see, this is a good example of the stupid side of donald trump's foreign policy.

trump's argument for pulling troops out of germany goes something like this: because germany engages in commerce with russia, it is unfair for it to ask the united states to protect it from russian aggression. i guess that the conclusion is that if they are going to engage in commerce with russia then they should face the consequences of russian tactics.

it's trumpian in that it's a threat, an intimidation tactic. the goal is probably not to remove troops from germany, but to bully the germans into buying fracked natural gas from the united states. so, it's a bluff, and we'll see if it actually happens.

but, it still demonstrates a fundamentally untactical way to view the world that has the potential for strongly self-defeating outcomes.

years ago, the united states saw germany as a tactical subject-ally, both in the sense of it's utility as a manufacturing center and in the sense of it being a buffer state to the access of western technology; that is, it was necessary to control germany for no other reason than to keep the russians from benefiting so dramatically from the understanding of vastly superior german technology. so, the united states deployed troops in the region to protect something very valuable to it.

while commercial links of the type described by trump did not exist in the cold war, an america of the past may have actually found it convenient that so much of the energy potential of russia's productive capacity was being exported to their competitors, who are our client-state, instead. stalin would have laughed at the idea of exporting gas to western europe - that gas belonged to russia.

so, the germans might have some right to a little self-dignity in the face of trump throwing away as valuable a prize as they, on such flimsy pretexts; the existence of those troops is hardly an act of benevolence, but muscle to protect a valuable asset.

if it weren't a bluff.

https://nypost.com/2020/07/31/president-trump-takes-on-the-permanent-war-lobby-over-germany/

so, they're projecting 230K dead, now.

i'm standing by 350K, minimum.

so, i got the 2013 travel blog to convert, which is just for personal use, but it means i can close that folder and keep trying with the 2014 stuff.

two more files left to convert, and a handful of things left to update.

so, the last update that i posted was for the december music journal. i was then able to get my third trimester files converted, which right now is for personal storage. i had initially converted the full 2013 documents last week, but the chromebook crashed before i could transfer them, and i've been fighting with that now all day.

i managed to get the full 2013 deathtokoalas pdf downloaded early this morning, but i'm still struggling with the travel blog.

it also took me all day to remember the trick to get smashwords to update the pdf file (you have to unclick online version, then reclick it after). this is the only place that the 2013 deathtokoalas compilation is uploaded to, but it is the most appropriate way to present it here.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026620

this is the errata for this update:

deathtokoalas

september

1) profile picture update:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/09/i-got-little-lazy-or-was-that.html

2) potential cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/09/death-valley-in-bloom-good-potential.html

october

3) kimmel post:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/10/note-that-26-states-so-far-have-opted.html

4) delete this:
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2013/10/google-account-password-changed.html

5) demo #1 cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/10/blog-post_14.html

6) profile pic:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/10/blog-post.html

november

7) demo #2 cover art
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/demo-2-cover-art.html

8) inrisampled cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/inrisampled-cover-art.html

9) inriched cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/inriched-cover-art.html

10) inrijected cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/inrijected-cover-art.html

11) warning cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/warning-cover-art.html

december

12) delete this:
https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/2013/12/this-is-balanced-and-informative-talk.html

13) weird wave form:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/very-fucking-weird-waveform.html

14) inrimixed cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inrimixed-cover-art.html

15) inridiculous cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inridiculous-cover-art.html

16) inricycled a cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inricycled-cover-art.html

17) inricycled b cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inricycled-b-cover-art.html

18) inrimake cover art:
https://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/12/inrimake-cover-art.html

i've spent a fair amount of time park drinking, and i have a few tips if you're concerned about the cops bugging you.

it's not toronto, but in ottawa there's a large amount of wooded areas near the river that are on what i believe is ncc property that can accommodate a reasonably large group - 30-40 people. a frequent social event that came out of the local occupy encampment was bush fires in a series of clearings off the parkway. just make sure you take your garbage with you.

if larger groups clear out of the public parks proper in favour of more secluded spaces, it could open up more possibilities for smaller groups to enjoy the parks, which is more typical of normal life. while i agree that alcohol bylaws in parks are an infringement of personal liberty, there are a few ways to get around it.

i would suggest, for example, that if you bring alcohol to the park then you do so in unmarked or differently marked (even better.) containers. i tend to carry around a bottle of mountain dew with me, so i always have a flask of convenience. if some cops walk by and you're drinking a bottle of coke, they won't have anything to say to you.

but, i like this kind of thinking, and i'm curious to hear the nature of any official response to it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/public-drinking-ontario-fines-parks-1.5670177

i'm a little baked; i'm going to re-articulate the kind of main point that i'm trying to get across.

if you elect biden in 2020, he's going to pick a youngish female vp, and the assumption is that she's going to be in power within 2-3 years. so, you're essentially allowing biden to pick the 2024 candidate for you, which turns him into the lamest duck of all time. a biden administration will almost instantly transition to the vp; he'll have six months to take a few trips, and that's it. further, we're going to know who that is fairly soon.

a key question that those on the american left need to ponder is whether it makes more sense to accept the candidate biden is presenting to them, or whether they are better off waiting and trying to pick a new candidate in 2024.

you should expect almost nothing from biden's presidency itself, at all.

a biden win may just end up blunting any momentum brewing up, as people take on a false sense of victory, and misplace their faith in a conservative administration to make changes it has no intention to make.

a trump win could accelerate that momentum, and lead to a more substantive change of power the next time around.

i guess the question is this.

what is more likely, at this point?

will a biden administration pave the way for a new generation of leadership that advances the ideas of the left, or will it impede that progress, requiring the process to essentially restart?

if the latter, are we better off essentially bypassing biden and looking to start fresh in the next cycle?

i remember back in 2016 that there was this argument that you should vote for trump because, in four years, he'll create such a backlash that it'll flush in a left of centre voice, for sure. i think that the face of this argument is probably jimmy dore; it's who i remember hearing it from.

that struck me as wishful thinking. rather, it seemed obvious to me that widespread opposition against trump would lead to a weakening of the centre, and a wholesale shift of the democratic party to the right - which is how we went from carter to clinton to obama, a sequential move towards conservatism, remember. like, that was exactly what we didn't want to do, because it was exactly what got us into this mess. if the intent was to create a revolt within the democratic party, the way to do it would be to let the democratic party rule and run itself into the ground.

at this point, it seems like i was right. joe biden is basically a republican, and the movement in the party over the last four years has been a very hard shift to the right, despite what some delusional media would have you think. now, people are just hoping that a biden win will be helpful for this swath of issues, with all evidence suggesting the exact opposite. along with this has been an influx of wealthier voters into the democratic party that seem interested primarily in identity issues, which is just going to lead them on further in the same direction of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.

my primary interest is not in removing donald trump, but in recharting the cultural course in the other direction. so, how does that argument work, now?

well, if what we didn't want was a big-tent, right-of-centre democrat than we got exactly what we dreaded. so, does the argument work better now? is it better to vote for trump in hopes that four more years will lead to some substantive upheaval?

i don't know yet - we need some more data about where the democrats are going with this. if biden picks susan rice and broadcasts that he's going to bring back the neo-cons and pick up where obama left off, it could very well be that this argument from jimmy dore makes more sense now than it did then - despite the reality that i'm sure he's distanced himself from it, and is all about stopping trump now (ironically). certainly, the left has a worse choice now than it did four years ago. if he picks somebody more left-wing, it makes the choice a bit more blurry.

so, what might happen if trump wins?

well, the unrest we've been seeing around race issues, while not revolutionary in scope at the moment, could become revolutionary if it refocuses away from race and puts a greater focus on organizing around class. when will the society break under climate change? how bad is the virus going to get, and might it provide for the possibility of more radical change in four years, when the ongoing demographic changes are that much more accelerated?

if we pick biden, it could slow that revolt down by 8-12 years if it just puts in place another conservative government that people need to reject all over again. if we pick trump, now, at this juncture in time, it could pave the way for a much better democratic candidate in 2024.

i'm not going to make a prediction, i don't know. i need to see the vp pick, first. but, the names in contention are all intending to appeal to a conservative black vote, which is charting a path towards competition with the republicans over the south. they always all want the south....

but, that argument would appeal to be more compelling now than it did then. and it's something i'll be thinking about, moving forwards.

so, i've got the following files updated, but i can't get the site to convert them:

- full 2013 travel blog  [personal records]
- january 2014 deathtokoalas  [bandcamp, smashwords]
- full first reconstruction phase deathtokoalas blog [lulu, drive]
- full first reconstruction phase travel blog [lulu, drive, smashwords]

there is no january 2014 travel blog, and i was able to download the 2013 deathtokoalas blog, which is also having trouble converting at the smashwords site.

so, i'm going to stop to eat and hope everything works when i'm done.

it's extra frustrating because i had downloaded a working copy previously but i lost it when the machine crashed.

i've been sitting here for hours trying to get this to work.

as mentioned previously, there are reasons why i want to use the microsoft site to convert and not one of these shady free conversion sites, but if the microsoft site refuses to skip the conversion to docx, i don't have a choice but to resort to the shady sites.

docx is simply not an acceptable file format for me.

so, i guess i'll try again when i get through the next phase, but, for now, i need to move on.

this is such a horrible waste of my time.

upload.

view version history.

fail.

delete.

repeat.

over. and over. for hours. why?

but, on the 35456th try it will work. and all i can do is wait.

:(.

i really wish there was a way to force the microsoft server to read the file properly.

it's just random. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but something seems to flip when it does.

maybe i should make a clear post about where i stand regarding gimbutas, renfrew, cavalli-sforza and the role of religion in science.

colin renfrew is a christian fundamentalist, and i don't think it's a coincidence that his model is essentially a relabeled telling of the biblical narrative regarding the tower of babel. that is a vicious statement to level at somebody that has legitimate academic qualifications, but it would appear to be true nonetheless.

the issue was ultimately to be decided by sforza, who was able to provide an empirical test for which model was more correct, and what he discovered was that the answer to the problem is better resolved via dialectic than via competition.

while renfrew's anatolian model was shown to be inconsistent with the spread of indo-european languages, which was shown to instead conform very closely to gimbutas' kurgan model, his anatolian model was also shown to be a relatively good survey of the existing understanding of the spread of farming from an origin in turkey, which was uncovered rather clearly in the data.

that would mean that renfrew's anatolian hypothesis could be salvaged by attaching it to earlier language groups, which we can currently only find in the substratum but may have been ancestral to poorly understood languages like etruscan, pelasgian, sumerian and elamite. so, instead of renfrew's very late linguistic derivations of every language group, as per the tower of babel, you have instead a model of linguistic diffusion via farming that is strictly local in scope, and now entirely lost.

so, the chronology in the synthesis is that this neolithic expansion would have taken place first, in the years 10000-6000 bce or so and then the kurgan invasion would have come in after that, starting around 4000 bce or so.

the megaliths seem to be strongly correlated with this cultural farming expansion, and central to the existence of these people in rather profound ways.

fwiw, i think it's pretty much settled that homo sapiens probably just outbred neanderthals, and overwhelmed them with sheer numbers. there was substantive neanderthal introgression into the anatomically modern homo sapiens, but in the end they just got back-crossed out.

one would expect that a species like neanderthal, that was adapted to a cold climate with scare resources, would develop lower breeding rates than a species like sapiens, which lived in warm climates and had abundant predators. when the climate warmed up, allowing sapiens to move north, they would have carried those higher fertility rates north, and there you go.

they tell us we have some percentage of neanderthal genes depending on our existing racial genotypes, but it's never really discussed what those genes are. i would expect that we'll eventually learn that the genes we inherited from neanderthals largely have to do with adaptations to colder climates. if true, the introgression no doubt increased the fitness of the donor species.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2003/09/22/bones-from-french-cave-show-neanderthals-cro-magnon-hunted-same-prey/

i'm going to suspend disbelief around the evidence, and wonder if it upholds the idea of neanderthals worshipping bears, in the first place. there's quite a bit of reason to expect early hominids to have had some kind of perceived spiritual relationship with wild bears, whatever one thinks of the arrangement of the bone fragments.

i've previously pointed to lions as the perfect representation of the word monster, but for humans living in more northern climates, the best example of a monster would clearly be a bear. like humans, bears demonstrate a large amount of bipedalism, to the point that they seem vaguely hominid. if i didn't know what a bear was, and i saw it coming at me, i might wonder if it was some kind of zombie apocalypse or something. further, i would imagine that any species of hominid in a bear's range would have experienced a large amount of predation at the hands of those bears until relatively recently, meaning living humans may very well have had memories of having their children or other family members eaten by these monsters that roamed around them.

my understanding is that humans eventually developed some very specific rituals around the killing of bears; there appears to have been a procedure that involved puncturing their lungs with arrows, to make sure they were really dead. this suggests that early hominids may have ultimately seen bears as dangerous competitors for the niche of head omnivore, rather than as superiors. one wonders if any observed ritual behaviour around the bears may have been to disturb their spirits, in an attempt to try to stop them from returning.

https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-the-cave-bear/

there's a different story like this every few years. what it seems like is that the stones have multiple origin points.

these megaliths are all over the place, and one wonders if that is generally true, and maybe provides fresh evidence for the hypothesis that the purpose of the monuments was as a meeting point. if there were multiple origin points, it could be that there were multiple groups involved in making the monuments, and they could recognize a place where related clans came together for celebration or trade, or even be treaty or territorial markers.

let's take a step back.

most people probably don't realize that stonehenge is merely one example of a type of very ancient building structure that seems to have originated with the neolithic revolution and spread with farming from modern turkey across europe. a wide variety of evidence suggests that a caucasian, but not indo-european, people migrated into europe many thousands of years before the kurgan invasion brought the existing languages and r1* genotypes into the region. these people would have held out on britain longer than anywhere else, but the functions of the megaliths they built on the island are foreign in origin and purpose.

if it could be established that the stones came from many places, it could provide for a loose model as to how different communities in this farming culture, which spread over the entire area that caucasians are indigenous to today, carried out certain relations with each other.

https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/world/2020/07/30/stonehenge-discovery-origins-large-sarsen-stones-finally-traced/5547629002/

i'm going to be getting back to work tonight...it's just a few more things to upload, and then i can get to 2014.

ok.

so, i got most of the cleaning i wanted done and picked up a bit more pot yesterday, to smoke through the rest of the rolling tobacco with. i also picked up some edibles to experiment with - and these are for experimenting, not for storing, so i will consume them relatively soon. the strain i picked up was royal highness by good supply, which is a company that has been selling the cheapest pot in the store for a while now, but always had slightly lower thc numbers; not this time, so i tried it. it's actually a little closer to the kind of buzz i'm used to, which is a bit of a nice surprise. it's good to know that the price tag is really not a market mechanism (and it rarely is, in reality).

the edibles i picked up were a chocolate bar sectioned into 4 pieces, with 2 mg each, and 2 gummies, at 5 mg each. that will allow me to try the 2s a couple of times to get used to it, before deciding if i think the 5s are a good idea or not - and ultimately whether i think looking at 10s is a good idea.

i'm approaching edibles more like i'd approach mushrooms, for now, which means i need to make sure i'm in a comfortable space before i try it. that may be overly cautious (my experience with edibles has been that it has knocked me out, but i don't know what doses i consumed), and i may end up wasting some of the chocolate, but i think it's best to ease my way in.

if this works out, i'll be happy about it; pot has been my last excuse for lingering levels of smoking for years. i've been waiting for a better solution for a long time, now. let's hope it's this easy.

so, that's my new diet, that i'm going to try. officially, this will be my daily intake, but i'm sure i won't be able to actually eat this much.

a) fruit bowl:
- 1 kiwi
- 1 banana
- 10-11 raspberries
- 20-25 blueberries
- 5-6 strawberries
- 1 medium-to-large scoop of cherry ice cream
- 250-350 ml of high-fortification vanilla soy milk

b) omelette:
- 4 eggs, cooked in olive oil margarine
- 50 g of wholesale genoa salami, pre-microwaved in slices and chopped
- 1 medium tomato (smaller than the ones for spaghetti, so that's a cost factor i didn't consider)
- 1/2 a red pepper
- 50 g of full fat marble block cheese
- 2 slices of rye or pumpernickel toast, with olive oil margarine
- 350-450 ml of real, but fortified, apple juice

in practice, i will probably make the omelette 4-5 times a week, and have fruit bowls daily.

if i know i'm only eating every couple of days, it makes the most sense to ensure that i eat the most nutritious meal i can every time, rather than pretend i'm going to eat every day, then work out averages to ensure proper requirements.

you know, i'm just looking at the components of these two meals and wondering why i don't just eat omelettes every day. this is eggs v tomato sandwiches....

bread <-------> bread
margarine <-----> mayo
salami <------>salami
cheese <----->cheese
tomato <------->tomato
red pepper
eggs

all i'm doing is cutting out the eggs & red peppers, which are two of the more nutritious components of the omelette.

i started eating tomato sandwiches in early 2013 because i was getting some truly delicious, firm, bright red greenhouse tomatoes in these plastic containers at the giant tiger on wellington, in ottawa. i just got hooked on them and brought the habit to windsor where the tomatoes are much bigger but a little less tasty. i eventually decided to move to the pasta to boost the calorie count (which didn't work out, and just led to me eating less and screwing up my calculations). so, i decided to go back to the tomato sandwiches, to get back to eating more eggs.

but, why bother?

i have to finish the open package of pasta first, but i think i'm going to omelettes full time.

what's the cost of this meal?

1) bread - $0.50
2) salami - $0.50   [wholesale]
3) cheese - $0.50
4) tomato ~ $0.50
5) 1/2 red pepper ~ $1.00
6) 4 eggs - $1.03
7) margarine - $0.10
========================
$4.13

hrmmn.

& i do recall the price being an issue, now that i think about it. the fried eggs i've been eating would be $1.50 less, which is $2.63

tomato sandwich costs:

1) bread - $0.50
2) mayo - $0.25
3) salami - $0.50
4) cheese - $0.50
5) tomato ~ $0.50
6) hot sauce - $0.25
=================
$2.50

pasta costs:

1) pasta - $0.20
2) red pepper ~ $1.00
3) tomato ~ $0.50
4) salami - $0.50
5) caesar - $1.00
6) cheese - $2.00
7) hot sauce - $0.25
=============
$5.75 ~ 2*2.88

if i had pasta six days of the week and eggs once a week it would be 6*2.88 + 2.63 = $19.91/week.

19.91/4.13 = 4.82.

so, if i were to have eggs five days a week (and just fruit the other two), that's $20.65, not including the cost of fruit. 7*4.13 =$29. while i know i'm not going to actually eat seven days a week for any lengthy period, this applies to the other numbers, as well. so, this would be a 50% increase in the cost of food, for me.

if i alternate every day, i'd have seven of each over a two week period, so 0.5*7*(2.50+4.13) =$23.21/week; (7/2)*(2.5+2.63) = $17.96. the second number is no doubt why i did it. and, if you take the salami out of the sandwich (or alternate between tomato sandwiches and salami melts, as i did initially) that $17.96 will go down even more, too.

i've been thinking about this all day now, and i think it really is a contradiction - there's not really a good way to move to this for nutritional reasons without paying for it. if i want to do this, it's going to cost me a bit; it's the unavoidable trade-off. i'm good at finding sneaky tricks to absolve contradictions via dialectic, but there isn't one this time. good food costs money; that's how it is.

so, i'm going to give moving to a full egg diet a shot and see what the outcome is. for right now, at the height of the summer, i'm only eating anything at all every day or two. and, i'll see how i'm feeling about this in a month or two - if it's working out, if i want to tweak it.

see, i'm pretty soft on crime in general, but when i say i don't believe in punishment, and that incarceration should be a mental health concern, you have to realize this comes with a wholesale discarding of much of the existing legal precedents.

iirc, the literature suggests four valid reasons to incarcerate somebody, but i can only really accept one of them, and that is to protect the safety of the community. yet, in doing so, i take that single reason extremely seriously.

while i understand that the existing precedent suggests that punishment for multiple crimes should not be excessive, if we flip the issue over and look at it from a community safety perspective, multiple crimes of the same sort over a period of time becomes an issue of grave concern. this person does not appear to have made a mistake, but rather repeatedly carried out the same behaviour. that suggests some habituation to it, and the need for exceedingly strong intervention to correct it.

permanent incarceration via locking somebody in a cage is not a particularly good way to correct for behaviour, granted. but, in situations where it is decided that intervention is unlikely to be successful, it becomes necessary to protect the community.

that said, i would envision the prisons of the future to look more like enclosed communities than torture chambers. if we decide that people need to be removed from society to prevent them from harming others, that should not prevent them from being able to exist in some kind of relative comfort.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-reduced-sentence-for-serial-sex-offender-matthew-mcknight-spurs-uproar/

listen, there's no doubt that trump has made some terrible foreign policy decisions as well, but i'd view pulling out of the who as less concerning than redeploying to the middle east; you gotta take a weighted average, here. biden will do some things i'm ok with, but he's also going to do some things that enrage me.

but, what jumped out at me reading the article was to wonder if a biden presidency might actually be best implemented if it reverses the contemporary roles of presidency and vice presidency. that is, maybe biden is better off letting the vp do the speeches and appearances and stuff, while he tends to legislative priorities. maybe the vp with senatorial experience that he really wants is actually himself.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7243577/joe-biden-foreign-policy/

due to how small most of the numbers are on the chart, it would probably be more useful for him to present the data not as probabilities but as upper bounds.

so, if he says the probability is 0.6%, and the margin of error is 6%, then he should present the chart as <6.6%.

but, he might find, then, that essentially all of the entries look the same.

i think if you saw the margins of error here, you'd be a little concerned.

i toyed with doing a little bit of this at the start, but the amount of data available here hasn't really allowed for me to put much confidence in it. we know the numbers we're getting are pretty flawed. that said, it is reasonable to consult a variety of sources when you make a decision - just draw in the error bars, yourself, when you do.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/statistician-worried-back-to-school-plan-risky-1.5671012

with the fat shaming, my main irritant is people that find it very important to try to undo a general media bias against the acceptability of being overweight. this is a movement that seems to have come out of attempts to minimize unrealistic advertising to young girls, which i agree with to a degree, but in this case has been taken too far, and flipped over on it's axis; in a misguided attempt to stop girls from being coerced into being underweight, they've embraced an even more unhealthy lifestyle, and an even more negative message. media messaging should be focused on promoting healthy bmis as normal, and encouraging everybody to remain healthy.

it follows that media biases that demonstrate an aversion to obesity ought to be as welcome as media biases that reject the anorexic images we once saw dominate media, that these things should be seen as equivalently undesirable.

some coercion, here, is to be desired, i think.

i'm also imagining a vigilante mask police that ends up spreading the virus by going around and yelling at people.

sometimes it's best to leave things alone.

see, in principle, the question is if this works or not. it's an informal means of social control, and i'm in principle in favour of that.

perhaps i should clarify some of the remarks i made about fat shaming. i would certainly not recommend randomly attacking fat people walking by on the street for no reason; if my comments were misinterpreted to suggest i am proposing that we all go out and yell "fatass!" at every behemoth that comes across our path, i do apologize, as that was not my intent. rather, i would advocate that fat shaming be done in more intimate settings, by loved ones and health professionals, that have the person's best interests in mind. further, something that utilizes a little bit of wit is probably helpful; you don't want to depress this person too much, as that will just lead to more eating.

i think there's a different psychology to mask wearing, though. it's sort of a reversal of the situation, as it's usually going to be healthy people that don't want to wear the masks, and people more likely to catch it that want to enforce mask wearing. as a non mask-wearer, i can tell you that i'm not particularly concerned about the opinions of people that want me to wear a mask, and i'm just as happy to avoid them; part of the calculus built into my decision to not wear a mask is that i'm reasonably distant from people to begin with, and reality at the moment is that i'm just not walking into many high risk situations.

but, in the hypothetical scenario where i was living with a high risk individual and refused to wear a mask (in fact, if i was living with a high risk individual, i would without question be considerate enough to take all relevant precautions), due to some temporary deficit in thought, i would be likely to respond to an emotional plea that laces into me for putting that person at risk.

as with any means of informal social control, execution and context are key.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/bill-gates-suggests-calling-out-non-mask-wearers.html

he has a conflict of interest on this issue and should avoid making policy prescriptions.

i would vote for bill gates, though. this was posted on dec 12, 2016.

---

bill gates v donald trump?

i'm in.

revenge of the nerds.

this would be epic.

"i come forward to represent the interests of rationality and science against the dark forces of magical thinking. i bring forth realism; i champion data. we shall always follow the evidence."

meanwhile, trump gets to play high school bully to his most advanced desires.

"look at him. he's a fucking loser. he's got four-eyes glasses. maybe we could hire him to run our email servers, or something? i hear he's good at that. loser. i bet i know what's microsoft about him."

he would then proceed to place an L over his head, and walk menacingly towards him.

and, you could imagine the speech you'd get from gates.

"i've been called a loser my whole life. and, yet look at what i've accomplished?"

i'm not sure the nerds will win, in the end. but, i'd still like to watch the game.

postnot broadcast:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020/08/it-should-be-noted-that-bill-gates-is.html

it should be noted that bill gates is both intellectually and financially invested very heavily in distance learning.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-explains-how-he-would-fight-coronavirus-if-he-was-president-dont-mislead-people-130857486.html

it's just a reminder that the real mob bosses in new york were always the dutch aristocracy.

those italian immigrants were just street agents.

wait.

so, they're lacing the opiates with an agent that counters the effect of the antidote, now?

so, they're trying to kill you? doesn't sound good for business....well, unless the model is to steal your money quickly, and snuff you out before they get busted.

there's been rumours for as long as opiates have existed that the whole thing is a population control scheme, and the whole crux of the opium wars, as driven by the harriman family, provides the only leaked model for how such a thing may be implemented. i remember my stomach sinking, the first time i read this:

In May 2007, Anthony Harriman, the senior director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council....

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawa-officials-brace-for-perfect-storm-as-covid-19-contributes-to-increased-drug-overdoses

so, i've noticed this happen a couple of times, now.

if i logout for a few hours, the posts start broadcasting again for a short period, and then they stop.

are they getting intercepted? is that what's happening?

listen, pigs - i broadcast the posts to myself (that is, email them to myself, from the blogger interface; there's a "send updates" feature at the site) to ensure i have a record of them. if anybody else is receiving the broadcasts, i'm not aware of them. but, this is very useful to me for record-keeping purposes.

i actually don't care if you want to receive updates. it's set up that way - that's the point. subscribe here:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

or, send me an email address to add to the updates list. it's not necessary to physically intercept the transmission; i'm intending for it to reach an audience.

but, if you must be a spy, realize that you're not only copying the information for your own records, but also preventing me from receiving the email; that is, i'm not getting copies of these updates because whatever you're doing is not letting them through to me.

i would appreciate it if you'd correct your surveillance software, so it's not preventing emails from reaching me.

as an aside, if i was actually some kind of bad person, the fact that you're making it so obvious would not be working out for you - i'd have dropped this line of communication, by now.

let's talk about kids, as one example.

we know that the initial strains of the virus have had very little effect on kids - they're not invincible, but, compared to more lethal threats like the flu, this virus is of least concern. that is, if you have kids, you should be more concerned about them getting the flu than you are about them getting covid-19, so long as your sole concern is the kids.

for now.

now, let's say that a mutation appears that makes the virus more lethal in kids. maybe it's producing virus at a faster rate. maybe it's killing cells at a faster rate. maybe it finds a better way to trick the immune system. the opposite may happen too, but let's suppose the worst case - let's say the next wave starts killing kids at a rate more comparable to the flu, even.

and, let's say your kid gets hit with the second wave, without having defended itself against the first one.

if, at that point, your child had already defended itself against the initial strain of the virus, it would have developed some level of immunity to the new strain; as it is, your child is now being forced to defend itself against a greater threat, without any defenses at all.

now, you can argue that this isn't a fair argument, because we could have stamped the thing out if we had tried better, but the level of naivete underlying that is too great to accept as reasonable error, and we are nonetheless past that point, now. we should all be able to agree, with confidence, that this virus will not be stamped out, now.

as an adult nearing the age of 40, i'm getting to that middle point. i don't have another 40 years to bump into this thing and beat it effortlessly; i have 10-20, depending on my health. give it to me now, please.

in a real sense, what the state is doing here is a kind of helicopter parenting, and the results are going to be more or less the same.

if you oppose helicopter parenting (and you should.), then you should oppose what they're doing for the same reasons.

if it was ebola, or aids-gone-airborne, or some other deadlier thing, i'd have a different story.

but it isn't.

and, you will suffer from your decisions, if you make the wrong choices, in the long run.

so, it's not that i don't think proper mask use is going to work to some minimal effect if all the sufficient clauses are met, although i'll argue they're overrated, and their efficacy is being overstated. it's that i don't want to protect myself from the virus - i want to expose myself, and develop immunity naturally.

and, it's not that i don't think that vaccines will be effective, up to the most recent strain of the virus. it's that i want to beat the virus on my own.

so, the messaging around the situation is finally starting to change to what analytically-minded people realized was obvious from the start. i'm starting to hear more talking heads talk about the permanency of the existence of the virus, and the who is warning to think in terms of decades when planning.

so, we're not going to get rid of this. ever. it's here, forever, and you have to get used to it.

now, i want you to carefully listen to what i'm going to say next because it really is crucial in understanding how this is going to affect your health moving forwards.

this was my argument from the start:

1) you can't wipe out a virus with social distancing or mask use, and it was crazy to ever think you could. no, they have not wiped it out in asia, they've just postponed the inevitable, and now they're stuck - they have no way out of lockdown, and will be in fascism forever. but, they don't have a cultural history of barbarism and anarchy like white people do. they just don't. they really will tolerate all kinds of tyranny that we just won't stand for, here. so, it's not that asia has won the fight against anything, it's that they decided they're happy enough to live in a fascist reality, anyways - they will still be in this lockdown 40 years from now, if they don't find some kind of breaking point. and, new zealand is in the same mess (although australia has now been hit.).

2) because you can't wipe out the virus, you are better getting it when you are young, and perhaps fight off a few mutations of it. that way, it won't kill you 50-60 years from now.

3) i've always supported vaccination for the elderly, but due to how widespread this disease is, the vaccines will have short shelf-lives. maybe it's not exactly seasonal like the flu; maybe it's every 2-3 years. but, if you just to do this via vaccination, you're going to have to get vaccinated over and over and over and....which is going to create a culture of dependency on the vaccine, like exists with the flu. you know those healthy 23 year olds that insist on getting flu vaccines, then die from the common cold at 28? the state got mixed up in it's projection, but it shouldn't be encouraging this kind of thing - it should be sending young people out to get sick.

the logic you need to follow is this:

if you are weak, protect yourself and wait for the vaccine; otherwise, preventing yourself from exposure is just harming yourself in the long run. you will run into this virus eventually, and if you've never seen it before at 75, it will likely kill you. if you've fought off ten different strains by the time you get there, you'll have a far better chance of winning in the long run.

it's a perfect example of the tendency we've developed to coddle, and we don't want to see the ramifications of that play out.

for the zillionth time, protect the weak.

but, otherwise?

you need to think of this more like throwing your kids or yourself in the deep end, and sinking or swimming.

you don't want to deny yourself exposure to this when your immune system can handle it. you want to get this now, not when you're too old to fight it.

this is from 2013 - a long time ago.

but the way the drug is being used for covid patients is the same as it is being used for lupus patients.

does dr. fauci have any comments to make about a study such as this?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3674253/

i'm not dr. fauci's peer, and i'm not going to pretend i am.

but, this is my opinion of his position.

this isn't a situation where a randomized study makes any sense. the study itself indicates that multiple treatments were used, and assigns the different results to that fact; fauci seems to think that's a bad thing, but it actually represents real-world use, as this drug probably wouldn't work as a sole treatment option. it's only going to be useful when you see patients fall into the cytokine storms. randomized trials are just going to lead to the drug being used in situations that are not actually appropriate.

so, his claim may sound convincing, but it isn't - it demonstrates that he doesn't really understand the situation very well. it seems like he's trying to rebut the second study rather than the first - but, as stated, i would expect the second study (the prophylactic one.) to fail.

i don't know what he's doing. maybe he's embarrassed and humiliated and digging in and hoping it works out. maybe he's legitimately confused.

but, i think an analysis and deconstruction by his actual peers would be highly useful, in context.

i mean, if you're going to tell me to pick between peer review and one guy, i'm going to pick peer review.

sorry.

"he's the country's leading..."

it doesn't matter; argument from authority. fallacy. wrong.

can we peer review dr fauci's testimony?

thanks.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/house-committee-coronavirus-1.5670440

how many people had tweets deleted or accounts restricted over challenging an article at cnn that insisted people were losing immunity?

it's surreal. truly.

our school systems are failing to teach basic science, and the media is just taking advantage of it to maximize profit - while the social media gatekeepers and government agencies tell us to relax and trust their lies.

it's a perfect dystopia, isn't it?

there's only one way out - educate yourself. do your own research. use critical reasoning; do not suspend disbelief.

only you are in charge of your mind.

be vigilant.

it took way too long for them to write this article, but it's better late than never.

read that and then compare it to the bullshit you've been reading in your twitter feed, for what? weeks? months?

my stepmother is (was? i don't even know. i guess she's over 65 now, anyways.) a bone marrow specialist with the red cross for some time, working specifically in the oncology department at the cbs. she ended up getting fired for harassing a colleague; i guess she couldn't throw the colleague out of the house. so, i admit i cheated a little. but, it's, like, introductory bio, guys...

i have a tendency to attack people for being ignorant fucking idiots, but i'm a patient person. you don't know this; maybe you should, but you don't. fine.

but, how some of this garbage got published at big sites like cnn, with no apparent attempt to bother checking the facts before generating the clickbait, is beyond me. there's dozens of articles by big organizations that made somebody a lot of money, but really, really just shouldn't exist.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/opinion/coronavirus-antibodies-immunity.html

wait.

pence's wife is named karen.

ahahahahahahahaha.

ahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

it's a shame there won't be any large gatherings between now and then, because i can just imagine a room full of mostly black people at an hbcu or something yelling...

KAREN! KAREN! KAREN!

or, how about this

SWEAR-IN, KAREN!

oh, it's fucking dodd.

that explains it.

dodd strikes again, apparently, with the dodd prank act, i guess?

....and, in other news, representative karen bass has reportedly filed to change her name to schmaren bass. hope that works out for her.

although, if she does end up in the white house, biden'd better be sure he doesn't break the law, eh?

i've never heard of karen bass, and i know nothing remotely about her.

but, it's a joke, right?

the name's a non-starter. is nobody over there reading twitter, or what?

so, if biden picks a black woman called karen, how long before black america spontaneously combusts, in a warp in space-time?

i'm imagining the speech. after five or ten minutes of empty pandering and talking about how important black americans are to the campaign, he stops and says.

so, i've picked my candidate, and we think that black americans will love her. her name is....

(pause)

KAREN....

...and, then all of a sudden, the earth starts shaking, the lights start blinking, and anybody that were to look towards the sky at that exact moment would have seen swirls of colours in the night sky, for that split second.

and, then that's it.

biden is gone. and, black america has imploded, gone to some other dimension within our vast & poorly understood cosmos.

well, this is nice to see.

hey, you give me some good news every fucking once in a while, and i'll post it, eh?

https://news.ontario.ca/mma/en/2020/07/canada-and-ontario-invest-in-affordable-housing-in-kingston.html

one thing that is probably true, though, is that the babylonians had more actual raw data than we do.

we have actual sunspot data, for example, going back a few hundred years.

they probably had thousands of years worth of observation, by the end of the process. those observations are probably lost, but (ignoring errors, like procession) they may have helped them understand cycles that we're really only able to guess with math. they probably recorded celestial objects we've never seen, and saw them come through more than once.

it's actually one of the great tragedies of history, and we can only hope we find something useful, eventually.

it's a fair enough critique; i may have been a little anachronistic in my language. i guess this clarifies what i meant to say.

but, this also helps to explain two things:

1) why the islamic authorities were so uncomfortable with the math & astronomy going on
2) the existence of certain strains of islam (like sufi.) that are kind of kabbalistic in scope. that is, there has continually been a synthesis of islam with astrology happening under the radar, and that's what they were trying to stop.

we had the same bullshit in europe. it's known now that newton, for example, was an avid alchemist - and that he spent a large amount of his life trying to convert base metals into gold. but, he had to keep it underground, or he'd have ended up dead.

and, if you look into it, the whole kepler/copernicus crowd had astrological streaks of it's own.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/babylonians-scientists/462150/

ei is in need of reform and has been for a very long time; it's stuck in the 50s, in a lot of ways.

so, this is beyond necessary, and i hope they make it better.

but, my confidence is fairly low. let's hope they prove me wrong.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7239834/cerb-recipient-move-ei/

personally, i don't carry a phone.

you might want to think about that for a little while.

i highly advise against downloading this or otherwise interacting with it in any way at all.

in the end, you might get arrested for alcohol consumption.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/07/31/health-canadas-covid-alert-app-goes-live-friday/

they're trying to shut the bars down.

that's what they want.

according to the official tallies, cases are supposedly going down. so, why are they targeting bars & restaurants, at this point in the process?

well, they just passed a hijab law for kids, with the apparent purpose of habituating them to mask use. i mean, just think about you're doing  - you're telling 10 to 15 year-old kids to wear masks at school. what's going to happen?

1) they're only going to wear them when there are adults looking over them.
2) they're going to grab the front of the mask repeatedly (defeating the point)
3) they're going to grab each other's masks and play games with them. there will be kids that have their masks stolen.

..and you can follow my train of thought from there.

these are actually exactly the reasons that health experts hesitated to even talk about masks for so long - if you don't wear them right, they'll make things worse.

on top of that, you're talking about kids in very close quarters. if actual medical masks may have some marginal benefit in stopping spread in spaces like malls, hijab-type cloth masks are going to be entirely useless in stopping the spread amongst kids in close proximity to each other.

and, you're not going to succeed in keeping kids apart from each other without exceedingly strict measures that nobody is going to tolerate.

it's a crazy idea, for any reason other than to try to habituate. that's what they're doing. deal with it.

and, what's next on the list?

alcohol.

muslims forbid any consumption of alcohol.

are you starting to get it yet?

and props to the first restaurant owner that hands out adult diapers in protest.

resign immediately, mr. ford.

your authority is no longer in force.

i mean, the rules are just getting hilarious at this point...

lol.

props to the first person that shits his pants in his seat in protest of the requirements.

they're breaking their own laws.

doug ford needs to resign, immediately. by breaking the rule of law in such an absurd fashion, he has defaulted on his previous mandate. he no longer has any authority, and no laws he passes have any force. 

we need an election, immediately.

in the mean time, how do you deal with this kind of fascism?

1) non-compliance, in whatever form it takes.

2) civil disobedience.

3) targeted legal action.

while i have no interest in sitting in a bar without live music, i will not be abiding by these rules, and i dare you to do something about it.

https://www.sootoday.com/coronavirus-covid-19-sault-ste-marie-news/bars-restaurants-now-required-to-keep-customer-logs-for-covid-19-contact-tracing-2605541

btw.

babylon > baghdad.

if you're wondering.

and, why do i call the "islamic golden age" a "babylonian renaissance"?

because that's what it was.

while muslims like to take credit for this now, the islamic authorities were actually not particularly impressed by all of the star gazing and astronomy that was going on and acted more to suppress it than to support it. the names that have come down to us are almost all kurdish. the contribution that islam played into this was really on the level of ending the damn war, which allowed the ancestral populations (which were semitic, not persian) to kind of regain themselves.

so, they built a city called baghdad on top of the ruins of babylon, but it just turned back into babylon, and picked back up where the babylonians had left off, in staring out at the stars and trying to figure it out.

the babylonians were, in their day, master astronomers, and we have stories of pythagoras traveling to babylon to meet the "sages" there for good reason; large amounts of what we call greek math are probably ultimately babylonian, in origin. we just can't trace it back; instead, we get these dead ends at the greek. more often than not, those dead ends are going to go back to babylon.

and, that's what happened - a return of babylonian science, in the city they built on top of the wreckage.

baghdad was eventually decimated by a grandson of genghis khan, and brother of kublai khan, and i'm in the camp that argues they never fully recovered.

i've been over this before, but briefly.

while there have been some attempts to link kurdish ethnogenesis further back in time, both the origin of the term (which means 'tent-dweller' or 'wanderer'.....which i'm interpreting as refugee) and the proposed date of linguistic differentiation from persian suggest that kurdish ethnogenesis did not actually take place until well after the islamization of the fertile crescent. stated very tersely, when the dust settled after the major shift in power that happened after the arabs moved north and (1) kicked the romans out and (2) flat out conquered the persians, there were all of a sudden all of these iraqi persians living in the mountains, and there's really not a story as to how that happened - kind of like how there's really not a story about how we ended up with a really large amount of jews in eastern europe.

we know that there was nobody called kurds in the region during the classical period, and we know that persians had been in control of iraq almost continually at that point for roughly 1500 years, with the only substantive break occurring in alexander's lifetime; the post-alexandrian seleucid state was eventually overrun by parthians from central asia, but it was essentially a continuation of the achaemenid state. so, the persians had a very deep history in iraq at the time of what was initially an arabic military occupation. so, we know that there was no such thing as a 'kurd' in any of the literature from the time of cyrus (c. 550 bce) until roughly the year 900 ce, and we know that the persians dominated the region for almost all of that period, until about 650 ce (roughly, and the dates are actually a little blurry).

then, we have these kurds living in the mountains like refugees, speaking a new dialect of persian that just pops into history just right then. further, we have a lot of muslims in mesopotamia, all of a sudden, living in baghdad rather than ctesiphon or seleucia (initially babylon). over time, we see these kurds develop as a kind of ruling elite, as well. if you look into it, you realize that the entire babylonian renaissance that was centered on baghdad was really kurdish, rather than arabic, in origin.

i don't even know how you'd convincingly prove the hypothesis, but it just seems obvious to me to put two and two together and deduce that quite a lot of iraqi persians must have ended up in the mountains around the time, as a way to evade what was happening in the city, and surrounding areas. and, all you have to do is look at what happened in the isis invasion to get a kind of rough idea of how that must have happened - the arab groups come in from the south in a rage, and the persians must have sought higher ground to get out. a few hundred years later, they have a new dialect and a new identity. or, sort of; if you can interpret being called a refugee as an identity.

what that means is that, if i'm right, the kurds are essentially a 1300 year old iraqi persian refugee population.

yes...

1300 years of being refugees in the mountains.

are ashkenazi jews really jews though?

the y-dna says that, yes, they are. the mt-dna suggests some admixture with indo-european types, although that's also true of mizrahi jews, due to the massive influence of the persian empire on hebrew ethnogenesis.

the science on this advanced rapidly about 15 years ago or so, when the technology finally allowed for it, and it's not really an open question. but, it's never really been clear how so many jews got so far north, and i'll admit having looked into the khazar thing...

there really does appear to have been a jewish empire parked roughly around the ukraine in the dark ages, and the story as to how they became jewish has not come down to us in any form other than myth. the story is that the khazar king converted to judaism to act as a buffer between the recently converted christian russians (they didn't actually convert for a long time after that) and the more seriously muslim caliphate to the south of the caucasus. i can't prove that didn't happen, but nobody really takes the legend all that seriously. so, nobody really knew for sure until they did the testing...

the thing is that eastern european jews don't actually look turkish, either. the turks are a central asian people that really have strongly eastern phenotypes. so, while the jewish empire was there, and for several centuries, it was actually observationally obvious that all these eastern european jews couldn't really be all that turkish, either.

they must have just migrated north sometime around the year 700. that would have been about the same time that the caliphate came in, and introduced coercive rules to stimulate conversion.

i have a similar hypothesis with the kurds, who show up out of nowhere at the same time, and the curiously close genetic relationship we've uncovered between kurds and jews is maybe kind of illuminating in that respect. both populations seem to have become migrant at about the same time, and apparently as refugees of the muslim takeover, after the conclusion of the lengthy roman-persian wars that ended the classical period.

but, yes - they are genetically jewish, even if they really don't look like it. and, it's just that curve tending to the limit, over time.

i used the example because it was the most obvious i could find...

i know there's this scare-mongering in these white supremacist groups.

"we're all going to end up half-brown! oh no!"

nah.

it's the other way around.

so, does that mean that if you're darker-skinned and move to canada then your descendants will lighten up over time.

yes, probably.

behold, the polish jew:

his (relatively recent) ancestors were much darker than he is, for sure.

"but skin pigment is caused by latitude and sun exposure"

well...

if you were to take sequential samples of italians over many thousands of years, you may find that they have a tendency towards a browner skin colour, as that phenotype repeatedly wins in that latitude.

but, if you were born in modern day germany, and your ancestors were from russia, and you migrate south to italy in a very large group of other similar looking people, you're bringing in dna that adapted to a very different climate, and it's going to take quite a while for that to get absorbed.

it works the other way, too - if you take darker skinned people and plonk them on the booted peninsula, their descendants may lighten up eventually, if they're lucky, but it's going to take quite a long time.

italians and spaniards seem to be roughly about where they ought to be, in terms of pigmentation, relative to other people at the same latitude, at this time. but, i believe the last major waves of migration to the peninsula were vikings and arabs, both pushing 1000 years ago, at this point.

immediately before the roman period, there would have been a large scale migration of very light-skinned people from over the alps, and that migration would be responsible for what we call the roman republic. when rome fell apart, you had germans from the north and arabs from the south meeting each other at that latitude, and the result would have been an infusion of darker skin, which has actually since lightened up - which is why it is both true that italians from the classical period look whiter than they do today and south italians from the dark ages look darker than they do, today.

if you look at a map more closely, you see this kind of thing all over the place, even with indigenous groups. people in the area north of china look more like people to the south of china than the chinese, themselves, because that was the direction of that migration. if you check back in a thousand years, that might change, but it takes some time to adjust....

likewise, european-americans are going to end up with the same skin tone as native americans, eventually. but, we're a few hundred years in, so far, and still waiting.

so, you need to be careful with that - the curve tends to a limit over time, but it's always going to be short-term migration that is dominant, overall.

when the romans started off, they would have looked more like modern day swiss or austrians than modern day italians. the italic languages are thought to have evolved alongside the celtic languages in modern day switzerland, before moving south into italy. but celtic and italic actually are thought to have split rather late, so the wide swath of western europe including spain, france, southern germany, italy and the british isles would have emerged from the bronze age roughly homogeneous in culture and language.

over time, the pax romana, which set in after augustus, led to large scale migration all over the place. the romans also brought in massive numbers of slaves from everywhere they conquered, and freed a large number of them in the end. genetic studies have demonstrated a major footprint from the orontes, which was noted in the classical literature as well.

so, rome changed over time. but, for the proper roman period, ending in 476, the emperors would have mostly been startlingly, pasty white.

if you want to know what a roman proper looked like, zuckerberg is actually pretty much spot on.

https://www.quora.com/Were-Roman-emperors-all-white

seems like i'm not the first person to think this through, huh?

i've noticed that about zuckerberg before.

the guy looks like a roman statue, straight up.

listen, though.

i'm an advocate of democracy, and in ways so intense you've probably never even imagined it, but history teaches us fairly clearly that the type of fake "democracy" that exists in the united states always ends up in dictatorship, in the end.

the american system almost seems like it intended for an augustus to take over, eventually.

i don't think trump's the guy, though. too old. past his due date...

i want to flip the conspiracy theory over, though.

trump talks about the opposition rigging the election when he's in the process of rigging it, himself. it's a deflection tactic.

the thing is that we just watched biden steal the primary.

Everyone knows it. Smart people know it. Stupid people may not know it

he's right.

this is going to end up as two old, corrupt white guys trying to steal the election by outcheating each other.

well......

just watch him, right?

if he were to delay the election by executive order or presidential proclamation (probably the latter.) at more or less the last minute, then challenge it at every level, he would no doubt be able to delay it for months.

1) the court is going to eventually rule on an election date. who knows when. but, that might be all he wants.
2) i couldn't imagine him winning an election that he delays by executive order, and then has overturned by the courts.

the more pressing issue is how self-identified conservatives are going to react to such a thing, and it would no doubt be pyrrhic, to say the least.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/donald-trump-united-states-election-delay-voter-fraud-1.5669270

would i have supported the american revolution?

no, i probably wouldn't have.

the american revolution is a little more complicated to me than the french revolution, which i would have supported very strongly (i may have even written a book tearing down edmund burke). i suspect i would have found myself in canada fairly quickly, but i can't say for sure; it may have depended a lot on what class i found myself born into.

france & russia are no brainers, for me, though - i would have been fully in support of all of the death and all of the carnage, as necessary to overthrow the ancien regime.

if i had a time machine, would i consider transporting myself back in time and bombing providence before it got going?

no.....because i'm not travelling at the speed of light with any bombs.

if i was in england in the 16th & 17th centuries, would i have argued in favour of bombing the puritan settlers?

i'd have a hard time making that argument....because bombs hadn't been developed yet.

cannons, maybe.

but, given the context, i'd have been more likely to encourage as many of them to leave england as possible; i'd have been more concerned about just getting rid of them first.

and, then, maybe, once every single puritan had been banished from england, then maybe we could start thinking about laying siege to them.

if only it was that easy, right?

if we could just hit delete and end religion forever, right?

*sigh*.

the difference between the bountiful colonies that i will again say i would support carpet bombing and...mennonitism?....is that in bountiful we're talking about one colony and with the mennonites there's many, many of them.

so, i can't uphold an example of rape as a reason to bomb all of the mennonite colonies. there may be the odd one that's ok; the point is i can't generalize like that, and i know it.

but, i'd certainly support bombing the bad ones.

yeah,

ugh.

how do we just delete these people?

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-48265703

what do i think of these weirdo mennonites, though, anyways?

not much, frankly.

they're very quiet. i guess we all know they're there, but we don't hear much from them, so it's kind of like they're not. and, that's probably better for both of us.

i don't really know much about them, what they believe or how they live. i get the idea that they don't really like technology, and i guess they probably live in very patriarchal societies that are rooted by threats of violence, but i've really never thought about it much. if they were to ever show up with guns and try to take over the government, i guess i'd have a reason to look into them a little more. as it is, the fact that they're so quiet means i have essentially no reason to really care about them much, one way or the other.

i know i've been very critical of the mormon groups up in the mountains, like in bountiful. that was a case that they very badly screwed up. "religious freedom" is hardly a valid excuse for rape, and i'd be just as happy if they carpet-bombed the place.

i frankly don't know if that kind of thing goes on in these mennonite colonies or not, but i would support a crackdown on them if there is any evidence or suggestion that it does.

if not, the existing arrangement - where we barely acknowledge each other's existence in any way at all - is fine with me. so, carry on...

the issue is explicitly and specifically within the mennonite community and explicitly and specifically tied to the religious and cultural aspects of that community.

the media should not be referring to them by the language or ethnicity they may share with people of other faiths, or of no faith at all.

i will repeat: to generalize a religious community by the language they speak is racist, as it creates prejudice and discrimination towards speakers of that language that do not follow the religion.

it's especially racist in context, due to the issue being the religion, and not the language.

i saw this in a different paper and couldn't figure out what the hell they were talking about, what is a "low german speaking" population?

it turns out that the term is used to refer to people from the low countries that speak germanic languages. but, like....is there some dutch community out there that got hit? did it spare the walloons, specifically?

it turns out that by "low german speaking", what they mean is mennonite/hutterite, and this actually appears to be a case of political correctness that has gone full retard. that is, as far as i can tell, they're trying to avoid mentioning the religious character of the community so as to not create some kind of stigma.

but, if you see this term come up, that's what it means - the isolated mennonite communities that do indeed exist throughout canada, and apparently in essex county, and that have been experiencing heightened rates, indeed as a consequence of their religious practices.

and, i'm actually sort of uncomfortable with this. when i talk about muslims or christians or whatever else, i ensure that it's the religion i'm mentioning, because i know there are plenty of arabs that have abandoned islam and plenty of italians that have abandoned christianity (and whole swaths of hebrews that have abandoned judaism). like, there is a difference between a religion and a language.

i would actually consider it racist to use arab and muslim interchangeably - these are different concepts, and i'm very careful to separate them.

i would really like to see this use of language discontinued, and denounced as the racism that it really is - there's not an outbreak in the dutch-speaking community, whatever that might even mean. rather, there is a developing problem with outbreaks in religious mennonite communities.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/health-unit-reports-covid-19-cases-among-low-german-speaking-community

the reason anarchists argue for a socialist economic system is that we interpret it as the best way to maximize actual, meaningful concepts of individual freedom.

and, the reason we oppose capitalism so strenuously is due to how coercive and enslaving it really is.

there's another foundational difference underlying the gap between how the americanized spectrum views these terms through colloquial language and what the terms actual mean, in the context of the theories they exist within, and that's this dichotomy around the individual v the collective.

what the americanized spectrum wants to do is set individualism (which it speciously associates strictly with hyper-capitalism) off against collectivism (which it equally speciously associates strictly with communism). so, in the americanized spectrum, you have individualists on one side and collectivists on the other and they're just always in struggle.

but, any european politico would acknowledge the centrality of hegel in the development of the politics of the left, and realize that the entire point of the left for the last 200 years has been about finding a way to synthesize the individual and collective into a dialectic, not set them off against each other in a fight. on the left, we fight about class, not about this individualist/collectivist canard.

the individual is more free when the collective takes control of private property; socialism maximizes personal freedom, it doesn't struggle against it. there is no contradiction, at all.

as an aside, one of the fun ways that left-libertarians like to piss off right-libertarians is to remind them that market theory is inherently collectivist in nature, and that the great ricardo was a total pinko. it's also fun to remind them that one of the defining traits of contemporary capitalism is the trivialization of individuality into market choice.

most people that call themselves socialists nowadays don't seem to care a lot about human rights in the face of government authority, and would probably be better off calling themselves conservatives, in the actual meaning of the word. what they want is an ordered, top down society where everybody has a defined role and rules are enforced relatively strictly. like star trek, or something. they think that's socialism.

they should read up on edmund burke; that's where they really are, and that is really where their movement is.

but, of course, the people that call themselves conservatives today are actually mostly classical liberals. so that's not their tribe, either.

i realize i just used a term i used to use more often but don't use as much anymore.

left libertarian.

nowadays, i usually just call myself an anarchist, but i haven't clarified the point in a while. due to the co-option of the term by hard-right classical liberals, anarchism has become kind of a damaged label - i know that, i get that. but, i guess at some point i stopped caring. or, maybe i decided there was enough writing out there at that point to make the distinction unnecessary.

but, as i'm ranting about masks in a way that is not that different than the ancaps are (and, this is the rare scenario where our shared libertarianism overpowers our diametrically opposed economic views), maybe it's a good time to remind you of the point: when i call myself an anarchist or a libertarian, i use the term in a mostly french/european context, just as i use the terms liberal and conservative in very british/canadian ways. i insist that i'm using the language correctly, and that i am right to use the language correctly, but i realize that the fact that americans are hopelessly lost in backwards colloquialisms may make my writing a little hard to follow if you watch too much tv.

this is a succinct quote:
anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man. Anarchism is only one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream whose main components are concern for liberty and haste to abolish the State.

that's me, isn't it? spot on.

i realize that it's a contradiction within the americanized spectrum to simultaneously argue for individual liberty and the socialization of production at the same time, but that's where we are here on the libertarian left, and we don't see it as a contradiction at all but as two halves of a greater vision for a society where people are freer to live in less statist restrictions because they've socialized the means of production.

the last thing to point out is that a lot of the confusion comes from the fact that the word socialism, itself, is so warped in the americanized spectrum. in this highly colloquial americanized spectrum, the words liberal and conservative have almost perfectly reversed meaning and libertarianism has been co-opted by what most of the world calls liberals (and americans call conservatives). so, it's only natural that the world socialism has been colloquialized as well to mean a reference to big government, when socialism has always been about abolishing government everywhere else in the world.

so, of course you're confused - you don't really understand what any of the words i use mean, because you've managed to destroy the meaning of virtually all of them.

but, i'm not going to conform to your colloquialisms, i'm going to insist on the proper terminology and demand you try harder to keep up.

when i sorted through this in 2016, the argument i made that i felt was most compelling was to point out that i had about an equal level of agreement with hillary and trump, which you might think is insane, but from a libertarian-left perspective (that opposes corporate globalization, the "free trade" system, imperialist wars and a number of other things that are central to the core messaging of contemporary neo-liberalism) it's really not if you look at it carefully.

so, i said something like that i agreed with about 40% of what clinton said and disagreed without about 60% of what she said - which is probably not all that different than your average fake-left "progressive". but, how many of them sat down and carefully sorted through what trump said and really carefully quantified it? they may have been surprised to realize that they probably agreed with more than 30% of what he said, anyways - and specifically regarding his opposition to this core neo-liberal agenda, some of which has actually panned out better than i actually expected (and some of which hasn't).

yes, it's sad that so many of us disagree with 60% of what the candidate we dislike less has to say, but...

unlike a lot of people, i would actually prefer clinton to biden, overall. she's at least bright; biden isn't. but, with clinton the problem was that she was ultimately evil to her core. biden's problem is that he's just kind of a dipshit.

so, i'm still basically in the same place with both of them - i agree with roughly 35% of what either of them say, and disagree with most of what both of them say, it's just over different specific issues. trump pisses me off on the climate the most; biden's going to piss me off the most with his foreign policy.

but, i might agree with 3% of what mike pence says, and it will mostly involve clauses that utilize the word puppy. he's pretty much the perfect personification of everything i hate about the world.

they're both clearly in bad health, but i'd guess that trump stays alive and cogent longer than biden.

it's just a perception, but i'd guess that trump will probably get through four years, and biden probably won't.

if trump actually quits, all bets are off on this.

as it is, i'm stuck trying to figure out what the least bad option is, who i think is going to die first, etc.

but, i'd vote for a warm pile of shit before i voted for mike pence.

i wouldn't even brake for mike pence if i saw him crossing the street. really.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/30/why-trump-might-quit-387681

again: the spanish flu mutated. twice.

that's why there were waves.

will there be multiple waves of this, too?

if it mutates a couple times, you should expect that, yes. and, over time, because it's not going away, you would expect it to become seasonal - which is what happened to the spanish flu.

if it's very slow to mutate, the difference between a "wave" and a "season" will likely get blurry.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-is-one-big-wave-not-seasonal-who-expert-suggests-1.5044839

to be clear, though: because the ruling has to do with the quebec charter, the supreme court will be interpreting the situation from a civil law (that is, a franco-roman) perspective, and not the common law (that is, germanic law) that i was talking about.

i don't have a lot of patience for civil law (yuck.), and don't really want to get into this. i find the premise that law is void of interpretation to be too authoritarian for my tastes. that's one of the things i don't like much about quebec; i wish they'd come face-to-face with their franco-german origins and embrace the superiority of common law.

but, when the supreme court takes on these quebec-specific issues, and uses quebec-specific rules, they only apply within quebec. that is, any ruling or precedent that comes out of this will be in a civil law context and not be binding in the rest of the country.

if the case was in ontario, or probably anywhere else in canada, the complainant just wouldn't have grounds to file and if it made it to court at all it'd get thrown out almost immediately. you can't just sue people for being mean, that's crazy. no duty exists.

yet, such a duty does seem to have been erected in quebec statute, bizarrely - and i think it clearly would infringe on freedom of expression, to the point that it's not constitutional.

but, quebec never signed the constitution, and doesn't consider itself bound by it.

so, who knows what they do.

i would:

1) scratch out 10.1 (& 2, while i'm at it)
2) allow that the statements were discriminatory, but discrimination by private citizens is covered by federal free speech legislation.
3) award $0 in damages to the complainant
4) award costs to the defendant

ok, so i just took a flip through this and it's really quite a bizarre document.

generally, human rights legislation wouldn't have clauses like this in it:

Every person must come to the aid of anyone whose life is in peril, either personally or calling for aid, by giving him the necessary and immediate physical assistance, unless it involves danger to himself or a third person, or he has another valid reason.

that's not a right, it's actually more or less the opposite of one - and something that the supreme court has actually explicitly rejected on multiple occasions.

this is the specific rule:
No one may harass a person on the basis of any ground mentioned in section 10.

section 10 is the usual list of prohibited grounds.

that's not a right, either - that's a law. and, frankly, it's in direct contradiction to the federal charter.

so, my initial analysis was a canada-wide analysis (well, it was an ontario-specific analysis that is applicable in probably every other province) based on a combination of ontario and federal law. federal law still applies in quebec, but it's a delicate thing.

can the court rule the charter unconstitutional? because that clause shouldn't exist, subject to the federal constitution (which quebec never signed).

that case could actually get quite messy.

http://www.legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/showdoc/cs/C-12

yeah, i'd have to look into this more specifically, but the premise underlying the discrimination tort is based on a duty of care that a comedian does not have to an audience member. there's no relationship there.

what does it mean for a comedian to discriminate against a private citizen? there's no contract involved. there's no commercial activity at hand. the comedian has no authority over the audience.

so, i don't really think it matters if it's discrimination or not, because a comedian does not have any legal obligation to avoid discriminatory jokes.

of course, if you don't like his jokes, you don't have to let him perform in your venue and etc. but to establish damages, the tort has to be built on a duty to the person claiming them that was not met by the person being accused, and i just don't see how that exists, here.

rather, it seems like the judges were just enforcing their moral opinions, and that shouldn't be happening, at all.

you could consequently potentially see a ruling that agrees that the comedian was discriminatory in his remarks, but awards damages to $0 and even gives him backs costs for wasting his time.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/supreme-court-of-canada-to-hear-appeal-of-quebec-comedian-mike-ward-on-joke-complaint-1.5045307

doug ford won most minority votes in the last election; it's the reason he won. they like him; he's popular in immigrant communities. he's the kind of leader they actually want.

but, he mostly got elected by swinging the muslim vote over the sex ed curriculum, which was key in specific ridings.

and, what has he done?

- banned sex ed
- passed a hijab law

i mean, what's next? mandatory praying? banning evolution?

my primary concern as a parent right now would be to ensure that my children do not become habituated to covering their faces in public, and that they don't develop the bad habit of putting faith in an idea over the realities of empirical science.

you may have faith in the idea of cloth face coverings reducing spread, but that's exactly what you're being conditioned to, and that's exactly why you need to pull the rug out from under the idea altogether.

this is how it starts.

it's up to us to stop it, via non-compliance, civil disobedience and carefully targeted legal battles.

and, if we don't?

get used to praying three times a day at the butt of a shotgun.

that's right.

ontario just mandated hijabs in the classroom.

that's what just happened, here.

it's very sad, and very depressing. but, all i can do is yell...

Students in Grades 4 through 12 will be required to wear a non-medical mask or cloth face covering while at school. Younger children will be encouraged, but not required, to do so.

that needs to be fought.

what if, as a parent, i find it revolting, humiliating, embarrassing and appalling to force my child to cover their face in public like a fucking religious idiot and refuse to do it?

and, let's be clear, here - there's no meaningful science underlying the idea that a hijab law (which is what this actually is. face the facts - your kids are being forced to wear religious gear at school.) is going to reduce the spread of anything amongst children except for self-confidence. this is not science; this is religion masquerading as science, and it's increasingly appearing as though it's actually a specific religion trying to enforce itself, underlying the issue.

if i had kids i would send them to school without face coverings and challenge the system to take me on. if they send the kids home that's fine - i'd rather home school them than send them to a fucking madrassa.

as it is, i find this law shameful, and it is just another reason that this government has given me to be ashamed and embarrassed about being an ontarian.

how do i get out of this collapsing society, that is heading into a dark age?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-19-coronavirus-ontario-july-30-back-to-school-1.5668495