israel is as close to herd immunity as anywhere right now.

so, it's going to be like getting a yearly flu shot.

and, you might not need to get yearly flu shots anymore, because the flu is essentially crowded out.

if youngish people want to get vaccinated, and there are extra vaccines, there's minimal harm associated with it. but, the focus should be on ensuring that people that are in more direct risk of harm get both vaccine doses asap.

and, i'll probably wait until it stabilizes and i'm in the 55+ category.

right now, i'd rather beat it myself.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/dozens-of-cases-of-indian-covid-variant-found-in-israel-including-among-vaccinated-1.9758121

they're kind of both right.

what fauci is saying is only meaningful insofar is it pertains to seniors or other vulnerable people that aren't getting vaccinated. if every senior gets vaccinated, the risk regarding the spread in young people reduces to the developing problem with variants. but, it doesn't seem like these vaccines are going to be very useful for variants, anyways.

i'm sorry to say it, but i care more about myself than i do about society, and i'll argue that's the best way to build a social system, through enlightened self-interest. what that means is that i realize that, at this stage, the vaccines are better used on people that need them more, and i'm better off avoiding the weak than i am wasting a vaccine in my arm, that is probably already nearly useless.

if i happen to infect somebody else that is young, i take no responsibility for their behaviour, afterward. they, too, need to realize the importance of avoidance, but that is their responsibility and not mine.

so, while fauci is making a good point and one that should be pondered carefully and reflected upon in terms of adjusting behaviour, rogan is fundamentally correct - vaccinating young people at this stage is the least of anybody's concerns, and probably of minimal actual efficacy, so long as they're practicing proper distancing from those that need it.

young people that are in contact with the vulnerable, however, should be vaccinated.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anthony-fauci-joe-rogan-covid-19-vaccine_n_608a8a67e4b04620270439a0

i should also note that i successfully ate some fruit and kept it down, so it doesn't seem to be a....

....virus...

...either.

but, i'm really more concerned about potential signals regarding cancer than i am about covid. i'll no doubt beat covid, unless i have cancer. and, i probably won't beat cancer.

there's no serious symptoms of it, and i have to keep reminding myself of that. but, i should be vigilant.

if it happens again, i'll take it seriously, it's just that the cause and effect with the coffee is way too clear, this time.

i'm a rationalist, and i'm a logician, so i realize i need to take things seriously. but i'm not a hypochondriac. i think i've navigated this middle point fairly well, actually.

to be clear - it wasn't like coffee grounds. that would suggest bleeding.

it was more like brown splotches suspended in the primarily clear mucus.

so, should i be concerned about this first vomit in i don't know how long?

it's very unusual.

but, it was a dry heave - all that came up was some mucus and what looked like remnant wheat, and maybe  some dried coffee.

so, you could look at it either way - the unusualness of it is concerning because it's so uncharacteristic, but it also means i was sort of due.

and, i clearly had a bad reaction to chugging....it was four large mugs of coffee. so, nearly a pot. in about a half hour.

if it happens again, i'll take it seriously. but, i won't drink that much coffee that fast again any time soon, trust me.

the purpose of the police is to protect the rich from the poor. what this guy is saying is delusional.

it's not that the universality isn't an ideological feature - i get it, and i don't disagree. at all. but, this guy is supposed to be an economist, so he should fully realize that a universal hand out in this sense will just produce inflation. and, then you've converted your universal right to income security into yet another government handout for the rich.

the idea behind this ought to be to maximize positive liberty and give people a way out of the labour market if they truly want one, without forcing them into abject poverty. ideally, this will even boost wages by restricting the amount of labour participation. so, everybody wins, in the end. but, the only way to make sense of it is to make it look like a negative income tax - and peg it to something like 75% of the minimum wage.

this whole "disincentive to work" thing gets the supply & demand curve upside down, and i'd guess it's because the curve has flipped over, at least in rich countries. that's a big part of why you had this middle class develop in the rich countries - because there was more work than there workers. capital consequently had to incentivize people to work, in order to maximize productivity. but, nowadays you have the opposite - there are way more workers than there are jobs, and that's just increased with globalization and mechanization. now, we have this natural unemployment rate, and this reality that there are always going to be unemployed workers, no matter what. there's consequently no longer any good reason to incentivize work; rather, if you're looking at it from a labour perspective, you actually want to give people incentives to exit the labour market so they aren't deflating the price of labour by instigating a race to the bottom. so, you can pull the rug out from that argument entirely by pointing to changes in the labour market. but, the point about inflation remains, and it appears that he's not even addressing it.

people don't really need an "incentive to work", anyways. we're all going to want to do some kind of work. what you used to need was an incentive to participate in wage work. but, like i say - that is flipped over. capital no longer needs such a thing, at all.

===

see,  this is the kind of goofy argument you expect from an arts major, not a professor of economics. if you fund a ubi with corporate & property taxes,  the rentiers will just increase rents to offset it. in the end, the government generates more revenue, and those that own debt benefit, but the poor just have the money they're given clawed back by the rentier class that you're taxing to redistribute to them. so, this is a handout to the rich, not a handout to the poor.

i understand that it is perceived that a ubi is politically unworkable unless it's truly universal, but it just doesn't actually work unless you target it.

====

the other thing is that it is easy to predict that if you design systems where you're giving money to people without robust government id, databases of imaginary people will start appearing out of nowhere, and money will be directed into slush funds controlled by politicians and their buddies in the corporate sector. it's an algorithm for corruption.

===

and he cites hayek but i actually think friedman got this specific idea better than almost everybody, in framing it as an escape from the market. right-libertarians are all about allowing individuals to make choices, and if you like markets and want to live in a market economy and have the capital to participate then the freedom of such a system is quite apparent, but markets are in truth tyrannical systems of vicious collectivism if you have no interest in participating in them. give friedman a little bit of credit in realizing the contradiction, there, and presenting a negative income tax as a way to escape the tyranny of forced marketization.

do you think dr. wolf really believes that work communes are what replaces capitalism? most commentators - even those on the left - seem to think we're falling back into a neo-feudalism, mr hayek's thesis notwithstanding. and, i'm sort of privy to that, myself - financialization is the actual road to serfdom, and it's the superhighway we seem to be on.

i never vomit. it always comes out the other end. but, whatever reaction i was having this morning ended in heaving up an empty stomach. and, i instantly felt a million times better.

it might have been something like chugging coffee + iron supplements = bad trip.

i'm absorbing everything except iron.

that strongly suggests that i don't have a general absorption issue.

but, i need to finish the tests, first.

scoping for "celiac disease" should be the absolute last thing you do, after you've ruled out all of the real diseases.

"here lies jessica,

who ripped her stomach out searching for a disease that doesn't exist,

and in truth was just eating too many phytates."

ok, so i'm going to make a bet with myself.

if i can convince myself that i haven't figured this out by the time i've run through these blood tests, i'll let them scope me - because i'll be out of options.

but, if i can convince myself that i've figured this out without needing the scope, i'll do that. 

so, what i'm going to want to do is delay the scope. and, chances are that it won't be for a few weeks, at least, anyways.

it's a minimal risk, but i'm pretty risk adverse with my health. the chances that they're going to find anything are likely remote; if i rip my stomach out, i'll deserve a darwin award for it.

the kinds of people that walk around avoiding gluten are the kinds of people that should be rounded up in a room and shot on contact.

i don't want to be like that. 

gross.

i don't want to stop eating gluten.

i like gluten.

i mean, what happens if he diagnoses me with this make-believe disease called celiac?

nothing. there's no treatment, and there's no cure - because it's not a real disease. and, i'm not cutting out gluten like a fucking dipshit hipster, i'd rather kill myself. i won't live like that. 

i'll just keep with the iron pills.

no...

i'm not putting a scope down my stomach to check for a disease that doesn't exist, that's foolish. i'll just cancel that.

i'm sure that it's an interaction.

so, that was truly brutal, but i'm finally feeling better and need to eat. i should have eaten this morning but i was fucked up from the coffee...

it might have been a caffeine overdose. i dunno. it was awful, whatever it was - almost felt like a mushroom trip. just that feeling of being overwhelmed by a chemical and not being able to stop it. ugh.

and, now i'm very hungry.

the stomach doctor wanted to do a stomach exam and a colonoscopy, but i don't see the value in risking the complications from a colonoscopy, given that i have no symptoms of colon problems. i'm willing to let him do a stomach exam, though. he'll schedule that next week.

really, i think the zinc results should tell me what's going on, when i get them.

ugh.

i don't know what happened, exactly; i was feeling a little blurry this morning, and didn't want to go back to sleep, so i chugged several mugs worth of coffee and....yikes. very bad reaction.

i don't know if it was the coffee itself, or the coffee reacting with something else, but if i was trying to stay awake, it totally backfired. i've been flat on my back for hours.

and, i feel like garbage :(.

whatever it is, i have to wait for it to pass. i guess.

i have my stomach doctor appointment today, and i need the zinc results, so i'll need to call my doctor's office and ask them to fax it to him.

another sleepy morning. let's hope i'm up for the day.

today's post is the lost "curious george" suite, inri037.

if i ever find the lost version, i'll upload it, but i think it's gone.

====

so, i was absolutely mortified of george w. bush considerably before it was cool. 

clinton had some problems, and gore was, at the time, a cartoon character; if you want to blame it on something other than the rain (and the moon and the stars), you should blame it on low turnout - something that was largely probably spurred on by the assumption that bush couldn't possibly actually win. well, maybe it was a fitting way to end the 90s. here's your apathy, kids. served cold. ice cold. cold as the blood of a shape-shifting lizard person...and cold as the blood on it's hands. 

of course, standing in the spring of 2000, i had no way of knowing what was about to be unleashed. i was mostly still just pissed at clinton for bombing medicine factories in the sudan. i mean, the level of assholery underlying it was just.....the threat of "terrorism" could hardly justify that kind of indiscriminate bombing....fucking medicine factories... 

the way i interpreted it was something more along the lines of this half-evolved hominid of undisclosed type slowly riding into town on horseback (with cronies in tow, including one with a yellow hat). it felt like you could see him coming days in the distance. it was unclear what was going to happen when he got to town, but it felt ominous. there was nothing to do but just wait, maybe prepare a little and ultimately hope for the best, even while bracing for the worst. 

so, i did what i do - i wrote a conceptual piece about it with the intent of raising awareness. even just amongst friends would help, if they'd talk. etc. 

...or, well, i sort of did, anyways. see, i lost a hard drive around this period, and most of the song along with it. what is posted here is a 90% done version that i thought i had lost completely but stumbled upon a few months after the election, after i had moved. given the circumstances, i'm lucky that i found this at all. however, it's remained unreleased as a cohesive piece all of these years. 

well, the election was over. it was no longer worthwhile to finish it. i suppose that if i was operating on a profit motive, or a desire for control, i would have finished it. instead, i just felt like i failed to warn people, and it actually put me into a pretty deep depression for a while. it was too late, i blew it, we're fucking doomed....finishing it wouldn't matter....nothing mattered anymore... 

listening to it now, it could maybe use a bass part. all this was really missing, though, were the vocals - which were also lost on the hard drive. i have no recollection of them at all at this point and don't see the value in making new ones up. 

i did have the first and second section put aside somewhere, on a cd-r. i was able to fill that up with samples and get it out just before the election, and it also ended up sequenced into deny everything. so, it wasn't a total loss. 

as for this suite, though? i present it as i've recovered it, with no further comment than that it accurately represents the deep, foreboding fear of the future that was in the air around the period that bush was elected. 

this is a song cycle. 

recorded in spring, 2000. released, unmodified, on jan 10, 2014. release finalized on oct 3, 2017. as always, please use headphones. 

the full suite is now on the outtakes compilation, inrimoved (inri042): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrimoved 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2000, 2014, 2017). 

released may 10, 2000 

j - guitar, effects, bass, synth, drums, drum programming, sequencing, sound design (sound raider, audiomulch, granular synthesis, noise generators), loops, digital wave editing, production