this is useful. you see those dips? those are the results of openly anti-black immigration policies.

they weren't allowed in the country. for decades....

and, you see the giant change between 1971 and 1981 and the high rate of growth since.

and, this is another stat that floors people.

we saw that there were 1,198,540 black canadians in the 2016 census.

749,155 identify as "caribbean canadians", meaning they came here not from the united states but from countries like jamaica. that's 63%.

384,875 were actually born in africa. that's 32%.

so, 95% of african canadians either came from the caribbean, or from africa directly.

well, surely some are american, right?

not many. not for a long time. in fact, as a source of immigration, the united states is folded into the "rest of the americas" category, which, as you can see, is statistically very small.

if you're bad at geography and prefer a picture:

in fact, 623,195 were born in their country of origin. that is, a whopping 52% of black canadians were born elsewhere, and migrated here in their existing lifetimes. and almost all the rest are their kids...

these are just the facts.

the largest visible minorities in canada are east and south asians, not blacks and latinos/indigenous groups.

just somewhat of a reality check...

ontario & quebec have the largest number of black canadians, and the number is around 4.5% in either province (a little less in quebec). most provinces in canada are about 2-3% black. it's a little less than 4%, countrywide. this is a recent change, as well - it wasn't very long ago, like the early 00s, that the number of blacks in canada was < 1%.

after a round of racism earlier in the century that drove people back south (look up robert borden), there were almost no black people in this country between 1945 and 1970.

the indigenous population, on the other hand, is larger out west and in the 2-3% range in quebec. it's less than 5% countrywide, but is growing quite quickly in the west. of course, they were here first, but they also got badly decimated, and, as recently as a generation ago, 5% would have seemed unattainable.

so, in both cases these numbers are trending starkly upward. 20 years ago, <1% would have actually been proportional representation.

but, things are changing.

1700*.03 = 51
1700*.005 = 9

1700*.05 = 85
1700*.006 = 10

so, can they get those numbers up? i think they can, yeah.

but the answer to the disconnect is that those lower numbers were accurate until the turn of the last century. so, maybe the difference is a little less than you were thinking, and maybe the idea that we're long overdue for state intervention is in truth rather ahistorical.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/mcgill-professor-says-systemic-racism-exists-at-university/wcm/c4ffd192-2b05-42d4-8997-0e8aebdf10c3/

sending this woman to jail would have been exactly the wrong way to deal with this problem, as it would have exposed her to the culture in the prison, and likely set her up as a repeat offender.

further, i'm not aware of any damages caused.

i don't believe in punishment in the worst cases, and i certainly don't believe in it for something like this. but, she should be liable for any actual, dollar amount damages she caused.

i would also support sending her to some kind of counseling as a condition for her probation. she clearly needs to talk to somebody, in search of potential personality disorders, and a likely eventual life on disability.

that's the other thing about sending people to jail - they don't tend to be likely to find jobs when they get out. and, we don't just let people starve on the street in this country.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/22/americas/chair-girl-sentencing-toronto-scli-intl

i mean, do you know what the primary example these people use to base their monetary theory on?

they consistently cite germany after world war one, under this bizarre myth that what happened was some kind of natural event. it's never been clear to me if this was supposed to be taken seriously or was just some kind of excuse to ram through neo-liberal reforms, but it's certainly become this kind of bizarre article of faith...

in fact, the germans deflated their currency on purpose in order to pay off a ridiculous war debt, and the anglo-french alliance that won the war punished them severely for it. what you saw happen in germany in the weimar republic was not some kind of natural law of economics, but rather severe vengeance by the occupying powers, who then used the situation as a pretext to invade the ruhr. in the end, the americans had to step in and try to pull them back from exacting their vengeance, and we know what happened next...

we've tried this experiment over and over, and it just never happens. it's just wrong.

they're not going to print themselves to hyperinflation.

that was debunked in the 70s, in the 80s, in the 90s....

again: i'm an mmt advocate. this swing to social conservatism on the left pisses me off, sure, but i'm a strict socialist, and i don't have any patience for anybody pushing hayekian market theory.

in canada, we could print as much as we want - we'll just have to take a hit in the credit rating. there's nothing stopping us from doing it, and it's not likely to affect the currency all that much on it's own. but, when the credit agencies step in, they institute sell-offs and drive the price down. it's real in effect, but it's artificial in construction; it's not printing the money that's going to kill us, it's the ratings agencies that will come in and decimate us for their pound of flesh, afterwards.

that just doesn't matter in the united states, and it's never going to unless they either make a stupid decision to institute their own decline (ie. stop printing money) or they get outprinted by somebody bigger and badder than them.

now, if that does happen, if the floodgates open, if the agencies are set loose on america, you're going to have absolute carnage. granted. america will end up subject to imf austerity regimes, forced to sell-off assets - the whole thing. how much do you think the saudis would pay for the statue of liberty?

but, they're really in control of this - so long as they don't stop printing.

this idea that you're going to print so much money to devalue the dollar is just poppycock.

it's complete bollocks.

yeah, he's right that this is cyclical.

listen: people get scared and they move their money into something that they think can't deflate. but, the price of gold is just as much a pile of bullshit as the price of any other commodity, including money itself, really is. in the end, it's just a worthless lump of metal; at least worthless piles of paper can be exchanged. all you can do with gold at the end of the day is sell it, and hope you've broken even.

so, is there any longterm potential in this? no. the day the situation flips over and there's any kind of interest going on anywhere at all, the people that fled to gold will sell their worthless metal and float back. in the mean time, the demand will keep pushing gold up, unless some smartass like soros steps in to fuck with it (and remember: this is why sovereign countries have fiat currencies, to prevent foreign speculators from doing what soros did to defraud the uk government). soros is super old now, right? if somebody pulls the same trick...

but, might people exchange their gold for a different currency, in the end?

see, it's a circular loop. the more money the united states prints, the more it dominates the global economy, and the harder it is to evade it. so long as that remains the case, you can sell the gold for whatever you want, but it's going to end up back as us dollars in the end.

if you want to break the fed, you want to actually do the opposite - you want to dry the money up, for the fed to contract. as it pulls in more and more dollars, it's going to lose purchasing power, and it's only then that a euro can step in. but, that's essentially never going to happen, unless the americans elect an idiot that's going to push through a bunch of neo-liberal nonsense - and for all their rhetoric, they actually don't do that because they actually know better. it would need to be a total breakdown in the system that would lead to that sort of collapse.

so long as they continue to create money rather than destroy it, there is little threat of anybody stepping in any time soon. and, when somebody does take a run for it eventually, and it will no doubt be the chinese that do it, they're going to do it by outprinting them, and just flooding the market with their own currency.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/federal-reserve-u-s-dollar-economy-rates-jerome-powell-1.5666260

total pulling out of canada has been an ongoing process, but it's an intriguing one.

total has very deep ties to the canadian deep state, in it's relationship to this entity called power corp. i'm not going to run over this, but look it up. it's this company in canada that acts as a major revolving door for politicians coming out of all three of the major parties, but is particularly closely related to the liberals, who are of course currently in power.

so, how do you read this? the relationships are so close, that...if this is just business, it's a very damning reflection on the future of the tar sands, which would be good news if true, but....

i think there's actually two more likely possibilities:

1) they're trying to ruin kenney. if that's the truth, i hope they succeed. but, they'll be back in a few years...
2) this fracture in the liberal party between the desmarais clique (that runs power corp) and the ruling party is actually quite deep, to the point that they're more concerned about the current global unpopularity of canada and are essentially trying to distance themselves from it. if that's the case, this is essentially a bad breakup, and it could put a lot of pressure on trudeau to get out of the way.

trudeau is still leading the polls here, but it's partly a reflection of the opposition being in disarray. the conservatives have recently started loudly calling for his removal.

i don't think trudeau has anywhere to go but down in the polls, but he's still winning just right now. his days appear to be numbered...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/suncor-total-fort-hills-conocophillips-tim-mcmillan-1.5668095

hey.

you want to live in a totalitarian state?

move to iran.

it's not how things are done here.

it never will be.

seems like california just plowed by canada in deaths, too.

that's significant because the population is roughly comparable.

...although we still have time to catch up, in the end.

i have to get up and do something.

and, let's be clear.

rights legislation doesn't exist except in emergencies; rights legislation exists to prevent abuses during emergencies.

this isn't a time to suspend our rights, it's a time to stand up for them, and give the state extra pushback if they're going to get despotic.

we don't need rights in normal times, we need them in abnormal times.

so, what does a bar owner do?

i'd just ignore it and challenge them to fight me on it. but, i'm a scrapper. i enjoy the conflict.

so, you know, people will set priorities and maybe it's better to let the patrons lie to them...

but, they should be aware that they can't make these requests, under federal and provincial law. i doubt a court would come down too hard on them, because they are in a hard situation, but the reality is that the toronto city council has just ordered toronto's nightlife to break the law, which renders it, itself, void of any force, until an election is called.

this is actually so weird that..

so, who is collecting the data here? the business? or the health authorities?

i'm going to go with the health authorities, because this isn't a part of a commercial transaction.

so, to begin with, the law is forcing bar owners to do unpaid labour. as a basic point, if you're going to employ bar staff to fulfil a function, you should give them a paycheck for it. otherwise, they're working for you for free. you can't just order people to do unpaid labour because of an epidemic.

so, then, do we treat the bar staff as volunteers, or what? they have no employment obligation to collect the data. there's no court order involved. what is the basis of the authority, here?

so, i'm going to assume that we're dealing with the regulations as they apply to the government itself, which is actually provincial rather than federal. if we were dealing with the bar, it would be federal.....but that doesn't make sense, because the information isn't being used by the bar at all, let alone for commercial purposes. the relevant law is here:
https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/04p03

Records kept in other places
(2) A health care practitioner may keep a record of personal health information about an individual in a place other than the individual’s home and other than a place in the control of the practitioner if,

(a) the record is kept in a reasonable manner;

(b) the individual consents;

(c) the health care practitioner is permitted to keep the record in the place in accordance with a regulation, by-law or published guideline under the Regulated Health Professions Act, 1991, an Act referred to in Schedule 1 to that Act, the Drugless Practitioners Act or the Social Work and Social Service Work Act, 1998, if the health care practitioner is described in any of clauses (a) to (c) of the definition of “health care practitioner” in section 2; and

(d) the prescribed conditions, if any, are satisfied.  2004, c. 3, Sched. A, s. 14 (2).

these are pretty stringent requirements. what is consent, in context?

elements of consent
18 (1) If this Act or any other Act requires the consent of an individual for the collection, use or disclosure of personal health information by a health information custodian, the consent,

(a) must be a consent of the individual;

(b) must be knowledgeable;

(c) must relate to the information; and

(d) must not be obtained through deception or coercion.  2004, c. 3, Sched. A, s. 18 (1).

Implied consent
(2) Subject to subsection (3), a consent to the collection, use or disclosure of personal health information about an individual may be express or implied.  2004, c. 3, Sched. A, s. 18 (2).

Exception
(3) A consent to the disclosure of personal health information about an individual must be express, and not implied, if,

(a) a health information custodian makes the disclosure to a person that is not a health information custodian; or

(b) a health information custodian makes the disclosure to another health information custodian and the disclosure is not for the purposes of providing health care or assisting in providing health care.  2004, c. 3, Sched. A, s. 18 (3).

so, what that means is that the health authority is banned from asking the bar for your address unless you provide explicit consent for them to do so. even if you give the bar your number, if you deny consent to pass it on, it's the health authority that is breaking the law in asking for it.

under federal law, the bar can ask you for your number, but only for "valid commercial reasons". there's no exception for public health.
https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/privacy-topics/privacy-laws-in-canada/the-personal-information-protection-and-electronic-documents-act-pipeda/p_principle/

so, let's back up and count the ways that this is illegal.

1) it is illegal for the bar owner to collect information that is not for valid commercial reasons, and they have an obligation to ask you for consent, if they do. if you do not consent, they cannot collect.
2) it is illegal for the bar to share the data with the health authority.
3) it is illegal for the health authority to store data in a bar, or other random location.
4) it is illegal for the health authority to ask the bar to disclose the information.

i'm not citing the constitution; this is existing legislation.

can the mayor overrule the province?

not in canada. the mayor is just one voice on city council, and the city council only exists by statute. so, the premier can essentially walk into city hall and do whatever he wants. now, he shouldn't do that. but, we actually recently had a fight about this, and the city lost very badly. doug ford was actually able to go in there and redistrict toronto; that's not theoretical, he just did it and the court just upheld it.

the bylaw is meaningless.

and, of course, if particular bar owners want to be assholes, just boycott them.

forever.

i mean, what are they going to do?

charge you with providing false information to a private citizen bar owner that's breaking the law in asking for it?

lol.

actually, no.

don't call the cops.

just give them a fake address. make their database useless - that's better than dragging yourself through court.

if a bar owner tries to force you to provide this information, you should call the police and have them charged.

Council also passed bylaws, at the recommendation of Toronto Public Health, requiring bars and restaurants to keep contact information for patrons so that the health unit can quickly contact anyone who was in the vicinity of a person found to have COVID-19. .

they can't do that, either.

it's actually illegal to ask somebody for id, under federal law, unless you're a cop. this isn't even a constitutional question; it's just flat out against the law to ask, at all.

"but it'll take forever to go through the board."

yeah.

tenants have these things called rights.

and, they don't go away because of a weak virus that kills old people and fat people.

the only property that the city of toronto can pass a law like that on it's own property, which would include city-owned residences. unfortunately.

and, i'm not an advocate of property rights; but this is the isolated example where some concept of privacy is paramount.

if the residents of a building come together and decide, through a direct vote, to pass rules relating to their shared living space, then somebody could potentially be asked to leave the building if they refuse to abide by the rules.

the landlord and tenant board would likely require some kind of compensation in such a scenario, and would no doubt encourage mediation to get to that point. that is, if you're going to throw somebody out of a building because they don't want to follow a non-binding community declaration, you really have a duty of obligation to pay for their moving expenses, at least.

but, a government cannot come in from the outside and enforce a mask rule on somebody's living space without even consulting them.

that's fascistic. it's despotic. it's uncanadian.

and, the bylaw is not worth the paper it's written on - it's that simple.

it's worthless. garbage. meaningless.

it doesn't exist.

that's not an empty statement.

this is an unacceptable abuse of power, meaning they've permanently forfeited the right to govern. they must have an election. asap.

in the mean time, nothing john tory says is worth listening to - he no longer has any authority, at all.

when the government refuses to abide by the rule of law, it loses any legitimacy in enforcement, and any claim to have the right to pass laws, at all.

that's where toronto is.

resign right now, john tory.

every single one of them, immediately.

once you've lost legitimacy, you can't get it back without an election.

the toronto city council has abandoned any claims it may have had to even a pretense of the rule of law, and really must resign, en masse, immediately.

so, that's settled, then.

there is no mask bylaw in toronto.

carry on.

i repeat: the mask bylaw in toronto is not worth the paper it's written on.

don't bother even acknowledging it exists - it doesn't.

there's a point where laws become worthless, and toronto has passed that point, clearly.

this is ridiculously invasive and absurdly unacceptable, and i hope they get viciously sued for it.

i would laugh in somebody's face if they tried to enforce this.

https://www.cp24.com/news/toronto-makes-masks-mandatory-in-apartment-buildings-passes-other-bylaws-ahead-of-stage-3-1.5044074

but, listen.

just because autism is random error doesn't mean they shouldn't get human rights.

i mean, obviously.

this is purportedly obama's prom date, although who knows if that's true.

cute girl. hope they had fun.

actually, this is an issue that has been explored, partly on mr. obama's own initiative.

that is, we know this is true because he told us it is.

his racial identity struggles were a part of what launched him to prominence; people found it compelling on a human level. he didn't know who or what he was for most of his life, and didn't begin to really identify as black until he hit his mid-20s.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/barry-or-how-barack-obama-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-his-blackness

so, when i talk about obama being white, i'm not poking at him. i'm not making it up.

and, the fact that his policies ended up so racialized opens up a can of worms.

it really does.

that picture probably exists on the internet to criticize the biracial relationship, and i'm not going to do that. i hope barack & miss cook had lots of fun together.

but, it is what it is.

that's all i'm saying.

he identified as white (and is. half.) for a good part of his life and that doesn't ever go away. trust me.

this is my ultimate piece of evidence.

this is dave chappelle talking about his white friend, chip.

now, doesn't dave sound a lot like barack obama, when he goes into his white friend voice?

like, uncannily so?

if you closed your eyes, wouldn't you think it was barack?

hey.

have you ever seen obama miss an opportunity to remind you he's fully half pasty white?

no?

that's what i thought.

another way to look at it is like this...

while trump may be racist like the rest of them, his racism is a tool of control. now, this comes out of the southern strategy - it's not new, it's a strategy developed in the 60s. but, there's a distance between trump and the rest of them (the worst recent examples are nixon, carter, reagan, clinton and bush, who all followed a southern strategy to win in various ways) in the sense that trump is just trying to win votes and the rest of them were/are truly racists deep in their heart.

reagan's and bush' racism was actually real; trump is just trying to get elected, and is willing to sink to the worst depths to do it. although, let's be real - everybody does this over and over because it works.

if trump is the first of anything, what he is is the first post-modern president. remember post-truth? well, i guess you wouldn't would you - it got dumped in the memory hole. funny, that. but, that's what the reality is.

he's the first president that just legitimately doesn't care. and, he doesn't; he doesn't give a fuck about anything. it's a very different turn, and it might not last (pence is a racist in the more traditional nixon/carter/reagan/clinton/bush sense), but it's here while it lasts.

trump is a racist, clearly.

but, he seems to be less of a racist than any president since johnson.

and that includes obama.

so, when trump says he's done more for black people than any other recent president (and the claim would certainly fail against johnson.), the truth is that it's not such an outlandish claim.

but, it's just because the bar is set so low, due to so much overt racism taking place at the highest levels essentially constantly since 1970.

so, don't tell me i'm exaggerating about the cold.

the fucking heater just turned on in july.

i mean, could you imagine it?

well, i don't have to.

and, i'll take the heat :)

but, could you imagine cranking the a/c so high that you manage to turn your own heat on, in july?

lol.

the heater in here just turned on.

i have no control over it.

it's actually not that cold in here. but, i guess it is in the cold air return, upstairs.

it's just a measurement of what it must be set to - the guy has managed to turn his own heat on with the a/c.

if biden shows up with susan rice, that means the neo-cons are back and the progress that trump has  made on that file is over - we'll be bombing iraq again in a week.

and, if he shows up with kamala harris, it means we're walking into a McAdministration and you'd better keep an eye out for the hamburgler.

i've done this before.

if you rank presidents since johnson, trump comes out somewhere in the middle of the pack. he hasn't been as aggressively neo-liberal, he hasn't started any wars and he's done quite a bit to reduce the militarism of american hegemony. maybe that's a catastrophe if you're like richard perle or something, but his rejection of the neo-con agenda is actually quite refreshing to those that have put ending neo-conservatism at the top of the activist agenda.

there's a huge trade-off with climate change...i wish he was better...i wish he'd pull a nixon on that....

...but, you have to take those trade-offs.

and, biden will cave in to exxon on day one, anyways.

the rhetoric, it's just...

it's nonsense.

i'm not falling for it.

but, listen...

i don't just think bush was worse than trump.

i think reagan & clinton were worse than trump, too. and, obama was negligibly better.

i'm not buying into this - he's bad in absolute terms, but he's actually not that bad in comparative terms.

there's no major wars. that alone makes him a better president than most.

i don't want to go back to normal. i want things to change, and if four more years of trump is the better way to get there, so be it.

so, what's my new choline intake going to be, then, over a two week period? i should have done that.

note that the eggs are going to go up if i throw a red pepper in there. so,

(7*710 + 7*125)/14 + 170 = (835)/2 + 170 = 588,

or 538 without the coffee, indicating i'm getting very close to or past it with it, even if i don't drink that much for a few weeks.

and, that's more what i want to see in my diet than the 450 i'm getting now.

but, i've been careening in this direction for a while - this is a push for me to do something i've been wanting to do. the pasta hasn't been working out for a while, now.

i will leave the pasta in the cupboard, for emergencies, which is why it was there in the first place. i switched after needing to use up expired pasta, which i had put aside in case of emergency. i'll go through the caesar before i buy any mayo....and i might stick with caesar instead. and, i'm going to end up cutting my cheese intake by over 60%, which should clear some money up.

but, i'm making the switch back...when i switched, i made assumptions about the amount of calories i can consume that have not panned out, and it's more important to ensure i'm getting enough vitamins than that i'm getting enough calories.

the daily recommended intake of choline is 550 mg/day for grown men. the usda gives dramatically different numbers for men and women, and i wonder if that is reasonable or ultimately just sexist bullshit; i don't particularly see why men would require higher levels of neurotransmitters than women, unless it's intended to counteract the retarding effects of the testosterone?

i actually don't know whether i should be looking at male or female numbers, but i'm going to aim for the higher number and suggest ciswomen do, as well.

i eat my eggs whole & fried, and i get the extra large variety, indicating i should get about 150 mg each. so, on days that i eat four eggs (1-2 times a week), i will easily blow by this with 4*150 = 600 mg.

i can get about 90 mg from a serving of salami. i think. this is variable, as salami is a strange idea, conceptually. that's probably an average.  i should also get about 10 mg from the bread (pumpernickel, toasted) and another 10 mg from the cheese. so, that would mean i'm getting over 700 mg when i make salami & eggs. if my sole concern was choline, that would be a great meal. in fact, it's a great meal, anyways - so long as you understand how your body creates and converts cholesterol (note: it's probably not what you think, and you should blame the msm for it, certainly.).

what about my pasta meals?

well, i should get about 30 mg from the pasta, 10 mg from the tomato, 10 mg from the red pepper, 90 mg from the salami, 20 mg from the caesar salad dressing (which i use as pasta sauce. ie. a lot.) and about 75 from the cheese. so, that's 235 to start - but i only eat half of it a day, remember. so, that's only around 110.

so, clearly my pasta meal has much less choline than my egg meal, but we can store choline. so, what is the weekly amount?

(2*700 + 5*110)/7 = (1950)/7 ~ 280.

hrmmn.

what am i getting from my fruit?

banana - 15 mg
strawberries - 5 mg
raspberries - 2 mg
blueberries - 2 mg
kiwi - 10 mg
cherry ice cream - 15 mg
soy milk - 60 mg
apple juice  - 10 mg
===============
~120

there's also about 6 mg of choline in a cup of coffee, and considering that i drink around 10 "cups" of coffee (which are very small things.) a day, with chocolate soy milk, i must be getting 50 mg on average, anyways.

so, that takes me up to 450, which is still a little low, although above the rdi for women. i'm probably doing better than most people. but, the difference in the meals - 870 v 280 - is kind of startling. and, a big part of it is coffee. oddly.

if i ate the whole plate of pasta, i'd be at around 550, which is actually spot on.

choline is actually something that i designed my diet around, as i've been aware of the need to ensure proper daily intake for a long time. i used to eat eggs more often; i knew that i was over-emphasizing the eggs for both the choline and the a when i brought in the pasta, but i was mostly concerned about c, and actually about gaining some weight. i calculated everything with the idea of eating a full plate of pasta, and that seems to have backfired on me when i cut the total amount i was eating down to a half a plate because....i just couldn't eat that much. yeah, i changed my diet to gain weight and then ended up cutting it in half because i couldn't eat it all. in hindsight, it was kind of pointless. i didn't recalculate anything, and it's clear that i should have - i cut some of my vitamin intake in half. it seems like i should add some choline to my pasta now, too, doesn't it?

or, should i go back to the more egg-heavy diet, and replace the pasta with what was there before, namely a combination of tomato sandwiches and salami melts?

how many days do i need to eat eggs for to get the weekly amount of choline?

(n*700 + (7-n)*110)/7 > (550-120) <---->
700n + 770 - 110n > 7*430 <--->
590n > 2240 <--->
n > 3.79

so, if i switched to eating eggs 4 days a week and pasta 3 days a week, which is closer to what i had when i built this, i would get up past that rdi. but, i'd lose all of those pasta calories - which i felt i needed because i was just chronically underweight, and unable to build up fat in places that women have it.

how much do i have to add to the pasta meal to fix this?

(1400 + 5(x+110))/7 > 380 <--->
x > 142

that's a lot, more than bringing back the broccoli (which i took out due to e-coli issues) is going to get me. broccoli would appear to be a little overrated, in terms of nutritional content. i get the c elsewhere. it didn't seem necessary.

what if i eat eggs three days a week instead?

(2100 + 4(x+110))/7 > 380 <---> x >30

that's more along the lines of what i can do with broccoli.

i'm going to think about this.

and, yes, dramatically reducing total caloric intake does have the side-effect of reducing vitamin intake, which is something you need to watch for if you're going to play with low total calories like this. as with the a, i should have paid closer attention to this, but i kind of decided it was fine - and it was, until i cut my calories down. the fact that my bmi is low should reduce my rdis for most things, but choline is one of the things where you probably want to get above it, regardless.

in practice, i often end up buying too many eggs and eating them up at the end of the month (something that's going to happen again; i've got a dozen eggs with an expiry in the first week of august, so i'm going to need to put the pasta on hold and eat them soon - something i do regularly. i'm evaluating a model that i don't hold to as well as i'd like to.).

if i eat eggs every second day then, over a two-week period, i'd average:

(7*700 + 7*110)/14 + 120+ 50= 7(810)/14 + 170 = 810/2 + 170 = 405 + 170 = 575

....and, that's what i actually built my diet around before it got distorted.

yeah.

how'd i manage to do this right, then do it wrong without realizing it? for years?

i guess when i started making the pasta and realizing i couldn't eat the whole plate, the alternation turned into every three days; instead of eating a plate of pasta on monday and eggs on tuesday, i ended up eating half on monday, finishing it on tuesday and then moving to the eggs on wednesday. and, that just became normal without me ever really sitting down and working it out.

then, because i would make a few days worth of pasta at a time rather than just a day, i ended up not wanting it to sit in the fridge while i alternated with the eggs. so, i would make the eggs after i got through a batch of pasta, and the period between pasta runs and eggs got stretched out even further. and, then the size of the batches got bigger. you get the point - it was this incremental thing that happened without thinking it through, and that was supposed to work itself out and then basically didn't.

it's time to reverse that and get back to the diet i actually designed, but is pasta the best way to do that?

comparing the pasta to the tomato sandwiches,

bread <-----> pasta*
mayo <------> caesar*
tomato <------> tomato
cheese <-------> cheese*
salami <--------> salami
nothing <--------> green pepper*

* increases in calories

the pasta has a lot more calories, clearly, but the only major difference nutritionally was the introduction of a green pepper. i mean, that was kind of the idea - i just took what i was eating anyways and embiggened it to increase the calorie intake. do you see what i did? do you get it?

however, i then went and cut it in half, thinking it was temporary, and i'd eventually get used to it (at this point, it is clear that i won't - that is just too much food for me). i'm probably still getting more calories from the pasta than the bread, and the caesar than the mayo, and the much larger amount of cheese, and the peppers are definitely a net benefit in terms of c and a, but i actually reduced both the amount of tomato and the amount of salami in half. that is, i'd have a whole tomato when i made a sandwich; now, i have half. and, the amount of salami i'd prepare for a sandwich is the same as the amount i put into the pasta, which was intentional - but now halved.

so, how much choline do i get in a tomato sandwich, then?

bread - 10
cheese - 10
mayo - < 5
salami - 90
tomato - 10
hot sauce - <5
================
~125

125 < 220. but, 125 > 110.

but, i can actually make a tomato sandwich and eat it without having to put it in the fridge, afterwards and finish it later. usually, anyways.

and, what have i lost? the answer is a half a red pepper a day, which i could just as happily use to make omelettes, instead. and some calories, which i'm just not eating anyways.

yeah.

so, it seems like the switch i made however many years ago hasn't worked out, in hindsight. i'm going back to my old diet, which is to alternate between eggs and tomato sandwiches on a day-to-day basis.

so, am i getting enough choline?

you knew that was next. admit it.

ok, i'm done with this now.

so, what is autism?

it's a highly individualized random error in translation that prevents the expression of specific genes. no two autistic people have the same error (well, unless they're biological twins, which i'd guess is some kind of weird entanglement issue).

what causes it?

bad luck. but, anything that increases mutation rates, like exposure to pollutants, would in theory increase error rates, leading to higher autism rates. and, pollution would appear to be a major risk factor, which is something we can actually fix.

https://www.statnews.com/2018/11/19/pollution-pregnancy-autism-vancouver/

yeah.

so, those numbers are about the same as the general population.

A recent analysis of data from NHANES 2003–2004 revealed that for older children, men, women and pregnant women, mean choline intakes are far below the AI. Ten percent or fewer had usual choline intakes at or above the AI.

correlation just ain't causality, not even when it's consistent.

that's a depressing statistic, though, truly - 90+% choline deficient. explains a lot about america.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19906248/

The results indicated that 60–93% of children with ASDs were consuming less than the recommended Adequate Intake (AI) for choline. 

i wonder if those numbers are that different from those of the general population, though.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aurt/2013/578429/

or....

feed your kids eggs.

well?

https://www.nature.com/articles/npp2013274

so, is autism environmental then?

well, you're blurring the question.

but, we're more likely to get autism rates down by addressing air pollution than we are in solving this via gene editing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737505/

i'll take a step back - is it possible to go at this from the whole "personalized medicine" slant? well, if you can determine that a specific individual is displaying autistic spectrum behaviour because they lack the ability to properly regulate a specific hormone because of a broken genome, then you could in theory develop drugs that get into the dna and correct for it. ok.

but, due to the randomness of the condition, this would only work for one person at a time and you really wouldn't be able to take that medicine and apply it to anybody else unless they have exactly the same mutation, independently - a potentiality so rare as to be discarded.

so, every single autistic person would need personalized drugs designed specifically for only them.

further, if you can understand the delivery mechanism well enough to know the hormone the person needs, it would certainly make more sense to just inject them with the hormone, so long as you can get through the blood-brain barrier (a problem, regardless). and, for some people that develop autistic spectrum behaviour, it may be as simple as just pumping them up with a neuro-transmitter or other hormone that undoes the broken genome. but, due to the compounding nature of the disease, that is probably too simple of a concept to take seriously - i mean, it would only be the very lucky ones where this is actually a cure. if you pump a 35 year-old autistic person up with choline or something then you might give them the opportunity to think more clearly, but you're not undoing 35 years of choline-deficiency and the compounding effect it's had. the result of waking up at 35 to the reality that you're autistic may actually be worse than not really knowing it. you'd have to start off by treating them like toddlers, and watch them go through adolescence in their 40s and 50s; they'll probably actually learn slower at that age, as kids learn way faster. so, you'd have to figure that out essentially immediately, and start them on hormone treatment for their entire lives.

is that a cure? it's a treatment, i'll give you that. but, why bother with the genetics, then? why not just start injecting neurotransmitters into autistic people and see what happens?

autism rates have gone up dramatically, and you can only assign so much of that to overdiagnosis. it's just a hunch, but it's an educated one, and i really think that getting the pollution down is going to have a much bigger effect on reducing the actual effects of autism than anything we can do with personalized medicine, to offset or mitigate it.

to put it another way: it's a band-aid. i want to get to root causes, and that would appear to be pollution-related...

ok, jess, get up and do something.

now.

i mean, give it 20 years and you're actually likely to get something like this in terms of precedence for the surname "clinton".

1. bill
2. george
3. hillary

and, george could give bill a run, after a while.

why do i always say hillary instead of clinton?

well....i don't. i will often revert to a plain old "clinton", after i've established i mean hillary and not bill.

but, you realize that her husband (if they're still technically married) was president for eight years, right? and in an important eight years at that. so, in the long run, when people say "clinton", they're going to mean bill and not hillary. i'm maybe fast-forwarding a bit, but give it a few years and that will in fact be the norm. her time window on that has passed. and, i'm sure she realizes that - that if you mean hill and not bill, you're gonna need to point that out, because people will justifiably assume you mean bill when you talk of a clinton, for good reason.

so, it seems like the coffee is working extra well tonight, after smoking pot all month.

jittery. alert. awake. a little fidgety, even.

that's fine...

she's a complete fucking idiot.

i remember watching an interview with cenk uygur, and i don't remember the context, but he explained rather clearly that he just couldn't vote for bush, because he was obviously a fucking idiot. and, this was right after clinton, so you can hardly accuse the man of swinging to the more moral choice or something.

i don't think that cenk ever really moved left; he's still a conservative, still a republican - a dino, to co-opt a term, which takes on an interesting double entendre that i didn't intend, but is still interesting.

i'm having that moment with a biden-harris ticket. i don't like susan rice's politics, but i'm at least confident that she's not a fucking moron like harris is.

and, like cenk, i may find myself supporting a party that i don't like in order to block the stupid from coming in.

kamala harris is stupid.

deal with it.

given that biden is not likely to make it through the term, i cannot in good conscience suggest voting for somebody as mentally deficient as kamala harris.

i'm sorry.

the reason she ran for president is that she knows she's going to lose her senate seat and end up working at mcdonald's.

no. listen.

autistic people do not have bad copies of specific genes. that is not what autism is. that is what down's syndrome is, an extra chromosome, but that's something else entirely.

i understand that people don't realize that. that's why i'm trying very hard to correct the point and educate people about it.

autistic people actually have perfectly good genes. however, they have deeply malfunctioning genomes.

the condition is about properly copying those genomes, not about whether the individual genes themselves are damaged; in most cases, they actually aren't, and if they are, it's due to something else.

so, you end up in a situation where the autistic person has great genes, but is unable to copy those great genes, which leads to a poor expression of them.

and, you have to understand as a basic starting point that these errors are just random and consequently unique to the individual, and not something that exists out there to be inherited.

and, they shut me down again.

lol.

fucking idiots.

oh, and it's hilarious that the canadian media is happy to harp on about rising cases in texas, but has a virtual media blackout on california.

it says a lot about how the canadian media operates....

i'll correct for that obvious bias, which appears to be necessary, it seems.

so, this is apparently official, now.

“Though some other parts of the world have released mortality data almost in real time, official death numbers from Ontario’s vital-statistics office are not expected for another year or more,” 

so, that's why i'm not bothering.

yes, i live here. yes, i'd be all over it, if i could be. but, it's pointless - the data simply doesn't reflect reality.

and, we consequently don't actually know if toronto got hit like montreal or new york did and can look forward to an easier reopening, or if it's still highly vulnerable like vancouver is, and is likely subject to a resumption of the first wave, like spain is seeing, once things get off the ground again.

cases are coming up, but it's still relatively slow going. but, we won't know until...well, the timelines suggest the shit should hit the fan about labour day, if it's going to.

there are no genes that code for autism.

rather, autism is what happens when your genes get corrupted during copy operations, and stop working properly, and that could happen anywhere in the sequence, and involve any genes at all.

i just want to clarify a point though.

“Many of the genes linked to [these] repeats [were] never thought to be involved in autism before.”

that's because it's not individual genes that are involved with autism, but the errors in translation, themselves. so, it's not the specific genes in these errors in translation that are important, but the errors in translation themselves.

granted, there are going to be a lot of places in the genome where these kinds of sequencing errors aren't important. but, what the research on autism says is that you will get symptoms of autism by introducing these errors in all kinds of different places in the genome, and that the symptoms will arise as a consequence of these errors jumping up all over the place.

i'm sure that the quote is unfortunate, and reflects more on the poor understanding of the journalist than the poor understanding of the scientist. what's important to me is that the conceptual error is corrected.

autism is not caused by any specific genes, or any specific number of genes, but by random errors in translation across the entire genome. for that reason, every expression of autism is genetically distinct - it's not the genes themselves that are causing the problem, it's the reproduction of those genes that is causing the problem.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/breakthrough-in-autism-spectrum-research-finds-genetic-wrinkles-in-dna-could-be-a-cause-1.5041584

we're actually way better off with kenney out in alberta than we are with him in ottawa.

i'd be just perfectly happy if he stays exactly where is, for a very long time.

let's hope he uses this as his election campaign slogan.

jason kenney, for a have-not alberta.

vote jason kenney to erase 55 more years of wealth in just 4!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-net-receiver-financial-transfers-1.5666387

it would be nice if biden would announce his vp pick already. he must know who it is, and my read on it is that it's almost certainly to be susan rice, even if what he really wants is a senator.

let's be honest here - when biden promised to pick a black woman (and he said that. explicitly.), that was a gaffe, the kind biden is known for. it seems like he would be truly comfortable with susan rice, granted. but, let's be real - he stuck his foot in his mouth, and he's not going to get the candidate he really wants, because of it. so, he's dragging that foot that's stuck in his mouth, and he's going to come out of the promise with a head wound.

right now, it seems like just about the only way he can lose is to pick kamala harris (who, if this happens, will go down in history as the black sarah palin. somebody ask her if europe is a country.), which probably means that's what the apparatchiks are pushing for.

so, i'm premature, and i will be premature until he announces.

but, i'm going to say this right now, anyways.

back in 2016, my deduction, after months of analysis, was that clinton would win if the election was fair but that the information i was receiving from media, in total, suggested to me that it had already been decided that trump would win, and the election was essentially a sham. that is (and i know that there are dissenters, but when you gather enough data, you can pull whatever trends you want out of it), that while the data seemed to point to a decisive clinton victory, the media coverage suggested to me that this data was essentially irrelevant.

you may have forgotten, but trump was the media's darling over the last election. admit it: either trump himself, or kellyanne conway, were pretty much on the news 24/7. they dominated the coverage, even when it was negative. it was absolutely obvious that something was pulling strings in the background, in trump's favour, and that the thing had already been determined.

so, that's why i said what i said: the data pointed to clinton, but the media suggested trump would win. and, i derisively suggested that they'd tell us trump will win pennsylvania, and we'll all be baffled by it. what happened was predictable - by watching cnn, not by reading the polls.

so, it was my media analyst hat that was more predictive than my data analyst hat, here.

let's stop for a moment and be clear about what i'm saying, because when you juxtapose "donald trump" and "deep state", you get to this messaging that the cia is out to get the donald. this is just a projection. i mean, i don't know - maybe they got something on him and they forced him into it. but, whatever the deep state's perception of donald trump really was in 2015/2016, there is considerably less uncertainty about what it thought about hillary clinton, and that is that it feared and loathed her. the vast right-wing conspiracy is a far more real construct, and represents reality far better, than any kind of deep state plot against donald trump; rather, what i'm suggesting is that donald trump seems to have been the prime actor in a deep state conspiracy to block hillary from office.

if you've been following clinton's career for any depth, you know this goes back. they've been blocking her path since the 90s, and i've been pointing this out for almost as long. but, if you look at what happened in the election - the emails just being a small part of it - it's rather obvious what side they put their thumb on.

so, i do argue for a deep state conspiracy involving donald trump, but it's the opposite of the projection that trump himself projects; i've been arguing for years that they're out to get clinton, and i argued through most of the election that trump was just a pawn of the intelligence apparatus. and, frankly, very little of what i've seen since has disrupted that perception. in the end, he seems to always do what he's told, doesn't he?

but, why did the media align with this? because, in the end, they cared about ratings, and all that the scandals that clinton generated managed to do was convince the media that a trump presidency would be more profitable than a clinton presidency - which they were no doubt correct about. fox is different, but, in the end, cnn and msnbc and ... are just corporations, and their single purpose is to maximize profit for shareholders. they don't care about policy; they care about ratings.

and, where are we today?

well, if you thought clinton was boring, meet sleepy joe.

so, we'll see what direction the coverage takes over the next few months.

but, i'm getting deja vu.

if you truly understand what autism is, you should immediately become an atheist.

now.

do it.

or, i'll state it again in a clinical way that is intentionally designed to offend crusty conservatives:

autism is a category of genetic disorder that is the consequence of random and unpredictable errors in dna translation.

to put it in a way that christians and other religionists can understand....

autism happens after conception. strictly.

you can't predict it....

and, it's one of the strongest arguments against design that i know of.

i want to be clear if you're not following this.

what is autism? is it genetic? like, what is it?

autism is random error in dna translation.

is autism even curable in theory?

we could imagine a scenario where we have an embryo in a test tube and are able to document every time it reproduces a new cell. using crispr-like technology, we could in theory go in and edit every single cell in real-time, as each error develops.

but, we can't know what those errors are until they happen - they don't come from your parents, they are the result of random errors occurring in the embryo. so, we won't know which embryos to monitor for errors as they are developing.

and, of course, this is a somewhat dystopic way to envision reproduction.

i have a better idea: let's ask ourselves if environmental causes (like introducing toxic chemicals into the environment) may have an effect on that error rate, and focus on that, instead.

is it possible that obesity might be caused by genes fucking up?

sure. that's called diabetes.

but, the conservation of energy still holds.

that is, it doesn't matter.

this isn't actually a new result. i actually believe that this is currently seen as the leading hypothesis into the cause of autism.

the article is not very well written, which is generally the case when english majors in the msm try to write about science, but what they're referencing is the broadly accepted idea that autism is essentially caused by replication errors. that is, every person with autism has a unique genetic error. therefore, it shouldn't be seen as a disease that can be cured or that even has a specific cause but rather as a condition that is the result of unique errors in translation that cannot be predicted in advance.

if they wish to hold on to some pretense of science in their nonsense, the intelligent design people would essentially have to deduce one of the following

(1) that autism is an error by the creator, and that their imaginary creator is in truth subject to massive amounts of error. that is, their god is indeed quite fallible, isn't t?
(2) that their creator has a sadistic streak, and is essentially carrying out nazi experiments on us as some kind of cruel game. hey, what happens if i put this fragment here...?

but, i just wanted to post to point out the big, big difference between genes doing what they're supposed to do and genes randomly fucking up and in some cases doing exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to do. autism is not inheritable, for that reason; obesity would be, if it could be established as genetic with any coherency of thought.

so, when i say that what genes do is regulate hormones and that things that are not regulated by hormones are not genetic, that is still very much true. yet, that assumes a relatively healthy underlying genome. sometimes, our genomes end up transmitted to us in a distorted or malfunctioning manner, or they end up breaking in the process of human reproduction. in that case, a person may have a genetic condition, but it's not being caused by what the genes actually do, it's being caused by the system not functioning properly, in itself.

autism is consequently not like tay-sachs, for example. tay-sachs is a real genetic disease, and we can identify the gene responsible for it. undoing it is a question of deleting the bad gene, and we should all look forward to the day that the bad gene is gone, forever. you can't expect an outcome like that with autism, because it's a result of errors that occur during reproduction, rather than an error that is written into a more or less correct reproduction process (translation is never 100% correct. not even close, actually. you're full of genetic mistakes yourself, too - just not in ways that have impeded your development so dramatically).

that is to say that there will never be a cure to autism and understanding that you can't cure it is intrinsically tied into understanding what it actually is.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/breakthrough-in-autism-spectrum-research-finds-genetic-wrinkles-in-dna-could-be-a-cause-1.5041584