means what? well, your stomach acids are a vicious thing, and i'm always baffled by people that don't get this. they think we just absorb whatever we eat. in fact, your stomach acids want to rip everything you give it apart into the smallest pieces possible, where those pieces can either be attached to enzymes and absorbed, or discarded and shit out. so, if you're going to take something like estrogen orally, you want to make sure you give it a protective coating to stop it from being destroyed in your stomach.

bafflingly, the generic lupin-estradiol simply doesn't do that, while the brand name estrace does. so, when you take the brand name, you absorb the estrogen attached to an ester, which splits apart in your liver - and is lost largely on first pass but at least gets there. when you take the generic, it just dissolves in your stomach. it's crazy that they're even allowed to sell it at all.

the way around it is to take it under your tongue (or inject it...), but the thing i liked about the oral delivery is that it's just like being on the pill - you don't get mood swings, you just get constant estrone cycling, until it gets excreted. if you take it under your tongue, it's going to hit a peak fairly quickly and then fall very fast, which is not just a problem for mood swings, but also an increased cancer risk.

so, i've gone well out of my way to find the brand name, but i seem to be out and that's it. one store told me they threw out a bottle recently because it was expired. so, anything i could potentially find in distant rural villas is no doubt already destroyed. 

around 18:00, i finally gave up and had to transfer the rx back to the local pharmacy and just get the generic. it's cheaper, at least. but, now what?

i got some more groceries done as well, which required another 21.7 km of walking, including the last 6.5 km with 15 kg of soy milk on my back. so, that's 41 km (25.5 miles, in backwards culture units) of walking in the last 36 hours. as i'm not going to need to go out to get more estrace until mid-month at the earliest (and potentially next month), i want to get everything done now, excluding inevitable quick mid-month fruit top-ups. so, i've got just about everything i could find - but i'll need to make another trip to food basics & the bulk barn in the morning. when i got in, i took a shower and need to eat an overdue fruit bowl, but i had to send a fax to the doctor:

======

hi.

it's your old fax-sending friend jessica, again, back to write you another essay. muahahahaha. i actually didn't check if the phone works, as i need to get a letter to dr. --------, anyways. i still have a vm at 5199161358 and an email address at death.to.koalas@gmail.com.

so, i'm calling to ask for a boost in the estrace to 16 mg/day, and i'll explain why. 

after bicycling to tecumseh a few times, to leamington, to tilbury (!) and then to amherstburg several times, i have finally run out of options for brand name estrace in the lower peninsula. if there's any brand estrace from here to chatham, it has done an exceptionally good job of hiding itself, as i have called every pharmacy that google can find me. 

it's gone. all of it.

i called the distributor, acerus, as well, at one point, and they explained that the problem is that the british government removed the license for the company that manufacturers it. they had an exclusive license. so, until somebody else licenses it in canada (and i'm not sure they can, if acerus has it) this is impossible to get, due to the actions of the british government. acerus might (and, i think should) win their lawsuit in the end, but even winning the lawsuit won't get the item back in circulation.

and, of course, the border is currently closed.

so, the only option is generic. i'm finally at the end.

i have explained before that i am apprehensive about the delivery mechanism in the lupin-estradiol. estradiol is famously weak, anyways; most of it gets destroyed on first pass, with only small amounts converting to estrone, which then cycles repeatedly before it's excreted. so, the brand name attaches the estrogen to an ester that is intended to help it a least get to the liver, where it breaks in half. the lupin-estradiol does not have this ester, meaning that it doesn't even make it to first pass, it merely gets destroyed in stomach acid. it's as good as a placebo, in practice.

it's been a while now; everybody's in the same boat. have your other patients noticed degrading effects after switching? 

the way around this is to either inject it (i'm the last gen xer; i've watched everybody die of drug overdoses, i don't want to inject anything into me, ever. no needles. no way.) or to otherwise avoid swallowing it by taking it sublingually. but, i don't want to eliminate the hepatic process altogether, because i want to maintain some little bit of estrone cycling.

so, this is my proposal, and it is a large dosage increase, but let's talk about it:

- sublingual application of 2 mg every 6 hours + 

- orally swallowing 4 mg every 12 hours (hoping that the large dosage gets a bit of it into the portal vein, at least - but realizing that this is mostly useless)

that would be 4*2 + 4*2 = 16 mg/day - a doubling of dosage. but, i've just halved the effectiveness. it's not a practical increase, but an adjustment to the delivery mechanism. i'm hoping it just balances out...

obviously, this isn't ideal. when i spoke to dr. ---------, he indicated that i was absorbing the estrogen. but, if i have to go further than chatham to get brand name, i'll have to wait until the spring. and, i'm not convinced it's there at all.

one of the last stores i spoke to was in lasalle, and they indicated they recently had to throw some of it out because it expired. so, any lingering supply may be unsellable, and this is consequently all there is to do.

if you'd like to book an appointment to talk, i have no schedule, so just leave a message at my vm to do so. give me like 36 hours notice or something. i'm empirically driven, so i see the value of testing it and adjusting to it, but i'm exceedingly apprehensive about this, and would rather come on strong and turn it down than come in low and turn it up.

that said, i've learned my lesson and will wait for a response. just please recognize that i can't wait too long for a response.

thanks,

jessica

===========

so, that's what's next.

i need to eat, first. after that, i need to finish my shopping - and also to mail a few things regarding court cases and fippas. and, then i will need to file a few things, after that.

i should hopefully be able to get back to what i'm doing tomorrow or the next day.

but, that was the last few days - 40+ km of walking to get grocery shopping done. and, i've got a few more to finish it up...

you can look at me like an idiot, if you want, i guess. why don't i get a car? or at least order a cab?

see, and i'm going to flip the question around - if you drive your car to the grocery store, what do you do for exercise? well, do you even exercise at all? 'cause if you just drive your car everywhere and sit on your ass all day, don't call me an idiot - go have a heart attack, instead. but, if you do take reasonable care of yourself, how do you do it?

do you spend $100/month to go to the gym? really? and you're calling me stupid?

do you run around in circles like a retarded horse?

this is what you probably do - you get in your car and drive to the grocery store (which costs money and produces emissions) and then get home and run laps like a gerbil, or go to the gym and pay through your nose to look sexy running on the spot. right?

well, if you did what my dumbass self does, you'd save hundreds of dollars a year on gym and gas costs, and help the planet by keeping pollution down - and be in better shape than you are now, on top of it.

in my estimation, running around in circles is borderline retarded, and i can't do it. i need to attach physical activity to functionally useful behaviour, like grocery shopping.

that said, i'd have cut my transit time by 75% if i had a bike, and i hope the weather's cleared up enough to allow for it by this time next month.

i need to eat...