while some of the posts started broadcasting again in the last few days of july, there were no posts between july 29 at 2:15 and aug 1 at 6:26, the first post for aug 1st.

while i would like to create a "not broadcast post" for each of the 170 posts created over these three days, i already have these posts archived in my records, and doing so would screw up my record keeping.

posts for july 29th:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020_07_29_archive.html

posts for july 30th:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020_07_30_archive.html

posts for july 31st:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2020_07_31_archive.html

the following sequence was also only partially broadcast:

july 28, 2020

fat people have a genetic disease that cannot be cured.

therefore, they should be prevented from breeding in order to eliminate the disease from the genome.

discuss.

4:01

so, do i think that weight regulation is determined by genetic factors? that is, do i think that obese people are "born that way"?

no. not at all.

well, not really.

what does the science actually say? it's not what the media wants you to think, but that's normal - the media almost never gets the science right. generally, when you read a report about science at the cbc or cnn, it's been so distorted by the obscene religious censors that you essentially have to run through every clause with a giant not operation. their journalistic integrity is beyond atrocious.

so, forget about the nonsense you've read in the news - it's just that. nonsense.

so, let's ask a question we've asked a few times, now. what is a gene? and the answer is that a gene is a protein that regulates the production of hormones. so, in order to demonstrate that an issue is genetic, you have to show that it's regulated entirely or at least dominantly by hormone production. so, is obesity determined solely or even dominantly by hormone production? if it is, then you've found a genetic defect that should be targeted for elimination from the genome. if it's not, then you can't blame obesity on genetics.

so, is weight determined by hormones? this is the actual debate here underlying the media obfuscation, and the answer is sort of. two people standing side by side can eat the same meal and metabolize it differently, and that difference in metabolism will be caused by different levels of hormonal regulation (which, remember, is all that genes do), but at the end of the day they consumed the same amount of mass, and it's conservation of energy that is going to predominate in the end.

so, these news reports (which are designed to ensure nobody has their feelings hurt, first and foremost, and not as the cold, rationalist scientific explorations that they should be designed as, to discard emotions as meaningless subjective opinions) constantly want to bring up genes as this kind of black box explanation. our understanding of genetics is slowly pushing past the point where you can get away with this kind of lazy journalism, but for right now you can still throw just about anything in this pile of magic called "genetics" using tricks like "studies suggest" or "scientists estimate", and get the answer you expected out of it by designing the question that way. to call that a perversion of science would be an understatement. but, if you want to understand this properly, you're better off starting not from the assumption (and that is still all it actually is) that genetics are paramount and unalterable (as though god decided, right?), but rather from the conservation of energy, which we can use newtonian approximations for, in context.

energy stored = energy consumed - energy burned

so, if you're fat it's because you eat more than you need, and it's the most basic physics in the world to understand it as much.

it is consequently the case that if your fancy genetic model contradicts that simple equation then you can throw it in the trash - it's garbage. genetic/hormonal complications may affect the amount of energy your body burns, but the issue of stored weight is ultimately determined by how much one consumes and not by how much one burns and you simply can't store more energy than you've consumed. that's not biology; that's physics. you can't gain weight by not eating, and if you burn calories you will always lose some weight, even if your hormonal regulation is particularly defective and prevents you from burning fat like a healthy person in a particularly invasive way.

given that truth, hormonal regulation brought on by gene expression can at most be an annoyance. it's friction. it's a complicating factor. but, to say that you can't lose weight because of your genes is wrong. rather, people with poor hormone regulation due to defective genes will simply need to work harder and eat less to maintain healthy vital statistics.

that means that the issue is not genetic, at it's core - and that people with defective genes should be paying more attention to lifestyle, not giving into fatalistic assumptions, or giving up on life because god.

as an aside, do we want to conclude that obesity is a genetic defect? because, i can tell you that i'll never accept it. the unavoidable conclusion of trying to clinicize an issue that is in actual truth almost entirely about lifestyle would be that we need to find a way to eliminate the genetic disease/defect of obesity from the genome. i mean, we can't be walking around talking about accepting inferiority as normal. actual diseases need to be targeted and expunged. so, this intelligent design recast as liberalism thing only gets the religious people to the end point they want if it's rooted in religious assumptions in the first place; if you find the fatalism of these religious arguments laughable, i'm talking about the "god made me the way i am" crowd, you're just going to take the knowledge as an argument for eugenics. the idea that being fat is a choice and can be reversed is consequently a lot better than the alternative, which is that fat people have a genetic disease that cannot be cured and should be prevented from breeding.

4:25

and is it just natural variation?

no.

these people would be eaten instantly by lions. no chance at all.

4:41

it's been the sporadic efficacy of the conversion process at the one drive site that's screwed me up over the last few days. i'd be done by now if i wasn't stuck waiting and trying over and over to get the server to convert the file properly.

it was yesterday morning that the third trimester file refused to convert properly from doc to pdf (the error is that they introduce a conversion step, from doc to docx, that breaks the formatting). so, i fell asleep waiting for it to work, and was up in the afternoon. it converted, eventually.

then, i was ready to post the 2013 combined (final) updates yesterday afternoon when the machine rebooted on me before i got the chance to save the downloaded pdfs anywhere (after trying to get the conversion to work several times), so i'll need to go back to the one drive site and hope it works. this is the chromebook, and it's designed with this in mind, but it's a process to set back up, and it threw me for the day. i was going to wait until i was done, but i ended up eating for the first time in a few days, and that just knocked me right out, in the end, after however many days without eating or sleeping (which is what i actually prefer, fwiw. fuck eating. fuck sleeping. but, i don't have an energy source to plug into. not yet, anyways.). the warm & humid temperatures finally overpowered the a/c down here yesterday as well, which was highly conducive to sleep after however many weeks of the frigid air from upstairs making it so hard to sleep. i sleep best when the temperature is in the high 20s, and can't sleep at all when i'm even a little bit cold in the summer - even at 22 or 23, it just feels like somebody is dumping cold water on me.

 i was up a little after midnight, when it cooled down, and have mostly been focusing on catching up on eating this morning.

i uploaded the 2013 deathtokoalas file to smashwords yesterday, but i didn't get a chance to catch the conversion before the reboot.

that means i have the following left to do:

1) check the july-dec 2013 deathtokoalas file at smashwords. the formatting there is bad, i just need to check that the file actually updated.
2) there is no travel blog for january, so i will need to upload just the dtk update to the january bandcamp archive. i will need to upload that file to smashwords, as well.
3) i will need to get the full travel blog file up to smashwords
4) i will need to get the full travel blog file and the full deathtokoalas file both up at lulu
5) i'll need to update the google drive share as well.

these are minor edits and should take an afternoon, but i want to prioritize cleaning for today.

the 2014 run through should be much quicker because i've got the parameters better set, now. i won't be adding any new posts, but i will be likely removing a lot and maybe transferring quite a bit. the major change is that the politics blog is likely to become a little more focused, as specific concepts get moved entirely to dtk.

will i do a combined blog one day?

i might, in the end, but likely only as a total update. so, you might get it all thrown at you in one ridiculous 100,000 page file, in the end. for now, i'm not planning on that.

so, for the day, i'm doing a lot of cleaning (including of myself) and i'll get back to this when it's done.

7:22

 Genes contribute to the causes of obesity in many ways, by affecting appetite, satiety (the sense of fullness), metabolism, food cravings, body-fat distribution, and the tendency to use eating as a way to cope with stress.

i'll accept metabolism, primarily. body-fat distribution is a consequence of metabolism.

but, if you're going to tell me that you're fat because you have genetic factors that affect your appetite and there's nothing you can do to stop it, i'm going to laugh at you. yet, that seems to be what a lot of the argument is based on.

"well, sure i ate the entire cake. i was hungry! it's genetic!"

go take a holiday in africa and come back and tell me how you feel about that, now.

7:29