the medical uses of nuclear power tend to get forgotten in these discussions. they are themselves a reason to keep some small reactors online.

the easy answer to this question is actually really easy - this simply isn't a solution to the problem. the life cycle of uranium, which requires utilizing huge amounts of propane for drilling and transport from remote areas, is already actually relatively inefficient. but, the uranium we will be able to access will get less and less potent over time, making it less and less efficient. if we went full-on nuclear, the future we'd end up with is one where the oil is carefully monitored to ensure there's enough left for drilling, and the decreasing potency of the uranium leads to constant brownouts. uranium is really in the same category as hydrogen, in that it is simply not an answer to the problem. rather, uranium is a particularly vicious algorithm for dystopia.

but, we need those isotopes, amongst other things.

nobody ever talks about fusion anymore either, which is maybe reflective of the state of it. it can't be more than twenty years, right? fusion is an answer to the problem, at least, but.....

likewise, if we could find an accessible anti-matter reservoir, right?

these subtle discussion around nuclear are really last century.

the reality is that it just ain't gonna work.

it was a fool's errand to ever think you could stamp out a virus like this.

and, in the end, they all always stamp their feet on the ground and yell into the sky and cry to their advisers that their authority is not being obeyed, like the fools that they are.

fools.

https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/08/13/bc-john-horgan-enforcement-covid-19/

recent posts, including unbroadcast posts:

aug 9

there's an underlying assumption in the discussion around food security in the north that the problem is infrastructure related, and just the result of bad planning. this perspective seems to be pervasive, but it's rooted in a sort of denial of the purposeful colonial practices that have led us to this point.

stated as tersely as possible, the food security issues are an entirely artificial problem that was created on purpose. and, how did we get here?

well, there have been people living there for thousands of years, and they always had plenty to eat before - they ate high fat diets of caribou, seals, walrus, narwhal and supplemented shrubs. it may be hard to grow plants that far north most of the year, but there's not an actual deficit of things to eat. and, what has happened?

what happened is that we moved in, rounded the people up into settled camps (stopping them from migrating) and fed them by shipping in food from the south. we also brought in the church to brainwash them into colonial living norms, which led to the demonization of traditional food sources as "country food", and a people raised to interpret their own traditions as backwards and satanic. the next things that came in were oil and guns; dogsleds became replaced by skidoos, spears by rifles. and, over time, they've forgotten how to hunt.

i'm not sure that it is possible, or even makes sense, to talk about undoing this. but, you can't truly address the issue without understanding that we did this on purpose, to separate these people from their heritage.

and, yes - now they're hooked on doritos and coke, because it's what we fed them with.

these areas are more than capable of sustaining their own food networks, but in order to get to that point you have to loosen the colonial grip that the federal government has put in place in order to prevent it.

13:07

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13:09

aug 10

this article is very poorly written, in it's survey of the science around the topic. that said, it would appear that this doctor is promoting the use of the drug as a prophylactic (which is not based on any science), rather than as a treatment in severe cases (which appears to be part of an effective strategy to prevent septic shock, when it sets in, which is the same way it is used to treat lupus, rather than malaria). as badly written as the article is, the doctor appears to have genuinely misunderstood the science.

however, her confusion is not a reason to censor her.

when somebody is confused about something, attempting to silence them is more likely to increase their confusion than resolve it. people easily develop persecution complexes, and like-minded people are quick to erect martyrs out of people that they feel are being suppressed. if your goal is truly a greater public understanding of the proper uses of this drug in the context of treating covid-19, it is a far better idea to engage this person in discourse, and try to convince them that they are incorrect than it is to silence them or shut them down with force.

further, before you silence dissent, it is always of paramount importance to ask yourself if you might be wrong. for, you might be wrong, and history will judge you terribly for it.

the science is in fact crystal clear that there are valid therapeutic uses for this drug (which is in fact approved by the appropriate bodies, worldwide, for these reasons) in the context of treating severe cases of covid-19. a little discourse may help everybody understand this better; clearly, sending experts out and demanding people obey their authority isn't actually working that well, is it?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/kulvinder-kaur-gill-tweets-cpso-1.5680122

5:42

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5:43

i understand that there are cultures on this planet that are highly hierarchical, and in which authority is paramount. these cultures are as ancient as any other, and sending out experts to bark orders may be an effective strategy in those cultures.

but, white people have always been all about discourse; the one thing that survived the vicious dark age that set in with christianity was the platonic discourse, which was the central focus of a real education, in those days. everything was always about talking it through - democracy, the market, philosophy, etc.

we lost that, but we brought it back, partly because it better fit the character of celto-german anarchy as it emerged from the boot of latin dominance. one of the misunderstood things about the vikings, and one of the things we actually understand best about them, was how startlingly democratic their society actually was. they would constantly convene at assemblies in ways that seem to have been lost to the romanized peoples they encountered. the english common law parliament is also a unique relic of german democracy that survived in hybrid form, where it disappeared virtually everywhere else. it makes sense that the new german aristocracy in europe would identify more with greek democracy than with what had become latin tyranny, and the renaissance kind of gave them the chance to make that choice, as to how they would be civilized. we often think of the renaissance and enlightenment as a struggle between the authority of the church and the primacy of empirical science, but it was just as much an overturning of latin civilization in favour of greek civilization. with that process, the west inherited all things greek, including the centrality of discourse, which better fit it's shared barbarian character with the ancient greeks than the dominance and authority of latin religion.

as with any reversal of thought, the struggle is never complete; today, we still see proponents of authority over discourse in the west, and they continue to wield power. but, our history is clear enough - nothing much changes in barbarian cultures without recognizing the centrality of discourse within them, without reaching out to the demos, without having a debate, or maybe even swinging it out.

if you want to get things done, you need to fit the approach properly to the culture.

6:41

while growing up in canada means you've been raised in the west and are a westerner regardless of what you look like, it's important to point out that the west is not the only culture that was dominantly influence by the greeks. it was perhaps a pitstop in the long run of things, but greek mathematics and astronomy, especially, were developed rather substantially in baghdad during the babylonian renaissance; the centrality of greek origins in this renaissance is itself rooted in the deep cultural realities of centuries of hellenic dominance in the region, from the persian collapse led by alexander through the parthian uprising and well into the roman takeover of the levant, led by pompey. the roman-persian war was initially built on a struggle as to who would inherit the greco-persian empire, a question that history never resolved, until the appearance of islam, which did not inherit it but dismantled it.

that ancient hellenic influence, as projected by alexander (but, in fact, preceding him, culturally) spread to the furthest eastern reaches of the indo-european sphere, and all the way into india itself. the legend is that very large numbers of alexander's soldiers ended up india when he died and just kind of stayed put there. when they did, they set up colonies with their own systems of government and manufactured their own art and whatnot. cultural exchange between these greek settlers, called indo-greeks and greco-bactrians, and the indians themselves was in fact exceedingly deep, and the effects of hellenism in india can be traced very far into the future.

i mean, check this out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_influence_on_Indian_art

it's a deep academic discipline - well studied, because it's so prominent in the art.

while i'm not aware of any tradition of plato or socrates in india, the period of hellenic influence in india coincided with the earliest buddhist writings, and it's hard not to see an influence from greek discourse on the way that the writings are ordered. it's known that many extant buddhist sculptures were essentially greek in construction, so the influence was there. regardless, buddhism is also a discourse-based system of thinking, rather than an authoritarian one.

8:08

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8:09

and, yes - early christianity itself was another example of greek discourse in opposition to authoritarian rule, it just happens to be the one that got badly co-opted, and turned into a vehicle of tyranny, culminating in (but not beginning with) constantine's declaration that he saw a cross in the sky that demanded he conquer in it's name, perhaps after consuming too much ergot. we forget it was the romans that invented the holy war to attack the persians, and neither the crusaders nor the arabs, who both adopted the idea from the book of roman tactics.

whatever early christianity's position on these matters was, the institution that developed in western europe after the fall of rome and called itself a christian church had little resemblance to anything championing discourse over authority.

8:45

would i have at least gotten along with early christians?

if they gave me enough wine, maybe. it'd liven the debate, at least.

the thing is that early christians were kind of not that different from pagans; they're thought to have carried out most of the same mystery rites, and essentially would have been left alone if they'd have just acknowledged the primacy of the emperor.

given that this was the major crime that christians were charged with, not accepting the superiority of the emperor, i have to admit i'd probably be a little sympathetic to them. they don't seem to have been particularly prude people at that point in time; rather, they were known for wild parties, orgies and who knows what else. they kind of sound like anarcho-primitivists, in an era where the population was low enough to actually live it responsibly.

at some point, some fascist thugs took control of the councils, and they started passing rules and outlawing heretics and whatnot; you can see the beginnings of a dangerous institution develop here, many years before constantine. i'd consequently break with them fairly early - potentially as early as the first generation after his death. i guess the shit really hit the fan with paul, right? that's only about 50 years after his death.

but, i don't think i'd have much particularly negative to say about the very, very first christians. i could maybe get along with them, a little.

8:57

interesting google search hit.

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/influence-mystery-religions-christianity

9:08

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9:09

i'm not familiar with this source, but if you want something that's not me, this discusses an academic source that has traced greek influence on the development of buddhist thought.

i understand that buddhism traces itself to before alexander, and i don't dispute that, but the earliest actual writings we have were created during the period of hellenic influence and they really do seem to have a distinctively greek style to them. it's actually very easy to believe, without getting technical about it.

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/consider-source-buddhas-hairdo-greek/

9:50

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9:51

it turns out that the earliest known buddhist writings were actually literally written in greek & aramaic - the same languages used to write the bible.

menander, who lived a little later but is central to a lot of buddhist writing when it appears, was also a greek.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar_Bilingual_Rock_Inscription

10:35

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10:36

it's interesting to note that, in the edicts, ashoka seems to position himself in a greek world, rather than an indian world. he doesn't mention china, or the areas to the east of india; his geography is restricted to the greek world, the areas conquered by alexander. this is quite strange, isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edicts_of_Ashoka#Ashoka's_proselytism_according_to_the_Edicts

10:51

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10:52

this is the world that ashoka saw himself as existing in:

10:53

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10:54

this paper attempts to argue that the edicts of ashoka were actually based on the delphic maxims, which have apparently been found in the region in tablets dating back to 300 bce (about 40 years before the first known fragment of the edicts).

the texts i've read on the indo-greeks have stressed that there was a black hole in the historical record in terms of understanding the exact greek influence on buddhism, but they would be fairly old and it appears out of date at this point.

i did not realize that there were concrete proposals for a genealogical link, based on actual archaeological findings; this theory appears to have advanced quite a bit since the last time i looked into it.

https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/dha_0755-7256_1990_num_16_1_1467.pdf

this paper makes a similar point, if you can't read french, without being explicit:
http://www.singor.org/publ/singor201201.pdf

11:15

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11:16

is the geographical thing complete bs? i think you need to be a little more subtle.

in 1976, the democrats were probably going to do well in the northeastern & union states, but they needed a southerner on the ticket to win georgia. that year, it was the president that was the regional factor, not the vp; nonetheless, by picking mondale, carter did manage to balance the ticket. so, geography was important in 1976.

1980-1988 were landslides, so it's hard to make sense of how geography may have made a difference.

but, my recollection of 1992 was that a very important part of the calculus around picking gore was trying to hold the upper south - tennessee, kentucky. the presence of ross perot makes these analyses difficult, and it does turn out that those handful of states were not decisive, but clinton didn't know any of that when he picked gore; the clinton campaign did legitimately believe at the time that those states were key to victory, and absolutely did pick gore partly in an attempt to win them.

that was why it was ironic that gore could have won in 2000 by carrying tennessee. but, 2000 was overall more like 1976, in the sense that george w. bush had his father's name recognition in key states like florida. so, pointing to cheney and saying that geography doesn't matter is not really grasping the situation.

biden, as well, was chosen partly to help the ticket in the midwest, and there are some states like ohio that obama may have had difficulty carrying without him. but, in the end, the geographic advantage in 2008 belonged mostly to obama, who carried truly decisive states like north carolina by mobilizing black voters.

so, really, what we see over the last few decades is not that geography doesn't matter but that the successful candidates have had decisive geographic advantages of their own.

while biden may do better in some places in the midwest than clinton did, there's not any good reason at this point to think he'll actually beat trump in most of these places. what i'm getting at is that biden's geographical strengths are largely neutralized by trump. we are consequently back in a scenario where biden should be looking for a regional advantage, either by trying to excite black voters to the levels that existed in 2008 (which is an absurd premise, given the historical events of that year), by keying in specifically on hispanics (something that i strangely haven't seen discussed at all, given biden's poor numbers with hispanics) or by doubling down and taking a serious run at the midwestern white vote.

as of right now, biden's geographic base appears to be in solidly red states. he's going to need to build a base in purplish states in order to win.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/10/politics/joe-biden-vp-pick-kamala-harris/index.html

12:32

i have pointed out in the past that the broad crux of ecological science is traversing in a direction that is convergent with the holistic tendencies of indigenous worldviews and that this provides for the potential of a deep synthesis that truly must be the future of the party, if it wishes to survive. the ideology of the canadian green party should, and must, in a very real sense be a combination of the scientific method, and where advanced insights into technology can take us, with explicitly indigenous concepts of land stewardship and ecological interconnectedness that overturn the aristotlian conception of humanity as the centre of everything; it is the only feasible way forward, and if the party misses it's chance to grasp it, it might fade permanently. we need to keep the science, but pretty much everything else about the west needs to be rethought.

i've been in and out of indigenous advocacy groups, studied some indigenous law and have talked to indigenous activists on the ground, and this kind of laundry list of issues you hear from politicians really isn't close to were their heads are at. there's such a wide spectrum of views on so many of these topics, from sovereignty to the indian act, that it's hard to make sense of laying down ideas ahead of time and pushing them forward.

what the next leader of the green party needs to commit to doing is talking to indigenous people. like, really talking to them - going into their communities, taking note of their concerns and then bringing them back to the party, where some very direct proposals can be drafted.

and, this should be a major project for your party, because the mla is right; i've never understood why the greens haven't sought to build a base in the indigenous community, because it's perhaps the only obvious way to build one.

13:50

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13:51

aug 11

russia is always the guinea pigs.

"We see this as part of competitive behaviour by some western pharma companies that want to dominate the vaccine market and do not want to have competition,” RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev said

that is anthony sutton's explanation for the confusing level of capitalist support for the soviet union, from day one. see, if you're a market libertarian (like sutton was.) then the kind of monopolized economy inherent to marxism sounds like a catastrophe, but if you're actually a shareholder at an actual corporation, monopoly access sounds like a great idea! so, these western bankers just shoveled money into the soviet union to fund the experiment, to see if that kind of model would lead to the total corporate dominance they always dreamed of. sutton called these people vulgar marxists, because they co-opted marxist theory and utilized it's insights for the benefits of maximizing accumulation. in their private communication, they often sounded like marxists, as they were funding marxists, but they flipped the whole thing over; it was the marxists that became the useful idiots for capital.

not much has changed apparently.

after all, russia was chosen because it was backwards, because it had always been backwards. it's the great paradox of white supremacy; the direct descendants of the ancestral white homeland have been at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy since year zero - past capitalism, past feudalism and into classical times.

somebody has to be a guinea pig.

if they're doing this, let's hope they can track it well enough to study it.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/industry-body-calls-russian-covid-19-vaccine-a-pandoras-box

3:48

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3:49

again: this kind of thing doesn't really irk me that much. this is the reality of governing in a capitalist system; every government does it, and the next government will do it, too.

but, you have to make a stink of it when it happens, anyways.

and, they're kind of swimming in it right now, because they're not even...the term they use is "the appearance of conflict", or something. their actual legal obligation is merely to make it look like they're not skimming money out, and they're not even trying, it's just rampant corruption and nepotism every which way.

i might not care myself, but this is how conservatives win back, and ultimately then lose, power. these are gifts.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/pmo-and-morneaus-office-wont-say-if-katie-telfords-husband-communicated-with-them-since-joining-private-mortgage-company/

4:04

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4:05

the rate of community transmission is lower in canada because it's had less time to spread freely without restrictions.

at some point, we've lost the plot with this. the whole point of it being safe to send kids to school is that they don't experience serious symptoms, not that they're impervious to getting it. so, we send them to school in masks and worry that they'll get it; the point is that sending them to school is of least concern because it's of little consequence if they get it.

well, 99.8% of them anyways.

when schools open in september, lots and lots and lots and lots of kids are going to get sick. but, if you didn't know any better, you wouldn't tell the difference between any other year.

just keep the kids away from the elderly for a while.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7262819/children-coronavirus-schools-reopening/

11:09

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11:10

i keep getting trapped in adding categories to the travel blog, which is preventing me from crossreferencing 2014.

there is going to be a major update soon that is going to increase the size and scope of the blog dramatically.

11:29

it's true, though.

nuclear winter is one solution to climate change.

i just think we can do a little better than that, even if it's not an empirical deduction.

15:41

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/nuclear-war-global-warming_n_828496?ri18n=true

15:42

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15:43

kamala harris will be the black sarah palin - picked to rev up a portion of the base that required little incentive to vote, and in truth representing them only transparently. a more representative pick would express more consistent conservative values.

she will simultaneously repel those she was not picked to woo, and fail to increase turnout amongst those she's been targeted towards. we already saw her fail to generate interest in her own constituency during the primaries. let us recall that she dropped out because she had no path to victory, in no small part due to disinterest towards her from black voters.

i will say this, though: the kamala harris that you get on one day is a different kamala harris than you get on another. there's some possibility she may be handed a golden script and hold to it, but i think that possibility is remote.

she was the most toxic candidate possible, and perhaps the only certain way that he'd lose.

ironically, this shifts my calculation in the other direction. as i believe that harris will sink the ticket rather badly, i'm left looking downballot and not wanting to endorse the greens too heavily. for, remember - my choice is between supporting the democrats, or passively supporting their opponents by advocating for a third party.

i would expect the polls to tighten up, and in the places biden had to swing to win.

17:44

i almost tricked myself into posting an argument about the child ifr using total case statistics, which would be misleading at best.

but, do you want real world stats, here? empirical probabilities?

i don't know how many children have contracted the coronavirus in california right now, but there has been a total of one death. it seems that roughly 17% of the population in california is under 18. if we naively assume that 17% of the 600,000 cases are in children, that is 102,000 cases. 1/102000 = 0.00000980392 = 0.000980392%.

those are not quite real world numbers; an ifr would need to be calculated from actual cases, which are probably closer to six million than 600,000. but, it is clear that even if a few more children perish, the empirically derived, real world probability is going to remain infinitessimally small.

the facts are that the ifr is just so low.....

with kids, it really is least concern. but, it's real - and expect your kid to get sick, and to need to take precautions regarding that, at least.

22:21

aug 12

i find that when this topic is discussed it tends to treat the melting glaciers as an infinite input.

if the concern around the shifts in the gulf stream are mostly long-term in scope, it seems reasonable to point out that greenland will eventually run out of ice, allowing the other processes that are increasing the temperature of the ocean to take control. even if the gulfstream collapses entirely, the general effects of sea temperature increases in the long run could lead to broadly warmer oceans in europe.

in theory, yes - this is something to be concerned about. where i am, the weather is often determined by a struggle between warm atlantic ocean temperatures and expanding polar air masses, the latter phenomenon being a mostly solar process. so, we also rely on warm atlantic temperatures for a lot of the heat in canada, especially during the parts of the year when we are tilted away from the sun.

but, from what i can see in front of me, what's actually happening is that the effects of global warming further south in the atlantic are dominating ocean temperatures off of the coast of florida, and it's the latter process that seems likely to be dominant, long to medium term.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/florida-current-is-weaker-than-it-has-been-in-over-100-years-oceans-climate-change

8:49

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8:50

i mean, we'll see what happens.

that's a struggle in nature playing out in the atlantic ocean in our lifetime - the cooling effect of melting glaciers vs. the warming effects of increased oceanic and atmospheric carbon concentrations. when you dump hot and cold into the atlantic at the same time, how is equilibrium eventually reached?

8:52

remember.

there's always a counterforce.

9:09

all your kids are gonna die.

(not really)

9:41

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9:42



10:03

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10:04

so, i've now done a final final final update for those published posts, which required adding many posts to the travel blog and fixing a number of typos in the other blogs.

i'm confident that i've exhausted the source, now.

so, i'm going to fight with the mocrosoft servers for a bit in updating these files and post an update when it's done...

i'm following through with a process, and it is time consuming, but it is necessary. i wll be back to recording as soon as i'm done with this round of documentation, and it is nearing an end. slowly.

10:41

so, we're coming to the end of the tobacco - i've got a few smokes left, and i'm going to need to make a choice in the next few hours about what the best way to proceed is.

so, let's recall how this happened.

in the middle of june, after they announced the border closure for the summer, i decided that i wasn't going to spend the summer inside yelling at the neighbours to stop smoking. while i have engaged in all smoking a good distance from the house, the fact that i've been smoking means i can't smell my neighbours, and i consequently haven't been pissed off about it. so, i bought a quarter with the intent of "headcaving", which is what i call my habit of biyearly marijuana use [celebrated at the summer and winster solstices, at the end of june and the end of december]. this headcave was a little different, in that i attempted to gear it around rolling tobacco rather than cigarettes, so that i'd have an understanding of what proportions we're dealing with in a legalized reality.

i learned that you can get about 3/4s of an ounce from a 50 g pouch of tobacco, which lasted me about a month. once i'd smoked through the first pouch, i decided that i'd buy another quarter along with a second pouch of tobacco and put it aside for sporadic usage.

it was partly due to the weather that i found myself smoking right through it, but in the process i started to realize that i was becoming re-accustomed to smoking tobacco, which i had quit at the start of 2016 on a habitual basis. i am confident that i will not go back to this habit, but i had to catch myself and realize i was slipping.

so, i decided that it was not a good idea to just leave it in the cupboard like i leave alcohol sitting around for months at a time because my previous habits of binge smoking marijuana combined with the extremely powerful addictive properties of nicotine meant it was increasingly unlikely that i would just leave it alone; i have no meaningful urge to randomly get drunk, and was hoping leaving marijuana sitting around would be just as easy, but it became apparent to me that if i leave something smokeble in the house, it's going to get smoked, as an excuse for the tobacco use.

at that point, i still had a lot of rolling tobacco left, so i decided that i'd smoke through it and then try and figure out some way to adjust. i've looked at tobacco replacements (i can probably get raspberry leaves at the bulk barn), but i decided to take a chance on some edibles at the beginning of august, that i have not touched yet. i've got four 2 mgs and two 5 mgs to experiment with.

i primarily went through this process to get rid of the tobacco, which is now gone, and i definitely do not want to buy anymore. but, the weather is giving me one more nice weekend, so i need to weigh whether i want to spend a weekend trying smoking pot with something else or spend it drinking a lot of coffee, instead.

three smokes left, and that's it. edibles are legal. i have alternatives to try to smoke with, and easy access down the street. there's no longer any excuse - this is it.

i've made major advances on this, but the pot was really the last thing.

i'm stoked to move on.

14:47

man, i'd trade morneau for carney in a minute. but, you'd have to throw in a shit load of draft picks if you expect the universe to give you carney for morneau, especially given that morneau's salary is so much bigger.

yes, morneau is a little out of his league; canada has some high level experts floating around out there, and this is a good time for them to step in, where they can.

if carney wants the job, morneau should graciously stand aside.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-morneau-finance-minister-future-1.5682567

22:52

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22:53

aug 13

it's still a trickle, but i'm starting to see a lot of for sale signs in the neighbourhood, suggesting the pandemic is starting to turn over into serious financial ruin for more and more people. while i don't have any desire to harm these people, their reliance on property as a wealth sink is a factor in driving up rent, and there is currently a bubble in the price of rent in windsor, which would not be anywhere close to average market rent under fair market conditions. if more people and more people are forced to sell at low prices due to the pandemic, that should burst the rent bubble and bring property values and subsequent rents back down to the level they were at a few years ago.

windsor can be a diploma mill college town for foreign students that couldn't get in anywhere else or it can be a retirement villa for people trying to escape the city without really escaping the city but it does not have enough housing supply to be both of these things, and attempts to be both of these things will just undo both of them as rising rents and property costs simultaneously repel retirees from toronto (who want to come here because it's cheap on a fixed income) and students (where high rents will undo some of the pull effects of the reality that foreign students coming into canada can enjoy some of the lowest entrance requirements in the world at the local university, which hardly appears to attract any local students at all due to it's atrocious reputation.).

i was hoping that it would be a collapsing industrial centre, ripe for revolutionary anarchism, but what once seemed like a promising epicentre has been taken over by the capitalist interests of students & seniors, and the banks funding their loans. it's disappointing, but it's what it is.

regardless, from a renter's perspective, a collapse in property values would be a godsend, right now, after so many years of unchecked increases in property values driving rent costs up to unsustainable levels, creating a bubble that needs to burst. in canada, the cmhc won't let bad assets tank the market like we saw happen in the united states in 2008; our system is structurally sound, and the regulatory safeguards to prevent the free market from running out of control and generating that kind of catastrophe are properly in place. but, all of that control at the ownership level will neither prevent a bubble in rent from developing, nor from it exploding in front of everybody.

so, if you start seeing piles of for sale signs go up, you should interpret that as a good news - it means property values are coming down as people flee the market, that supply is coming up and that decreases in market rent are imminent.

4:04

canada's often praised for not undoing policies that would have prevented the housing bubble. this is all very true.

but, what's being missed is that the bubble just shifted from ownership to rent, and consequently took longer to get to a crises point.

4:16

i've been pushing for increases in the low income housing supply for years and there hasn't been a lot of response; property owners appear to have allowed their greed to function more dominantly than their good sense.

a good, hard crash in property values is long, long overdue.

4:19

in america, the banks handed out piles of bad loans to people that couldn't pay their mortgages (and in scenarios where any due diligence at all would have made that clear).

that cannot happen here. it's impossible, structurally.

however, what that means is that instead of people that can't pay their mortgages, we have people that can't pay their rents. that issue started getting very bad all of a sudden around 2008 or so, and appears to be entering a crises point as a result of the pandemic.

lowering property costs (which didn't really happen here after 2008 due to the structurally sound system) should ease some of the bubble in rent that's developed, but we ultimately need more regulation to keep rents down and more supply to accommodate the rising population.

4:26

i started to feel the nic pulls last night and realized that when i say i let it sneak up on me...

i'm used to smoking a pack or two over the weekend, but i've been smoking pot - with tobacco - almost daily for two months. it really snuck up on me.

so, i opted to try a non-tobacco rolling option for the last nice weekend, hoping to strangely smoke myself through the detox. i've done this several times, now; the first thing is to break the physical addiction, and that actually only takes a few days. while it's uncomfortable, i actually don't find that part difficult. rather, it's the habitual part of the whole thing - having a smoke after every meal, for example - that i found so hard to smash up. and, i still crave cigarettes with alcohol, particularly.

so, this is going to be a rough weekend, regardless, and it's better to get ahead of it than let it linger further. so, i may have smoked my last ever cigarette last night on the way home from the store.

after some cursory research, i decided that what i was looking for was red raspberry leaves and the best way to find it was to looking for loose leaf raspberry tea. raspberry tea is both ancient and popular, it is no doubt a tradition passed on via family going back decades, so i did not think this would be hard; this struck me as an easy to find commodity. the bulk barn did not have raspberry tea, surprisingly. i tried some tea stores, and they had raspberry mixes...

i decided to just take a walk out to the store and stop at a few places, and i ended up spending $4.50 on 60 g of tea, in two box - a pure peppermint tea (30 g for $0.99) and a mix that includes raspberries and blueberries (30 g for the remaining price). i did not know if it was safe to smoke these teas or not, but i figured i'd have some tea, worst case...

it turns out the peppermint is safe, and i'll have to look into the other mix when it comes up.

when i was at the store, i asked the clerk if she had any filler to sell; if not raspberry leaves, then maybe even ground up hemp. she pulled out a concoction by a company called enlite that includes the following: Mullein, Red Raspberry Leaf, Yerba Mate, Gotu Kola, Marshmallow Leaf, Spearmint, Thyme. well, there's my raspberry leaf, for the night.

i've smoked a few joints using this mix now, and it smells and tastes like tea; it's mostly the raspberry that dominates, but you can get strong hints of spearmint as well, giving it a kind of menthol feel to it. this mixture also contains caffeine, so it's got a lift to the buzz that i like.

unfortunately, this mix is quite expensive; i paid $20 for 16 g, and i only did it because i didn't know the safety of the tea i'd just bought. this stuff is at least marketed to smoke, tea certainly isn't. the price of peppermint tea looks a lot more appealing, and i may be able to order raspberry leaves in bulk online. however, depending on how this goes, i suspect that i may see some attraction to green tea for the caffeine content. this is cheap and widely available.

for now, that's what i'm smoking for the weekend, and let's hope the physical pull on the nicotine is gone in a few days.

while i know that smoking herbs is not less unhealthy than smoking tobacco, i do hope it is less addictive.

potential side effects of smoking herbs like this are going to be allergies, headaches, dryness and rashes. the truth is that tobacco also has those same side effects. it's still early, but right now it seems like any such side effects would be lessened, given that the buzz is a little softer. but, we'll see what happens.

i want to move to edibles for normal (sporadic) use. but, if this works, i could maybe retain a place for the odd spliff, too.

6:06

and, then they went and changed the forecast on me - it's actually going to be kind of cold in windsor this weekend. like, not even 30. that's not summer...

so, i was right the first time - we're having a cold august, and summer really ended in mid-july.

9:25

i don't know why this is so baffling to people.

the reason i cannot be contacted by phone is that i don't want you to contact me by phone. some people get excited when somebody wants to talk to them on the phone; i tend to get anxious, and annoyed. i simply do not want to own a device that sits in my house and rings when somebody wants to talk to me; it's an invasion of privacy, and the reality is that if i actually had a phone connected to an actual live service then i'd just turn it off anyways.

i would greatly prefer written communication over verbal communication, and would rather communicate over email than over the phone.

so, i have eliminated means to contact me verbally because i do not like to engage in verbal communication and i find the premise that somebody can ring a bell and expect me to talk to them to be an invasion on my personal privacy that i am not interested in normalizing.

15:43

phones are really very weird, invasive things when you drop the advertising blitz and think about it for a minute.

why the fuck would anybody want to walk around with a device that allows anybody to bother them at any possible time?

it's a bizarre idea, on it's face.

15:48

here's the 7th-9th summary, as kept in my own records.

aug 7

this was much later, but it's also still, to my knowledge, the highest selling indie record of all time. so, any records that sold more than this were always on major record labels.

punk as a movement didn't release many records on major labels and the only thing i can think of that sold more than this off the top of my head is actually nevermind.

that means this was the centerpiece of one of the most recognizable punk rock records ever released.

and. well...listen to it...

16:00

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16:01

i'm not sure if dexter holland ever finished his phd in microbiology or not.

16:05

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16:06

remember...

when life's a waste, just run away.

i think i've got my point across - this wasn't a minority view in the punk scene, especially not after about 1982-1983. it was a dominant component of what punk was from the start, to the end.

the fans may have been less into the messaging than the bands, and i get that. but, the general perception of drug use in the punk movement was never particularly positive; they seem to have broadly seen potheads as losers, and people that did heavy drugs as giving up on themselves.

and, they made fun of them for it.

16:32

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16:33

aug 8

is gretchen whitmer a reasonable choice?

let's hope this isn't creepy joe at play, here. listen - this is a potential problem that could develop with a number of people around him. i keep saying he's the mirror reflection of trump...

trump seems to have a kind of specific hate-on for her, as well, which could work to his advantage if he's subtle (which he never is.) but could backfire if he gets desperate, or just overwhelmed with misogyny. that's a real wildcard. my impression is that she's a strong campaigner, and might be able to push the right buttons so that he self-destructs. pence is more self-disciplined, and also more hateful to his core being, so that's a weird dynamic.

it would seem to me that a whitmer pick would put her at the front of the ticket, in the sense that she would be the media front for a biden-overseen background operation. she's relatively young, comfortable in front of the camera and fairly photogenic. the fact that she's still in contention suggests that, creepy joe or not, he is valuing these qualities rather highly.

her main strike against her would be a lack of meaningful executive experience, although she has a lot of legislative experience, and a feeling that she's kind of jumping the gun. she's a bit of a black box as to what she might actually do.

her pandemic rules appear to have deeply over-reacted to the scenario and had little effect on reducing the spread of the disease, but that's a problem with all democrats, who are not interested in following the science on the issue, even when they play political games about it. so, we know she has a fascistic streak to her, which is a downside - but to the party in general, not just her.

iirc, she ran on an infrastructure mandate, and all she's really had time to do since elected is focus on disaster relief. i remember some encouraging words to the effect that queer people actually have rights coming from the attorney general's office, but that's a separate election, right? it would be helpful from an analytical standpoint to have data from less chaotic times to get a chance to see how she might govern a few years from now; as it is, and from what i can tell, she seems to be about a middle-of-the-road centre-left democrat that should check all the boxes for most of the big single-issue voters but isn't going to be very appealing to leftists, who don't really matter, anyways.

so, it's electorally reasonable, and perhaps more so than it is a reasonable governing option. but, i'd assign a wide margin of error; what i'm saying is that we don't really have the data to know.

so, i'd need to focus on the campaign to determine whether i'd want to vote for her or abstain.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/politics/gretchen-whitmer-joe-biden-meeting/index.html

5:15

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5:15

"but, he's a decent guy."

he's really not, he's a total creep.

5:16

i need to make this point very clear. i do it every election, because you people always want to take sides, and create friends and enemies, and split people apart...

i don't approach elections like they're sports tournaments, or competitive games, and consequently don't take sides or pit groups against each other in the process.

i hate the democrats

i hate conservatives

i hate the liberals

i hate the republicans

i hate the ndp

and i hate the greens, too

ok?

i hate you all to your core, from my core, all the time, in every way.

so, i may very well post the most vicious attacks you've ever seen on biden one minute, then suggest i'm endorsing him the next. if you interpret my attacks from a partisan perspective, you're going to be run astray.

no, attacking your opponent doesn't mean i'm on your side - and i might not be. and, attacking you doesn't mean i won't endorse you.

i am not a team player, i do not want to cooperate and i'm not interested in repeating party lines.

i have no party membership and don't want to join one. if i were going to join a party, it would be something more like the communist party.

and, i can't vote in this election or any other american election.

the choices in this election are truly particularly disgusting, even relative to a long series of uninspiring choices; i thought 2016 was bad, but biden really makes clinton look pretty compelling, in comparison (not enough to seriously endorse her).

so don't try to put me on a team, or assign me to a side.

i'm an independent agent, a loose canon, a free radical. and, i'll happily demonstrate all manners of bipolarism in my analysis, and not care if you think that's "inconsistent"; it's only inconsistent if you see it as a competition between two antagonistic forces, of which you have to choose a side.

when you have no intention of choosing either side, there's no process of the sort at play.

i will no doubt produce an opinion in the end, but not before ripping my endorsement to shreds, first, and perhaps no more than five minutes after i correctly and convincingly explain why they're unfit to govern.

it's the reality of existing in (or near) a system where democratic choice is really little more than an illusion.

5:37

and, no, i don't care if you don't like how i behave, because i'm not on your side, anyways - even if i endorse you, in the end.

and i don't care if you don't want my endorsement; you're getting it anyways, if i decide i hate your opponent more than i hate you.

5:40

call me post-partisan.

even if i'd really rather send a pox on both your houses.

and, i might get it.

5:41

so, i understand that biden people might read this blog and conclude i must be a trump supporter, but it's just the fallacy of the excluded middle at play; the idea that not(biden) = trump is a logical fallacy, and i'm happy to demonstrate it for you.

conversely, trump people might read this and conclude i must be working for biden, but they're wrong for all the same reasons.

and, in my view, if you both think i'm working for the other party, that means i'm demonstrating a proper level of impartiality.

5:47

the reality is that they're both unelectable and they're both unfit for office.

i'm not going to pretend otherwise, or trick myself into thinking differently.

5:50

but, if you're reading this, do also realize this truth:

i am the elusive educated swing voter; statistically, i don't exist, but we know i'm the ultimate arbiter of elections, when they are free. you may in the end only succeed in reducing my scorn from active to passive hate, but i am the key to victory, on all sides, and my opinion is of paramount concern.

6:01

while dmitri & glen may have broader disagreements about the benefits of capitalism (and i think these are likely even minimal, as glen is further left than he's projecting, and dmitri is actually a little further right than he's projecting, too), the difference between "enforcing your will on the corporate sector" and "working with the corporate sector" has more to do with language than a meaningful difference in policy.

while dimitri might perceive that an authoritarian articulation of positive law is a more effective means forward, he must certainly realize that he can't just pass a proclamation, and then it will just be. if we could all just chant a spell that emissions shalt recede, right? why stop there, though? i hereby declare that atmospheric carbon concentrations will recede to pre-industrial levels! make it so. what, in actuality does imposing one's will on the corporate sector mean? it means working with them to help them meet legislated targets.

likewise, glen is surely cognizant of the reality that any interaction with the corporate sector will require explicit legislation regulating it, as a basis for action in the first place. the regulators that he sends will be there to enforce the legislation, unless somebody pays them off between now and then, or the body overseeing it gets captured.

they're saying the same thing, they're just restating equivalent statements to emphasize different parts of a machinated process, rather than focus on the machinated process itself, as a holistic entity. it's a truly dumb argument.

as an aside, i've watched a few of these now and, while glen ought to win this thing easily, the format of these debates is not helping him get a wonkish message across and neither the moderators nor the other candidates seem to like him much. i would like to see a very data-oriented person in the leadership role, and he does strike me as the best candidate from that perspective, by a good margin. i haven't seen any polling; your guess is as good as mine. but, i'm getting the feeling that i'm going to walk out of this process with more respect for a defeated glen than the party, which is maybe moving away from climate change as a central point of concern.

9:44

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9:45

i think i've seen enough to produce a ranked ballot. however, i'm not going to analyze this further. it gets a little blurry after 4 or so.

i'm not looking up spelling, and don't care if i spell their names correctly right now.

1. glen murray

2. courtney howard

3. amita kutner

4. dmitri lascaris

5. judy foote

6. miriam haddad

7. david merner

8. annamie paul

9. andrew west

15:11

i've been over this a few times before; i understand that i'm an omnivore, that this is necessary, but if you look at the animals that we choose to eat...

like, go hang out with a pig some time. these are intuitive, playful creatures that are considerably more intelligent than the animals we keep as pets, cats and dogs. they have individual personalities that you learn when you rear them for slaughter, will respond to names if you give one to them and can even be effectively toilet trained. they seem far too intelligent to be raised in cages for the purposes of consumption.

humans and pigs share some weird similarities as well, like brain structure and skin composition. i've even wondered if pigs may be currently phylogenetically miscategorized as ruminants when they're really descendants of a horrid lost human culture that enslaved and converted a conquered tribe into livestock; the dna may suggest otherwise, but one wonders how powerful a role the environment can play in convergence, via epigenetic expression. hey, humans can grow tails and horns; i'm sure we have the code to grow hooves, too. some back-crossing with the right mutation, and you'd get hooved homo sapiens in no time.

i've never lived on a farm myself, but i've heard from multiple people that there's an almost traumatic rite of passage involved with coming to terms with the fact that the animal friend that you've been playing with in the yard for the last two years is going away because your family is going to eat it. that's a very difficult memory that multiple people i've met have, which demonstrates the point - you feel empathy for the animal, because you've experienced it's cognition.

these issues just don't exist with a species like crickets, who have primitive neuron-like structures but do not technically have brains. it's hard to understand what the signals they experience are like, but we can state confidently that they don't have personalities, that they don't respond to names and that they have no meaningful cognition or intelligence. i wouldn't view raising and eating crickets that differently than i view plant-based agriculture; the best way to do it is probably even in a greenhouse.

21:15

you're going to tell me a cricket has a brain.

a cricket has an eye, but it doesn't really have a brain. the nervous system is actually really localized, so it's able to function independently when parts of the body get chopped off. one wonders if that's a first step to regeneration, or a mostly lost memory of it. but, what that means is that the neurons in the head of the insect, in addition to the optic neurons, are just the local cluster for functions in the head (like eating), and are not any different than the local clusters elsewhere in the body, that are for movement and reproduction.

a brain is supposed to be a centralized processing unit that oversees the control of the entire organism, and insects do not have that; they have an optic bundle that controls for functions in the head and a series of other bundles that control for other localized functions.

so, then, do they have six brains? it's a meaningless compound phrase, a contradiction in terms. i was taught that they have a ganglia that exists throughout their body, rather than multiple brains. but, we can call things what we want, i guess, so long as you realize that "six brains" is sort of an incoherent idea, and that what you're calling brains are very limited and segmented in the scope of their functions.

it's interesting to look at insects that have eyes, though, because it seems to suggest that brains may have evolved from eyes, rather than the other way around. further, who knows; in a few million years, maybe some insects with eyes may develop actual brains, as the optic nerve takes control of the ganglia system.

21:41

aug 9

i want to be clear....

my skepticism about the virus, and criticism towards public health measures, isn't rooted in a political persuasion. i'm not sitting here hoping that people get sick, and if i thought we could have stamped the virus out, i would have supported it.

but, my analysis of the situation was that the virus would not be suppressed. this was based on what i was able to gather about the contagiousness of the virus, combined with what kind of measures could be realistically put in place; i pointed out that the social distancing thing was really just a ridiculous joke in terms of keeping people apart from each other, and that the laboratory assumptions put in place in these studies around mask use did not reflect the realities of people fidgeting with masks, putting them in their pockets, accepting them from centralized locations that are touched and breathed on by dozens or hundreds of people, etc.

i legitimately expected these measures to fail - not because i wanted them to, but because a sober analysis concluded that they just would. and, if you listen to the public health experts, it was clear that they all knew that, they were just reacting out of desperation, to try to solve something they didn't know how to deal with.

see, here is where i maybe get political, but i'd challenge somebody to negate this phrase and argue it: i don't think it's the role of government to take wild guesses on policy and hope it works, but rather that it is the role of government to look at the data through sober, critical filters and make the clearest deductions from it possible. if government had done that, if it had truly followed the science rather than base it's policy on faith and hope, then it would have concluded that it should have brought in policies to mitigate the eventual spread, rather than policies to stop it from spreading.

and, then, what does mitigation mean? it means protecting the elderly and weak, and trying to keep the spread within communities that have the highest chances of fighting it off. something we've learned is that the spread of the virus comes down substantively at around 20% exposure. while the measurements we've observed around that magic number of 20% represent a broad cross-section of the population that is at least partly demographically representative of the population as a whole, the lesson from that observation is that the contagiousness of the virus decreases to a manageable level when you can provide immunity to as little as one out of five possible spreaders. policy should then be shaped around building in immunity in the much greater than 20% of the population that is at least risk of mortality.

at this stage in the pandemic, opening the universities is probably the best thing they can do.

but, if you're old, stay inside and away from students during september, please.

4:15

well, he's got the ndp in place to blame, when the bankers grill him on it.

but, people are losing or have lost patience. if he's serious, he'd better be spending his vacation working something out (wouldn't that be a dramatic change, itself) and be ready to ram it through on day one, because he doesn't have much public goodwill left, and consequently doesn't have much time left to change minds.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/08/08/insiders-say-justin-trudeau-doesnt-want-an-election-he-wants-to-remake-canada.html

4:34

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4:35

time's just about up, justin.

4:37

i support them in principle, but this is maybe not the best idea just right now. 

if you don't want to wear a mask, then don't. it's not necessary to gather in the park and make a show of it; in a sense, they've got you, if they can get you to do that.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/anti-mask-march-montreal-aug-8-1.5679598

4:42

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4:43

guinea pigs. what have we done to them?

it was the other night, walking home with groceries, maskless, that i was thinking about the virus, and potential vaccination approaches. with all of this skepticism around basic science (people challenging the science around antibodies, for example) that i'm pushing back against, it's frustrating that we're not seeing a more healthy skepticism around vaccine use; the potential dangers of handing out an untested vaccine don't seem to be registering with the general population, who seem a little bit frighteningly naive about the safety of untested vaccines, as they've been conditioned to be by a media that understandably targets vaccine skeptics as a public health nuisance.

but, i need to stress that a tetanus shot has been widely tested for a long period of time. we know that adverse reactions are rare, and it's a relatively safe way to protect yourself from something that can legitimately kill you. it's going to be impossible to do proper testing with these covid-19 vaccines before releasing them; the safety trial is going to be the first deployment of the vaccine.

so, the people that get the vaccine first are going to be...guinea pigs. you want to argue you should give it the elderly first, but given that the first recipients are going to be guinea pigs, is it potentially better to give it to a more resilient population, like kids?

but, then do you support treating kids like....guinea pigs?

and, i stopped and decided that, no, i don't support treating kids like guinea pigs - it is the elderly at risk, and they must assume it.

but, then i stopped to realize that i don't even support treating guinea pigs like guinea pigs.

what have we done to these creatures? we have entirely co-opted their identity, fully stolen their existence from them. for when we think of guinea pigs, we no longer imagine vibrant, high-strung rodents flopping around the edges of the forest floor, but imagine animals in cages under human experimentation. they exist, in our language, solely for our own amusement.

there's a historical parallel in how we've used racial terms to refer to slaves in various languages, so that the word that we use to describe that racial group is the same word we used to describe the concept of a slave. in english, we've adopted the word slave from anglo-norman invaders, who brought it to the island with a germano-latin ruling class that enslaved the slavic-speaking speakers to the east of europe, largely to sell them to the arabic rulers in the middle east. so, in english, our word for slave is the same as our word for slav. in arabic, the concept of slavery is intrinsically tied into the physicality of blackness, which is something that partially developed in the united states, as well.

6:15

so, it took me a few days longer than i'd have liked it to get groceries done; i picked up a few things late on thursday, a few more on friday and had to wait until saturday afternoon to get some raspberries & strawberries at the far store, as they were overpriced at the close ones. so, i'm a few days behind.

i've got my workstation set back up now and am ready to get back to work in rapidly finishing up the consistency check over 2014 and moving to rebuilding 2015 in one swoop.

8:06

190

19:36

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19:38

248

here's the 7th-9th summary, as kept in my own records.

aug 7

this was much later, but it's also still, to my knowledge, the highest selling indie record of all time. so, any records that sold more than this were always on major record labels.

punk as a movement didn't release many records on major labels and the only thing i can think of that sold more than this off the top of my head is actually nevermind.

that means this was the centerpiece of one of the most recognizable punk rock records ever released.

and. well...listen to it...

16:00

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16:01

i'm not sure if dexter holland ever finished his phd in microbiology or not.

16:05

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16:06

remember...

when life's a waste, just run away.

i think i've got my point across - this wasn't a minority view in the punk scene, especially not after about 1982-1983. it was a dominant component of what punk was from the start, to the end.

the fans may have been less into the messaging than the bands, and i get that. but, the general perception of drug use in the punk movement was never particularly positive; they seem to have broadly seen potheads as losers, and people that did heavy drugs as giving up on themselves.

and, they made fun of them for it.

16:32

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16:33

aug 8

is gretchen whitmer a reasonable choice?

let's hope this isn't creepy joe at play, here. listen - this is a potential problem that could develop with a number of people around him. i keep saying he's the mirror reflection of trump...

trump seems to have a kind of specific hate-on for her, as well, which could work to his advantage if he's subtle (which he never is.) but could backfire if he gets desperate, or just overwhelmed with misogyny. that's a real wildcard. my impression is that she's a strong campaigner, and might be able to push the right buttons so that he self-destructs. pence is more self-disciplined, and also more hateful to his core being, so that's a weird dynamic.

it would seem to me that a whitmer pick would put her at the front of the ticket, in the sense that she would be the media front for a biden-overseen background operation. she's relatively young, comfortable in front of the camera and fairly photogenic. the fact that she's still in contention suggests that, creepy joe or not, he is valuing these qualities rather highly.

her main strike against her would be a lack of meaningful executive experience, although she has a lot of legislative experience, and a feeling that she's kind of jumping the gun. she's a bit of a black box as to what she might actually do.

her pandemic rules appear to have deeply over-reacted to the scenario and had little effect on reducing the spread of the disease, but that's a problem with all democrats, who are not interested in following the science on the issue, even when they play political games about it. so, we know she has a fascistic streak to her, which is a downside - but to the party in general, not just her.

iirc, she ran on an infrastructure mandate, and all she's really had time to do since elected is focus on disaster relief. i remember some encouraging words to the effect that queer people actually have rights coming from the attorney general's office, but that's a separate election, right? it would be helpful from an analytical standpoint to have data from less chaotic times to get a chance to see how she might govern a few years from now; as it is, and from what i can tell, she seems to be about a middle-of-the-road centre-left democrat that should check all the boxes for most of the big single-issue voters but isn't going to be very appealing to leftists, who don't really matter, anyways.

so, it's electorally reasonable, and perhaps more so than it is a reasonable governing option. but, i'd assign a wide margin of error; what i'm saying is that we don't really have the data to know.

so, i'd need to focus on the campaign to determine whether i'd want to vote for her or abstain.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/politics/gretchen-whitmer-joe-biden-meeting/index.html

5:15

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5:15

"but, he's a decent guy."

he's really not, he's a total creep.

5:16

i need to make this point very clear. i do it every election, because you people always want to take sides, and create friends and enemies, and split people apart...

i don't approach elections like they're sports tournaments, or competitive games, and consequently don't take sides or pit groups against each other in the process.

i hate the democrats

i hate conservatives

i hate the liberals

i hate the republicans

i hate the ndp

and i hate the greens, too

ok?

i hate you all to your core, from my core, all the time, in every way.

so, i may very well post the most vicious attacks you've ever seen on biden one minute, then suggest i'm endorsing him the next. if you interpret my attacks from a partisan perspective, you're going to be run astray.

no, attacking your opponent doesn't mean i'm on your side - and i might not be. and, attacking you doesn't mean i won't endorse you.

i am not a team player, i do not want to cooperate and i'm not interested in repeating party lines.

i have no party membership and don't want to join one. if i were going to join a party, it would be something more like the communist party.

and, i can't vote in this election or any other american election.

the choices in this election are truly particularly disgusting, even relative to a long series of uninspiring choices; i thought 2016 was bad, but biden really makes clinton look pretty compelling, in comparison (not enough to seriously endorse her).

so don't try to put me on a team, or assign me to a side.

i'm an independent agent, a loose canon, a free radical. and, i'll happily demonstrate all manners of bipolarism in my analysis, and not care if you think that's "inconsistent"; it's only inconsistent if you see it as a competition between two antagonistic forces, of which you have to choose a side.

when you have no intention of choosing either side, there's no process of the sort at play.

i will no doubt produce an opinion in the end, but not before ripping my endorsement to shreds, first, and perhaps no more than five minutes after i correctly and convincingly explain why they're unfit to govern.

it's the reality of existing in (or near) a system where democratic choice is really little more than an illusion.

5:37

and, no, i don't care if you don't like how i behave, because i'm not on your side, anyways - even if i endorse you, in the end.

and i don't care if you don't want my endorsement; you're getting it anyways, if i decide i hate your opponent more than i hate you.

5:40

call me post-partisan.

even if i'd really rather send a pox on both your houses.

and, i might get it.

5:41

so, i understand that biden people might read this blog and conclude i must be a trump supporter, but it's just the fallacy of the excluded middle at play; the idea that not(biden) = trump is a logical fallacy, and i'm happy to demonstrate it for you.

conversely, trump people might read this and conclude i must be working for biden, but they're wrong for all the same reasons.

and, in my view, if you both think i'm working for the other party, that means i'm demonstrating a proper level of impartiality.

5:47

the reality is that they're both unelectable and they're both unfit for office.

i'm not going to pretend otherwise, or trick myself into thinking differently.

5:50

but, if you're reading this, do also realize this truth:

i am the elusive educated swing voter; statistically, i don't exist, but we know i'm the ultimate arbiter of elections, when they are free. you may in the end only succeed in reducing my scorn from active to passive hate, but i am the key to victory, on all sides, and my opinion is of paramount concern.

6:01

while dmitri & glen may have broader disagreements about the benefits of capitalism (and i think these are likely even minimal, as glen is further left than he's projecting, and dmitri is actually a little further right than he's projecting, too), the difference between "enforcing your will on the corporate sector" and "working with the corporate sector" has more to do with language than a meaningful difference in policy.

while dimitri might perceive that an authoritarian articulation of positive law is a more effective means forward, he must certainly realize that he can't just pass a proclamation, and then it will just be. if we could all just chant a spell that emissions shalt recede, right? why stop there, though? i hereby declare that atmospheric carbon concentrations will recede to pre-industrial levels! make it so. what, in actuality does imposing one's will on the corporate sector mean? it means working with them to help them meet legislated targets.

likewise, glen is surely cognizant of the reality that any interaction with the corporate sector will require explicit legislation regulating it, as a basis for action in the first place. the regulators that he sends will be there to enforce the legislation, unless somebody pays them off between now and then, or the body overseeing it gets captured.

they're saying the same thing, they're just restating equivalent statements to emphasize different parts of a machinated process, rather than focus on the machinated process itself, as a holistic entity. it's a truly dumb argument.

as an aside, i've watched a few of these now and, while glen ought to win this thing easily, the format of these debates is not helping him get a wonkish message across and neither the moderators nor the other candidates seem to like him much. i would like to see a very data-oriented person in the leadership role, and he does strike me as the best candidate from that perspective, by a good margin. i haven't seen any polling; your guess is as good as mine. but, i'm getting the feeling that i'm going to walk out of this process with more respect for a defeated glen than the party, which is maybe moving away from climate change as a central point of concern.

9:44

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9:45

i think i've seen enough to produce a ranked ballot. however, i'm not going to analyze this further. it gets a little blurry after 4 or so.

i'm not looking up spelling, and don't care if i spell their names correctly right now.

1. glen murray

2. courtney howard

3. amita kutner

4. dmitri lascaris

5. judy foote

6. miriam haddad

7. david merner

8. annamie paul

9. andrew west

15:11

i've been over this a few times before; i understand that i'm an omnivore, that this is necessary, but if you look at the animals that we choose to eat...

like, go hang out with a pig some time. these are intuitive, playful creatures that are considerably more intelligent than the animals we keep as pets, cats and dogs. they have individual personalities that you learn when you rear them for slaughter, will respond to names if you give one to them and can even be effectively toilet trained. they seem far too intelligent to be raised in cages for the purposes of consumption.

humans and pigs share some weird similarities as well, like brain structure and skin composition. i've even wondered if pigs may be currently phylogenetically miscategorized as ruminants when they're really descendants of a horrid lost human culture that enslaved and converted a conquered tribe into livestock; the dna may suggest otherwise, but one wonders how powerful a role the environment can play in convergence, via epigenetic expression. hey, humans can grow tails and horns; i'm sure we have the code to grow hooves, too. some back-crossing with the right mutation, and you'd get hooved homo sapiens in no time.

i've never lived on a farm myself, but i've heard from multiple people that there's an almost traumatic rite of passage involved with coming to terms with the fact that the animal friend that you've been playing with in the yard for the last two years is going away because your family is going to eat it. that's a very difficult memory that multiple people i've met have, which demonstrates the point - you feel empathy for the animal, because you've experienced it's cognition.

these issues just don't exist with a species like crickets, who have primitive neuron-like structures but do not technically have brains. it's hard to understand what the signals they experience are like, but we can state confidently that they don't have personalities, that they don't respond to names and that they have no meaningful cognition or intelligence. i wouldn't view raising and eating crickets that differently than i view plant-based agriculture; the best way to do it is probably even in a greenhouse.

21:15

you're going to tell me a cricket has a brain.

a cricket has an eye, but it doesn't really have a brain. the nervous system is actually really localized, so it's able to function independently when parts of the body get chopped off. one wonders if that's a first step to regeneration, or a mostly lost memory of it. but, what that means is that the neurons in the head of the insect, in addition to the optic neurons, are just the local cluster for functions in the head (like eating), and are not any different than the local clusters elsewhere in the body, that are for movement and reproduction.

a brain is supposed to be a centralized processing unit that oversees the control of the entire organism, and insects do not have that; they have an optic bundle that controls for functions in the head and a series of other bundles that control for other localized functions.

so, then, do they have six brains? it's a meaningless compound phrase, a contradiction in terms. i was taught that they have a ganglia that exists throughout their body, rather than multiple brains. but, we can call things what we want, i guess, so long as you realize that "six brains" is sort of an incoherent idea, and that what you're calling brains are very limited and segmented in the scope of their functions.

it's interesting to look at insects that have eyes, though, because it seems to suggest that brains may have evolved from eyes, rather than the other way around. further, who knows; in a few million years, maybe some insects with eyes may develop actual brains, as the optic nerve takes control of the ganglia system.

21:41

aug 9

i want to be clear....

my skepticism about the virus, and criticism towards public health measures, isn't rooted in a political persuasion. i'm not sitting here hoping that people get sick, and if i thought we could have stamped the virus out, i would have supported it.

but, my analysis of the situation was that the virus would not be suppressed. this was based on what i was able to gather about the contagiousness of the virus, combined with what kind of measures could be realistically put in place; i pointed out that the social distancing thing was really just a ridiculous joke in terms of keeping people apart from each other, and that the laboratory assumptions put in place in these studies around mask use did not reflect the realities of people fidgeting with masks, putting them in their pockets, accepting them from centralized locations that are touched and breathed on by dozens or hundreds of people, etc.

i legitimately expected these measures to fail - not because i wanted them to, but because a sober analysis concluded that they just would. and, if you listen to the public health experts, it was clear that they all knew that, they were just reacting out of desperation, to try to solve something they didn't know how to deal with.

see, here is where i maybe get political, but i'd challenge somebody to negate this phrase and argue it: i don't think it's the role of government to take wild guesses on policy and hope it works, but rather that it is the role of government to look at the data through sober, critical filters and make the clearest deductions from it possible. if government had done that, if it had truly followed the science rather than base it's policy on faith and hope, then it would have concluded that it should have brought in policies to mitigate the eventual spread, rather than policies to stop it from spreading.

and, then, what does mitigation mean? it means protecting the elderly and weak, and trying to keep the spread within communities that have the highest chances of fighting it off. something we've learned is that the spread of the virus comes down substantively at around 20% exposure. while the measurements we've observed around that magic number of 20% represent a broad cross-section of the population that is at least partly demographically representative of the population as a whole, the lesson from that observation is that the contagiousness of the virus decreases to a manageable level when you can provide immunity to as little as one out of five possible spreaders. policy should then be shaped around building in immunity in the much greater than 20% of the population that is at least risk of mortality.

at this stage in the pandemic, opening the universities is probably the best thing they can do.

but, if you're old, stay inside and away from students during september, please.

4:15

well, he's got the ndp in place to blame, when the bankers grill him on it.

but, people are losing or have lost patience. if he's serious, he'd better be spending his vacation working something out (wouldn't that be a dramatic change, itself) and be ready to ram it through on day one, because he doesn't have much public goodwill left, and consequently doesn't have much time left to change minds.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/08/08/insiders-say-justin-trudeau-doesnt-want-an-election-he-wants-to-remake-canada.html

4:34

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4:35

time's just about up, justin.

4:37

i support them in principle, but this is maybe not the best idea just right now. 

if you don't want to wear a mask, then don't. it's not necessary to gather in the park and make a show of it; in a sense, they've got you, if they can get you to do that.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/anti-mask-march-montreal-aug-8-1.5679598

4:42

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4:43

guinea pigs. what have we done to them?

it was the other night, walking home with groceries, maskless, that i was thinking about the virus, and potential vaccination approaches. with all of this skepticism around basic science (people challenging the science around antibodies, for example) that i'm pushing back against, it's frustrating that we're not seeing a more healthy skepticism around vaccine use; the potential dangers of handing out an untested vaccine don't seem to be registering with the general population, who seem a little bit frighteningly naive about the safety of untested vaccines, as they've been conditioned to be by a media that understandably targets vaccine skeptics as a public health nuisance.

but, i need to stress that a tetanus shot has been widely tested for a long period of time. we know that adverse reactions are rare, and it's a relatively safe way to protect yourself from something that can legitimately kill you. it's going to be impossible to do proper testing with these covid-19 vaccines before releasing them; the safety trial is going to be the first deployment of the vaccine.

so, the people that get the vaccine first are going to be...guinea pigs. you want to argue you should give it the elderly first, but given that the first recipients are going to be guinea pigs, is it potentially better to give it to a more resilient population, like kids?

but, then do you support treating kids like....guinea pigs?

and, i stopped and decided that, no, i don't support treating kids like guinea pigs - it is the elderly at risk, and they must assume it.

but, then i stopped to realize that i don't even support treating guinea pigs like guinea pigs.

what have we done to these creatures? we have entirely co-opted their identity, fully stolen their existence from them. for when we think of guinea pigs, we no longer imagine vibrant, high-strung rodents flopping around the edges of the forest floor, but imagine animals in cages under human experimentation. they exist, in our language, solely for our own amusement.

there's a historical parallel in how we've used racial terms to refer to slaves in various languages, so that the word that we use to describe that racial group is the same word we used to describe the concept of a slave. in english, we've adopted the word slave from anglo-norman invaders, who brought it to the island with a germano-latin ruling class that enslaved the slavic-speaking speakers to the east of europe, largely to sell them to the arabic rulers in the middle east. so, in english, our word for slave is the same as our word for slav. in arabic, the concept of slavery is intrinsically tied into the physicality of blackness, which is something that partially developed in the united states, as well.

6:15

so, it took me a few days longer than i'd have liked it to get groceries done; i picked up a few things late on thursday, a few more on friday and had to wait until saturday afternoon to get some raspberries & strawberries at the far store, as they were overpriced at the close ones. so, i'm a few days behind.

i've got my workstation set back up now and am ready to get back to work in rapidly finishing up the consistency check over 2014 and moving to rebuilding 2015 in one swoop.

8:06

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