see, this is the kind of thing that i find virtually impossible to stand in solidarity with.

some imbecile actually gave me shit for saying "north america" instead of "turtle island". that's infuriating! it's like being corrected for my heliocentrism.

i will simply not, under any circumstance, in the context of any people, religion or culture, support the reconstruction of nationalist mythology.

i mean, from where i'm standing here, i'm in a long tradition of attacking, marginalizing, rejecting and abolishing christianity. there's been some setbacks, recently. but, i remain positive that, within a few generations, with enough education, christianity can be rooted out once and for all.

i stand in solidarity with my fellow atheists the world over that want to abolish judaism, islam, hinduism, buddhism....and fucking confucianism, maybe most of all...

....and you expect me to respect *this*?

no thanks. i think i'll stick to arguing for educational parity on and off reserve.

at least 'turtles all the way down' has an interesting paradox attached to it. this is merely RUBBISH.

http://www.native-art-in-canada.com/turtleisland.html

i had to firmly end things after she asked to drop by

Shelly Teagan
Hey jess. Can i come visit you this week?

Jessica Amber Murray
are you coming down to windsor for some reason?

Shelly Teagan
Oh no. Im just depressed and want to travel a bit.

I might just hang out in guelph

Jessica Amber Murray
erin, i wasn't sure how to bring shit up with you. i found myself in a really difficult position last month. when i say i wish you the best, i mean it in absolute sincerity. even as i was trying to wind things down, i couldn't bring myself to hang you to dry when you needed somebody to talk to. i may or may not have made a good judgement call regarding timing, but it was a thing that was going to happen. maybe we could meet for coffee to talk if you come down, but i'm not comfortable with you staying here. i think i know i'm being paranoid, but there's just this competitive streak you have that really scares me and that makes me feel really vulnerable to being taken advantage of. i just have some really profound trust issues and certain bells went off. i need to follow my gut.

Shelly Teagan
Im a little confused and dont know what youre saying. You dont want to be my friend? Was i shitty recently?

Its ok i get it. I hope youre doing alright.

Jessica Amber Murray
i don't think it's any one thing, so much as a culmination of observations. the approach you're taking to existing in a social reality will probably serve you well in the long run, once you can get beyond the institutionalized daycare system that the elites have constructed for us, and is keeping people chained to their own ambitions pushing into their late 20s. it's exactly the quality that i lack, and has kept me from being able to succeed socially. but, that juxtaposition puts me in a situation where i'm in deep peril in the medium-term because i'm not equipped to respond. it's not that i don't want to be your friend. i actually sort of do. i rather like you. it's that i've come to understand that it's not safe for me to continue along that path, that there's an inevitable endpoint that will cause me harm. i realize you might not fully understand, and i'm sorry if you don't, but i have to keep myself sheltered from certain things. and, i do hope things work out for you in the way that you want them to.

Shelly Teagan
Lol i dropped out of school if that makes you feel better. Also i have no ambitions anymore.

Baha. I seriously dont give a shit about shit.

this elite, institutionalized daycare!!!!!

Jessica Amber Murray
well, that doesn't make me feel better. why did you drop out?

Shelly Teagan
I think i want to go to algonquin and become a technician or something.

Jessica Amber Murray
i dropped out several times and went back, if that makes *you* feel better. i was going into third year when i said "fuck it, i'm going to get a job in a coffee shop and make music". i took the semester off, drank a ton, had a lot of fun and then want back in the fall. yeah. i was kind of getting the impression that maybe you wanted to study something other than music.

Shelly Teagan
I was trying to show you how un-competitive im being. Lolll.

Anyways i might not come to windsor this week. I might go to guelph only, and midland maybe

Jessica Amber Murray
that's very competitive of you :P

you shouldn't try to change yourself for others.

Shelly Teagan
Im confused again. Damnit!

Bahhh i cant win!

Jessica Amber Murray
always trying to win...

Shelly Teagan
Shitt..... nvm. Ok gotta run. My phone is about to shut off.

Jessica Amber Murray
listen, i wouldn't make you sleep outside, either. i just think we should be going our separate ways. good luck.

Shelly Teagan
Lol ok, jess. See ya.

Jessica Amber Murray
and, erin, just one more thing? realize that i'm not happy about this, that it hurts me to do this, probably more than you. now, i'm having this fear that you wanted to come down here to see me, and it's like a stab in the heart that i responded like i did. you know that feeling you get when your emotional hormones just go haywire? but, that's exactly why i had to.

Shelly Teagan
Youre just trying to find reasons to cut people out so you can feel more alone than you already do. Im not taking it personally. I just feel bad that you feel like you have to alienate everybody you know

i picked up this little one person blender (500 ml) for $10 and it's pretty much the greatest thing ever. one banana, one peach, a handful of strawberries and some vanilla soy, all blended up. it's pretty much all i consume, now.

well, that and tomato sandwiches. and some eggs and pasta every few days for some protein.

hydroponics is the way forward, maybe with a bit of help from gmos. there are political/economic challenges, though, in preventing corporate dominance....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY7O5YNxKuI

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/18/saudi_arabia_rejects_security_council_seat

....or perhaps to create drugs that eliminate the necessity for sleep?
http://medx.cc/301207002

previously assumed by who? i'm all about the tabula rasa...
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/17/the-heritability-of-intelligence-not-what-you-think/?WT.mc_id=SA_facebook

kind of specious, considering the limits inherent to dna tests.
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/09012013/article/ancient-human-crossed-ocean-barrier

so, your brain is like flash memory?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=important-new-theory-explains-where-old-memories-go&WT.mc_id=SA_MindFacebook

this explains british paranoia over soviet influence in india in the interwar period.
http://digitool.library.colostate.edu/exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS8xMTk0ODc=.pdf

i'm not following the logic here. if they really wanted to stop the attacks, wouldn't they just pull out? that being said, i'm not particularly keen about sharia law, either.
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/16/ban_declares_war_on_al_shabab

see, this is the dialectic i want to see - just on the other side of the spectrum.
http://jacobinmag.com/2013/10/greeces-fascist-threat/

"This study looked at how people feel after an immoral act that doesn’t seem to harm anyone." well, if it doesn't harm anyone, why is it immoral? silly study.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/study-people-love-to-cheat/280587/

well, teleology is one of those things that aristotle had good deductive reasons for, but isn't very naturalistic. evolutionary biologists are careful to try and avoid this. however, it still saturates the field as an unstated and often unnoticed assumption.
http://phys.org/news/2013-10-evolution-one-way-road-complexity.html

http://www.nature.com/news/skull-suggests-three-early-human-species-were-one-1.13972?WT.mc_id=FBK_NPG_1310_NatureNews

well, they need to test it before they go around making statements like this.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tying-light-in-knots-slide-show&WT.mc_id=SA_facebook

i called this. nice to see that the field is catching up to me...i might have to delve back in soon to get a few steps ahead of them.
http://scim.ag/19Q4dto

ok, but this is obvious and it's true of virtually everything. the question is if you can make the disturbance insignificant or not.
http://phys.org/news/2013-10-physicists-heisenberg-intuition.html

this is a big deal, for something that was obvious.
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/09012013/article/skull-find-key-to-understanding-early-human-ancestor-species

a game-theoretic analysis of gandhi's tactics. i dig this.
http://central.d127.org/library/classprojects/gandhi/Documents/GandhisNonVioasaTactic.pdf

see, i don't fear autism.

....but i do fear this. and i do fear it wasn't an accident. those pesky eugenicists may have been kicked out of their political offices, but they were never kicked out of their board rooms.

http://www.nature.com/news/hiv-vaccine-raised-infection-risk-1.13971

i didn't post about this the other day...

the ruling was a judicial review, which means they had to determine if the initial judge was "reasonable" or not. those arguments are always tough to win. the judge would have to fuck up in misapplying the law somehow. the review doesn't negate the judge's discretion.

now, it's sort of hard to compare environmental and financial costs. really, you'd have to quantify the environmental costs. that's hard for two reasons. first, it's predictive - whereas the financial loss for transcanada is costed. second, any quantitative approach is going to be insufficient to win the case. the real cost in terms of things like people dying can't be worked into the equation.

so, the sierra club made that argument - that they're incomparable, and that's how the judge fucked up, by making the comparison in the first place. yet, that was the nature of the suit! also, consider the precedent that would set. it's unworkable. of course the judge wasn't going to stand up and say "environmental costs always overrule financial costs because they can't be quantified". that makes no sense in any kind of existing context.

i've seen this sort of thing before, and it makes me wonder. i'll admit i'm having trouble coming up with a better argument. but it's obvious that one wasn't going to fly. did they really think it was going to fly, or did somebody get bought off? and did they assume nobody was going to follow the argument?

http://truth-out.org/news/item/19453-us-court-transcanadas-keystone-xl-profits-more-important-than-environment

this is....

interesting. the kush of the sudan, connected with the kushans of central asia? a very strange suggestion.

while the existence of a classical writer stating that there was a migration from india to the sudan is interesting - i was not previously aware of this - the migration could not have been this simple. the name 'kush' is what the ancient egyptians called the area, many centuries before the 'kushan' invasion of india from the north - which was thought to have been by an iranian tribe, rather than a tocharian one.

nonetheless, we know there were periodic invasions of egypt and the near east by central asian tribes. there was the hyksos invasion, for example. the persian empire conquered egypt. etc.

if the merotic script appeared around 500 BCE this is roughly contemporary with persian hegemony in the area. the exact point in this essay may be historically ignorant, but if we the idea is not outside the range of possibility.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/91594296/Tocharian-the-Cognate-Language-of-Meroitic

i've studied the achaemenids in depth. (there *are* some things i haven't studied). resettling unruly tribes outside of their homelands is something that the persians did do. so, could darius have hauled some tocharians out to egypt? well, if they were pissing him off, he might have done that. they *are* right on the silk road. there's a potential for annoyance, there.

it doesn't explain what is likely a false connection between the two kushes, though. there's a term, "hindu kush", that relates to the mountains in the area. this is probably what the asian kushans are named after. they were the mountain people.

i suppose there's a possibility that the nubian kushites could have also been named after the mountains. but, that's a stretch, and even if it's true it's still an argument for a false cognate.

yeah. i was thinking it might have been possible that kush was named during one of the periods where egypt was under possible northern rule (hyksos, sea peoples), but it seems like it was renamed from nubia during a period where the egyptian pharoahs were black.

(that's a complex issue that's riddled with racism on both sides. the truth is that some pharoahs were white and some pharoahs were black. whites and blacks in the area took turns enslaving each other. you need to understand 5000 years of egyptian history in the context of racial class struggle, not in the context of one race being perpetually dominant over the other).

so, there's no logical connection there. the egyptians were referring to their southern areas as 'kush' back when the proto-tocharians were living somewhere in eastern europe.

so, if there's a connection it would have to be from nubia to asia, and it doesn't really make any sense given the indo-european etymology of kush as a mountain.

false cognate.

still, that doesn't rule out the possibility that the false cognate is a coincidence, or even that the persians noticed the false cognate and used it as a sort of a twisted joke in resettling some annoying tribes.

but, see, this is where *evidence* becomes useful.

...although i guess the decipherment, if it's valid, and that's something i can't comment on, is inductive.

liberals are at 44% in saskatchewan and 40% in manitoba? that's very hard to believe, ekos.

the conservatives simply don't come in at under 30%, not in their lowest depths of unpopularity. you've got a 3% margin of error, there. i'd take it, and then some.

even compensating for those unlikely polling numbers in the prairies, this is still a good news poll for non-conservatives. minus the vote splitting.

of course, i have to keep reminding myself that there's not a significant difference between liberals and progressive conservatives anymore.

http://www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2013/10/liberals-widen-lead-on-eve-of-throne-speech/

the margins of error in sask and man are 17 and 14. i'll take those as pretty close to it...

this is the kind of thing i'm all about. now, that's a potential 95,000 jobs lost, which means a potential 95,000 more people out there fighting for social justice. further, the machines don't run unless people have shiny coins to put in them, which people need jobs or welfare for. as more jobs are lost to automation, and the number of potential employment options likewise decreases, the pressure to abandon currency will continue.

the revolution is in the mode of production

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/this-robot-barista-promises-a-perfect-cup-of-coffee/280658/