back when i was doing my human origins projects, i needed to create this evasive placeholder group called northeast asians that brought genetic continuity with the west to northern asia. it was a necessity, but largely ignored by the specialist literature because there wasn't any useful evidence of migration, or even a worthwhile mechanism. but the genes say it happened, so i erected it. i then derived a sino-tibetan clade as a hybrid population of "southeast asians", who otherwise became austronesians, and a siberian-like group that became native americans. so, this phantom population (which remains extant in siberia) actually got up and went to america, which is why nobody has traced it, only stopping in china on the way there, and being subsumed by the chinese population - but altering it dramatically. what that means is that the modern northern chinese population, as well as korean and japanese population, would actually have substantive northwest asian ancestry. well, that's what we know; what i'm doing in erecting this phantom population is provide a hypothesis for the movement.

i just came across some pictures of the offspring of a melanesian man and a white woman, and they do not look like either of their parents. they could both pass as chinese. i won't post them here.

while hardly any kind of evidence, it is at least consistent with the theory i developed, which is that the ethnogenesis of the modern chinese actually lies in this somewhat unique process of hybridization between west asian and southeast asian subtypes in multiple layers, but most prominently over a siberian-austronesian mix that was left as collateral in the movement of siberian peoples to the new world.

i'm going to focus, now. i've been sleeping all day...

it's not in our collective self-interest to taunt the american military personnel we have stationed here. i mean, we do want them here.

listen, the canadian government is trying to build up this anti-american narrative to distract from it's own middling handling of the problem. it's true that the case rates in the united states seem to have diverged from those in canada recently, but we've always been a few months behind them, and if you divide out statistics related to population with that time lag in mind you'll see that canada is doing a little bit better - but not substantively better.

we'll see if the kind of infection rates we're seeing in the deep south make their way to canada in august or september or not. based on any evidence i've seen, that's a reasonable projection - that we will continue to follow them, at levels more proportional to our population levels.

so, the reality is that the contrast is fairly muted, which is why the government is fomenting this anti-american distraction and exaggerating the differences in the process.

i'm not interested in this. from a public health standpoint, the border has been open the whole time, we've just restricted americans coming over by car. the effects of this policy are merely assumed; there's never been any attempt to actually measure what kind of effect this might actually have on reducing transmission. nor is there reason to be optimistic about it; in the abstract, virtually all of the studies ever done on the topic indicate that border closures have almost no efficacy in slowing the spread of pathogens.

so, this is all just empty political rhetoric; the government sought the easiest way out, by fomenting anti-americanism, and it seems to have worked, to some degree, whatever the consequences. opening the border is therefore now a political question, not a public health question. and, my pleas to look at the science are likely to fall to the wayside, as evan solomon takes centre stage over the summer.

i'm not flailing against unwinnable battles. but, i'm profoundly disappointed by the stupidity of all of this, and i can only hope it lifts relatively soon.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/american-military-airforce-members-harassed-winnipeg-1.5644364

ok.

so, what i'm going to do is rewind and make a comprehensive list of all posts that i might any to any other blog. right now, the only thing i've found has to do with the travel blog, but if i rewind i might find something else.

then, i'll decide what to do after.

i expect a list of upwards of 50 posts to add to the travel blog in the end, and little else. i will probably go ahead and add them in bulk, then update everything. that's fine; it's really only stored in monthly journals at bandcamp. that is, updating the travel blog once would actually be pretty painless.

see, this is...

the purpose of the travel blog has shifted somewhat dramatically over time. it was initially set up as a fake account so that if i were to log in to the internet from a coffee shop i wouldn't be exposing my main passwords on the unsecure network. that way, i could still blog safely, remotely.

but, over time, it's expanded to any recollection of an event that occurred when i was out. as such, the early travel blog really needs to be overhauled.

the other three are holding up fairly well, right now.

the thing is that i don't want to do that, so i'm coming up with excuses, and sort of hitting a brick wall with it.

it's two months. let me get the list of changes and see.