one of the complaints is that they're letting the "big box" stores stay open. and, i mean, think it through.

how many thousands or tens of thousand of people go through your average walmart per day? do you think that's going up or down with everything else closed?

and, how many go to a small shop somewhere, or a pub or a restaurant?

what is promoting spread, here? 

does it make more sense to send everybody to the same couple of stores or does it make more sense to spread people out?

if they were serious, they'd close the big stores and leave the little ones open. right?

it's for show - it's political theatre. because people are scared, and need the nanny state to protect them. they have to 'do something'.

but, it's not acceptable - we must stand not with the business owners, but with the customers trying to exist. it's the right to enjoy a meal with your friends or family that is important here, not the bottom line of the restaurant owners.

listen - i understand that this is a scary, challenging time for people that are at risk of this virus. but, they need to take responsibility for their own risk factors - they need to stay out of bad situations, and they need to tell people that might harm them to stay the fuck away from them. it's on them; nobody will do it for them.

and, the state needs to concern itself with things that will make a substantive difference, not telling young & healthy people that they can't eat chicken wings together in a public place because it might spread to somebody at risk that hasn't taken the necessary precautions.

life's hard.

people die if they're dumb. that's a constant, not restricted to the current moment.

i'd rather hand out darwin awards.

good. this is long overdue and the kind of dissent we need right now.

i'm finding myself with strange allies recently, it is true. but, i don't fault myself for it. the spectrum is truly in flux.

i am still a communist. that hasn't changed. i'm just more disenfranchised than i used to be, and less willing to identify a lesser evil than i once was - because the establishment left has truly become indiscernible from the establishment right. 

it's really a return of class as a political identity marker, even as the establishment types reject it more and more. they can reject it all they want - they're just rejecting the simple truth right in front of their noses.

and, it's actually up to people like me to organize these folks. 

is it much different than it was 150 years ago? or 50 years ago? the left has always had this problem with the political orientation of workers being less than ideal. what's happened is that the bourgeoisie has managed to masquerade as a fake left by playing itself off against a fascist, aristocratic hard right, and that has confused a lot of people, at the supposed end of history.

but, history's still going, as far as i can tell. and, leftist organizers face the same challenges that they always did.

they are fundamentally correct to resist and the right thing to do is stand with them. these restrictions are neither necessary nor effective, they are political repression. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/adamson-bbq-toronto-indoor-dining-lockdown-1.5815715

they put an age restriction on this, which is just censorship.

i can understand why some people might not like this - and that's fine, i don't like them, either - but there's nothing age specific about it.

it's actually a very correct deconstruction of the mistakes people make about this song.

there's a post coming for the pasta bowl, but what about the seeds and peels of the items i'm eating now? 

we already talked about banana peels (which i decided were just too filling to eat) and capsicum seeds (which i still have a stash of in the fridge). i'm also leaning towards grinding up guava seeds. but, let's be more systematic in trying to figure out how to consume these items, if i'm going to at all. i'm wondering, for example, if baking avocado peels or seeds and adding it to the pasta bowl is a good idea - that way i could eat the avocado fruit for breakfast, and use the peel for lunch. that might even help keep costs down by removing something else. so, how can i be resourceful about this, in ensuring i'm getting maximum nutrition for minimal cost?

avocado

if you search for information about avocado pits, you'll see a lot of poorly written articles, arguing one thing or the other. they all want to tell a narrative about how they're "unsafe" or "harmless" or "healthy", but none of them provide much data to back up their claims.

it took quite a while for me to find this article:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3e21/cdcf5bef6f698852634628e6636903ad9bbb.pdf

i was hoping it might have some more vitamin e and maybe some b5 in it, it is after all a seed, but it really doesn't seem like it.

so, should we eat avocado seeds? are they "safe"? i'm going to have to argue that they're just not that nutritious - that all you're going to get out of a 20 g seed is a decent shot of vitamin c, which is just going to get destroyed if you try to cook it, which is likely necessary to get around the persin.

likewise, i can't find any useful data about avocado peels, although what i've learned is that you'd better cook them good if you want to think about eating them. so, for example, you could consider baking them, or perhaps frying them. but, i'm not seeing any good reason to, at this point. while it is true that they appear to be high in polyphenols, and that is what most of the research seems to be focused on, these are the types of antioxidants that we can't absorb. so, you'd have to crush it up and inject it, or it won't do anything at all. on top of that, frying or baking has the potential to destroy whatever might be useful.

so, i'd like to find a use for these extra avocado parts, but it seems like i'm going to have to just dump them in the woods. unfortunately...

guava

i've been putting the guava seeds (and the syrup they're housed in) in the freezer for about a month now, and i have a full margarine container of them, at this point. i was hoping to grind them up, but i'm again not seeing any reason to think that would be helpful. these seeds are very, very hard and the only research i've found is, again, about things like polyphenols and "essential oils". if there are any vitamins, i can't prove it - so i don't see the use in bothering.

what i think i should do is begin to dissolve this part of the fruit in a solution of water and then strain the seeds out to discard them. i can do this as i'm preparing the meal; i should be able to get a small, usable strainer the next time i go shopping.

again: if you have any links to studies exploring the nutritional content of the seeds, let me know. but, the fact that they're tiny and rock hard suggests to me that they'd be hard to study. i guess you'd have to dry them out and grind them up into a powder, but what seems to be done instead is press them into an oil - which just leaves things that aren't that useful.

banana

as analyzed previously, banana peels do seem to offer some benefits, but they're just too fattening. i couldn't get through the smoothie - it just filled me up. nor am i in need of vitamin e, anymore - i solved that. i'm also getting enough potassium, it seems. that said, doing another scouring run through google has brought up the issue of lutein, which appears to be of legitimate value (along with the other obscure carotenoids) and seems to be quite high in the peels, when they're still yellow. i'm going to guess you could probably even leach it out and drink it. that's a real possibility, even if i haven't decided on it yet.

strawberry

again - i wish i could find better data, not just poorly written websites that provide anecdotes and narratives. i would imagine that strawberry leaves are high in vitamin k and vitamin c, but i can't prove it. it could be a useful add to the pasta bowl, if not the fruit bowl.

and, with that, i think i can start clearing some things out of the freezer.

what should they do in france?

well, i'm actually more or less on board with shutting down the religious schools, and would support that done here, too. i've long supported the abolition of the catholic school system in ontario, and would support a total ban on all religion in schools. i would agree that this is a big part of the problem; there needs to be a stronger focus on secularizing children, and helping them evolve past the faith of their parents. get to 'em when they're young.

again: i'm a socialist. we're like that. "religious liberty" is a conservative idea. on the left, we think that religion is organized ignorance and that smashing through it is a necessity to move forward, as a society. the question is what the best way to do it is, and most of us realize that you need to be careful, because if you're too tyrannical about it, it just backfires. but, leftists have never supported ideas about the rights of individuals to worship in freedom - that has always been a right-wing idea. what the left has always concerned itself with is what approach to eliminating religion is going to work - we want to succeed in destroying religion, once and for all. and, we're not just saying that. we really do.

one is not free to worship; religion is organized slavery. one emancipates themselves from religion. so, "religious freedom" is orwellian doublethink. religion and freedom simply cannot co-exist.

so, i can at least get behind the things he's doing in the schools, to an extent. i haven't seen the details.

but, there seems to be a common theme regarding the violence in france - it's not coming from kids that are raised in france (whatever their origin, or whatever the religion of their parents), but rather from very recent immigrants. the issue in austria was different, and maybe an outlier......and it will be impossible to eliminate all religious violence, as well. let's set our bounds here - freedom of thought means the right to be retarded. so, you're going to have idiots and you can't prevent it...

but, case after case in france shows that the problem is that the immigration policies are simply too lax. they seem to let anybody in. and, some of the people that get there seem to undergo extreme culture shocks, and lash out in violence.

despite attempts to suggest otherwise, none of these attacks seem to be organized. rather, they seem to reflect the extreme levels of alienation experienced by muslim immigrants into a society that broadly doesn't care much for it's values. and, that's actually not that hard of a problem to solve.

1) they need better screening. if you ask people certain things, you may be surprised - and appalled - by what they tell you. maybe it's time to stop assuming people have universal values and are fundamentally good and ask them what they think about specific things, instead. and, maybe it's ok to judge them for it, if you don't like it.

2) they need better integration. not just social systems (which are no doubt drastically underfunded in the neo-liberal period), but social workers. people to call new immigrants and ask them how they're doing. places for them to meet, and people to help them fit in and explain how things are different in france than they are in the places they come from.

3) they need exit strategies to help people leave if they decide that it's too much, they don't like it and they want to go home.

but, they cannot waver.

and, i will continue to stand with the french republic, even as i criticize them for reacting poorly. we must not let the mistakes of a foolish leader undo solidarity for the system that birthed the modern world. the french will get through this - and we must stand with them, not with the enemy.

while i would actually support rather extreme action taken directly against religion in france, it's been clear from the start that this wasn't what macron intended to do.

this is frustrating. macron is saying many of the right things and identifying many of the right things that need to be done, but then when you look at what he's actually doing, he's just playing right into the hands of the muslims, christians and other fascists. 

it's almost enough to make you wonder if he's getting pay checks from the saudis, and if this is all a false flag to bring in islamic rule.

needless to say, i oppose virtually all of this.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/france-about-become-less-free/617195/