catherine mckenna was one of the more capable and well spoken ministers in the trudeau government, and her departure should be seen as both a disappointment and a failure within the pmo. i would have interpreted her as an acceptable potential successor to the prime minister.

when core members start dropping off like that, it's suggestive of a lack of focus in government and evidence that the whole thing is beginning to unravel. in which case, i'd say good riddance to justin trudeau, at the unfortunate expense of his far more capable supporting staff.

so, my doctor skipped town again...he seems to do that in the sunmer. 

listen, if i could find a better doctor in this city, i'd jump at it.

as it is, i'm going to go to a clinic to get these blood tests ordered, instead.

so, this might be just a tad too warm for me. 

i start feeling it around 38-39ish, so i'm ok with turning the air on when it gets above 40.

maybe.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-businesses-close-1.6082448

so, i had this huge pile of mail from the student loan office that i didn't bother opening until now, and spent hours ripping the plastic out of the envelopes in order to recycle them. why do they still put plastic in envelopes in this day and age? i mean, if your'e going to waste the paper, i can at least recycle it. but, stop sending me plastic envelopes, you assholes.

that's what i did tonight, and it's at least almost done.

it's always the little things that take the longest.

i have this giant stack of papers strewn across my floor, but it's the last thing.

and, i'm not exaggerating the destructiveness of this last persian-roman war or the depth of the dark age that set in after it, either. this is well understood, and all the sources over centuries all point it out.

one of the things that archaeologists point out is that there was a "destruction horizon" that set in previous to the arab invasions. what that means is that cities were destroyed on a large scale, and never rebuilt - the abandonment of the region by rome (which may have been shortlived in initial intent) is something you can see in the archaeology of what happened. and, so they talk about how the character of the region changed from an advanced, urban society into an agricultural society. and, then the arabs moved in - which makes sense, because they were migratory, and would have walked into open grazing land.

there were diseases that would have also contributed to the depopulation.

and, you could even suggest that this was essentially the apocalypse, in the sense that the prophets had some grasp of geopolitics. to be clear - i'm not suggesting that god destroyed the earth, and islam is the antichrist (even if it's tempting). i'm just pointing out that the prophets were ranting and raving in the context of existing geopolitical facts, and that this kind of massively destructive war between europe and iran, that would leave the levant demolished, was predictable as far back as biblical times. the fact that they saw it coming doesn't mean that prophesy was actualized so much as it demonstrates it was obvious.

that dark age, like others that occurred after similar destruction horizons (like the late bronze age collapse) takes a few centuries to lift. and, when it does, islam is this formed thing, with a set of myths built up around it - almost all of which are dated to centuries after the fact. but, you try to question that in the region, and you lose your head - and that's been true for over a thousand years. so, the myth, as it emerges from a dark age and a civilization collapse that preceded it, just perpetuates itself.

you can believe that mohummad existed if you want. i don't really care, so long as you don't try to legislate your morals on me. and, i'm able to separate these things, even if i see the causality.

but, there's really no actual good reason to, and the correct scientific answer is that he's equivalent to a fictional character, even if he did.

is the idea that the arab invasions never actually happened just revisionist nonsense?

in fact, it's standard revisionist nonsense - what they teach you nowadays is that arabs didn't conquer the region, so much as they migrated into it. that change in mindset actually isn't obscure, anymore. nobody teaches the standard "islam conquered via the sword" thing anymore, except to debunk it.

as usual, the truth doesn't lie in any specific caricature of peaceful caravans or bloodthirsty conquerors, so much as it is something in between. you have to understand the roman-persian conflict (an ancient war, that goes back to thermopylae) to understand the arab expansion, and that is difficult because the destructiveness of it set in a dark age that the rise of islam exists within. your own critical thinking skills aside, this is a period where the world's two largest and most advanced civilizations fought themselves to bloody pulps, and both caved in on themselves. islam only emerges, historically, in the wreckage of this - and as a consequence of the simultaneous collapse of these two major civilizations.

so, the story is that the muslims drove the romans out of the middle east, but if you understand the history then you know this doesn't add up because the romans had already been driven out by the persians, who were aided by a semitic revolt. what happened a few decades before the supposed life of muhammad - and this is real history, however obscured - is that there were major revolts in egypt and the levant over a type of christianity that was considered different than the type practiced in constantinople, and the persians took advantage of it by offering the heretics military support. so, there was an alliance between the heretics in the region (who were numerically dominant) and the persians (who were the sworn enemy of the greeks, and therefore of the greco-roman byzantines). it is in fact well understood that heraclius had to make some concessions to stop them from breaking off, and that those concessions would have included enough autonomy to avoid these sorts of conflicts.

the details of the exact relationship between constantinople and the heretic bishops in the semitic speaking regions will no doubt be forever shrouded in the dark age they occurred within,  but nobody doubts that the conversion to islam was inextricably linked to the christian infighting that was taking place, that there was some concept of pan-semitism and anti-roman sentiment underlying it and that the arabs could not have held the region without the active support of the semitic christians living there at the time.

once you realize that the story that was told was at best an exaggeration, the jump to complete fiction is a matter of degree. is most of it true, some of it true, almost none of it true or absolutely none of it true? and, the fact is that if you insist on a purely evidentiary approach, there's essentially no evidence for any of it, and quite a bit of evidence that almost all of it is flawed.

...but i would claim this isn't even necessary, as when something reads off as fictional bullshit, it probably is. it simply doesn't get past my bullshit detector, and it never did.