somebody that does not live far from you will die at the hands of a drunk driver tonight.

everything else aside, i don't think i've left the house on any new year's since i moved to windsor.

it's the most dangerous night of the year to drive, and it's usually too cold to transit without transportation. i would usually prefer to stay in and eat nachos.

i'm most of the way through the emails for 2014, and am about to stop to eat. i've been clear that i want to detox right now, but the fact is that i wouldn't normally go anywhere on new year's anyways....

i guess the beer test is too edgy nowadays.

https://www.straight.com/news/1182011/poll-shows-canadians-would-prefer-justin-trudeau-their-kids-babysitter-over-andrew

"but, if you just rely on quantitative easing, wages will stay stagnant, and all the wealth will remain at the top."

right.

because wages have risen, historically, due to market forces - rather than union movements.

a strong economy is not a sufficient condition for distributive policies, but it is a necessary one. crashing the economy doesn't help anybody. but, we've lost the plot - which is that we need to fight for our wages and benefits, not leave it to the momentum of a regression analysis, which has been moving the other direction for far too long, anyways.

if we were to snap our fingers immediately, and democratize the workplace, and eliminate management, and redistribute the wealth, we would still need to keep creating very large amounts of money in order to keep pace with that redistribution, as well as compensate for population growth.

there's really no way out of this, and it's consequently a false choice.

and, i'm glad that trump is sticking to his word and continuing to facilitate the withdrawal of troops from syria.

what i will acknowledge is that the orac count is only one way to measure anti-oxidant levels in foods, and that the effects of digestion are an important consideration in determining whether a food has useful levels of anti-oxidants or not. i was initially going to post a frap assay, but it wasn't ordered. note that all of the assays have some criticism of them, and the results aren't better than each other - these are just different measures. if you can find an ordered list of some other count, i'd want to take it into consideration as well, but i'd expect substantive overlap.

so, the list i posted measured how many total anti-oxidants are in a food per 100 g, raw, using one specific method of measurement. you might not be able to digest all of those. they might be modified by heat. etc.

but, the list pointed these defects out. it's right there in the introduction - clearly.

see, and this is the valid criticism that you hear about the whole thing - that people are easily duped by fancy marketing, don't understand what they're reading, etc. but, that's true about anything, and the solution isn't to attack what is in fact good science but to try and focus on the scientific literacy of consumers; if a company can easily trick people into buying carcinogenic water as a health supplement, it's not the company's fault, it's the fault of the people that are easily tricked. and, likewise, if you think that pomegranate juice is going to cure your prostate cancer, that's your fault - not theirs.

exactly what you can get out of any specific food is going to be complicated, granted. but, what that means is just that you're better off playing the averages.

so, i mean, if you want to make the argument that the orac list wasn't beamed down from the temple mount then, sure, i guess. but, who said that in the first place?

"my friend ate berries every day and she got cancer, therefore it's all bullshit.

#yolo #noethicalconsumptionincapitalism"

note to neckbeards: you don't generally want to get your information from a youtube video called anti-oxidants debunked !!!!1!!!!

i just want to post something on the question of anti-oxidants, as there's as much nonsense "debunking" them as there is in support of them. and, i tend to find myself more pissed off by these "debunkers" than i do by the naive hippies, because at least the hippies don't pretend that they have some literacy in the topic. i recently went over this with the question of what effect tidal drag has on earthquakes - something the neckbeards will instantly write off as pseudoscience, without the slightest idea of what they're talking about. it just looks like astrology, right? but it's a research topic with a lot of potential. and, likewise, these same neckbeards are going to jump all over anti-oxidants as empty marketing hype, as though a few exaggerated claims are enough to throw the entire idea out of the window. like i say: it's the people that misuse science that piss me off more than the people that don't care about it.

the science underlying the issue is not controversial. free radicals are very strongly linked to cancer development, and the reaction involved is one of the most basic ideas in chemistry. i'm not aware of any research that suggests that attempting to maximize your anti-oxidant count is harmful, or even ineffective. the criticisms exist around the honesty of marketing claims, rather than the mechanism, and that is the responsibility of the consumer to work through.

but, you'll notice that i'm not advocating the use of supplements or trying to approach the situation as some kind of irradiation process. i am aware that attempts to protect against cancer growth by taking high doses of whatever vitamin cocktails have proven inconclusive - just as i am aware that tests on diets high in anti-oxidants have demonstrated themselves as having a lower cancer risk. and, there's no contradiction there, either.

the error that the neckbeards (who usually have little more than a high school education, if that) are making is in imagining that anti-oxiodants as some kind of magical potion, and then pointing out that they didn't ward off the evil spirits of cancer. "look", they'll claim, "not everybody who took these supplements of high concentrations of isolated anti-oxidants avoided getting cancer". well, ok. but, maybe that wasn't what anybody really thought in the first place.

we also know that diets that are high in anti-oxidants lead to lower risks of cancer.

i'm not telling anybody that drinking a glass of blueberry juice every day is necessarily going to ensure that they live to be 100 years old.

but, i am going to hold by the claim that there is good science that suggests that maximizing anti-oxidant counts in your diet is likely to lower your risks of cancer.

as of right now, i expect to remain straight edge through most of 2019.

and, what can i say about this year?

it has not been a good year at all, and i'm not sure i've found much of a solution. i've been optimistic about most years since 2013, at least. i'm rather pessimistic about 2019 - i don't expect it to be a good year, and i expect to waste a large amount of it on the trivialities of market capitalism.

i spent most of the last year trying to escape an uninhabitable scenario, only to end up in a place that is merely unhealthy. i don't have the same urgent need to immediately escape this place, but i'm nonetheless not planning my stay here to be lengthy, either.

i'm going to need to spend the next year continuing my attempt to find a healthier, more isolated living space, which is going to need to begin with finding some source of wealth. i'm going to need to look into my father's estate, with the intent of probably launching a lawsuit against my step-mother, and potentially also against my sister. i am going to need to sue the woman that put me in jail for discrimination in housing, and seek a settlement for trauma and emotional harm. and, i'm going to need to sue the police for false arrest. beside my continuing work on the aleph discs, these three lawsuits are going to be my primary focus, moving into 2019.

so, i think that the best i can hope out of 2019 is that it puts me in a better situation for 2020 - that it gives me an opportunity to move to somewhere that is less polluted, has less smokers and perhaps has less people, per capita. that will probably be away from windsor. and, how far away is going to be determined by how much money i can win in these lawsuits.

as such, i'm going to be focusing more on saving money than spending it, as i have been for much of 2018. my living arrangement is not stable; i don't have the luxury of being able to spend money, any more. i could lose my income source in the next 24 months, and if i can't find some way to cushion it immediately, i'm going to have to find some way to buffer it. i can currently put aside around $250-$300 a month if i stay in and don't do anything. if i can put the odsp renewal decision off until 2021, and hope that the conservatives are removed from power in 2022, i could maybe get back on disability for 2023 - and live off of savings in between. but, it's going to mean an extremely frugal lifestyle for the years in between - no partying, no concerts, no drugs or alcohol. just food & rent. that's fine; it's better than getting a job. and, if i find myself forced into working part time, i will at least have some savings to cushion it.

there's currently roughly $2000 left in there. if i can put aside $275/month for the next year, that will push it over $5000, which is enough to live on for around five months. and, the longer i can put the decision off, the more breathing room i end up with.

how about the music, which is supposed to be the point?

well, as mentioned, i'm circling around a pivot. i was hoping to be caught up by now, but have lacked energy recently. i've added 60 pages of emails to the liner notes over the last few days, which is a level of direct productivity that has been elusive of late. i should get most of that done by the end of the day, and potentially get through the filing push by the end of the week. i do expect more rapid movement forwards once i get to that hook up at the end of november, 2016 - meaning i should be able to get to actually closing discs in the alter-reality in early 2019.

but, the fact is that i have essentially nothing completed for the year. and, i can only present this journal as the explanation for it.

again: this year won't be much better, but, if i'm lucky, 2020 will be.

i'm not calling around on december 31st.

i'll wait until wednesday.

it's just how the days have fallen, this year.