it's probably the worst police department in canada - and that's not hyperbolic.
Sunday, January 24, 2021
see, one of the ways i'm able to tell that the smoke is coming from upstairs is that it clears out when the truck leaves.
but, i'm still not sure if it's the guy that lives up there (i suspect it mostly isn't), if it's his sidekick cop, a woman he's seeing or his teenage daughter, which he's just letting smoke inside when she comes over.
i don't actually care. i just want it to stop.
and, i'm glad it's better right now, even if it's just for a bit.
so, i mean, i think it should be clear sorting through this that i spend essentially all my time learning, nowadays. and, if you think i should be reading philosophy books instead of peer reviewed science, we can have a heated debate and discussion over what is worth reading up on and what isn't.
if anything, my education is unusually broad and my scope has unusual breadth. but, no single human can read everything. in the end, we make our choices as to what we wish to learn.
and, while it may be somewhat obscure and less amenable to debates at dinner tables in respectable circles, i actually think that what i'm reading is far more valuable than what you're reading - and may even suggest that most of what you read is, in truth, of almost no value at all.
sorry.
if you see something here that you think is not quite right, go ahead and send me an email.
think of it like this: this is a space where i post notes about what i'm learning about, largely for my own use later on, rather than a space where i try to teach things to other people. so, the mistakes have to exist as they do, to document the learning process for future generations.
you know that meme about the obsessive ex-girlfriend, or female that feels a little too deeply, in general?
the return of psaki-bot requires a new picture, i think.
that said, this secretary is a known entity to political observers and we know something about her from the start - she can not lie effectively. no poker face. worst liar ever...
that's a problem.
"you admit you're wrong and then correct yourself but don't delete the wrong information"
yeah. and, i think that's what everybody should do, too.
this isn't a reference site, it's a personal journal. i actually don't really know what the size of the audience is, but i suspect it's very small. it may be somewhat specific. i don't actually know - i don't spend any time at all sorting through those kinds of metrics.
and, there's no income source here, remember.
why do i do this, then? it's theoretically for historical value. i'll remind you that i'm a composer. did beethoven leave us a journal? if he didn't, i think we can all wish he did.
so, i'm not talking to real, living people - i'm talking to future historians. that's my intended audience, here: people studying my music hundreds of years from now. i don't care much for real, living people.
but, the other reason i post here is because it helps me order my thoughts.
so, the errors are a part of the project, and must be retained as they are. i keep track of sources for my own benefit, not yours. but, in the end, if you find that upsetting, i'd advise you don't source from blogs, then.
renewing this treaty is important, and i was clear the whole time that there would be a handful of things he'd do that i'd be on board with, this being one of them.
i guess the 80s won, in the end.
i'm less convinced the iran deal is salvageable.
but, aaron's right to point to an underlying conflict as deeply concerning, as biden indicated from the start that he sees russia as an adversary - which is a reversal of obama's position. obama famously mocked romney for that.
watch psaki-bot here first:
then take a walk down memory lane:
biden is a small step forwards for america, and a giant step backwards for mankind.
that bugaloo boy sounds exactly like a 19th century populist.
jimmy is making the same anti-sectionalist argument that the populists made, and sam (who is usually relatively moderate) is making the argument that the socialists of the time were making, in opposition to it - that while violent revolt is necessary for actual change (do you know who else had guns? civil rights activists in the 60s.), you need an analysis, first.
and, indeed what happened? the populist faction (renamed "progressives") takes over the democratic party under wilson, and you get antisedition laws, and debs finds himself in jail.
and, if somebody harms themselves, does that give you the right to harm them too? does that undo the whole thing?
well, if somebody punches themselves in the face, does that mean it's ok to join in?
if somebody stabs themselves, does that mean it's permissible to stab them?
i think very few people would suggest that.
likewise, my failures around tobacco don't mean it's ok to blow smoke on me when i'm not relapsing, and it doesn't take a lot of depth of thought to realize that.
the nap of course has some caveats, too.
so, a religious person may not acknowledge that queer folks are people, but that doesn't actually harm them in any way. it is partly for this reason that i tend to cite mill rather than anything else; my preference is the harm principle, and i insist you have to actually establish harm before you adhere to an nap.
clearly, smoking is harmful.
in fact, i can't think of anything that's more harmful.
golden rule: treat your neighbours the way you want to be treated.
contrapositive of golden rule: if you don't like to be treated in a specific way, don't treat your neighbours that way
these things are logically equivalent, it is true.
but, this is the nap:
don't treat your neighbours in a way that they don't like to be treated.
in context, the golden rule wouldn't prevent inside smoking by a heavy smoker, but the nap would. as such, the nap is a stronger protector of individual rights, even as it inflicts less strenuous requirements on individual behaviour.
is the nap the golden rule?
no.
the golden rule prescribes a positive action - to actively treat others in a specific way. the nap is a statement of negative liberty, that tells you what not to do to avoid infringing on the rights of others.
courts have routinely rejected the good samaritan principle, and most libertarians would reject the idea that you have any necessary prerogative to go out of your way to treat others as you want to be treated. i might even argue that it's part of the point of being a libertarian.
but, if we're to eliminate the state, we have to replace it with self-policing and the nap plays a vital role there in ensuring that we have a good heuristic to understanding what we should and should not do.
i've never really believed in mental addiction.
but, they say smoking is more addictive than heroin, and that's based on the reality of physical addiction.
addiction doesn't control you; it doesn't make you do things, you retain control, and you retain responsibility. but, nicotine addiction is a hard problem....
i was stressed out about my birthday; that's why i relapsed. but, it's been ten days since i stopped and there's no threat that i'm going back to it any time soon. before the 2nd of january, i hadn't bought any cigarettes since august - pretty good. hopefully, i succeed in finally quitting for good this time.
listen - i started smoking in 2002, in 2nd year, mostly as a stimulant. the coffee wasn't working; it was nicotine or cocaine, and i decided on nicotine.
i started quitting almost as soon as i started smoking, and never really considered myself a smoker, but i had to live in the real world, and i found the withdrawals impossible to deal with. i'm sure they're less violent than any withdrawals i'd be dealing with from cocaine.
so, even when i was a smoker, i'd quit for a month or two over and over, but i kept relapsing because i kept having to work two jobs, or kept having to stay awake all weekend to finish an art project. i kept quitting, but i kept coming back to it to use it like strong coffee. i couldn't get out of this loop, where i needed the nicotine to be productive.
and, that lasted until the start of 2016, when i finally cut myself off. i no longer had to do anything, and i was increasing my estrogen intake to a point where smoking was becoming a serious risk factor. i had to stop; it was time.
and, i did. i succeeded. finally.
since then, i've relapsed many times, largely as a function of marijuana use. in fact, it's one of the reasons i've decided to strongly reduce my marijuana intake - i can't find a way to use marijuana, even casually, without relapsing back to tobacco. i'm still trying to figure this out; i still don't have an answer.
but, i need to be clear that i don't defend myself for doing this. when i relapse, i'm failing. i'm not asserting my rights (smoking is not a right, and it's stupid to suggest it is) or being free or anything like that - i'm failing in an addiction that i'm largely over, but still struggle with occasionally. i'm relapsing, and i'm not proud of it when i do it.
but, i have the decency and common courtesy to make an attempt to minimize the effects it may have on others when i do fail for a few days or a few weeks (it's never more than that) at a time by ensuring that i smoke away from the house and away from other people. so, i go for a walk. and, if somebody on the street were to address me about it, i would be sure to avoid their house when i'm walking. i'm very conscious of this.
you hear more about this on the anarchist right (the real anarchist right, not this randian selfishness-as-a-virtue bs), but it's a shared value on the anarchist left, even if it's often articulated differently. you can cite mill's harm principle or the nap, or ancient celtic customary law, but it's a foundational principle of all forms of anarchism:
my rights end where my neighbours' rights begin
what that means is that smokers that are also libertarians or anarchists need to be concerned about the externalities of their behaviour, otherwise they're not really anarchists - they're randian objectivists. anarchists give a fuck, because they understand that they can't have a functional stateless society unless they do. and, what that means is that the nap actually negates the concept of smokers' rights, due to the external effects of the behaviour, just as it would negate the right to produce any other sort of pollution.
i'm very conscious of this.
it frustrates me to no end that others simply aren't.
but, i know that very few people know how to think in this society, because they're not taught how to; in fact, they're explicitly taught how not to think. and, this is the result of that.
i don't care if my neighbours smoke, as a moral principle, or something. but, as a rights concern, i insist i have the right to breathe fresh air, and insist they adhere to a basic libertarian rights framework, which means that they smoke away from other people, if they choose to.
in context, that means that you don't smoke inside when you've signed a non-smoking lease, as my landlord has.
and, i'm just waiting for basic honesty on the point.
actually, it seems like there's a companion study by the same authors.
Results: The mean and population-safe (upper limit of the 95% CI) methionine requirements in the absence of exogenous cysteine were found to be 12.6 and 21 mg·kg−1·d−1, respectively. The mean and population-safe methionine requirements in the presence of excess dietary cysteine were found to be 4.5 and 10.1 mg·kg−1·d−1, respectively, representing a cysteine sparing effect of 64% in a comparison of mean methionine requirements and of 52% in a comparison of population-safe methionine intakes. Furthermore, the difference between population-safe intakes with and without dietary cysteine establishes a safe cysteine intake of 10.9 mg·kg−1·d−1 in the presence of adequate methionine intakes.
is it that easy?
let me understand this before i decide that.
actually, i seem to have misunderstood this term "population-safe intake". the pdf says:
population-safe intake (upper limit of the 95% CI)
...which i misunderstood as meaning the 95% confidence interval of the upper limit. that is, i thought that was a number that represented 95% certainty that you have an upper limit.
but, that didn't seem right, in the context of the actual numbers in front of me. it's a term i hadn't seen before. i found a definition at the who:
For an individual, a safe individual intake has been defined as the 97.5th percentile of the distribution of individual requirements, nominally the average + 1.96SD. Thus any individual receiving such an intake will have a very low (<2.5%) risk of deficiency (intake < requirement).
that means it's more like an ear than an upper limit, and it becomes considerably higher than i'd be able to consume. i should have also used the sigma for the specific study, rather than the one in the nap document.
from the pdf again:
Therefore, the total SAA requirements found in the present study represent the amount of dietary methionine needed to fulfill all the functions of methionine in vivo. However, it cannot be concluded from the present study whether the amount of cysteine required for the synthesis of glutathione, taurine, or sulfate was achieved with methionine intakes at the breakpoint for protein synthesis. This is an important consideration for deciding on appropriate dietary reference intakes for SAAs; additional research is required on this issue.
i had previously cited the first sentence (but had read the last one). i need to find the amount of methionine that is required for everything except cysteine, or otherwise take a guess at it.
this is confusing, but i'll get it, in the end.