sunday, august 1, 2021
this is for the journal template.
i'm essentially completely ripping apart this template for the lined paper background:
but, i can't repeat it the way i want because the top and bottom rows aren't symmetric with the rest of them. i guess the template isn't intended to be usable.
so, i've cropped the jpg slightly and am uploading it here instead:
now, i'll have to link from that picture, instead.
1:59
let's try again using the most simplest pattern possible, if there's enough blue:
2:15
i've been trying to get this right all night, and the aspect ratio just isn't working...
let's try to shrink the background a tad:
4:32
and again:
4:38
last time?
5:01
try again...
5:15
and again...
5:16
the correct ratio seems to be in between the options available, so i'm trying to fudge it by shifting the scale.
let's try again:
5:20
i'm getting closer. really.
5:31
that didn't work and it's just fading the blue lines.
here's the site:
i'll need to rebuild a pattern of maybe ten lines and introduce an extra bit of whitespace.
5:41
let me try this one:
5:47
that was pretty good, one more time:
5:53
just a bit more:
6:01
i also have to compensate for the top:
6:04
just pulling back a tad more...
7:01
that took far longer than intended, but i've got my template down:
the mechanism is that i'm writing in a little book, and i find it somewhere and scan it. hence, the lines - and the trouble i'm taking to line the writing up.
here's the trick - i used a 12 line image because that's when it starts to overlap, but even that will only take me so far before i need to reset. it's like a calendar - you need a leap year every four years to make up for the measurement error. but, i posted many test posts to make sure that the cycle resets on a new post, so long as i post it with a title.
i'll have to keep an eye on it and make adjustment if necessary but i think this is sufficient.
i just want to finish the template, and then i'll upload it for anybody, as i think this is useful and am happy to share it.
this will run from 1989-1996, and is intended as a preface - these are childhood year notes, from before i did any recording. the alter-reality will run from 1996-2013 and occupies the actual writing phase. and, current reality runs from 2013-death and is the cleanup and finish phase.
7:45
so, here's the theme, if you want just the notepad without the goofy shit:
this should line up well, just keep in mind the following:
- you need to title every post. if you post something without a title, it will misalign.
- it will eventually go out of alignment if your post is too long - well over 100 lines.
- new posts will realign, so long as those posts have titles.
- you want to use normal breaklines and not the weird ones it defaults to nowadays. i use the following as a template:
<div style="text-align: left;"></div>
that simple line will default everything to normal line breaks, and let the formatting work correctly.
it's entirely functional, but it has some limitations that are probably hardcoded into the html, and may even reduce to floating point errors within the processor. computers aren't as good at math as people think...
so, i'm ready to get going, now.
8:16
....and, we've got the font updated, too:
10:01
it's not the most exciting update, but it's a start.
10:35
this is the best document for me to use to try to triangulate the things i was influenced by at that age, as the radio & television set were by far the biggest influences on me:
11:29
you know, there's another way to interpret those test results...
some time ago, i decided to switch from pasta to quinoa, but i haven't run out of pasta yet. the reasoning for this was actually to compensate for lost betaine, due to the removal of the beets.
- i wasn't digesting the beets, so i wanted to replace it with spinach to get extra iron and betaine
- but spinach has oxalates, which block iron, so i wanted to replace it with kale, which doesn't have betaine
- i then decided to go for quinoa for betaine & protein, which also removes the gluten
i had been eating a pasta salad bowl with vegetables, pasta, yogurt & cheese. i tossed a few things like sunflower seeds and yeast in, too.
but, when i made that decision, the salad was meant as a side for the eggs, which would become eaten daily. so, i didn't need the extra cheese or yogurt.
but, i still had spinach and yogurt and pasta...and i was concerned that the calcium might be blocking the iron...
so, what i did was separate this into two submeals to isolate:
- i started eating the spinach with yogurt. pasta and cheese to use it all up. in the long run, this item is intended to be dropped.
- i cut the salad down to a five item dish (kale, tomatoes, red peppers, carrots & limes) and added some extra spices (cumin, basil, thyne) to boost the iron.
the idea was to add the quinoa (and probably maybe the cheese) back to the salad when i ran out of pasta.
and, what was happened?
- my iron has gone up
- and my d and calcium have gone down (but are still ok)
i initially decided that my d went down because i was eating a little less, and maybe because i was absorbing too much calcium. and, those are no doubt factors - that's no doubt at least partly correct. but, how did separating the items like this affect the outcome?
well, my iron went up. a lot. was the calcium blocking it, a bit?
conversely, my calcium went down. is the gluten partly responsible for that? is there something bad about eating milk products without vegetables?
now, i need to be clear - i used to eat the iron, calcium and gluten altogether and my calcium was fine, and in fact fairly high. it's still fine, just less high. the idea that i'd absorb less calcium in a yogurt/cheese/pasta mix than in a yogurt/cheese/pasta/vegetable mix ought to seem a little backwards (i'm still eating the calcium in a meal, but with less stuff than i used to, specifically less fiber than i used to, so calcium absorption should go up), unless it has to do with some absorption increasing factor, like vitamin c. fwiw, i'm putting hot sauce in the pasta to increase the acidity (remember: my gastrin is a little low). i guess that's really the thing that changed, there - i took the c out of the calcium.
the cheese is my highest source of retinol.
i haven't been drinking alcohol at all, and my coffee intake has decreased substantively.
so, before i abandon gluten (i'm not celiac!), i'm going to try to make sure i'm taking c with the calcium-focused pre-meal and otherwise discard the results as anomalous.
the separation of iron and calcium in my diet may, however, become permanent - there's a signal there, and i almost missed it.
21:50
i've also been taking the d at the same time as the cheese & yogurt.
i'm going to start taking it in the morning with the avocados, instead.
these are the sources of wheat in my diet...
morning meal:
- all bran (fortified) + vector (fortified) + extra raw wheat bran <---will be hard to replace for minerals like zinc and iodine, which are not present in high amounts in vegetarian diets.
evening meal:
- pasta (will be replaced with quinoa in salad)
- double flax whole wheat bread <----if i have to, i can find some gluten-free flax bread
i am still not convinced i'm celiac, but i obviously will need to remove the wheat if i am.
but, i like wheat....wheat is good for you....
22:24
no, really - the meal before was..
- five vegetables (red peppers, carrots, beets, garlic, lime) + pasta + yogurt + cheese + soy milk + hemp seeds + cayenne + yeast + sunflower seeds + oregano
...& sometimes broccoli, sometimes tomatoes.
the new meals are:
- five vegetables (red peppers, carrots, tomatoes, kale, lime) + soy milk + hemp seeds + cayenne + yeast + sunflower seeds + basil + cumin + flax + oregano + thyme + paprika (this is tons of iron...)
- pasta + yogurt + cheese + cayenne
the garlic got moved to the eggs, and the beets got dropped, probably due to low gastrin (my stool has hardened up a lot, since).
so, the calcium is still being eaten with gluten, still being eaten with milk protein, still being eaten with animal fat, still being eaten retinol....but not being eaten with phytates, fiber or vitamin c.
the c must be having a huge effect, i guess.
if i'm moving the quinoa to the pasta, and i want to keep the...
no, let's monitor it a bit more, first.
but, if i want to keep the iron separated from the calcium, i'll need to find a better way to consume the cheese & potentially not drop the yogurt. maybe, i could add a bit of broccoli to some kind of indian-style flatbread dish or something, and eat the yogurt and cheese together, like that. let's wait to see what happens...
for now, i'm going to make sure to eat the pasta with about 100 mg of c, in tablet form, because i'm taking it anyways.
but, i also have to keep pointing to the likelihood of a weird result.
22:50
monday, august 2, 2021
why, exactly, was this allowed to get to a situation like this, where you need a last minute rescue package to bail out renters?
why weren't these bills ready to go?
every politician at every level needs to answer for that.
0:34
i'm looking at some old pictures.
i knew that old black ibanez was the second electric guitar, but i couldn't remember what the first one was, other than that it was a hondo. it turns out it was a hondo telecaster copy - clearly, from the pictures. i was very young, but i think i always assumed it was some kind of strat. nope - most obvious telecaster, ever.
so, when the hannah montana washburn mini telecaster arrives, it can be the replacement for the first tele, which was traded in for the ibanez.
there was also an unbranded acoustic guitar, which would have been traded for the tele, and would have ultimately been replaced by the epiphone, which i still have. it looks like it was probably 3/4 size, but i couldn't tell you that at the time.
so, that's two more guitars that needed replacements, and it's all already dealt with.
i can't think of anything else to take note of that young, except that i learned to play recorder at school in the 5th grade
i'm working on the next batch of replacements.
1:46
so, there's the first guitar, which i would have got in probably late 1991 or early 1992. i'm dating that picture to mid 1992, but these are guesses.
and, there's the hondo tele which i can replace with the hannah montana tele:
3:43
i'm dating this to around the point where i'll start the alter-reality:
i think this was from the first part of 1989. my dad didn't understand my existential ennui about the meaninglessness of winterlude and insisted i play in the snow, to little response from myself besides boredom. this is feigned reaction to a request for a smile. i remember that, and wish it wasn't from outside the bounds of the story. maybe i'll do a flashback.
this is a picture of me on a bicycle from the summer of 1989.
i had a number of stuffed animals and other doll-type toys that i personified for quite a few years. judging from my hair, i believe it's the same period as the other shots.
i'm surprised i don't have more shots like this, actually:
i'm dating this to the later months of 1989, before it got too cold.
4:03
tuesday, august 3, 2021
in canada, we did have a rent moratorium in most provinces. in ontario, the rent moratorium ended in june.
however, we also still have a pandemic benefits system, that is giving people higher monthly income than their jobs, in some cases.
so, while people certainly lost their jobs, we had a social safety net in place for them to fall back on, and that shouldn't have led to many evictions, except in cases where people had to downgrade because their rent was higher than the subsidies available - a situation that all evidence i've seen suggests was fairly rare, because most labour in that category would have shifted to work-at-home rather than layoffs.
that's the reason i framed the issue the way that i did - there's lots of ways to address this problem, besides an eviction moratorium. as far as i can see, the united states did almost nothing at all, and now it's looking at 5 million homeless people - many of whom were denied employment options by state restrictions on economic activity.
so, it's one thing for the government to say "you can't go to work because you might spread this disease", and it's another for it to follow it up with "oh, and you're on your own for rent, too. you'll have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.". how, exactly, are people to pay their rent if the economy is shut down?
if you're going to shut down the economy, you have to offer a social safety net on top of it. if you don't, you're going to end up with mass evictions. and, every other country in the world realized that as fucking obvious.
so, it's not really about the moratorium. you can kick the can down the road, but the united states has constitutionally protected property rights (not true in canada....), so you have to pay the rentier class, in the end. that's the basis of the court ruling - the president can't wave away constitutionally protected rights, which is what the demagogues in congress are expecting him to do.
what it's about is a social system that barely exists.
people laid off due to the pandemic should have received monthly checks from day one. that is what every other civilized country realized was necessary, to prevent the catastrophe that's about to occur.
don't let them obstruct the issue by talking about a moratorium - the issue goes back to those $2000 checks that biden promised and never produced.
0:24
the reason the white house can't extend the moratorium indefinitely is property rights, and the fact that the court is predisposed towards the right, at the minute - and probably for a long time.
and, the reason the white house can't produce a bail out via executive order is that it doesn't have the power of the purse.
it's a congressional issue. and, nancy pelosi is a piece of shit.
0:30
the house should have had this bill ready weeks ago.
for pelosi to sit on her hands for months, and then blame it on the president using the language of moral outrage is beyond any concept of contempt - it's deplorable. truly.
0:35
i need to keep going with the gear replacement before i move on to the next thing. we'll split these into by-basement posts.
the thing i'm still missing from basement #1 is a medium sized bass amp that i can use for bass, keyboard or amp simulation. although, i do still have a 120 watt fender combo amp/cab that can be used for that purpose, so it's not much of a missing item. the problem is it's too loud, so i'm not going to get an "amped" sound from it unless i piss off the neighbours. it has an exaggerated bottom end, as well - it's a bass amp. a smaller keyboard amp would be far more useful to me, for recording - which is why i bought all these little amps. i'm pretty sure it was a kb60, but i'd actually rather take it down to 30ish. i'm very seriously looking at that little vox amp for this, although i wish they made it in lower wattage options than 50. 50 watts is pretty loud, and the point is to crank it most of the way.
i was also looking at a sennheiser e609 as a potential mic upgrade, but stopped short because the altec is probably pretty similar.
so, this is basement #2...
- the ry30 is an irreplacable item, in any reasonable sense, except with itself. there's really no hardware drum machine that does quite what it does, at much of any price point. but, when i had sold it, the truth is that i'd grown out of it because i started writing longer, more complicated sequences in an actual score writer...or found it easier to do repetitive, simple loops in basic software.
so, this is my ry30 record, which is an example (not comprehensive) of what i was able to do with the ry30:
in order to write in that kind of detail, i had to slow the tempo down to the lowest possible speed and fill everything in in quadruple or higher time. this had the effect of limiting the complexity of the compositions that could be built on the device, as well. this is a deficit of the device's lack of memory, as an early 90s computer. you could buy expansion slots, but they weren't cheap, and it didn't really solve the problem. so, you could only do so much with the device, as a sequencer, due to the limitations of the technology.
that said, it was also one of the most advanced machines of the period, and the entire concept of a standalone drum machine disappeared with the move to computers for recording. so, while i may have outgrown it's limitations, it was also just about top of the line for a device of it's sort - there isn't really an upgrade path, besides moving to cubase.
the technical thing i used to replace the ry30 was a program called noteworthy composer which is a scorewriter, like sibelius or finale. i like the interface a lot better, as it's keyboard driven rather than mouse driven:
while the ry30 had a primitive synthesizer built in, i no longer found it useful once i had access to a jx along with cool edit, and while no tool is ever truly obsolete, it wouldn't be my go to for sound generation, if i had one, today. there's a million other ways to generate noise and hook it up to a sequencer, and there was nothing particularly unique about the device for that purpose - even if it was exceedingly useful to have the thing in house, so long as you had enough memory.
on the other hand, what you could do with noteworthy composer is anything you can do with written music. there are no limitations regarding bar lengths, time signatures, numbers of patterns, "polyphony" in drum types, song complexity or anything else - you're just writing into a score editor. in theory, you should be able to interface those midi parts with any kind of sampler, but in practice you end up limited to general midi, meaning you'll need another approach to integrate sound effects and sampling. to me, that's fine, as i found myself more drawn to wave editors (like audacity, although i still use an old version of cool edit) for that kind of sound generation.
this is an example of something i created in noteworthy composer (and using a soundcard emulator for playback) that i could have never created using the ry30 due to the intricacies in time signatures and the sheer number of "patterns":
further, this is my noteworthy composer record, as ported to more contemporary vst software:
of course, i also have an electronic kit, and that's actually going to be what i'm focusing on using for most of what's left of period 3, at least, as these tracks were actually intended to be recorded with sarah on the drums. sarah used to play drums for her dad, and found it upsetting to have me dictating instructions to her, which is the only way i knew how to work, musically. i may be a little less controlling nowadays. but, she couldn't deal with me yelling at her to stay in fucking time...and i had to play my drum parts, myself.
but, a good way to look at the ry30 is as a device of medium complexity; it's not detailed enough for very carefully written parts (because it is ultimately a drum machine, meaning you have to build up patterns in blocks, however much detail it allows for), but it's far too developed a device for simple, repetitive loops. as such, i really did grow out of it, as i couldn't do with it what i needed from a device of it's sort, and it was just a lot easier to use a 909 emulator if i just wanted some simple beats.
so, the replacement for the ry30 is as follows:
- hammerhead + leaf + whatever other simple 808-style emulator is around for loops and simple beats and weird sounds, in a strictly sequenced manner
- fully written-out sections in noteworthy composer for actual drum parts <---this is the real replacement/upgrade, namely moving to scored parts in midi rather than drum machine sequences in beats/bars/patterns
- i can use a scorewriter for midi sequencing (some of the earlier sequencer parts that sound like synths were actually created on a ry30)
- cool edit + various synthesizers for sampling and whatever other noise generation
while it's not exactly the same - and i'd jump at an emulator if i found one - i'm not really missing anything in no longer having the device, except the idiosyncrasies of the device itself, which can only be replaced by the device. i know of no other drum machine that can really replace the ry30, in the sense that i used it - which was in quite a lot more depth than your average user. but, i still outgrew it. that's ok - it was my first programming device, and we all outgrow our first devices, right?
that said, the one thing i don't have that the ry30 had is those velocity-sensitive pads, and i'm looking at a way to remedy that, even if i'm less convinced about the importance of it. i have velocity sensitive keyboards and velocity sensitive electronic drum heads, is there really any use in having velocity sensitive drum pads, especially for period 3? i can't say it's worth much to me, no. but, if i can get one of those mini akais for $20 or something, i'll do it.
as it is, the scorewriter is an upgrade to the sequencer in the ry30 by a long shot, and i've got a million software synths to generate sound with, and a million other ways to sequence it. i miss my ry30, for sure. but, i realize i have more important things to expend scare resources on.
you see those akai pads come up on kijiji relatively often and they don't sell, so i'll get one when i can get somebody to cut the price enough, just give me time.
so, here's the ry30:
and here's the upgrade to it, in any meaningful sense (although i am using a program called noteworthy composer, not finale):
you can then take the sequences once they're written, export them to midi and line them up in a daw (i use cubase) to make it easy to layer in sequenced sound effects, samples, etc.
- i also started using noteworthy composer as a sequencer around this time, and i still use it to write midi parts (and then export them to use with different playback engines)
- i don't use the windows 95 sound recorder anymore, but i still use cool edit as a wave editor
- i still have the portastudio 414 and do still use it from time to time as a buffer for things like bass parts. but, the replacement mixer is the alesis:
(post from july 19th inserted here:
so, i spent the day running around (technically, walking and biking around) and now have the following in my possession:
- the two purple and pink tanktops came in the mail
- i picked up the behringer umx61 this morning. mine is grey, with some mild yellow staining, presumably from being near to an ashtray for an extended period. i had to play through some pops (indicating it hadn't been used in a while), but the keys all work, and, if anything, they're a little hyper-sensitive. that's fine.
it cost me $95 cdn, used.
this device has two major purposes for me:
- it replaces the keys on the jx-8p, which were stuck. it's a common problem with 80s rolands, and i just never fixed it. but, my 49 key dx100 is just a little lacking. i guess i never counted it - i though the jx had 88 keys. it turns out it has 61, too. so, if anything, i'm getting two extra octaves with the behringer...
- it will finally give me access to a control surface, if a minor one. i'm probably not going to go all knob-twiddly, but it is useful for tactical use to be able to physically turn a sweep, and i've really never been able to do that. the jx has a control surface, but i didn't get it in the package, second hand. it's just something i've never had in front of me...and something i've long intended to rectify...)
- i still install goldwave regularly, although i haven't used it in years. it was more useful as a noise generator than cool edit, and it had a different selection of effects that i found were more pronounced. it's still there if i want it.
- i could never get sound raider to work in nt (xp on), but it's one of the things i'll want to try to install on the 90s pc. it's a unique program that has no direct parallel. but, i'm probably past it, as well.
- i recently replaced the wood flute my aunt gave me in 1998. i actually still have the old one, but it's splintered at the top. i may also get a plastic recorder. this is less about the sound and more about the breathing, which you can't really get out of midi, unless you have a breath controller, which is a lot more than a plastic recorder. if i ever find a million dollars on the ground, i'll definitely get a breath controller. for now, i'm happy with my line to midi interface, which is coming.
- hammerhead is a basic 909 emulator that still works in nt. it's one of the types of programs i found myself going to for simpler drum patterns when i needed something quick.
- i still have the three epiphones & the ms-2, too.
- coagula did still work the last time i tried it. i still install it, but i haven't used it for years. i always wanted to do more direct sampling with it, but it never really happened.
1:33
this is a good demo.
i used the pitch banks quite a bit, because i wanted a good harpsichord sound.
what he doesn't point out is that the layering on the drum triggers, while polyphonic, is limited by a number of things, including available memory. so, the demo songs sound great, but two or three tracks like that, and you've run out of memory.
1:55
i spent forever trying to figure out how to clear the demos to reuse the memory, and you can't, you have to take it apart.
1:58
i think i cleared the smell out of the fridge by bleaching it, but the side effect is that i ended up with a sore throat, and i'll need to stay in for a few days.
*shrug*
i actually think it's from breathing in third hand smoke, which just goes to show how powerful the toxins from smoking actually are, although i have a longstanding bronchial concern, which is why i always smoked outside, when i did. so, something like that is going to affect me more than most.
or, maybe i picked something up, the other day.
i don't wear a mask because i want to catch the virus and develop my own immunity, even as i realize that cases in windsor are either exceedingly low or completely unreported. but, that means that i need to stay in if i think i'm sick, and i'm ok with that.
it's impossible for me to tell if it's the air quality or a virus, at this stage. i'll know tomorrow, probably.
that's fine - i didn't finish what i was doing.
10:38
i have little respect for online polling.
but, what the results say - if you are to take them seriously - is that the number of undecided voters is about four times as many as required to swing an election, and that the results of calling an election right now are highly uncertain.
in years past, i've strongly suggested that there is no swing between the tories and the liberals at the federal level, and that essentially all swing in the country exists between the liberals and ndp. i am not going to make that argument this cycle, although it is unclear if that is a fluke or a longterm shift.
the reasons are twofold:
1) there has been large amounts of demographically relevant movement in the last two years. i strongly suggest that the movement of upper class liberals out of toronto and into the suburbs will have the effect of making several traditional liberal strongholds in toronto more competitive, and making several conservative strongholds in the areas around toronto more competitive, as well.
2) the extremely conservative approach to the pandemic by the ruling liberals, combined with the more liberal approach by provincial conservative governments (outside of ontario), may have finally loosened up traditional conservative support in ways that i would have never otherwise thought possible. one would expect traditional conservatives to be the strongest advocates of lengthy lockdowns, and traditional liberals to be the strongest opponents of them. this has the potential to substantively "shuffle the deck", especially amongst older voters.
so, i've been yelling for years that the undecideds are all small-l liberals and that elections are really fought on the left, in this country.
not so, this time - i expect to see the opening of a larger group of undecided voters in an older age demographic. and, whether the liberals can swing them or if they go back to their tribe is an open question.
while this may have longterm consequences on the viability of the liberal brand, it could win them back their majority, in the short run.
but, it's a huge gamble - because if that block of voters does go back to the conservative party, they could be looking at a reduced minority.
i've been clear that my preferred outcome is a caucus revolt in the liberal party. i don't like this incarnation of the liberal party, and i think justin trudeau is the personification of unearned privilege and empty bourgeois vacuousness, but the current incarnation of the ndp is even worse, and some kind of return to liberalism within the liberal party is the best option.
i realize that that isn't going to happen - so i want to extend the minority until it does. the party will only hold on to a candidate that can't win a majority for so long.
but, i cannot present a prediction as to the outcome, at this time - the number of undecideds appears to be far too high, and trying to dial in who they are requires too much guesswork, especially in the face of unreliable online polling.
16:57
the next election in canada very well may be a landmark, realigning election in canada, the likes of which we haven't seen since 1993. the liberals might finally swallow the right, leaving the conservatives with a socred/reform rump.
it might turn out to be the status quo, if people find their tribal allegiances to overpower, in the end.
or, it might just be a weird election.
right now, all i see is large amounts of uncertainty - and people with more open minds, potentially mostly on the right, than we've seen in quite a while.
17:04
and, i don't care about the budget deficit. at all.
nobody does.
17:26
wednesday, august 4, 2021
i had a hard time finding information about the guy that briefly taught me classical guitar, so i'm going to post this here.
it's from a glebe newspaper article from 1993. and, that is indeed his wife, cathy. i took lessons from early 2000 to about mid 2001.
a different rollins band than you were expecting, perhaps.
4:21
i think he photocopied some of my crazy scrawled over pieces.
i wonder if i can get in contact with him.
4:25
i found a number; i have no idea how useful it might be.
it sort of just clicked. why didn't i think of that before?
i'm guessing he'd be around 70 or so. it's a long shot, but there's a chance...
4:50
you know, i even think he may have recorded me playing.
i completely forgot about that...
6:35
thursday, august 5, 2021
i thought my melodica was $4.00, but it was just the mouthpiece and i had to cancel it.
xylophone sticks are still coming.
i spent the last few days building the gear part of the releases blog for the basement on hilliard, and will have a "replacement" post coming soon.
i had to catch up on sleep today. it happens, when you don't sleep.
but, bleach run #3 on the fridge seems to have worked, so i should be able to get things back in order, starting tonight.
i was able to confirm the orchiectomy for this month, but i don't have an answer regarding who can pick me up. they can't legally release me alone until i'm no longer on drugs (like i'm not used to stumbling around on drugs, right?), and they can't keep me in the hospital due to covid. i don't know anybody in toronto at all. so, i'm kind of fucked.
they suggested hiring a nurse...to drive me to the bus station. it's absurd, but it's the rules, and i get it.
so, i'm going to look at the bus schedule. if the unavoidable fact is that i'm out of the surgery in the afternoon, and the train doesn't leave until 19:00, i really have a choice between sitting at the hospital and sitting at the train station. i mean, that's reality - i could hire a nurse to drive me to a train station or i could sit in the hospital for a few hours. there's no other option. let's pick.
so, that's what i'm doing tonight.
first, i want to try to open up some space on the floor to vacuum some of the dust off.
0:32
i'm not a senior, but i live on disability. i get about $1200/month from odsp, which covers rent and a bit more. but, i've often had money coming is as gifts from family, or as untaxable winnings from court battles.
i looked into the cerb and realized pretty quickly that if i applied for it they'd just take it back in the end.
that said, making a mistake like this shouldn't result in you being evicted. while i have little interest in fiscal conservatism, the argument that the liberals are going to make is that you have to have rules and have to enforce them, or the government will just bleed money in every direction. well, why don't we look at kickbacks to the trudeau family and the pmo's cronies to start, then?
but, regardless, what are the rules?
in a situation like this, what should happen is that the recipient should get a clawback over a long period, rather than get removed from "eligibility". so, if it's decided that they took $3000 more than they should have, they should have to pay back a reasonable amount - $200, say - on every check until it balances out. that will make them poorer for the next however many years, but it won't land them 70 years old and homeless.
this was not unpredictable, though. i saw it coming and avoided it.
18:30
science can predict the results of laboratory experiments, but assigning predictability to science, in a more general sense, is a dangerous idea, and one that scientists generally try to step away from. science is generally unable to predict the future, and makes no claims to being able to.
so, what patty hadju is asking for does not exist.
that said, we have some models to point to that suggest that covid is inevitably going to become a seasonal flu. one of those models is here:
it's just one. there's many others.
despite what mostly uneducated (and largely unintelligent) politicians may say about "following the data", which is just an empty talking point, words they don't even understand, lifting restrictions is not something that can be done without risk. at some point, a gamble is required. it's a problem for an actuary, not one for a a doctor. there will be loss involved, and that's inevitable.
as i am not a conservative, i'm not obsessed with this and think some loss of life is justified in order to uphold concepts of liberty and freedom.
now, i'm actually of the perspective that the science never justified any of these restrictions in the first place and this has largely just been a political ploy to undo liberal democracy and take away everybody's rights. so, when patty hajdu stands up like this and bloviates like the unqualified dunce that she is, i'm not particularly interested in the "arguments" that she is making.
this woman is a buffoon, and this is simple demagoguery for political purposes.
but, what i see is a liberal party that has become reflective of the far-right, and is trying to compete with jason kenney for conservative voters. and, i'll pass on that, thanks.
the orwellian politicization of science by this government is beyond the pale, and it's just going to get worse and worse as high school dropout after high school dropout comes up to podium after podium and reads scripted nonsense designed to take advantage of your perceived ignorance.
what a disgusting display.
18:55
in the post-truth, post-reality fantasy world inhabited by the trudeau government, "science" is just another tool to deceive people with in order to advance the interests of capital.
19:10
friday, august 6, 2021
so, what have i been doing?
- all i did yesterday (a short day after a sleep catchup day, which seems to be the norm) was try to get the place reassembled in here, which was mostly successsful. i woke up in the evening, checked my email, wrote a response to the hrto about the grocery store case, ate some fruit & cereal, understood the various urine and stool tests i need to get back to the medical labs in the next few days, ate some pasta, started reorganizing the basement, bleached the fridge a fourth time, made some pasta and then i was out...
- when i woke up, things seemed a little more normal. but, i basically just got some eggs and started on august cleaning, which is mostly done.
the fridge issue is really mostly resolved, but the smoker is back upstairs, worse than ever. so, here comes the shower. again.
it's the only thing that works, until they just stop being fucking idiots and fess up.
2:58
for tonight, i want to get back to what i stopped doing on wednesday morning.
2:59
so, we've got more of this "global warming makes things colder" stuff again. i never take this really seriously...
this model is at least physically sound, unlike that goofy jetstream stuff, but the question at hand is whether the amount of cooling produced by melting glaciers is going to be more powerful than the warming created by increased carbon dioxide levels, and i think the physics is that the warming wins.
rather than scare monger about europe going into an ice age (which is denialist garbage), they should be suggesting that the melting glaciers might slow the process of warming down a little. i mean, we're seeing this with the weakening sun, as well - the historically unusual dips in solar output have had the effect of expanding the polar vortex, which has acted to slow down the worst effects of warming.
but, journalists seem unable to grasp concepts like "equilibrium" and need a story to run with...
but, the bottom line is this: the warming we're experiencing is permanent, and there's only so much ice in greenland. if we don't undo the carbon emissions, the warming will eventually win. so, the question is how long it takes to happen, and what kind of short term balancing might play out as a result of it; it's a question of how much the melting ice might slow the warming down, not of whether the melting ice may overpower.
the record temperatures in eastern north america are in fact a result of a warming atlantic, overall.
and, i can say this with certainty: there will not be an ice age in europe set off by global warming, and you should be exceedingly skeptical of anybody trying to tell you there will be.
7:57
well, she was right that it's a charter right to refuse a shot, but that doesn't extend to the right to keep a job. if you don't want to get vaccinated, you can find another job.
now, whether that might qualify as workplace discrimination is another question, and i think there's situations where it can. if you have one set of rules for the vaccinated and another for the unvaccinated, you should (rightfully) prepare yourself for a charter challenge.
the one workplace that would have heightened criteria - because it is not private property - is the public sector. it will have to write it's policies more carefully, and provide for more alternatives, than the private sector.
but, so long as you are neither physically forcing vaccinations nor denying some kind of necessity to the unvaccinated, the unvaccinated person always has the right to decline, and the charter right to refuse vaccination is not being infringed upon.
8:14
that said, children are at no risk whatsoever from this virus, and there is at best questionable grounds to mandate vaccination of education workers.
i couldn't imagine a healthcare worker not getting vaccinated, and would argue there's grounds for firing them due to gross incompetence.
this is one of the things that the public sector has different rules for. a private business doesn't really have to explain something like this (although, we might see some arguments about analogous grounds, and it might work if the complainant is something like a jehovah's witness), but the public sector has to demonstrate that there's actually some logic in implementing a mandatory vaccination policy.
so, if you're working at home, they couldn't force you to get vaccinated; and if you can work from home, they'll probably have to let you.
but, there can be no debate about healthcare workers - that's obvious.
8:21
listen - i'm not running for office, i don't give a fuck if you like me or not. i'm telling you what the law actually says.
if a jehovah's witness sued their employer for firing them for not getting vaccinated, they'd probably win.
as it is, doug ford is taking the more liberal position here, and the two fake left parties are falling over each other to appeal to the authoritarian right.
8:30
so, i got my mini tele in today and it plays very well. all the electronics work, as well.
unfortunately, the eye holes ("ferrules") on the back need a regluing (somebody tried to tape them back on...), one of the springs on the bridge needs to be replaced and somebody put some stupidly tense strings on it and otherwise set it up rather poorly, as well. this is either coming from an adult that tried to turn it into a grown up guitar in a silly way, or a dad that didn't know what he was doing.
that's fine - these are minor repairs, and i can fix that fairly easily.
it's otherwise a pretty nice little tele.
14;13
so, i found a nurse that can drive me the distance. it's a a senior's escort service. but, i'm still going to wait until monday before i buy the tickets to be sure...
i think i fixed my bike seat. for now. i bought a cover..
i should be able to get the urine sample in in the morning, and potentially at least one of the stool samples in, as well. i'm going to wait until early in the week for the fasting items, to get the calcitonin done.
i got some more cleaning and organizing done.
so, that's been the last three days, and now i need to get back to what i was doing before looking at fixing these guitars, in preparation for recording with them.
17:20
see, this is the kind of thing i'm looking at in trying to weight relative risk levels.
"but, 4/40000 is only 0.01%! that's rare!"
true. but, the cfr for people under 40 is also .01%, and that's no doubt an underestimate in the denominator - perhaps by a factor of 100 or larger.
based on these numbers, i'd have to conclude that a healthy young person is more likely to get bell's palsy from the vaccine than they are to suffer complications from catching the virus.
listen - if you're going to do science, do it right, even if you don't find the outcomes intuitive. that's just the raw data, here - .01% is a relatively high risk factor, in context, given that the disease is mostly harmless for most people.
that's something they might work out in thirty years or so, when it becomes reasonable for me to look at seasonal vaccines.
18:17
it's a measure of the illogic and mass hysteria when the media can't work out a basic comparison of numbers.
when a fatality rate of .001% (in people under 50) is presented, that's framed as an imminent threat we all need to be protected from.
but, when risk of complications come up as .01%, that's written off as a triviality.
it's perfectly absurd.
18:21
this is the right choice to make - covid-19 does not belong in a list that includes whooping cough and polio, it belongs in a list that includes influenza and the common cold, the latter of which it is a variant of.
18:28
i mean, c'mon.
- whooping cough
- measles
- rubella
- covid-19.
18:33
saturday, august 7, 2021
so, i've just been eating and sleeping the last couple of days. ugh. wasted existence...
i guess i needed some rest.
at least the stench in here seems to have lifted....
i need to do another bleach run on the fridge, but it's exceedingly minimal compared to what it was before. and, i gotta finish with the monthly cleaning on that side before i do anything else.
this sucks. but, i can't live in filth, and i need to correct it before i get back to work.
4:18
so, i just finished my stool sample for parasites & ova. i had to mix this one up in a solution, so i got to see little bits of kale and whatnot come out of the shit and float in solution. it's kind of illuminating.
...and, if what i'm supposed to be looking for is white specs and stringy lines, i'd have to give a positive id, on visual inspection. but, i can't tell if those string lines are worms or plant fibers, and i can't tell if those white specs are eggs or sunflower seeds.
mixing the shit up with a plastic spoon has led me to the following conclusion, though - there's a fair amount of non-shit particulate matter in there, so if these aren't parasites, then they must be undigested food.
and, then i'm back to celiac again...
...but i'm actually convinced that these are eggs, on inspection, without any particular training to be able to discern as much. and, i've been suspecting that for quite a while...
5:30
there's no red or black in the mix.
it's brown with clumps of green and white.
5:31
i've also got barely an hour left on this jug of urine for oxalates, and i'm worried it's about to overflow.
i have a relatively low bmi, and i'm not particularly tall. if that's supposed to be a one-jug-fits-all-urine specimen collection utility jug, i seem to be pissing well above my weight.
if you're into pissing contests....
5:41
so, i got the fridge back in order, at least (even if i need another bleaching job, exclusively on the seal).
that's important because it means i can do groceries; and i timed it to ensure i'd be out of food before i did.
you see how this is setting everything back in place?
i just wish i got more done this week :(.
8:16
sunday, august 8, 2021
i got everything dropped off and spent the evening doing monthly groceries.
so, normality is fast approaching...
0:17
the fake left news wants to talk about nina turner...
listen: nina turner has never won an election, as far as i can tell. she won her ohio senate seat unopposed. she seems to have done relatively well as a talking head, but politics doesn't seem to be something she's very good at.
and, my distant, cursory observation is that she seemed like a fly-in candidate that doesn't spend much time in the district. voters are often pretty good at figuring out who represents them, and who represents themselves.
so, i basically wouldn't read anything into this at all, except that she's a losing candidate and people should move on.
0:21
if the left thinks it needs to rebuild itself by flying media celebrities into districts, it needs to think again.
but, it's reflective of the deficit of movement on the ground.
...and all she likely did was get in the way of an actually organic candidate, with real local support, and help shontel brown win.
we need grassroots bottom-up politics, and not centralized top-down rule. but, that was what i learned at the dsa, right? that the fake left wants to rule by vanguard, and that never actually works.
0:26
i was hoping to finish eating last night, spend the day cleaning this afternoon and fall asleep about now.
instead, i barely finished eating this morning and slept for over 12 hours.
so, another day wasted due to the - preventable - annoyance of sleeping. :(.
let's try to get something done tonight.
18:50
we've seen a parade of mps that have been known to criticize trudeau "retire" or "resign" over the last few months. it's another sign of increasing fascism in the pmo.
i need to strongly encourage you to vote for anybody except the liberals - this party needed to remove trudeau some time ago in order to prevent itself from collapsing into authoritarianism, and trudeau seems to have won that struggle. they should not be supported by anybody identifying as small-l liberal, as they have become the antithesis of liberalism.
18:54
monday, august 9, 2021
i seem to have misunderstood the length of which a "celiac attack" can happen, and.....it's simply not consistent. i don't have celiac...
so, i mentioned previously that the idea of taking pasta out of the salad bowl shouldn't affect calcium absorption because nothing substantive changed, except the removal of fibre (and vitamin c). but, if i was having a celiac atack, i'd be having it for days at a time - so any calcium malabsorption would have been affected not just by the pasta in the meal, but also by the cereal i ate in the morning and the bread i had the night before. you can't isolate gluten like that; it's not a real-time interaction type effect, but an event that lasts days at a time. so, for me, that means i'd have to stop eating wheat altogether for days to see an effect, which is something i haven't done...probably ever.
but, you can separate calcium and iron, and that interaction seems to be the one that actually makes sense, in terms of understanding why the iron went up.
that means i shouldn't be worrying about separating bits of wheat to isolate.
0:10
so, let's clarify this point.
the idea that the celts were illiterate is false.
and, this claim needs to be sourced:
this reddit post also discusses the topic a little:
so, we have uncovered scripts, but we have not yet been able to decipher them. the roman histories that described the celts as illiterate are not just wrong but an intentionally produced lie that was disseminated as propaganda to dehumanize and barbarize the celts into a subhuman, inferior race so that they could be slaughtered and thrown off the land with impunity. the concept of the noble savage is not modern; it was invented by the romans to dehumanize the celts. this lie has, however, held a dominant, central place within christian histories because it's convenient to deny there was any history in the region before the church, as it was convenient to the romans to deny they were literate, in order for to justify carrying out a vicious genocide against them that slaughtered them by the millions. modern historians have just repeated the lie, which has turned it into a commonly accepted myth.
it would be true that the celts of the dark ages (the descendants of the historical celts) would have ended up illiterate by the time that later writers showed up to document them, centuries after the roman genocide of the historical celts had occurred in the region, but this would have been as a consequence of the brutality of roman colonialism and of the barbarity of the catholic church, which destroyed their system of writing and tried to forcibly assimilate them into either a system of slavery (the romans considered the celts to be a slave race) or a roman identity (if they were lucky), and not due to a deficit of actual literacy in the celtic cultures of antiquity. it's quite similar to the way that the church treated indigenous groups throughout the world, centuries later. remember: colonialism is a middle eastern idea, it's not a northern european thing. the celts and germans are amongst the most colonized people in the world. they have almost no connection to their indigenous culture, because it was burned to the ground by mostly brown looking roman catholics. this is, of course, the reason the vikings moved south, to defend themselves from a violent christian expansionism that sought to destroy their culture and identity.
as the romans were generally quite thorough in their various genocides, we'll probably never uncover anything substantive in the celtic script, but i would call on people to look in two places for it:
- ireland (where it may have held out longer, as ireland did not suffer the catastrophic effects of roman colonialism the way that france (gaul) or england (britain) did)
- the vatican sub-sub-sub-basements. seriously. we don't know what's down there...but if we have anything substantive, that's probably where it is.
but, there's probably not much left to find because it was all burnt or shattered or otherwise destroyed in a very conscious act of genocide, and probably repeatedly over centuries.
so, we'll probably never uncover anything substantive, but there's more than enough evidence that they did write and that claims to the contrary were openly racist roman propaganda.
the persians, on the other hand, seem to have not written anything, except to benefit the literate subject nations. so, you'd have to imagine that most persians were literate, but there really is no evidence that they saw literacy as anything but a kind of quirky middle eastern thing (the persian were, of course, from north-central asia). the germans were a layer removed from civilization until the celts were absorbed by the romans, so there's less evidence that they would have come into early contact with literacy, except via the celts, themselves. but, the celts occupied a large swath of europe going back into deep antiquity, and they would have had centuries to pick writing up.
the idea that the celts were illiterate should be instantly realized as absurd to anybody with any serious grounding in the history of the period.
so, the next time you hear some anti-pagan christian blowhard talk about "illiterate pagans", look them in the eye and tell them they're full of shit - and they're repeating 2500-year old racist propaganda, without even understanding what they're doing.
0:43
so, we've got post #2 up at the alter-reality.
i'm going to try very hard to actually stick to this. and, i should start some reviews for next week, time permitting.
3:42
i updated the theme link and put it at the bottom of the template:
that is probably final. updates are related to the colour of the text, which is now a pencil grey.
again - the theme works exceedingly well in terms of actually lining the paper up, but some care is going to be required in ensuring that the size of the posts is not too large. it looks like a floating point error issue to me that's baked into the html rendering, and you're never going to fix that. but, i've forced it to recalculate frequently, and that's the best answer that i think is available.
4:31
just a note on the asimov reviews, before i start on them...
i'm going to be more or less comprehensive. of course, i hadn't read every asimov text by the time i was ten, but i'd read a good deal of them. that's not important. this is a mechanism - it reflects reality. you want to take the idea seriously, and allow for tremendous artistic license in the details, although i am going to try to be as specific as my memory can allow for. the details are admittedly a little blurry, more than thirty years later.
so, no - i didn't read every asimov text in order.
but, i am going to review them that way.
as i want to speed this up, i'm going to try to get four of these texts done over next weekend, but i don't know if that's feasible. these are 200 page books in large fonts that are written for teenagers; i don't know if i can do two or three per day, but i should be able to do more than one.
but, i have to finish cleaning, first.
5:52
should i start by talking about asimov's role in the perpetual, cosmic war between religion and science? asimov is known for aggressively promoting rationalism, liberalism, secularism and atheism in and outside of his literature. should kids really be reading this stuff, or was he just out there corrupting the youth?
the reality, for me, is that my parents were not just both atheists but that they conscientiously raised me as an atheist, so asimov didn't undo anything because there wasn't anything to undo. i want to get the point across on that: they didn't raise me to dislike this or that religion, or to have a disdain for the faithful (that came naturally...), but rather purposefully raised me without an active belief in any sort of god, and, when it came up, simply expressed skepticism as a matter-of-fact in any situation that my subconscious considers important enough to still remember. basically, my parents were of the view that a child shouldn't be pushed into a belief system; that's not a deduction, i specifically recall hearing both of them say, independently of one another, that it ought to be up to me to figure out, and not up to them to direct, although i'll admit that it may have been driven by laziness, on both of their respective behalves. belief in god isn't embedded in our genome and doesn't come instinctively, without instruction; if you don't foster it, it doesn't develop, and that's really the actual truth with me: nobody ever told me i ought to believe in god with any conviction or persistence and, as a result of that lack of persuasion, i just never did. the result is that, unlike most adult atheists, there really never was a time in my youth when i was naive enough to believe in any sort of god. there was no break with faith, no rejection of the church - i've just always been an atheist, by default. so, i was an atheist child reading books by an atheist author; in that sense, asimov was appropriate, for me, in the same way that a christian child reading christian authors is appropriate, for them. asimov shares my extended family's belief system; he's a representative and a member of my tribe. conversely, it would have been weird for my atheist parents and grandmother to give me religious books, given that they were not religious, themselves.
so, i mean, maybe asimov wouldn't be right for some kids, but that concern wasn't an issue, for me.
but, what that means is that i just didn't have a perspective on this conflict because science was really the only thing that i actually knew. i actually had to learn about religion from the other kids, and that conflict had to develop in my mind over time, as i aged and became more cognizant of it. at the age that i'm starting this with, there just wouldn't be much of a conflict to resolve - all i knew was science, and all i knew was atheism (in the sense of it being the absence of religion). i didn't really know the traditional christian stories or narratives, so i wasn't aware that they contradicted the science, and i didn't know there was any reason to push back on them. it's hard to imagine an alternate history of yourself at such a formative age, but i'd like to think i'd have pushed back against the religion, if only i knew that there was a reason to. instead, i naively allowed both ideas to exist side by side, oblivious of the intellectual inconsistency in doing so, although the only thing i ever spent any actual time actually thinking about was the science.
so, i'm not going to be pushing this point much in this journal, because i wasn't really aware of it at the time. rather, i'm going to try to present my own perspective, as best as i can remember it, which means that religion wasn't much of a factor, because i didn't really know very much about it. i liked science, as best as i could understand it; i wasn't even cognizant of what religion was or was about, in any meaningful sense.
that said, my stepfather was religious, and that's something i'll need to talk about.
my mother was uncomfortable with his religiosity, and it ultimately ended the marriage. he "found god" shortly after they got married, and she went along with it thinking it was a phase, but ultimately rejected him over it, although there was a point where he got violent with me over nothing, and that was the actual cause of the break-up. she wouldn't have identified as one, but her religious views were roughly comparable to that of a laveyan satanist. i think she would have identified as some kind of vague deist, but her concept of god was...it's an old testament god. it's a mean, vengeful, retributive god. but, it doesn't follow the rules in the old testament. it's really a pagan concept of god.
my father's religion was hockey. he didn't take it seriously. i don't think he'd have identified as anything, and if you brought it up, he'd have changed the topic. i guess that qualifies as agnostic, but it was a kind of a "i don't have time for this" agnosticism. if there was some vague notion of deism, he never really articulated it. and, he was a libertarian in his concept of religion; so long as they didn't bother him, he didn't have a problem with them. years later, when my stepmother started going to church, he would drop her off and go for breakfast with me, instead - and then make it home in time to watch the nfl game. but, it was just disinterest more than anything else. he was a big zappa fan...
so, it was strictly because of my stepfather that i spent some time in a methodist church around the time that the journal starts, before being banned from sunday school for asking too many awkward questions. if you think catholics are fucked up on specious guilt, you should spend some time with methodists - they make catholics seem moderate, in comparison. it was around that time that i picked the bible up and read it all the way through, so that should probably be one of the book reviews. but, i've pointed out before that all it took for me to do away with christianity was to read the bible. it was just obviously just a bunch of nonsense. and, i remember being baffled at the premise that there were adults in the world that were dumb enough to take it seriously.
also, i did attend a catholic school until the end of grade 13, but my mom only enrolled me in the catholic school system because it started at four-year old kindergarten, and the public system started at five-year old kindergarten. so, i was going to have to skip a year, otherwise (i had been in pre-school starting at age 2); it was really just a pragmatic decision to avoid having me skip a year. i was subsequently baptized at the age of four strictly to facilitate it. i distinctly recall my mother being mortified that the priest would molest me, and ordered me not to go anywhere near the church to prevent it. the cynicism underlying the process is truthfully actually another demonstration of the strictly non-religious environment i was raised in.
these minimal and temporary influences aside, the reality is that religion was really not a part of my upbringing, that i was always strictly interested in science, and i'll consequently be approaching the issue from the perspective of a strictly atheist childhood. but, i want to double down on what that means: if it's not pointed out by adults, it's just not obvious to a child that there's any sort of a contradiction between science and religion, and so a child wouldn't reflexively choose a side in the debate. when they send you to sunday school, they don't bring up theological discourses surrounding the big bang, or at least they don't do it on day one. it takes time for the inconsistencies to unfold and for the need to pick a side to become apparent. eventually, after so many trips, the contradictions start to pile up, and there was never any question in my little mind as to which set of ideas had primacy. the moment i became cognizant of the conflict was the moment i picked a side and the moment i intellectually turned against religion.
so, i won't admit naivete, but i'll admit some ignorance. i think some ignorance at the age of eight or nine is forgivable. for me, the ignorance was of the conflict between science and religion - i was not aware of one, at first, or of the necessity in choosing one over the other. and, i realize that many religious people will argue that there isn't a contradiction, but i reject that, as an adult - and did, eventually, as a ten year-old, as well.
so, i'm going to actually approach the asimov as a blank slate, regarding the conflict between science and religion. i was simply not old enough to be aware of the struggle, and simply had little awareness of religion. however, my biases throughout are going to be towards science, and that position will be dominant when conflicts arise and will win outright, in the end.
6:11
actually - and i had decided this once before - i should read it in this order, then fill in the gaps:
honey, i shrunk the fantastic voyage II: destination brain <-----added
this is based on the ordering suggested by asimov, except i'm strategically adding in short stories collections to fill it out.
i am ignoring asimov's later forays outside of science fiction, altogether.
(i did not read any of the lucky starr series as a kid, and i'm skipping them in this reconstruction. but, they would plug in first)
the early asimov (short stories) <----added
the complete robot (short stories) (1982) + robot dreams + robot visions
the complete stories, volume 1 (short stories) <----added
buy jupiter and other stories (short stories) >----added
the martian way and other stories (short stories) <----added
the bicentennial man and other stories (short stories) <----added
caves of steel (1954)
the naked sun (1957)
the robots of dawn (1983)
robots and empire (1985)
the currents of space (1952)
the stars, like dust (1951)
pebble in the sky (1950)
prelude to foundation (1988)
forward the foundation (1993)
foundation (1951)
foundation and empire (1952)
second foundation (1953)
foundation's edge (1982)
foundation and earth (1986)
==========
asimov's mysteries (short stories) <----added
the winds of change and other stories (short stories) <---added
the end of eternity <-----added
the gods themselves <--------added
nemesis <----added
there are some asimov texts published after 1990, but not many. i'll have to skip them, altogether.
or maybe not.
1992 silverberg additions:
- positronic man
- ugly little boy
- nightfall
9:52
So, when I was eleven, it occurred to me that if I wrote my own books, I could then reread them at my leisure. I never really wrote a complete book, of course. I would start one and keep rambling on with it till I outgrew it and then I would start another. All these early writings are forever gone, though I remember some of the details quite clearly.
i'm not sure how many people realized it at the time, but the man was a damned troll.
so, i'm going to start with this on pdf, if i can't find it at the goodwill shop.
10:38
and, let me say it clearly enough.
was asimov a great writer?
he wasn't, no. that doesn't matter.
what i actually liked about asimov was the (often times naive) exploration of various scientific hypotheses. but, i was, like, ten years old. i found the gaia hypothesis to be fascinating, for example. could the earth be a living thing? well, if you're tripping out into that as an adult, you need to take some basic science, but it's an intriguing question for a kid to try to work out.
as it was with king, it didn't matter to me that he didn't excel at the specific literary devices that an academic analysis will key on. i mean, i get the criticism - and i expect to roll my eyes.
these are good kids books, though, whether they were intended that way, or not.
but, yeah - i know i'm going to cringe, and i'm ready for it. but, expect the reviews to largely gloss over it...
10:45
shouldn't i have been reading contemporary kids' books from the 80s and 90s, though?
well, i did eventually - and went with the king.
but, i just finished grade two, here, and i'm consequently somewhat at the mercy of the adults around me. i was frequently gifted books, and i read most of them. nobody reads every book their grandmother gives them...
but, i'm just googling "tween books from the 80s", and it's predictably a bunch of pornographic smut. i wouldn't have gone anywhere near that stuff.
the one thing i remember trying out briefly was rl stine, but i decided pretty quickly that i was well beyond it. there was a tv show with goosebumps adaptations, but it didn't have the character depth of a king novel, which was a big part of what i liked about reading king. the attempt to get into the head of a rabid dog, or a kid that can't stop themselves from lighting things on fire...that's what kept me coming back, rather than the plotlines, exactly. and, again - i expect to realize the criticisms of king, but there was still a giant gulf between these king texts, which were written for less educated adults, and these stine texts, which were fully intended to be kids' books.
i never really liked being a kid... <----does that imply the paragraph was deleted by the vandal? check other sources.
so, i mean, that's my answer - i quickly deduced that all of the texts being marketed to me as "young adult" were just empty, pornographic trash. and, i'd hold to that view now, too. i wanted something more substantive than that...
11:08
i would have preferred william gibson to sweet valley high, but i didn't know he existed, at the time.
11:11
ok, so i've confirmed the logistics of my orchiectomy. but it is simply impossible to get to toronto for 8:00 am using public transportation, so i don't have any choice but to hitch.
the greyhound used to run a service that left windsor around 1:00 am and got to toronto before 7:00 am. that's exactly what i need...
the train comes in at 1:00 pm or 9:00 pm, which is useless to me, as i'd have to spend the night outside. i refuse to pay for a hotel in a locked down city. but, i'm left to conclude that it's some kind of a conspiracy, and i'm not about to buy into it. that's the kind of bullshit i'd resist out of spite. fuck you.
i was hoping to maybe hitch into london and catch something early, but that's just as impossible. the earliest bus gets to toronto for 10:00 am. who would take that bus?
i could conceivably catch the go train in kitchener at 4:30, but it's out of the way, and it makes more sense to just keep going up the 401.
so, my only actual route is to leave late and try to hitch overnight.
14:46
don't misunderstand me; i would rather find a way into town on public transit that gets me there between 5:00-7:00.
that would not appear to exist anymore. so, i have no actual choice but to hitch.
thanks, doug.
18:06
and just a note for the bus stations: people are going to generally want to get into toronto for the day and leave that same night, not arrive in toronto some time in the middle of the business day. if your'e going to run a bus from windsor, it should get to toronto at 6:00 or 7:00, not at 10:00 or 11:00.
i can't think of anybody at all that's going to want to take a bus from windsor to toronto and get there midday.
18:13
i live a few blocks from the bridge that something like 90% of the commercial traffic into canada comes over. i will have hundreds of choices per hour over truckers coming over the border, almost all of whom will be going to toronto.
i can even hitch from a nearby truck station.
i will take the train back.
18:19
the united states doesn't seem to be able to extricate itself from the backwardsness of supply-side economics. they really seem to think that markets are driven by supply.
the problem from day one has always been that americans want big, stupid gas-guzzling suvs that they can put the extended family in and drive like fucking tanks. many car manufacturers have stopped making mid-sized vehicles altogether. and, sports cars don't sell, either.
the companies can promise the world the sky, but if they don't find a way to change consumption patterns, it will not matter much. and, because a substantive amount of americans think global warming is a hoax, they have a huge hill to climb.
the inevitable consequence of a supply-side approach is that they're going to have to ban combustion engines, and good luck trying to do that in the united states, where the car is the symbol of american freedom:
so, what can we do? fuck...
listen: i'm not opposing this, it's no doubt a helpful step, i'm just pointing out that it's empty rhetoric, lip service, if it doesn't come with real teeth.
a "pledge by automotive manufacturers", after all, is not just supply-side economics. it's also self-regulation.
if that's the best they can do, it's almost nothing at all.
18:46
this is obviously better than a voluntary pledge by ceos, but these incentive systems are still not likely to be enough. the canadian public, though, has a drastically different perception on the reality of climate change, and that is a dominant, consequential difference.
electric cars are only a small step towards the solution, but we have deep hydro resources in canada and the conversion problem is less of an issue here than in most places. however, we need to start taking steps away from the idea of personalized transport and start looking at renormalizing public transport more seriously. i can think of very few excuses for people to own a car, nowadays. things like making it harder to drive around by putting electric street cars over major city streets would dramatically help.
the biden administration is approaching this like something that can be fixed with a couple of bandaid solutions and some effective pr messaging, and it isn't the case. resolving this problem is going to require revolutionary changes in how we exist, as a culture. and, all evidence is that the administration doesn't understand that - or doesn't care.
we may, in the end, see some corporate welfare for the auto industry, and they may try to use climate change as an excuse for another handout. but, that's just a measurement of the cynicism underlying the lack of substantive action.
the solution to climate change is going to require some more in depth policy decisions than writing yet another check for general motors. but, this administration is so trapped in neo-liberal ideology that it lacks the vision for anything more than that.
20:39
i actually never bothered to get a driver's license...
i've never owned a car and probably never will. and, my cholesterol levels thank me for it.
20:42
it was the late 90s, and i was strictly concerned about boycotting the oil companies. i've never wavered on that, either.
when i was a teenager, i refused to get a driver's license or drive a car due to environmental concerns, but left open the possibility of an electric vehicle, one day; nowadays, i don't want an electric car either because they make people fat and lazy, and i'd rather force myself to get some exercise when i'm out and about. and, that's just going to become more relevant, until i can't feed myself anymore, if i make it that far.
that, and the amount of labour invested into maintaining any sort of vehicle has always struck me as absurdly wasteful. like, i'd have to get a job, if i want a car. i'd rather be free from labour and not have a car than have to go to work to pay for a car.
so, i'm past this - i'm leading by example. and, hopefully i'm the future.
there's some minimal scenarios where i need a vehicle, mostly revolving around moving large objects, but it's a twice a year thing, and i'd be happy to rent a van for an hour, if i were able to drive it.
ideally, i'd argue that electric cars should be treated as collective property, rather than personal property. so, people would just sign the electric car out when they need it to move something or maybe to go on a lengthy trip and sign it back into the storehouse when they're done with it. normal humans don't need vehicles for day-to-day life - it's unnecessary, wasteful, lazy, decadent and bourgeois.
20:50
hey, sorry to disappoint you, but this was the side of 80s media i identified with, in terms of the utility of fossil fuels and the fetishism of automobiles:
21:47
ugh.
via rail just randomly sold out of affordable tickets and boosted it's prices, overall. assholes.
so, i'm looking to take the bus back instead, i guess. but i have to find access to a credit card, because they don't take pay pal. fuck...
i'm not wasting money on a fancy train seat, especially considering i'm going to sleep the whole way back. that's so bourgeois it's retarded. if i can't book a seat for under $50, i'll have to tell them to reschedule the surgery.
i'm cheap as fuck, and i'm not ashamed of it. i mean, i resent being forced to go to fucking toronto in the first place, i don't want to give all my money to the fucking train corporation for some stupid hierarchical bullshit.
23:08
toronto is a policed state, right now.
i just want to get the surgery done and get out as quickly as possible.
23:10
can i just buy a bus ticket at the old greyhound station?
that would be easiest...
23:15
let me see if i can get a prepaid debit card at the corner store.
23:19
tuesday, august 10, 2021
yeah.
so, it seems like i bought a ticket home.
i'll have to call in the morning to work out the details with the shuttle.
i need to finish this hilliard post..
1:59
Schellenberg was convicted of smuggling 222 kilograms (448 pounds) of methamphetamine, according to the court.
that stuff is poison.
you might argue it's harsh, but how many people would that much meth kill? the answer is quite a few.
i have no sympathy for this guy. at all.
sorry.
2:11
he knew what was going to happen if he got caught, and he nonetheless went to an authoritarian state and tried to smuggle in one of the most heinous substances ever created.
i'm never going to stand up for a drug dealer...and it's kind of embarrassing that our government is making a big deal out of it.
as far as i can tell, we have a corrupt female banker from a rich chinese family on one side and a drug dealer on the other, and i'd just as well send them both to the gallows.
but, i'm not convinced of the claim that the chinese are holding this guy hostage, or that they'd be willing to kill the hostage before their princess gets released.
the logic is essentially this: if they kill this guy, it's proof he's not a hostage. that doesn't prove he actually smuggled drugs into the country, but it dismantles any claims he's being held as collateral.
2:18
yes - a death sentence for selling meth is a little too harsh.
but, only a little. i'm not in favour of mild sentences for drug dealers, especially not the ones running it internationally. if they caught this guy, and he did what they said, he should rot in a chinese jail for a very long time.
but, even if i agree that it's a little too harsh, my level of empathy for him is essentially nil. i wouldn't advocate that kind of sentence myself, but i wouldn't intervene on his behalf, either.
if the chinese want to send the message not to smuggle meth into the country, that's a message i can get behind, and one you might want to take seriously. i can't criticize them for that.
but, it makes no sense to kill your collateral, and the chinese aren't insane muslim extremists that are going to behave like idiots. if they carry through with this, it makes the canadian government look like fools for pushing what is essentially an instantly debunked conspiracy theory, and trying to use a common criminal as leverage.
the chinese are right to make fun of this government...
2:24
moving to the next basement...
first basement:
- mid-sized keyboard amp
- e609 mic to upgrade the altec, maybe.
second basement:
- if i find an affordable ry30 somewhere, i must get it. not a priority.
- but, in the short run, something like an akai mini would give me access to velocity sensitive pads, if i can find one for very cheap. not a clear priority, for now.
- plastic recorder (or wind controller?)
- i've added a picture for fake strings to sept 6, 1997 because that's the oldest attempt i have at creating a string section that's designed to sound like strings (rather than a synthesizer), probably actually due to an influence from a canadian band called the tea party, and which is something i've struggled with for years and years. i'm going to be seeking generally approaches towards creating different sounds as i try to plug in production holes that i know i can't do well with sampling. i have an electric violin with a bow that i got for $50, but i've never set it up because it hasn't really ever made sense to do so. it's kind of a toy. that would be the obvious answer for high strings, but it's actually the low strings i generally want to reach for. i've used e-bows in the past (something that shows up in the next basement) and still have one. but, i've recently purchased an audio-to-midi converter that will let me track guitar parts directly to midi. with the aid of a sample library, an ebow and an actual bow, i wonder how close that will get me to what i need. but, it's an open question, and something i approach on a track-by-track basis.
third basement:
- the dan electro fab tone i used on liquify and the day inri messed the world up was not mine, it was borrowed from a friend. i have many distortion pedals, but i would grab one in the metal case (not one of those plastic ones...) if i saw it cheap enough. that said, i'm going to claim that the rocktron metal planet that i have is an effective substitute/upgrade for this (they're both based on boss metal pedals, but the rocktron has a less compressed sound than either of the other two, which is useful because it lets you control the amount of compression....), but you can never have too many distortion pedals:
i used that pedal as an extra gain boost on some of the parts for proverbs, along with a guyatone sd-2 and a marshall jackhammer.
i'm not a metal guitarist, though, and i don't generally use high gain tones like that, except as niche effects. i prefer a dirty overdriven sound to a high gain metal sound.
but, like i say - you can never have too many distortion sounds. you never know what you'll need to get the sound you're imagining, and i've found that just having as many combinations as is possible is the best approach.
- i still install cool edit pro.
- by dad bought himself a nicer drum kit around this time, that was meant for communal use but ended up banished to my bedroom by my stepmother. this was the kit used for deny everything material. my solution for kit replacements is my dm pro kit:
that was the last of i think three kits that he bought, and i never saw him play any of them.
- there was a marshall amp in the living room for a while that was purportedly given to me as a gift, but it never functioned properly. i don't know where he got it from exactly, but he did a lot of garage sale shopping, and i'm guessing he picked it up from somebody's garage for almost nothing. i'm guessing he thought it was worth a lot more than it was actually worth. again - i'm not convinced i would have ever picked a marshall practice guitar amp over a fender bass amp, when the two are sitting side by side like they were; broken speaker or not, i don't think i ever recorded anything at all with it, and am not sure i plugged into it for more than a few minutes. yeah, i know - i've got a marshall amp on a table in my bedroom, and i don't even plug it in. i'm sorry. i had a di on the soundcard, and a bass amp for recording pedals...together, they were far more useful to me than this cheesy scooped marshall with a midrange speaker. my dad didn't get it, either.
i traded this marshall for a half broken vintage 50s electric mandolin that i fixed up and used on several recordings before it disappeared in 2011:
i traded this marshall for a half broken vintage 50s electric mandolin that i fixed up and used on several recordings before it disappeared in 2011:
do i need to replace this, then? well, i never used it! and, i swapped it for a mandolin. i definitely need to replace the mandolin...
if i need to record guitar parts, the mini amps are more useful to me. i could never make any functional use of a 75 watt amp, in this space - or any space i'm likely to inhabit in the near future. and, really, the thing that replaces this is the pod:
so, i'm comfortable with leaving that as it is - although i've decided that i'll get a cheap modelling amp, if i find one, too.
the pod through a flat keyboard amp is a better idea than a cheap marshall, though, if it comes down to it.
- i've been saying this is 120 watts. it's actually 160 watts. it showed up around this time, and was meant as a bass amp. i still have it...and i may try to use it as a cab for the mini orange and/or vox...
i have used this periodically for recording heavily effected guitar parts through complex effects chains, specifically when i want a low frequency response. but, it's just so damned loud...
i mean, that was the point - it was parked beside a drum kit. it had be loud, and was purchased for the volume. but, that's not real life for me, and hasn't been since i was 20.
- i still have the creamy dreamer, and still use it
- from previous post dated to june 8th:
i picked up a morley pro series wah around this time for pretty cheap but i found the effect to be a little more subtle than what i wanted. i mean, i was hardly interested in doing 80s hair metal whammy dives, but, after playing with direct x filters in cool edit, i wanted a much more dynamic instrument that i could warp like a dj or sound engineer warps filters with their hands, but in real-time with my feet, and found this was really designed to be the opposite of that. there was no doubt a mental disconnect between the world this was made for (southern rock guitarists) and the kind of sounds i was imagining (warped sound effects from contemporary experimental techno, like download). i mean, i knew better, but i guess i didn't. that said, i made some sufficiently demented use of it in the climax to "entropy", as well as in the intro solo to "ignorance is bliss" before i swapped it for a digitech xp-100 a few basements later. the pod has a couple of wah sounds in it; it wouldn't make sense to try to model this in a daw, unless you have the right kind of controller. so, you need hardware here, one way or another.
so, i'm happy with the pod as a replacement for this, and also for the digitech.
- i can still install the aipl spin cycle plugin as a direct x effect, but i've mostly put it aside. there are leslie-like effects in guitar rig. likewise, the hyperprism and north pole effects are there, but i never reach for them anymore.
- i still have the 90s pc and pretty much every important piece of hardware in it still works flawlessly.
- pi warp is a weird effect and i absolutely still use it.
- sounder does not work right in xp, but i'm hoping to get it running on the 90s pc (in windows 98)
- i've dropped acid. the program, i mean. discarded it. i was actually hoping to use it for samples (listen to entropy to hear my intended use), but i just keep going back to basic midi. the old scorewriter is just the most useful way for me to write, always has been. so, my replacement for acid is noteworthy composer, but there's nothing you can do in an old version of acid that you can't do in a slightly less old version of cubase:
- i posted the imaginary trumpet and imaginary sax because i'm looking at getting pocket versions for use with the midi controller i just bought. you can get mini saxophones for cheap and i'm on the brink - as soon as i finalize the operation transactions.
- there was a baby grand outside my door, which....i can use a vst effect. that's fine. if i find a million dollars, yes, there will be a real piano. but, it's not even on the radar...
- i now have two mini classical guitars, and they're really both functional replacements for the aria, in any meaningful way for how i used it, which was never intended to be as a performing guitarist at a church or something. i want to keep one of them. but, i need to get a 21-fret classical guitar with a pickup in it relatively soon.
- i still install audiomulch.
- granulab doesn't work will in xp. it seems that there's a vst version. but, the granulator i used most often is in the hyperprism suite (see xenophanes for a good example)
- i still have the rubber ducky setup files, but i don't recall the last time i ever used it.
- i still install leaf drums, but i couldn't imagine myself writing that way anymore. it's actually a useful program, and i'd recommend it as a basic drum machine for noise music.
- i stil have the mxr flanger & distortion II boxes, as well as the ibanez eq.
- i cannot find a downloadable version of megatrancer
- koan does not work in xp. but i can try to update it and should.
- from june 8th:
i picked up a mooger fooger mf-102 ring modulator that spring, hoping to drive it with the morley and get that dramatic foot driven techno-oscillation filter, but it didn't actually work; it just didn't convert to an expression like i hoped. i never got another expression for it. guitarists kind of have their hands busy, so this became an expensive trick item. that said, it is used extensively as a bass (acidosis) and vocal (trepanation nation) processor over the next few years, before i cashed it in as having done it's purpose. it's also become very expensive ($600?), but isn't any more useful than a freeware vst plugin - it's expensive because it says "moog" on it, and likely of little actual functional value to you, unless you're doing very modular synth work. just about any old ring modulator with a carrier signal should be just as good.
i wish i could find a demo with the expression pedal plugged in like i wanted to set up, but what this demo (not posted) does is really demonstrate how kind of useless the thing really is.
the pod has a collection of synth and ring mod effects that are quite frankly more usable than the moogerfooger, which i really was quite disappointed in - but it had a lot to do with the fact that i just didn't have a foot controller for it. i'm going to pencil in a generic ring mod, but the pod is really probably more than good enough.
- i've long wanted to get or make a theremin and never have, so i'm going to pencil this in as a project.
- a ukelele would be a useful utility sound generator, but it's hardly at the top of the list of priorities.
- i don't know exactly what happened to my old electric mandolin, but i definitely need to replace it. the electrical was a little funny, but i would have hardly discarded it over that. it's in a small list of items that just kind of disappeared. i don't imagine the item was worth much, and i'd probably benefit from upgrading it to something newer. but, i got it for almost nothing and am sad it disappeared.
- likewise, i've decided to replace my bontempi with a bontempi. they do show up on ebay, but i don't really want to pay shipping. i was looking at melodicas as a replacement and it's probably going to be roughly the same price. but, i still may decided to go down that route. we'll see.
- i still have the e-bow.
ok, let's get to the next basement, then.
5:00
and still going...
first basement:
- mid-sized keyboard amp (like the vox kb50)
- e609 mic to upgrade the altec, maybe.
second basement:
- if i find an affordable ry30 somewhere, i must get it. not a priority.
- akai mini-like controller for pads
- plastic recorder (or wind controller?)
- orchestral string midi controller hack ideas
third basement:
- metal case dan electro fabtone, if found cheap enough
- $50 (max) mini modelling amp
- pignose amp
- mini trumpet
- mini sax
- piano (long term project that will probably never happen; i don't have the space, and i can't move it, even if i bite on one of those $100 pianos on kijiji)
- 21 fret classical with piezo
- megatrancer vst effect
- update koan
- any basic ring mod box
- theremin
- ukelele
- electric mandolin
- bontempi b4 reed organ
fourth basement:
- that ancient 12-string was in my possession until 2011 and then disappeared, and i wish i knew what happened to it. it was either an ovation or a harmony, but i think it was a harmony. the guitar had been left beside a furnace for i don't know how long and was so locked it up (due to dryness) that it couldn't actually be played. when i recorded "strung out" the next fall, the concept was to play every guitar in the house, and that one did not get played, so it's a measure of just how bad it was. i also remember writing the guitar part for clarity on the epiphone, hoping to play it on the 12-string....but i didn't, in the end. see, when a guitar is dry like that, you have to slowly humidify it, and i was paranoid that i was going to moisten it up too fast and snap it in half. my best guess is that my sister stole it and sold it for some unknown amount, but you'll never get a straight answer from her regarding much of anything at all. i would like a 12-string to replace it, but i do not think i ever recorded anything with it, either. the lost symphony would probably sound very good on a 12-string...
- the 6-string saturn does appear on strung out, and i think that's the only place it appears. it was a cheap guitar that was nice to have around, but doesn't have any particular purpose; i don't need multiple acoustic guitars. i don't know when this one disappeared, but i don't remember seeing it after 2003. i guess the takeharu could potentially take it's place as a substantive upgrade in japanese made instruments.
- the age of the capo is a good hint as to the ago of these guitars - mid 60s. there was also a partridge family trading card that i had for years and have since lost. the guitar capo is still in my possession, even as the guitars it came with are not.
- the dx100 was a christmas present and garage sale pickup. i still have it.
- i found an old beat up tele with what i called "weird pickups" at a garage sale that summer. i think they were gold foil, in hindsight. i kept it for alternate tunings, and recorded a few tracks with it as a noise generating device, but i never fixed the broken pickups. it disappeared in 2011. i'd need to replace it with a functioning gold foil device.
- jon's guitar and amp were left in my basement for a few months and only used to record his own parts. it's a measure of how often he actually played the instrument that he felt comfortable leaving it at my place for months at a time (they were his only guitar and his only amp).
- my dad sold his bass with his drums, and i spent a while without a bass. the material that spring was done mostly with synth basses (or organs), when it wasn't just written out as a score. but, i picked up that washburn that summer for the purposes of playing bass for jon & sean. i sold it in 2003, and replaced it with the ibanez a few years later. i found the neck far too big for me...
- a mini classical appears around this time, that eventually had to be replaced because the top fell off. i think it was a yamaha, purchased for $2 at a garage sale. i always called it "the $2 guitar". it would be replaced with the hohner, eventually. i actually used this little guitar more frequently than the aria, due to the small hands.
6:59
just a few more...
first basement:
- mid-sized keyboard amp (like the vox kb50)
- e609 mic to upgrade the altec, maybe.
second basement:
- if i find an affordable ry30 somewhere, i must get it. not a priority.
- akai mini-like controller for pads
- plastic recorder (or wind controller?)
- orchestral string midi controller hack ideas
third basement:
- metal case dan electro fabtone, if found cheap enough
- $50 (max) mini modelling amp
- pignose amp
- mini trumpet
- mini sax
- piano (long term project that will probably never happen; i don't have the space, and i can't move it, even if i bite on one of those $100 pianos on kijiji)
- 21 fret classical with piezo
- megatrancer vst effect
- update koan
- any basic ring mod box
- theremin
- ukelele
- electric mandolin
- bontempi b4 reed organ
fourth basement:
- 12-string acoustic
- a guitar with goldfoil pickups
fifth basement:
- the altec 683b & harmonica are both still in my possession. so, nothing.
sixth basement:
- from previous post:
still hoping to get that demented foot pedal guitar sound, i swapped the morley for a digitech xp100 and still didn't really get what i wanted. the harmonizers are exceedingly synthetic sounding, probably because they're ultimately doubling the sound from a sampler, which is kind of lame. it was used in the next two basements, but was sold in 2003. the pod actually does what this did a lot better than it does.
so, nothing.
seventh basement:
- the digital piano was nice (the quality of font is noticeably upgraded in reflections and flying), but it doesn't require a replacement.
- a version of cakewalk was actually purchased, but it didn't run correctly and disappeared some time when i was gone in bc. i've used cubase sx 3.0 as my main daw for years, since i upgraded pcs in 2006, which is still my main recording pc. i will update this when i move to 64 bit, eventually. but, this was my first attempt at multitrack digital recording and i didn't try again for years.
- i don't have setup files for orion anymore, and don't really remember what it was. iirc, that sequence part was done in the only time i ever really looked at it. there's lots of ways to make sequencer parts...
- i still have files for drumstation, but i don't install it. it might not work well on xp; i don't recall. it's a roland style emulator, and i have lots of options, even if i'd rather score it, generally. but, it's still around.
so, nothing....
8:06
so, this is what i'm looking at, in total:
first basement:
- mid-sized keyboard amp (like the vox kb50)
- e609 mic to upgrade the altec, maybe.
second basement:
- if i find an affordable ry30 somewhere, i must get it. not a priority.
- akai mini-like controller for pads
- plastic recorder (or wind controller?)
- orchestral string midi controller hack ideas*
third basement:
- metal case dan electro fabtone, if found cheap enough
- $50 (max) mini modelling amp
- pignose amp
- mini tube guitar amp?
- mini trumpet
- mini sax
- piano (long term project that will probably never happen; i don't have the space, and i can't move it, even if i bite on one of those $100 pianos on kijiji)
- 21 fret classical with piezo*
- megatrancer vst effect
- update koan
- any basic ring mod box
- theremin
- ukelele*
- electric mandolin*
- bontempi b4 reed organ
fourth basement:
- 12-string acoustic
- a guitar with goldfoil pickups
* - check midi controller for these items, as well as things like sitar, banjo...tunings notwithstanding (that is, one four string guitar-like instrument may be sufficient for all)
extra guitar items:
- midi guitar <----polyphonic guitar parts
- i'm looking for a basic paul shape, to put p90s in it. must be a super cheap pawn shop purchase. <----amplified rhythm parts
- a jazzmaster or jaguar shaped guitar with jazzmaster pickups. idea probably put aside for now. <---effects work
- a couple of cheap electrics for weird tunings, etc.
i think this should be anything and everything.
so, one thing at a time. slowly...
10:08
yeah, you're not safe....
...if you're there to sell poison.
fucking idiot.
13:55
what exactly is their argument for clemency, other than his ethnicity?
i don't want to repatriate this piece of shit, or to let him out on the streets to murder canadians.
14:06
i condemn this government in the strongest possible terms for standing up for drug smugglers instead of standing with the chinese and helping them wipe the scourge of meth off the planet forever.
14:08
there's a lot of exceedingly pressing matters that the pmo could be focusing it's efforts, including focusing it's communication efforts with the white house, on.
fighting a losing battle to save the life of a meth smuggler is not one of them.
14:21
i've spent most of what i won. so, i need to make sure i get the operation done first - that was the point, after all.
i need to finalize the plan with the shuttle service, first.
14:33
the government is captured by the petro state.
and, the ndp are worse.
what utter nonsense.
14:46
i have a better way to raise revenue to fund carbon transition - print the money using the bank of canada, and balance it by raising taxes on investors and shareholders.
14:49
i don't think anybody got what they wanted (except finance capital, of course), but it's nice to see the government in the united states spending some money, whatever the inadequacies of the bill might be.
but, no - an infrastructure bill isn't going to create inflation. not generally, and not specifically. it's not printing money that creates inflation, because inflation isn't governed by a natural law. while prices fluctuate due to production costs, they don't necessarily tend upwards, and spending in an infrastructure bill should have essentially no effect on that. inflation is the word we use to describe when rentiers take advantage of renters to extract as much as they can from them, and it's an opportunistic process brought on by more specific shifts in spending.
so, the child benefit may lead to inflation in child care costs because the daycare centres might take advantage of the new subsidy and interpret it as a handout for them. if parents are to be given more money, they have more money to extract - therefore, inflation. but, it depends on whether parents accept it or fight back, and that depends on market forces like how much supply exists relative to demand, and whether parents are organized enough to stand up and refuse to pay it.
demand for childcare is much higher than supply in most places, and the parents have no direct political power (they don't organize, and they don't understand the economics). so, i think it's reasonable to expect childcare costs to go up.
but, i haven't seen any other good or service that would be directly affected by this kind of funding because nothing else in it seems permanent. to be sure, you might see short term spikes in prices, as people take advantage of the situation. but, that only leads to inflation when rentiers realize the situation is permanent.
it's why you can't fix capitalism with government spending, even if you realize the need for keynesian style stimulus in periods when the economy is slow due to crisis.
15:03
this, on the other hand, is abhorrent and should be condemned in no uncertain terms.
15:15
so, i'm not going to get an invoice for the driving service until the first of september, meaning i should be able to worry about that next month.
by my calculation, there's about $250 left.
i'm going to take a nap and try to refocus.
16:20
no, i need to repeat the point - government welfare checks in the form of handouts to parents via child subsidies for childcare costs may be politically popular, but it's a reflection of the stupidity and ignorance of most low to middle income parents, who managed to get themselves in the situation that they're in because they didn't think it through. i mean, it's a tautological observation - if you're a poor parent that needs government help, you obviously didn't think it through, did you? 'cause you're not that bright...
all that childcare subsidies really are is an inflationary handout to daycare providers.
unlike electric cars, childcare is in great demand. if you want to decrease the cost of childcare, you need to either decrease the demand by reducing the number of kids (i think that's the best idea, myself) or increase the supply of babysitters, which is almost impossible using incentives without creating cost increases. nothing else will work, besides legislating cost maximums (but that's not going to work either, because the government will just get captured by the daycare industry).
frankly, what the government should be doing is discouraging people from having children when they're not financially secure enough to pay for them. raising kids is necessarily expensive, and if you can't afford it then you shouldn't pretend you can. there's lots of people with money looking to adopt.
but, no, you can't just give out welfare checks and think that's going to decrease costs - that's popular, sure, but it's retarded.
22:44
it would not be correct to suggest i'm opposed to childcare handouts, because i don't actually give a fuck.
but, no, it's not going to work.
22:49
wednesday, august 11, 2021
so, what's really happening in afghanistan? are we "withdrawing"?
the media seems to think that we're "losing", but the premise is absurd. these are a bunch of inbred, fundamentalist muslim idiots - they can't win a fight against a modern army, and if the situation appears as though they are winning, you're being misled. when biden points out that the afghan army is capable of defending itself against these retards, he's absolutely correct.
so, i have two thoughts on this, one more likely than the other.
first of all, i'm reminded of the situation in iraq with isis . it could have never actually played out the way it did, unless it was a just a giant act of theatre. see, isis was always a saudi proxy group. lost in all of the propaganda around isis is the simple fact that the united states was trying to get an invitation to continue the occupation in place. this is called a "status of forces" agreement, and the iraqis were putting up a protest in signing one right before isis appeared. so, in the face of iraqi insolence, this group of terrorist savages (funded by america's primary client state in the region) appeared out of nowhere and all of a sudden the sofa had a justification, and the iraqis had to agree to continue the occupation for their own preservation.
so, was isis just leverage to get iraq to sign a sofa? that's an oversimplification, but basically, yeah. and, the reports are clear enough - the iraqi army stood down and let isis take over, in order to create a pretext for a continuing american involvement. this has the added benefit of blurring levels of oversight, and confusing the application of international law. and, the saudis got some ethnic cleansing out of it, which is what they get out of the deal. once iraq fell in line, the impetus for the saudis shifted to trying to topple the assad regime, because it was threatening to implement democracy. but, the same basic pretext continued itself...
so, is there some reason to think that iraq is a model, here? well, afghanistan is more remote than iraq and it's always going to be harder to get reports from the ground. but, the taliban is also a saudi proxy and there is likewise no way to really make sense of what's happening, unless it's being designed as a pretext for further involvement.
so, that's the first thought - that the taliban is being ceded ground to allow for a renewed justification for the occupation. you could call this the obama model.
the second thought is that the americans may find afghnistan more useful under taliban rule, if the intent is to destabilize china. let us hope, for the benefit of the people living there, that biden is not walking down that path of depravity. but, you'd call that the reagan model.
i would broadly consider biden more similar to reagan in his foreign policy, but all i can do is speculate until the play enters the next act.
2:34
as it was with isis, if the intent is to justify a further round of occupation, i have to relent. sure, i can deconstruct the situation and scold america for it's tactics, but at the end of the day these kinds of regimes have to be fought. we can't just let the taliban take over afghanistan - we'd be abrogating our responsibility to the afghan people, and ultimately broadcasting to the world that we're an unreliable ally.
so, i stand with the afghan people against the forces of islamic fundamentalism.
...which is what i'm being manipulated into doing. and i know it. but i'll clench my teeth and do it anyways.
2:42
and, no, nobody wants to live in tyranny.
i don't believe that for one minute.
that's utter bullshit.
2:47
...but if it's the reagan model that is true, if we're trying to convert the taliban into foot soldiers to invade western china, i must condemn that plan as reckless and egregious in the most disparaging terms possible, and you will hear nothing but dissent from me on the matter.
3:05
i will remind you that the taliban were created by the cia under reagan (starting with carter...) to destabilize the then russian occupation of afghanistan, mostly through saudi proxies (operating in pakistan).
that's where the taliban comes from - we created them to fight the russians.
so, it's not crazy at all that the pentagon might see them as allies in a fight against the chinese.
but, it's a tactic that will devastate the region and the people living in it and that no westerner can support, in good conscience; it is the kind of historical destructive imperialism that just writes the people of the region off as collateral and has to be opposed by the left.
3:12
canada's brand of genocide is a softer one than in the united states, but the statement that "there has been genocidal intent present in almost all of official canadian policy towards indigenous people" is an absolutely correct one.
i wrote an essay about this for a sociology of law course on indigenous law:
the policy is clear, longstanding and absolute - everything the canadian government has ever done in regards to indigenous people, from the point of contact forwards, including the chretien-trudeau white paper and the mulroney quantum rules, and certainly the harper push for private property on reserves, was at every step of the way an attempt to undermine, do away with and discard any concept of indigenous identity, culture, and society and replace it with dominant western economic concepts of capitalism and middle eastern religious value systems, in the form of christianity.
so, i agree with the society's analysis.
but, i'm not qualified to present a survey of the literature.
22:10
why is canada's version of genocide softer, though?
because the crown has generally seen the indigenous population as an asset, if properly developed - a natural resource, of sorts. the americans just saw them as occupying land they wanted and killed them all or otherwise drove them off.
the crown has often even used indigenous settlement as a buffer against american expansionism, and offered it's protection of the natives against more active forms of american genocide.
so, our genocide is cultural - we sought to assimilate, rather than to destroy.
22:16
"intellectual property" is a mid-20th century idea that made some sense in a pre-additive manufacturing industrial landscape, but is just obsolete and irrelevant in the modern manufacturing context.
i need to be clear: i've always opposed any meaningful concept of intellectual property. as an artist, i'd be happier with a stable subsidy and the ability to give the art away for free, because the point is that you want people to enjoy it, not to maximize profit from it. "art" produced to maximize profit can simply not have a meaningful artistic purpose, and becomes reduced to the emptiness of being a commodity; in order to function as art, you have to dispense with the profit motive, first. it's why so much of the best art comes from the upper classes.
i've always found the pro-innovation rhetoric coming from the liberals on the point kind of irritating, but you expect them to hold to a certain narrative, because they are a banker's party. but, you don't see them legislate on the topic because it's not 1955; it's hard to even present a coherent argument on the matter, in the face of a concept that has no relevance in the modern world.
if the conservatives honestly want to turn the clock back in this, that is something people should be apprehensive about.
but, they're probably just trying to appeal to randian objectivists, or something. good luck with that, you fools.
22:39
if the feds want to provide a "vaccine passport" for people going to other countries, i have little opposition to that.
but, if you think you're going to ask me to show you a vaccine passport to do anything at all in this country, i'll see you in court.
22:43
i'm not a capitalist like kurzweil is, and my opposition to intellectual property is more foundational than his is, but he briefly explains the point here in a way that's easy to understand:
we're no longer at the stage of history where debates about intellectual property are ideological, we're at the point where those concerns are historical because the technology has rendered the concept obsolete.
but, i tend not to bother criticizing the conservatives because they're not in power and it's too easy.
22:52
thursday, august 12, 2021
so, how do i want to"spur innovation"?
well, i think it's a term that is incoherent - innovation is not spurred by government economic policy, and few useful advances are created with the intent of profiting from them; innovation comes as a consequence of higher education and as a corollary of advances in technology.
so, if you want more "innovation", you want more education you want to speed up the advance of technology.
the way to do both of these things is to make it as easy to stay in school for long periods of time as possible so that the best minds aren't wasted in the market and also to fund generous government research grants on just about any hare-brained scheme presented to decision makers. but, these are things better left to the institutions that control the financial system, and not to a client state like canada.
so, that's the real answer to the question - the best way to spur innovation is to lobby the united states government to increase the money spent on r &d.
a country like canada operates on the same principles, but has restrictions on resources, and needs to focus on more specific aims.
but, it's a simple equation - the more money you spend on research, the more "innovation" you get in the end.
0:01
it's maybe a little ironic that a party devoid of useful, relevant, contemporary ideas wants to run on "spurring innovation".
if they had any useful ideas, they might begin by applying them to themselves.
0:27
i was supposed to get a blood test today after a 12 hour fast, but i took a longer shower than intended and ended up missing the close time by about ten minutes.
we need a 24 hour blood lab...
i can try again, but it's hard for me to do 12 hours due to the meds.
0:29
that said, if you read the article closely, it's clear enough that the policy isn't even about "spurring innovation" at all, but is rather about finding ways to make it easier for scumbag shareholders to launder money and evade taxes.
"spurring innovation" seems to be the buzz word these idiots are using to refer to "stimulating capital investment". that's a horrible abuse of language.
and, the only reason they would care about "stimulating capital investment" is as a means to hide money and evade responsibility, in the form of taxation.
0:36
i have a better idea - let's abolish limited liability and make these antisocial monsters pay for all of the problems that they're creating with their investments.
it's long past time that we removed the shield of liability held by investors and made them responsibility for their financial decisions
0:39
the urologist is on "personal leave".
i really hope i'm not going to have to reschedule this. i've been trying to do this for over five years, and it's just been one bullshit delay after the other.
i'm going to cry.
:(.
to be clear - it's not cancelled. yet....
14:56
so, i got a mediation date set in the karen case...
the lawyer does not appear to want to go to trial, but i'd really love to lay out the facts in a court. the issue has yet to be put in front of any sort of judge, remember. so, let's see how that goes.
17:04
it's just a reminder of how powerful arab blood money, in the form of lobbying, is in washington.
now, if we'd sell the oil to the saudis, right?
don't misunderstand me: i'm happy to see the pipelines shut down. but, they're right - this is retarded.
....unless you work for the arab lobby. then it makes great sense.
20:36
it's pretty consistent - joe biden seems to be a wholly purchased subsidiary of the saudi monarchy.
20:39
i really wish i knew why google continues to try to sell me video games despite clicking "not interested" and "skip" a million times.
i haven't played a video game since i was about 14, and i was never very interested in them in the first place.
21:12
on a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 is "plays every day" and 10 is "never plays at all", i was about a 9.5.
the singular exception was civ 2, which isn't really a video game at all.
21:14
friday, august 13, 2021
i'm fighting with these automated systems...the one at wish seems designed not to work correctly, for the benefit of the seller. at least paypal's system works, in theory.
but, the argument about job losses due to automation was always that the workers could join the "knowledge economy", which essentially meant becoming support workers. if the ai is taking their jobs, too, then what's next?
and, the answer is a return to the dark ages, when the west was a society dominated by elites, who purchased items made by slave labour in china.
that's not any idealistic person's concept of the future - it's a return to the past, and to the world's worst era of darkness and backwardsness. and, that's where we're headed, if we're not already there.
6:28
american kids are obese.
no, really - that's what it is.
6:39
but, it's very curious to me that we're all of a sudden talking about kids being susceptible to this virus, when all evidence is that the mortality rate is negligible - error, basically.
could it be that the vaccine industry is trying to speed the process up by broadcasting fear?
i would hold off on vaccinating your kids until we get more data, myself. the chances that they'll be affected by this at all are pretty obscure; you'd be better off helping them get into shape and being more aggressive in coercing them to lose some weight, if they need it.
6:53
i don't for a second think the pentagon is so daft as to not understand the strategic value of afghanistan in a struggle against china, specifically, but also against russia. i mean, that's what the great game was all about. and, with the partition of india (we're talking long history, here - and that is a new development, in context), russia now has two chances to get to the indian ocean, by playing one off the other.
of course, the easiest path to that elusive warmwater port for russia may be global warming...
but, the whole fucking point of going into afghanistan was the strategic place it is on a map. they didn't just figure that out now. it was the point from the start!
the great game aside, afghanistan is also the key strategic link in the silk road, which the chinese are tying to open back up. the chinese would benefit dramatically from a reduced american presence in the region.
so, i mean, we all need to guess at what's happening, but the idea that they need to redeploy to fight china is straight poppycock - they were there to contain china, to begin with, and any serious chinese containment policy would realize the strategic necessity of holding afghanistan.
they're not confused, either. that's just bullshit.
10:17
this won't stand up in court.
i'd call on the ccla to take it down, please.
19:09
so, i slept all day...
i got a blood test last night - i was only gone for about a half hour, total. but, it's sort of consistent, isn't it? i'm always exhausted after a draw...
that said, i also haven't had any coffee in almost a week and i'm intending on fixing that tonight.
the cbc came back the same as always - slightly low rbc for men, but in a normal range for women, which makes sense due to the fact that i'm estrogen-dominant and have almost no testosterone... - and the cortisol actually came in sort of high, which is a result i've now seen on several occasions. reticulocytes remain low to normal, so there's still no evidence i'm bleeding. the other tests got referred out.
the appointment with the endocrinologist is on monday. so, i'm going to take all of this data and put it together.
i wanted to refocus this week and it didn't happen, with the annoyances around planning the surgery and the difficulty getting a 12 hour fast for the draw yesterday in (for the growth hormone test). but, it's friday, so i need to get that asimov reading done...
20:55
if this ban has any effect at all, it's going to open up a large housing glut in windsor this fall. i'm not convinced it's going to have any effect - note that there is an article in the times of india explaining how to circumvent it - but we're talking about thousands of students in this city coming in from india, a fact that is visibly obvious to anybody spending time here.
the weird thing is that a lot of these students, if they get here, are going to live in cramped dormitories designed specifically for indian students. these places are owned by indian landlords that are horribly racist and exclusionary, and won't even look at applications from non-indians....but, the conditions presented are also so awful that few non-indians would for a minute consider actually living there. it's actually an embarrassment to the country, and windsor is far from the only city with these kind of indian student slumhouses run by indian slumlords. but, they exist, and will grow until we take the initiative to clamp down on them and assert the building codes.
so, blocking indian students likely won't have the kind of direct effect on housing supply in the city that i'd hope for, for that reason; 5000 indian students are going to get crammed into accommodations designed for 500 people, and the units themselves will require conversion back into normal housing before they're acceptable to the general canadian public. these slumlords aren't likely to want to do that...
there are of course more wealthy indian students coming in that are looking for normal apartments, but it's many times less in this particular city, which has a university with some of the lowest entry requirements in the world.
what you might see happen is some of these houses put up for sale, which is just going to create an even bigger problem with supply in the long run.
the university is building some dorm rooms, but they're not likely to loosen pressure at the bottom of the market. best case is that if they open up spaces at the top of the market, it might drive prices down, creating a ripple effect.
i've been keeping an eye on this, hoping it might create an opening, but it hasn't happened yet. and, this fall might be the last chance.
22:09
the only thing the ban is really doing is sending the traffic to american airlines, instead.
22:12
....and, of course, there's a multiplier effect on that, too. when you lose airline business, you lose hotel business, restaurant business, etc - and business for covid testing services, too.
it's a great example of dumb policy.
but, if it works in opening up the supply of housing in this city even a little bit, i'll take it.
22:15
so, are there are any authoritarian "leftists" out there that are uncomfortable with the fact that they're aligning directly with bourgeois capital in stamping out our rights, at the minute?
well?
hey, maybe the bourgeoisie is the new vanguard!
or, maybe your analysis is a crock of bullshit.
the left needs to stand for individual liberty, or it isn't a left at all.
23:14
saturday, august 14, 2021
no. really.
when all of the comrades in your insurgency group become indistinguishable from status quo liberals, it's time to take a moment to reflect, don't you think?
maybe this whole "take away the people's rights for their own good" thing isn't really what you thought it was, huh?
0:02
it turns out that the bourgeoisie would love to take away your rights, after all!
wow.
maybe you miscalculated a little...?
but, for fuck's sake, get off their cocks.
0:12
ok.
so, the august cleaning is done (slowed down by the fridge, but done), everything's pretty much organized and i'm sitting down with a cup of coffee to do some work for the first time in a while.
i stopped some time in early july and started focusing on finding cheap gear for the period 3 rebuild. i do remember clearly that i was doing an alter-reality rebuild on the blogger timeline and entered the ms-2 as an entry. that got me wondering about other miniamps, and it went off from there.
and, i think the thing i was doing was filing the pc, and i even think i was almost done.
but, i'm going to do a quick throwback to earlier in the year and just read through the blog and go from there. i'll take notes. and, i should be back into the schedule i devised very soon.
obviously, because i'm going toronto for surgery this week, i won't start back up again on monday. but, i think i can plan to start back up again for next monday.
the surgery is going to make it difficult to walk for a few weeks, but i don't expect to be on any sort of serious painkillers (i expect they may give me something like t3s, and i expect i probably won't take them....i don't do much heavier than aspirin for pain meds....and i rarely take aspirin, even if i'm in pan...) and it's not clear how much that's going to mess with me.
it may be a chance to catch up on the asimov for the alter-reality.
1:24
so, i got this write-up for the endocrinologist done and lining these items up presents the following thing as most concerning to me:
creatinine
mar 9th: 78 umol/L <----fasting level
mar 31st: 80 umol/L
july 29th: 87 umol/L <-------20+ hour fast (except coffee)
egfr:
mar 9th: 107 <----fasting level
mar 31st: 106
july 29th: 96 <-----------20+ hour fast (except coffee)
these are markers of kidney health and, while still considered healthy levels, they're moving in the wrong direction and i'm going to want to keep an eye on that. it's rather obvious that it's an effect of the high dose iron.
so, i'm taking a lot of iron and need to cut down on it. hopefully, that fixes itself with the cut in iron...
i'm going to want to renew the rx, for now, but at a much much lower amount.
i didn't realize i was taking 100 mg. i think i may have been overprescribed. but, it did work...i just need to slow it down, now...
9:46
then again, it might be due to fasting:
i wasn't intending on doing the monthly standing when i went in and probably should not have, but they didn't let me do the growth hormone because i had had a sip of coffee.
i should not get upset about those numbers, at least not until i see numbers for september, first.
9:49
the rx is 300 mg of ferrous fumarate, which seems to be the most potent thing on the market.
9:51
i needed pills. there's no question. and i can only hope that i've found the problem (calcium interference....and i'll get parasite results soon, as well)
ferritin
mar 9th: 12 ug/L <----fasting level
mar 31st: 9 ug/L
april 7th: 6 ug/L
=====================<----iron pills
apr 24th: 17 ug/L
may 21st: 21 ug/L
======================= <----calcium heavy dishes & iron heavy dishes split in meals
july 5th: 29 ug/L
july 29th: 43 ug/l
some intervention was clearly required. i did the right thing. but, i gotta back off.
9:59
listen: i'm not bleeding.
i've had two negative fit tests, a negative cea test...i'm not losing weight....my reticulocytes are pretty low...
but, i wonder if the sudden boost in estrogen is related to the sudden increase in iron. that makes sense - if my estrogen shoots up, my iron absorption should shoot up, too.
i don't quite understand that. i mean, why did my estrogen go up so fast?
estradiol
mar 9th: 363 pmol/L <----fasting level
mar 31st: 388 pmol/L
july 29th: 563pmol/l <--------weird? 20+ hour fast (except coffee) [no change in estrogen supplments, but some change in diet]
the high 300s or low 400s was a normal level for me for a long time. in fact, i was concerned it was falling because of the shift to generic.
but, it makes sense, and seems to confirm my thoughts on the matter - so long as i'm absorbing estrogen, i should be absorbing iron. but, if my estrogen falls, my iron is going to fall too.
"but, you're a genetic male!"
ok. but my body doesn't know that - it's got hormones running through it, and the genes will react to the instructions when they come in. it won't say "wait a second. this is all wrong.". like, your genes aren't cpus, they're just molecules. the crude error-correcting is not enough to reject the hormone as wrong.
i might be uncovering something that needs more research, but i doubt the boost in estrogen coinciding with the boost in iron is a coincidence. i wish i could measure the hepcidin to be sure, but i can't.
10:10
it's a feedback mechanism, right.
so, the way it would work is that falling estrogen would lead to increasing hepcidin. it's not going to measure it, or try to figure it out, it's just going to react. and, i might actually be in a danger zone if that's right, because i've essentially screwed the whole system up by overloading my body with more estrogen than is "normal" for a very long time, creating reactions that are sort of bizarre.
so, it's not going to adjust to absolute levels, because it's a feedback. rather, if i'm used to it being at 400 all of the time, and it falls to 300, then i'm going to end up anemic; if it climbs to 600 or 700, i could go into iron overload.
i've done a lot of research on this, and i haven't seen any sort of study on transfemale hepcidin feedbacks due to modulating estrogen levels, i'm just guessing based on what i'm seeing and experiencing. and, again - i can't measure hepcidin in canada. nobody even knows what i'm fucking talking about.
but, if the feedback system just sort of fixed itself, i might have shocked my system into undoing the anemia.
this was my thought from the start, i just had no way to demonstrate it.
10:18
something that might confuse you...
yes, my genes will react to estrogen. they don't know any better - it's just a chemical reaction. there's no right or wrong, here. it's not quite as dramatic as putting a male frog in an estrogen bath and watching it change sexes in front of you, but it's the same basic mechanism, up to a level of complexity (ok, probably a couple levels).
that's why i look exactly like my mom - i'm triggering genes i inherited from her.
so, the idea that estrogen would regulate hepcidin in genetic men should be well grounded, because the genes wouldn't actually know any better.
and, this is the point that sex reductionists get wrong - they think that sex is genetic. but, we all carry genes for both genders, and they're only expressed by the hormone that we're dominated by. we don't have binary sex chromosomes, so much as we have competing sex hormones.
saying that xx is female and xy is male is only correct in the sense that xx codes for estrogen and xy codes for testosterone. it's really the hormones that matter, not the chromosomes. so, the expression is modifiable and entirely fluid - up to a point - and not set at birth.
but,i wish there were more specific studies i could google. if you know of them, send me an email.
10:26
what might have happened is that something might have turned over and the feedback may have readjusted itself.
i dunno - these are blind guesses.
all i know for sure is that these results are weird.
10:28
see, and i need to be careful with this.
my sister, for example, presented the audaciously ignorant claim that if i were to go off hormones then my iron would "recover". this is physiologically completely backwards. in fact, if i'm right, then going off estrogen entirely and cold turkey would actually kill me, as i'd end up morbidly anemic. if i wanted to get off estrogen at this point, i'd have to do it very slowly, to allow my hormones to recalibrate.
and, that's why shifting from brand names to generics isn't something that should be done, and why i'm very angry at the british government for forcing me to go through with this.
10:34
as mentioned: it's possible that my body did recalibrate, and that's why my estrogen and iron both shot way up.
but, at what long term damage?
and, at what potential consequences, had they not found it on a random iron test?
10:36
so, i have to get a covid test today for the surgery and i'm not happy about sticking something invasive up my nose to verify i don't have a cold.
what a fucking stupid waste of time.
14:13
there is likely a statistically higher chance that i'll get impaled by the swab than that i'd suffer complications from the virus.
and, i have no symptoms.
this is retarded....
but, whatever.
14:17
all to make some fucking decrepit geriatrics feel safe for the last three weeks of their worthless lives.
ugh.
we've become a society of idiots.
14:19
no, honestly.
i have to get on a bicycle and go for a half hour ride out to a lab on the edge of town to get tested for the common cold, and it has to be four days before the surgery, before i hitchike into town to get a surgery.
if i test negative, it means i haven't caught it in the last three days. if i caught it yesterday or the day before, or i pick it up on the way in, i'll be contagious when i get there.
and, it's a variant of the fucking cold..
1) the testing has no clinical relevance on whether i'll be contagious or not when i get there
2) it's not a dangerous virus, anyways
i don't know if it's more stupid or if it's more insane.
but, such is the order of king doug. fucking idiot...
14:23
it's really not primarily about making old and/or stupid people feel safe.
it's really about putting you in your place and making you subservient to the bourgeoisie.
bow down and serve your master - and get tested for the common cold.
yeah? no - fuck you. but, i need a surgery, so whatever. i'll take your pointless test, but i won't show you any deference, and i'll call you out on your tyranny, instead.
14:27
this is how dictatorships work - they make you do stupid things because they can. it's a show of force - a reminder that you're powerless, that they can tell you to do any stupid thing they want, and you can't do anything about it.
so, put your right arm in, and take your right arm out
put your right arm in, and shake it all about
do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around
that's what it's all about!
14:30
*shrug*
you can take my nose hairs, but you can't take my freedom!
14:31
no, i mean, what am i going to do?
stay on these drugs another year and fuck my liver up?
no - i've been waiting months as it is. i'll take the stupid, pointless test - but i'll leave this analysis of it, in hopes that the world understands the stupidity of it and wakes the fuck up.
14:33
if they wanted to do this in a way that made sense, they'd have antigen testing at the door. it still wouldn't really be useful, because it wouldn't pick it up if you caught it on the way to the hospital. but, it's about as good as can be done.
what they're telling me to do - get tested four days beforehand - is utterly useless.
14:35
i would advise the authorities to pick their battles carefully, because if you intend to get authoritarian with me, i will cost you a lot of money, as i drag you through decades worth of court battles, waste police resources and cause havoc and mayhem.
i don't have any particular aversion to vaccines. i don't think they cause cancer or autism. and, i'm sure this one is relatively safe.
but, this is a personal, autonomous choice that cannot be mandated by the state - and i will force the courts to demand the state pull back, if i have to.
if you're going to go down this path, you will only vaccinate my cold, dead arm.
17:02
i control my body and what i put in it, not the state.
and that is not up for debate.
sorry.
17:04
so, i got my covid test today and i oddly have a sore throat.
where have i been in the last two weeks?
- i went to the covid test today. i stopped to mail the ancestry result, and to get some kale.
- i went to get a blood test on thursday and came right home.
- i was out last saturday to drop off some urine and stool samples and to get some groceries.
conspiracy theories abound, right? i just don't want to miss the operation, and i'm going to be pissed off if i have to due to some stupid government psy-op bullshit.
17:11
i had no symptoms whatsoever when i left.
17:14
if a private business decides it wants to have a vaccine-only policy, that's fine - i'll spend my money somewhere else. their loss.
but, a government can't force them to have a vaccine only policy, and if they try then we're dealing with a constitutional issue.
quebec doesn't think the constitution applies to them. whether that's true or not, understand the argument - quebec is not arguing that what they're doing is constitutional, they're arguing that they're not bound by the constitution. well, let's see how that goes.
but, everywhere else is going to be bound by the constitution, and i'd dare you to try to pass a law like that - it would be useful to have the precedent clarified, so we can stop pretending that this isn't total fucking nonsense.
17:24
public gatherings, parks, malls, stuff like that?
you can't deny entry based on vaccine status, and don't try.
17:30
if i were to show up at a park and some thug was standing there checking vaccine id, i'd just walk by him - whether i was vaccinated or not.
and, if he wants to be a big man about it, i'll sue his big ass.
17:31
i have no patience for this idiocy.
don't fuck with me - i'll waste the next ten years of your life over it.
17:32
did the nato occupation of afghanistan create the situation on the ground?
it's hard to point to the authoritative thing that broke afghanistan. from what i've read, the irrigation systems that were destroyed by genghis khan were never rebuilt, but the society itself was liquidated in the muslim invasions, which had the feel of a cultural genocide. the area was once the center of buddhism in the ancient world, remember, and that was the region's cultural and economic high point.
so, the area has been a backwater for over a thousand years.
but, whatever you think of the situation on the ground today, and whatever you think of afghan society over the last several centuries, the fact of the matter is that the soviet civil war set the country back a long ways. to the extent that the west was involved with this, it was to train jihadist extremists to fight the atheist soviets, who i think all evidence suggests were legitimately trying to improve the conditions of the average afghan. it was our involvement in the civil war that was more catastrophic than the more recent occupation.
but, this is not a society that has seen good days in some time, and any analysis of the consequences of the 2001 invasion need to be properly tethered in the reality that the society was already devastated before we got there.
23:20
the liquidation of the taliban, one way or another, is a prerequisite to rebuilding a stable afghanistan.
23:22
but, where exactly are we going to put 20,000 afghan refugees, in a country that the government acknowledges has a housing supply issue?
resettling refugees is not the answer to the problem. i'd rather arm them and tell them to fight for their homes, and their homeland.
23:29
the liquidation of the taliban, one way or another, is a prerequisite to rebuilding a stable afghanistan.
and, only the afghan people can carry that liquidation out.
i support arming them and helping them stand their ground, not airlifting them out to a country that lacks the infrastructure to house them.
23:31
no, listen - i'm not some pacifist quaker or something, i'm a revolutionary leftist.
when the fascists show up with guns, the left does not pack up and run off - it stands it's ground and fights.
23:36
we get nowhere by ceding ground to fascism.
nor can we consider abandoning our comrades to their fates.
23:37
...but, once again, we see the fake leftists that are all too happy to take conservative pacifist approaches, to choose reactionary politics over revolution and to act as apologists for the worst elements of the far right.
23:39
sunday, august 15, 2021
my throat is still a little raw but i think i'm just a bit dehydrated due to the change in weather.
7:27
listen - i'm going to tell you my opinion on the matter of afghanistan, and i want you to listen to it and understand it and stop pretending it's something else.
i was not initially as opposed to the war in afghanistan as i was to the war in iraq. there was a security council resolution - so it wasn't illegal - and the taliban were only recognized as a valid government by a handful of pariah states, whose opinion i don't hold in much regard. i'm not generally one for military adventures, but i'm not ideologically opposed to the military like some idiot fundamentalist quaker pacifist would be, and there was a reasonable case for intervention. however, the more i looked into it, the more i realized we were setting ourselves up for a catastrophe - that enough of the people in the region were hostile to modernity and basic concepts of human rights that it would be almost impossible to wage a war of this sort and win it without resorting to ethnic cleansing. if we wanted to win in afghanistan, we'd have to resort to tactics we probably wouldn't resort to - and it was consequently inevitable that we'd both lose, and have a mess in front of us when we did.
i was never naive about the geostrategic reasons for the invasion, but i live in the empire and i don't have a particular aversion to it holding these kinds of strategic regions. i mean, better us than the russians, right? i'm not an idiot - i want reform and revolution, but i'm not out there rooting for the forces that would displace us and reduce us to poverty and backwardsness.
but, it is one thing to involve yourself in a foreign conflict in a disinterested way (whatever the propaganda...), and it is another to extricate yourself from a situation like this, when the consequence is the installation of a vicious, fascist regime that will maim and slaughter based on any characteristic you could come up with, and will assert a medieval rule by force that has no concept at all of any kind of rule of law. that is not to say that the government in kabul was even moderately good, but it at last had the potential to move in the right direction. the taliban's is a governing ideology that will never amount to anything except misery, and will simply need to be removed with force in the long run - and hopefully as soon as the next election in the united states, if we have to wait that long. getting out of the way and letting these people rule, when you could stand in the way and stop them from ruling, is a morally bereft position, one that has a very different kind of analysis than asking yourself if you want to get involved in the first place. by getting up and leaving, we are actively aiding the taliban, and we should be condemned internationally as a pariah state for doing so. it is the singular worst thing that the united states has ever done. they've never just gotten up and left in a situation like this before, where they clearly have the military and moral high ground - it's historical in it's cowardice, it has no precedent at all.
so, while the issue was always blurry with me when this started, afghanistan has become the kind of conflict that we should be fighting - it may not have been previously, but it is now the kind of war that is worth fighting, to save the world from this kind of barbarism that has no redeeming qualities, and ought to be wiped out of existence. this is now a just war, and we're abandoning it at exactly the wrong time.
and, this is the situation i feared we'd be in - a situation where we're up against a great evil that we truly have to fight.
biden's actions here are that of a senile buffoon that has lost touch with reality and has abandoned any concept of reason, and i might wonder if it's grounds for impeachment.
12:39
while it is not clear to me what is really happening, and i've already laid out a few hypotheses, the only comparison i can come up with to this, on a surface level, is neville chamberlain's pathetic hand off of central europe.
the taliban are apparently promising not to do any more terrorism, and biden fell for it like chamberlain at a nazi rally.
appeasement of fascism never works, and america should be embarrassed for electing two presidents in a row that seem to think it might.
13:02
so, that was a really sleepy weekend, and i got almost nothing done...
20:43
unfortunately, it's gotten very cold outside, so i'm finding myself forced to run the stove on full blast to offset the air conditioner. ugh.
20:44
while you may have some specific reason to vote for some specific candidate in your riding, the primary aim in this election for anybody with an iota of awareness should be to try to block the liberals from getting an unearned majority, which should mean aligning with the candidate in your riding that is best positioned to defeat the liberals.
i would call on some strategic voting institutions to develop some means of trying to help that happen by doing polling in key ridings. and, unfortunately, that might mean voting conservative in some places.
i do not intend to vote at all in this cycle as i am repulsed by all of the parties - and i actually usually do.
20:51
ok, so there's some clues from ghastly blinky here:
â€Å“But, at the same time, we had invested, over four administrations, billions of dollars, along with the international community, in the Afghan security and defense forces. Building a modern military with sophisticated equipment, 300,000 forces strong, with an air force that the Taliban didn’t have. And the fact of the matter is, we have seen that that force has been unable to defend the country. And that has happened more quickly than we anticipated.â€
this would appear, on it's face, to be an utterly nonsensical summary of what happened, as the americans actually signed an agreement to hand over the country to the taliban, and then withdrew in a systematic fashion. the afghan army was not defeated by the taliban in a serious fight; the afghan army was ordered to stand down and get out of the way to facilitate a transfer of power to the taliban. it's the same thing that happened in iraq...
so, why are we getting a line of complete bullshit from the secretary of state?
that force has been unable to defend the country.
so, this is looking like the obama model.
the argument is apparently that we need to continue the occupation because they can't defend themselves. and, look - they just got beat down by a bunch of primitive barbarians. that's how useless they are, and how much they need us.
so, let's see if that unfolds now or not.
21:43
something else to keep an eye on is this - when this group of fascist murderers decides to call itself a state (and while a group of fascist murderers may be a reasonable working definition of a state, these fascist murderers don't have any discernible set of usable rules, besides some discredited nonsense from the dark ages), and declares itself one, who will recognize it as such?
if the united states takes the surreal step of recognizing the taliban - and i fear it might - we will know that we're entering into the reagan model, and the idea is to prop the taliban up to start a war in western china.
but, if the united states refuses to recognize them. and instead aligns with a transitional government or a government in exile, we'll know it's the obama model, and the reinvasion is imminent.
22:25
what i will say to china is this - there is a time window that is now open in which they can take control of this region, and capitalize on this stupid mistake. the americans appear to be almost entirely gone, which means the region is essentially up for grabs.
if i were beijing, i would strongly consider launching a lightning strike and occupying the region overnight by parachute, in the window that's been made available to them.
22:28
further, the chinese would likely be willing to carry through with the kinds of reforms that the west won't, and are needed in order to transform the society and bring it into modernity.
22:30
they also have their own history in the region, one that is relatively complicated. the chinese may make the opposite argument that you so often see in the west;hey may argue that pre-emption is required to stop history from repeating itself.
22:31
the russians appear to be thinking about it, but they don't have the stomach for it, either.
only the chinese will be able to transform afghan society in the way that is required to save it from itself.
22:32
well, i mean, that's reality - you eat or be eaten.
and, a weak government run by primitive barbaric idiots that is in control of trillions of dollars worth of wealth and is no longer under the protection of a superpower, and that sits at the only global confluence of the three major world powers, is a sitting duck, waiting to be invaded.
if we won't topple them, one of the other two powers will move in and do it instead - you can be sure of that.
22:35
it's also worth noting that the afghan president, ghani, went north into the russian zone and not south into pakistan.
that would suggest that he realizes that the americans just handed the country over to the taliban and is looking to the russians, and not the americans, for support.
i bet there are people in moscow that want to wipe the taliban out once and for all, but they don't have the tools. moscow should defer to the chinese, who have superior skills to apply.
22:40
to be crystal clear: the best thing that can happen to the region, for it's own stability and prosperity in the long run, is for the chinese to apply the kinds of tactics they've utilized in xinjiang to afghanistan.
the russians may want to bomb the fuck out of them, and i get it and sort of want to cheer them on, but it's the wrong approach.
they need to be dismantled, deislamicized and properly colonized and only the chinese can and will do that.
22:44
one possibility is a joint russian-chinese operation, where the russians do the military part and the chinese come in with a socialist model to revolutionize the people, and it would be a great example of specialization at work, but i suspect the russians would oppose that on ideological grounds.
22:51
monday, august 16, 2021
oil revenues declined, so alberta wants to mine coal, instead. brilliant.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/08/15/how-his-plan-to-open-the-canadian-rockies-to-coal-mining-set-albertas-jason-kenney-against-country-music-stars.html
the reality is that alberta is a wealthy province full of resources and that it's even strategically located, on a warming planet. it has endless options. but, fossil fuels seem to create brain damage amongst politicians, and it becomes this short-sighted kind of disease.
alberta has had a lot of advance notice that the fossil fuel era is closing.
i don't want to listen to them whining, when they come face to face with all their squandered opportunities. let the bastards choke on their own filth.
1:05
i keep waking up, eating, falling asleep......waking up, eating, falling asleep...
i'm going to get some coffee now and it should get me out of the funk.
the one thing i did look at this weekend is afghanistan, and the best i can come up with is that the situation doesn't make any sense. the primary reason the americans went into afghanistan was to contain china, so the premise that they're leaving to focus on containing china is incoherent. further, the media is trying to present the situation as though the afghans won a jihad or something, when reports from the ground - and the sheer speed of the advance - make it clear that the troops were ordered to stand down. the biden administration is arguing that the afghans were unable to defend themselves, but all evidence suggests they were ordered to get out of the way. the other key piece of information i'm seeing is that the legitimately elected afghan president has apparently fled to a russian-aligned former ssr, rather than to pakistan or an american outpost in the middle east. i'd have to surmise at this point, then, that we're backing the taliban, and the democratic forces in the country are looking to the russians for military help.
we'll have to see what happens, but there are actually three models, not two, if we want to be thorough:
1) the obama model - which is that we're pulling out temporarily to present a justification for a longer term occupation. the idea is to demonstrate just how much they need the occupation for their own security, while we continue to take control of a strategic location that sits on trillions of dollars of mineral and other wealth. note that there is some possibility that this was the intent and the fascists on the ground have taken advantage of it by moving more quickly than expected, and thereby making it more difficult to react. i feel i'd have no choice but to support such a thing, for the benefit of the people living there, as the opposite option is to not just look the other way but actively facilitate the rise of fascism in afghanistan, and that is untenable and not debatable.
2) the reagan model - which is that the taliban aren't islamofascist terrorists bent on killing everybody that doesn't ft into their conformist society (that was last week...), but are actually anti-communist freedom fighters that should be supported in the liberation of xinjiang from chinese imperialism. i've seen some articles leaning in that direction, and you have to understand that biden is essentially a reaganite in ideology and political alignment. i would consider this to be deplorable, and would condemn the united states in the harshest language possible for engaging in something so outlandishly reckless.
3) the third option is the "biden is a retard" model, which is that he actually just abandoned trillions of dollars in wealth in the most strategic location on the planet due to domestic pressure from idiots. i would consider this baffling, but we need to be thorough, here, and i have to concede that, on the surface, this does indeed appear as simple base stupidity. i will lose all respect for the united states as a military force, if it turns out to be true, and it'll probably take quite a while before i really come around to it. but, this is option number three and it can't be discounted - we might just be dealing with a senile buffoon (one that was never that bright to begin with), and a pentagon leadership that is unable or unwilling to stand up to him.
6:45
i just can't get my head around the premise that the united states would do something so incredibly stupid as hand over afghanistan to the chinese, like this. and, there are indeed plenty of other pieces of information suggesting something covert is going on...
but, there may eventually come a time when i'll have to concede that it's just a ridiculously stupid mistake, rather than some kind of sneaky plan.
let's let the situation unfold. i'm not a clairvoyant, i'm a logician - i need data, and it has to come in, first, before i can make analytic deductions.
i was initially leaning towards the obama model (and perhaps the botched obama model alluded to), but i'm starting to lean more towards the reagan model, as more information comes out. i'm only including the retard model out of completeness - i'm not taking that seriously, right now.
6:57
maybe we could call the "biden is a retard" scenario the bush model. it's not an exact analogy, except in the underlying stupidity of the action, but i have made this mistake before: i was arguing late into 2002 that there was no way that they'd actually be retarded enough to invade iraq in the face of all analysis indicating it would be a disaster.
so, to recap.
1) the obama model is that it was leverage on ghani, and it might have backfired. we should expect a reinvasion within the next few months if that's true.
2) the reagan model is that we're now aligned with the taliban to fight the chinese.
3) the bush model is that biden is just a retard that handed away trillions of dollars worth of wealth for nothing at all, right before it finally became actionable - and after spending trillions to hold it.
7:39
listen, this is idiotic.
i'm not going to vote for some free market ideologue and legit christian idiot just because i agree with him on whether people have the right to refuse mandatory vaccinations or not. it's pretty much the last thing on the list of important voting topics.
and, this is particularly annoying because the spectrum has flipped over - the liberal party is taking the traditionally right-wing position that the government can do whatever it wants, and the opposition is taking the traditionally liberal position that s. 7 of the constitution is paramount, and humans have an inviolable sense of self-ownership. the fact that the government is taking an illiberal position on this specific issue doesn't mean that traditional liberals are going to all of a sudden align with a traditionally conservative party on issues of economics, of morality (or lack thereof), of military spending, of taxation, of religion, of family, of sexual freedom, etc.
so, as vaccines are not a political issue, human rights are not one either, and the prime minister needs to shut the fuck up. again.
the issue will be dealt with in a court, not via an election. that's how we deal with rights abuses by a government that doesn't respect the rule of law - we sue them and force them to abide by the constitution.
this should not be a ballot question, and it's certainly not going to be one for myself.
10:19
you can't vote down the constitution, and it's not a matter for a plebiscite, and that's the fucking point of having one - because it's understood that majorities can be oppressive, and can enforce tyrannical rules when given the chance to do so.
this is exactly the situation that the constitution was brought in to prevent from happening.
it's a legal question, not a political one - and legal questions are dealt with in court, not via elections.
he's just wrong. again.
but, the fact that the opposition has some semblance of legal training (and the prime minister has no discernible education at all) doesn't predispose me towards their political positions. it's a point of fact, it's not a political debate.
10:35
listen - i know i'm disenfranchised, and i've known it for quite a long time.
i don't intend to vote this cycle, and would like to see the liberals with a reduced minority at the end of it.
10:39
i'm sorting through the blog to refocus like i said, and this comes up in early february in relation to the decision to no longer refer to the terrorists in yemen as terrorists:
but, the point i'm making is that you're missing the context, here - this is a broader shift back to the neo-con policy of funding islamic extremists to advance american geo-strategic interests.
don't let them confuse you.
indeed.
reagan model it is, then?
biden is going to have an emergency address this afternoon and there's one specific thing i want to pay attention to: how does he refer to the democratically elected government of afghanistan, which is now apparently in exile? and, how does he refer to the illegitimate government that has usurped power with american help, by all appearances?
13:14
well, will the taliban hold elections?
careful with this - the way they think is that they'll kill everybody that'll vote against them, first.
13:19
what mandate do you claim the taliban has?
they showed up with guns and took over - that's not a government that should be recognized by anybody, and claims that the war is now over are delusional.
13:25
i mean...
the united states has replaced a lot of democratically elected governments with authoritarian regimes, but it's been a while.
when was the last one? pinochet?
actually - honduras in 2009. we mostly blame clinton for that, but i wonder what biden had to do with that one...
this is particularly awkward, though - not unique, if it turns out to be right, but very blatant. it might be the first openly orwellian us-backed coup.
13:52
no.
stop.
this is a coup.
obviously.
13:54
so, i talked to the endocrinologist and he told me to cut the stress and stop freaking myself out over it.
it's a mild abnormality, and while it looks bad on paper, it has minimal, if any, discernible real life consequences.
just take some d, get my estrogen and get some exercise.
ok.
16:23
i'm taking this mostly as evidence for the bush model.
there's a good chance that biden is essentially operating on his ego and settling old scores and that the situation on the ground is of little relevance to him - he's not looking at existing information, or reacting to what's happening today, but implementing the choice he made 20 years ago, which was based on the information that existed 20 years ago.
and, he thinks this is about him, not about the region.
16:27
freudian slip in a typo from c-span:
that's obviously meant to say "live" rather than lie.
but, y'know.
16:37
"the taliban does not have an airforce" - joe biden
well, they do now.
16:46
he didn't address any sort of substantive question, he just made it all about him, whether he did the right thing, etc.
that was a political defense full of excuses by a narcissist that obviously fucked up, not an address by a commander in chief.
we don't know how the united states will treat the taliban moving forward, or who they consider to be the legitimate government in afghanistan at this point, which is the answer we most needed to know.
16:49
i need to reiterate that the afghan army didn't even try to launch an offensive, and i'm starting to wonder if the reason they were ordered to stand down was to not conflict with the president's 20 year-old assumption that they couldn't defend themselves.
the facts on the ground seem to be that the taliban wasn't able to win the war until we gave up and handed the country over to them without a fight. suggestions to the contrary seem to be entirely fabricated, and for what political aim...?
we don't know yet, but you could fit that into any of the three hypotheses.
one thing seems to be certain, though: biden knew in 2005 that the taliban was going to eventually win the war, and he wasn't going to let the facts on the ground (like the fact that they hadn't won yet 15 years later) get in the way of ordering a withdrawal in 2021.
17:09
i need to repeat that canada does not have the infrastructure to support 20,000 afghan refugees, at this time.
it's unlikely that we'll get 200 out.
18:07
good.
so, it's not a barrier to the operation.
that's what i care about.
23:30
tuesday, august 17, 2021
do the afghans support the taliban?
the only polling i've seen suggests that 85-90% of afghans do not support the taliban. i mean, this is a research question - do you have polling? or are you making stupid, racist assumptions?
i need to repeat: the only polling i've seen pegs opposition to the taliban in afghanistan at upwards of 90%, and that opposition would be higher than 90% in the cities (and a little lower outside of them).
so, the idea that the taliban are supported by the afghan people would appear to be an evidence-free assumption, from what i can tell.
you might ask why the talban were winning if they had no support, and the answer is that they weren't winning at all. in 20 years of fighting, they were unable to make any substantive gains, until we got up and out of the way and let them take over without a fight.
further, there are shady sources that argue that the taliban makes money from drug trafficking, but that seems to be wrong. rather, the actual sources of funding for the taliban seem to be wealthy donors in the arabian peninsula, and it would seem as though the movement would collapse rather quickly should those sources of funding be removed.
listen - i'm the one that will insist upon facts, here. and, if you think this is some kind of indigenous movement that is popular on the ground, it would appear that you have your facts wrong; this is a mostly foreign-funded group that is exceedingly unpopular amongst afghans, and could not exist without funding from outside the country.
.....which is why i keep pointing to saudi lobbying in washington.
either the president is woefully misinformed due to racism and/or ignorance, or he's misinformed on purpose due to large bribes convincing him to be purposefully misinformed. and, the pentagon has no such unplausible deniability, at all.
0:34
it's also nice to see support for the withdrawal fall amongst american voters once the ramifications of it have been made clear.
it restores a little faith in america - it was clearly not the right choice, and the americans appear to be able to see that. good for them.
0:38
reality check for those that need it:
https://asiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019_Afghan_Survey_Full-Report.pdf0:48
data is important.
it's useful in dismantling stupid assumptions - many of which are thoroughly racist.
and, this is what the data says.
deal with it.
0:54
i want to be clear about what the endocrinologist said.
- "the entire population is vitamin d deficient" and then ...."your...wow...ok, your d is more than sufficient"
in fact, my d is barely sufficient, according to any public health recs i've seen. but, what he was getting at is that my d is way higher than what he usually sees. and, that's kind of what i thought. my diet is actually very high in fortified d.
- he generally prescribes 2 mg of estrogen per day for post-menopausal women. i'm on 8, and about to get an orchiectomy. i was going to propose going on injections until i get the orchiectomy, but i'm getting the orchiectomy tomorrow. so...
- he suggested cutting the cyproterone to zero as soon as i get the operation, and i'll go ahead and do that.
- he didn't seem convinced that exercise helps much, but he did suggest walking.
- he didn't think the other hormones were clinically dangerous
- his main lifestyle concern was smoking, and i quit that some time ago.
so, he basically confirmed everything i thought. but, his opinion was that the numbers were in the realm of basic variation, and i don't actually require an extraneous explanation - they actually weren't that bad, in his view. a tad low. sure. but he didn't even suggest i get pro-active about it - he suggested i shouldn't worry about it.
i'm going to be proactive about it.
but, what that means is carrying through with what i'm already doing - getting enough estrogen, getting enough d and making sure i'm doing enough walking on top of the biking.
if i hadn't taken the test, and had just obliviously carried on, i can wonder if it might have gotten worse and required treatment. but, it doesn't seem to be in the realm of concern, according to him.
1:45
my estrogen should shoot way up when the testicles get cut out tomorrow.
and, that's the best thing i can do for my bones - just bathe them in as much estrogen as i can get.
1:49
1:53
1:59
i'm not going to post screenshots, but it seems like the issue that is top of mind for most afghans is actually the economy, and specifically high levels of unemployment.
which is the same as most people everywhere.
2:04
this might be higher levels of support for gender equality than in the rural parts of the united states.
2:08
it's consistent - you're looking at 85-90% of people that are totally opposed to everything the taliban stands for.
so, don't tell me this is what they want.
that's bullshit - it's racist bullshit.
2:10
i'm still working on that catch up post. i've got the idea in place, but i'm going to finish it.
i'll have to get back to the alter-reality this week, and i'd expect a flurry of posts when i do - it's going to be one text per week (in the alter-reality), so if i end up doing 20 texts, it'll take four weeks.
i expect to be bed ridden for at least a week, and if it means i really catch up on it then great.
5:08
i'm just double checking and there really seriously isn't a way to get to toronto on public transit before 9:30 am.
that's absurd.
and that needs to change.
5:10
(i need to be at the hospital by 8:00 am and i refuse to pay for a hotel in a city under fascist lockdown)
5:10
ok, there's a secondary bus running from london to toronto with an arrival time at 8:20 am.
it's still too late, but i need to make sure i have options if i'm hitching and get stuck.
i want to be in toronto before 6:00 am.
5:14
i took the greyhound down i think twice and it was ideal because you'd get there around 7:00 - if it was late.
5:15
i was hoping i could just plan to get to the outskirts of the gta somewhere and take public transit in, but it doesn't seem like that's as workable as i thought.
the exit points of the gta - kitchener, guelph, hamilton - are all kind of off the beaten path.
if i get stuck in cambridge, i could maybe take the go train in, but that doesn't seem like it makes as much sense as i'd like, either.
if i can find a transit option with a useful scheduling option, i'll take it. but there isn't one. even the london option requires hitching to london, but i might want to do that to get a guitar, see.
if i have to hitch out from london it'll almost certainly get me to toronto...like, nobody's going to drive me from london to cambridge....
5:21
if i can get to kitchener, milton or hamilton, i can take the train - but none of those options make any sense. i can take the city bus from milton, and kitchener and hamilton are both out of the way.
if i can get to brampton or cambridge, i can take the bus, but nobody is going to stop in either of these places. i don't think....
and, i have to basically be downtown before i can get on the subway.
the only workable way into town really is to hitch. it's not my choice, it's just the fact of the matter.
5:41
i need to reiterate the point: i live a block from the ambassador bridge.
there's hundreds of trucks coming in from detroit every hour, and 95% of them are headed to toronto.
it's maybe the easiest place to hitch from in the country, and i'll probably only need to get on one truck.
what i'm worried about is getting dropped off halfway there. i need a contingency plan, and none look very good.
this is an example where losing the greyhound is having a discernible effect on my mobility, and the "free market" choices are essentially all useless to me.
5:54
there's a light at huron church & college, and a mcdonald's there as well.
meet me there tonight if you wanna drive me toronto to get my balls cut out...
6:01
well, they gotta stop at the light anyways, right?
6:04
see, i think this is completely backwards - parks are where people should be allowed to smoke, and it should be completely banned in residential neighbourhoods.
there's just not any way to smoke in your house or yard without the smoking drifting to your neighbours' house, where it's a nuisance to their health and quality of life. as a renter, i'm constantly annoyed by my neighbours' habits - and would rather they go smoke in the park instead, where they're not bothering anybody.
6:18
the reason he wants to do it now is that a period of austerity is inevitably coming after all of this spending, and he's not going to hit the rich with caviar quotas - it's going to be the swing demographic on the left that's going to get bludgeoned with budget cuts.
so, he wants you to give him a majority before he stabs you in the back.
basically.
7:15
it is imperative that we leave the ndp with the balance of power, as we come out of this, to prevent the bankers from clawing everything back.
and, you should not be confused - a lot of what the liberals legislated as a social safety net is ultimately new democrat in origin. not all of it, but a lot of it.
there's plenty of hints of what the liberals would have rather done, and it's not nearly as generous. but, the generosity was necessary, and they did it because they knew it. but, they wouldn't have done what they knew was necessary if they weren't forced to. such is the curiosity of the bay street party - despite knowing what the best thing to do is, you still have to drag them through the mud to get them to do it...
...and they will require continuing coercion to prevent them from snapping back to the party of austerity that they were in the 90s, when nobody was around to keep them in check.
this is the worst time for a liberal majority. minority government remains the way forwards for the next 2-3 years, until we get out of this and get back to some concept of solvency.
7:30
the liberals will deflect and obstruct and distort the narrative for the next month, and try to trick you into thinking the election is about any number of things, many of which aren't even political questions at all.
what the election is really about is the prime minister trying to escape the accountability of a minority parliament. don't forget that when you cast your ballot.
and, i, for one, don't think he should be given the pass he's seeking - i think the existing arrangement is far preferable and should be maintained.
7:44
so, here we go.
listen: my testosterone has been in post-castration ranges for over ten years. it might even go up.
i'm doing this for my liver.
22:51
wednesday, august 18, 2021
so, the commentary i'm seeing online is that people are just making of joe biden for failing in afghanistan. and, this might be sort of teachable - it's important that you understand when you're out of touch.
he seems to have made the choice to pull out (and note that "pulling out" jokes are everywhere, and generally employed in ways to ridicule his masculinity) some time in the millennial youth period, based on an interpretation of baby boomer social ideas. it's like the ghost of cindy sheehan, or something.
but, nobody cares about the troops, and nobody has cared about the troops in a really long time. all these kids see is a beta male that got humiliated by a bunch of half-human, half-ape barbarians, all of which have far more facial hair.
...and they seem to think it's comical.
these framings, these narratives that biden is working with - they're just all going over these kids' heads, entirely.
all they see is an old man that lost a war by making a dumb mistake.
0:22
hey, i'm still waiting for him to appoint karen bass to cabinet.
0:25
thursday, august 19, 2021
so, i got the surgery done and eventually made it back home.
and, have i got a story to write you...
23:39
no.
this is neither a political concern, nor a medical one, it is a legal one.
you will not have a vote on whether i get vaccinated or what kind of life i will live if i choose not to, and if you insist on trying then i will tear your law down in court.
that's how a constitutional democracy works - unconstitutional laws get dismantled by the court. and, it is up to the judiciary to decide, not a bunch of fascist idiots operating on hysteria and the ignorance of groupthink.
23:51
your bullshit laws are of no consequence and will be declared as such in time.
...because your opinion is not important, when put up against constitutional rules that prevent you from enforcing it on everybody else.
and, that's all this is about - your worthless, inconsequential, uneducated, uninformed and unscientific opinion.
23:53
vaccination will not be mandatory for federal workers, whatever the opinion of the prime minister or his voters may be.
that rule is unconstitutional and will be thrown in the dung heap, where it belongs, by the courts.
23:55
if you want to live in a society with a king that writes arbitrary rules, i'd suggest saudi arabia.
that's not how the legal system works here in canada - the government has a set of rules it has to abide by, and the judiciary will undo it's decisions if it wants to waste everybody's time flaunting them.
23:58
friday, august 20, 2021
the science is pretty clear that this vaccine will be essentially useless by the spring, and perhaps by mid-winter.
you can't vaccinate a population against a rapidly mutating virus with a .0001% mortality rate. the premise is insane....
and, the courts will tear these rules down - because they're driven by fear, and not by science.
what the science says is that you need to get used to recurring strains of this virus as a fact of life, and that there is nothing that can be done to even mitigate it; the science says you'll probably catch this every couple of years, and that if you survived the initial contact with it then you will probably defeat variant after variant without so much as a few coughs.
and, what the science says is that this world will never be safe for the existing extremely old, ever again.
stop confusing fear and hysteria with science. and, stop confusing utopian magical thinking with science, too.
science is pretty brutal sometimes.
and, the facts are pretty clear - this is something people need to get used to, and these rules are not rational in the face of how the state needs to react, over time.
0:07
the inevitable conclusion of a federal vaccine mandate is that you will be ordered by your employer to undergo routine vaccinations.
and, you are not cattle - you are not property.
they cannot make that an employment condition, and the court will clarify as much, if the dauphin wants to waste everybody's time with his delusions of grandeur.
0:13
so, the prime minister's opinion - as ignorant as it is - is not important here, not in the face of a clear judicial interpretation.
and, the opinion of the opposition leader does not matter, either.
nor does your opinion matter on this issue, as a voter.
that is why it should not be politicized - because it shifts the center of government away from constitutionality and towards ocholocracy. and, i, for one, will not be ruled by an angry and ignorant mob.
0:17
how am i feeling?
i'm supposed to be in writhing agony, and was prescribed t3s, but you know i won't touch opiates. i'm not going to fill that rx.
in fact, all i've taken is acetaminophen and i'm not in any pain at all.
it took an extra day to get home, which means i should be able to shower after i eat
0:27
i had to crash, which just means i'll need to so some laundry today. that's fine.
one crazy story coming up...
9:16
i've got all the bandages off, but i still have electrodes on me...
9:19
it's the politics of fear and doubt.
it's absolutely consistent - and sort of desperate.
we can probably get rid of this idiot for good by denying him a majority, so let's sit down and work together to do it.
17:06
see, this is the kind of thing - forcing people to wears masks at work if they don't want to get vaccinated - that any kind of actual liberal political movement would be up in arms about. it's just about the most conservative policy you could possibly imagine.
the courts won't let something like this stand because it's not proportional, and it's not justified in a free and democratic society. further, the science, when read correctly, makes essentially the exact opposite argument. it's just empty authoritarianism and heavy-handed statism, with little actual basis for it.
as a comparison, let's look at smokers. unlike this mild virus, second and third hand smoke is a serious health risk. yet, we've all been in situations where there are smokers at work. do we mandate that smokers wear hazmat suits if they insist on smoking at work? we would consider that retarded, but it's exactly what you're doing when you're mandating masks - except that the science is clear that there's no safe exposure level to smoke, and the virus is harmless to 99.999% of people.
these are the kinds of arguments you see in a court, not the kinds of outlandish things you're currently hearing from politicians. you need to look at comparisons to other trivial health risks, and put the thing in perspective. is this a rational reaction, or a hysterical absurdity? is it proportionate? is it reasonable?
that said, a court cannot generally overturn an employment decision. what it can do, if it's found to infringe on human rights legislation (as this clearly does..) is to order for compensation and/or accommodation. the reality is that a lot of jobs done at banks can be done remotely, and that's the more reasonable form of accommodation. for the little bit that can't be - like teller services - the right approach would be some kind of payout, if the company wants to enforce the policy.
but, this is not a serious policy and won't hold up to meaningful scrutiny. the bar for these things is set very high for good reason, and this doesn't come close to meeting it.
it's insane.
18:29
for essentially everybody working at a bank (they're not geriatrics...), your coworker that goes for a smoke and comes back in is breathing more toxic air into your lungs and doing more damage to your health than your coworker that happened to get covid because they weren't vaccinated - if they happened to get covid, which remains fairly remote.
is the government saying anything at all about smoking?
no.
so, this clearly isn't about your health at all, is it?
18:34
in fact, if you bring in relevant jurisprudence regarding "smokers' rights" at work as precedent, you're going to come to some disappointing deductions.
again: second and third hand smoke is way more dangerous than covid for almost everybody working at a bank. that's not an exaggerated comparison - it's a severe understatement.
18:37
i just got off a bus full of smokers and it probably reduced my life by a week.
when will the government ban smokers from boarding planes and taking trains?
18:39
but, you'll take note of how the government did this, which is an admission that it can't do it at all.
the one scenario where a court can overturn a human rights breach is when you're dealing with the federal government, and for that reason i want you to very carefully consider how they went about this.
they didn't pass a law in the legislature. why not? the reason is they knew it would be overturned. what they did instead was call the companies up and ask them to voluntarily implement the policy, which is a conscious attempt to circumvent the existing human rights legislation, as well as the constitution.
if they thought they could pass a law, they would have. they didn't because they knew they can't get away with it.
so, what does that tell you about the legality of the government's promise?
and, how does a court interpret such a thing? i mean, it's some kind of coercion, clearly. if those banks decide to take some other path, they'll be subject to retributive action.
and, that is unconstitutional and in contravention of human rights legislation and not at all how a democratic society functions - it's like something you'd read in a history book about mussolini.
18:45
the only real precedent of something outrageous like that in canada would be the kind of ridiculously corrupt governments that existed in quebec before the silent revolution, and there are landmark cases about it.
that's a road the government should think twice about travelling down.
...because who really wrote these policies?
if the court decides the government did, and then enforced it extralegally through coercive means, it may produce some landmark rulings in response.
18:47
you may not understand any of these things or think they're very important, but that doesn't matter because it's not up to you to present an opinion about it.
this is an issue for specialized legal scholars, and cannot and will not be determined by voting.
18:48
mr trudeau gave the banking sector an offer they can't refuse...
you should be angry about that - that's a subversion of democracy.
18:58
i bicycled by the local hospital here last week twice (once to get soy milk and once on the way back) and there were different nurses outside smoking, in their scrubs, on their break, when i went by. i was outraged.
i've had teachers that are at risk of giving their students leukemia from second hand smoke.
when will the government pass legislation banning teachers and health care providers from smoking?
19:14
this virus isn't novel anymore, and it's here to stay.
so, it's time to sit down and be rational.
we need to think past the shock and awe and get back to critical, proportional thought.
19:15
dropping the legalese, what do i think the government should actually do?
1) first, it needs to accept the basic science, which is that
a) the virus is here to stay. that is, this virus will continue to mutate into perpetuity until booster shots are required by all. two shots for all does not end the virus. because:
b) vaccines are not magic potions or antidotes, like you'd see on the legend of zelda and,
c) the virus appears to be seasonal, as most viruses in it's class are.
d) further, it only poses a serious threat to the elderly and those with weak immune systems (like most other viruses..)
e) therefore, the data simply does not justify the kind of fear or the kind of disproportional authoritarianism being bandied around
2) it needs to acknowledge that vaccination status is a personal choice, and that the government has no place in the immune systems of the nation. that means accepting that people have the right to choose the consequences of their behaviour, including dying of covid if they insist.
so, once the government has accepted the facts, understood the science and comprehended the rights issues, what should it should do in response?
3) we have long accepted that most people will die of cancer. in fact, i learned recently that we deny colonoscopies and other similar cancer-screening procedures to people that are relatively young, under the argument that cancer screening over the age of 70 is "inappropriate". of course, it's the age range where people are at highest risk - which is just the point. the system cuts you off. while most people will not die of covid in the long run, we need to come to terms with the simple reality that most people alive today over a certain age will in fact die of covid and that's just how it's going to be until generational turnover occurs.
4) once we realize that, we need to make appropriate funding decisions regarding costs and benefits to prolonging death as long as possible in these populations. i, personally, see the upside of not doing too much about it.
5) we need to keep up on the science, which means tracking mutations and funding booster shots. vulnerable populations will require regular immune boosters for the rest of their lives. appropriate funding decisions need to be made to ensure that these are accessible.
6) we need to stop trying to suppress the general spread of the virus and start focusing on ensuring that up-to-date booster shots are continually available to those that require them.
7) we need to exit this absurdity and ensure that we have resources dedicated to fighting this in the most vulnerable populations on a yearly basis.
19:56
the government has more pressing health concerns (like smoking) and more pressing scientific concerns (like reducing emissions).
20:04
saturday, august 21, 2021
i want to be clear about what i'm saying.
- if it were legal to ban the unvaccinated due to health concerns, it would be legal to ban smokers (nicotine, marijuana, opium, whatever) as smoking is many degrees more dangerous for almost everybody.
- governments and businesses have repeatedly tried to ban smokers and been overruled by the courts by human rights legislation
- legislation and jurisprudence around smoking is a more appropriate precedent for covid than anything to do with a more serious virus, like polio
- it follows that if these legal justifications for banning the unvaccinated can be upheld then it should follow that smokers should be banned from entering most public places, as well
- further, many other classes of people can then also be banned on the whim of whomever decides to
- maybe you're ok with laws restricting the rights of smokers, of construction workers and of anybody else who may pollute the air. but if you oppose that kind of thing, you need to oppose banning the unvaccinated as well, or you're lost in a set of horrible contradictions.
- this isn't about your morality. it's not about the morality of hypocrisy - although there's something to say about somebody that stands up for smokers' rights and wants to ban the unvaccinated and doesn't see what's wrong with that. what it's about is consistency in law.
most doctors are not lawyers and should not be consulted for legal advice. they don't know the slightest thing about human rights law, and are not remotely useful in context. their opinion doesn't matter, either.
my own view is that i'd actually like to ban smokers and not ban the unvaccinated, and the reason is that i think banning smokers from transit and malls and etc (i've been in grocery stores that smell like cancer, and resent being forced to stand in line with them) meets the high bar of evidence, and banning the unvaccinated does not.
but, one thing at at a time.
i'd love to make the argument, actually, and would jump at the chance.
2:36
if the data doesn't uphold the necessity or rationality or proportionality of any of this, what exactly is trudeau actually doing?
the answer is that he's scapegoating a minority group and using it as a way to try to ram through restrictions on rights and scare you into voting for him.
now, you can argue there's a justification for it - or at least you could try to. when you actually look at actual numbers, it's clear enough that there actually isn't.
but, that doesn't actually matter. i mean, hilter had his jewish bankers, right?
it's a difference of scale, but it's the same poli sci model as developed by goebbels, albeit via karl rove. and, you need to clue into that and become cognizant of it if you want to make an informed choice in september.
and, yes - the ndp are even more ridiculous, and taking it to an even greater level of absurdity, with even greater scapegoating and even lesser rationality.
3:24
so, step one was to upload the vlog for the day:
have i switched vlog channels or what? naw.
these videos will all end up in vlogs, in the end, and i will have to do a huge catchup, one day.
it's really just a temp site..,
the story is coming. soon.
4:32
i think we should ban fat people from beaches.
10:24
and, there's nothing more unsanitary than men with beards. it's just fucking gross.
let's ban them from leaving the house altogether.
10:28
in fact, let's just cancel them all altogether.
where's the delete button for real life? it's gotta be around here, somewhere...
10:34
so, there's the list of people with identifiable characteristics that i think ought to be banned from all kind of places for health reasons:
- smokers
- construction workers
- truck drivers
- nurses (they carry all kinds of diseases.)
- fat people
- bearded men
- recent immigrants
- the elderly (because they just get sick too fast)
anybody else we should ban from interacting with the public?
vote for me! i'll keep you safe from the bearded obese men!
10:37
and, i mean, like...
you put a guy at the door, and i'm just going to walk past him. i'll make you call the cops, go to jail and then sue you over it.
pick your battles, people.
10:38
justin trudeau has been broadcasting a strong lean in the direction of fascism for years.
this isn't new, and it's not surprising. rather, it's a predictable consequence of the leadership we have in place - and i pointed the likelihood of this out years ago. but, we have to understand the situation.
and, the time window that the liberals have to course correct may have already passed.
10:41
we should also ban dogs, because they might carry parasites.
so, here's the updated list of what should be banned from existing:
- smokers (smoking is the leading cause of death, not covid-19)
- construction workers (they transport carcinogenic chemicals)
- truck drivers ("")
- nurses (they carry all kinds of diseases.)
- fat people (they hurt my eyes)
- bearded men (it's like having a toilet on your face)
- recent immigrants (because they bring diseases into the country)
- dogs (parasites)
- the elderly (because they just get sick too fast)
10:53
it's also worth pointing out that this is one of those things that the bourgeois left can do and the bourgeois right cannot do. this is an argument you frequently hear on the real left - the bourgeois left is often more dangerous, because they can carry through with fascist policies without generating a backlash from working and middle class voters.
could you imagine what would happen if the conservatives tried to enforce a vaccine mandate? i mean, there's some levity on the debate, right. trudeau's out there (without a moustache..that's the other guy...) pounding podiums like a fascist, demanding the opposition take away your rights. but, if the conservatives were in power, and they did something like that, the same people supporting the liberal party's vaccine mandate would be out there rioting in the streets.
i'm ultimately trying to knock some sense into people that have been lulled into compliance by the media. just realize that truth - the conservatives could never implement a policy like this. reflect on that - and whether you think the liberals ought to be implementing it or not.
11:27
this was presented in the show as a surreal running gag, and it worked because there was a strong level of truth underlying it.
if the government wants to ban a behaviour by teachers due to health concerns, banning smoking would be far more consequential than banning the unvaccinated.
and, it would follow that students that smoke should be expelled, as well.
14:14
if we're opening the laws up, here, maybe there's an upside to it.
i'd support a strong crackdown on teachers smoking at or near school, on their break - really at all. and, if we're now allowed to ban people due to health concerns, i'd be in favour of getting pretty heavy-handed about this.
this needs to be stamped out:
but, be careful what you're advocating for - think it through.
14:23
i want to be clear that when i referenced booster shots, i actually didn't mean a third shot of the existing vaccine. i don't expect that the vaccine will "wear off" or that taking a third dose will provide any increased immunity against developing variants. third doses are probably largely just a waste of vaccine.
what i was referring to is the inevitable vaccine update shots, that will provide for heightened immunity to new variants by understanding how the virus has modified it's proteins to evade existing antibodies - like the kind of booster shot you get for the flu, on a yearly basis.
14:38
if rich countries find themselves with so much vaccine that they're redosing, i'd encourage them to send the vaccines to africa, instead.
14:42
the elementary school that i went to had this room in between the principal's office and the 5/6 classroom that was actually padlocked so that the students couldn't open it looking for a teacher and weatherstripped to keep the smoke in. the windows were covered over with inch thick curtains, so you couldn't see in from the yard outside. but, you could still smell the smoke seeping out when you walked by, and could even smell it in the 5/6 classroom.
my 5/6 teacher was a non-smoker, and he used to bang on the wall to piss them off. he found the situation outrageous.
but, as i far i could tell, every other teacher in the school was a heavy smoker, and they would cram in there like sardines during breaks and recesses. of course, i never actually went in there, ever. but, i'd imagine it wasn't that different than in the gif.
if we're doing this, let's be serious about it - let's throw the smokers out of the workforce.
14:49
but, if the vaccine isn't wearing off, then why are some studies showing decreased efficacy?
it's because the virus is mutating. so, the vaccines are less effective because the virus isn't the same as it used to be, not because they're "wearing off". and, everybody knew that was going to happen.
it's one of the reasons i'm not getting vaccinated yet - i knew these vaccines would not be powerful enough to protect against dominant variants within a few months after i was eligible for them.
so, a third shot isn't what vulnerable people need. what they need is an updated vaccine - which i called a booster shot - that includes a wider range of dead proteins to stimulate more antibodies for.
i don't have a study to give you, but it's a question of understanding the basic science. this idea that vaccines "wear off" is almost aristotlian. no. you don't require constant vaccination against the same viruses. but, viruses are constantly changing, and if your immune system is too weak to adjust then you'll need to become reliant on the science to constantly be giving you new vaccines to constantly react.
and, yes - that's very expensive.
but, we do it for the flu, and we'll have to do it for covid, too.
15:01
there was a failure in messaging by the authorities - they made it seem like this would be over and we'd just eradicate the virus after we all got vaccinated.
unfortunately, that's a total failure in understanding the science and now we've got millions of confused people - including many in media - that don't realize that these vaccines were always going to be temporary, at best.
the state put down unrealistic expectations and is going to have to present a mea culpa around it to get people to understand that this never actually ends - we just have to get used to it.
15:11
so, what the fuck is the government doing mandating vaccines that are 50% effective today and will be 5% effective next year?
they're trying to win an election, that's what they're doing.
and, they should be ashamed of themselves for using that kind of tactic.
15:12
again - i'm going to call on the government to make developing new or "updated" vaccines a priority, not on trying to vaccinate people with old ones that offer minimal and declining levels of protection.
this is done by tracking mutations and getting funding out to develop what i called booster shots.
there should have been a new vaccine for the delta and lamda variants available at the beginning of the flu season. everybody saw this coming. but, there is not. and, that is a failure in planning due to anarchy in production - again.
15:16
also, note to media - lamda is preferable to lambda. it's a transliteration, but the b is an anglophonism. i spent years with greek letters, trust me on this.
15:19
i've been pointing out for months that we're probably going back into lockdown in the fall. that's why i had to get my testicles out when i had the chance...and i'm glad i did...
these are the facts:
1) we have at least two major variants (delta, lamda) that are evading the existing vaccines. there's more coming, and it's just going to get worse.
2) as far as i can tell, only moderna is working on an actual booster shot with extra dead proteins to stimulate extra antibodies (or, in their case, extra fake dead proteins. whatever.).
3) if you can't get these booster shots out to vulnerable people very fast, cases in old folks homes are going to skyrocket in the fall. and it doesn't matter if the attendants have existing vaccination or not - the point is that the new variants aren't being detected by the antibodies generated by the existing vaccines.
4) so, what do we do? we're back where we started - because we didn't properly understand the science, and we didn't react like we should have.
5) therefore, lockdown. again.
i was yelling months ago to get the boosters out, and i was ignored and/or told that vaccination with the old vaccine was more important.
it's the same stupid thing that happens in every pandemic through history - the state demands obedience and, once obtained, merely uses it to demonstrate it's own incompetence. then, there's always some smartass out there that gets it right....
here's your commentary, future.
and, here's my plea - don't listen to the fucking government.
15:47
we're going to need to start all over again with this next spring, when we have update vaccines that can protect against the variants.
but, for fuck's sake - don't pull funding. and, make sure you have a booster shot ready for the next batch of variants by this time next year. or, we'll have to do it again...
15:48
ok, wait. pfizer is developing a third shot, too.
so, are doug ford & joe biden offering third shots of the same vaccine or is the third shot the kind of update i'm referring to?
i don't think the news reports understand, and i think i'm confused because the journalists don't get it. i need to find a better source.
15:56
ok.
so, this is pointless - they're just wasting vaccine they should send to india or africa or something.
First, it's important to know that the vaccine's third dose, be it Moderna or Pfizer, will be the exact same formula given in the first two doses. Rodriguez said there's no difference between the three shots.
the third dose does nothing.
17:10
what i was talking about - and which is necessary to prevent another lockdown - is something being discussed in this article:
this should have been authorized by health canada by now, and the shots ford should be handing out should be update shots, not third shots of the same vaccine that we know doesn't work anymore.
yet, it looks like only the israelis have made steps toward this at this time - and will be handing the shots out to everybody over 50.
...because only the jews were smart enough. again. obviously, right?
17:16
this is a terrible idea - it's just going to create inflation. and, because it's going to be targeted at nuclear families with kids, it's going to make it harder for the people that have the hardest time paying rent because the price will go up for everybody but only nuclear families will get the subsidy.
this is a bribe intended to win votes, not a serious policy to reduce the cost of rent.
what we have is a supply and demand issue at the bottom of the rental market and the only way to address it is to build more housing, to reduce the number of people at the bottom of the market or both.
18:35
we obviously can't snap our fingers and build millions - not hundreds of thousands. millions. - of affordable houses all over the country. even finding where to put them is difficult.
if one of the parties wants to seriously fix this immediately, they're going to have to bring in serious rent controls - the kind that are considered taboo in a neo-liberal system and are firmly under provincial responsibility.
i've been exceedingly clear that rent is a major electoral issue, but i'm just being blunt about this - subsidies for families are just handouts for property owners, and i don't have to read the proposal to know that it's going to be targeted at nuclear families with kids. the ndp is very much a conservative party in this sense. they have no interest in subsidizing rent for single people, or even for couples without kids - whether they happen to be queer or not. it's meant to prioritize this kind of idyllic concept of 1950s america that never actually existed. the liberals and conservatives are the same, but you expect it from the conservatives, at the least. trust me on this - search through the various subsidies, and you won't see a damned thing for single people. the message from the state is that if i'm concerned about high rent costs then what i ought to do is get married (and, my response is "fuck you....").
nor is anybody going to cut immigration at the bottom - which is specifically about refugees. they're all running on bringing in more refugees, and none of them seem to really understand the contradiction, or to remotely care, if they do. when you bring in wealthy immigrants, they buy houses in the suburbs and pay high taxes; that doesn't contribute to the problem. but, when you bring in thousands and thousands and thousand of refugees, you put them in competition with the disabled and artists and others that have minimal abilities to generate income in a capitalist society, by choice or necessity. that drives the price of rent up on the bottom, which has a cascading effect, and drives the rent up everywhere else.
there's really just too many poor people in canada, nowadays, and it's creating a massive poverty problem - and the more poor people you dump in the pile, the worse it gets.
the one answer is to write a law that says what the rent is and enforce it at gunpoint.
anything else they're going to tell you is either going to make the problem worse or take so long to have an effect that it won't matter when it does.
19:13
the liberals and conservatives are both operating under the delusions of infinite growth. that's why they get this wrong over and over and over, and why they'll both look you in the eye and tell you that refugees are good for the economy. well, who's economy? they increase the price of rent - so they're good for rentiers, that's for sure.
you would hope for something from the ndp that breaks with economic orthodoxy and actually addresses the problem, not just a rebranded version of the conservatives' child tax subsidy, which the liberals stole from them, and which is what the rental subsidy really is. it's been a long time since they could do that, though.
19:31
the three parties are all presenting the same basic collection of ideas, and they're all just different ways to hide state subsidies to rentiers and capitalists.
19:33
at some point, we have to just realize that it's not about this bourgeois party or that but about capitalism, itself.
the role of the state in a capitalist society is to redistribute wealth upwards.
all of the parties will do nothing but that - regardless of what story they tell you about it.
19:35
so, i mean...
there is a way to fix this, quickly - we could pass a law deciding what rent is.
but, no bourgeois party would do such a thing and it's not in the list of options being discussed.
so, my advice is to not pretend that the electoral cycle is going to reduce your rent. we have to look outside of electoral politics for that.
19:37
a quick perusal through the various proposals is that the liberals seem to want to build the most housing, but you'll have to deal with the corruption and kickbacks. and, it'll take 20 years.
the proposal from the conservatives is a little surprising in a pleasant way - i think it's a good idea to convert unused business spaces into housing. it's not likely to be sufficient, but it actually addresses the problem in a more direct way than the proposal by the ndp.
19:40
i'm not saying that canada should ban refugees forever. it's a big country - there's lots of space. and, until recently, we valued our freedoms, here. that should reassert itself, soon.
but, we took in too many people too fast and just assumed the market would deal with it. that didn't happen - the market didn't deal with it. and, it built up and created a crisis.
if we had kept up with housing for the last 50 years, we wouldn't be in the situation where we need to reduce refugee resettlement to catch up. but, we didn't, and we are.
so, i'd call for something like a 10 year freeze on refugee resettlement until we can rebuild the infrastructure to accommodate for it.
19:48
i mean, if there's enough vacant office space, it might actually work. that's what we need - hundreds of thousands of new units, tomorrow.
i don't actually know - but i doubt it.
and, i mean, i can't vote for a party i'm in 80% opposition to because i agree with a few things. i went over that.
so i'd call on one of the other parties to acknowledge that that's a good idea and steal it from them.
19:53
there's a complex in detroit called the russell industrial center that served an incredibly useful purpose and i'll just name drop and let you look up. the city closed it down, but it's the kind of solution i'd actually like to hear from the ndp - seizing old industrial centres and turning them into cooperatives.
i don't think anywhere in canada has as much empty space as detroit, and you have to actually go there to get it. there's giant empty buildings, everywhere.
but it's a fast, easy solution that can give the people on the bottom what they actually want, which is not a family home with a white picket fence but a place to exist outside of capitalism and pursue ideals that are parallel or contrasting to it.
i'd be happier in a relatively small unit in an abandoned apartment building downtown if it's clean and safe than in a family home in the suburbs. and, that is what most people that are looking for rent relief are actually going to tell you, too.
20:00
yes - the federal government has the power to seize an abandoned building.
20:32
...and there are lots of cases where it absolutely should.
20:32
a vacant building fee?
fuck that.
seize the motherfuckers via eminent domain and turn them into subsidized apartments.
21:03
actually, that's a way to get around the constitutional declaration of housing as a provincial matter, as well - the federal government could seize existing apartments that are not charging fair rents under eminent domain and then enforce subsidization on them.
would the ndp support such a thing?
if not, you should think twice about supporting them.
21:11
sunday, august 22, 2021
i don't exactly want to declare solidarity with this group, as the northern alliance was not much better than the taliban, in terms of human rights atrocities.
but, my argument was that the idea that taliban rule would bring stability to the country was always delusional - that it would just lead to a war that the west had no direct influence over (unless it re-engaged with a faction). and that appears to be what's happening.
do i think anybody is backing this group? not right now, i don't - everybody wants to influence the taliban, and is looking the other way, which just exposes the lie that this was about stability.
it's still not clear what has happened, but it is clear that the civil war in afghanistan is not over, and probably never will be. and, remember - the west seeks division everywhere, because it rules by division.
3:50
the bottom line is that the people of afghanistan do not want taliban rule, and will never succumb to it - no matter what racists like joe biden decide from washington.
so long as they are in power, there will be a war in process to remove them from it.
stability in the country requires their liquidation and elimination, one way or the other. the chinese and russians would be wise to realize that, before they get too cozy with them - they're largely a mercenary force of foreign fighters with an imported ideology, and not anything resembling a representative body.
we might not like what democracy looks like in afghanistan, but it would not look much like the taliban.
3:53
for the moment, this resistance movement looks indigenous and real, even if it's rather vicious.
that might change as things develop.
3:54
in fact, do you know what the right word to describe biden's position on afghanistan is, in a single term?
orientalism.
it's right out of said. and, the saudis are taking advantage of it...
4:04
i'm a leftist.
i stand in solidarity with the people on the ground, and their struggle against tyranny.
i'm not interested in right-wing dictatorships willing to institute fascist rule for the benefit of "stability", in order to make it easier for corporate interests to operate.
if there is a force on the ground that can fight the taliban, i will stand with it.
4:32
"stability" is the lexicon of foreign investors, not the language of the left.
4:34
i also resent this idea that it took too long to defeat fascism in afghanistan, so the left should just give in. i mean, it's like because we couldn't cram democracy into a three minute segment that it's not worth bothering with.
popular resistance struggles can and do take generations.
and, the struggle against the taliban may take 200 years to win, but that's not a reason to give up.
5:09
...but the forces amassing in the north would appear to be the legitimate government of the country, at this time.
and, if the west can offer them support in their struggle, we should.
5:13
further, those that argue that the struggle against fascism is local need a reality check - and a history lesson.
5:15
this video came up in my feed and i thought it looked interesting enough to look at, but i want to draw attention to it, as jimmy dore makes an absurd, misogynist ass of himself in it.
this is really a rather disgusting display of male chauvinism and heteropatriarchal delusions of dominance. hey jimmy - don't you think stef gets to decide if she wants to do the interview or not?
jimmy: if somebody called me up and asked to do an interview with my woman, i'd tell them to fuck off.
stef: jimmy, i'm doing the damned interview and if you don't like it you can fuck off.
i mean, what year is it? holy shit...
he sounds like al bundy, but without the irony.
kyle himself is a pretty obvious douche bag, but at least he understood that his co-host's gender didn't eliminate her personal autonomy.
i'm not in favour of censoring people. i think it's more useful to let jimmy keep talking, so we can all hear what his views on female autonomy really are - and they're pretty revolting, clearly.
obviously, krystal doesn't need to ask kyle for permission to do an interview with bernie sanders, and bernie would be out of line in asking kyle for permission. further, stef doesn't need to ask jimmy for permission, either - and bernie would be just as out of line in asking jimmy for permission. any arguments to the contrary are just religious patriarchy, and are of no consequence in a liberal society.
but, there's a deeper reveal here, because i've been pointing out for years that fake leftists like jimmy dore - who has recently expressed strong solidarity with the taliban in supporting a total withdrawal of forces from afghanistan - are happy to align with the far right out of more than a sense of pragmatism. when you watch the chauvinist rants in the video, and you cross-reference it with jimmy's views on afghanistan, you should see a consistency present, and it's easy to deduce that jimmy's concerns about human rights are muted in afghanistan because he doesn't care much about american women, either.
this video is helpful in getting into jimmy's head because these things are happening simultaneously, but jimmy is merely one example of a toxic masculinity that dominates the fake left.
i left a comment on the video, and the responses used alt-right language that made them sound like dedicated trump voters. there's something underlying the reactionary politics here, and it's a level of commonality in views with extreme levels of social conservatism that lies so shallowly under the surface that it's revealed without any sort of prodding; jimmy, and so many people like him, are willing to look the other way towards rights abuses abroad because they'd be willing to look the other way towards rights abuses at home, as well. they're just willing to look the other way, in general - because they ultimately agree with the far right on religious and socially conservative structures in society, deep down.
and, that's dangerous.
so, i'll repeat myself: jimmy dore is a dangerous idiot. i told you that years ago, and it's still true today.
14:07
monday, august 23, 2021
this particular tweet is actually not that misleading at all. two-tier access - which is the more technical description of o'toole's position - is just a semantic gloss over privatization. the reason we need a healthcare monopoly is that the industry falls into instant market failure. you don't get "efficiencies" when you bring in a market, you just eliminate the incentive to provide care to people that can't pay their way to the front of the line.
and, there's been a recent court ruling in bc that upholds that.
so, i don't think this is misleading at all - o'toole's attempt to differentiate between free market healthcare and a public/private partnership is disingenuous. they're the same thing. and, you simply can't maintain a system with universal access and bring in markets at the same time - it's a contradiction. you just get instant collapse, instant failure.
yes, i'm a socialist, but this is a classical liberal analysis.
now, that said, freeland has certainly been prone to producing false statements in the past. her statements regarding venezuela, for example, have generally been in the realm of pure slander and nonsense. and, the russians are probably right in their accusations of her holding fascist leanings (something that is apparently also true of trudeau, himself). so, there's perhaps some chickens coming home to roost.
but, there's a little bit of irony here and also a reminder to the fake left - when you let censorship run wild, you might find it comes back to bite you. eh?
2:47
for a little context:
2:50
the liberals are in favour of censoring their opponents, but find it upsetting when they get censored themselves.
awww.
2:56
but, let's not get self-righteous ourselves, here. let's try to turn this into a teachable moment.
ms. freeland claims she disagrees with the analysis, but she's surely realizing that there is no mechanism in which to disagree - twitter gets to make any decision it wants, because it has property rights over the server. is she frustrated by that? maybe, now, she might understand what the problem actually is - that we have these private companies being tasked to perform a policing service, which should be publicly funded.
there's two ways around this, that i can see.
1) i'm a socialist, so i like the idea of nationalizing twitter. once the twitter servers are public property, we can go ahead and enforce free speech rules, as developed over the millennia. speaking on twitter should be legally equivalent to demonstrating in a park; the way to get there is to nationalize the servers, so the companies can no longer claim it's their property.
2) you could also just bring in legislation to allow for a court mechanism. in our system of westminister democracy, speech issues are not meant to be determined by private capital, they're meant to be determined in a court of law. twitter should be forced to ask for an injunction before it takes something down. the laws could easily be changed to ensure that this is the case.
so, i mean, freeland can sit in her cesspool of irony and pout if she wants.
...or she can really grasp what just happened and take steps to fix a festering problem.
3:03
there's something else to take note of here, though.
a large percentage of the shares in twitter are held by a handful of saudi aristocrats, who have had repeated differences with freeland, particularly over the issue of female autonomy. there's a good chance that this is interference in the election by the saudis, on top of it being pushback by twitter.
but, regardless of the motives, we've just seen a private, foreign-owned company censor the deputy prime minister, which is clearly going to have an impact. and, that shouldn't happen...
3:10
it is, however, worth pointing out that freeland's own party has dragged it's feet badly on health care funding, including refusing to renegotiate the transfer agreements.
while freeland's statements are not misleading, her own party has recently contributed to the funding problem which fuels the rhetoric of privatization in the first place.
3:18
so, it's monday morning. i got in on thursday night. what have i been doing?
i've been trying to refocus and stay awake...
i'm still sleepy, so i'm going to take another nap. but i want to try to be up for the morning to finish that write-up, catch up on stuff from last week and refocus.
3:40
so, it turns out my growth hormone is at 0.5 ng/ml, which is just barely at reference levels.
the doctors all thought i was nuts to ask for that test, but low growth hormone can lead to poor bone density.
10:35
it seems like the most likely causes of low growth hormone in adults are:
- a tumor in your pituitary gland or
- drugs like cyproterone acetate (which i just got off)
and, there is some risk factor of the drugs causing the tumor.
should i get an mri? i'll talk to him in september..
10:52
i got some coffee for the first time since i came in, so let's try and sit down and do something.
how am i feeling?
my shoulder is a little sore, and i'm suspecting it's because my breast size instantly shot up. i should see a general reversal of the defeminizing i was experiencing over the last year or so, including a return to thinner hair. i've never been able to grow much of a beard, but i had reverted from "almost nothing" to "some mild scruffiness" over the last few months and i'm hoping that clears up without the need to resort to electrolysis. i can handle a bit of facial hair, and just tell people i'm italian.
no, seriously - that should get better, almost instantly.
the last tylenol i took was sunday morning about 8:00 am and i'm doing ok. i mean, i can feel it a bit, but it's not much worse of a sensation in the general region than the-day-after-mexican phenomenon. you know what that's about.
i've called the three doctors i'm dealing with and set follow ups with each. i also have a dentist appointment soon...
so, let's get caught up on email.
14:51
i'm guessing that was probably mike patton's favourite song, fwiw.
it's uncanny. really.
(but, done in 1979)
14:53
this one's the classic, despite what people of questionable taste and consequent metal bro persuasions may claim:
14:58
why are we tiptoing on glass as to not upset the fucking taliban?
listen - we have foreign nationals there. if they don't want to let our people out of their country, and insist on torturing and killing them, that's an act of fucking war and should be treated like one.
what the fuck?
15:32
if this was anything remotely close to a legitimate, civil government, it would be aiding in the evacuation process, not getting in the way and threatening us about it.
15:33
if there were any lingering delusions that the taliban were going to act in a civilized manner, they should be quickly abolished by observing the fact that they're refusing to let our foreign nationals out of the country and insisting on torturing and killing them, instead.
like, wake the fuck up.
do you think this is a formula for stability, you fucking idiots?
15:35
the russians would be just as happy to co-opt the taliban, and will no doubt give it a good try. the chinese seem to even be actively trying to whitewash recent history, leading to a rare backlash by the chinese people, who rightly see them as vicious barbarians.
but, those that care about the struggle against fascism may find themselves aligned with the russians - again - as proxy wars break out in the region. the chinese are powerful, but naive. the russians are the smart tacticians, and if they're mobilizing it's because they realize there's a reason for it.
it's looking like the reagan model was correct. but, it's still too early.
15:49
oh, and i would take russian promises to not interfere with a grain of salt.
that's what they always say, as they're mobilizing.
15:57
if you think the war in afganistan just ended, you need to pull your head out of your ass.
14:04
ok, i'm caught up on my email, let's look at getting that write up done before the end of the night.
18:12
â€Å“We have to find public private synergies and make sure that universal access remains paramount,†- erin o'toole
it's an incoherent string of words that has no meaning in the english language.
do not be fooled by this nonsense - the policies he's advocating would result in severe restrictions to access, unless you can buy your way to the front of the line.
research the catastrophic mess that two-tiered care has created in quebec, and read the recent court ruling about the doctor in bc.
you cannot have your cake and eat it, too - you don't get free market health care and universal access at the same time. you get one or the other. pick which one you want.
18:15
â€Å“We’ve got the Liberal Party putting out misinformation, spreading it online, to the point that Twitter had to flag it,†Mr. Singh said. â€Å“It is really disconcerting … that the current party in power is engaging in exactly what we need to be ending.â€
wow.
he's as dumb as he looks, isn't he?
18:22
this is a smart move, politically - but workers shouldn't fall for it. this is a party that wants to bring in free market healthcare, amongst other anti-worker initiatives.
that said, the conservatives are making a serious play for workers and i would call on the ndp to match it - and really have to call them out on being less socialist than the conservatives, if they don't.
19:05
i mean, the ndp can hardly sit there and let themselves get out-socalisted by the fucking conservatives.
they gotta up their game, clearly - first on housing, and now on worker representation.
19:10
so, let's have some competition here - let's up the stakes.
19:11
you should take this with a grain of salt. the ndp has not followed through with any sort of meaningful climate action anywhere it's actually been elected, either.
think of it like this: if you put them in opposition, they may vote against a few things (although it won't matter because the conservatives will prop the liberals up on oil issues), but if they somehow manage to actually win then that's all out the window - just like our dauphin and his own party.
we're not going to fix the petro-state via bourgeois electoral politics, we need direct action outside of government.
19:24
the ndp is very strongly correlated with a giant industrial union in canada called unifor that represents, amongst other things, oil & gas workers, and automobile workers.
that's right - coal workers, pipeline workers, oil rig workers and auto workers are all represented by the same union. and the ndp is in many ways little more than the political operation of that union.
so, if you think that voting for the party that functionally acts as a front for fossil fuel workers (which is what the ndp is) will lead to lower subsidies for oil & gas, i have a bridge to sell you.
19:30
maybe, one day, unifor will have more workers in renewable sectors.
until then, promises by the ndp to reduce emissions should not be taken seriously, as that would not be in the interest of the union that it acts as political representation for.
19:32
listen to this speech carefully.
19:33
yeah, i've been pointing out for years that keynesian-style stimulus directed at the lower middle class is just going to end up as a handout to banks. there's a very small window where giving people money actually results in spending; if you give it to people with too much money (your typical tax cuts for the rich), it doesn't work, and if you give it to people with too much debt, it doesn't work, either. although this might be the first serious empirical evidence for the latter.....
i generally use this as an argument for debt forgiveness, as a form of stimulus.
but, if all of this free money actually got some people out of debt, it means a fresh round of stimulus might actually work, for the first time in decades.
so, i'm going to call for some studies into this...
20:31
but, people expecting a big spending boom when this is done should think twice, as not many people really saved much, at the end of the day - most people are still underwater.
20:33
yeah, this is what i said last month.
a few things to take note of...
- a lot of wealthy liberals have fled the cities, moving to rural ridings. this is a very big demographic shift that we do not currently understand well, and it's not clear if it's going to help the liberals in rural ridings, hurt them in urban ridings, do neither or do both. that is one potential cause of surprises - liberal breakthroughs in the 905 and conservative breakthroughs in ford-nation regions of the 416 that liberals may have abandoned. you could see some real shuffling. or not. it's very unclear because we don't have the data - we just know things have changed.
- you'd expect older voters to align more with the liberals or the ndp, as they have the more conservative opinions on pandemic restrictions, and that population is at highest threat from the virus. conversely, you'd expect to see some movement towards the conservative party in younger voters who are annoyed by restrictions that don't benefit them. that's another real shuffling of the deck.
- there were existing shifts happening on the fringes of the spectrum. the reality is that your traditional union ndp voters are largely white men, and the ndp's collapse in the last election clearly had a lot to do with them running jagmeet singh. the party is clearly trying to shift bases in reaction to the collapse of industrial unionism in the country; there's a clear attempt to appeal more to new canadians, large percentages of which are actually upper middle class. it's not at all clear how that works out in the end, but it is clear that the base is splintering in some ways and combining in others. i'm very pessimistic about this and expect it will lose them the few bases they have (in places like windsor and hamilton) without giving them the breakthroughs they want in places like brampton.
if these older voters run back to the conservatives because they're more afraid of getting taxed (that's what'll do it. taxes. 'cause they're older and have some assets.) than they are of dying of covid, you're going to get roughly the status quo - or the liberals could even lose a few seats (they were drastically overextended in 2015 and probably still are by quite a bit, especially out east). but, if the liberals can convince them that the conservatives are being irresponsible about covid, this could be a redefining election, as they take control of the traditional right for the next generation, leaving the conservatives with an unstable coalition of young liberals and hardcore party loyalists. that will probably destroy the liberal brand in the long run, but could leave them in a dominant position for the next 20 years.
it's not clear, for the first time in a while. and, for the first time in a while, "undecided" is not code for "disgruntled liberal" - there's a lot of annoyed conservatives in there, too.
so, o'toole needs to find a way to reassure older voters that voting for him is not going to leave them dead - or, at least, that dying is less frightening than being taxed. that seems to be the opposite of what he's doing...
but, i need more data before i start projecting things. this is just preliminary polling confirming my initial non-polling, political analysis. we have no data at all yet.
20:54
nik's polling is historically dead on, but it's mid august and i want to give this some time.
i don't think he's getting a great sample right now.
21:04
the conservatives won the popular vote in the last election, remember.
it's not so crazy to think they might again.
that doesn't mean they'll win the most seats, though.
21:06
tuesday, august 24, 2021
so, if the "reagan model" in afghanistan is correct, what's going to happen next?
well, first let's understand what i think has already happened. please understand that this is blurry..
what we know from analyzing existing data is this:
1) despite a lot of racist analysis, mostly from old white men, and largely based on either very old data from the 80s or 90s, and/or on saudi propaganda, the fact of the matter is that the taliban does not represent the will of the afghan people, at all. there may have been a time in, like, 1991 when they were something approaching a popular resistance movement, in the face of the soviet invasion. but, that was over 30 years ago and recent polling done in afghanistan makes it clear that they're seen by the vast majority of the population as not just an unpopular governing institution, but as a corrupt criminal organization. while afghanistan is a conservative country, the afghan people overwhelmingly interpret the taliban as a mafia-like group of thugs, and not as a valid governing body. if you read the data closely, it's almost like they're seen as fake conservatives that don't actually represent islam. but, the data on afghan popular opinion also actually looks more like tunisian data than saudi data. that is, in terms of muslim states, it actually seemed to be leaning in a more liberal direction, over the last ten years or so. that said, in the deficit of clarity, multiple viewpoints should be considered, but you want to discard any analyses rooted in viewpoints from the 90s or earlier. please ensure that whomever you're listening to is citing recent data, and not out of date data. this runs the gamut from legitimate commentators that appear to simply be out of touch with reality (like chomsky) to more sinister analyses that would appear to be pushing this perspective in order to justify supporting the taliban militarily (which is underlying op-eds in state mouthpieces like the washington post).
2) the afghanistan army did not lose a war with the taliban, nor do the taliban represent a popular uprising against the nato occupation. rather, it's abundantly clear that some kind of deal was made in which the afghan army would evacuate power without a fight. we did not pull out and let the taliban take over, we cut a deal with the taliban that handed them power.
so, the culmination of these two data points is that we have installed the taliban. surely, we didn't do that by accident - it's surely not some kind of mistake.
in fact, the united states has a long history of overthrowing democratic governments and installing fascist military dictatorships in their place, and it sure seems like they've just done it yet again.
so, what happens next?
3) the russians and chinese will no doubt jockey for influence in the region, in an attempt to co-opt the government. if a mistake just occurred, it would appear to be this - we've just given our opponents an opportunity to step in, and they will certainly try. but, the taliban was created by the united states and is funded mostly by saudi money. they're too ideologically opposed to the chinese and may not even want to do serious business with them, especially not if the americans insist otherwise. and, i have a hard time believing that the taliban will ever see the russians as anything other than adversaries.
4) the period of instability and jockeying will end when the americans "pull out", which will immediately be followed by a recognition of taliban rule as legitimate by washington, followed by an announcement of aid and a showering of weapons. that's right - we're going to declare that the taliban are now our friends again. that's the basis of the reagan model - that afghanistan is more useful to us interests as a hotbed of anti-communist resistance, which means the taliban will once again be proclaimed "freedom fighters". some of this will happen over the table, but most of it will happen under the table. we will probably use the cover of gulf funding to accomplish this, but we're ultimately going to end up selling weapons to the taliban.
5) the next step is that the violence begins to spillover into the surrounding areas, but most particularly into western china. us-backed opposition movements for independence in western china will find themselves headquartered in afghanistan, where they will be sheltered by the taliban and receive generous us funding. the hope is that this will topple the chinese state, as afghanistan toppled the soviet state.
(as an aside, i don't think that the war in afghanistan toppled the soviet state. the russians themselves dismantled it in a desire for more personal freedom. and, in the end, there was a us-backed coup that resulted in boris yeltsin seizing power. but, this is the reagan model, and it comes with reaganite delusions about the role of afghanistan in the fall of the soviet union)
the next president will inherit this shift in policy, and we'll see where it goes from there.
in the mean time, what we will have on the ground is something we actually haven't seen since the cold war - a brutally repressive government backed by us weapons. and, if you think that is progress, i do not agree - i think it's making america mccarthyist again.
4:04
biden is essentially reagan redux, so expect something like this soon:
of course, it was as much utter bullshit then as it is now.
9:38
you might not remember this, but biden does.
9:46
john pilger is a reliable source.
"fact checkers" in controlled us media are not.
9:50
this kind of rhetoric is coming from biden.
get ready for it.
9:57
this is weird, but it's consistent amongst multiple polling firms, and one wonders if it's long-term or not.
as is the case pretty much everywhere, liberals tend to do better with younger voters and conservatives tend to do better with older voters. but, the fake left in canada has been very conservative during the pandemic, and the conservatives have been far more liberal. this is opening up a predictable reversal.
we always talk about younger voters not showing up and the conservatives getting a boost from older voters at the box. the opposite might happen, this time - and these polling results may be completely misleading. we're also dealing with demographic switches that we've never seen here, and that's going to fool the modelling.
the reports are suggesting that if the conservatives are doing well in ontario, they should flip seats in the 905. but, that was based on the old demographics. i strongly suspect that the conservative boost is tied more to the 416, at this point - as it's being driven by younger voters that are fed up with the pandemic restrictions, and not your typical older voters in the 905 with property.
nobody's prepared for this, and nobody's modelling is going to get it right. somebody is going to have to redesign this from scratch, and nobody is going to. am i going to have to fucking do it, then? ugh.
it's going to be hard if the polling firms put up paywalls on the data, because i'm not paying them for it.
but, while these numbers might lead to a surprising outcome (if all those older liberals show up and all those younger conservatives do not, the liberals could still barely eke out a majority), if the liberals have managed to completely kill their chances with younger voters by hugging the extreme right during the pandemic, it's going to destroy them in the long run. this could be viciously pyrrhic, they might collapse entirely in ten years.
as i said a few weeks ago, we're looking at volatility like we haven't seen in a long time.
and, i'm going to predict right now that the polling will get it completely wrong - because it's not ready for the shifts that just happened.
10:21
split the data up into urban/rural/suburban categories, please.
it may reveal something surprising.
10:29
listen, i'm upset about the pandemic restrictions, too, but i'm not going to vote for the conservatives. that's not an answer - that's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
we want to return a liberal minority, not to give power to the right. this will pass, and we want the liberals to learn from the mistake they're making and reengage with liberalism, not get wiped off the map.
call your liberal mp and yell at him or her for embracing authoritarianism and abandoning their base. let them know why you're mad. and, then vote strategically to block them from getting a majority...
...but we gain nothing by putting a right-wing government in place, so please be careful not to make that mistake.
10:55
i've been clear as day that i'm not a cultural relativist and i'm not a conservative isolationist, i'm a revolutionary leftist. i'm not interested in the prime directive, i want to burn conservative cultures to the ground and rebuild socialist societies on top of them.
what's bothering me about afghanistan is that i'm left with the deduction that the people were not given the choice - they were handed over to this vicious regime because it's what we wanted.
and, that bothers me.
a lot.
as i said before: it's one thing to stay out of a fight, but it's another to hand your allies over to their enemies. it's yet another to facilitate the imposition of a reactionary government on a society that is moving away from backwardsness and religiosity and conservatism. what we've done is unconscionable - it's a new low, truly.
and i can only offer my solidarity for what's left of the resistance movement and hope they're able to run the barbarians out of the country, and send them back to the gulf states, where they came from.
14:14
does he regularly meet with all the terrorists or just the taliban?
ugh.
something to keep an eye on: who moves in to all of these fancy bases and buildings we're supposedly leaving behind?
17:01
they're going to recognize them...
it's the reagan model.
clearly.
there's almost certainly covert us troops still in the country, then, getting ready to send forces out into the region. and, that's no doubt what the cia director was in afghanistan to talk about.
18:01
who's at bagram?
some sheep-fucking afghan warlord that's never seen a plane before?
who's at the embassy?
etc.
there's state of the art equipment and facilities being left behind, supposedly. that's where this is going to launch from.
18:02
so, there's going to be a few hundred left there, it seems.
18:06
if you don't like the military times, here's the associated press.
or you could google it.
so, there will be special forces continuing to operate in the country...
18:10
they seem to currently be at the airport.
we'll see how long that lasts.
i mean, they're obviously going to try to get back to the embassy, at the least...
18:20
i've pointed to these old men looking at data from the 90s and not realizing that things have likely changed over the last 30 years as a problem, but i'm not sure most of them would care much, anyways.
but, there may be a deeper underlying divide here, in the shrinking of the world that has happened since the 90s. how many people under the age of 40 see afghanistan through the kind of distant, orientalist goggles that a man well into his retirement would? to digital natives, raised in multiculturalism, it's never been this distant, far-off place.
so, is not handing the afghan people over to the taliban in the american interest? well, fuck, what about the global interest? what about some concept of basic solidarity with actual human beings?
but, the world used to be a lot bigger, didn't it?
at some point, somebody is going to need to point to that 20% approval rating biden's picked over this and have it explained to him - may joe biden hasn't changed much in the last 40 years, but the world around him sure has. and, afghanistan is not the distant, far off, foreign land that it was in the 1970s and 1980s, not to a generation of people that were raised in a single, global culture and don't really see national borders as things that are actually real.
so, is there some bush model lingering on? i don't think so - i mean, maybe, in biden's interior, there might be. but i do not think that's what's going on.
20:43
something i'm not getting clear answers to is when these silly "vaccine passports" are going to end. surely, nobody intends to do this permanently. i mean, the vaccines are already running at 50% protection - they'll be useless in a few months.
i'll have to see what happens and react to it as it comes up, but, personally, i'm going to take the perspective that if people don't want my money then i'll go spend it somewhere else...
right now, ontario isn't planning to do anything stupid like that, and i'm going to suspect the government would be smart to avoid it, based on the numbers coming out of the federal election. but, i'll remind the government that michigan has recently passed a law banning vaccine checking. the border remains closed right now, but it won't be much longer before i can decide to take my business to detroit, instead. so, it's something to think about.
but, we'll see how things develop, and if legal action is required or not, as it does.
21:16
i have no standing to sue the government of the united states for barring me from entry.
i'm a guest in the country, to be admitted at their pleasure. i have no say in the matter.
it's very different when i come back to canada, though.
21:20
listen - we all want to follow the science.
and, it's not clear to me why public health experts are treating a highly transmissible, exceedingly volatile, weak coronavirus (the kind that we expect will stabilize as a variant of what we call the "common cold") like it's this stable virus that a simple vaccination is going to protect against.
the science has never suggested that.
we expected from day one that we were going to need to update this vaccine yearly, like we do the flu virus. there's no surprises here.....
21:34
if we're going to do things like force people to show vaccination status before they get something to eat, the science underlying it should be rock solid.
and, all of the science points in the other direction - that such an act is probably just increasing the likelihood of the checker acting as a vector for transmission.
21:36
no, that's not fox news, guys.
that's national geographic.
and, they're citing a study from cambridge.
wake up.
21:42
i basically have nothing to do until they open the border, anyways - i dislike eating in restaurants, i hate sports and there's no live music in windsor for the foreseeable future. eventually, i will prefer shows in small venues, and mostly in detroit - where they're not allowed to check. i haven't been to a concert in a large venue since i was in my early 20s.
so, i'm waiting this out...
but, there's two reasons why vaccine passports are stupid, and the fact that they're an unscientific way to exclude people is actually the less concerning issue of the two. i'm not afraid of this virus and hope to catch it as many times as i can when i'm young so my body recognizes it when i'm older. but, if i was an older person that was vaccinated, and interpreted that as proof that i'm immune, i would be giving myself a false sense of security that might end up killing me. so, the decreasing levels of effectiveness against each successive variant work in both directions - you're both excluding people on really flimsy evidence that wouldn't pass peer review and potentially killing people by deluding them into thinking this is safe.
but, i mean, we always have to learn the hard way, right?
if you're smart, and you're vulnerable, you want to be careful this fall. your flimsy little mask will not save you. and, your outdated vaccine will not, either. you will be at risk for the rest of your life, and will need to make permanent adjustments for it.
but, if you're young, you want to take this on the nose and beat it as many times as you can....
22:11
my guess is that most places i'd want to go to will get bored with these vaccine checks within a few weeks, once they realize how time consuming and annoying it is.
so, i'm going to treat it like an annoying fad i should ignore and that will pass very quickly.
...just so long as the state doesn't get involved. 'cause you're going to regret pushing them to pass a law in six months, trust me.
if some places want to get pushy, that's fine, i'll avoid them until they get bored with it. but, it should be up to the venue, not enforced by the state.
22:32
the public health benefits will be marginal, at best.
it's hysteria, and silliness.
and, it will pass - so long as we let it. so long as we don't get the government involved...
22:33
if you really want to do something for the benefit of public health, then stay away from old people.
and, if you're old, then stay away from young people.
everything else is trivial - truly. it's just marginal probability distributions. the one and only meaningful thing you can do with any certainty is to prevent physical contact with the vulnerable. but we just can't figure that out...we keep looking for a way out..
23:22
the virus is seasonal - it's going to happen over and over and over again every year for the next 100 years.
it doesn't matter if you're vaccinated.
maybe, this year, we'll get used to it.
23:23
it's hard to believe that the taliban are commanding this kind of leverage without some kind of agreement with the saudis anchoring it.
that is also going to need to come out - what exactly it is that is driving the rigidity of this.
the taliban are of no meaningful military threat, and the idea that "american troops would come under threat" comes off as some kind of bad joke. so, why are they setting conditions, here?
it's bizarre - we're not getting the whole story.
23:38
i mean, i was right - johnson did a 180, and is talking about sending them aid and recognizing them as the legit rulers.
there's something very sinister happening here.
23:41
i'm starting to wonder if a false flag is being planned.
23:44
wednesday, august 25, 2021
so, where should i begin? the video component makes the situation a little different, as i kept a running narrative as i went. there's often not much to add. but, i have a few blanks to fill in...
nurse!, i cried, you have to call my ride! my bus is at 17:00!
then, i had to buy a prepaid card at the petro to get another ticket, which was another $80. it's a good thing i had the extra cash, right? thanks, jesus.
as is clear from the video, i tried to hitch from the mcdonalds at college & huron church starting around 3:00 am and quickly realized that it wasn't going to work out as planned. i generally get picked up very quickly, so i was surprised by this, but there are reasons for it. it's dark in the video, but there was construction at the intersection, and it would have been very difficult to stop there as a result of it (as the highway is reduced from four to two lanes). that said, i did get three stops, here - but they were all travelling locally. after a while, i started realizing that many of the truckers were uncomfortable with somebody hitching from the middle of the city like this, and that my chances would be better a little further out of town, where a truck could actually stop. i also noticed that the sun was starting to come up and that my time window to actually get to toronto in time for the surgery was becoming limited, as the traffic through this intersection was set to increase, making it even harder to stop in the reduced lanes.
so, i walked all the way up huron church to what seemed like the on ramp to the actual 401, a stretch of highway that seems to have been redone since the last time that the google maps bots were in the region, and tried to catch somebody getting directly on the 401 from there. i was not there long, and got two stops, but the first wanted to take me to leamington (where local workers pick fruit) and the second seemed to think i was a prostitute. the highway has since been redone, so you can't see the tunnel that opens up at that space now, but i was actually unable to open the (obviously stoned) guy's door when he stopped because the space between the shoulder and the tunnel wall opening was too narrow, which made it clear enough that i wasn't getting anywhere, there. so, i had to make a choice - did i want to follow the on ramp down, hoping it opened up, or try to circle around? i decided on the latter, which was the right choice.
so, i crossed the road (past a meowing cat that i feared was a baby cougar, and note that cougars do meow...) and took a path along the highway to grand marais, before recalibrating and realizing i couldn't cross down to cabana on that side and would have to go around. as such, i decided to just walk directly to the dougall parkway and try from there...
google won't let me walk up the dougall parkway, although it's exactly what i did, so i have to redraw the route from here using a car (which i obviously wasn't in, yet):
i got my first pickup walking up the dougall parkway as the sun was beginning to shine brightly - the first of three heavy smokers that stopped, but i can't complain when i'm hitching, can i? he dropped me somewhere that he thought was a truck stop but was actually a truck inspection stop and that i'm glad i didn't go into, as i would have gotten arrested. i just looked over, saw it was empty, and kept going, as i was late.
in fact, i only stopped for a second before smoker #2 picked me up, and this was an odd individual. he introduced himself as jesus and explained that he was going the other way and turned around to get me because he felt i was in trouble. he lived through a civil war, you see (somewhere in the middle east, i might guess - lebanon?) and felt he had a good sense of when somebody was in particular need. he then pulled out five one hundred dollar bills and handed them to me, which certainly caught me off guard to say the least.
if i were to be a little cynical, i might conclude that he thought i was a prostitute and gave me the cash he was planning on paying out, without asking me to perform. but, i have no real basis for that. he introduced himself as a jesus freak looking to help, and i should take him at face value.
but, i decided not to prod, because as lucky as i was to have an extra $500 in my pocket, i realized i was actually in a very vulnerable position. that kind of generosity rarely comes without strings.
but, he dropped me at the travel j in tilbury and didn't ask me for a thing.
there's obviously some questions that arise when somebody picks you up hitchiking and introduces themselves as god incarnate, then hands you a fair amount of cash. if you've read this blog at all, you know i'm an atheist. i was once picked up by a cult leader in bc, which is probably closer to the reality of the situation. but, if the son of man saw it fit to give me a few dollars, what i'll say about that is that his hindsight was divine - it would turn out that i needed the cash, in the end. one way or another, i needed this to get home, in the end.
so, call it divine intervention, or call it good luck, but let us stop for a minute to give thanks to jesus, whatever that means to you; to me, it means i'm thanking a dude that helped me out in a way he may not have fully understood. i certainly didn't understand it. i had a ticket to get home with in my pocket, and every intent to catch the bus back. alas...
a truck stop was what i wanted; i was hoping to catch a truck heading to toronto, but, after asking around, it became clear that this particular stop was full of people going to the united states. foiled. so, i went up to the highway and gave it a run, then went back up to escape the rain. and, it did in fact rain, but then i headed back out to the road, feeling like i was running out of time...
at the very last minute, somebody going to toronto picked me up in a rather swank brand new mercedes. this was smoker #3, who was a small business owner heading to toronto to meet a client. as it would happen to be, he was also a race car driver in his spare time. so, this was a smooth and rather quick ride. that's some even steven for you - i'm late, and i catch a race car driver that gets me all the way there in a jiffy. his self-interest was that he got to take the car pool lane when he picked me up, which let him zoom through the traffic in mississauga. he got me to toronto by a few minutes after 1:00 (and in about half the time listed in the following picture).
i was not initially sure where i was, so i had to orient myself by the lake; i knew i had to walk away from the lake, and i knew i had to take a right to move in the direction of yonge st. i was planning on walking to the hospital, but i was late, so i walked up spadina, past the cn tower, turned on to front and hailed a cab - and then that $500 found it's first use.
it was an airport cab driver that picked me up, somebody that first immigrated to windsor, before moving to toronto. he liked toronto better, and i don't blame him for it. but, he insisted that the hospital i was going to was the york street hospital and not the michael garron hospital - only to be baffled when we got there that i actually got the name of the place right. it was only a $30 ride, but i only had about $100 in the bank, so that first $100 bill came out here, and i was happy to slap it down on his surprised face - because i sure didn't look like i had a $100 bill in my pocket.
so, i got to the hospital around 13:30 and learned that i was scheduled to go in at 10:45. oops. i knew from what the secretary told me that he's done at 15:00, so i just had to get in on time. and, had they got me in right away, there wouldn't be a second part of the story. but, the nurse in the er had previously clocked me in, which created a computer system error at admitting, and i had to wait over an hour in admitting before i could get up there. that would turn out to be decisive, in the end.
i finally made it up there a few minutes before three, got my clothes off and got sent into the er, where they stuck an iv in my hand and counted me down...
i actually got paranoid at the moment. what was going through my mind was the fuckers have got me, and they'll file it as a covid death, how could i be so dumb as to walk into it, but i was out before i could escape...
...and i woke up without testicles.
they offered me morphine, and i had to very firmly reject it in favour of acetaminophen. i was pretty clear headed when i woke up, and remember taking the two white tylenol pills by chewing them, and following it with water.
you might imagine i'd be in excruciating pain, but i couldn't feel anything at all, a fact that i found surprising but that hasn't altered itself. i was sure that the drugs would wear off and i'd be left immobile, but it just never happened. i initially rejected my popsicle, but relented in due course.
you might imagine i'd be in excruciating pain, but i couldn't feel anything at all, a fact that i found surprising but that hasn't altered itself. i was sure that the drugs would wear off and i'd be left immobile, but it just never happened. i initially rejected my popsicle, but relented in due course.
i then looked up at the clock and realized it was 16:30. fuck.
it was point blank: not happening. uch-o...
my ride showed up at 17:30, and what exactly was i to do? i wasn't able to stay at the hospital, due to covid regulations. so, i took the lift to union, hoping to find a way out. what else could i do?
i realized i probably missed the bus, but could i take a train? via? go? anything? nope - last bus out of town was at 17:00, last train at 17:30. fucked.
insistent on getting out of toronto before dark, i caught the go bus to cambridge, which seemed to be the furthest trip that could be taken. i was hoping to catch a ride to london, and seeing if i could hitch from there, but i was really just trying to flee toronto as fast i could and figure it out from there. $20, from downtown toronto to the edge of town, and i was just happy to get out.
so, i'm in cambridge at 22:30. now, what? right?
well, i needed some meat. i don't eat much meat, but i needed the iron and the fat, out of surgery, and i knew it. they dropped me off at a walmart, so i got a bacon cheeseburger at the mcdonalds. that's another $10 out of my pocket.
now, i needed to find a tim horton's for wifi, and this is a persistent problem that first appears here - i found a tim horton's, but it was closed. what? at 19:00, even. i found this very disorienting, but it seems to be a new reality - tim hortons across the board seem to close early, nowadays.
this was too much walking as it was, but what next? i asked around, and everything was closed. but, i'm face to face with a super 8 and i have $400 in my pocket, so maybe i can stay the night and get on the wifi there? nope - they need a credit card. fuck. i didn't realize that there were more expensive hotels up the street.
they at least agreed to let me use the wifi if i can find an outlet, so i'm stumbling around the block looking for one and finally find one at the petro across the street, which is only live because it's plugged into an ice machine. but, there's a trick - look for the outlets with the ice machines at the gas station.
the wifi at the tim horton's didn't work, and the super 8 said i was too far. but, thankfully, i was able to get into the wifi at the closed home depot in the mall behind me, which was enough to get the point across - the only bus comes through cambridge the next night. so, i can wait 18 hours for it (without a hotel room) or i could try to hitch out of town.
so, i called a cab to get me to the nearest truck stop, which was another flying j.
that's another $50, which was more than i intended, but i had to get somewhere other than where i was, given that i couldn't walk. i was a sitting duck in cambridge; there was simply nowhere to go. if i could get a quick ride out from the truck stop, i could be home before the sun came up. unfortunately, though, the truck stop was dead. fuck.
the logic asserted itself pretty clearly - as i could not walk, i had no choice but to sit there and wait until the traffic picked up in the morning. it actually wouldn't make sense to move at all until the next afternoon, as the bus to cambridge didn't come until the following evening. in the worst case, i'd have to cab back to cambridge to catch the bus, but i wouldn't have to make that choice until the following afternoon, and surely i'd find something going to windsor well before then.
so, i sat and waited. and waited. i bought a lot of coffee, took some extra strength tylenol, chatted with some locals and waited for somebody to pick me up and drive me out.
right when the sun started coming up, that is right when my chances started to improve, the travel j called me in to have me escorted off the property. see, and this is frustrating to me because i explained to them why i was there. but, they seemed to think i was soliciting funds, which was false.
when the cops showed up, i explained to them that i missed the bus out of surgery and did not have another option to get home until the following evening besides hitching, nor could i walk off the property, nor was i about to try to hitch off the 401 in the dark with mobility issues, so they would have to arrest me if the travel j wanted me off the property, which was an unreasonable request. i'm sure i could have caught something within minutes once the sun cane up. the cops did not initially accept any of these claims, and rather tried to coerce me into getting up and walking, which was met with point blank resistance. i would have gladly caught a transit option out of town, but none existed, and the situation before us was the consequence of a lack of transit options: i really had no way out besides hitching, and there was really nowhere for the cops to drop me off, not even a bus station. after some back and forth, one of the cops suggested dropping me off at a hospital, as i could at least wait there for a few hours until the bus came. so, they actually drove me into cambridge and dropped me off at the hospital and then threatened to throw me in jail if they saw me hitching again, thereby adding an extra day to the journey home.
assholes.
there would of course be no basis for such an arrest - it would be police harassment. but, once i found myself at the hospital in cambridge, it no longer mattered - the logic flipped over,, and it was then easier to take the bus home.
dropping me off at the hospital was really just an excuse to sleep somewhere - something that should not have been denied to me in toronto - so i was able to get a few hours of sleep at the emergency room before getting released around noon. i then had roughly seven hours to find a bus ticket, find a way to print it, get to the bus stop and get on the bus.
first, i had to get into kitchener, so i took the bus in to the sportsworld plaza, which is where the bus to windsor leaves from.
i then caught the bus to the library to buy the ticket and print it:
i stopped to buy some toothpaste & a toothbrush at the layover, because it had been too long....
i didn't get much of a tour of the downtown kitchener public library, but i did happen to notice that they had a gibson acoustic signed by jim cuddy in the library, which is a piece of canadiana that you don't see every day. free printing, too - hey. score. so, i was in and out pretty quick, and i'll thank the library for the experience. they probably had no idea.
i brushed my teeth on the side of weber (incorrectly pronounced weeber by the locals) and caught the 8 back to the mall, then the 206 back to the sportsworld complex:
at this point, it was around 16:00. the bus was coming at 18:50. so, i got a chicken caesar pita (no caesar) at the pita pit, got an extra large coffee at the timmy's and waited it out....
the bus finally arrived at 18:50, and i was fast asleep within seconds, although i do definitely remember stopping in london and watching the entire bus get off to take a smoke, and then having to deal with the consequence of twenty smokers walking back in to the bus, many of them with nicotine-soaked masks on top of everything else. i had a sweater to hide in, thankfully...
but, then i was home.
finally.
there is a federal election right now in canada, and let me just state the obvious - once a day service in off hours is not sufficient for the 401 corridor. i understand that ridership is low, but the same can be said of most city buses, and they run at a loss because it's a public service. this is a market failure, and that's all you're going to get out of it if you leave it up the market. so, i'm going to call on the federal parties to propose a properly integrated public transit network that ensures that this doesn't happen to anybody else.
3:20
i'm going to call on the pmo of canada - whomever is in it next month - to break with the g7 should (when.) it chooses to recognize the taliban.
this is coming and canada should reject it.
11:16
so, surveys come in suggesting that students are upset about pandemic restrictions and the government restricts their access to the vote - "in a pandemic".
i mean, they're explicit - students don't deserve a vote, because it's a pandemic. surreal.
it's the kind of voter suppression you expect from the hard right in the united states.
11:23
these are trivial fluctuations in the margin of error, in polling done at the end of the summer.
11:30
it is a part of the mandate of congress to observe situations on the ground themselves, and i would encourage more members of congress to see the situation first hand.
11:41
so, let me understand this correctly.
the official position of the united states government, which it is also enforcing on it's "allies" (more like client states, and this is laying that bare) is that the united states will pull out on or before aug 31st and if you can't get your citizens and friends out of the country before that then they'll be left to their fate at the hands of the taliban, and they don't care because it's not in their self-interest to care.
it clearly is in their self-interest to care - these are core members of a 100+ year old alliance that are being told that the rights of their citizens are inconsequential. is the united states so myopic and delusional as to not think that protecting it's core allies is in it's self-interest?
what exactly is it's self-interest, according to donald trump, i mean joe biden?
i thought the united states had a core military doctrine of nobody being left behind.
so, what exactly is happening, here?
11:47
so, the official policy of the united states is that it's allies will be left behind in a war zone to be tortured and killed by vicious, barbaric terrorists, and meh, they don't care.
am i understanding that correctly?
11:50
i'd consider that a red line, and suggest there will be consequences for it.
11:53
is the "peace agreement" signed with the taliban of greater importance to mr biden than solidarity in nato?
does he consider the taliban more worthwhile partners than canada, or the uk?
11:58
or does he just think he's the emperor of the world and everybody has to fall in line when he pronounces truth and dictates behaviour?
12:00
one way or the other, it opens up a lot of questions as to whether it's in canada's self-interest to remain a part of this alliance - or not.
12:01
you would think that man in his late 70s would have learned by now that those who treat their friends with contempt will eventually find themselves without any.
12:12
so, now they're claiming that the taliban fighters that were being held in the areas that we handed to the taliban on a silver platter are actually isis fighters, not taliban fighters - a gargantuan pile of bullshit, that we're being directed to swallow with a shit-eating grin.
one wonders if they're even the same people, or if we just flew in thousands of isis fighters from the gulf and let them loose, and are going to pretend they were escaped from the jail.
but, the sum total is we're being conditioned to believe that isis is a threat in afghanistan, all of a sudden - leading to the logical necessity of sending the taliban "freedom fighters" fresh weapons to fight them.
13:04
remember the "moderate rebels" in syria?
well, now we have the "freedom fighters" in afghanistan.
it's the same bullshit. except that we controlled the democracy in afghanistan (and did not in syria), so it was very easy to dismantle the state and hand it over to the terrorists, who are now our proxy in the region and will do the dirty work that the civilian government wouldn't and couldn't.
it follows that nobody should be getting tortured and dying in afghanistan - unless somebody on our side wants it to happen.
but, that's not what anybody is going to think. i'm not presenting a conspiracy theory, exactly; conspiracy theories try to gather evidence that challenges the dominant narrative in order to make what is essentially a legal case. i'm operating in the realm of deductive logic, and not pretending that evidence is useful, in context, as i know it is not. evidence for this or that is doctored; i could fake evidence to counter the existing fake evidence, but it's the wrong epistemology. so, i can't prove anything, and i'll concede it - i can present a theory and you can tell me if it unfolds or not. and, i'm not suggesting infallibility. i could be wrong.
but, i'm coming to a conclusion - this is the reagan model, and the taliban are now our proxies in the region. they're certainly not beyond being bribed, so it might not be permanent. but, other proxies will develop to counter their influence, and the war will continue from there.
it is not clear if a redeployment will follow, or on what terms, but i would expect some kind of direct us military presence in the region to continue - either via private contractors, via covert forces or via acual troops, or some combination of the bunch.
biden seems to have just picked up on a scheme left to him by trump, which appears to have been an election ploy to both run on a peace deal in afghanistan and turn the fighting over to groups that could behave in a less restrained fashion. trump repeatedly argued against fighting with a hand tied behind your back. so long as they can be kept under direct us control, the taliban will show no such restraint and no such concerns for human rights, which is what the pentagon wants.
it's the same logic that has led to the us hiring contractors instead of using a professional standing military; mercenaries (the historical term for contractors) tend to be better trained and more ruthless than forces the state can train and equip by themselves.
isis is the excuse, but we control isis everywhere else and i'm sure we control it in afghanistan, too.
so, the obama model was to coerce the state into turning itself into a fighting force, which worked well enough in iraq but did not work in afghanistan. reports suggest that the afghan army was ordered by the pentagon to stand down. if you listen to ghani, he'll say he didn't want to fight a prolonged civil war; whatever the truth is, the pentagon seems to have picked the taliban over the afghan security forces, as a stable security partner in the region. this is the reagan model - to abandon the pretense of a democracy in the region, and install a us-backed military dictatorship as a mercenary force to carry out our dirty work, instead. and, that seems to be the truth of it.
ok.
mystery solved.
back to the update post i was working on, then.
we'll see how this unfolds, but i'm convinced i've cracked it and am moving on. and, it's up to all of us to react to our local governments for participating in it.
13:34
somebody should pay the guy, clearly.
i mean, it's iconic - and he didn't get paid for it.
22:34
i'm going to agree that the language is vomit-inducing, but i think it's fairly clear from the context that she's making a delusional plea for amnesty that, while delusional, is probably sincere. you want to read this more as pragmatism than anything else.
i mean, i somehow doubt that addressing the taliban as barbarian pedophiles was going to result in the outcome she was looking for. and, you can look at that as nauseating in itself - that we're resorting to deference and pleas in the face of an enemy that's barely out of the iron age.
but, it's not what they're framing it as - and i wouldn't worry about that, until you start seeing her walking around in a niqab.
22:46
you forgot they were pedophiles too, right?
yup.
22:47
the taliban would kill ms monsef on contact.
and, she knows that.
22:52
the taliban would spend roughly ten seconds looking at ms monsef, shoot her in the face and throw her in a ditch.
and, she knows that.
23:14
the thinking is they'll create a stable investment climate, though.
gotta get those minerals out to market.
23:17
i'm keeping an eye on what the russians are doing because it's a better metric. america is the leviathan, so it's constantly funding all sides and supporting and opposing everything at the same time. russia remains a nation state, and the americans know who their primary foe still is.
so, the russians are evacuating, purportedly under fear of getting drawn into a conflict with isis, which they fully understand is a us proxy.
but, i'm less concerned about that. what i find more revealing is that it indicates they're pulling back from trying to influence the taliban directly.
if the russians thought they could sway the taliban, they wouldn't be leaving.
it's making me wonder, though - is something destructive about to land in the country?
23:40
thursday, august 26, 2021
there's a serious question here - what kind of reparations is afghanistan entitled to?
see, this is a complex question, because i think you have to have a representative government in place (which the taliban are not.) before you can look at reparations, and the only way to get a representative government in place is to bomb the thugs out of power and prop it up. we've been through this before - it's the same fundamental thing we had to do in germany, except we refused to actually do it in afghanistan.
further, while the initial occupation had a lot of "collateral", these are concerns that have largely faded over the last 10+ years. bush was bombing wedding receptions. we haven't seen that kind of thing in a long time. i mean, we've seen civilian casualties, but they've been mostly taliban sympathizers, and, geneva convention notwithstanding, the line is actually pretty blurry, in a lot of these areas.
so, yes - i would support some form of reparations in the abstract for the nature of the war from about 2001-2010, but the funds should go into some kind of fund that's only accessible by a democratic, representative government. and, i have no interest in pretending that the taliban are the "people's choice", as per the propaganda out of beijing - this is not a legitimate government under any kind of international law, and i'm not going to ever accept that it is.
of course, this is actually just an excuse for the chinese to try to curry favour with the taliban, and maybe sucker the americans into ponying up for funds it's going to have to put down itself - but only from the delusional chinese perspective, which legitimately appears to have no idea at all what's going on.
0:39
the chinese are legitimately out of the loop.
0:42
According to the United Nations, anti-government elements were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011.
i believe those numbers are roughly accurate for the following years.
so, i mean - yeah, the bush years were awful. but, that was less than half of the war, and things really flipped over dramatically.
and, this is the part that a lot of older analysts seem to be missing - it's not 2002 anymore.
0:47
trump was responsible for an increase in bombing, but, even so, the taliban were still responsible for far more civilian deaths:
All sides – the Afghan government, the U.S. and its allies, along with the antigovernment militant groups – have escalated their attacks during various periods of negotiations. This has led to a predictable and alarming increase in civilian deaths. Antigovernment elements, including the Taliban and ISIS, killed an average of 1,964 civilians per year between 2007 and 2016. Between 2017 and 2019, these forces killed an average of 2,071 people each year, a slight but significant 5% increase.
The U.S., its allies, and the Afghan Government, which the United Nations calls ProGovernment Forces (PGF), also escalated their operations in the period immediately before and during the negotiations in hopes of retaking disputed territory and gaining leverage. As a consequence, the number of civilians killed and injured by pro-government forces also grew in the years prior to the U.S. peace agreement in early 2020. From 2007 to 2016, PGF killed an average of 582 civilians each year; from 2017 through 2019, Pro-Government Forces killed an average of 1,134 civilians each year, a nearly 95% increase.
1964/(1964 + 582) = 77%. on average.
2071/(2071 + 1134) = 65%. it's still the vast majority.
so, i mean...how can we justify giving reparations to the taliban? that's crazy talk.
now, you can argue that we have all the power, so we have all the responsibility. but, israel kills that many harmless gazans in an afternoon. while it's maybe not the most illuminating comparison, it gets the point across - if you want to look at a brutally disproportionate onslaught, look at israel. that is what afghanistan is not.
america does have an obligation to rebuild, but not until the taliban is done away with, first.
1:02
finally.
fuck.
i'm going to stick with the fluoride baths, but i'm taking the toothpaste out of the coffee.
11:20
yup.
but, let's understand. the idea of this pullout was to dump the fighting on the taliban, itself - and these are barbarians, remember, they like to fight wars, and they're good at it. so, it's kind of half a pyrrhic victory (in reward for the prize of governing afghanistan, the taliban will now face a us and saudi-funded isis insurgency) and half a divide and conquer strategy. meanwhile, we'll expect them to do our dirty work in the region (fund insurgencies in china and russia), and maintain stability for mining companies. it's everything that the occupation wanted and couldn't get from a democratic government. i mean, one thing that all ideological opponents agree upon is that fascist dictatorships are better at war than liberal democracies are, right?
so, this is not likely to be used as a justification for a redeployment, the pullout seems to be real (if illusory), but rather as a reason to sell weapons to our new allies, the freedom fighters in the taliban.
it's obviously not sustainable, and history will condemn it as base trumpian stupidity, but it's what we're trying. the taliban will no doubt enjoy being in charge for a while, and then realize they got played as dumb barbarians by the scheming empire and are stuck in a quagmire with no end. they will realize they have more in common with isis and try to build a common front, only to be overrun by cia agents embedded within the fake jihadist camp.
china has a huge opportunity to take direct control, but they're too clueless to use it and will instead push for traditional relations with one or both of the us puppet forces, unaware of what's really going on.
but, now i'm being a clairvoyant, and i try to avoid that.
the short term reality is that we're going to prop up our friends, the taliban (which we created to fight the soviets), to fight our enemies, isis (which we control and fund via proxies in the gulf). it's a ridiculous sham. the war's not over, it's just starting a new phase of proxy involvement. and, the taliban - dumb barbarians that they are - could take quite a while to figure out that they got played.
i would expect the return of a skeleton force to run the airfields and embassies and stuff.
11:38
it's the old imperial treachery trick.
that's the second time the barbarians have fallen for it this century.
eh?
12:05
the oldest trick in the book!
read history, you'll get it.
12:06
when the liberals start campaigning on conservatives supporting private health care (which they haven't been as aggressive in rooting out as they ought to be, partly due to jurisdictional issues), you know they're in trouble.
you could hear the desperation from trudeau from the start - he knows he's in trouble. but, he knows it's just going to get worse, too. if he somehow manages to lose this thing to this gorbachevesque doofus, it'll be easy to make fun of him, but he knows the choices a liberal government is going to make are going to make this harder, the longer he waits.
if you think this is a hard sell now, wait until after the austerity budget.
but, what are the chances that the conservatives are going to do this, really? the right answer is that if you care about universal health care, it's not a bet you want to make - because they'd do it tomorrow, if they thought they could.
the kind of slow death they're articulating is likely to run up against legal challenges and mass revolt and they know they need to be careful about it. but, don't mistake a tactic of slow adoption with a disinterest in application.
it's not a gamble i'm interested in making, that's for sure.
14:46
also, this clampdown by the provincial ndp in bc is going to net the conservatives 20 seats in the province...
trudeau might want to give horgan a call.
15:27
the winner of the federal election will have little consequence on whether your region goes into lockdown this fall or not.
but, i'd guess a large percentage of people don't understand that very well.
15:30
....and, if the end result of this is a "no more lockdowns" statement by the general public, maybe it's what the political class needs to have put in front of them to properly react.
15:32
"but 60% of people support vaccine mandates"
sure - because they don't want another lockdown.
but, add it up.
liberal - 33
ndp - 20
bloc - 5
green - 4
===============
62%
that leaves 40% of the population on the other side of it - and 35%+ of them are going to support the centre-right.
overwhelming support for authoritarian approaches to the pandemic is both easily miscalculated and easily misread.
15:49
the pmo is run by a lot of staffers and amateurs.
this is the kind of mistake you'd expect them to make, and that they should have made a long time ago.
15:51
when you have an electoral system that is defined by massive splitting on the (fake) "left" and massive consolidation on the right, it is basic math to understand that introducing any kind of "wedge issue" at all will massively benefit consolidated support on the right, while leading to fragmentation on the (fake) "left".
yet, it's the liberals that keep bringing in wedge issues.
...because they all went to school in the states, and they're tying to apply american political theory into a european-style spectrum.
it's just utter incompetence by out of touch idiots.
15:58
there was a reason harper ran on these really narrow issues, and it's because he at least understood the spectrum - and he knew that polarizing the electorate was in his benefit.
the liberals are not facing the same spectrum as the democrats and cannot benefit by exploiting wedge issues in that manner. rather, they need to run on a more blurry platform that's about feelings and broad rhetorical ideas, a general vision for the future that can attract as many people as possible, and avoids creating these kinds of defining ballot box issues that will alienate people into binary choices. the liberal party needs to be a big tent, or it's fucked.
it's just a question of there being one specific choice on the right and a whole bunch of different choices on the fake left. when you design that game, it's baked into the structure of the electorate - wedge issues can only help the right and only hurt the fake left.
16:09
you're looking at 60 dead civilians in that terrorist attack in kabul, that i'm strongly suggesting was designed to generate support for the taliban as a force against extremism.
it's a sad, twisted joke.
it's a reminder that the war carries on - and that removing salaried american soldiers from the country (that volunteered for this job and get paid for it) won't do much to protect afghan civilians (who volunteered for nothing and don't get paid at all) from further attacks.
...if that's what you thought, for some delusional reason.
but, i'll say it again - fuck the troops. that's the least of my concerns....
16:27
pulling nato out of afghanistan will not end this war, it will merely remove the least evil belligerent from participating in it, and leave the battlefield free for far less moral actors to run amok over.
and, as this descends into a vicious conflict between ruthless actors, the (flawed) proportionality of us actions in the region will quickly start to look like the good old days, when some restraint was being applied...
16:30
ok, so it's been a week since i was out of surgery and i'm actually feeling a lot better. must be all of the vitamin c.
i've been off the tylenol completely for days, and i'm pretty sure i can walk endlessly without pain, although i'm not going to risk it.
while i got essentially nothing done, i'm ready to refocus, now.
14:51
20 years is a long time, and it's a ridiculous fallacy to try to analyze the withdrawal in terms of the invasion. the existence of this guy is proof that the country was changing and that attitudes about realities on the ground in 2001 (or 1991...) need to be updated to be coherent in 2021 - or risk being rooted in racist stereotypes that are simply no longer empirically correct.
(the youtube video appears to have been pulled, but the clip is available at democracy now:
i find it sickening to watch this parade of racist old white men approaching the microphone to applaud themselves for being right about the impossibility of changing the culture, as thousands try to desperately flee.
19:20
i want to address another point, this idea that it's not the american military's role to protect foreign civilians from terrorism and heteropatriarchy.
well, i mean what exactly do you suppose the american military's role is, then, exactly? to protect foreign capital? to advance imperialism?
if i were to devise a list of things that the hegemon ought to be doing, advancing human rights would be near the top of the list.
now, it should be clear that i'm not naive about this. i'd challenge you to find a more cynical analysis - you won't find one. i understand that the role of the american military is to protect foreign capital and to advance imperialism.
but, i don't understand how you can stand on the left and aggressively push this argument, that this isn't our problem. that's a very right-wing perspective, and i find it kind of deflating. if america is going to have a huge army, and i have a say in it, i'd rather it be used to protect civilians from terrorists than used to maximize profits. that's my vote.
and, i'm going to make it a point when it comes up to aggressively push the idea that america shouldn't be sending troops abroad to maximize corporate profits - not that they shouldn't be advancing human rights.
21:40
if there's a reason to have a big, global army, there's few things i can imagine it doing that would utilize it better than what we were doing in afghanistan.
this idea that this isn't what this big, global army is for is ass backwards - it's the only thing it ought to be for.
21:42
again - i'm not a conservative isolationist, i'm a revolutionary leftist.
i'm in full, eager support of using violent force to institute positive change.
that's a key plank in any socialist theory that's ever existed.
do you think the warlords in afghanistan are just going to give up? no - they need to be defeated.
21:46
you can't be a pacifist and a socialist at the same time, there's a fundamental contradiction underlying it.
you can be some kind of reformist liberal that wants to institute change by using the state. sure.
but, the ideology on the fake left that leads to pacifism is really ultimately some kind of quakerism - that's the historical basis, whether you realize or not. it's maybe the last vestige of traditional conservatism in american culture, and i wish all you people identifying as leftists would kind of clue into that...
21:51
i, personally, have absolutely no patience for quakerism or pacifism, at all - don't waste my time with that kind of bullshit.
21:54
let me pose the question like this: is it possible for the taliban to coexist with socialism?
i claim it is not.
21:59
my ancestry.com results should be ready some time soon.
but, to my knowledge anyways, i have absolutely no connection whatsoever to puritanical america. my ancestors came here as factory workers and shop owners in the late nineteenth century, from italy and ireland and finland and norway - and probably from somewhere in the middle east, as well.
i have no cultural connection to that at all - i want perpetual, global revolution. and, i'd rather have the empire work towards that (even if it's not in the empire's self-interest) than work against it.
22:14
i'm not a trotskyist, i'm an anarchist.
but, i'll side with the trotskyists over the quakers, that's for sure.
it's an accident - nobody intended this in 2001. biden is right about that. but, arguing for pullout because the mission isn't doing what the neocons wanted it to do, and is actually helping the people there, however accidentally, doesn't strike me as the right approach by a left. a left should be taking advantage of that mistake and trying to exploit it, to lay the conditions for socialism in the long run.
22:18
that said, i'm willing to give people a few weeks worth of slack, because there seems to be a widespread level of delusion. people seem to think we got beat by some sheep-fucking goat herders and had to flee, but it's a confirmation bias on a false reading. that's what you expected, so that\s what you see.
it's not going to take long for the lie to fall apart and the new reality of collusion to assert itself.
and, we'll see how people react when that's clear.
22:21
if your argument ends up something along the lines of "afghanistan is a conservative society, and we shouldn't interfere in it", then you're not a leftist and you can basically fuck off.
22:22
to be clear - i generally argue against both violence and wanton property destruction, but it's tactical, it's not moral.
if we ever get to critical mass, i'll be the first to argue in favour of storming parliament and permanently deposing the leaders; if i were to try that tomorrow, i'd just get killed. so, that would be tactically stupid. but it wouldn't be immoral - and that's not the point, anyways.
if you really, honestly hold to this idea that you can't have a violent overthrow for moral reasons, you're just condemning yourself (and the world) to the status quo, into perpetuity.
22:36
in a situation like afghanistan, where you have a vicious gang of barbarians literally going around killing people on the streets, there's a moral obligation to fight back.
you can't escape that - so you have to pick which side you're on.
22:37
i was not aware that avi lewis was running in this election.
hrrmmn.
22:56
How, exactly, did the Biden administration̢۪s critics think U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan was ever going to end?
see, this is maybe a part of the bourgeois left's fault, for demanding an exit strategy in iraq. but, we still have troops in germany, in korea, in japan, in the philippines, etc. the idea that a war has to end has become dominant, but it's kind of a silly idea - wars don't actually have start and stop points like that, except in oversimplified history lessons. world war one became world war two became the cold war, and world war one had roots in the franco-german wars, and all the way back to napoleon, which goes back to charlemagne.
wars are like diamonds - they're forever. all of them.
so, the question becomes not how it is that we end this local conflict but how we end all war, and that is rather beyond me, but i'll propose a suggestion - when we get to a global socialist society. and, i think we need to vanquish organizations like the taliban as a prerequisite for that, however long it takes.
i can try to get to the intent of the question, though, and i'll tell you what my honest answer is, which is that the people of afghanistan would need to rise up and do away with the taliban. you can tell me that it's been 20 years and it hasn't happened, but what's 20 years? it's nothing - a child barely even reaches adulthood in 20 years.
if the emancipation movement in the united states had given up after 20 years, where would we be today? women's movements? ecological movements? it's a dumb argument to suggest that if it can't get done in a mere 20 years then it'll never get done. and, i see a lot of evidence of substantive change on the ground.
so, i get that there's angst, and i understand that bush didn't intend to put an occupation force in the country to change the culture. but, putting an occupation force in the country to change the culture isn't something to oppose, when it's already there. it's a better idea than a military force to protect mining interests, or fight china. and, 20 years is barely enough time to start a movement, and certainly not enough time to give up on one.
so, call me a lost optimist if you must, but i actually think the evidence on the ground supports the idea that, with enough time, afghanistan would have thrown the taliban into the dung heap, through a combination of popular resistance and demographic overturn, if they just had a few generations to do it in. yes - a few generations. 200 years, not 20.
but, that wasn't in line with the imperial self-interest.
(edit: let me rephrase that - it wasn't in biden's flawed perception of the imperial self-interest. i think it actually was in the imperial self-interest.)
23:20
also, i find this idea of "it's their culture" to be disingenuous.
1) the region was actually historically buddhist. it's muslim because some people went in with weapons and converted everybody with force. then, the mongols came in and carried out one of the worst genocides in world history, and islam was what was left after the carnage. i've said this before - the region never fully recovered. but, "their culture" is essentially a refugee culture that never rebuilt and is foreign to the region in the first place.
2) it's stated in a way that denies history - as though "their culture" is insulated from global change, and stuck in some kind of point of perpetual stasis. when did the left start pushing bullshit like that? "their culture" has to adjust and adapt...
3) ....like our culture did. we used to live in a viciously repressive christian society, where we banned reading, killed witches and launched crusades. then we changed. right?
again - "it's their culture" is just an argument that is void of critical analysis. it's dumb. but, it's what you frequently hear from fake leftists.
and, don't get confused - that's about the fakest left that could be fake. it's the literal negation of hegel.
23:44
friday, august 27, 2021
let's stop to remind ourselves that the election in canada is not about afghanistan, it's about justin trudeau's attempt to evade accountability in the house of commons.
6:05
the russians seem to think there's something to the reagan model, anyways.
11:13
it looks like the same thing is happening in california - a small-l liberal state that is so frustrated by over the top restrictions that it's on the brink of electing a republican.
despite what clueless fake left pundits claimed, this was predictable. most issues that drive the soft left vote and define the political spectrum attach a higher value to freedom on the political left, not the political right. and, these words have meanings - liberal means more freedom, and conservative means less.
i know that this has gotten blurry in recent years, but the electorate simply hadn't shifted because it didn't take the political class seriously. sure, it was the republicans out there talking about freedom and democracy, but it was the democrats protecting abortion rights.
that's changed, now. for the first time, action has been matched to rhetoric. and, the ground is shifting in california in a way that it perhaps hasn't since loma prieta.
arnie was a fluke - this might be structural. it might be generational. and it might last a while.
11:38
we have a generation of kids being raised into a reality where the democrats are widely seen as fascists trying to take away their freedom.
and, all i can say in response is that they're both fascists trying to take away your freedom - don't run into the arms of the right. i have no defense for the fake left right now, at all.
11:39
i saw this band in a closet in ottawa a few years ago.
it was very, very loud.
11:41
yeah, if i had kids i would opt to home school them this year rather than force them to wear a mask. i think the science is clear - this isn't justified, remotely. so, i don't expect this rule to withstand a court challenge, and would choose to simply wait it out.
the benefit of public over home schooling is the socialization, but i would rather my kids not be socialized into a reality of mask wearing.
11:55
so, there should be a bill ready by now, right?
*crickets*
if you didn't see it coming last time, you have no excuse at all this time.
12:23
as far as i am concerned, this would at this point be the legitimate head of the legitimate afghan government, now in exile.
it's probably worth giving it a minute to read through it.
12:38
international law provides for almost no scenario where a group of armed thugs can overthrow a democratically elected government by force.
as the president has stepped down, the legitimate head of state, as laid out in the constitution, is the vice president, currently in exile.
that's what anybody pushing a consistent rule of both international and domestic law should uphold.
some people don't care about that, and whatever. but, there's massive hypocrisy going on amongst people that routinely claim to be in favour of upholding international law, but are not concerned about it at all in this scenario.
12:50
if the taliban are so insistent that they represent the people, let them run a fair election and win it.
12:53
this shouldn't have happened, but it did. now, the only way out is via elections.
so, that needs to be what the international community should be pushing for - there needs to be elections in the country.
and, aid and recognition should be tied to the taliban winning an election, not toppling the government by force.
12:54
if the taliban can run and win an election, then fine - they've proven they're the "people's choice".
if they refuse to allow one, they're implicitly demonstrating that they don't represent the people and should not be recognized at all.
12:56
this isn't a cultural question, either, as disinterested as i may be in the premise. it's a question of international law.
12:57
democracy is not a foreign concept in afghanistan - the loya jirga is a tribal democracy, akin roughly to an afghan magna carta.
nothing else could demonstrate their legitimacy, or lack thereof, and that needs to be the message by the west - might does not make right, and we don't overturn democratically elected governments by force, or recognize attempts by armed militias to do so.
no aid should flow until they announce the date of an election to transfer power from.
13:01
am i hypocrite in arguing that overthrowing the democratic representatives was illegal, and overthrowing the taliban was not?
no, because the taliban were never a legitimate government. i'm of the view that the nato invasion of afghanistan was a legitimate, legal operation, although it would have been more legal if it was done under the banner of the united nations.
this narrative that afghanistan was a stable country run by a legitimate taliban party and was overthrown by a nato occupation is not reflective of reality; the taliban were never the legitimate rulers of the area, so what the nato invasion was doing was parachuting into a country that had no legitimate government and installing one in it's place. you can't really argue against that on legal grounds, unless you're an anarchist, which i am. but, i'd consider the taliban to be bad enough guys that you had to fight them...even if i'd rather the un had installed a socialist government rather than the one they put in. still, a bourgeois liberal representative government is better than a group of tribal warlords that rule by fear and exploitation.
20 years later, in 2001, a legitimate, democratic government existed. the situation as it was is no longer relevant - what we have is an illegitimate militia organization overthrowing a legitimate, democratically elected government. that's the only legally coherent way to look at it.
there's no hypocrisy here, unless you misunderstand the situation in 2001 on purpose.
13:10
see, here's the question - how do you interpret the taliban? were they a state actor or a non-state actor? were they a government or a terrorist group?
if you take the position that the taliban were a non-state actor and a terrorist group (as i would) then the un security council resolutions are more than sufficient to justify the action that took place.
if you take the position that the taliban were a state actor, then it gets a lot more blurry. but, i don't think that position can be upheld. if you accept a lockean concept of legitimacy, the taliban had absolutely none at all. further, they only controlled a fraction of the country, and had minimal bureaucracy or services in the region they controlled. you'd be stretching the concept of "government" or "state" pretty far, and i'm not going with you on that.
i think the facts on the ground are clear enough and the taliban should be described as what they were - a group of barbarians, and not anything approaching any kind of actual state.
but, there is a state in the region, now. and, these ambiguities no longer exist - the taliban are clearly a militia group, and they have clearly overturned a democratically elected government. the law is pretty clear as to what should happen, next.
13:32
no sane person would support something like this, but he's insistent on dying on this hill.
we're going to have a conservative government this fall....i don't want one, but he's committing suicide and that's the inevitable result of it.
13:38
the liberals have proven they're interchangeable with the conservatives on emissions targets.
if you care about emissions targets, you cannot vote for either of them, with conscience.
13:45
maybe i should type this out.
- i am exceedingly socially liberal and overwhelmingly economically socialist.
what are the parties offering?
- the conservatives are still on balance mostly socially conservative, but are offering more socially liberal positions, while remaining exceedingly economically liberal. they are a terrible match economically, and still a very poor match, socially. i have no intention of supporting the conservatives.
- the liberals are still on balance mostly socially liberal, but are moving very rapidly to embrace social conservatism (especially around vaccines). they have always offered a kind of mixed economy perspective, where they flirt with socialist ideas under a dominantly liberal framework. they remain more appealing than the conservatives, but i cannot and will not vote for a party led by justin trudeau a third time, because i realize he's the primary driver of the move towards social conservatism. i want to coerce the party back in a more socially liberal direction, and i will do so by withholding my vote and being aggressive as to why.
- the ndp have always leaned towards social conservatism, although that wavered a little in the 90s and 00s. however, they've also always been the most economically socialist party. this generally leaves me very frustrated, as i want to support their economic policies but don't like their social policies. right now, they are by far the most socially conservative of the three parties and are consequently not a valid alternative to the liberals, who i am avoiding this cycle due to their own turn towards social conservatism.
- the greens are what is left and are also falling under the sway of social conservatism, this cycle. their economic platform is a mix of socialism and liberalism, but leans a little more socialist than the liberals.
so, as a social liberal and economic socialist, i'm left without a good match, this cycle. the party i would most agree with economically (the ndp) is also the party i'm finding myself most in opposition to, socially. and, the party i would normally agree with most socially (the liberals) is very purposefully and very consciously going after it's own base with an exacto knife, to cut them out. even the last resort protest party is moving in a direction towards social conservatism that i cannot support.
so, i am therefore disenfranchised, and badly enough that i am not intending to vote.
in order to bring me back into the voting population, at least one of the three fake left parties will need to move back towards a socially liberal platform, and i would prefer the greens to do it. while i am trying to coerce the liberals away from social conservatism by withholding my vote, i realize that the longterm trends are in that direction. and, that does open up a gaping space on the left.
14:41
for reference, i would describe the republicans as radically socially conservative on balance (but becoming more socially liberal) and radically economically liberal, and the democrats as moderately socially conservative on balance (and becoming more socially conservative) and moderately economically liberal (but becoming more mixed-economy).
they're basically the same type of party. the differences are in terms of how extreme they are.
it's very different in canada, where we have more real choice in the spectrum....
15:00
i have a suggestion for mr trudeau's campaign song.
thirlwell went to town with this:
15:16
jim.
i had no idea, for years, that i was really actually a giant foetus (and coil) fan. i had to really look at the liner notes carefully to pull that out. and, then it clicked.
jim...
dammit, jim!
16:36
what is economic conservatism?
well, it's the old toryism - monarchism, mercantilism, that kind of thing. historically, it's what the democrats used to be in the 19th century. in canada, we actually held on to a distinct concept of economic conservatism until the late 1970s, when the conservative party started picking up neo-liberal economic ideas. the last vestiges of that disappeared when the old progressive conservative party collapses in the early 90s.
both of the major parties here are economic liberals, with the conservatives offering the less regulated version of it.
16:51
i guess we know who anonymous was now, huh?
but, i thought the empty suit was the other guy.
17:20
rapid testing is actually a more effective way to screen people than vaccine mandates, because vaccines are only about 70-90% effective in the first place, and even less so with the mutations.
to put it another way - you don't actually know if the vaccine generated an immune response or not unless you test for it, and you don't know if the immune response is effective against the variants or not unless you expose the individual. we can talk in aggregate - we can present probabilities - but if you're hell bent on being anal as fuck about it, those probabilities are of marginal value. even at a 10-15% failure rate, you're almost certainly going to have transmission in a large room.
see, and this is what is wrong with taking half-educated arts majors like trudeau and asking them to do important or complicated things - they don't know how to read numbers, or measure risk or really anything worthwhile at all. what they can do is react to rules of thumb, and take ideas on authority, and that leads to badly formed policy rooted in - and spurred on by - mass ignorance.
ask your favourite health expert. yes, they'll tell you to get vaccinated. but, every single health expert you'll find anywhere will tell you that rapid testing will catch for more transmission than mandatory vaccination will - and that it's not even close, in terms of efficacy.
and, i've stated repeatedly that i'd be happy to get an antibody test, as i'm pretty convinced i already caught the thing. an antibody certificate is also better than proof of vaccination, because you don't know if a vaccine worked or not unless you test the recipient for antibodies. 10-30% of people that get vaccinated (we have many different vaccine types, and they're of varying efficacy.) won't develop antibodies. that's not even being discussed.
so, i mean, i don't actually think either of these things are particularly necessary of 95% of activities. i've clarified before that i'd support mandatory vaccination policies for health care workers, and especially long term care homes, and i think most public facing jobs should have something in place. but, i don't think this is relevant for people going to a concert, for example - i think that's hysteria.
...but if i really wanted some system in place, the science is pretty clear that a vaccine passport is the least effective way to actually stop transmission. antibody tests are better than vaccine passports, and rapid testing is better than either of them.
if you can't see through the fear mongering, and are actually concerned about this, take the time to do some basic research and think it through because the obvious conclusion is indeed obvious - trudeau's position is disingenuous, and really just about misreading the polls.
17:57
if you get a vaccine, there's still about a 10-30% chance that you'll catch the virus, which is about the same odds as the flu (and nowhere close to the efficacy you get with vaccines against actually scary viruses, which are very, very high). it might not kill you - it probably wouldn't kill you anyways - but the point of this is to reduce transmission.
but, if you actually catch the virus and beat it, there's a 100% chance you developed antibodies. otherwise, you'd be dead. again - we can have a discourse about risk, but that's not the point. the point is to reduce transmission.
so, if the liberals are intent on being so fucking anal about this, why aren't they mandating rapid testing?
18:07
i don't really know if it's that trudeau doesn't understand the science, or it's that he's just pretending he doesn't because polling tells him that you don't, but i don't really care. it's the same fucking thing...
18:10
if we're going to be hysterical and anal and stupid about this, let's be hysterical and anal and stupid about this and rapid test everybody whenever they leave the house.
but, a vaccine passport (like masks...) is a half-assed measure designed to increase consumer confidence or something, not a science-based measure that will actually reduce the spread of anything.
18:12
no, it's a grade 11 probability theory problem. how many adults can figure this out?
suppose that a vaccine is 87.5% effective against a virus with a reproduction rate of pi*, and that everybody is vaccinated. if a promoter wants to put on a concert, how many people can she invite before the probability of transmission is greater than 50%?
you may further assume that the average number of people interacted with by potential concet-goers in the days before coming to the concert is 16/day**, all of whom are of course vaccinated, and that 0.025% of the population is currently infected. however, you may also use different numbers if you'd like, so long as you properly derive them.
show your work.
18:17
i'll post my answer in 24 hours.
there's some art here, granted, but you should get the point pretty quick - the number is very small.
send responses to death.to.koalas@gmail.com and i'll grade them and post a few if they're good ideas.
19:24
i'm currently calling for an immediate boycott on all businesses, canada wide, that demand proof of vaccination.
22:33
it would be useful if somebody could help compile a list of businesses, so it's clear who to boycott.
and, i would call on the vaccinated who agree that this is overkill to stand in solidarity with the boycott, as well.
22:34
for example, if the movie theatres don't want your money say "ok" and download a torrent, instead.
find a friend with a big tv.
or, better yet, find something better to do.
let's cause a recession in bc - and force capital to push back.
22:36
there will be businesses in your area that will not enforce the law.
go find them, and give them your business instead. use the black market, whenever you can. put your money in places that can't be traced...
we need to stand together against these kinds of extreme right, authoritarian governments, build social contacts, find places where free and open exchanges are occurring, etc.
it's an opportunity for parallel structures, and we should take advantage of it.
22:43
they're looking at enforcing it here too and, i mean, until i can get to concerts, the only places i'm going to spend money is at grocery stores.
if some specific store doesn't want my money, that's fine, i'll find another one.
22:46
right.
so, spend your money in one of these places, instead - and dare the state to send thugs in to shut them down.
22:59
my position in afghanistan was never that it was illegal or immoral, but i did come out fairly early and suggest rather strongly that it wouldn't work. so, i was right, right?
no - i was wrong, because the evidence on the ground was that the society was changing, and was changing in ways that i never anticipated.
so, go be a dominant ape somewhere else, i don't give a fuck about that kind of childish stupidity.
23:21
i think that he needs to take some responsibility for the nature of his policies.
i'm not going to condemn these people. i hope they got the point across.
23:51
nobody feels particularly bad for marie antoinette, and our dauphin doesn't deserve much sympathy, either.
23:54
saturday, august 28, 2021
listen - you can be in favour of changing backwards, primitive societies (that is, you can be a leftist revolutionary) or you can be in favour of maintaining the status quo, like some kind of anthropologist observing the prime directive (that is, you can be a conservative reactionary).
i don't want to hear about "imperialism" or "colonialism" - that's mostly a bunch of reactionary nonsense.
now, if you're running a bourgeois democracy, i'm not going to be particularly surprised if you end up being a conservative reactionary. it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise, and i've at no point argued that the empire intended to act as a revolutionary left in afghanistan - to the country, i'm arguing that a big part of the reason they've pulled out is because the revolution was working and their allies in places like saudi arabia were opposed to it (although it seems to ultimately simply not be in the interests of capital to have a democratic body in the region, because then they have to share the wealth and adhere to the laws - the taliban don't carry about anything like that, it's just rule by intimidation and fear).
my quarrel is with the left, not with the bourgeoisie. i don't intend to get along with the bourgeoisie or care much about what they think about much, but the "left" is out to lunch on this.
so, my attempt is ultimately to draw attention to facts (which are probably not what you think, as you've been misled by leftist punditry for years...) and try to reframe the issue away from this orwellian neocon idea of "bringing democracy to the world" and trying to get you to see why pulling out is being done because it's in the interests of the military and the capitalist class that upholds it, which you should not be particularly interested in. you should be concerned about the rights of the citizens of the country (who can potentially form a revolutionary force) and not about the interests of the empire.
your solidarity should be with people on the ground, not with the troops.
and, if breaking through the propaganda and the bullshit analysis doesn't help you dismantle the fundamentally reactionary nature of "anti-imperialism", i guess we're stuck. but, i think it says as much about you as you seem to think it says about me - i think it demonstrates you're a conservative, and of no use to the left.
10:55
so, this is likely a heaping amount of bullshit, but it gets the point across - this war isn't over, the technology's just changing.
and, i'd expect this to continue, as we build an alliance with the taliban around it.
11:22
is that what you've been agitating for for the last 20 years - replacing a democratic body with a far-right militia group?
you call yourself a leftist?
11:24
so, the conservatives come face to face with the reality of poverty and poor education levels amongst their current voters, and instead of presenting a coherent policy analysis, they resort to moral grandstanding and the horrifically exclusionary "you're not welcome here" (a phrase with no place in any democracy).
idiots.
off with their heads, too.
but, get the point - they don't care, and there's not much reason to think they might have.
12:55
the proper representation for these people is the ndp, but they've entirely abandoned the working class.
12:58
and, it's reflective of the elitist, out of touch nature of this idiot prime minister that instead of designing programs to undo the damage created by his ruling party's ideology, he's essentially arguing to throw all the poor people in jail.
if you leave this moron in power long enough, canada is going to end up with poor laws. that's the kind of asshole he is.
13:02
i mean, fuck off.
that's a bunch of bourgeois bullshit.
13:04
when you sign up for a job like this, there's a certain level of vitriol you have to deal with it.
and, if our dauphin can't stand the heat, he ought to get out of the kitchen; he can take his ball and go home and cry on his momma's shoulder, if he insists.
13:06
he's a snivelling, whiny, sheltered upper class snob that has no business running a country and i look forward to finally getting rid of him.
13:11
dear internet,
please ruthlessly make fun of itty bitty wittle justin for his donut shop excursion of horrors.
thanks,
jessica
13:50
if the prime minister resents being mocked as a petulant child, i might suggest he refrain from behaving as one.
14:06
just a reality check: singh's numbers were inflated in 2019, and there does seem to be a bradley effect at play. i'm guessing it's mostly union households in previous union towns.
they may get a bit of a bump in the youngest demographic as trudeau's hypocrisy sets in amongst voters, but it's unlikely to translate into many extra seats.
the models have them in the 40+ range. i'd say 25-30 is more realistic.
15:17
there's a famous line by adlai stevenson:
"i don't want to send them to jail, i want to send them to school.â€
mr. trudeau wants to send them to jail, for ruffling his expensive suit.
the bottom line is this: this is the prime minister talking, and he's been prime minister since 2015. he whines and complains like an undergraduate student, with no recourse to react, but he has an unusual amount of power in the system.
we're having an election.
so, what's our dauphin's policy proposal? i don't see it - anywhere.
but, we already know - he wants to send them to jail.
18:41
....and then he'll criticize the chinese reaction to the low levels of education in their western provinces, without understanding the irony.
some staffer in the pmo needs to sit him down with a storybook and slowly get it across to him.
18:58
i just woke up. so, let me solve the lemma.
i didn't get any responses, so you'll just get one take on it.
19:01
i'm going to do this the long way, so it might take most of the night to type it up.
20:01
sunday, august 29, 2021
here's my lemma:
suppose that a vaccine is 87.5% effective against a virus with a reproduction rate of pi*, and that everybody is vaccinated. if a promoter wants to put on a concert, how many people can she invite before the probability of transmission is greater than 50%?
you may further assume that the average number of people interacted with by potential concet-goers in the days before coming to the concert is 16/day**, all of whom are of course vaccinated, and that 0.025% of the population is currently infected. however, you may also use different numbers if you'd like, so long as you properly derive them.
show your work.
*: https://academic.oup.com/jtm/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jtm/taab124/6346388
**: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Daily-average-number-of-contacts-per-person-in-age-group-j-The-average-number-of_fig2_228649013
i added the extra information in to make it intuitive and allow for a simple response that everybody can understand. they're reasonable assumptions. i'm also making assumptions of uniform distribution across the country and whatnot because i wouldn't know where to find robust data, and i think it would just be a waste of time, regardless.
part one: computing the probability of contracting the disease before entry to the concert
so, public health claims that we can pick this up for about 14 days before we notice we have it, and i think that's half overly cautious assumption and half empirical fact, which is a sardonic way to suggest it's probably complete bullshit. nonetheless, that's the accepted "truth", based on what we know about other respiratory viruses in it's class. if we interact with 16 people per day on average then we've interacted with 16*14 = 224 people that may potentially have the virus in the relevant days leading up to the concert. you can argue that's too many in a lockdown, but we're talking about a fully vaccinated population post-lockdown, here.
i'm also assuming that masks are essentially useless and/or not being worn, which is what all of the data pre pandemic suggested. i find it curious, but not very convincing, that a bunch of studies appeared after the pandemic started that completely rewrote the science on the topic, and am at this point writing them off as biased and/or manipulated. i would expect studies redebunking the efficacy of mask wearing to show up any day now. if masks are so effective, why did it take a pandemic to generate data to demonstrate it? why don't surgeons wear little blue masks instead of n95s?
but, it's also just a question of understanding that viruses are very small and "surgical" masks (no surgeon wears those little blue things) are very porous. sometimes you need studies, and sometimes you can just work it out. if a virus can get through the holes in your mask, it's useless - and viruses definitely can get through those little blues masks. those masks are more useful to protect against larger particulate matter, like car exhaust, which is what they're worn for in east asia. it's just not the right tool for the job. i've said before that i'd have no choice but to shut the fuck up if they started handing out n95s, but the science just doesn't uphold the idea that wearing blue surgical masks is going to reduce the spread of a contagious respiratory virus in a meaningful sense. you're looking at a likely 5-10% difference. you can pencil that in, but i'm not going to.
so, masks are not being presented as a barrier to transmission, because they aren't one, especially not when people are going back to normal activities where they aren't being kept apart by metre sticks or stickers on the ground. and, ideally, we're not wearing them because we don't want to and because we don't have to. i'm trying to model normal social interactions in a fully vaccinated population.
i assumed a 0.025% probability. that number was determined by taking the number of cases reported in ontario on a recent day (where most people are vaccinated, so don't let them tell you transmission is only occurring amongst the unvaccinated, that's nonsense), multiplying it by 10 (a frequently thrown around multiplier) and then scaling it down. if you wanted to do this the way they teach you at school, you'd need a probability distribution function, and we don't have one. if you don't like my probability, insert your own.
but, realize that there's going to be a background infection rate forever, until it gets assimilated into the collection of infections we call "the common cold", which is a bunch of coronaviruses and rhinoviruses, and more or less forgotten about - the virus isn't going to go away. that's what happens in a flu pandemic (which is the functional replacement of one dominant strain of flu with another), and it's what's going to happen here, too.
so, those are my assumptions and where i'm coming from.
so, if we're in contact with 224 people and each has a 0.025% probability of having the disease then what is the probability that we contract the disease before coming to the concert?
rather than bring in a formula that you need a stem degree to understand (with the understanding that i'm dealing with liberal arts majors that have perfectly cromulant degrees but can in fact barely count), i'm going to derive this. but, i'll admit that it's also because i'm a mathematician, i'm not an engineer - i couldn't remember a list of formulas to save my fucking life. i need to derive everything on the fly, and more so than most. i actually used to get shit for it - "just use the fucking formula! stop deriving everything!". but, i can't remember the fucking formula. sorry.
so, you prove something like this using a technique called induction, which is a logical trick based on an infinite chain of logical implications. it's not actually complicated at all, and they do in fact teach it in high school. but, it takes a minute to get your head around it. i should also point out that there are longstanding philosophical critiques of induction as a valid proof method, but i'm actually more of the opinion that your theory of sets would be pretty useless if you couldn't get induction out of it than sympathetic to the idea that induction is in some way controversial. i mean, can you give me a good reason why you can't count forever? i can't come up with one. but, you can look that up if you really want. i'm not going to entertain a critique of induction here, i'm just going to go ahead with it.
you'll probably remember this when i start doing it. i'm not going to get formal with it, either, i'm just going to scrawl it out.
but, the idea is this...
if you can show that something is true for n=k (usually k=0 or k=1) and then also show that if it's true for n=k then it follows that it's true for n=k+1 then you've shown that it's true for every m>k and less than infinity (that is for every number you can mash into a keyboard, like 65479365473021654321).
i know that the symbols scare people, but it's not that bad. when you're in high school they make you do this in a series of steps, but it obscures the logic of it in favour of rote formalism, and really isn't the kind of thing you do in real math. we can figure this out constructively fairly easily.
if you've shown something is true for n=0, and you can show that whenever it is true for n=k it is also true for n=k+1, then you get an infinite train of logic. that the statement is true for n=0 means it's true for n=1 (because 1=0+1), which means it's true for n=2 (2=1+1), which means it's true for n=3 (3=2+1), and you just keep going until you get to n=643547302564734570643756347564289320658932 and on and on and on and on and on and on. you can then use the formula to plug whatever n you want in, and it will always be true.
where the philosophical qualms come in is the question of the infinite chain, but we're not even dealing with limits, here - we have a finite n, 224. so, we could constructively demonstrate that the claim is true for all n<=224, if we really wanted to. nonetheless, let's get to it.
i can't go through the axioms of probability theory, here, but you can look it up yourself, if you'd like. i just googled this blindly, and am posting it without analyzing it:
so, suppose you have interacted with just one person in the two weeks before going to the concert. if we do away with all the questions of transmission variables, assume the disease is so contagious that you more or less catch it on contact (it is airborne) and then just focus on the issue of vaccine efficacy (87.5%) then the probability of contracting the disease is the the probability of coming into contact with the disease, which we've pegged at 0.025%, which is 0.00025 (because you divide it by 100 to get from a percentage to a probability), multiplied by the probability that the vaccine didn't work, which is 100%-87.5%, which is 0.125, when divided by 100 to get from a percentage to a probability:
.125*0.00025 = 0.00003125 = 0.003125%.
so, your vaccines are going to reduce the transmission rate significantly, so long as you stay inside by yourself with the windows closed. but the point is that we want to go out and play...
now, suppose you've interacted with two people in the two weeks leading up to the concert. then, you might have caught the disease from the first person, or caught the disease from the second person or.....caught the disease from both? hrmmn. you can't really catch the disease from both, can you? and, it's certainly attractive to cut out the intersection in the sum. see, this is another reason why working things out is useful - the intersection doesn't actually make any sense in context, does it? i guess maybe you could catch two strains, but we're just concerned about the binary question of transmission, here.
so, if you've interacted with two people you could catch it from the first person (p=0.00003125) or you could catch it from the second person (p=0.00003125) and the idea that you could catch it from the first person and the second person (p=0.00003125^2) seems silly.
0.00003125 + 0.00003125 = 2*0.00003125 = 0.0000625.
now, suppose you've interacted with three people in the two weeks leading up to the event. then, you could catch it from any of the three people, and we're doing away with the intersection. it should be obvious that the answer is 3*0.00003125 = 0.00009375.
if we were doing this via induction (which is mostly useful to deal with the intersection term we've discarded), we'd want to go through a process of showing that if it's true for n=k (k*p) then it's also true for n=k+1 ((k+1)*p), but the elimination of the intersection term makes it trivial.
(edit: i'm going to provide an alternate derivation that does what i was intending to do, and it will quickly be apparent that the difference is trivial.
let's re-examine the interaction with two people question. if you've interacted with two people, you could catch it from the first person (p=0.00003125) or you could catch it from the second person, if you didn't catch it from the first person (p=(1-0.00003125)*.00003125). this is a scaling down of the second probability, by introducing the idea that you could only catch it from the second if you didn't catch it from the first. but, the fact that the probability of catching it is so low means the probability of not catching it is very high and that factor will tend to 1 very fast. the idea that you could catch it from the first person and the second person (p=0.00003125^2) is still silly. then,
0.00003125 + (1-0.00003125)*.00003125 = 0.00006249902.
now, what about n=3? you could catch it from the first person (p=0.00003125) or catch it from the second, if you didn't catch it from the first (p = (1-0.00003125)*.00003125) or catch it from the third if you didn't catch it from the first two (p = ((1-0.00003125)^2)*.00003125)). so, the sum is:
0.00003125 + (1-0.00003125)*.00003125 + ((1-0.00003125)^2)*.00003125 = 0.00009374707
this is a sum in the following form: p*(1-p)^n, which is a geometric series.
when n=3, we can note that,
1) s = p + (1-p)*p + (1-p)^2*p
2) s*(1-p) = p*(1-p) * (1-p)^2*p + (1-p)^3*p (multiplying both sides by 1-p, generally shortened as 'r')
then,
1 - 2 can be written as
s - s*(1-p) = p + (1-p)*p + (1-p)^2*p - p*(1-p) - (1-p)^2*p - (1-p)^3*p <--->
s[1 - (1-p)] = p + [(1-p)*p - (1-p)*p] + [(1-p)^2*p - (1-p)^2*p] - (1-p)^3*p
you'll notice that the middle terms cancel, leaving:
s*p = p - (1-p)^3*p
dividing both sides by p,
s = 1 - (1-p)^3
this is where the induction step i'm going to skip comes in, but it's easy enough to show that, for n=k,
s= 1 - (1-p)^k
then, for n=224,
s = 1 - (1-p)^224 = 1 - (1-0.00003125)^224 = 0.00697566568
the number i previously derived was .007.
if there was a way to make sense of removing the intersection, it would likewise impact the sum in a very minimal sense as even p^2 is negligible. but, the better way to look at it is really that the intersection is 0 because the probability of catching it from the second given that you've already caught it from the first is 0. that is, p(b|a) = 0 ----> p (a ̢蠩 b) = 0. but, we'll skip conditional probabilities - which are still, nonetheless, high school math.)
so, i don't think constructing a summation formula is necessary here after all - if we have a probability of p of catching the virus from each of the 224 people we come into contact with, then we have a probability of 224*p of catching the virus, altogether, which follows directly from the third axiom of probability theory.
16*14*.125*0.00025 = .007 = .7%
so, there's a close to 1% chance that you're going to bring the virus to the concert, after being vaccinated, without even knowing it.
now, let's stop for a moment to consider that 87.5% efficacy is actually pretty optimistic, right now. studies are coming out suggesting that the vaccines may only be 50% effective against the new strains. one study suggested 39% efficacy.
what if we plug in 50% efficacy instead?
16*14*.5*0.00025 = 0.028 = 2.8%.
a 3% chance of unknowingly bringing the virus to the concert, after being vaccinated, is not what you're being told about the usefulness of vaccines, is it?
16*14*(1-.39)*0.00025 = 3.416%, and those numbers will increase to a maximum of:
16*14*(1-0)*0.00025 = 5.6%.
but, realize that the background rate should be presented as a function of the vaccine efficacy, and will increase (exponentially) as the vaccine efficacy decreases, so this model is a facile underestimation - when vaccine efficacy falls that far (as it probably already has), the background rate will shoot up very quickly (which is no doubt what's currently happening).
a real world number right now is probably something more like this:
16*14*.5*0.001 = 11.2%
you obviously want rapid-testing then and not vaccine passports, right?
the point is we're going in the wrong direction with this, and increasing vaccination rates will not help until we get updated vaccines that are distributed widely enough to prevent further mutation and/or enough old people die that we're not worried about it anymore (which is how viruses operate, historically).
but, i'm presenting best-case optimistic scenarios here to make a point, so let's stick with the smaller number of 0.7%. it's more than large enough to make the point.
part two: computing how many people can be allowed at the concert to reduce the probability of transmission to less than 50%
a coin toss is of course a much higher level of danger than public health wants right now, but we'll look at that as i work it out
you could be naive about it and just say that if everybody has a .7% chance of bringing the virus then we need to add .7 to itself until we get to 50 to get the answer. then,
x*.7 = 50 <----> x = 50/.7 = 71.42857.
so, you're looking at about 70 people allowed at the concert before transmission is more likely than not.
(edit: as i did before, we could look at a geometric series.
so, the probability of the first person bringing transmission is .007, the probability of the second person bringing transmission (and the first person not bringing transmission) .007*(1-.007), the third term is .007*(.993^2) and so on. then, the sum is still a geometric series and the kth term is 1 - (1-p)^k, with p = .007. so,
1 - (.993)^k > .5 <--->
.5 > .993^k <---->
kln(.993) < ln(.5) <---> [where ln is the logarithm of the constant e, named after euler, 2.71828....)
k < ln(.5)/(ln.993) <--->
k< 98.6740464467
it's a little bigger, but the point remains the same)
and, if you want to reduce the number to 10%, which is still more than public health would want, you're looking at:
x*.7 = 10 <----> x = 10/.7 = 14.2857.
(edit: 1 - .993^k > .1 <-----> k < ln(.9)/(ln(.993)) <----> k < 14.9987603026)
now, what if we use the biggest numbers instead of the smallest ones?
x*11.2 = 50 <-----> x = 50/11.2 = 4.464 (edit: ln(.5)/ln(1-.112) = 5.8353809287)
x*11.2 = 10 <----> x = 10/11.2 = 0.89 < 1 (edit: ln(.9)/(ln(1 - .112)) = 0.88699595259)
i guess you'd have to book a three-piece?
however you want to interpret this, one thing is very clear - a large gathering, like a rock concert or a sports event, which is where these passports are being most aggressively promoted, is almost certainly going to feature substantive transmission, even in a fully vaccinated audience.
if k = 10000,
1 - (1-.007)^10000 = 1 - epsilon ~ 1.
the subtracted term is too small for a computer to calculate without floating point error - the likelihood of transmission is certain.
and, i guess that the reproduction number, in context, isn't that important. i mean, we can use it to try to calculate how much transmission might occur at an event, but it's not that relevant in calculating the likelihood of transmission occurring in the first place. so, we can skip the mini lesson on basic differential equations, then.
so, are the passports justified by science? is that a proportional, reasonable reaction? the answer is "no", quite clearly.
and, this is grade 11 - grade 12, tops - mathematics. it's not esoteric, it's not outside of the realm of what most people should be able to calculate. it should be easy for most people to understand.
if you are an adult, and you like to present yourself as educated, and you cannot follow this, i strongly advise you enroll yourself in a numerical literacy course. i'm not trying to make fun of you, but the situation demonstrates the point: we need numerical literacy for democracy to be functional.
0:11
ok, i think the last one is final.
i've officially been floundering. i took a testosterone suppressor the other day and it knocked me right out - i should be careful with that. i'm feeling more alert, now and need to get that catch up post done.
0:13
i'm not trying to argue that you shouldn't get vaccinated. i don't think it's an appropriate step for myself at my age, as i think i'm better off fighting the virus in the wild, but i'm not against other people vaccinating themselves, if they choose to - and i've never argued otherwise.
the point is that vaccine passports are stupid, and if you insist on being anal about it then you want to do rapid testing, instead.
0:30
i'm going to respond to a potential critique, though - why did i calculate the likelihood of catching the virus over two weeks? why didn't i just use the background rate?
because i'm trying to get the point across that the virus is circulating at a high rate.
but, if we take the formulas i derived, what happens if you just plug the estimated background rate of 0.025% in?
- ln(.1)/(ln(1-0.00025)) = 9209.18903145 [bound for 90% chance of transmission]
- ln(.5)/(ln(1-0.00025)) = 2772.24213421 [bound for 50% chance of transmission]
- ln(.9)/(ln(1-0.00025)) = 421.389380178 [bound for 10% chance of transmission]
these are higher numbers, but they don't undermine the argument - it would still suggest that any kind of substantive event is going to feature transmission, even if people are fully vaccinated.
so, what are the conclusions?
- at risk people need to accept that there is a new normal in place where they can't live the way they used to anymore.
- rapid testing makes more sense than vaccine passports. i mean, if you're serious about public health - if it's not just a pr gloss to increase consumer confidence.
- there is no utopian outcome. the society needs to move on.
0:44
it's the same basic problem that we've seen on the fake left for decades.
they're terrible at math.
0:54
what if the background rate ticks up to .1%, if it's not already there?
- ln(.1)/(ln(1-0.001)) = 2301.43360847 [bound for 90% chance of transmission]
- ln(.5)/(ln(1-0.001)) = 692.800549179 [bound for 50% chance of transmission]
- ln(.9)/(ln(1-0.001)) = 105.307826616 [bound for 10% chance of transmission]
remember: this is the size of a fully vaccinated crowd that will lead to the subsequent likelihood of transmission occurring within it, based on a small background rate, and with no attempt to calculate the likelihood of patrons picking it up before the show. i think it's an inferior calculation, but it gets the point across - this is much smaller than a stadium show, and more in the realm of the kind of small bar shows i'd normally go to.
the vaccine passport is pointless.
and, please take the proper precautions, if you need to - don't put blind faith in a technology that the science underlying it doesn't justify.
1:14
i should also clarify the the previous calculation calculated the likelihood that somebody would bring the virus to a concert in a fully vaccinated population, not the likelihood that transmission would occur in any specific person at a concert in which the virus is brought to. the number calculated is the number of people required to bring the virus into the concert with a specific level of certainty.
so, there is an underlying assumption that transmission will occur in a large event so long as the virus makes it's way into it. and, the numbers i'm throwing around - from 70 to 10000 - are enough that the question is pretty much a triviality. i don't think i need a mathematical argument to suggest that if you bring a virus into an event with as little as a handful of people then it's going to spread.
if you want to calculate the likelihood of transmission then occurring at the concert, you'd have to calculate the individual probabilities of catching the virus at the concert and add them up in the same way, which i've avoided doing because it largely shifts the nature of the question - i'm not trying to provide the probability that you will catch or circulate the virus, i'm trying to provide the probability that transmission will occur at the event. the latter question is of concern to public health, whereas the former mostly is not.
nonetheless, if you have a 12.5% percent chance of catching the virus when exposed to it (after vaccination) and there's 0.7% chance you'll catch it from any specific person, what's the chance that you'll catch it, when fully vaccinated?
the answer is .007*.125 = 0.000875.
so, that's your new p.
now, how many people are you going to be in contact with at that concert?
you're probably going to interact with roughly five people in front of you and roughly five people behind you in line to get into the concert. there's going to be 2-3 people at the door. there's 2-3 people at the bar or concession stand. if you're lined up in rows at the concert, you could have ten people in front of you, ten people behind you and five people to either side of you that are close enough to breath or expel air on you. and, let's say you walk by 100 people in total as you're moving around.
then, that's:
(5 + 5) + 2.5*2 + 10*3 + 100 = 145. about 150.
in a larger concert, you'll be around more people.
so, using the geometric sum previously derived,
1 - (1-p)^k = 1 - (1-0.000875)^150 = 0.12305188948
so, even fully vaccinated, you're looking at about a 12% chance - as an individual - of catching the virus at a concert in which you interact with at least 150 people, if you ignore the effects of transmission at the concert. a better model would increase p with k.
(the naive way would be 0.000875*150 ~13%)
i would not advise trying to calculate k based on a preferred s, because the specific risks to an individual actually wouldn't increase beyond the number of people they could feasibly interact with. how many people can somebody interact with at a concert? 200? 300? then, it doesn't matter if there are 10,000 people at the concert - what matters is how many people you share air with, which is much smaller.
if you suppose that the maximum number of people you could interact with is k=300, s ends up as:
1 - (1-0.000875)^300 = 0.23096201146.
a 25% chance isn't what you signed up for, right?
1:54
now, if you want to add this up, and you don't want to fix k, you'll need to take a geometric series of a sequence of functions. those are big words to some, but it's just taking the existing idea to the next level of abstraction - you're just taking another sum, but the components of the sum are themselves sums. that's done all the time in math, it's not crazy at all.
in fact, it's common even to take three sums. now, we're living dangerously, right? get me some more coffee...three sums...pftt...she's making this up...
in the end, you still want the formula of 1 - (1-p)^k, but you want to plug in what the probability for p is, based on k. so, you need to replace p with a different set of terms that includes k. i'm going to lose people here and that's fine - this is extra credit shit, now.
we're maybe doing second year math, here. i don't recall seeing these ideas explicitly until first year algebra, and also first year calculus. that said, the concepts are still high school level, it's just built up a little in a way that you wouldn't typically see in high school. there's maybe some advanced counting (combinatorics) ideas that i'm glossing over that could be taught in third year, but you wouldn't need 2nd year pre-reqs for them.
so, let's start this off by constructing a sequence of sis in place of the previous s:
q = si = 1 - (1-p)^k <----the probability that the ith individual will catch the virus in a crowd with k people, if each has a probability of p of spreading it
now, how do we add these sis up? they should all be the same, right? i needs to the index variable, but in the end we're adding up k individuals. so, both sums need to be over k. but, this is no longer disjoint, as the conditional probabilities are no longer zero - we have to keep track of the intersections. so, we need to build a different type of series. let's go back to the initial induction step:
if k=1, there's 2^1 possibilities - it's just one individual, so they catch it or don't and it's just q
if k=2, there's 2^2 possibilities, and
- you could have neither catch it
- you could have only the first one catch it (q) (not dependent on the other)
- you could have only the second one catch it (q) (not dependent on the other)
- you could have them both catch it (q^2) <---independence
so, p(s1 + s2) = p(s1) + p(s2) - p(s1 ̢蠩 s2) = q + q + - q^2 = 2q - q^2 = kq - q^k
if k=3, there's 8 possibilities:
- nobody catches it (000) - 0
- 3 single catches (100, 010, 001) - 3q
- 3 iterations of 2 catches, one non-catch (110, 011, 101) 3q^2
- all three catch it: q^3
so, the sum is 3q - 3q^2 + q^3.
yeah, see - you're going to laugh at me but i totally forgot that this was the binomal theorem until i wrote a few lines down.
k=1: (-1)^(1-1)*(kc1)*q^k
k=2: (-1)^(1-1)*(kc1)*q^1 + (-1)^(k-1)*(kck)q^k
k=3: (-1)^(1-1)*(kc1)q^1 + (-1)^(2-1)*(kc2)q^2 + (-1)^(k-1)*(kck)q^k
then k=4 has sixteen possibilities,
- 0000
- 1000, 0100, 0010, 001 - 4q - (4c1)q
- 1100, 1010, 1001, 0110, 0101, 011 - 6q^2 (4c2)q^2
- 1110, 1101, 1011, 0111 - 4q^3 (4c3)q^3
- 1111 - q^4 = (4c4)q^4
so, k=4: (-1)^(1-1)*(kc1)q^1 + (-1)^(2-1)*(kc2)q^2 + (-1)^(3-1)*(kc3)q^3 + (-1)^(k-1)*(kck)q^k
so, it's clear what's going on here, and the summand is, over j=1..k,
(-1)^(j-1)*(kcj)*q^j
that -1 is annoying, and i need to get it in the form of k-j to use the binomial theorem. so, i can multiply by (-1)^2+k-k and take the 2-k out of the sum, leaving k + j -1. then, i can add j-j to that, resulting in k + j -1 + j -j. rearranging,
k + j -1 + j - j =
k- j + j + j -1 =
k -j + 2j - 1
i can then take (-1)^2j = 1 out (-1 squared is always one, no matter how many additional times you raise it), leaving
k - j - 1
then, i can take the remaining -1 out and leave it with the 2-k, leaving 1-k.
so, the following is now out of the summand: (-1)^1-k and the following is now in the summand:
(kcj)*(-1)^(k-j)*q^j
by the binomial theorem, that leaves us with:
(-1)^(1-k) * (-1 + q)^k (1 > q, as q is a probability)
let's clean that up:
(-1)^1*(-1+q/(-1))^k = -1*(q-1)^k
(those pesky -1s...)
now, q-1 < 0 (because q is a probability), so all these nice absolute values get messy in the inequalities. but we want:
-1*(q-1)*k > 0.5
let's plug q in and see if it helps:
-1*([1 - (1-p)^k] -1)^k =
-1*[-(1-p)^k]^k
-1*[(-1)^k]*[(1-p)^(k^2)]
(-1)^k+1 * (1-p)^k^2
ok, so this is only going to be valid for every second k, then. we can just pull that out and set k+1 = 2w. to be clear, it will be a less precise answer, but only by a triviality. we're only interested in setting a loose bound, and we don't want to deal with the even ks. we can then check by substitution to make sure we didn't overshoot.
then, k = 2w-1 and the answer becomes
(-1)^2w * (1-p)^[(2w-1)^2]
the first part disappears, leaving
(1-p)^ (2w-1)^2 > 0.5 <----->
(2w-1)^2*ln(1-p) > ln(0.5) <--->
(2w-1)^2 > ln(0.5)/ln(1-.000875) <--->
2w-1 > abs val [ln(0.5)/ln(1-.000875)]^.5
then we can plug k back in to get
k > 28.1393244802
as k has to be odd, i need k=29.
why is that number so much smaller? because the individual probability of catching the virus given that we know it's already there is a lot higher than the probability that it might enter the area in the first place.
this is a more challenging calculation and i'm only 75% sure i did it right, myself. don't feel bad if you didn't follow it. the math isn't hard, but it's a bit conceptually abstract.
so, the conclusion is that you can invite up to 70 people before there's a 50% chance that the virus gets there, but you can't even get to 30 people before there's a 50% chance of actual transmission.
5:02
i've added a new feature on the side of the blog that i was intending on integrating into the site with the diet run throughs.
the posts i've been working on tonight are now in the form of a "page"
5:42
i've never heard of bolton, ontario before. i'd imagine they all have terrible moustaches and listen to bad 80s croon-pop. but, waterloo is a major city and home to what is probably the country's best university. it's a very highly educated region, and if he's getting booed off the stage...
his numbers are falling across the country because people are blaming him for unpopular vaccine restrictions and generally conservative covid policies. and, as i actually understand how this works, i realize that's mostly not fair. but, i'll take it.
he's done.
his response?
"everything i've done is to keep canada safe."
what is he, the fucking taliban? i could accept that from a conservative, but it's a baffling response from the center-left.
canadians are showing up in force and giving him a hard time. if he won't listen, we'll have to throw him out.
17:46
let's unite in one voice and send the message loud and clear: justin trudeau is not welcome here!
17:48
see, i can work this through, because i realize what's actually going on.
but, here's a question for some normal people: if the united states is willing to recognize and work with the taliban, which is one of the most egregious islamic terrorist groups on the planet, what is the actual point of bombing isis?
if the taliban and isis are basically the same thing (in terms of ideology), and we're willing to work with the taliban, why exactly are we still bothering to fight isis?
it's a contradiction at the very heart of the public face of the policy, and i'm curious how long it takes people to start grappling with it.
19:55
i actually think that the conservatives are going to win bc by the kinds of margins they usually win prairie states by.
21:08
there's a narrative floating around that ndp voters ran back to the liberals in previous elections and it saved them from utter defeat because they were so afraid of the conservatives that they couldn't stop themselves from voting liberal.
it's not the 90s, and i think we need some younger analysts that are able to better understand the people around them.
to begin with, i don't think that's true. it's what some liberal strategists tried to generate by pushing scaremongering ads, but it horribly failed. conservative support actually went substantively down after the merger, and was essentially stagnant afterwards all the way to 2015, although modulations in turnout made it seem like they did better than they actually did. the singular, substantive change in the electorate from the time they sacked chretien until the time that jack layton died was actually a steady, substantive movement of people away from the liberals and towards the ndp, which didn't just not save the liberals (who lost government in 2006) but actually landed them in 3rd place.
so, that narrative is bullshit to begin with.
but, even if it wasn't, that was 15-20 years ago and a lot of things have happened - a lot of people have died, and the liberal brand has done an almost 180 from being the party of smart people that governs and gets things done to being the party of dumbass loafers that sits on power without doing anything at all.
i can't point to a single substantive thing the liberals have done since the 90s. so, what exactly am i saving? and, why exactly would i deduce that the liberals would be willing to save it? all i see is a party that lies to me to gain power, and then sells out to the corporate sector when they win.
stated tersely, the liberals don't have the leverage that they once did because they're not a credible governing party, as they once were. they're just a bunch of incompetent hacks that had parents that were smart, some time in the last century.
it is true that this isn't an argument to vote conservative, and i certainly don't plan to.
it's an argument to stay home - because i realize that it doesn't actually matter this cycle, that the liberals are so unappealing that i can't be bothered to try to block their opponents.
21:38
i'm a historical liberal voter, but i'm on the very far left of the party. i've voted ndp a couple of times, and green a few less times, but i tend to prefer the liberals for a variety of complicated reasons. so, i'm the kind of voter being imagined.
...and i'm more excited to get rid of this buffoon trudeau and start over than i am worried about blocking the conservatives.
it's that bad - i feel no impetus, whatsoever, to stop the ship from sinking. let them drown. i want to start over...
21:45
the entire management structure needs to go - i want to see the whole thing wiped out, and i want to see them start from scratch.
this happened in 1984, and it happened in 2011, too.
as a historical left-liberal voter, that's where i am - i'm not coming to save anyone, i want to wipe the slate clean.
21:46
there is a liberal government in power that doesn't care about the charter of rights.
that's an absurdity, and it needs to be liquidated entirely so we can rebuild.
21:48
monday, august 30 2021
the rhinos aren't running in this riding.
i'm trying to avoid supporting the green party this election and it might be a while before i do again.
there's an mlm here, but they're a bunch of fascists. if it was a different flavour of socialism, i'd think about it, but i can't support anybody that advertises themselves as a leninist.
there's really not a choice i'm interested in.
0:00
i'm sorting through polls and it's just total.
the liberals are now starting to bleed in the atlantic provinces, in quebec, in bc, in ontario, amongst the university educated, amongst women, amongst "middle class" voters...it's across the board, in every demographic, in every region.
as i suspected might happen, they've lost the support they were hanging on to amongst older voters and have failed to make it up amongst younger voters. the liberals are actually in third place right now amongst the youngest demographic.
something like this can't be traced back to a tax credit or a fiscal policy - this is ideological. the country wants to change directions, clearly. and, if you think it's not about the pandemic restrictions, please tell me what you think it is about. you don't think the country's shifting across demographics over afghanistan or social housing, do you?
two of the three pollsters now have the conservatives in minority territory. the models aren't updating because they're inherently conservative (in the dictionary meaning of the term), but when the conservatives start polling over 35%, they're probably going to win. the third could get there in a day or two. mainstreet arguably has them in majority territory.
somewhere else the liberal party seems to be bleeding to - and i noticed this in the last bc election - is the people's party. that seems counterintuitive; you'd expect them to bleed support from the conservatives, right? but, if you look at their policies a little more carefully, they're actually a very liberal party and not a very conservative party. disgruntled conservatives generally tend to tune out over issues like abortion, and start looking for a more christian or conservative alternative. but, the people's party are aggressively pro-choice, aggressively free speech, aggressively gender egalitarian, etc. they don't like immigration, but their arguments against immigration are more from a liberal-left position than a right-wing position. and, yes, there are a lot of valid arguments to restrict immigration from a liberal-left position....
what i find unappealing about the people's party is actually their economic positions, which are right-libertarian to the extreme - unrestrained market capitalism. i stated previously that i'm extremely socially liberal [and, they may actually be the best match for me in those terms, as they're probably the most socially liberal party] and overwhelmingly economically socialist. so, they're the party i'd be most opposed to economically, even if i find them sort of appealing, socially - because they're the most liberal, not the least liberal.
but, that's just me.
i can very easily imagine a whole lot of historical liberal voters that are both socially and economically liberal that would find them exceedingly appealing. i'd certainly imagine more disgruntled liberals looking at them due to being upset about the liberal party policy on free speech and their ideological support for pandemic restrictions (where the liberals have swing hard to the right) than conservatives, who, as mentioned, tend to move right when they get upset, not left.
but, i'm not imagining this - it's in the data over several different elections, now. whenever the ppc goes up, the liberals come down. it sure seems like that's where the votes are coming from...
0:24
the liberal party is not the democratic party. historically, they're the whigs, which is the republicans.
our spectrum is more like the uk's, except the dominant party would be the "liberal democrats", not the tories. we have tories, we have liberals and we have a labour party, sort of (the ndp). the liberals were of course dominant in the uk before the second world war when some historically devastating mistakes by neville chamberlain did them in, and the truth is that that is really where our liberal party comes from - it's the last remaining vestige of the british liberal party.
so, liberals in canada are a dramatically different animal than democrats in the united states. they tend to be upper class, for one thing. and, it's actually sort of predictable that they'd lose their ideologically liberal wing, if they decided to take the path they've gone down recently, if there was only somewhere to go.
bernier just happens to be around at the right time, i guess.
0:35
the conservatives are only up a few points since the last election, and you generally don't need complicated explanations for stuff like that.
but, the liberals are down a lot - more than can be explained by assigning it to the conservatives, especially considering that the greens are down and the ndp is roughly flat.
the ppc are up.
so, it's sort of inescapable - the ppc are eating into the liberal vote, and it could be enough to kill them in close ridings.
0:39
0:50
marxists, particularly, should know all about british liberals.
that's our liberal party - or was, anyways.
0:57
i keep saying this.
the people running the liberal party today largely went to school in the united states, and spent their formative years reading american media. and, when they took over, they tossed everybody over 60 out of the party. so, their own conception of the party they're running is essentially that they're the canadian version of the democrats, and they purged anybody around that knew any better.
if i were to point these numbers out to the...we used to call them liberal apparatchiks, but it hardly seems apt nowadays....but if i were to point these numbers out to the staffers and overgrown teenagers running the party, they would be in utter disbelief and simple bafflement.
but, that's the reality, and it's always been the reality.
it was mr. trudeau's father that brought a bill of rights to this country in the early 80s, and that's not some kind of accident. he was reacting to criticism in his own party (and to his left) about how he behaved in the flq crisis. so, he brought these rules in to stop further leaders from restricting the rights of voters, because his own party agitated for it. that wasn't 200 years ago, it was roughly 40 years ago, and that demographic is still a major constituent of the party's voting coalition - roughly a quarter, or more, given the size of the shift we're seeing.
it's one thing for a party to attack it's own base, and it's another for a party to attack it's own base and not even know they're doing it because they don't even know what their base even is.
the people's party of canada is a vanity vehicle for an mp that got sacked from the conservative cabinet years ago. if he wins a seat, he may even join the new government, if he's allowed into it. it's not a stable political movement, and nobody thinks it is.
but, it's not clear to me how the liberal party thinks it can win elections in the future if it's willing to abandon the core, foundational part of it's base, like this. and, the only answer i can really give you is that they need to clean house at the top.
1:30
i can imagine a throng of under 30 liberals looking at me like i'm from a different planet.
"but, we don't believe in free speech! we really don't. it's not about political expediency, it's a core value."
well, you'd better marge with the ndp, then, if you want to win another election in this country - because substantive parts of your historical voting coalition just isn't coming with you on this one.
1:35
free speech.
self ownership.
personal autonomy.
freedom of movement.
freedom of association.
due process of law.
the rule of law.
these are core beliefs amongst canadian liberals. and, this government has done everything it can to undermine all of it.
it's not hard at all to understand why the party's base is abandoning it - the party is attacking it's base.
1:42
he's his father's worst nightmare.
1:44
at least a quarter of these cases (we don't know how many of the unknown are fully vaccinated), almost 200 in total, are in fully vaccinated people.
using the 10x scaling factor, that suggests roughly 2000 infections in fully vaccinated ontarians, yesterday.
i'm not telling you not to get vaccinated, i'm pleading with you to look at and understand the facts so that you:
(1) act appropriately for your risk factor and
(2) don't support tyrannical rules that aren't justified by the science, out of a sense of desperation and/or panic.
2:31
so, you're old and you're scared and you're panicking out of desperation and fear, and i'm telling you that the vaccines barely work against the new variants, and it's just going to get worse. so, what do you do?
the fact is that you need to stay home.
i'm sorry - but your life will never go back to normal. it will never be safe for you to play outside ever again.
2:47
and, you're running an event and looking for a way to make it safe, and i'm telling you that vaccine passports are useless, so what do you do?
rapid testing is a more effective way to screen for entrance - even on those who are vaccinated. if your establishment requires an entry requirement, it should focus strictly on rapid testing and discard vaccine status as an unreliable metric.
2:49
vaccine utopians will point me to studies suggesting that the vaccinated have better outcomes, and while i'd suspect there aren't good controls there (i'd bet vaccinated people have lower levels of obesity, as well), i'm not actually interested in arguing the point. it's probably overstated, but i'll concede it, nonetheless.
but, it's not a relevant consideration in the discussion about vaccine passports, which is what we're having.
the issue isn't whether getting vaccinated might lead to better outcomes for some or most individuals, but whether it leads to lower levels of transmission, and every study i've seen suggests it doesn't - and that, if anything, being contagious and vaccinated and asymptomatic is the greatest risk for further transmission.
so, again - i'm not telling people not to get vaccinated, i'm presenting an argument against vaccine passports, which are based on flawed and unscientific logic.
2:54
what i'm saying is that checking for vaccination status at the door is not a reliable way to keep your establishment safe from the virus, or an effective way to reduce transmission.
what i'm saying is that rapid testing is a more reliable approach.
2:57
*sigh*
what a bunch of idiots..
we''ll have to see if i have to sue, or not. but, now this is about personal autonomy - and if there was some chance i might have gotten vaccinated before, there's no chance at all that i'm going to, now.
you wanna fight, bring it on - i'll see you in court.
the data's on my side, not yours.
3:16
i think i'd rather let a group like the ccla deal with this, but i want to see their argument. i'd rather file as an intervener in a case they've already launched. the problem with these groups is that they often use dumb arguments that seem designed to fail.
i'd rather react by doing the following:
1) seek out businesses that refuse to obey the law, and spend money there instead,
2) boycott businesses that adhere to the law,
3) contact business owners that abide by the law and ensure that they understand why they're being boycotted,
4) take as much of my business to the black market as is possible, if necessary.
i'd also call for an immediate boycott of any business implementing vaccine passports and ask for vaccinated allies to stand by the boycott call.
3:26
don't give these people your money.
and, don't download their app, either.
3:28
we can build parallel systems outside of their bourgeois control, we don't have to be forced into this.
this might be the spark we were waiting for to do it with.
3:29
so, this is a call to ontarians that care about the autonomy of the individual and resent the idea of being told what to do; let's all find each other and build a new socialist society outside of their statist oversight.
3:31
how long before we see scenes like this in montreal, vancouver and toronto?
4:04
oddly, now the corporate media wants to talk about herd immunity - after it pushed lockdowns for months, which kept us isolated and allowed the virus to mutate.
at this point, there are so many mutations of the virus that:
1) you'll probably have to beat a couple of the existing variants, even if you're vaccinated
2) there's little hope of us stopping future mutations from piling up into perpetuity
3) herd immunity is probably as impossible for covid-19 as it is for any other respiratory virus out there
we had a window where we could have let the initial virus run rampant and beat it before it could mutate, but that's passed.
so, we're not going to get to herd immunity.
ever.
5:37
what is my take on the constitutionality of vaccine passports?
if a business wants to check people entering it, it can do so on the basis of it being a club. so, a grocery store (except costco) or a restaurant could not ask you to show documents of the sort - it's an illegal search. but, they could restrict entry to those not willing to volunteer it, if it's their own directive. this is ultimately about the business' private property, which has shady justification in canada but is enough that they'll get away with it.
what we can't do is have a situation where the government orders a business to do something, under threat of penalties. the business ultimately retains free choice in the matter, and the government is overstepping it's bounds in forcing it to comply.
so, businesses will retain the constitutional right to refuse to implement this law, and the state will be liable for damages should they attempt to enforce an illegal rule.
as a consumer, i want to exclusively support businesses that fight back, and do not want to support businesses that enforce the rule. and, for the businesses that legitimately want to ban entry to the unvaccinated, that's fine - i'll spend my money somewhere else.
my qualm is with the state dictate. i should be able to find businesses that don't want to enforce this, if i look around, and i should have the choice to support them.
now, frankly, i expect that the government won't enforce this very much, if at all and that most businesses (or most businesses i'd go to) will resent the hassle. upper class restaurants may stick to it, but anywhere i'd want to go to will stop bothering in a week or two. so, the best way to deal with this is just to ignore it under the hopes that everybody else ignores it and it just goes away.
but, i can't predict the future.
we'll have to see what happens.
6:34
nothing that justin trudeau says is worth analyzing, because there's a roughly 90% chance that he's flatly lying.
so, i'm not going to bother looking at his climate proposals - he hasn't followed through with a word he's said previously, and there's no reason at all to think he will, now.
and, that's the totality of what i'm going to say on the matter - none of the three parties will do anything meaningful to reduce emissions, so there's no point in pretending it's a meaningful policy issue.
13:31
there is 100% chance that emissions will continue to rise in this country in the years after the election.
the result of the election will neither change nor mitigate that outcome.
i'm more concerned about other things, right now - not because they're more important, but because they're actually real.
13:33
trudeau will say all kinds of nonsense to win your votes, but at the end of the day, when it comes to real policy actions and real measurable outcomes, we'd might as well have just left the conservatives in place.
in fact, we might be better off putting the conservatives in place for a few years to change the leadership in the liberal party and get people re-engaged.
this is an issue where we tend to go to sleep on whenever we put the bourgeois left in power, who just use it as a vote-generating tool. frankly, it's not in their interests to reduce emissions, so long as people keep voting for them to do it - it just takes away an incentive to vote for them.
so, i'm not falling for that and you shouldn't fall for it either.
13:37
i'm on the side of the argument that proposes that we need substantive government action to really resolve the issue, we can't reduce it to market choice.
but, you have to realize that, by dumping it into the arena of bourgeois politics, you are converting it into a market choice - because it just becomes an advertising tool for the bourgeois parties. it's the colour of the iphone they're selling, that's all.
i don't want to pretend i've fallen for that; i always knew better. but, i played into it anyways because it's better than nothing, right? but however many years later, and with so much blatant fascism coming from the pmo on individual rights, it's not worth deluding yourself over.
the way the liberals use climate change is just as a way to advertise their brand. when they win, they'll write a check to the fossil fuel industry and laugh at you for voting for them.
so, if you're weighing accepting rights restrictions in the pandemic v climate action, it's a false choice - they won't do anything on climate action, but they're sure going to keep restricting your rights. you want to pull support over the rights restrictions, not pretend they're offering any kind of real climate policy.
the lesson from the last six years should be that, if we accept that we need real government action to fix this, then we have no choice but to look at citizens assemblies as a model, not representative bourgeois politics. it means we need to build a parallel system of governance and try to overpower the captured bourgeois system with it.
but, we've probably run out of time.
and, we actually probably want to seek higher ground, not common ground.
13:44
when the liberals won in 2015, they adopted harper's weakened climate change goals. then, they missed every target they'd signed up for since kyoto (as both parties had been doing, since kyoto) - emissions actually went up. they dipped during the pandemic, as they did during the 2008 recession, but there's no reason to think that won't reverse as the economy goes back to normal functioning.
now, the debate is about the paris agreement. but, why would you think that a party that ignored kyoto - and everything since then - would adhere to paris? the conservatives want to hold to the targets that the liberals have been holding to since harper set them, and that the government won't meet, anyways.
so, it's a debate that only exists in a fantasy reality.
the reality is that neither party is going to meet any of the targets, and it doesn't matter what target they pretend they're going to meet.
the reality is that emissions are going to increase, not decrease.
in a normal situation, it might not matter if you delude yourself about it. but, right now, the focus needs to be on the pmo's disdain for constitutional rights, not on their pretend climate policies.
13:56
this separation between the state and the market isn't something that is real anymore in the backrooms of the liberal party, which is strictly post-ideological and strictly neo-liberal.
in their minds, voting is like buying something in a store, and you can buy the blue item or the red item (or the budget orange item). but, the red item and blue item are manufactured in the same factory, and just have different stickers on them.
the advertising is just designed to sell you something - like advertising for commodities in the private sector is. that separation no longer exists - voting is just a market interaction. so, it doesn't matter if what they tell you is true, it only matters if you buy it or not.
like it or hate it, it's how it is, and you need to grapple with it - it's all just obfuscated advertising to sell you something by people that have no intent of following through with any of it.
if we need government to solve this - and we do - we need a grassroots movement to take the government back, first. and we don't have time.
so, focus on how they're restricting your rights - which is real - and not how they're selling climate change policy - which is not.
14:31
the contemporary liberal party is less like a political organization that wants to implement policy, and more like a corporation trying to sell you a product.
and, like any other corporation, they're just out to maximize profit for their investors (lobbyists) and shareholders (upper brass party members).
14:34
the policy announcements are functionally equivalent to a "beyond petroleum" ad, or a benetton commercial, or whatever.
i think you get what i'm saying.
there's a pretty boy front guy that they use as their public face to trick you into supporting them, but behind the scenes is just a bunch of accountants looking to maximize profit.
14:37
let's clarify a legal point, here.
if you support mandatory vaccination policies, what are you actually legally supporting? are you aligning with the "collective" over the "individual"?
first of all, let me clarify that i'm a socialist, i'm not a fascist. the idea of aligning with the collective over the individual is not a left-wing idea, it's the extreme right; it's not marx, it's mussolini. but let's put that aside for a minute. what are you actually aligning with in canada or any similar bourgeois economic system?
well, what is the source of a business owner's claim to mandate vaccines amongst staff or customers? it's property rights - bourgeois property rights. it has nothing to do with a collective right or an individual right, it has to do with capitalist property relations.
and, what is the claim to rejecting it? it's self-ownership. personal autonomy.
so, who is supporting a bourgeois position here? i'd suggest it's the side that's arguing in favour of private property rights, is it not?
i would expect that, in a socialist economy, it would be up to workers to decide, not delegated to private property rights and that, as such, a business owner would have no actual decision making power over it's workers or customers. and, i'd be out there arguing for individual autonomy, although i'd accept some concept of vaccine safe zones and volunteer to stay out of them. and, we can then debate whether we want anarchism or authoritarian leftism, but we should agree that socialists put the issue up to workers, not to capital.
so, let's get our heads on straight with this - if you are aligning with the narrative around vaccine mandates, you are taking a pro property rights position and succumbing to the dictates of capital to enforce those property rights.
and, that's not left wing, at all.
...even discarding the question as to whether collectivism is left wing or not in the first place.
so, it's not hyperbolic to argue that this is fascism, when it's the literal historical definition of it.
15:28
the debate that's unfolding is not one about the collective vs the individual, it's about the rights of property v the rights of workers.
15:34
so, when somebody like jagmeet singh stands up and argues that workers should be fired for not getting vaccinated, you should understand that as aligning with property rights in opposition to workers' rights.
15:35
will this election reduce to a competition between mr. trudeau and mr. singh over who can fire the most workers?
16:08
this was initially a stevie wonder song, but they thoroughly made it their own.
16:16
see, this was harper's pet project and the kind of non-answer that we voted against in 2015.
we erected this false dichotomy between government and markets without realizing that the government's solution in a bourgeois state will always be to let the market fix it.
this technology does not exist, and there's little reason to think it will exist any time soon. but, it's still not a solution, even if it were to appear tomorrow - it's just kicking the can down the road.
we need to leave the oil in the ground to meet the targets, and none of the three parties will do that, or even entertain contemplating doing that.
17:25
trudeau is pointing to the other guy and saying "don't vote for him, he's just like harper", while evading the sobering, unfortunate fact: they're both just like harper.
the liberals have not altered the harperite policy at all.
so, you can vote for harper or, if you don't like it, you can vote for harper.
17:33
again- i know the media wants to argue that there's this huge swing happening because erin o'toole is pro-choice, but i'm not buying that.
this is what i think...and if you disagree, try to prove me wrong.
- it is true that polling pegs support for pandemic restrictions & vaccine passports in the 60-65% ramge
- that means 35-40% are opposed
- but, that 60-65% is split amongst a number of parties that have all kinds of things to worry about....
- ....and that 35-40% is laser-focused, upset and choosing the conservatives as their vehicle to express it
further, the liberals can't win if the issue cuts them down by even 3-4%, which seems to be an underestimate.
so, this might be a historical blunder in the making. if the conservatives can really tap into that 35% of angry, anti-restrictions voters, and the majority can't get along to beat them, and in fact even suffers from voter apathy, then the conservatives win a majority.
this happened - recently. it's the same political dynamic that won harper a majority, without ever commanding anything close to majority support. his supporters had all the passion, and the fake left had lost interest in the process. and, it's even true that harper didn't even represent the rabid right that voted for him, and that they eventually gave up on him when they got their majority and it clicked.
so, o'toole doesn't have to actually be the solution, and trudeau doesn't have to actually be the problem. but, trudeau walked right into the framing, and o'toole might fluke out a giant win from it.
there's still a long ways to go, and some event might scramble things up. but, it's not going to be what's happened so far.
so, be careful with polls - if you read them wrong, they might kill you.
19:41
(that's from ekos politics)
it might be a snapshot.
it might be a low sample.
it might be a fluke.
but, i've never seen it before. and, it's suggestive of a potential landslide developing.
again: data this weird doesn't happen because of a fiscal policy.
the country is rejecting the party's governing philosophy, and it's hard to make sense of why if it isn't concerns about individual rights.
23:16
tuesday, august 31, 2021
i want to be very clear.
i wouldn't show you a vaccine certificate if i had one. it's none of your fucking business.
and, if you dare ask me for that kind of information, i'll never give you a dime of my money again.
ok?
0:35
i suspect that this is about the app...it's probably a tracking tool.
0:38
so, what are you more afraid of - state surveillance or the common cold?
0:38
i'll again point out that michigan has recently banned vaccine passports.
so, i'll go spend my money there, instead.
...just as soon as they let me.
0:59
i'm also expecting i should be able to avoid it by just telling people i'm from out of town, though.
it seems like they don't check you if you're from a different province or a different country. so, that's an easy excuse.
1:02
it's a way out for bar owners, too, right.
"she said she was from out of town."
1:03
of course i'm not taking it seriously, it's retarded.
i just proved it's a dumb idea.
but, we're a dumb country.
1:06
hooray for dumb as fuck canada, once again.
1:11
i'd leave, but i can't.
1:13
so, they're still carrying out strikes and still killing afghan civilians, we've just handed the government over to a bunch of hooligans.
thanks, joe. good move. top notch leadership.
where exactly are they launching these strikes from? pakistan? qatar? iirc, pakistan initially refused to allow use of it's airspace (and iran is a nonstarter), which is part of the reason they had to go in in the first place. if they have some other base somewhere with access, they'd have probably preferred to use it all along.
one of the ssrs?
or...
nah.
they're not still there. couldn't be. right?
where are the drones and planes launching from?
2:43
*sigh*.
covid is a seasonal disease.
it should peak sometime after the solstice. i mean the winter solstice.
18:50
see, i don't find this surprising, and it's a part of my logic in not bothering.
20:00
i want to be clear on what that study is saying and what it isn't.
what the study is saying is that your body is more able to recognize the delta variant as a virus if you have natural immunity than it is if you were vaccinated. why is that obvious?
because your body already went through this once before.
"but viruses and vaccines are the same thing!", you claim - well, not really, exactly. when you infect your body with a dead protein, or a fake dead protein, as it may be, your body is just recognizing a generalized pathogen. in the end, your body has to clear it from your system, yes, but it's like clearing out any kind of random pollution, because it's not actually generating virus symptoms - it's not attaching to cells and blowing things up.
the reason vaccines work is because your body initially doesn't care what the invading protein is, it just knows to get rid of it. if it had to test to check if it's a virus or not, it wouldn't work. so, it might be a virus, or a bacteria, or some particulate pollution or something inedible that somebody ate - all your immune system cares about is that it's unrecognized and it needs to mount a defence.
but, when you've beaten off a virus, and your body sees a variant, and the variant is not dramatically different, it recognizes it as a virus and immediately gets to work wiping it out as a virus.
it's the difference between your body knowing that a protein does a certain thing if left alone and just knowing it's not quite right and shouldn't be there, and clearing it out. so, you won't see differences in efficacy on initial virus iterations, but might when mutations start piling up. and, it was always obvious that mutations would start piling up...
the result is that vaccines can be very, very effective at clearing stable viruses, but it's a sort of a trick, and not a true immune response. if you're old and your immune system doesn't work anyways then you want every trick you can get. but, the science always suggested that the young were better off fighting the virus off than relying on vaccines to do it for them.
now, the variant is dominant, and we're seeing this predictable result demonstrate itself.
again, i can't stress this enough - a vaccine is not a magic potion and the at risk will remain at risk forever. don't lull yourself into a sense of false complacency.
and, if you're young and think these restrictions aren't quite right, have some confidence in your sense of deduction - you're right. they're not...
20:17
the united states has sufficient infrastructure to accept a large refugee population.
canada does not.
so, what does our retarded prime minister do? he clamours all over himself, begging the united states to allow us to take their refugees, because he thinks it will win him a few votes.
then, he'll dump them in a ditch somewhere and tell them to fend for themselves on the market.
what an asshole.
everybody would be better off if those refugees stayed in the united states.
21:36
anybody seeking to flee to canada should understand that the cost of living is higher here than almost anywhere else in the world due to poor infrastructure and a suffocating level of overpopulation in the core regions, and that the poor, particularly, suffer immensely for it.
21:54
so, this month's cleaning only took two hours - a welcome change, let me tell you, but that's done, for as long as i'm down here for. i never got that wood for those shelves...and it's no longer my top priority at the moment....
i was hoping that august would be very productive, but i got that call about the surgery at the end of july and it sapped my brain for the first two weeks, then left me floundering for the last two. i've been working on that update post far too long.
all i can do is make september productive, so here we go.
22:58
ford is dithering on the vaccine passports.
i don't think the idea is justified by the science at all. but, i won't have to freak out if:
1) you make it voluntary by business - then i can just avoid businesses that push it
2) you make an antibody test equivalent to a vaccination and make antibody testing covered by ohip. i'm sure i have antibodies...
23:01
you have to understand that this isn't actually about reducing the spread of covid, and i've explained why in some detail.
it's primarily about consumer confidence, and that should be left up to the business owner to work out. one business may have a customer base where people want the false sense of security, and another may have a customer base that will tell the business to fuck off.
and, i suspect it's also about tracking software in that app or qr code. the government will now have an easily accessible database of every non-essential business you go to, so they'll be able to track you from business to business, like they do in china. do you really want that?
23:06
i'm being passive about this because i know that a lot of these rights restrictions are somewhat inevitable in any concept of technological dystopia, and the virus is more of a catalyst than a driver. they were probably going to try a lot of this stuff anyways.
but, i don't carry a phone and i'm not going to start carrying one - there's always been an opt-out clause. and, i'm content to just take it so long as it's there - at least for now.
23:09
so, give me the opt-out and we can declare a truce.
but, try to force me into it, and expect me to react like it's a declaration of war.
23:11
see, again - this is about branding.
trudeau, himself, has been accused multiple times of harassment, and has just shrugged it off. maybe he has a different personality in blackface, or something, and doesn't think he's responsible for the behaviour of his multiple personalities. or, maybe he's a rank hypocrite that's completely full of shit.
but, there's a brand that they sell you (of mr trudeau being the sensitive, caring "nice guy" type that's oh so concerned and such a good ally), and then there's the reality of how they operate (which is as a heteropatriarchal corporation that wants to maximize profit at all costs).
if this mp was in any other party, they'd be calling for his resignation and making a big deal of it.
but, liberals operate by one set of rules and demand the world operate by another. the left has known that about liberals for decades, and this is just another example of it.
obviously, this candidate should have been replaced quite some time ago, and should resign, now.
23:48