temporary full june, 2022 backup archive (not source material - to be permanently deleted when pdf uploads)

note to moderator: i don't want to be moderated. i want complete free speech. that is why i'm taking my blog down, i don't want to adhere to your "community standards", i want to post somewhere else. that said, i'm currently being harassed by some childish dykes that are mad at me because i'm not a lesbian. they should choose not to read my blog if they don't like it, rather than continue to annoy me for rejecting them.

i am republishing everything temporarily in order to use mirroring software to pull it down. i expect this post to be taken down within 24-48 hours. i would request you refrain from unwanted moderation in that time frame, so i can take my site down from here and upload somewhere that cares more about speech rights and less about conservative value systems.

wednesday, june 1, 2022

it's really a little odd to see the liberals promise to remove taxes on fast food. liberals in most jurisdictions want to increase taxes on fast food to try to disincetivize consumption.

in ontario, an extra obesity tax (on top of normal taxes) on fast food would be something i'd support, as it would potentially help direct funds from the tax system to the health system by targeting one of the worst abusers of the system, the overweight. call it the fat cat tax.

at the least, campaigning on removing taxes from fast food sends the wrong message; we're better off using the taxes we already collect from fast food on mitigating the damages caused by it.

15:53

i would like to run for the rhinos, but, like, seriously.

i'm not joking - i think that would be an awesome campaign message: let's tax the fat cats to pay for their own health care. 'cause i'll pull out the fucking charts and make you understand.

16:07

thursday, june 2, 2022

so, what are the choices today?

- the tories are terrible, but ford is very much an empty suit in the sense that he has no real direction or aspirations of his own. this is the real lesson of four years of doug ford: he's lost at sea, entirely over his head and hopelessly incompetent in his role, so he just does what the bureaucrats tell him. so, a vote for doug ford is really a vote for the bureaucracy, and whatever direction it's heading within. it's a vote for governance by deferral, because he has no competence or ability to do anything himself. maybe that's part of why there's an overlap in ford/trudeau voters.

- the liberals have some alright ideas, but they're lacking vision, and primarily due to unusually poor leadership. this del duca character doesn't have goals as to what he wants to do with the province, so much as he seeks a raise and the status of being premier. it's about his ego, not about policy. these types show up on the bourgeois fake left repeatedly, and they very rarely win. biden is the rare example of this type of politician that wins, and it took him many tries - and a very weak opponent.

- the ndp are untrustworthy at the best of times. they run on funding social services and representing workers, but they have a tendency to attack workers (bob rae) and end up obsessed with reducing deficits when they actually win (see darrell dexter, roy romanov and, probably, thomas mulcair). the ndp don't win very often, but they tend to do exactly the opposite of what they campaigned on doing when they do win. this particular round of ndp promises - capping gas prices amidst a carbon tax? - are particularly stupid and you'd consequently have to be particularly stupid to fall for them.

- the greens are substantively better on almost every issue, but i don't think that they're poised for a breakthrough, this cycle. there is no longer a per-vote subsidy, although there should be. voting for them is likely to have minimal impact in most ridings. with these options, voting green as a wasted vote is probably worth it.

i am not voting.

but, my non-official endorsement is to vote green.

8:47

in response to the weird bill being fast-tracked through the canadian senate without sufficient debate, which is ordering canadian social media sites to provide a subsidy to legacy canadian media corporations, i will no longer be posting links to legacy canadian media sources on this site.

i would encourage you to join this boycott of legacy canadian media.

9:56

it's interesting to see the ukraine media narrative shift to supposed russian war crimes (they caught a 19 year-old child and put him in jail for life (something the canadian supreme court recently rightly ruled is inhumane) in one of the worst show trials that we've seen since world war two) as soon as the russians make some gains in the east. combined with the nonsense about a "russian defeat" in the "battle of kiev", the propagandistic function of this war is laid that much more apparent.

in previous wars, the west has used overwhelming propaganda to present itself as good and it's opponents as bad. recently, this propaganda has been much less effective, leading western citizens to question it's intended outcome, as brainwashing. in this war, the propaganda seems to be the point: we will fight because we are right, and we are right because we will fight.

this seems to be the reason that non-western narratives are now entirely banned on western media (i guess our diversity is a liability after all; some powerful democracy we are, aren't we. right.): the only reason we're really fighting this is in order to fight it.

it makes world war one look rational, in comparison.

so, yes - the drastically superior russian army is making expected gains in a ground war against the exceedingly inferior ukrainian army, but that can't be reported in western media because the intent and purpose of the whole fiasco is to frame us winning a war against the bad guys to reconstruct a bullshit cold war narrative about nato being on the right side of history.

whatever you think about the bullshit, it's baffling to me that they thought they were actually going to win. 

they should have invaded grenada, or something.

14:36

this couple should sue, as their s. 6 and s. 9 rights are being infringed upon by this policy of arbitrary detention.

but, i'm using this post as a way to demonstrate the change in posting format.

i would have previously posted the link to the article at the bottom of the page, which was intended as a reference. by posting a link, i am neither hosting nor reusing content, and the premise that i am is retarded.

but, nonetheless, if legacy canadian media would prefer to use legacy citation methods, that can be arranged.

so, the new posting format will to be cite the article the way people used to cite articles when legacy media was relevant, which will be as follows:

reference:

"Montreal couple forced into 14-day quarantine for failing to fill out ArriveCAN entry app", cbc news, june 2, 2022

you'll have to google that yourself if you'd like to read the article.

16:39

the last few days have actually been slightly difficult. i was out early on tuesday to take the long bike ride (past belle river and back) to enjoy the 30+ degree weather, and while i certainly enjoyed the ride and the wonderful heat, my too-white legs got absolutely roasted, which has actually made it difficult to even walk. this is unusual for me; i rarely have to worry about getting burned. i was planning on getting out early on wednesday morning for one last grocery run, but it just wasn't possible, i really had no choice but to stay inside. the shower i took yesterday was pretty painful, if necessary - you don't want your sunburns to get infected. i then tried to lie down for a few hours yesterday evening (i was waiting until after 19:00 to do laundry) and i found myself unable to get back up until sunrise this morning. i'm still feeling it, but it's manageable, now. nonetheless, i still found myself sleeping most of the day.

i wanted to get focused on doing my end/start of the month cleaning when i came in, but have instead been having difficulty getting started on anything.

should i seek medical attention? i think these are first degree burns. they're still burning, still dilated and red, but i'm not seeing any swelling or cracking or bubbling. i'll keep an eye on it. 

have you ever tried to take a shit with a sunburn on your legs? it enforces proper shitting posture, because you can't slouch and rest your arms on your legs, you have to sit up in a proper manner. i'm used to eating with a plate in my lap, but not now, no way.

i got my blood tested before i went out for the ride. here's my chart update, minus a number of items that i'm no longer checking:

	2021										2022
	m	a	m	j	j	a	s	o	n	d	j	f	m	a	m	j	j	a	s	o	n	d
cholesterol	3.93	-	-	-	3.99	3.8	4.15	4.01/3.83	4.14/4.02	4.14/3.67	3.54/3.8	3.78/3.68			3.42
triglycerides	.87	-	-	-	.95	.89	1.41	1.05/0.94	1.09/1.32	1.86/0.73	2.26/0.75	0.69/1.02			0.42
hdl	1.69	-	-	-	1.84	1.59	1.73	1.42/1.55	1.37/1.42	1.51/1.74	1.75/1.72	1.74/1.69			1.55
ldl	1.85	-	-	-	1.72	1.81	1.78	2.11/1.85	2.28/2.00	1.79/1.6	<0.8/1.75	1.73/1.52			1.68
non-hdl	2.24	-	-	-	2.15	2.21	2.42	2.59/2.28	2.77/2.60	2.63/1.93	1.79/2.09	2.04/1.99			1.87
wbc	8.7/8.4	9.9/9.0	-	-	?	7.0	7.6	6.9/6.9	7.8	11.3/8.2	6.7/6.4	7.4/7.1		5.3	6.4
rbc yellow: 4 normal: 4.2	3.97/4.25	4.11/4.38	-	-	4.17	4.12	4.33	4.47/4.2	4.28	4.55/4.19	4.3/4.22	4.42/4.26		4.4	4.13
hemoglobin normal: 120	132/140	133/142	-	-	139	136	141	138/138	139	144/131	141/133	140/136		145	132
hematocrit normal: 0.36	.382/.404	.394/.424	-	-	.405	.398	.418	.417/.402	.405	0.431/0.393	.409/.396	.417/.404		.412	0.392
mcv normal: 100	96.1/95.1	95.8/97.0	-	-	97	96.8	96.6	93/95.7	94.6	94.7/94	95/94	94/95		93.7	95
mch	33.1/32.9	32.4/32.5	-	-	33.3	33.2	32.7	30.9/32.8	32.5	31.8/31.3	32.7/31.5	31.7/32		32.9	32.0
mchc	345/346	338/335	-	-	?	343	338	331/343	344	335/333	344/336	336/337		352	337
rdw	13.3/13.5	13.0/13.1	-	-	?	13	12.3	11.7/12.9	12.6	13.4/12.0	13.2/11.7	11.7/13		12.8	11.9
platelet	199/187	171/171	-	-	?	175	167	168/150	155	188/185	159/184	187/175		166	181
reticulocytes	-	-/42	-	-	53	56	46	35	33	33	39	41		43	49
vitamin d	87	-	-	-	109	72	64	72/83	78	64/71	61/74	74/80		102	77
estradiol	363/388	-	-	-	-	563	443	432	777	343	578	416		307	691
testosterone	0.9	-	-	-	-	-	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4		1.4	<0.4
progesterone	1.9	-	-	-	-	-	<0.5	0.7	0.5	0.9	<0.5	3.7		62.5	21
fsh	<0.2	-	-	-	-	-	0.2	0.1	<0.1	-	<0.1	0.1		0.5	0.2
lh	<0.2	-	-	-	-	-	0.1	0.1	0.1	-	0.1	<0.1		<0.2	0.1
ferritin	12/9	6/17	21	-	29	43	28	40	42	59	33	28		59	64
tibc	-	69.5	-	-	65.7	62.9	64.7	58.9	58.2	63.2	57.4	58.7		57.9
iron	-	9.6	-	-	22.7	37.3	19.3	28.3	37.3	32.5	13.1	14.8		28.2
iron sat	-	0.14	-	-	0.35	0.59	0.3	.48	0.64	0.51	0.23	0.25		0.49
transferrin	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.59	2.29	2.38	2.49	2.31	2.39		2.42
pth	-	-	-	5.5	-	6.2	5.9	6.2	5.5	8.0	6.3	5.7		6.9	6.4
tsh	0.92	-	-	-	-	0.94	1.22	1.67	1.48	1.07	1.39	0.97		1.26	0.92
calcitonin	-	-	-	<0.6	-	-	-	-	0.6	-	0.8	-
alp	61	-	-	63	59	50	60	59 /55	47	50	60	58		55	67

- i don't want to draw conclusions from the vitamin d as the numbers are known to demonstrate variability. i was out for most of the day on saturday, so i didn't have a deficit of sunlight. it depends on where i catch it in the cycle. i've been pointing that out for months, and there it is.

- cholesterol is fine. i was worried after the testosterone spiked over 1, but it seems to be ok. you'll note the tsh moved down with the testosterone again, too, which i think is good.

- pth is still too high, and i don't know the next step - i have lots of estrogen, lots of calcium, lots of d. why is my pth not coming down? i'll give it a few more runs to see if it stabilizes with the testosterone back to normal trace levels, but what next?

- these hormone ranges are ideal, but it's random. i got a good snapshot. that's positive.

- my ferritin inched up to 64 from 59. that's a slow increase, but it's the right direction. this lab did not do circulating iron, and i will need to go back soon to yell at them for it. i need to wait for my legs to heal, first.

so, everything seems like it's stabilizing. finally. but...

- my reticulocytes are still slightly low. this lab did two different metrics i hadn't seen before:

- immature reticulocyte function, which is at the high end of the normal range

- reticulocyte hemoglobin, which was technically high (if by a fraction of a percent)

the other lab simply didn't do these tests.

i have an appointment with a blood oncologist because i'm concerned that i'm not producing enough reticulocytes and that i might have a marrow issue; together, this new data suggests that i am producing a large number of reticulocytes, but that it's not making up a large amount of blood content.

i need to do some research into this, but i'm tentatively thinking this is actually a metric of mixed value, in the presence of continued ferritin increases. what i've been imagining is that i should be creating reticulocytes at a high rate, because i was previously anemic (and still am, technically) and the data that suggested that i wasn't was concerning. but, now i see that i am creating the reticulocytes, but they're not making up a large percentage of my total blood count.

so, it's a positive data point that i'm creating enough blood; it's concerning that it's not getting out of the marrow, or is being destroyed too quickly after it does.

i wouldn't imagine that i'm only bleeding out the new blood; that doesn't make sense. maybe the blood cells are exploding before they get into the bloodstream and maybe this is the missing piece of data required to diagnose me with the type of anemia where your blood cells explode randomly. this is generally considered genetic and is almost certainly the cause of the anemia on my father's side. i wish i had seen this data point previously but, as it is, this is something to take to the blood specialist. it may be the case that the only solution is to take iron pills.

am i maybe just using iron at an unusually high rate? well, that's the alternative hypothesis, and i think that i'd have reason to be careful about using iron at a high rate if i have a production issue in the marrow. so, the things are probably working together. but, i now have some real evidence suggesting that hemolysis is occurring, so that's going to be my focus, moving forwards. you'll notice that my blood cells are all always a little big, but this is also seen in athletes and is actually generally reflective of good health.

i have another fit test soon, but the most likely cancer at this stage would actually be leukemia. rather, it is clear that i have something like sickle-cell anemia, if not that condition exactly. i have some poorly understood, distant trace italian genes from my father's side (nobody in my family would identify as italian, and i did not know i had italian ancestry until i was in my 30s. i actually have a distinct distaste for italians, as people, and a strong dislike of italian culture. i think italians are pretty gross.); conditions of that type are relatively common in that gene pool.

if it's a genetic hemolytic anemia, it seems to be relatively mild and the solution may be to just take iron. but, if it's leukemia then i'm likely in some trouble.

18:35

i don't know if i'll be able to stay awake or not, but i'd like to clean tonight if i can, and if my legs allow me.

18:36

my white blood cells have actually come way down. they were elevated, previously.

so, it's probably not leukemia.

18:59

friday, june 3, 2022

the turnout for the election was estimated at 43%. that's the lowest turnout on wikipedia and the most important number.

what can i say?

doug ford increased his seat count by 16 because he swept toronto, and that's somehow not surprising. the ndp actually did best in the rural north. the liberals won one extra seat, and that's not surprising, either.

this is a map of the new political reality in the new toronto:

this is not a fluke. this is not a hiccup. this is not short term. this is the new demographic reality in the new toronto, and it's just going to deepen with more immigration from conservative countries, and more right-wing immigrants that have 13 children, each.

if there is some minor upside to this, it is to point out that the liberals and ndp clean split the vote and it probably made a difference in a small number of ridings. if there is anywhere where a hypothetical ndp-liberal merger makes sense, it is in ontario. you can't  just add the numbers up; doug ford's totals would likely increase, and the greens would likely pick up protest voters. but, they have to do something about this, because it doesn't make sense to have two fake left bourgeois liberal parties. if the ndp just want to be the liberals, let them merge with them, then.

but, if 2018 was ominous as to the future of this province, 2022 is a death blow. this province is dead, it just doesn't know it yet. and, i wish i could get out.

3:38

i actually slept all night. i keep waking up, eating, realizing i can't walk and going to sleep.

it's finally a lot better, so i'm going to try to wake up and stay up.

4:08

ugh.

repeat after me.

interest rates have no effect on inflation.

and again,

interest rates have no effect on inflation.

tout ensemble!

interest rates have no effect on inflation.

one more time!:

interest rates have no effect on inflation.

the reason we have a central bank is to stop pieces of shit like george soros from defrauding taxpayers by fucking with exchange rates. it has nothing to do with inflation.

but, what exactly are conservatives arguing for, here? do they want higher interest rates? is that the populist movement on the right - a clamouring for higher interest rates?

what a joke.

but, guess what?

justin trudeau wants higher interest rates, too.

and, they're coming. deal with it.

5:48

this guy gets it, even if the dumbass bnn host is baffled by it.

is it going to work?

it's sort of the opposite argument that i made around 0% interest rates. they set interest rates at 0% because we were supposed to borrow money and start businesses and be entrepreneurs! but, nobody borrowed money and started businesses and became entrepreneurs, because the truth is that very few people actually want to be entrepreneurs because being an entrepreneur is kind of fucking boring and tedious.

these complicated models of human behaviour that assume we all want to be astronauts have largely been debunked. humans are generally fairly humble creatures; we care about the people around us, and about how to directly affect the people around us. we need somewhere to stay, but we're mostly not concerned about it being extravagant. we don't think like homo economicus and the economists just can't get their head around that, so they keep pushing these debunked theories.

he's right: the government has almost no ability to control inflation in an open economy. in a closed economy, perhaps. but, this economy is not closed. and, the economy is not a metric space - it is either fucking open or it is fucking closed.

i actually think that most of the inflation we're seeing is price gouging and the best thing consumers can do is stop paying it. perhaps the state could look at regulatory bodies regarding gouging in certain industries (but, not oil. the price of oil needs to come up, by policy design.) and maybe it could look at some kind of advertising-style brainwashing to insert the idea of not buying when prices are too high, but it really can't do much at all.

6:08

interest rates are not a tool of "monetary policy", they are a way for banks to increase profits on existing loans. if there are less loans, the bank will decrease rates to try to attract more borrowing (with the intent of raising rates once borrowers are locked in). when there are more loans, the bank will hike rates up in order to make a larger profit.

the idea that banks exist for some other reason than to maximize profit is bizarre, if widespread in this backwards neo-liberal dystopia we've inherited.

6:24

the result of higher interest rates is higher profits for banks.

that is all.

6:26

the easy way to think about central bank policy regarding inflation is as follows.

suppose you're a hard-working bond holder or investor. your income relies on interest from those bonds or other investments. so, if inflation starts coming up then your real income starts coming down, and you need some way to ensure that your income increases with inflation, otherwise you'll end up less rich. you're in the investor class, so you call your mp, and they call the bank. then, they adjust the interest rates so that you're no longer forced to make ends meet with your trust fund.

that's what a rate hike really is.

8:28

regarding the low turnout, this would appear to be another example of this phenomenon ontario has, which is the binary liberal voter.

the ontario binary liberal voter has now appeared in the defeats of stephane dion, michael ignatieff and steven del duca, who i must applaud myself for not pointing out looked creepily like mike myers' dr. evil character in austen powers, even if he was actually going more for a billy corgan look. he looked like a loser, and this is what happens when you run people that look like losers in this culture.

but, the binary liberal voter did not vote for some other party, they just did not vote at all. and, i get it - to an extent, i'm one of them, even if i'm on their far-left flank. they didn't want to reward mediocrity, so they didn't bother. the message is: no, i don't want to vote for the other parties, but get me a better party before i support yours.

so, there may be some sleeping liberal voters in the gta, yet.

but, they're aging. and they may not be replaced - or at least not in proportionate numbers.

9:18

saturday, june 4, 2022

while i oppose formally decriminalizing drugs, i do support just sort of looking the other way and ignoring the problem, altogether.

you can't save these people and trying is a waste of time. resources should exist to let them help themselves, but public outreach should be minimal to non-existent. public resources should be focused on getting kids to make smarter choices than their parents and more or less facilitating the accelerated death of street addicts. they really do eat into systemic resources in ways that really cannot be justified.

so, while i would rather just tell the cops to stop enforcing the laws around use (while actually getting much stricter on sellers - i think selling opiates should be treated as manslaughter) and kind of just let the problem deal with itself by letting the surplus of street addicts die rather than officially decriminalizing it, i think the end result is likely the same: decriminalizaiton will lead to more addicts dying faster, and that's actually what we should want, as a public health policy.

i'd suggest people listen to the arguments being made, precisely. it's hard for me to understand how anybody could honestly believe that decriminalizing opiates is going to somehow help the addicts. if you remove the layer of policing, you're not making it easier for addicts to seek help, you're just making it easier for addicts to be addicts without being bothered by law enforcement about it - you're removing an excuse that law enforcement has to get people off the street and into whatever system might help them. but, if people are arguing that reduced enforcement will lower policing costs or free up police resources or minimize health costs or accelerate the rate of addicts dying, these are arguments that can be taken more seriously and that are, frankly, in the self-interest of the province to pursue.

so, when they talk about decriminalization likely not actually reducing deaths - in fact probably increasing deaths - you should realize that that's actually probably the point and that speeding up the deaths of these walking dead addicts is in truth probably in everybody's best interests.

ref:

"why decriminalizing drug possession won't fix canada's toxic supply", cbc news, june 4, 2022

14:18

i'd really like to ignore this because i know it's a sophomoric stunt driven by the fact that trudeau thinks he can win votes by othering "the unvaccinated", because this is a government run by flunkie english majors that consider freud to be an example of peer-reviewed science. but, there's so many problems with this...

i don't know if this was a ballot question in the previous election or not, but suppose that it was - suppose the people in this woman's riding specifically decided they should be represented by an unvaccinated person. what grounds does this farcical parliamentary committee have to overrule the decision of the riding? these are scenarios that democracies find themselves in when they are dying, when they find themselves up against basic definitional problems regarding what democracy actually is.

the constitutional validity of such a decision by such a committee is made difficult by the fact that i don't think there is judicial oversight over this body. but, it certainly ought to be a decision that should be thrown out by an oversight body as unconstitutional, whatever that oversight body is. and, if there is no oversight body, then we have a crisis - this decision proves an oversight body is clearly required. the precedent being set here is of extreme concern. if this farcical committee wants to decide that unvaccinated people are not allowed to represent ridings on the hill, what is to stop them from deciding that atheists or indigenous people or francophones are not allowed to represent their ridings? for that matter, what is to stop a conservative controlled committee from one day deciding that liberals are not allowed on the hill, or for the liberals themselves to decide that conservatives are not allowed in parliament?

mr. trudeau and his advisers have, characteristically, not bothered to think such things through - they never do. one of the things that opponents and supporters of his father's foundational stint in government have agreed upon is that the elder trudeau had tremendous foresight, and always governed with an eye on the distant future. the younger trudeau, our twisted dauphin, is the exact opposite: apparently suffering from an undiagnosed adhd, this prime minister and his cronies operate strictly in the short term, almost from paycheck to paycheck, and often seem to act out of impulse, just to get to the next day in the best position possible. perhaps merely pointing such things out is enough to have them think about it for the first time. asking for a sober second thought is overestimating this government; we need to ask them to think about decisions they've made a first time, as they generally don't bother.

and, what do we really learn about mr. trudeau and his clique of tinpot dictators, here? what we learn is that they're willing to jump at a machiavellian scheme to attack a minority at the first opportunity that it's politically viable. they seem to even be eager to do this. you might not have much compassion or sympathy for "the unvaccinated", but you should really interpret this consistent behaviour from the prime minster as a severe red flag. he's making it crystal clear that he's a fascist, and that he's willing to attack minorities for political gain, when he can. 

when they came for the unvaccinated, you said nothing, for you were vaccinated.

i don't want to belabour the point, because it seems to be what they want - they want a stupid argument where they can demean the unvaccinated mp, like a bunch of high school bullies, because they think they'll come out politically ahead on it. i am not a conservative, i am a very concerned libertarian socialist that has actually preferred the liberals to the ndp in the spectrum because they've been far more libertarian. i am baffled by this hard-right turn towards extreme conservative authoritarianism. this is a critique from the left. 

so, i want to condemn the system from a distance - i want to tell the members of parliament to collectively grow up. this is a juvenile stunt, and the right response is to label it as one.

i would call on this committee to meet at once to voluntarily reverse it's decision, and to recognize the primacy of the will of the people in the riding, and that the people of this riding have spoken - this women is their representative, and she must take her place in the house to represent them.

otherwise, perhaps we will need to convene a new parliament, where the will of the people is actually respected.

reference:

"conservative mp removed from parliament hill over vaccination status", cbc news, june 3, 2022

15:03

i'd actually like to see this brought to the floor, so that each mp can have their vote on the record and have to defend it in the next election.

this situation has been a mess and canadian public opinion is currently unclear. research surveys have been marred by leading questions and there has simply been a lack of political debate in much of the country around many of these issues. for example, do you interpret doug ford's recent landslide win in ontario as a statement of support for the fact that ontario had the strongest restrictions in the western world for most of the pandemic, or a statement of support for removing most of this restrictions, in the face of an opposition that wants more restrictions? i mean, if we're to vote on the status quo, today, and what ontarians face moving forwards into the future, a vote for doug ford is a vote for less restrictions. right? but, this is very confusing because doug ford also brought in a policed state for much of the last two years, and could very well bring one back in the fall. we don't have the option to vote against restrictions, we have the option to vote for severe restrictions (the pcs) or for even more severe restrictions (ndp or liberals). turnout was 43%.

this is what happens when politicians talk out of both sides of their giant, fat asses - it's not entirely clear what a vote for them even means. or, is it even a vote in favour of the overall handling of the mess? it's impossible to figure this out, and i'd encourage you not to bother trying.

but, as one example, forcing rural ndp mps to vote in favour of vaccine mandates could be fatal for them. unfortunately, if they continue to prop up the liberals, they may need to be replaced with conservatives. that could be an issue in northern ontario, next cycle.

ref:

"conservative leadership hopeful pierre poilievre tables bill to ban covid-19 vaccine mandates", cbc news, june 3, 2022

15:29

canadians don't get it.

there's this perception in the canadian bourgeois political class that america wants us to be bestest friends with them, and we just need to show up and slobberingly suck their cocks and everything will be just fine.

the reality is that the united states sees canada as a competitor and america does not behave nicely to nations it sees itself as competing with. for whatever reason, we seem unable to put this together. we keep challenging them on trade policies and we keep trying to foster this kind of naive idea of british sport with them, and we keep expecting them to respond positively. it's a reflection of the baffling stupidity we have at the highest levels in this country.

america will split the world into three categories: client states, competitors and enemies. while america will provide some level of special status to it's clients, it will ruthlessly attack it's competitors - even more so than it's enemies. in canada, we seem to have decided we can be a client and a competitor at the same time. america does not allow for such things and never will.

this sort of buddy-buddy just-for-fun competitive attitude may work with britain, but it does not fly in america: you do what you're told, or you're mercilessly destroyed.

for some reason, canada also seems to have decided that these policies were just decided by trump, as though trump was actually making decisions. again, this is baffling. these decisions to treat us as a strategic competitor have been building for decades - long before trump. biden is just carrying through with a policy that was put in motion thirty years ago.

i don't know what the way out of this is, but i know this: we need to get our head around this. our bourgeois class' love for the united states is unrequited. they see us a force to be reckoned with, that needs to be contained and isolated because our insistence on competing with them has been flagged as a threat to their interests.

ref:

"joe biden’s snub of canada is a chance to carve our own path on foreign policy", toronto star, june 2, 2022

16:00

well, that's pretty blunt.

as i said to start this: i don't think erdogan is looking for "leverage", whatever that means. i think he wants out of nato.

i've noticed media reports praising the turkish opposition since that time, and you can put 2+2 together. they have tried to replace erdogan several times already and have not been able to do so. 

this is a critical question: is erdogan going to get assassinated over this? it seems like there's really only two outcomes, at this point:

1) turkey leaves nato and finland joins

2) erdogan gets assassinated or otherwise removed and the new turkish government conveniently drops opposition to the plan.

the very unstable scenario is where nato tries repeatedly to assassinate erdogan and cannot, and he then successfully takes turkey out of nato. the next step could be catastrophic.

https://yle.fi/news/3-12476998

16:13

there's this idea called the monroe doctrine that mr. trudeau doesn't seem to have read. surprise, right?

maybe they should look into that.

16:33

i'm updating this to include the iron numbers.

	2021										2022
	m	a	m	j	j	a	s	o	n	d	j	f	m	a	m	j	j	a	s	o	n	d
cholesterol	3.93	-	-	-	3.99	3.8	4.15	4.01/3.83	4.14/4.02	4.14/3.67	3.54/3.8	3.78/3.68			3.42
triglycerides	.87	-	-	-	.95	.89	1.41	1.05/0.94	1.09/1.32	1.86/0.73	2.26/0.75	0.69/1.02			0.42
hdl	1.69	-	-	-	1.84	1.59	1.73	1.42/1.55	1.37/1.42	1.51/1.74	1.75/1.72	1.74/1.69			1.55
ldl	1.85	-	-	-	1.72	1.81	1.78	2.11/1.85	2.28/2.00	1.79/1.6	<0.8/1.75	1.73/1.52			1.68
non-hdl	2.24	-	-	-	2.15	2.21	2.42	2.59/2.28	2.77/2.60	2.63/1.93	1.79/2.09	2.04/1.99			1.87
wbc	8.7/8.4	9.9/9.0	-	-	?	7.0	7.6	6.9/6.9	7.8	11.3/8.2	6.7/6.4	7.4/7.1		5.3	6.4
rbc yellow: 4 normal: 4.2	3.97/4.25	4.11/4.38	-	-	4.17	4.12	4.33	4.47/4.2	4.28	4.55/4.19	4.3/4.22	4.42/4.26		4.4	4.13
hemoglobin normal: 120	132/140	133/142	-	-	139	136	141	138/138	139	144/131	141/133	140/136		145	132
hematocrit normal: 0.36	.382/.404	.394/.424	-	-	.405	.398	.418	.417/.402	.405	0.431/0.393	.409/.396	.417/.404		.412	0.392
mcv normal: 100	96.1/95.1	95.8/97.0	-	-	97	96.8	96.6	93/95.7	94.6	94.7/94	95/94	94/95		93.7	95
mch	33.1/32.9	32.4/32.5	-	-	33.3	33.2	32.7	30.9/32.8	32.5	31.8/31.3	32.7/31.5	31.7/32		32.9	32.0
mchc	345/346	338/335	-	-	?	343	338	331/343	344	335/333	344/336	336/337		352	337
rdw	13.3/13.5	13.0/13.1	-	-	?	13	12.3	11.7/12.9	12.6	13.4/12.0	13.2/11.7	11.7/13		12.8	11.9
platelet	199/187	171/171	-	-	?	175	167	168/150	155	188/185	159/184	187/175		166	181
reticulocytes	-	-/42	-	-	53	56	46	35	33	33	39	41		43	49
vitamin d	87	-	-	-	109	72	64	72/83	78	64/71	61/74	74/80		102	77
estradiol	363/388	-	-	-	-	563	443	432	777	343	578	416		307	691
testosterone	0.9	-	-	-	-	-	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4		1.4	<0.4
progesterone	1.9	-	-	-	-	-	<0.5	0.7	0.5	0.9	<0.5	3.7		62.5	21
fsh	<0.2	-	-	-	-	-	0.2	0.1	<0.1	-	<0.1	0.1		0.5	0.2
lh	<0.2	-	-	-	-	-	0.1	0.1	0.1	-	0.1	<0.1		<0.2	0.1
ferritin	12/9	6/17	21	-	29	43	28	40	42	59	33	28		59	64
tibc	-	69.5	-	-	65.7	62.9	64.7	58.9	58.2	63.2	57.4	58.7		57.9	53.2
iron	-	9.6	-	-	22.7	37.3	19.3	28.3	37.3	32.5	13.1	14.8		28.2	17.2
iron sat	-	0.14	-	-	0.35	0.59	0.3	.48	0.64	0.51	0.23	0.25		0.49	0.32
transferrin	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.59	2.29	2.38	2.49	2.31	2.39		2.42
pth	-	-	-	5.5	-	6.2	5.9	6.2	5.5	8.0	6.3	5.7		6.9	6.4
tsh	0.92	-	-	-	-	0.94	1.22	1.67	1.48	1.07	1.39	0.97		1.26	0.92
calcitonin	-	-	-	<0.6	-	-	-	-	0.6	-	0.8	-
alp	61	-	-	63	59	50	60	59 /55	47	50	60	58		55	67

the fact that the tibc is coming down as the ferritin goes up is a good sign, and i should probably interpret the other two as somewhat random, with the caveat that i took this test after a bike ride in the heat, yesterday. i had taken an iron pill not more than a few hours previously. on previous tests, my circulating iron tended to come in very high directly after taking the iron. so, is the fact that the iron was a little lower after the bike ride supportive of the sports anemia hypothesis, or does it suggest that the hemolysis is actually getting worse?

i'm going to make it a point to get the iron tested next time immediately after a dosage and without intervening exercise.

17:25

so, what are my symptoms, here?

i have:

- potential hemolytic anemia (meaning the blood cells are being destroyed upon production, due to high irf and high reticulocyte hemoglobin)

- slightly higher mcv (it's marginal), which means my blood cells are a little big, which might just be from biking. this is not consistent with sickle cell or thalassemia, even if i am likely dealing with a genetic hemolysis.

- lowish rdw, meaning the blood cells are all about the same size, which is usually a good thing.

- i now have high b12, but i did not previously

- i was tested once with very, very high b9. does that actually mean i'm not using it properly?

- my ferritin is increasing, but i'm still technically anemic and it's coming up very slowly despite taking massive, frequent dosages

- there's no sign of bleeding.

- lowish reticulocytes, even after increasing ferritin

- i have low testosterone, which would suggest a rate bottleneck in production. so, this would explain why i have lower rbc and hemoglobin over all, but not why my reticulocytes do not come up with increased ferritin or why i need so much iron.

- my bone health is questionable, with my pth refusing to go down, despite sufficient d and sufficient estrogen. tsh seems to be correlated with testosterone, but is generally suppressed.

so, my anemia seems to be both hemolytic and macrocytic. remember when i was concerned about my spleen? so, what conditions are consistent with these two things, together?

18:21

macrocytic anemia is supposed to only be caused by b9 or b12 deficiencies, except, as far as i can tell using google, if you have a bone marrow disorder called "myelodysplastic syndromes", which is a type of cancer.

if i have mds, and that doesn't seem right to me, then it would be at a very early stage. i don't know if that helps much, though. but, i feel i need to rule this out. it's consistent with the data.

this is why i need to talk to the specialist.

they'll have to do a bone marrow biopsy if they think i'm on to something, or maybe they'll tell me to fuck off. we'll see.

is there anything else to think about?

18:43

i need to reiterate that my rbcs are really not particularly large. a slightly elevated mcv is also consistent with atheticism. 

so, i may be pushing it thinking i have macrocytic anemia in the first place.

it's just that this idea actually makes sense, whereas the ideas that i'm bleeding and have no sign of it or strictly have sports anemia really don't.

18:45

macrocytic anemia is usually correlated with hypothyroidism, and my tsh is really quite strictly regulated in the 0.9-1.7 range. i've never had a tsh over 2.0. 

i really think it's probably just from bicycling and i shouldn't focus too much on the slightly elevated size of these rbcs.

19:14

if i just focus on the hemolysis issue...

the cells are either being destroyed in the spleen or in the marrow. if there's a third choice, i don't know what it is.

again, i want to imagine that if the cells are making it to the spleen then the reticulocyte count ought to be higher, given i'm recovering from anemia, but i've been on iron a year now and my reticylocyte count did spike, right after, albeit not by much. this is an intuitive, abstractly kinesthetic (virtually kinesthetic?) way to grapple with this, and it might not actually be correct. i'm really just guessing at a rate issue. there's really probably not any good way to know if my spleen is acting up or my marrow is.

if it's happening in the marrow, the term is apparently "ineffective erythropoiesis", but this is generally associated with high ferritin levels. i suppose that must mean that the iron gets recycled, as the rbc production fails over and over, and the absorbed dietary iron just builds up? again, i'm trying to get a nuts and bolts, mechanistic, descartian grasp of this and it's perhaps leading to unrealized poor assumptions.

so, what condition has "ineffective erythropoiesis" and low ferritin? is there one? if not, i guess i'd have to conclude it must be my spleen.

19:50

the condition with hemolysis & low ferritin is...

sports anemia.

it just doesn't seem like it's enough. a partial solution, perhaps, but not a full one.

i'm going to have to talk to the specialist.

i now have data suggesting that hemolysis is actually happening and that strict bleeding isn't good enough to explain what's happening, whether there's evidence of it or not.

19:56

my data doesn't make sense - or, the condition it describes is so obscure that i can't google it.

or, i'm really just bleeding to death, and can't figure out from where.

20:10

this is the type of thing i wanted to see:

Immature Reticulocyte Fraction (IRF) indicates the less mature subgroup of reticulocytes, which contain the most RNA, and is an early and sensitive index of erythropoiesis. 90 Immature reticulocytes are released into the peripheral circulation during periods of intense erythropoietic stimulation such as hemorrhage, certain anemias or in response to therapy to stimulate bone marrow production. 78 The IRF increases before the total reticulocyte count and has been found to be useful in distinguishing anemias characterized by increased marrow erythropoiesis (high reticulocytes, high IRF) from anemias due to reduced marrow activity (low reticulocytes, low IRF) and from situations such as acute infections and myelodysplastic syndromes (low/normal reticulocytes, high IRF). 80

https://academic.oup.com/ecco-jcc/article/5/5/381/377756

i have lowish reticulocytes and high irf - that's suggestive of myelodysplastic syndromes or acute infections.

but, mds usually implies high ferritin.

i got really sick in late 2019, and i think it was covid. of course, right?

20:22

we did all of this last year...

===

1) my ferritin increased rapidly from 6 to 17 after going on 300 mg/day of iron supplements for two weeks, suggesting i don't appear to be losing blood. 
2) my reticulocytes were normal to lowish, indicating i am not overproducing blood.
3) my haptoglobin was in the exact middle of the range, indicating that any deficit in rbcs would be at the production stage rather than the loss stage.
4) my igA, igG and iGM levels as welll as rheumatoid factor are all low, indicating i'm not having an immune response. my serum protein electrophoresis was also normal.
5) my vitamin d is in normal ranges, indicating i can at least absorb one type of fat soluble vitamin.
6) there's no blood or albumin in my urine, indicating i'm not bleeding through that pathway.
7) my ck & ldh came in normal, indicating i'm not experiencing organ failure or damage and not rupturing via that pathway.

========

like, we did all this stuff and it all came in normal.

so, if the hemolysis was happening in my bloodstream, i would have high haptoglobin, right?

....except that that would imply i had blood cells to explode in the first place. when i did this haptoglobin test, my ferritin was < 20. so, i didn't have a lot of iron. so, i wouldn't be experiencing a lot of hemolysis.

now that i have more iron, and i have some suggestion of hemolysis occurring, maybe i should take another haptoglobin test. 

but, for now, i should conclude that, if my haptoglobin is really not elevated, then the hemolysis must be in the marrow. i think...

21:02

i think i'm misreading this.

so, irf is a measure of the number of immature reticulocytes v the number of total reticulocytes. if i have a high irf, it means that there is a high number of immature reticulocytes in the blood. the reason this is suggestive of hemolysis is that the reticulocytes are being destroyed at a high level after they leave the marrow, meaning that only the newest ones are being measured. i suppose that the counter-example would be if total reticulocytes were high, in which case it would just suggest excess production. so, the way to imagine it is that large amounts of blood are coming out of the marrow, and getting quickly destroyed.

so, then i want to check the haptoglobin a second time, for sure, now that i have more iron. if the blood cells are getting destroyed in my body, the haptoglobin should be high. otherwise, i'd have to be bleeding. but, then, my total reticulocyte count should be higher. or, we have incoherent results.

likewise, what the reticulocyte hemoglobin is measuring is hemoglobin in my reticulocytes, which is in my bloodstream. so, what that's saying is that my new blood cells have tons of hemoglobin - more than normal. so, i have a lot of iron to distribute into blood cells, and the blood cells are coming off the assembly line with a large amount of hemoglobin.

then, it would seem as though my blood cells are losing hemoglobin at an unusually high rate, if they end up with low hemoglobin, over all.

i suppose that could mean that i'm still recovering from the anemia. 

or, it might be...

yeah.

sports anemia. essentially, i'd be sucking all of the hemoglobin out of the red blood cells, leaving myself oxygen deficient, and with red blood cells that need to be destroyed at a faster rate than i can replace them.

the rate issue with the low testosterone then might reassert itself: i might be creating wonderful, top of the line blood cells, but just not enough of them, and not fast enough, meaning i have to reuse the old ones over and over until they're almost out of hemoglobin.

again: this is intuitive. it's descartian. i'm trying to mechanize this, trying to automate it.

the results are weird, as far as i can tell.

let me try another haptoglobin test. i expect it'll come in high, this time - that's my test.

21:34

there's three non-exclusive possibilities:

1) i have no absorption issues at all and i'm generating high hemoglobin (but perhaps otherwise defective) blood cells, and they're all dying almost immediately. then, my marrow is working fine, but my spleen is going crazy. it seems like we ruled that out, but i was severely iron deficient at the time. so, i should try the haptoglobin test, again. if that's the case, i'll need to look at trying to solve the root cause, but i basically need to feed my marrow enough iron to overpower my spleen, in the short run. my blood cells seem to be unusually uniformly slightly large. is that because the rest of them are all dying too fast? this would almost certainly be a genetic type of hemolytic anemia, but one in which ferritin is low because the cells are being destroyed and the iron is being eliminated at a high rate - something that i have neither been able to measure nor that is consistent with the literature.

2) i'm generating exceptionally high quality blood cells, but i'm using them up faster than i'm replacing them. this could reduce to a rate issue (i do have low testosterone, by choice), in the face of a large amount of exercise, which was my previous deduction. the cause of the anemia would then be over-exertion, in combination with relatively poor absorption and a reduced rate of production. the low ferritin would have to be due strictly to poor absorption, while the low hemoglobin would be due to the sports anemia. i would still need to feed myself enough iron to overcome the rate issue. this would primarily be sports anemia, but exacerbated by poor absorption and a choice to reduce my testosterone. the apparent hemolysis would then be a misreading; i would have a high percentage of immature reticulocytes because the rate of production is low, not because they're being destroyed quickly. redoing the haptoglobin test can clarify that. if it doesn't come in, i have to conclude that hemolysis isn't happening in the bloodstream, and that it can't be happening in the marrow, either - because i'm clearly generating high hemoglobin reticulocytes.

3) i've been on the increased dosage since the end of february. the length of a blood cell is about 4 months, which comes up at the end of june. if everything magically falls in place at the end of june, there's some possibility that i just didn't stay on the iron for long enough at the high enough dosage to actually completely turn over. then, the issue would strictly be absorption.

some combination of these things is most likely, i think.

the more obscure possibility is:

4) i'm bleeding and the reticulocyte data is counter-intuitive. in that case, i would be bleeding out new blood at a higher rate than old blood. while i wouldn't understand that, i might be missing something.

so, i need to ask for another haptoglobin test on monday, along with the fit and cea tests.

22:06

what i want to clarify is this: do our blood cells lose hemoglobin over time as we use them?

i mean, the blood cell transfers the oxygen on the hemoglobin. does the hemoglobin get "used up" after that, on it's way to destruction in the spleen? so, if i have more old blood, and i over exert myself, and i'm producing blood at a low rate, should i expect to test for low hemoglobin because i used it all up when i was exercising?

22:18

i didn't actually post the data.

the irf was 12.0%, which the lab suggests is in the high range (2-13%). it's not that high, though - i've seen some literature suggest high means more like 25%. but, you need to be careful in substituting numbers from different processes. this lab tags it as high.

the reticulocyte hemoglobin is 36.5; the normal range presented by the lab ends at 36.3. the point is that my new cells seem to have sufficient hemoglobin. so, why don't my old ones?

is it because it just didn't turn over yet?

or is it because i'm using it up?

22:23

sunday, june 5, 2022

iron recycling seems to be somewhat poorly understood. and, i think that's a part of the problem in taking the sports anemia thing really seriously - it doesn't add up with the textbook understanding of how this works, even though we can visibly measure it, repeatedly.

so, maybe iron isn't destroyed in the spleen, after all.

maybe it's done in the liver.

like, we've only recently discovered the regulating hormone, hepcidin. and, i still wish i could get that tested, but nobody even knows what it is.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160718132646.htm

0:14

It is known for many years that senescent RBC are smaller, denser than young cells and have lost membrane and hemoglobin.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2013.00387/full

ok. so, older cells have less hemoglobin than new ones.

does the rate of hemoglobin loss have to do with the stress on the cells, so that they "wear out" faster with heavy exercise?

0:25

Glucose transport across the RBC membrane decreases with cell age (Bosman and Kay, 1990). Young (least dense) RBC metabolize 2.5 times more glucose than old ones

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2013.00387/full

see, i never sat down to wonder if rbcs metabolize glucose, but i guess they must. they must need energy like any other cell. ultimately, red blood cells swap carbon dioxide for oxygen by exchanging electrons - it's electricity. really. they pick up the oxygen in your lungs and drop the carbon dioxide off, then they bring the oxygen to cells for cellular respiration. 

so, i looked it up and the way rbcs metabolize glucose is apparently anaerobic, which is bizarre. but, it means they're not using the oxygen they transport, which is at least efficient. that's what made me pause and stop to think - how are they using and transporting oxygen at the same time? and, it turns out they're not, they're only transporting it.

again, this is curious, when you really look at it. our blood is transporting oxygen via iron to ensure our cells can breathe, but does not need to breathe, itself. our blood, then, could survive on the ocean floor, near a volcano, without us - with the other anaerobic microbes, so long as it gets access to sugar. and, we insist on demonizing this molecule, too. but, even us land based nitrogen snortling humans only need oxygen at the meta level. the transport mechanism needs metals and ions, and it runs on sugar for fuel.

so, if older rbcs are undergoing less anaerobic glycolysis, does that mean they are transporting more or less oxygen? well, you see where i was going with that, but the mechanism pulls the rug out from under the question. still. if there's less energy being consumed by the cell, it must be doing less work - unless our blood is composed of perpetual motion machines, which of course it is not. the hemoglobin must be "running out" and the rbc must be "wearing out".

so...i think the question i want to answer is this: is the amount of oxygen being transferred dependent on the number of free charges, and does that change, or is it fixed amongst all red blood cells?

1:01

proverbs for paranoids #3: if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

1:02

the answer is that each hemoglobin molecule can bind up to 4 oxygen molecules, but the carrying capacity depends on chemical conditions like temperature, amount of carbon dioxide and ph balance.

https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Book%3A_General_Biology_(Boundless)/39%3A_The_Respiratory_System/39.4%3A_Transport_of_Gases_in_Human_Bodily_Fluids/39.4A%3A_Transport_of_Oxygen_in_the_Blood

so, it's not static - it fluctuates based on conditions.

now, over time, does that get messed up by oxidation, or do the hemoglobin molecules start to fold in on themselves, or something?

1:12

that was a good guess - the oxidation reaction does occur, and hemoglobin does bind to itself, and the process does increase during exercise, but both reactions are biologically reversible. that doesn't mean that either process actually reverses in any person, though.

the oxdized form of hemoglobin is methaemoglobin.

could i get a methaemoglobin test?

1:54

i think the idea that rbcs "wear out" is well founded, even if i can't find any direct links to it. red blood cells stream with anti-oxidants like vitamin c and glutathione to prevent the hemoglobin from oxidizing, but any kind of stray molecule that gets stuck in there will screw the carrying capacity up, and the more frequently the cell undergoes oxygen transport the more likely that something going wrong becomes. that is the answer as to how hemoglobin breaks down - it binds with itself or with something else. and, the more frequently you breathe, the more likely any specific red cell will lose hemoglobin in an oxidation reaction. the process of picking up a carbon dioxide molecule, transporting it to the lungs, exchanging it for oxygen and then going looking for some cell to drop the oxygen off at, in exchange for more carbon dixiode, is a mechanical process - molecules are coming in and out, bonds are forming and breaking and open ions are getting physically bent in and our of shape, which can lead to errors in binding. and there's no error-correction.

if the probability of a mistake happening on each exchange is x and exercise increases the number of exchanges by 100-fold, the probability of a mistake happening is 100x greater. these are realistic numbers. so, you would expect rbcs to have less hemoglobin after exercise, in the long run, and up to the point of healing.

with that in mind, i generally get off the bike and get my blood taken. i don't wait for myself to heal, for the oxidation to reverse. i may consequently be underestimating my hemoglobin by consistently measuring it at the lowest values.

2:14

my cbc tests are up and down. 

i'm going to try to avoid strenuous exercise for a few days before readings to see if i'm just actually measuring the result of over-exertion, now that my ferritin is getting much better.

haptoglobin, though.

that's the test i need to hone in, finally.

8:47

the article i posted previously seems to all but explicitly state "rbc cells wear out" and "hemoglobin gets used up".

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2013.00387/full

8:59

everything i'm seeing says high irf should be correlated with high reticulocytes. and, that makes sense.

there is almost no discussion of the scenario of high irf and normal reticulocytes, but i have found some references to "dyserythropoiesis", which is the technical term for dysfunctional blood cell production.

i'm trying to make sure i'm right, that there's really evidence of hemolysis, and i am. it's just rare. and, this is a different type of hemolysis.

10:12

i think i've done as much research as i can on this, for now.

the new metric, in the context of the previous ones, usually means the patient is producing abnormally shaped blood cells which are dying quickly. but, my smear didn't pick that up. and my ferritin is low; usually, this results in high ferritin, as the iron gets recycled.

so, where is the iron going, then?

if you go back to the results from last summer, you'll note that the iron and iron sat all of a sudden jumped way up and that this has mostly retreated, since. that is actually a sign of hemolysis as damaged blood cells release iron into the bloodstream.

but, that should lead to high ferritin, as it eventually ends up back in the liver.

as far as i can tell, the only real answers as to where this iron is actually going are that i'm bleeding it out or otherwise eliminating it in urine that collects via internal bleeding. the special kind of hemolysis that ends up with iron in the urine is called intravascular hemolysis and is what i'm calling sports anemia, combined with intestinal bleeding from tearing due to exertion. i did a urinalysis and there was neither blood nor albumin in it. there is some weak evidence to suggest iron might be sweat out, but it's not taken seriously.

there is really no sign of any bleeding, but i have to acknowledge that my ferritin came down when i went off the pills, indicating that it is  leaving my body, somehow.

14:45

note that some iron loss is normal, which is why we have daily iron requirements. 

non-menstruating humans such as myself need to absorb on the order of 1-2 mg of iron per day to make up for losses through normal digestive tract excretion.

i don't know how to calculate the rate lost when i was off it or to guess if it was greater than a base rate. but, i have to throw that out there: watching ferritin go down after going off pills doesn't exactly mean you're bleeding, or at least it doesn't mean you're bleeding more than normal; you're going to lose some iron, regardless.

but there's only one way out...

14:54

if we're going to send the ukrainians weapons with the clear intent of using them against the russians, i can hardly fault the russians for striking the transit points.

this is dangerous, as it opens up potential conflict zones very close to the polish border.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61697093

18:39

if the canadian military doesn't want it's planes to be harassed by chinese planes, perhaps they shouldn't be flying in areas that are clearly in the chinese sphere of interest.

they don't come here and bother us. we have a lot of nerve going over there and bothering them.

all canadian equipment and military personal should be removed from the korean peninsula and from japan, immediately.

19:27

this is absolutely outrageous.

canada used to be known for donating food and medical aid. the current government wants to donate weapons to nazis, in a turn to the fascist right that has no precedent in this country.

reference:

"canada is in discussions to buy 100,000 artillery shells for ukraine", ottawa citizen, may 31, 2022

19:32

monday, june 6, 2022

there's a narrative post coming, and i'm once again stuck in recursion, now on the narrative posts. ugh.

i talked to the blood specialist today and she thinks i'm just flat out iron deficient, and just due to being a vegetarian. she's going to do a few things that are very helpful:

1) while i'm confident i'm not celiac, i'm going to get the test done at the hospital. that will give me the results (and put the issue aside) without the requirement of spending $250 on a test that i am certain will come back negative. i just couldn't justify spending $250 to get a piece of paper that tells me something i already know.

2) we're going to do an ultrasound on my body interior to see if my liver or spleen are enlarged. this will help determine if hemolysis is actually happening or not. apparently, such tests are not helpful in determining gi concerns and they don't do them for colon issues because they're considered redundant.

we're going to do some things over again - she wants a b12, a b9, a copper - and i'll let her do it while knowing the results beforehand. my b12 has come way up and may actually now be very high, my b9 is ridiculous and my copper is elevated due to the estrogen. i don't see the use in arguing with her, i'll just do it. i'm also curious to see what the hospital lab says, as opposed to the various private labs.

she didn't think that haptoglobin levels would be dependent on iron availability.

her main point was that essentially all of my data is within a broader range of variation; many items that were flagged were actually not really very concerning. there's a flip side to that, as well - she frequently deals with people that are nearly dying. she sees the worst of the worst, on a daily basis. while i'll acknowledge that i'm not dealing with hemoglobin down in the 30s, that doesn't mean i shouldn't be vigilant about it or not be pro-active about pre-emptive care. so, we're doing cautionary tests. 

but, she just thinks i'm a little iron deficient due to holding to a vegetarian diet and that the numbers aren't really serious cause for concern.

18:04

historically speaking, resisting islamic colonization has required the use of violence to prevent and check the spread. that's just a historical fact - it was true in spain, in eastern europe, in india, in russia, in southeast asia and, in fact, in most of the middle east, too. when left to develop unfettered, islam takes over societies by force and subjugates indigenous populations. it's a system of racial superiority, as well, that places the arab at the top of the hierarchy and everybody else at the bottom. there's not any good reason to think that what's happening in north america is any different, or that the outcome will somehow be unique, except that we're also living through an experiment in secularism that the world has not known, previously, with the possible singular exception of the late roman republic. our species has almost always had dominant aristocracies that use religion as a tool to control the population - as is done in contemporary islamic societies. we're very different, in that sense; our state has moved past that model, and tries to use crude forms of psychology to control us, instead. let's get the cause and effect right - they use these approaches because we won't be dominated by superstition, and not the other way around; our cultural emancipation from christianity, which happened in the enlightenment, came first and the (pseudo)-scientific tools of psychological manipulation to replace it came later. but, that means we really do enjoy unprecedented levels of freedom here, or at least did before the early months of 2020.

it follows that our society uniquely has the potential to meet and defeat the very real threat of islamic colonialism without the use of violence by aggressively neutralizing and secularizing it. this is by no means a battle with a clear outcome, and there is by no means any guarantees that this attempt at islamic colonialism won't end in violence like all of the previous historical attempts have, but we are far better off making a very real and sincere attempt to utilize the qualities that actually make our society strong - democracy, free speech, free thought, open access to information, etc - to attempt to defeat this threat as a first line of defence, and only relying on violence as a last resort. if we want to act like we're better than they are, we should avoid falling into hypocrisy as strenuously as possible.

we will know that violence is an appropriate tool of resistance when we find ourselves in serious threat of being forced into obeying islamic law. that does not appear imminent at this point. for that reason, it is not the appropriate means of resistance to this threat, at this time.

while attempts to aggressively neutralize and secularize islam will necessarily run into opposition by cultural nationalists and religious fundamentalists, and such people should not be socially tolerated, the general aim of separating these people from their beliefs must rely on inclusion and must be inherently anti-racist in character. if secularism is to defeat islam, it must do so by convincing the children of muslims that secularism is preferable, by seeking to tear them away from their heritage and integrate them into the dominant society. acts of violence or exclusion are counter-productive to this goal, as they foster feelings of alienation and resentment. 

the political class has proven itself to at best be a hindrance in this matter and to at worst be attempting to "keep religion alive for the masses", as engels warned they would in socialism: utopian and scientific. the left cannot be confused by such things, it must interpret them as they are, and it must, as in all other facets, work around the state, in it's reactionary behaviour.

islam cannot be tolerated in a democratic and socialist society, but we must be enlightened in our attempts at doing away with it, via tools of discourse rather than tools of violence - or at least, we must be for now. we should not forget history, either.

20:09

yeah. as expected, nato is basically ignoring turkey's opposition to finnish membership, with the expectation that they'll just shut up about it.

if nato is a cultural institution or something, i understand that.

but, nato is a military alliance, and turkey is one of it's strongest members. from that perspective, this is simple, base stupidity.

it is probably too late to do so. but, if the united states does not quickly address turkish concerns, it is going to wake up to a dramatically redrawn map of the eastern mediterranean and a shift in the balance of power that is decidedly not in their favour.

23:02

there's a lesson, here.

nato presents itself as a consensus democracy, but it is actually strictly dominated by american hegemony. everybody knew that. but, this is very concrete.

23:04

tuesday, june 7, 2022

so, i mentioned that i was going to have to piece together loose ends as i went through and filled out these narrative posts.

what's happened with this inverter?

i, in hindsight somewhat foolishly, bought a universal ccfl inverter thinking it would be a good general use testing device. that is, i decided it would be useful for not just this old compaq cq60 laptop (the one i want to turn into a multieffects unit) but for many future laptops, as well. screens die. then, when it got here, i realized that the adapter was different than the one sold to me, and i've been struggling with trying to find a big 6 pin to small 6 pin adapter. but, i'm deciding that this is irrelevant, because i'm realizing that i've misunderstood the relevance of the technology.

i'm going to post some pictures.

so, this is the item that actually arrived at my door, exactly:

the cable on the bottom (the one plugged in in the picture) has 6 big, widely spaced pins. it comes with the cable in the picture.

but, the invertor in the laptop was this item, exactly:

the cable that is connected to the board inside the laptop (which i have not disassembled) fits into the bottom inverter, which has six small pins, which are close together.

so, i cannot connect the tester to the board. and, try as i may, i cannot find the right adaptor.

if i look through youtube, it seems like the way around this is that people use an external power adapter to connect to a 9v, like i was trying to use for my external sata power supply. but, these run up to $100.

so, i thought maybe i'd try to connect it to the board on the bricked hp, instead, and realized something: the hp doesn't use an inverter. in fact, laptops, in general, no longer use inverters. so, my logic appears to have been flawed; the likelihood that i'm going to be able to use this universal inverter to test screens in the future is rather slim because laptops haven't shipped with inverters in many years. there's consequently little value in bothering trying to find a way to get this universal adapter to function, as the only laptops i have with screens of this type are the cq60 i'm trying to repair and the 90s laptop and there's essentially no possibility that i'll purchase a laptop in the future that has this kind of display, either.

so, i just bought a replacement invertor, and i'll have to hope it works when it gets here.

if the new invertor works, i've lost $13 and a fair amount of time, but i've learned a fair amount about laptop screens that i didn't know previously. unlike the phone, there's really no way out of this.

if somebody can suggest the right adapter, send me an email.

2:06

again, though - i bought a voip phone and wanted to use it as a voip phone. i got it to work, in the end, but it required a lot of weirdness.

i bought a universal lcd inverter and expected it to be universal. it is not. i'm not getting upset about it.

2:23

i just want to be very clear about what i'm saying, which is that the contemporary left, following the lead of foucault, the head reactionary conservative, is dominated by reactionary conservatives. some of them are more honest than others; some of them realize it and some of them don't. alexandria ocasio cortez is a reactionary conservative. bernie sanders is a reactionary conservative. angela davis is a reactionary conservative. slavoj zizek is a reactionary conservative. even noam chomsky is, essentially, a reactionary conservative.

you know who is more of a literal, actual leftist? richard dawkins.

i understand that i'm not getting anywhere by standing alone in the rapids and waving a flag against the current. if the entire world defines the left in orwellian terms, that is how the world will discuss the left.

but, i'm going to stand in that river, anyways - i'll just be cognizant about it, as i'm doing it.

self-identified leftists that stand with islam are at best reactionaries. there's no other way to put it.

3:51

as my nose is burning after cutting thai chilis, i want to take note of the thought that they might be working. i don't know how much longer i can stand it.

when i first started on them, i had a legitimately violent reaction to them, and the result was a pretty thorough purging. i may have missed out on some nutrients due to my body expelling the contents of my intestinal tract several times in succession, but the flush was pretty vicious, and i think it would have been hard for much to hold out in there.

in fact, soon after that, i started noticing not one but several very long and very thin bowel movements that sunk to the bottom of the toilet. while i hardly was going to pull the turd out and examine it, the fact is that these movements slunk into the toilet immediately, beyond a point i could examine them. they were unusual, though, for me, at any point - they seemed like encrusted serpents in their length and smoothness and thinness. what else can i do but celebrate, if true?

and, then, it stopped. the result has been a rapid hardening of my stool in a way i haven't experienced in quite a while. the long, skinny and smooth has given way to metres-long coils of soft-serve chocolate ice cream that form almost textbook-perfect stools. this has been stable for a few weeks, now.

so, maybe it's all a coincidence, or maybe i at least busted something up, a little. i'm not claiming hot peppers will cure you of anything; if i'm right, if i flushed something out, it's likely still in there. there's even the scary possibility that i just strengthened it. but, for now, i have to wonder....

4:58

he's right.

the mexicans should host a counter-summit and invite everybody except the united states. 

they can shove their monroe doctrine up their puckered asses - if america will not be a good neighbour, then a pox on them.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/06/politics/lopez-obrador-summit-of-the-americas/index.html

10:24

you always see this issue come up when turnout comes down, and it's wrong. 

first of all, if you don't feel you're properly informed, i would plead with you: please do not vote. i would not go so far as to require an entrance exam before voting is allowed, but this is purely for practical reasons. the foundations of democracy are not rooted upon the coercion to participate in an empty ritual, but the assumption of an informed, engaged and educated electorate. we have to decide we want a democracy, and we have to participate in it without coercion, or it's not actually a democracy. mandatory voting is to democracy as coerced sex is to a relationship: it may technically prolong the matter, but it's not real. you should want your partner to consent and base your own participation on the premise; you should withdraw participation if you don't think it's sincere, as much out of concern for your own well-being as theirs. you shouldn't degrade yourself into the depravity of going through empty motions.

second, refusing to vote can be an act of informed participation. if i had a mandatory voting law in the last election, i would have written in myself; the options presented to me were not acceptable and the refusal to vote was not an act of apathy but a very clear political act. i was so opposed to all of the options that i could not, in good faith, vote for any of them. that is something that i expect to become more frequent, moving forwards.

if we want to increase participation in our rather tepid and inconsequential democracy, we need to find ways to do so that are consensual, and are rooted in a desire to actually participate. as stated previously, i would really like to see a greater focus on direct democracy and a lesser focus on representation. however, i should point out that i have more free time than most because i am not enslaved by an employer. it is likely the case that policies designed to reduce the dependence of individuals on the labour market will lead to increased political participation. like so many of the other problems in our society, one of the major root causes of the lack of political participation is this bankrupt idea of property and it's theft of so many people's actual time. another thing that we're dealing with is the simple lack of relevance of government in the day-to-day lives of people, due to increasingly ubiquitous marketization. the more the market does, and the less that government does, the less important democracy becomes. people may have difficulty articulating that, but it's likely at the very core of their non-participation.

i think that turnout will recover in ontario in the next election. i suspect that the absolutely unacceptable overreach of government into the lives of individuals during the pandemic created an understandable response of disconnection; the message embedded in the lack of turnout is that people are sick of too much government, right now. a voting option for less interference in personal decision making that wasn't market fundamentalist (bernier's movement) or christian fundamentalist (a couple of traditionalist conservative breakaway groups) may have generated a significant protest response (i wish the greens had taken a more principled stand on individual rights.), but that option was not available, so people just tuned out, instead.

four years from now, i suspect people will again be more willing to engage with the traditional parties, but only on the condition that government backs off a little. i think we have a time window here, where the situation either stabilizes or the spectrum implodes, like it did in france.

reference:

"mandatory voting can rescue canadian democracy", national observer, june 7, 2022

11:00

stated differently, i think ontario voters are in the ultra-paradoxical phase, at the moment - we've had so much government crammed down our throats that the mere thought of considering voting made large amounts of us want to vomit.

11:09

making voting days federal and provincial holidays is a good idea, as many employees are too shy to assert their existing right to time off to vote, and many employers would consider the demand to be a form of dereliction.

mandatory voting is not.

11:28

in blatant contravention of the ottawa treaty, which ukraine is a signatory to, the ukrainians have made gratuitous use of land and sea mines, which is the actual reason this is taking so long. mines have devastating longterm consequences for the regions they're deployed in, which is why a more enlightened era of canadian governance went to such great lengths to have them banned under international law. this was something canadians had good reason to be proud of, and that has been entirely defecated over by the sitting government, in it's macho support for the reversal of one of the country's most impressive international accomplishments. and, this is a government that is obsessed with prestige and image, too.  but, despite their catastrophic externalities on the local population, land mines are exceedingly effective at deterring an invader.

so, let's get this point clear.

q: why can't ukraine export grain from odessa through the black sea?

a: because they put so many mines in the region to prevent a russian attack that the port will remain closed for years.

let's get that point clear - odessa will be closed as a port for years to clear the ukrainian mines - and adjust.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/07/plan-to-ship-grain-out-of-ukraine-dealt-blow-by-russian-sea-mines

11:52

so, this is round two of narrative posts regarding how to set up a cisco 7941 voip phone to connect to voip.ms from behind a nat.

after the false start on the 17th, i started to type up a new narrative update again on the 25th, but i didn't get more than a line into it. i was too busy cleaning, and the place was too disorganized; i kept sitting down to type, and it just didn't get moving. i started to do this again on the 29th, but i didn't get more than a few lines into it at that time, either. so, i'm going to pick this up on june the 6th and work forward from may the 17th, where i left off, until may the 23rd, when i posted the answer to the problem with the phone.

while i did not post the aborted narrative post on the morning of may 17th (dated to 8:56) until the afternoon of may 30th (https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2022/05/as-alluded-to-several-times-i-am-very.html), i did start back on the phone by posting the following at 9:00, instead:

===

i mentioned that the phone cannot pick up the tftp server on the virtual subnet created by the virtual dhcp server in xp, that it needs to have the tftp server running on the same subnet as the laptop. i spent some time this morning experimenting with whether i could get around it by using ip aliasing, but that seems to be incorrect.

however, now that i'm realizing that i can assign multiple ip addresses to the same device - something i've never done before or realized was even possible - the premise of installing a pbx server is no longer so absurd, if i can get a freepbx binary that will run on windows as a service. i should be able to run both the tftp server and the freepbx service on the 90s laptop. i think.

but, i cannot run anything on windows xp, so i'm going to upgrade to vista, at least to see if it works. if it does, i might consider moving to linux on the 90s laptop.

i'll have a more interesting post shortly.

9:00

====

that more interesting post was supposed to be the post i didn't finish until the 30th, and which is linked to above.

the next post is not until early on the morning of the 18th, and i was still holding my thought about the delayed narrative post from the morning of the 17th. i spent all day on the 17th trying to get the phone to connect to the voip server through the windows machine, and ultimately decided there was no solution other than to buy a second network card.

i would have typed this up on the dell in the studio space as i was researching cardbus costs.

====

i was hoping to get a narrative update in by now that explained how i got the phone set up, but i keep...

i keep having ideas. maybe this doesn't work out in the end, but i feel i need to keep trying, so long as i keep having ideas.

vista is barely usable on the 90s laptop and i haven't been able to get it to behave the way i wanted it to, but i'm convinced at this point that i just don't have the right network topology in place, and it really ought to work if i could get the connections right. i keep pointing out that i don't know why this isn't easy because it seems as though it ought to be. i can get it to pick up a separate tftp server and i can get it to pick up an ip address on a virtual dhcp server, but i don't know how to connect that virtual ip to the internet without sending it back through the address it came from, which windows doesn't want to do. what i wanted to do last night was install freeswitch, but that doesn't even work on vista, and the laptop would not be capable of doing much with any sort of virtualization.

but, everything i'm reading about this tells me two things:

1) this would probably be as easy as i want it to be, if i'd just use the wireless adapter. yes, the 90s laptop has a wireless adapter - it's the size of a piece of bread, and probably radiates pure cancer. it has been removed, along with the wireless adapters in the two hp laptops. my pcs do not have wireless cards. i don't want a wireless network, though - i've gone to great lengths to avoid one.

2) i could use ics natively if i had a second nic.

now, i was hoping to use the loopback adapter as a dhcp server, but i'd have to find a way to encapsulate the phone inside windows first, it seems. it won't pick it up through the switch. in the process of uninstalling it, though, i noticed this device in device manager:

texas instruments pci-1400 cardbus controller

yes. i have a laptop with a cardbus controller. and, the battery even still works.

i knew there was a weird slot in the machine, and thought it was for an ancient type of card reader (for use with ancient phones and cameras, no doubt), and that is what cardbus was for, but on googling exactly what this thing is, i realized i can put a nic in it.

if i understand correctly, the second nic in the laptop would let me plug the device directly into the laptop, which would allow me to bridge the connection to the router. if this works the way i think it does, it should let me use windows to do proper port forwarding using the firewall - something i can't do well on my cheap, ancient dlink router. it will also help me understand the traffic between the phone and the server better.

cardbus nic adapters are inexpensive, and i think it's a good addition to the laptop, which is unfortunately then reduced to behaving as an appliance. but, i mean, that's fine - the second nic will also be helpful if i do decide to go with linux, i believe, and even if the phone works properly on the switch with linux.

so, i'm not done with this yet. i want to see if i can get it to read a virtual dns, and even i can get a virtual gateway. but, i think the problem is that i'm trying to use a single nic as a two-way device and windows does not actually allow for such things.

so, i'm about to buy an ethernet cardbus controller for an evo 8300c, but i should be able to see if it works first by trying to bridge the connection with the usb to rj-45 i bought for the dell, and which just crossed my mind as a troubleshooting option at the moment.

if this doesn't work, the seller has agreed to accept the item before june 1st. so, i've got a few days to work it out.

1:14

====

i must have slept, at least briefly, on the 18th. there is not another post until much later on the 18th, when i summarize what happened over the calendar date in a handful of posts:

===

so, i'm on the thinkpad for the moment as the usb to ethernet cable is being used for the 90s laptop. unfortunately, whether you signed up for it or not, the more time you spend doing things like this means the more that you have to get it right, lest it all be in vain. i have to justify wasting the time.

i've stated before that i have no relevant education, experience or useful training working with any sort of networking. you might have to answer a couple of stupid multiple choice questions about network layers on a first year comp sci exam, but it's of no actual use or application in the real world. as a musician/blogger, networking is not something i've had to figure out on my own, or spent any time playing with, in my spare time. i've really never done anything like this before. so, i have absolutely no idea what i'm doing, and am rather relying on general technical intuition. if there's some useful outcome here, it may be that i have the opportunity to teach myself how these devices work, but how useful that actually is is up for debate.

the network sharing worked with the second adapter connected. sort of. it connects, but it's behind a very oppressive firewall that i don't appear to be able to turn off. the default is that all access to the virtual subnet is strictly restricted; you have to tell ics what ports and protocols to open, as everything is closed, by default. the device uses a random high number port to dial out and then listens on it, so i'd have to write in 30,000 exceptions, one by one, using the windows gui. if that's even right. this is what it means to say a device doesn't work well behind a nat.

what i was hoping was that connecting through windows would give me more control over the packet routing, not less - and, maybe it might, if i can teach myself what the options are. but, right now, it seems like i've just put myself behind two nats instead of one.

what are some more approaches?

1) well, i'm using the windows ics and getting annoyed by the restrictive defaults. maybe i have a less restrictive option. i mean, i can connect using microsip on the same computer; why can't i connect using a voip phone behind the same nat? is it the second nat?

2) what i see in wireshark is that the packets go from the phone out of the router and don't come back. i don't get responses from ntp (although i did this morning) and i don't get responses from voip.ms. voip.ms responds to register requests by microsip on high ntp ports. worse, despite many tutorials on the topic, i do not seem to be able to change the range of ntp ports used by the device, which are not in the range used by voip.ms.

3) so, i need to forward the ports in a complicated way that neither my router, nor windows firewall can do. worse, i don't have the resources in vista on this 90s laptop to do it, nor am i sure exactly what needs to be done.

so, what are some tasks for the night, then?

1) i'm going to need to go back down to xp. if installing vista was intended as a proof of concept, it's very clear that the 90s laptop simply cannot handle the operating system.

2) can i get wireshark to work on the router, or am i stuck with the limitations of it? it seems like the packets from voip.ms to the phone are being blocked by the router but that the packets from voip.ms to microsip are not. why would that be? is it because the phone is sending out bad headers?

3) would it be more helpful to use a different virtual router and try to bind it to the lan (which goes to the router via a switch) and therefore bypass the filtering in windows? or can i do this using the command line?

see, it should be clear that i have the background to figure this out, but i don't have the direct knowledge. if i can prove that the basic problem is that the phone is sending bad packets, i'll have to either find a way to modify them by putting some (virtual) device in between or give up.

i don't want to waste my time on this, but i already have, and i don't want it to have been all for nought. i need to either prove it's really impossible or figure it out and move on.

21:52

something else i had to do last night was fix the hinge on the thinkpad. i've been thinking about getting a monitor for it, recently. you don't want to open and close these cheap chromebooks too often.

what seems to have happened is that the plastic that the screws that connected the hinges in place were connected to shattered (i don't know how that happened, but i wonder if this machine was tampered with when i was out), which meant that the metal hinge was physically moving back and forth with the screen, on the side with the power. the problem with this is that (1) the chassis will break, eventually, as there is a hinge pushing on it and (2) the power button is in danger of being damaged. on this particular laptop, the power is not connected via wires or anything so the button is unlikely to get seriously damaged. however, the more the chassis gets demented out of place, the more likely the thing won't be able to turn on.

i don't remember dropping it, but that kind of damage would have to be from it being dropped or something dropping on it. it looked like somebody took a hammer to the corner with the hinge on it. like, the plastic was shattered into little pieces that fell out when i opened it up.

what i had to do was take the whole thing apart and just rip out the bulk of the hinge with a pair of wire cutters and kind of tuck the rest of it away; ripping out the entire hinge would dislodge the video out. what that means is that it's not as sturdily held together but also that there isn't a piece of metal recklessly pushing against the chassis every time the device opens and closes. the solution is to just not close the lid.

i'm also going to get a new keyboard for it, because it's inexpensive and it seems to otherwise be fine, besides the dead battery, which is unfortunately normal and which i think is actually bullshit. i think the battery would come back if i reprogrammed the board. that is, i think the chip in the board is telling me the perfectly good battery is dead, in an attempt to get me to buy a new chromebook.

23:15

my inverter also came in today, so i should be able to check to see if i can save the actual vista machine or not, as i take it off the 90s laptop. again, i just picked it up and it seems like somebody has taken it apart and then did a shitty job of putting it back together again. i have strenuously avoided disassembling this laptop. we'll see what happens....

i wish i understood what stupid reason it is that the police have for breaking all of my computers. this is going to come out in the end and they're going to give me millions of dollars for it. but, in the short term, i just wish i understood what they're looking for. i don't know what the point of bugging all of my laptops is, unless they think that i'm secretly communicating with vladimit putin.

23:30

now, to answer the first question - can i inspect traffic to and from the router? sure - if i put a sniffer between the modem and the router. well, i have enough laptops to try, right? apparently, i'd need to use a hub rather than a switch.

i need to shower and i'll come back to this in a few hours.

23:34

so, it seems like a local firewall setting was blocking the ntp server and turning off windows firewall altogether entirely resolved the problem.

if i could tell ics to unblock everything by default....

23:56

btw, in researching this, i'm starting to see message board posts that say things like "17 years ago".

that's a little surreal. internet time isn't supposed to go that far back.

you're going to eventually see message boards posts from 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago.

0:01

=====

i did take a shower and stopped to eat, afterwards. as i was eating, i watched the debates for the then upcoming ontario parliamentary election and posted some cursory analysis of them, the main point being that the only thing i wanted to vote for - a promise for no more lockdowns - was not available to vote for, and i would therefore not be voting in the election.

i want to take note of the situation in the apartment at this point. i was still waiting for parts for the i5 so it was sitting quietly in my bedroom. rather, i was sitting in the couch area, almost exclusively. my normal gateway device - the dell chromebook - was disconnected from the network because the usb-to-ethernet cable was plugged into the 90s laptop. my first chromebook, the thinkpad, was partially disassembled, but plugged in. and, my 90s laptop had vista on it, and was consequently throttling so badly i could barely turn it on.

so, i decided to start the day by focusing on the inverter issue, which i am now stopping to actually figure out, as was the plan and is the purpose of doing this narrative. the inverter appears to require either an external power adapter, which i can't find via any google search, or a special cord to connect it to the laptop's power supply. i searched many places for this cord, including my windows 98 pc. in the process of searching my windows 98 pc, i concluded it was time to swap the old ram out for some of the new ram i purchased last year - and learned they sent me the wrong ram. i'll need to finally tell this story now in this space, which i've been waiting to do.

the end result was that my space was a mess, and that i found myself not able to finish thoughts, which bothers me. so, the recursion begins.

so, these were the posts on the morning of the 19th:

=====

so, i tried to plug the inverter in and i don't have the right power connector. i thought it would just connect to the laptop power supply, but it's the big style 6 pins for use with pcs, not the small style for laptops. that's not something i have siting around to swap.

i wanted to buy this as a backup tool as i suspect i will need to test more laptop screens in the future. but, if i have to spend $20 for an adapter, i'm not going to do that, i'll just take a chance on the part.

i have an external sata drive kit, so if i can find a 4-pin to mini 6-pin adapter, that should work. but, fuck. 

9:40

they actually sent me a different item than i purchased, and the one i bought had the right connector. the items are otherwise technically interchangeable.

:|.

9:41

the price of this item was thirteen dollars. canadian. including shipping. i'm not returning the item.

the cord it comes with looks like one of the old 4-pin power cables you'd use with a floppy drive, but it has 6 pins instead of 4. i have sata cables, i have ide cables, i have fdd cables and i have all kinds of splitters and adapters but i've actually never seen a six pin like this before.

i can get 4 pin fdd to 4 pin molex adapters. and, there's only actually 4 wires. so, can i find a 6 pin to molex adapter?

9:49

is it some kind of european or asian cable or something?

9:52

my detour this morning was that i went to check the windows 98 computer for a cable and noticed that, again, my soundcard was unseated. why do my sound cards keep getting randomly unseated?

the cable wasn't there.

i can think of two reasons that the cops may fixate on my sound cards. the first is that they may think they can bug the card somehow and the second is that they may think i'm bugging the card. i happened to leave a sound card out on my desk, which may have led them to some false conclusions.

i've basically concluded that the cops have the mentality of young children - they think they're "investigating", but they're ultimately just driven by childish curiosity. the simple, obvious truth that i'm a musician with a lot of sound gear is not good enough, apparently. they need to investigate a sound card and try to figure out what i'm doing with it.

like, really - a cop walks into a recording studio and has to sleuth out what the sound card sitting out in it might potentially be for. because they have no fucking clue, and i'm obviously up to no good. i even have several of these strange devices, and put them in every single computer. am i using them to network the computers, and send secret messages to vladimir putin?

what was happening was that the computer was freezing on bootup, and it took me a few tries to understand it was the soundcard that wasn't seated properly. upon reseating the sound card, everything began to work properly, again. however, i kept getting a ram error message on startup, so i decided to try to swap a stick out. after all, i bought 4 backup sticks.

it turns out that the four backup sticks are all mislabeled - they all say 256 mb, but they're all 128 mb. i don't have any computers that i could use the 128 mb sticks for, so they're going to have to send me what i bought.

the pc boots and reads all of the ram, but one or more of the sticks may be a little shorty. that's ok, for now. but, i bought backups and i want them sent.

so, let me get back to the inverter, now. ugh.

15:22

======

a few hours before the last post, i sent an email to memorystock (the ram reseller that sold me the ram for my windows 98 pc) which was actually responded to relatively promptly but that ended up in my spam filter and which i did not see until several days later. as i was then distracted by the ram and focusing on the phone, i did not get back to dealing with the inverter; instead, i seem to have stopped to eat on the evening of the 19th, and spent some time ranting about some political issues. i may have slept briefly, but i spent the rest of the night analyzing wireshark data and came to the following conclusions on the morning of the 20th:

===

rebooting into windows xp instantly helped clarify what's happening, and i actually think it's because it disabled ipv6, although i also turned off alg.

so, now i'm getting a loop:

- phone tries to register

- server responds with a 401 at a high port

- phone sends back destination unreachable

- laptop tries to register

- server responds

- phone sends back destination unreachable

there's some nat-related settings at the server i can experiment with, but it seems like the phone is unable to connect to the server through the nat because the right port isn't opening, which is preventing authentication from occurring. so, i need to find a way to get all of these ports open in the ics, somehow, to allow free communication between the phone and the server.

how does that compare to microsip?

the answer is that microsip only uses port 1121.

so, what happens if i try to fix that on the phone? the answer is that it doesn't take.

well, what if i just turn off nat then? it just doesn't authenticate...

so, here is where the need for a middle piece of software becomes apparent: that middle piece of software needs to handle complex port mapping and needs to potentially act as an authentication layer. i'm going to guess that the phone - from about 2005 - will not be allowed to log directly into the server, today. and, there's your irresolvable contradiction. i'd need something like freepbx.

can i use a different virtual router instead of ics, specifically one that has less port restrictions?

1:29

ok, i'm now actually surprisingly getting it to authenticate, but it's authenticating the packets from the address on the first subnet. so, it would work if the phone was a program running on windows xp, but it can't get to the phone behind the ics firewall.

so, i really need a different virtual router.

1:44

ok, no - i think i confused myself. i think that was the softphone that i forgot to turn off. oops.

2:42

ok, i think i've figured it out by looking at the wireshark output for microsip. it's a handshake. i guess that was obvious.

the first 401 is expected, then the phone needs to send something back, then the 200 comes in, along with a notify request.

the laptop is responding to the 401 with a host unreachable, so i really do need to open those ports up.

6:07

ok.

it seems like i can open the ports just using a loop in a script. that's relatively easy. 

i want to essentially send all traffic on the virtual subnet to port 5060.

6:20

so, i have indeed written a very simple dos script that will forward ports on the router's ip from 40000 to 65535 to the phone's ip on the secondary nat at port 5060. that should send all traffic from the server to the phone.

but, it's going to take a while to finish.

10:24

=====

if this was the answer to the problem, i would post the script here, but it is not and there's therefore no value in doing so. i would not advise that you set anything up behind ics with all of the ports open like this. note that there's no actual data on one of these phones, and they refresh their firmware on boot-up. 

but, i then let that script run for a very long time before finally getting back to it. while it was running, i slept and ate and watched some youtube and commented on some news, but i was able to multitask the weekend by finally doing the vlogging component of the diet runthrough as i was waiting for this script to finish. i also spent some time reading through open tabs on the older chromebook, in an attempt to close open thoughts, and which included reading through some further guides and manuals on the topic. i wanted to make sure i understood every component of the xml settings file to make sure i wasn't missing something.

this was not posted until the 25th, but explains what i was doing as i was waiting for the script to finish, and also jumps ahead to the answer:

===

while this was happening, i also received a response from the oiprd regarding the court-ordered investigation into the legality of the arrest that occurred on the direction of the karen in 2018, which is being undertaken by the ontario provincial police (opp). yes, i've got the opp investigating the windsor police for karen-orchestrated corruption, by superior court order. i asked for concrete timelines, and they've given themselves until the end of september.

i'm hoping they will conclude the arrest was at least unjustified, although i realize the likely need to go back to divisional court on the matter.

the script finished early on the morning of the 21st, and did not have the intended outcome. by that time, i had finished reading through the manuals and settings guides and found the setting that needed to be changed. so, i updated the file, rebooted the server....and it worked. the reason the handshake was not completing was not that the ports were closed but because the phone is set to use udp by default and is trying to log in to a server using an authentication method that udp does not support. ensuring that the phone is correctly set up to use tcp instead of udp fixes the problem without having to make any changes related to the nat, and without having to open any ports.

===

i got it. 

it works.

now, i have to type it up.

it turns out i was just missing a file in the firmware package and that the phone doesn't authenticate correctly (through my router) unless you connect it over tcp, rather than the default udp. there's no fancy software required to get this thing to operate, and i don't have to connect it through the windows ics to evade the nat - i can just plug it directly into the switch, so long as it is communicating using tcp.

9:57

===

after sleeping and waking up, the following posts appear, from research back on the dell, which was reconnected:

===

i had to sleep.

these devices have been unfairly smeared as "not nat friendly", but they're really just misunderstood. yes, they're designed to run behind a nat and not connect to the internet - which is why they use udp by default. but, you can very easily tell them to use tcp, if you want to connect to a remote voip server with them, instead.

so, i was sitting there trying to figure out why a handshake between a local phone and a remote server wasn't working, when the phone was trying to connect over udp. that will never work.

this succinctly explains the problem:

it has nothing to do with enabling or disabling nat, opening ports or setting external addresses in the header - which is what the internet's analysis of the device is incorrectly strictly focused on.

17:50

this isn't what i intended to buy - it doesn't connect to a softphone, so i'm losing functionality. but, it's a definite upgrade over the noisy microphones i had to use for divisional court, for example. the receiver should dramatically cut down on environmental noise, which should be ideal for 90% of applications.

but what if i want to record the conversation? or if i need to use my hands?

now that i understand how this works a little better, i think i want to also get a cheap headset for use with microsip.  but, i intend to actually set this phone up in the other room, if i don't need to drive it with a laptop.

i will still need to use the xp laptop to run a tftp server, but it doesn't need to run anything like pbx. to be clear: voip.ms is itself running freepbx. so, i don't need two freepbxes running, and it might not actually work well.

18:04

====

at this point, i had the problem solved and needed to collect my thoughts, but also apparently needed to sleep that much more, as i'd been pushing myself a little too hard. the following post comes up on the morning of may 22nd:

===

so, that was an unorganized few weeks that has left a lot of my things unorganized and a number of ideas open in my mind, but the phone now works. so, i need to collect my thoughts and move on.

what i'm going to do is post a single how-to post that is based on existing walkthroughs and corrects the mistakes in them. then, i'm going to need to write a big narrative post that pulls together the ideas of the last few weeks and helps me refocus, as i reorganize both my space and my thoughts.

i didn't ask for that project, but that's what it was. the solution is relatively trivial to implement, but it was relatively difficult to get there. i tend to go into high coffee and low organization mode when i get these things thrust on me, and may not want to sleep much until i get it. so, now i have to undo the damage. 

11:25

====

it seems like the last thing i struggled with was figuring out how to correctly set the caller id on calls out. the two tags are <callerIdBlocking>0</callerIdBlocking> and <displayName>...</displayName>. i had to work through this via trial and error on the morning of the 23rd.

finally, the write-up gets posted to the main blog and to the articles page on the afternoon of the 23rd:

====

so, this is a write-up explaining how to connect a 7941 cisco voip phone directly to voip.ms from behind a consumer-grade nat.

rtfm

first of all, let's read the fucking manual, which is up at my growing google drive manual share:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mN5EWhPLqTR5ae4lyzs7iL0rx4sgXMLg/view?usp=

basic research on tftp

now that you're a little familiar with the phone, i'm going to direct you to the following video to get an understanding of what a tftp server is and how to upload or reset the firmware:

the video is helpful, but the steps i needed to follow were a little bit different. so, i'm posting it as a reference but i'm not suggesting you follow exactly the same steps - unless you're actually trying to connect to a local pbx, which we are not doing. rather, we are connecting to a remote pbx, and from behind a nat.

factory reset

first, i would advise purposefully bricking your phone by following the factory reset instructions at the following site:

https://pbxbook.com/cisco/cipsetrst.html

Generic factory reset procedure:

1. Press and hold #, power cycle the phone
2. When an LED starts to flash, release #, and enter:

   • Hard Reset (format flash): 3491672850*#

   The phone will display Upgrading and erase its configuration. 
   

downloading firmware

now that your phone is wiped clean, let us find new firmware to download.

i need to start with a word of warning, and i do think this is a reasonable suggestion, given that you're trying to use a phone from c. 2005 - the procedure i'm going to describe requires two network interfaces connected via internet connection sharing, if attempted in xp. xp will not pick up your phone if you try to connect it to the computer using a vlan, a loopback adapter or a switch. xp will always assume that it is intended to be a client to anything you plug it into, unless you go out of your way to tell it otherwise; newer versions of windows allow for more intuitive, plug and play type two-way networking. i was able to get a second connection on my xp laptop using a usb-to-rj45 connector, and i had to plug the phone into that connector (and the nic into the router, in my case via a switch) in order to get it to pick up the connection. conversely, i was able to get windows 7 to pick up the phone as a client by simply plugging it into the back of the computer, and letting it connect to a dismantled vlan that hadn't been destroyed yet. i'm going to provide both sets of directions that i used to connect the phone to the respective operating systems, but just keep in mind that the point is that the tftp server has to bind to an open connection. the tftp server essentially piggybacks on to an existing connection, so you just have to have an existing connection, but this isn't obvious if you only have one nic, nor is it clear what to do next when faced with the reality of having one nic and needing to set up a dhcp server on your xp computer or your air gapped windows 7 computer.

but, before you can upload the firmware, you need to have firmware first.

the video suggests using the files at firewall.cx, but there is a strong suggestion online that they do not work behind a nat. it is not clear to me if my solution will work with the 9.3 firmware files or not, because i downgraded to 8.5 as a troubleshooting step and do not want to upgrade to see, but it would seem as though the problem was misdiagnosed by the internet community and, as such, the solution may not require downgrading, after all. if somebody wants to play with that, feel free to let me know the outcome.

regardless, the firmware i am using is not the one in the video but is rather this one:

https://downloads-global.3cx.com/downloads/misc/legacy-phones/cisco-79xx.zip

3cx is a commercial provisioning provider, and if you want to avoid headaches then you may even consider buying their product. as it is, they are providing a safe download link to a firmware version that is no longer hosted by cisco. i have that file archived, but let us hope 3cx continues to provide it for free.

take that file and unzip it somewhere. next, go to where you unzipped it and immediately delete cisco_dialplan.html.

there are numerous walkthroughs online, but they all get the basic setting required to get the phone to work wrong and are all full of comments by people complaining that the answers don't actually work. if you want this to work, do not follow any of the other walkthroughs on the internet. however, i started by following these walkthroughs, and used their files as starting points, so i am going to properly reference them, as i correct the errors within them.

it is easiest to start with this walkthrough because it provides three accessible files:

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32557543-Voip-ms-Guide-Cisco-7941-getting-started#google_vignette

you can read through the discussion on nat if you'd like, but i would advise you not to take it at all seriously in any way, except to realize that this is an office phone. it is certainly true that you don't want office phones connecting out to the internet, and it is likewise true that the examples on the forums of people not being able to connect to remote servers have to do with the phone's networking settings preventing them from doing it, but this external ip/nat thing did not fix my problem, did not fix the poster's problem and doesn't really seem to have anything to do with it. i was even able to open 30000 ports for the phone, which was sitting behind ics, using a batch script; it made no difference in resolving what is not a port forwarding error but a handshake error. in hindsight, it shouldn't have been expected to, because the error was that i was trying to complete a handshake over udp, not that i was unable to reach ports over tcp.

to continue with an actual working solution, download and extract each of those three files to the same directory that you extracted the 3cx download to. keeping in mind that you will eventually have to dial 1 to dial out, there is no reason to alter the dial plan or xmldefault files. the sepmac file will be where the user-configurable entries will be edited. and you should immediately change the name of the file so that it contains the mac address, as explained in the video and the forum post.

there is one more file required for the firmware. go to the following webpage and search for sip.conf:

https://www.voip-info.org/asterisk-phone-cisco-79x1-xml-configuration-files-for-sip/

create a new txt file in your directory that you unzipped everything to, paste the following contents into it and save it as sip.conf:

udpbindaddr=0.0.0.0

tcpenable=yes

tcpbindaddr=0.0.0.0

callcounter=yes

transport=udp, tcp

this enables your phone to use tcp as a transport protocol, which allows it to log into an external web server. otherwise, your phone will try to log into voip.ms using udp and the handshake will never complete - some intermediate device, like a virtual nat (ics), will send back a "destination unreachable" response, instead.

uploading firmware to your phone

a) using windows 7 or 10

when i bought the phone, i intended to use it as a front-end for microsip running in windows xp on an evo n800c, so i spent quite a while trying to get it to accept an ip from windows xp, with no success. after a while, i decided i had to try it in 7 to make sure it works, and i happen to only have one wired ethernet port in my only working 7 box, so i had to be creative about getting it to bind.

if you have two ethernet ports or an ethernet port and a wireless port, then it should be straight-forward like in the video. if you don't, you'll need to trick your computer into making it look like it has an open connection.

the way i got it to work was to right click on my lan connection, go to properties and select configure on the network card (in my case, an integrated intel card). i then went to the vlan tab and added a vlan. i then restarted the computer. after rebooting, i then went back and deleted the vlan i just created. this vlan will disappear on another reboot, but is still available as a ghost binding for the tftp server while the machine is on, and until the machine turns off. now, plug your phone in and the icon should spin rather than say "unplugged". i then went to my normal lan connection and changed it to a static ip and continued to bind it to tftp, like in the video. i would suggest you disable the tftp client. now, your phone should pick up an ip address from the dhcp server running in tftp and then connect to the tftp server. to flash the phone, you want to push # (on the phone) on startup until the lights flash, then type 123456789*0#.

b) using windows xp sp3

you need two physical connections for this to work. i used the ethernet port in my laptop (connected to the switch) as the local area network connection and then connected the phone to a usb-to-rj45 connector, which installed as a secondary adapter. the trick is to connect the two adapters using internet connection sharing, which turns the usb-to-rj45 connector into a virtual nat. your phone will then pick up an ip address from the laptop, which is now a server. you can then bind your virtual tftp server to the virtual subnet.

first, i'd suggest you just turn all software firewalls running in xp off for a second, altogether.

next, you create the internet sharing connection by going to the advanced tab of the adapter properties and clicking the appropriate box. you will then need to restart your computer; when it comes back up, you'll notice that the second connector has ip address 192.168.0.1, and is acting like a virtual router. your phone should pick up an address on that subnet (192.168.0.x), meaning you won't need to set up a dhcp server in tftp.

i would advise installing an alias on the virtual ics router to bind the tftp server to, as it keeps the concept conceptually cleaner; you can have your virtual router at 192.168.0.1, and your tftp server at something like 192.168.0.2. you can do this by entering the advanced tab of the tcp/ip properties in the adapter (lan) properties and adding a new address for the tftp server to bind to. you should then be able to reset the phone by holding down # on power up and keying in 123456789*0# when the lights flash - your phone will get the ip from the virtual nat and connect to the tftp server on the virtual subnet.

----

note that your phone now has the firmware on it, but it probably doesn't have the right configuration file and you probably don't have a long term tftp solution. so, we're now going to disconnect everything and put it back together in a more stable way.

giving your phone access to the wan

now, plug your phone directly into your router and make sure it can get an ip address from it. personally, i plug my phone into a switch that connects to a router on one side and a laptop (the evo n800c) for the tftp server on the other side. in the router's firmware, i use mac filtering (meaning i restrict which physical devices are allowed to connect to the network, behind the nat) and i have a very restricted pool of static ip addresses on a dhcp server that only hands out addresses to identified devices. so, if you come to my house and try to plug your cell phone or laptop into my network, it won't work until the router knows your mac address and i open up an exception in the dhcp list. so, on my network, the phone has a static ip address set in the router's firmware, and assigned to the phone's mac address. you will set up your network as you will, but the phone needs to be able to access the wan and needs an ip address from the router.

setting up the stable tftp server

you need to have some computer running a tftp server on the same subnet as the phone every time you turn this phone on. this is entirely absurd, but it's just how it works.

whether you are using a windows 7 or xp machine, the steps are now the same - disable whatever sharing scheme you had (either by rebooting the windows 7 machine with the vlan off or by disabling internet connection sharing on your xp machine and unplugging the secondary adapter, if it's not hard-wired) and just plug it directly into your router, in order to get an ip address on the same subnet as the phone. in my case, i keep all of my pcs off the internet, entirely; i will be using the evo n800c laptop as the tftp server, connected into the switch, as described before. this laptop has a static ip address on the subnet, as assigned by the router, to the laptop's mac address.

while you may just use this static ip address for your tftp server, i would again advise that you use an alias for it using the same procedure as before. that way, your computer and tftp servers will not have the same ip address on the subnet, and you can readily identify between them, if you need to analyze any traffic. broadly speaking, i would suggest that each virtual device ought to be given a unique alias on any subnet, real or virtual, as a best practice.

if you are using an alias, or if you are not, you can now bind the tftp server to the computer's active ip address on the subnet by using the steps in the video or in the forum post.

hardcoding addresses into your phone

this step will not apply to you if you are using dhcp servers to assign random ip addresses on the fly, but you may find yourself repeatedly reconfiguring your device if you choose that path, which is the opposite of the intent of the technology. based on my (limited) experience with this device, i would strongly suggest that you assign it a static ip and assign your tftp server to a static ip as well.

to enter the settings, push the settings button. if you don't know where that is, read the fucking manual.

now, push **# to unlock the settings on your phone. if you have just uploaded the stock config file, your phone will not have a password on it. yet.

- go to network configuration, then go to ipv4 configuration and change dhcp to disabled. 

- now, go down to the ip address and type in the address you decided should be assigned to it by the router.

- below that is the subnet mask. perhaps your phone entered a subnet mask automatically, and perhaps it did not; you will need to look up how to do that if you don't know how, but you'd better enter in the right value.

- default router should be the ip address of your router, on the subnet

- dns server is probably the same as default router

- now, go down to tftp server and enter the alias to the computer's ip address, or the computer's ip address itself, if you insist on being unorganized.

- press save

- press **# again to lock the phone

- press **#** to reboot the phone

at this stage, your phone should correctly get an ip address from your router, and you should get an error when it loads data from the tftp server, but you need to be sure that it can connect to both of these external devices before you move forwards. if you're not sure, check the log messages in the tftp server; don't worry if there's error messages, just make sure it's actually connected.

updating the configuration file

i started with the configuration file (the sepmac file) at the above forum site and made a number of changes, which are highlighted here in red.

<device>

<deviceProtocol>SIP</deviceProtocol> 

<sshUserId>whatever</sshUserId>  

<sshPassword>whatever</sshPassword> 

<devicePool>  

 <dateTimeSetting>  

    <dateTemplate>M/D/Y</dateTemplate>  

    <timeZone>Eastern Standard/Daylight Time</timeZone>

    <ntps>  

         <ntp>  

             <name>128.138.140.44</name>  

             <ntpMode>Unicast</ntpMode>  

         </ntp>  

    </ntps>  

 </dateTimeSetting>  

 <callManagerGroup>  

    <members>  

       <member priority="0">  

          <callManager>  

             <ports>  

                <ethernetPhonePort>2000</ethernetPhonePort>  

                <sipPort>5060</sipPort>  

                <securedSipPort>5061</securedSipPort>  

             </ports>  

             <processNodeName>ip address of voip.ms proxy server</processNodeName>  

          </callManager>  

       </member>  

    </members>  

 </callManagerGroup>  

</devicePool>  

<sipProfile> 

 <sipProxies>  

    <backupProxy></backupProxy>  

    <backupProxyPort></backupProxyPort>  

    <emergencyProxy></emergencyProxy>  

    <emergencyProxyPort></emergencyProxyPort>  

    <outboundProxy></outboundProxy>  

    <outboundProxyPort></outboundProxyPort>  

    <registerWithProxy>true</registerWithProxy>  

 </sipProxies>  

 <sipCallFeatures> 

    <cnfJoinEnabled>true</cnfJoinEnabled>  

    <callForwardURI>x--serviceuri-cfwdall</callForwardURI>  

    <callPickupURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-pickup</callPickupURI>  

    <callPickupListURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-opickup</callPickupListURI>  

    <callPickupGroupURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-gpickup</callPickupGroupURI>  

    <meetMeServiceURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-meetme</meetMeServiceURI>  

    <abbreviatedDialURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-abbrdial</abbreviatedDialURI>  

    <rfc2543Hold>false</rfc2543Hold>  

    <callHoldRingback>2</callHoldRingback>  

    <localCfwdEnable>true</localCfwdEnable>  

    <semiAttendedTransfer>true</semiAttendedTransfer>  

    <anonymousCallBlock>1</anonymousCallBlock>  

    <callerIdBlocking>0</callerIdBlocking>  

    <dndControl>1</dndControl>  

    <remoteCcEnable>true</remoteCcEnable>  

 </sipCallFeatures> 

 <sipStack>  

    <sipInviteRetx>6</sipInviteRetx>  

    <sipRetx>10</sipRetx>  

    <timerInviteExpires>180</timerInviteExpires>  

    <timerRegisterExpires>180</timerRegisterExpires>  

    <timerRegisterDelta>5</timerRegisterDelta>  

    <timerKeepAliveExpires>120</timerKeepAliveExpires>  

    <timerSubscribeExpires>120</timerSubscribeExpires>  

    <timerSubscribeDelta>5</timerSubscribeDelta>  

    <timerT1>500</timerT1>  

    <timerT2>4000</timerT2>  

    <maxRedirects>70</maxRedirects>  

    <remotePartyID>false</remotePartyID>  

    <userInfo>None</userInfo>  

 </sipStack> 

 <autoAnswerTimer>1</autoAnswerTimer>  

 <autoAnswerAltBehavior>false</autoAnswerAltBehavior>  

 <autoAnswerOverride>true</autoAnswerOverride>  

 <transferOnhookEnabled>false</transferOnhookEnabled>  

 <enableVad>false</enableVad> 

 <preferredCodec>g711ulaw</preferredCodec>  

 <dtmfAvtPayload>101</dtmfAvtPayload>  

 <dtmfDbLevel>3</dtmfDbLevel>  

 <dtmfOutofBand>avt</dtmfOutofBand>  

 <alwaysUsePrimeLine>false</alwaysUsePrimeLine>  

 <alwaysUsePrimeLineVoiceMail>false</alwaysUsePrimeLineVoiceMail>  

 <kpml>3</kpml>

 <natReceivedProcessing></natReceivedProcessing>  

 <natEnabled>true</natEnabled>  

 <natAddress></natAddress>  

 <phoneLabel>name displayed on phone</phoneLabel> 

 <stutterMsgWaiting>1</stutterMsgWaiting> 

 <callStats>false</callStats>  

 <silentPeriodBetweenCallWaitingBursts>10</silentPeriodBetweenCallWaitingBursts>  

 <disableLocalSpeedDialConfig>false</disableLocalSpeedDialConfig> 

 <startMediaPort>10001</startMediaPort>  

 <stopMediaPort>20000</stopMediaPort> 

 <sipLines> 

  <line  button="1"> 

       <featureID>9</featureID>  

       <featureLabel>name of line 1</featureLabel>  

       <proxy>USECALLMANAGER</proxy>  

       <port>5060</port> 

       <name>##VOIPMSUSER##</name> 

       <displayName>call display name</displayName>  

       <autoAnswer>

          <autoAnswerEnabled>2</autoAnswerEnabled>

       </autoAnswer>  

       <callWaiting>3</callWaiting> 

       <authName>##VOIPMSUSER##</authName>  

       <authPassword>##VOIPMSPASS##</authPassword>  

       <sharedLine>false</sharedLine> 

       <messageWaitingLampPolicy>1</messageWaitingLampPolicy>  

       <messagesNumber>*97</messagesNumber>  

       <ringSettingIdle>4</ringSettingIdle>  

       <ringSettingActive>5</ringSettingActive> 

       <contact>##VOIPMSUSER##</contact>  

       <forwardCallInfoDisplay>  

          <callerName>true</callerName>  

          <callerNumber>true</callerNumber>  

          <redirectedNumber>false</redirectedNumber>  

          <dialedNumber>true</dialedNumber>  

       </forwardCallInfoDisplay>  

    </line>

</sipLines>

 <voipControlPort>5061</voipControlPort>  

 <dscpForAudio>184</dscpForAudio>  

 <ringSettingBusyStationPolicy>0</ringSettingBusyStationPolicy>  

 <dialTemplate>dialplan.xml</dialTemplate>  

</sipProfile> 

<commonProfile>  

 <phonePassword>password for phone</phonePassword>

 <backgroundImageAccess>true</backgroundImageAccess>  

 <callLogBlfEnabled>2</callLogBlfEnabled>  

</commonProfile> 

<loadInformation>SIP41.8-5-4S</loadInformation> 

<vendorConfig> 

 <disableSpeaker>false</disableSpeaker> 

 <disableSpeakerAndHeadset>false</disableSpeakerAndHeadset> 

 <pcPort>0</pcPort> 

 <settingsAccess>1</settingsAccess>

 <garp>0</garp> 

 <voiceVlanAccess>0</voiceVlanAccess>

 <videoCapability>0</videoCapability>  

 <autoSelectLineEnable>0</autoSelectLineEnable> 

 <webAccess>0</webAccess>  

 <spanToPCPort>0</spanToPCPort>  

 <loggingDisplay>1</loggingDisplay>  

 <loadServer></loadServer>  

</vendorConfig> 

<versionStamp></versionStamp> 

<userLocale> 

 <name>United_States</name> 

<uid>1</uid> 

 <langCode>en_US</langCode> 

<version>1.0.0.0-1</version> 

 <winCharSet>iso-8859-1</winCharSet> 

</userLocale> 

<deviceSecurityMode>1</deviceSecurityMode> 

<authenticationURL></authenticationURL>  

<directoryURL></directoryURL>  

<idleURL></idleURL>  

<informationURL></informationURL> 

<messagesURL></messagesURL>  

<proxyServerURL></proxyServerURL>  

<servicesURL></servicesURL> 

<dscpForSCCPPhoneConfig>96</dscpForSCCPPhoneConfig>  

<dscpForSCCPPhoneServices>0</dscpForSCCPPhoneServices>  

<dscpForCm2Dvce>96</dscpForCm2Dvce>

<transportLayerProtocol>1</transportLayerProtocol>

<capfAuthMode>0</capfAuthMode>  

<capfList>  

 <capf>  

    <phonePort>3804</phonePort>  

 </capf>  

</capfList> 

<certHash></certHash>  

<encrConfig>false</encrConfig>  

</device>

====

notes: 

1)  <anonymousCallBlock>1</anonymousCallBlock> ensures that anonymous callers cannot reach you. if you want to be reached by anonymous callers, pick 0. 2 does not seem to be in use.

2)   <callerIdBlocking>0</callerIdBlocking> allows your call display name to appear on the phones of the people you're calling. if you want to make anonymous calls, pick 1. 2 does not appear to be in use. 

3)   <dndControl>1</dndControl> this is supposed to block incoming calls, but i don't think it works.

4)   <timerRegisterExpires>180</timerRegisterExpires>  is recommended by voip.ms

5)  <natReceivedProcessing></natReceivedProcessing>. note that i removed the value from this entry. i do not believe my headers are being processed by voip.ms.

6) <natEnabled>true</natEnabled>. i am, in fact, behind a nat.  

7)  <natAddress></natAddress>. but, this isn't necessary to fill in.  

8) <phoneLabel>name displayed on phone</phoneLabel> 

9)   <line  button="1"> i removed the carriage line, here.

10)  <proxy>USECALLMANAGER</proxy>. the call manager tag is defined above.  a hard-coded ip might also work.

11)   <displayName>call display name</displayName>. this is the name displayed on the phones of the people you're calling. 

12)  <phonePassword>password for phone</phonePassword>. if you enter a (short) password here, you will need to provide it after pressing **# to edit values on the phone.

13) <loadInformation>SIP41.8-5-4S</loadInformation>. you need to get the firmware revision correct, here.

14) <transportLayerProtocol>1</transportLayerProtocol> - this is the magic setting that fixed everything, and it seems to have been badly misunderstood. the numbers i've seen entered are 2 and 4 and the assumption seems to have been that you're telling the phone what layer to use in the osi framework. that is not what this setting is at all. this setting has values of 1 and 2, where 1 tells the phone to communicate over tcp and 2 tells it to use udp. functionally, 1 means you're behind a nat and trying to get through it and 2 means you're communicating strictly on the local subnet.

make sure that voip.ms is set to nat=yes

a common troubleshooting step is to try it with nat=no at voip.ms, but that does not make sense. you are, in fact, behind a nat. make sure that voip.ms knows that.

if you press settings, then **#** your phone will reboot and it should do the following:

1) find an ip address

2) load the tftp server

3) register

you should get a dial tone when you pick the phone up. 

make sure to press one before dialing out.

15:36

===

the link to the article is here:

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/p/how-to-connect-7941-cisco-voip-phone.html

13:32

step three in the narrative update catch-up is going to be to finish the post i intended to post on the 29th. so, i need to tell the story of the week of the 24th-29th, and push forward a little, to the 31st.

i woke up on the 24th, which was the tuesday after the long weekend in canada and consequently the start of the week, and sent an email to memorystock indicating that i had not received a response to the email i sent on the 19th (i actually had received a response, but it was in my spam folder). this was also responded to within a few hours, but i did not receive it, either, as it also went to my spam folder. i also noticed, on checking my email, that my package of several ps/2 mice was refunded because the supplier only had usb mice, but that was not entirely clear - i had to contact them to ask about it.

later in the morning, i contacted my drugstore to ask them to update my estradiol and cyproterone acetate prescriptions; i received a response regarding the estradiol, but nothing regarding the cyproterone acetate. i decided to wait; maybe they needed to order something.

early in the afternoon, when i was ready to start cleaning the place up, i posted the following:

====

so, that was a floaty couple of days. i got focused on something, accomplished a task and then couldn't stay awake for the next several days. it's a little self-realization that maybe i am lacking a little drive.

i've set out a plan for myself, and i complain i can't do it because i'm too tired, but if i was as into it as i ought to be, i wouldn't have as much difficulty staying awake to do it. 

that doesn't mean i'm reconsidering. i think it's the lack of interest in the music, and i've been through this before with this - i may argue that my music is objectively superior to that which has market potential and that music that exists on the contemporary market is, without exception, void of value, and i may interject that my audience does not exist yet and that i'm strictly composing for the future, but that doesn't eliminate the alienation inherent in existing outside of society and creating for an audience that doesn't exist.

i have no interest in society, and nothing i've said changes that. but, i wish there were more outcasts and losers around that want out of the system, and it seems like it's getting harder and harder to exist without conforming and selling out.

a little real interest would help, as motivation.

but, i'm not wavering - my art is my purpose, my meaning, my existence. i just need to get myself going. i'm not the first artist that's struggled with the futility of existence.

for now, i need coffee and i need to put my space back together again. there will be a big narrative post coming.

13:01

=====

i'm still working on that narrative post, and it is definitely a little blurry, now.

what i remember is that this week was spent uploading videos to youtube, ordering parts on the internet and reassembling pcs and laptops that had been ripped apart the previous week and that it took longer than it should have for a variety of reasons.

the issue on the 24th was the ram. while i did not receive responses from memory stock's customer service (because they were in my spam folder), i did receive responses from their info line. they asked me to take pictures of the ram, and suggested i was mistaken in my analysis of the size of the ram. after sending them pictures of the ram, and of my post messages on the windows 98 pc, they responded with a suggestion that i update my bios, which i found to be enraging and insulting and started to make me concerned that i might be getting ripped off and more or less laughed at about it. then, the responses stopped - or, at least, i thought they did. it turns out that there were further responses in my spam box. nothing else substantive appears to have happened on the 24th besides researching that ram and convincing myself i was right about it.

so, i woke up on the morning of the 25th feeling ripped off, and with the impression that the supplier wasn't taking me seriously. i had previously suggested that they could either replace the ram or send me a refund, and the only response i received was a suggestion i should update my bios; in fact, there were rma instructions in my spam box that i did not see. so, i waited until late in the morning and, upon still receiving no response (or thinking i hadn't...), sent the supplier a demand that they immediately refund me the ram, or face legal action. within a few hours, i got a fedex tracking number for replacement ram that was scheduled to arrive within a few days - and this did not get filtered as spam.

in hindsight, memorystock were certainly responsive, and i wish i had received their rma responses. while the responses i received from the info line were amateurish, i took them out of context and did not realize it (because the substantive responses ended up in my spam folder). if i had received their rma responses, i would have followed their instructions. as it is, i got the ram replaced very quickly and still ended up with four free 128 mb sticks, although i have no idea what anybody would do with 128 mb sticks of ram in today's world.

the following was posted on the afternoon of the 25th:

===

i haven't been able to stay awake the last few days, and i'm sure it's caffeine withdrawal. i'm taking such high potency coffee with this one person machine that if i skip a day i just fall over.

i've got a coffee, now, and i hope i can stay awake for a bit.

lots of stuff has happened, and i really have to go through a narrative update to document it, but it's going to take a while. i might have four sticks of 128 mb sd ram that nobody wants, so that might guide me in the decision to get an old powerpc mac, which i believe had lower ram requirements than the pcs of the same era and which were still using sd ram until the mid 00s.

narrative update coming, really. here we go...

14:59

naw. even the g3s released in the mid 90s can take up to 768 mb of ram. i'd have to get a museum piece board to have a max of 512 mb, and chances are it won't work.

i take good care of my computers, so i have 20 year old boards in pristine condition. that is very rare.

i'm not going to find a 30 year old board for this ancient ram, and i have no idea what i could run on it. getting older than this windows 98 machine (which takes 1 gb max) and having a utility for the device really means looking at amigas and they had weird ram. 

know what i can do with 4 sticks of pc 100 128 mb ram? send me an email.

15:10

amigas run for over $3000 on ebay, apparently.

most of the best electronic music ever created was done on an amiga, which is a very old type of personal computer with a powerpc processor that has been unavailable for decades. it's where cubase comes from.

15:16

having an amiga in a studio might seem unusually niche, but it would get used, trust me.

15:17

===========

as mentioned previously, this narrative update did not happen - i got a few lines in and got distracted by the need to rewrite existing posts and to finish thoughts on reassembling these machines. this is really where i've been ever since, in trying to get these posts typed up.

the ps/2 connector came in on this day, and i also finished uploading the diet playlist:

by the evening of the 25th, i became convinced that something unusual was going on with my cyproterone rx and posted the following:

===

for many years, there's been a subset of the transgender and broader queer community that has struggled against the idea that this isn't a choice, under fears that queerness may end up medicalized as an illness. it does follow that if we do not have a choice in the matter then we can be cured because it's not our fault in the first place. i don't think people really thought that through.

the science is pretty unambiguous about this, and it's pretty much the opposite of what stupid fake liberals think (a constant with stupid fake liberals is that they think they understand science and do not). humans are not born with a sexual orientation, nor is that sexual orientation fixed; sexuality and gender are spectrums, and they're fluid. they change based on a large number of variables, and choice is certainly one of them. we have overwhelming free will when it come to gender expression, particularly, and we have every right to reject religion, to reject norms and to reject society in regards to the issue if we happen to feel like doing so. any kind of queer advocacy should be insisting on the right to free expression, not pretending that free expression doesn't exist.

i point this out because i know i'm being drugged with testosterone, and i'm finally getting hints that the system that is drugging me is getting frustrated and confused by my refusal to go along with it. my doctor boosted my prescription for testosterone blockers, but the drugstore seems to have been ordered not to fill it. i don't know what level this is occurring at, but i suspect it's federal - and i'm not supposed to know about it. i'm just supposed to get drugged by the testosterone and be "cured", because i was simply testosterone deficient, and i never had any free will in the matter, anyways. 

this is what happens when you allow for the absence of individual autonomy; you lose your right to make decisions. my right to decide what gender i want to present myself as is being forcibly suppressed, and i haven't even been informed, because i have no choice in the matter, anyways. it's not science, it's an extreme right-wing political ideology rooted in radical calvinism and that has taken over the bourgeois fake left.

i will continue to resist, but my organs will only allow me to do so for so long. and, in the end, my death will be a testament to my ability to make free choices about my gender expression, and a demonstration that suggestions otherwise are simply wrong.

19:23

=====

the ram came in on thursday the 26th and it was in fact the right ram, so the windows 98 pc was back to running at full strength, once again. there are very minimal posts from that point on wednesday night until sunday afternoon and the reason is that i was trying to get the place reordered, primarily - i had both of my recording pcs disassembled due to the ram, i had my xp laptop in need of a reinstall, i had to put the thinkpad back together and i had various parts strewn around that needed to be put away. when i was doing some minimal typing, i was retyping older posts, with a focus on removing specific phrases that don't seem like they're in my vocabulary and i was sort of surprised to see appear in my writing.

after mostly getting things back together in the studio on thursday (reconstructing both pcs), i sat down on friday with the intent to do a final update on the items in the couch space, for eating, watching chromebook-tv and using the cisco phone. i partly summarize this in the following aborted narrative update post schedule for the morning of sunday the 29th:

===

i've been promising a narrative update for a while, but i keep getting distracted; i'm not typing new posts because it's supposed to end up in the narrative, but it's been so long now that i might have difficulty reconstructing the timeframe. i'm going to force myself to finish the narrative update before i do anything else, but i want a short update in this space, first.

i had to break the shift-sleeping that came out of the phone project by forcing myself to catch up on sleep, which resulted in me sleeping for almost a full 24 hours before i was able to really convincingly wake up. when i did finally wake up, i had to put everything back together again in here. so, thursday was mostly about reconstructing the space i had torn apart to get the phone to work. i then spent friday reassessing the phone/tv space to make sure that the devices have everything they need for the near future, which involved ordering the following:

- a $10 split mic/phone 3.5 mm headset for the 90s laptop. i like the phone, but i can't record calls with it. i could certainly capture the packets if i set it up to connect via xp's internet connection sharing again, but i'd have to use some kind of virtual packet sniffer on the virtual subnet to record the calls and that just strikes me as weird. apparently, it's relatively easy using wireshark, but that doesn't mean i want to actually do it. i do, however, absolutely want that functionality. i also want to be able to sit on the couch and relax if i'm on a very long call. the phone + the headset (using microsip) should provide for total flexibility and functionality, and that should be a final solution, for as long as that laptop continues to boot. that said, i'm going to get an extra usb-to-ethernet connector when i get one for the new linux laptop and will no doubt toy with the idea of recording calls in this manner, in the long run. we'll have to see what idea is most useful in what context, over time.

- the chromebook is only 13" and it's just a little too small for watching anything unless you're sitting right up to it, which is not how the couch space is designed to work. even if the broken battery and hinge didn't make moving the chromebook difficult, i will generally have food on my lap when i'm eating. so, i bought a 17" external monitor on saturday morning for $25 over kijiji. i intended to buy a 19" model but the seller convinced me it didn't display properly; i thought the one i bought was 19" because it's the same size as the one that was advertised as 19", but it turns out that the other one was advertised as the wrong size, and that it's only 17". we'll have to see if i think this is big enough to be a general purpose youtube tv monitor or not; if it isn't, i'll put it aside as a backup and look for something in the 20-25" inch range, instead. it was just hard to see the equations on the 13" chromebook.

11:30

====

i also ordered another batch of ps/2 mice on this day and hope they arrive shortly. in addition to that, the following updates to the two laptops in that space were considered:

- i spent some time rescripting the 90s laptop to make sure the reinstall and startup scripts are useful for the laptop's new function, as a notetaking device for phone calls (including light web browsing) and a tftp server for the cisco. 

- i spent a while trying to find a cheap replacement keyboard for the thinkpad, as previously referenced, and was not able to do so. i then had to screw the broken keyboard back in and the bottom of the thinkpad back on. this device can accept a hard drive, in the long run, and may potentially boot into linux or windows. for now, it's very limited use as a streaming device does not require further modification.

the idea is that i wanted to have that space set up in a permanent fashion, with both a phone device and tv device, before i moved to setting up the new i5. in fact, it is all set up now, in theory, even if i haven't actually installed the new monitor, yet. that will be done very soon, now.

so, on the morning of the 28th, i did indeed go out to pick up the monitor, which was the first time i'd left the house since the 15th. my plan was to pick up the monitor in the morning, pick my pills up on the way home, stop briefly to eat some quinoa and then catch up on grocery shopping in the afternoon, which i managed to get done. saturday was a big grocery day. but, i want to stop to talk about the pills.

as posted previously, i've recently been extremely concerned that something improper is going on, in regards to my ability to access testosterone suppressors (and in conjunction with a strong feeling that i'm being drugged against my will). i did call ahead on friday to ensure that the cyproterone was ready, and was initially met with an argument, although they did certainly relent. so, i was only slightly surprised when i went to pick up the cyproterone on saturday morning to find out it was the same unmarked brand that i had returned previously.

i have not brought this up with store staff, but i want to stress the unmarked nature of the pills. the normal cyproterone that i buy say cyp/50 on them, and they are a certain softness in texture. these new pills are very hard, and they do not say anything on them at all. it is the second time i've rejected them, partially out of an apprehension that i do not actually know that they are cyproterone acetate because they do not actually say that they are on them. for all i know, they might even be testosterone.

certainly, if i were to find out that a drug store gave me testosterone when i ordered cyproterone, and i actually took the wrong pills as a result, even once, i would sue that drug store and actively attempt to have their license revoked. that would be egregious beyond description, and i would show them no mercy in my wrath. as it is, my direct concern was ensuring i got the cyproterone, not retaliating against them for a human rights breach. so, i asked the pharmacist to take back the pills he gave me and replace them with the ones i know and recognize - and that say the name of the rx on them.

the pharmacist quite oddly claimed that this was not possible because shopper's (a large drugstore chain in canada) had changed distributors and the previous pill was no longer available. he then decided that i must not want the pills, and threatened to fax my doctor, telling him i'd refused them. this was quite the red flag. so, i asked him to print off my rx with the two din #s - the one i've been taking for years and the supposed new one - so that i could see if i could locate the din elsewhere.

in fact, i walked down the street to the next shopper's up, being that there are over a dozen locations even in a small city like windsor, and the pharmacist at the other shopper's told me that the guy was full of shit, and was able to order me the rx i'm used to taking.

again: i find this very curious. there's something quite odd going on, and the fact that this pill was unlabelled - and could have been anything at all  - is quite concerning, to say the least. 

in the end, my desired pills arrived at the new shoppers on tuesday, and i'll be picking them up at that location from now on.

the 28th was a pleasant but not a hot day, and i got in relatively early, before dark, and before it started to rain. i intended to take a shower and get something to eat, but took a shower and fell asleep, instead - which resulted in me waking up with bed head and being a little pissed off about it.

the 29th and 30th were then spent finishing the first narrative update, which was posted on the afternoon of the 30th. i wanted to get these updates done before i got out to the blood lab on the morning of tuesday the 31st, but i did not.

the narrative update posted on the 30th is here:

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2022/05/as-alluded-to-several-times-i-am-very.html

23:15

wednesday, june 8, 2022

i try to plan my days out to take advantage of the hottest days of the year when i see them coming. so, when i realized there was going to be a heat wave here at the end of may, i booked the hottest day of the heat wave to go for the longest ride possible, in the least amount of clothes, which meant a pink tanktop and some cutoff jeans. what else would have been expected?

i stopped first at the furthest of the two blood labs i've been going to recently. i've decided i want to alternate between these two local labs to maximize variation and see if i can pull out any patterns, for as long as these monthlies continue. so, i was out around 9:30 to catch a 10:15 appointment, and noticed that the billboard on tecumseh already said 30 as i drove by, the first time.

from there, i went on the long ride past belle river; it was just to enjoy the heat and get some vitamin d at the top of the day:

you can see that i'm driving along lac st clair here, which is a smaller lake in the great lakes system that sits between lakes huron and erie in the flow of water, and between the st clair and detroit rivers. a bit more than a three hour round trip back home (near the ambassador bridge) was roughly correct, meaning i was out from about 10:30 to about 2:00, which both maximized the amount of vitamin d i got and absolutely roasted my very white legs. i caught a 34 on the board on the way back. it's late on june 7th, a week later, and my legs are still sore to the touch and just beginning to peel.

as i did most of my groceries for the start of the month on the previous saturday, i only had to pick up a small number of items on the way back, but i screwed it up by picking up a six pack of mountain dew on the way through belle river and then learning that the grapefruit juice was on sale at the sobey's. dammit. i told myself i'd come back and so just contented myself with some kale at the zehr's, instead, along with some novamin toothpaste, which is an item i hadn't seen anywhere here in months.

i was already feeling it when i got back, but i had a number of things to do, so i kept going, which was a terrible mistake. you have to understand that i can bicycle or walk endlessly, so i fully expected to get back to the sobey's before the end of the day.

first, i had to get to the shopper's to pick up my pills, as mentioned - and that was fine. next, i had to stop at the factory direct to get that second dell chromebook, which i intend to put linux on. i also had to print name change forms at the library to get to my doctor, and then actually get to my doctor, as well as pick up some extra items at the freshco. it was still early evening, early enough that i wanted to keep biking for hours, if for no other reason than not to waste the wonderful heat, when i realized i just had to get in to...

cool down?

yeah. i can't remember the last time i had to cool down, but my legs were on fire. there simply wasn't another option. the grapefruit juice would have to wait until the morning.

in fact, it had to wait until friday. the rest of the week got eaten up by the need to recover from this sunburn; i wanted to get in another grocery run in the morning, i wanted to do my monthly cleaning and then i wanted to finish the narrative posts, but i could do no such things - i couldn't bicycle, i couldn't walk, i couldn't even sit. i was essentially bed ridden until thursday, except to get up to eat.

so, there are some posts over the next few days, but they are pretty sporadic, as every time i tried to get up to do something, i finished eating and then realized i had to go lie down to rest my legs. it was less that i was tired or needed to sleep and more that i couldn't even bend my legs to sit without dealing with the pain, i really had to remain horizontal. so, i did sleep, but it was because i was in pain and not because i was tired. this week was really spent waking up, eating and going back to bed to rest my legs. it was only on thursday that it started to finally get substantively better and on friday that i was able to get back on the bike to finish the grocery run. but, i need to tell the story about the blood work, first.

i got my bloodwork mostly in by wednesday but it took a few tries to finish the following post on the night of thursday june 2nd:

=====

the last few days have actually been slightly difficult. i was out early on tuesday to take the long bike ride (past belle river and back) to enjoy the 30+ degree weather, and while i certainly enjoyed the ride and the wonderful heat, my too-white legs got absolutely roasted, which has actually made it difficult to even walk. this is unusual for me; i rarely have to worry about getting burned. i was planning on getting out early on wednesday morning for one last grocery run, but it just wasn't possible, i really had no choice but to stay inside. the shower i took yesterday was pretty painful, if necessary - you don't want your sunburns to get infected. i then tried to lie down for a few hours yesterday evening (i was waiting until after 19:00 to do laundry) and i found myself unable to get back up until sunrise this morning. i'm still feeling it, but it's manageable, now. nonetheless, i still found myself sleeping most of the day.

i wanted to get focused on doing my end/start of the month cleaning when i came in, but have instead been having difficulty getting started on anything.

should i seek medical attention? i think these are first degree burns. they're still burning, still dilated and red, but i'm not seeing any swelling or cracking or bubbling. i'll keep an eye on it. 

have you ever tried to take a shit with a sunburn on your legs? it enforces proper shitting posture, because you can't slouch and rest your arms on your legs, you have to sit up in a proper manner. i'm used to eating with a plate in my lap, but not now, no way.

i got my blood tested before i went out for the ride. here's my chart update, minus a number of items that i'm no longer checking:

	2021										2022
	m	a	m	j	j	a	s	o	n	d	j	f	m	a	m	j	j	a	s	o	n	d
cholesterol	3.93	-	-	-	3.99	3.8	4.15	4.01/3.83	4.14/4.02	4.14/3.67	3.54/3.8	3.78/3.68			3.42
triglycerides	.87	-	-	-	.95	.89	1.41	1.05/0.94	1.09/1.32	1.86/0.73	2.26/0.75	0.69/1.02			0.42
hdl	1.69	-	-	-	1.84	1.59	1.73	1.42/1.55	1.37/1.42	1.51/1.74	1.75/1.72	1.74/1.69			1.55
ldl	1.85	-	-	-	1.72	1.81	1.78	2.11/1.85	2.28/2.00	1.79/1.6	<0.8/1.75	1.73/1.52			1.68
non-hdl	2.24	-	-	-	2.15	2.21	2.42	2.59/2.28	2.77/2.60	2.63/1.93	1.79/2.09	2.04/1.99			1.87
wbc	8.7/8.4	9.9/9.0	-	-	?	7.0	7.6	6.9/6.9	7.8	11.3/8.2	6.7/6.4	7.4/7.1		5.3	6.4
rbc 4: yellow 4.2: normal	3.97/4.25	4.11/4.38	-	-	4.17	4.12	4.33	4.47/4.2	4.28	4.55/4.19	4.3/4.22	4.42/4.26		4.4	4.13
hemoglobin normal: 120	132/140	133/142	-	-	139	136	141	138/138	139	144/131	141/133	140/136		145	132
hematocrit normal: 0.36	.382/.404	.394/.424	-	-	.405	.398	.418	.417/.402	.405	0.431/0.393	.409/.396	.417/.404		.412	0.392
mcv normal: 100	96.1/95.1	95.8/97.0	-	-	97	96.8	96.6	93/95.7	94.6	94.7/94	95/94	94/95		93.7	95
mch	33.1/32.9	32.4/32.5	-	-	33.3	33.2	32.7	30.9/32.8	32.5	31.8/31.3	32.7/31.5	31.7/32		32.9	32.0
mchc	345/346	338/335	-	-	?	343	338	331/343	344	335/333	344/336	336/337		352	337
rdw	13.3/13.5	13.0/13.1	-	-	?	13	12.3	11.7/12.9	12.6	13.4/12.0	13.2/11.7	11.7/13		12.8	11.9
platelet	199/187	171/171	-	-	?	175	167	168/150	155	188/185	159/184	187/175		166	181
reticulocytes	-	-/42	-	-	53	56	46	35	33	33	39	41		43	49
vitamin d	87	-	-	-	109	72	64	72/83	78	64/71	61/74	74/80		102	77
estradiol	363/388	-	-	-	-	563	443	432	777	343	578	416		307	691
testosterone	0.9	-	-	-	-	-	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4		1.4	<0.4
progesterone	1.9	-	-	-	-	-	<0.5	0.7	0.5	0.9	<0.5	3.7		62.5	21
fsh	<0.2	-	-	-	-	-	0.2	0.1	<0.1	-	<0.1	0.1		0.5	0.2
lh	<0.2	-	-	-	-	-	0.1	0.1	0.1	-	0.1	<0.1		<0.2	0.1
ferritin	12/9	6/17	21	-	29	43	28	40	42	59	33	28		59	64
tibc	-	69.5	-	-	65.7	62.9	64.7	58.9	58.2	63.2	57.4	58.7		57.9
iron	-	9.6	-	-	22.7	37.3	19.3	28.3	37.3	32.5	13.1	14.8		28.2
iron sat	-	0.14	-	-	0.35	0.59	0.3	.48	0.64	0.51	0.23	0.25		0.49
transferrin	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.59	2.29	2.38	2.49	2.31	2.39		2.42
pth	-	-	-	5.5	-	6.2	5.9	6.2	5.5	8.0	6.3	5.7		6.9	6.4
tsh	0.92	-	-	-	-	0.94	1.22	1.67	1.48	1.07	1.39	0.97		1.26	0.92
calcitonin	-	-	-	<0.6	-	-	-	-	0.6	-	0.8	-
alp	61	-	-	63	59	50	60	59 /55	47	50	60	58		55	67

- i don't want to draw conclusions from the vitamin d as random readings are known to demonstrate a large amount of variability. i was out for most of the day on saturday, so i didn't have a deficit of sunlight. it depends on where i catch it in the cycle. i've been pointing that out for months, and there it is.

- my cholesterol is fine. i was a little worried after my testosterone spiked over 1, but it seems to be ok. you'll note the tsh moved down with the testosterone again, too, which i think is good.

- pth is still too high, and i don't know the next step - i have lots of estrogen, lots of calcium, lots of d. why is my pth not coming down? i'll give it a few more runs to see if it stabilizes with the testosterone back to normal trace levels, but what next?

- these hormone ranges are ideal, but it's random. i got a good snapshot. that's positive.

- my ferritin inched up to 64 from 59. that's a slow increase, but it's some movement in the right direction. this lab did not do circulating iron, and i will need to go back soon to yell at them for it. i need to wait for my legs to heal, first.

so, everything seems like it's stabilizing. finally. but...

- my reticulocytes are still slightly low. this lab did two different metrics i hadn't seen before:

- immature reticulocyte function, which is at the high end of the normal range

- reticulocyte hemoglobin, which was technically high (if by a fraction of a percent)

the other lab simply didn't do these tests.

i have an appointment with a blood oncologist because i'm concerned that i'm not producing enough reticulocytes and that i might have a marrow issue; together, this new data suggests that i am producing a large number of reticulocytes, but that it's not making up a large amount of blood content.

i need to do some research into this, but i'm tentatively thinking this is actually a metric of mixed value, in the presence of continued ferritin increases. what i've been imagining is that i should be creating reticulocytes at a high rate, because i was previously anemic (and still am, technically) and the data that suggested that i wasn't was concerning. but, now i see that i am creating the reticulocytes, but they're not making up a large percentage of my total blood count.

so, it's a positive data point that i'm creating enough blood; it's concerning that it's not getting out of the marrow, or is being destroyed too quickly after it does.

i wouldn't imagine that i'm only bleeding out the new blood; that doesn't make sense. maybe the blood cells are exploding before they get into the bloodstream and maybe this is the missing piece of data required to deduce i have the type of anemia where your blood cells explode randomly. this is generally considered genetic and is almost certainly the cause of the anemia on my father's side. i wish i had seen this data point previously but, as it is, this is something to take to the blood specialist. it may be the case that the only solution is to take iron pills.

am i maybe just using iron at an unusually high rate? well, that's the alternative hypothesis, and i think that i'd have reason to be careful about using iron at a high rate if i have a production issue in the marrow. so, the things are probably working together. but, i now have some real evidence suggesting that hemolysis is occurring, so that's going to be my focus, moving forwards. you'll notice that my blood cells are all always a little big, but this is also seen in athletes and is actually generally reflective of good health.

i have another fit test soon, but the most likely cancer at this stage would actually be leukemia. rather, it is clear that i have something like sickle-cell anemia, if not that condition exactly. i have some poorly understood, distant trace italian genes from my father's side (nobody in my family would identify as italian, and i did not know i had italian ancestry until i was in my 30s. i actually have a distinct distaste for italians, as people, and a strong dislike of italian culture. i think italians are pretty gross.); conditions of that type are relatively common in that gene pool.

if it's a genetic hemolytic anemia, it seems to be relatively mild and the solution may be to just take iron. but, if it's leukemia then i'm likely in some trouble.

18:35

====

as i needed my iron results, i set an appointment with lifelabs to go in and yell at them and rather got yelled at instead. the employees at lifelabs really have a lot of nerve, here. i showed up with a doctor's requisition that said "do iron + ferritin", and they decided that they didn't need to do iron, because they did ferritin. when pressed with the fact that the doctor ordered both tests - because my anemia is not well understood and we're monitoring it to try to understand it - the employee just explained that it's company policy.

so, it's company policy to disregard the doctor and insert contrary decisions, then hold to it when contradicted on the point? the employee claimed she wasn't a doctor, so she couldn't comment. but, that's just the point - she's not a doctor, so what grounds did she have to contradict the requisition?

i think i understand that the computers are locked and there's no way out of the company policy, but i don't understand what grounds the company has to overrule the requisition, or ask the doctor to explain himself. what occurred was a private company overstepping it's bounds in a system that it has a tenuous and largely unwanted existence within. lifelabs should really mind it's manners on this point; it cannot be instructing it's phlebotomists to contradict the authority of medical professionals - that's ridiculous, and if they're not careful, they might find themselves on the other side of legislation severely restricting their decision-making authority on the matter, if what i experienced wasn't already in contravention of existing law.

regardless, the employee would not relent and i had no option but to to get the iron done at the other lab, instead. they didn't understand the concern, themselves; they thought iron studies + ferritin together actually makes sense, which it of course does.

i want to continue alternating between these labs, but there's a very arrogant employee at the lifelabs that might make it difficult. i don't have an alternate lifelabs in windsor, unfortunately. i might try the dynacare, instead.

so, once i got my second test done, i took the ride back out to the sobey's to get my grapefruit juice, which was no longer on sale, but purchased, regardless. *sigh*. and, after a few more grocery runs, i made it in, hit the shower and was back asleep.

when i woke up on saturday, i intended to get back to writing the narrative but instead found myself focused on the blood work, ahead of my appointment on monday morning. the weekend was supposed to be spent cleaning, but all i really did was read up on red blood cells.

my appointment with the blood oncologist was on monday morning at 8:30; i arrived at the hospital around 8:40ish and was told to put a mask on if i wanted to see the doctor.

excuse me? i thought we did away with that, but the hospital was insistent, so i walked out on them instead. i'm really taking a principled stand on this. if the in truth largely unqualified hospital bureaucrats really think that transmission is enough of a problem to enforce mask wearing, they should be insisting on social distancing and phone appointments; if they don't think transmission is a problem, then they should drop the bullshit around superfluous mask wearing, and be done with this charade of ritualistic idiocy. the status quo of mask mandates is incoherent - either transmission is serious and we should be talking over the phone or it isn't and mask use is just bullshit performative superstition. this middle point doesn't make any sense.

so, i stopped for one more grocery run on the way back, hopped in the shower when i got home and phoned the hospital to schedule a phone appointment for the end of the day.

i also had a phone appointment with my gp on monday. he filled out the name and gender change form for me and a requisition for a yearly fit and cea test, just to be sure. i'll be doing fit & cea tests yearly for as long as i remain existent. i have not picked that up yet; it will be in the next few days.

when i did talk to the oncologist, she was kind enough to answer my questions, as well as schedule me for a celiac test at the hospital, so i won't have to pay for it, as well as an ultrasound at the hospital to check for hemolysis. i'm of course going to be baffled if i find out i'm celiac, whereas i'm expecting to find some evidence of hemolysis. you'll recall that i've been experiencing shoulder pain in a classic kehr's sign for quite a while, although all the blood tests we did suggested no sign of organ damage. one way or the other, these will be useful results.

i need to reiterate that i really don't think that i'm bleeding; she seemed to think i was just a vegetarian. i'm hoping i get a few calls with her, so i mostly humoured her on the first call. we'll have to see if i can get more information from her on the next discussion or not.

and, now it's wednesday morning and i've finally got these writeups finished - and am ready to finish the monthly cleaning in here, for the rest of the night. just as soon as i get something to eat...

if i can finish cleaning in here before sunrise, i can start to look at the new chromebook/i5 combo and start to put it together, a little. i'm going to be doing all of my typing over there, from now on.

0:47

now, it seems like the russians can get the grain moving out of mariupol, but they're under sanction.

so, let's recall.

1) the ukrainians have functionally blockaded themselves by mining their own ports in what is really a scorched earth policy.

2) the russians have sea access.

3) but the russians are not allowed to export due to sanctions.

therefore....

c'mon, kids. we can deduce this, right?

therefore...

the...

sanctions....

are...

that's right.

therefore, the sanctions are responsible for preventing the export of grain from ukraine.

so, those concerned about the ramifications should be calling for an end to sanctions.

2:15

turkey wants to change it's name.

pftt. what a bunch of turkeys.

14:21

it does take away the eventual one-liner when we get into a war with them.

i want to be there when some future president wipes the sweat from his brow and looks up to his advisers.

"well, to hell with them, then."

*pause*

"i eat turkey for dinner."

14:23

(after dinner, the president was observed enjoying an unusually deep rest.)

14:25

what's the best way to treat a room full of turkish pows?

decapitate them, and stuff them with bread.

14:28

but, seriously. now, that i have that out of my system.

we really should have accommodated the turks and changed the name of the birds, instead. instead of calling the birds turkeys, i propose we begin to call them 18th century aristocrats, or perhaps burkeans, for short, as they look and carry themselves that way. that would unfortunately eliminate an insult directed at contemporary arrogant douches, but that is an acceptable trade-off.

or, we could just wait a few decades, until constantinople is liberated and turkey no longer exists and nobody gets confused anyways. yeah. that's the better choice, on second thought.

hey, nobody today thinks an ottoman is anything more than a fucking foot stool, right?

14:38

so, what's the best way to treat a burkean, then?

decapitate them, and stuff them with bread.

14:58

when your source is larry summers, it's a pretty good clue that you're doing something wrong. i feel the need to react to this.

first of all, let's note that this article is converting biden's completely ridiculous claim - which is that taxing corporations will reduce inflation - into something somewhat more defendable - that taxing the rich will reduce demand. but, it's still wrong, and larry summers is still wrong.

still? well, it's the same argument larry summers has been making for decades about tax cuts for the rich increasing demand, but with the opposite causality, right? remember when republicans were all on about reducing taxes on the rich in order to stimulate the economy, and there was an uproar on the pseudo-left about it? this article is (fraudulently) arguing that what biden is saying is logically equivalent to that, just a simple shift in the naive, monotonic linear model, but in the other direction; that if you instead increase taxes on the rich then you reduce aggregate demand. so, of course the pro-market right likes the claim.

that's not what biden actually said, though. biden's actual claim was so incoherent that the only way to make any sense of it is that he looked at his poll numbers, realized inflation was making him unpopular and found some way to deflect the issue to corporations by blaming it on them, instead. it's just utter straight-out-of-ass demagogic pure bullshit, nothing more or less; it's "don't hate me; hate them, instead". it's "all your problems are caused by them.". there's really no other way to deconstruct or make sense of it.

but, let's ignore that and instead look at the statement that the new republic is inserting in place of biden's actual statement, and that they seem to like so much, because it's logically equivalent to the bush-clinton-reagan policy of cutting taxes to stimulate economic activity, which is not surprising because biden is a reaganite.

biden's claim was clearly about corporate taxes. but, will increasing income taxes on the rich actually reduce demand?

well, demand in what? yachts? luxury cars?

i spent a while thinking about this, and the best analysis i have of it is that the claim is unsalvageable, that it's one of the many examples of claims that will appear in a first year economics textbook and which any respectable economics professor will immediately debunk, in class. i don't doubt that it's in larry's book - as mentioned, it's equivalent to the well implemented and repeatedly debunked point about tax cuts for the rich - but that doesn't mean it's right, or even that it makes any sense.

so, stepping away from the naive linear models, what conditions are required to actually have a policy like this actually reflect reality in the actual real world? well, you'd have to have the following:

1) the increase in income taxes would have to actually decrease the individual's disposable income

2) as almost all large purchases are financed with debt, this functionally means that the increase in taxes would have to make it harder for the individual to access debt.

3) so, the condition really reduces to the increase in income taxes being substantive enough to have banking institutions make different decisions about whether the individual can pay back debt, in the long run.

while i must concede the abstract possibility that increasing personal taxes on high-income earners could decrease inflation on some potential specific luxury items, try as i may, i cannot think of any concrete examples where such a thing would actually happen, in the real world. the increase in personal income taxes would have to be very high, to begin with. 

but, this isn't a discourse that exists in any meaningful political context. when people talk about inflation and tie it to approval ratings, they're talking about the price of necessities and tying it to low to moderate income levels. so, we're concerned about the price of food, fuel and shelter - not the price of yachts and mansions and bmws. the idea that increasing personal income taxes on the rich will decrease inflation in the cost of rent or food does not make any sense.

but, let's be clear about how this idea of modifying income taxes might be helpful in policy, moving forwards. i have not tended to kneejerk against tax cuts for the rich the way that the pseudo-left does because i'm an actual socialist - i know that money isn't real. that's one of the differences between liberal/progressive types and actual left-wing socialists; leftists have a very different concept of fiscal policy, because the end point is to eliminate currency, altogether. we don't think debt is real, and we have no meaningful concerns about it. we think the economy needs to be reorganized so that production is based on need, and not on profit. there is no meaningful concept of debt in socialism. so, the idea that the rich need to "pay their fair share" actually entirely ceases to have any meaning in an actual left-wing context, as we don't even have rich people in socialism, to begin with.

i don't think it's helpful to have money sitting idly, and that is the reason i'd oppose tax cuts on the rich - i want that money to be utilized by some actor, in this case the state, and not to sit in a bank account collecting dust. i don't like or want currency, but if we're to have it, let's spend it, let's not waste it in savings accounts. to an actual leftist, savings just represent unused resources in the economy, and subsequent want in society.

if you follow that logic to it's conclusion, you should actually conclude that tax cuts on a very targeted income level would actually stimulate the economy because it would actually increase disposable income. now, you have to be careful with this. while i would certainly not oppose tax cuts - or, in my case, tax rebates. i don't pay taxes. i'm too poor. - for the very lowest rung of society, expecting it to "stimulate the economy" is not reasonable. if you give me money, i spent it on second-hand goods and necessities; it improves my quality of life, but i'm not increasing gdp. if you give tax cuts to people with a little more money, the working poor, they're likely to spend it on debt reduction. i would certainly support programs targeted at debt reduction, but this won't increase gdp, either.

there is a very targeted group of people - the lower middle class - that would actually take extra money from reduced taxation and spend it in ways that will spur economic growth. first, you have to make sure they're actually paying taxes. second, you have to go for a high enough level of income that the target is not in substantive debt. third, you have to avoid overshooting, so that the cuts just sit idly in accounts, which i think is bad. it is very difficult to get this right, and it requires a large amount of empirical analysis to hone in on the right demographic, but there's grounded logic underlying it.

it does follow that if you increase taxes on this very targeted group of people - the lower middle class - you can succeed in decreasing gdp. but, i'm not sure why the new republic would promote such a thing, and do not think it would improve mr. biden's political fortunes.

if we are to take this logic to it's absurd end point, we might also conclude that increasing income taxes on the working class would lead to a decrease in demand for food - because they'd starve to death. the resultant surplus of food as a consequence of the starvation of the working class would then stabilize prices and flatten out inflation. 

so, they're inserting themselves into this discourse in an attempt to advance their own arguments, by changing the intent of biden's statement to align with their own long-held prescriptions. but, those prescriptions are still wrong, as they always were.

https://newrepublic.com/article/166695/bezos-biden-taxes-rich-tame-inflation

20:19

it's true - wiping out the working class would stop them from complaining about inflation.

20:43

it seems that a lot of people aren't taking carbon taxation seriously, perhaps including the federal government, which is a big part of the reason that environmentalists are so skeptical about the efficacy of carbon pricing in reducing emissions. but, the fact is that we have a federal carbon tax in place. these issues need to be analyzed through the prism of this carbon tax.

if the federal government were to seize profits from the oil industry and redistribute them to gas consumers in order to buffer the effects of increasing gas prices, that would be undoing the incentive system in carbon taxation, which is intended to force consumers to use less carbon by placing an incrementally increasing price on it that makes access to carbon increasingly out of the reach of the average consumer and forces them to adapt to it. i mean, it would in some sense be an extension of the existing carbon pricing and, as a non gas user, i'd just pocket that much extra. but, if the government embraces that logic and extends it forwards, it's undoing the supposed intent of the pigovian taxation, which is not actually to reward low carbon users as some kind of morality play but to actually force people to change their habits by making them prohibitively expensive.

i would consequently actually agree with the minister from alberta on the point - the federal government should not be stepping in to subsidize gas users. 

rather, gas users that are concerned about inflation should find ways to reduce their emissions footprints - and spend their carbon tax rebates, which are set to increase next month, on something other than inflation in the cost of gas.

"federal oil and gas windfall tax would be 'extreme act of aggression,' alberta's energy minister warns", cbc news, june 8, 2022

21:31

most ontarians are set to receive the first of four much larger carbon rebate checks starting at the beginning of next month. as a single person on permanent disability, i will get a roughly $100 check in the first weeks of july, october, january and april. large families will receive amounts in the low thousands. that is going to continue to increase.

will you merely spend that money on gas?

or, will you adapt, find ways to minimize your emissions footprint and enjoy the windfall?

21:40

i'm going to call on legacy media to make some attempt to explain this to people, and to get the articles circulating on social media.

i know most people don't get it.

21:45

i have a suggestion as to how you spend your carbon rebate: buy a bicycle.

it'll benefit your health, too.

21:57

this was re-written to make me look like a retard. rewrite this entirely.

i need to be realistic about the ferritin not stabilizing.

it's either sports anemia, or it's a parasite, or i'm bleeding somewhere and can't tell. hemolysis or not.

the fact that i see no signs of bleeding really means it has to be a parasite.

if i'm producing large amount of healthy blood cells that are dying quickly, the parasite might be in the marrow. apparently, the most likely cause of this is malaria.

i do not live in a malaria range; nobody gets malaria in canada. or, that's the conventional wisdom, at least.

i'm going to let the doctor do the tests, but that's the thing that's really starting to become apparent: if my ferritin levels will not stabilize, and there's no obvious source of blood loss, it has to be a parasite.

23:54

this comment analyzed the question of parasitism on ferritin and reticulocyte levels but was replaced with a stupid one-liner to make me look like a retard. rewrite this.

23:55

apparently, malaria targets reticulocytes.

23:56

thursday, june 9, 2022

do i have fucking malaria, in windsor, ontario, canada?

it's one of the predicted results of climate change. but, you'd think there'd be a trail, northwards.

0:04

if my ferritin levels don't stabilize quickly, it's unavoidable: i may be experiencing hemolysis, and i may have poor absorption, and i may even have a regulation issue, but the only way the ferritin is leaving is through a parasite, and that parasite seems to be very malaria-like.

malaria is probably unlikely for the same reason cancer is - i've actually gained a little weight over the last year.

but, what other parasites are "malaria-like"?

0:10

there is a malaria-like infection called babesiosis, or nantucket fever, and that i am in the geographic range for.

0:15

no.

the ferritin is high with that particular parasite, too.

0:20

most parasites cause broad nutritional deficiencies, not just iron deficiency.

i'm starting to suspect the ferritin is going to stabilize and that i was more deficient than i realized.

0:39

i mean, if my ferritin is unstable, it's unavoidable that i'm either bleeding it out or getting it sucked out. everything else would lead to recycling.

...or that it's not actually leaving at all, and that i'm just taking a very long time to rebuild exceedingly depleted stores.

that was option 3. it is possible.

0:42

we imagine that people that live like rich people are actually rich. i mean, look at their fancy cars and their fancy houses and their cottages and the whole bit. they must have six figure savings accounts.

in fact, the startling truth is that, while these people clearly have assets and investments, they are living pay check to pay check just like the rest of us are, they just have bigger bills.

the bigger the house, the bigger the mortgage payment. you'd be surprised, really. trust me. at the end of the day, differences in real disposable income are less than might be imagined.

this is the bizarre, sad truth of the system we live in: the more money you make, the more debt you end up with. my analysis was not an exaggeration, it was spot on.

it might follow, then, that a large enough tax increase to curb inflation in luxury goods would have the unintended consequence of a stock sell-off.

4:29

tax the banks.

5:10

In a rare update from Sievierodonetsk, the commander of Ukraine’s Svoboda National Guard Battalion, Petro Kusyk, said Ukrainians were drawing the Russians into street fighting to neutralize Russia’s artillery advantage.

the "svoboda national guard battalion".

wow.

this is a quote from an article at global news, referenced below. 

the entity mentioned is an openly neo-nazi group.

canada should be condemning these terrorists as the nazis they are and working with the russians to annihilate them, not sending them artillery to advance their hate.

reference:

"ukraine needs more artillery to maintain fight in key donbas city, commander says", global news, june 9, 2022

9:15

so, i just took a look through the concert listings in windsor for the first time in a long time and i don't actually know if the music scene in the city has completely died out or if the nexus of live shows in town has shifted somewhere away from downtown.

the places i would normally go to all appear to be entirely dead.

is that even related to the annoyance of crossing the border?

so, i've been toying with staying in versus going out, but i may not really have a real choice, if the music scene is really this dead.

17:02

unfortunately, that was a botched couple of days. i stopped just after midnight on wednesday morning to eat the big salad, intending to get some cleaning done after, but found myself eating too slowly because i was typing in front of the studio laptop as i was eating. that issue should resolve very soon. but, i actually fell asleep midway through eating, and then didn't finish the salad until the afternoon. the next step was to get a coffee and sort of proofread the posts posted after i came in on monday, which i got distracted from by ranting about some other things, instead. it was about 4:00 am on thursday (this morning) that i finished, stopped to get some cereal and found myself with a bout of vicious gas.

i know - get scoped, right? but, i have a history of stomach aches like this that have been going on since i was about 10 years old and tend to get worse when the weather changes outside. i've long deduced that my stomach is in some way depressurising in the context of shifts in the atmosphere. whatever is going on, this is recurrent and recognizable. it could very well be related to the anemia, which i have almost certainly had for essentially my entire life, but it's not cancer and getting scoped won't help much.

when the stomach wrenches - which is what i've called them previously in this space - come in, i have to just stop to sleep. there's no other solution. further, i often have to sleep a fair amount. the next bowel movement will be dense and wide, if the pattern holds, and i'm sure it will. i guess i'll take a good look at it...

i wasn't really up until around 14:00, when i returned some calls from the hospital and the court house before finishing the second half of breakfast, doing some dishes and sitting down with a coffee.

i'm going to do some light news browsing and then get to finishing setting up the couch space, in final form. so, the task for the night will be to complete the assembly on the i5 and maybe move to the disassembly on the other chromebook.

20:00

it's interesting to me that the talking heads on the news are talking about creating a recession.

recessions are usually presented as errors by the ruling class, and people like me that question that and suggest there are often geopolitical intents behind recessions are usually cast aside as quacks. so, this is weird.

do i think there's a recession coming?

i don't think interest rate hikes on their own will create a recession, no. i think we have to take a step back and realize that almost none of our labour market is involved in production anymore, so the premise of a slow down in the economy leading to job cuts doesn't have the same level of threat that it used to. i'm pretty critical of unrestrained free markets, but one of the upsides of being an import-reliant economy is that you're somewhat shielded by these kinds of shocks. if aggregate demand really crashes, the result would be a recession in china.

if aggregate demand does go down, you might see some warehouse workers laid off by amazon. but, almost everything else in the economy should actually be resistant to that kind of slow down.

a "recession" in our economy would look more like the bank taking a turn to the tyrannical and extracting wealth until people start bleeding. that ought to be a choice; that doesn't seem inevitable.

my suggestion is that the federal reserve should print more money and just continue on as they were. the americans have really found a recession-proof formula: just print and print and print. the debt is irrelevant. so, i'm not entirely sure why they're pulling back on that.

if they decide they should pull the plug on this to "fight inflation", we will have our miscalculation, and probably trigger into stagflation. but, the way they're talking about it is like they think it will get done on purpose...

i would hope the central banks are thoughtful enough to realize that their policies are not responsible for this inflation, and that they will only make things worse if they try to fix it.

the best thing you can do to get inflation under control is to stop using oil & gas.

20:34

She says people should view themselves as a corporation.

now, you kids listen to me - don't you take your advice from legacy media. they're a bunch of shills and hacks.

maybe you kids ought to watch this:

that should put the article into some perspective.

ref:

"recession fears are growing. here’s how younger Canadians can prepare.", global news, june 9, 2022

20:57

friday, june 10, 2022

so, this was more difficult than intended, as always, because it took me so long to do that writeup. that monitor has been sitting there unplugged since not last saturday but the saturday before, way back on may the 28th.

is that big enough? i think it is.

it took me a few tries to figure out how to do it, but i think that's stable. i need to be able to turn the chromebook in the back on and off, and that's the one with the broken hinge, so i can't just close the lid and put it under the monitor. i've had the phone between the speakers the last two weeks and didn't really want to move it but there's no other answer; i tried elevating the monitor, but nothing really fit in the space. the keyboard is on the couch. this gives me enough space to put a plate down...

i left off with the quantum physics lectures on may 12th and am waiting for a usb pen and the i5 to come up. but, i'll be going ahead on them, regardless.

i've been eating in the studio for weeks. that will come to an end, now.

so, i'm going to vacuum in there and get a salad...

this is a shot from the other side, that shows the spot for the (never used) smartphone and the receiver for the speakers.

so, that's done.

if i have to move some time in the future, that will transfer to any new space, more or less in tact.

1:14

i remember talking about converting old computers into appliances as one of the first posts - it was to my old facebook site - when i moved to windsor in 2013. as these old computers pile up, i will continue to find things to do with them...

i've been over this before. but, the broken chromebook in the corner is strictly for streaming youtube. so, it's my tv, functionally. i just felt i needed a bigger out. the real reason i got it was that i was having difficulty reading the equations on some of the lectures (due to poor quality captures), but i'm sure that watching something like the fall of civilizations podcast will be a lot more enjoyable on the bigger screen and louder speakers. in fact, i'm going to go ahead and watch one, to break it in.

the 90s laptop on the other side is running the tftp server, which is what is booted up. i need that to boot the phone, so i'll need to turn it on whenever i turn the phone on. i can also use it for note taking when i'm on the phone, and for light browsing - to google phone numbers, for example. the headset is still coming in the mail. i really cannot do much more with this laptop, as it is beyond legacy, at this point. but, i mean it works.

the next conversion will be for the cq60, which i want to turn into a mobile effects processor. so, i really hope the inverter works.

do you have other uses for old laptops? send me an email. 

one thing i don't have set up and may set up with the next broken laptop (even the bricked hp, if i can figure it out) is a security camera. and, i think i have some reasons for one, too.

1:32

as i've pointed out a few times, my xp images are barebones and stripped out. in some sense, that machine is a sitting duck on any network, but i've completely ripped out 95% of the networking functionality, so it would...i don't want to say it would be easy to hack it, as i don't even know, but it would be difficult to do much with it if you did hack it. any would be hacker would be left very frustrated and confused as they kept running commands that just didn't work.

i do not recommend using windows xp on any network in 2022, unless you've done something like i have to make the networking aspect of the operating system impossible to use. 

the flip side is that that xp image may have a lighter footprint than a modern linux os. again - may. i don't know. i know that the machine is actually relatively fast, in terms of browsing devices. it's probably faster than your brand new iphone over 5g, just so long as you don't try to use javascript.

1:38

while i understand that the russians are responding to the (ongoing) ukrainian show trials, this is a tactical mistake. sentencing children to life in prison does not make the ukrainians look very european, and is not going to make them look very good in the eyes of westerners, who would broadly consider such behaviour to be barbaric.

the russians had an opportunity here to take the high road, and they are instead making themselves look just as bad.

these are stupid kids. unlike isis recruits, they haven't been brainwashed into a religion and didn't go to ukraine on a schizophrenic delusion that they're carrying out a mission from god. the russians have grounds to attempt to determine if they're intelligence assets or not; if they are, they should treat them as pows, and follow the geneva convention. if they're not, they should send them home to be spanked and sent to bed without supper.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61745556

3:02

i guess moscow got pissed off that kiev was upstaging them on bullshit show trials and felt the need to put an end to that kind of insolence.

3:03

well, leave it to the slavs to compete with each other over who can orchestrate the most barbaric show trials, right?

3:05

yeah, i think the monitor is big enough to enjoy the video quality, and that the difference is big enough to justify.

the monitor was only $25 and is probably close to 20 years old. i'm really not much of a visuals person (i don't watch action or science fiction movies), so i don't have a lot of interest in fancy screens, but this is definitely an improvement over the chromebook monitor in both size and quality, and i actually think it looks pretty good - relative, i suppose, to my lack of experience with high quality video, and my lack of really giving a fuck about it.

it just needed to be a little bigger to get a better look at the board. really. the better definition is just a bonus and, i suppose, really just unavoidable given what i'm coming from.

so, i slept this morning and i want to spend tonight in the bedroom, setting up that new typing environment.

16:05

the philips 192e is a roughly 2008-2010 model. so, not quite 20 years old.

16:20

i don't know anything about graphics. i'm a sound nerd.

so, the monitor is running at 1366x768, and 60hz, which is the widescreen analogue for "720p". all three chromebooks are running at 720p as well. so, the monitor and chromebook are running at the same display resolution and this is 720p.

my production machine can run at 1080p, but i actually run it a little lower, at 1152x864 because i like the size better. i use a square monitor on my production machine - and am insistent upon it. if that monitor goes (as one did previously), i will need to struggle to find another square monitor. this is also running through a very old kvm that i bought about the same time as the production machine, which was early 2007. graphics are not important in sound production, and not important for these three computers; i prefer the larger resolution, and that's just a personal preference.

the 90s laptop, which still works because it was a premium machine on manufacture, is also 720p. i would presume the cq60 is 720 p and that the bricked hp might be 1080p; if it is i didn't notice any difference.

the new lenovo is the only thing in the house running at 1080p. i will be editing on that machine. but, i record in the lowest quality available to minimize file sizes.

i've long assumed i couldn't tell the difference, and haven't really concerned myself with it. looking into it, it's apparently a size thing and is mostly of concern when dealing with actual tvs - by which i mean screens in the 40 inch plus range, which is apparently normal nowadays. i haven't had cable since i was a kid (early 00s) and the tvs we had back then were in the 20-30 inch range. i would consider a 40 inch tv to be ridiculous, rather than normal, but i don't define the market. if you are going to get a ridiculously large tv, i can understand why you'd need better resolution options.

but, i think the science is pretty clear that you're just wasting money on 1080p or 4k computer monitors, in the 15-30 inch range, even if the primary use is streaming. i would have considered a 25" monitor, for this application, to be excessive, and you'll apparently never tell the difference between 720 and 1080 at the size, let alone have any use for 4k.

18:08

i think this is probably what's actually correct.

It is not always possible to tell the difference between 720p and 1080p resolution.  For the human eye to discern the difference, you would need to be sitting closer to the screen to notice the details with the higher number of pixels. Also, for viewers to begin to see any difference between 720p and 1080p, they would need a screen that is at least 42 inches. Since the most popular TV size is around 50 inches, the 1080p resolution makes sense.

https://humtech.ucla.edu/news/are-4k-tvs-worth-buying/

i'm sitting about 4 ft from the screen, which is actually 19" after all (i didn't realize you're supposed to measure them diagonally). that's maybe a little closer than you'd expect in a living room, but it's further than you'd normally see in a computer application. but, at 19"...

see, because i'm used to small screens and i'm the kind of over-educated culturally liberal snob that will make fun of people for having 40" tvs, even if that makes me a little out of touch, the way i want to present it is in the question of whether you need to increase the resolution to compensate for the increased size. so, the way i want to frame the question is whether you need more than 720p for 19" - which is how the question would have been framed 20 years ago. and, i want to say that there isn't any math that would justify that, even at a reduced distance of four feet.

i do get it - your 75" tv is going to look bad at 720p. but, maybe you should look into buying a bicycle and taking a little better care of yourself if you find yourself excited about a 75" tv.

as mentioned, i think a 35" tv would be preposterous. i'm used to tvs in the 20-25" range.

19:17

this little bit of cursory research is helpful, though, even if i don't actually give a fuck.

if i do find that i want to get a little bigger screen - maybe in the 20-25" range - i may want to consider 1080p depending on price and availability.

19:20

this chart is helpful.

at 19" and 4 feet, i'm barely at the screen size where i can tell the difference between 480p and 720p.

at 25" and 4 feet, however, i might be able to start telling the difference between 720p and 1080p. 

19:40

considering that i wanted to spend the least amount possible, 720p and 19" was probably just about optimal, however accidentally.

like i say - i've never really even thought about this much. i learned at some point many years ago that it doesn't matter, and haven't concerned myself with thinking about it.

even for 25", which is my maximal considered size, 720p is just about optimal, and you shouldn't bother paying even a cent extra for 1080p. but, in today's second-hand market, you'll probably find a 1080p 25" monitor for the same price or even for less, if you're lucky, than a 720p monitor - with the caveat that they may have made many fewer 25" 1080p monitors than 25" 720p monitors. for that reason, you're probably better waiting for the 1080p monitor to come up in the listings, if it's not immediately available.

19:49

here's a rule of thumb: if you find yourself turning your head to watch the car drive from one side of the screen to the other in the chase scene in the movie you're watching, your screen is too big for your living space.

20:08

forget about eye strain; you're going to give yourself spinal cord damage.

20:09

no, really.

you're going to go to the spinal cord wing of the er some day soon and you're going to have the guy that got hit by a car, the guy that had a workplace injury, the guy that got into a fight and the guy that's talking to his lawyer on his phone, because he's filing a lawsuit against ben affleck.

20:12

i told you i was going to make fun of you.

20:13

if you're going to buy a stupidly sized tv, read this first:

https://www.learnergo.com/lifestyle-ergo/2020/7/5/ultra-wide-monitors-a-pain-in-the-neck

20:15

if i walked into your house, and i saw a 75" tv in your living room, would i judge you for it?

yes.

20:23

as per usual this is bullshit, but there's a coded message in it that combines two arguments i've made previously:

1) the purpose of interest rate hikes is to profit off of locked in borrowers, who thought they were getting a deal and foolishly didn't see it coming. it has nothing to do with inflation, that's just a bullshit excuse. these suckers took the bait and are about to get angled.

2) recessions are often intentional policy decisions, not accidents by the bourgeois ruling class.

what tiff macklem is saying is something like "yeah, we're raising interest rates, and you're fucked. this is no mistake, it's by design. sorry."

i'm working class. i don't care much about the middle class, with the caveat that i don't want more competition for resources and will be frustrated if that is the outcome. but, the next time a trust fund, bourgeois politician runs on "helping the middle class", realize it's code for raising interest rates.

the liberals - and mr. trudeau, particularly - have been broadcasting this since 2014. this is not a surprise.

reference

"newest homebuyers could pay the price for Canada's financial stability", cbc news, june 10, 2022

21:02

mr. trudeau's family will benefit dramatically from the rise in rates.

so will mr. polievre's.

wake up.

21:05

when leaders on the bourgeois left and bourgeois right have convergent policy proposals, the conclusion is obvious: this benefits the banks.

21:07

macron's statements that russia should not be humiliated would be better dated to the mid 1990s, when nato was expanding directly into the russian sphere of influence and stomping all over it's allies in the former yugoslavia. humiliating is the right term to describe these events from moscow's perspective, and what we're seeing in ukraine today is in large part a consequence of those western policy decisions.

the west failed to learn the lesson of the treaty of versailles, and failed to carry out the kind of embrace of russia that it had earlier carried out in germany, when it correctly adjusted to the mistakes it made in the 1920s. a marshall plan type economic package - or even the debt forgiveness that the russians repeatedly requested - would have done a lot to prevent the current situation. nato did no such thing - it merely strategically advanced, and has continued to strategically advance, pushing the russians into an unavoidable breaking point.

the idea of avoiding humiliating putin, today, seems strange - putin is clearly winning the war. but, macron's statements are wise: even in the best case scenario for nato, russia is not going to end this war dismantled or destroyed. if nato is to learn anything from the mistakes it made leading up to this, it must be to avoid a policy of bruising russian pride.

this is not like the second world war, and there is not a reason to compare it to the second world war - or, not yet. nato should watch itself. we made this mistake once before and should not make it again. 

21:59

ukrainian politicians should be allowed to speak, to show us why we don't want their alliance, don't want their friendship and don't welcome them into the west.

they're not like us.

22:06

ukraine will never be admitted to the eu.

22:13

1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

6. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their goodwill, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

22:39

there's clearly been a secret treaty put into force between ukraine and the united states, which is the root cause of the war.

further, we end this with russian territorial integrity reasserting itself in the south and east of ukraine.

22:46

france and russia are traditional allies. 

this is very much the point.

23:01

i want to be clear about what i'm saying about interest rates and inflation, here.

1) the causes of inflation are complex, but much of the inflation we're experiencing is being driven by either conditioning/expectation or by the increasing price of oil. printing money does not create inflation. interest rate hikes do not reverse inflation.

2) i do not think we're headed for recession, in north america, at this time.

3) while printing money does not create inflation and interest rate hikes do not reverse inflation, interest rate hikes and a retraction in the money supply together may lead to sharp increases in debt in the short term and decreases in discretionary spending in the long run. 

4) so, the result of an increase in interest rates and a decrease in the money supply will be continued inflation + economic stagnation, which is called stagflation.

i think that the economic policy that should be followed is the following:

1) maintain near-zero interest rates.

2) continue printing money.

3) aggressively increase carbon transition, to reduce reliance on the cost of oil.

the only thing that's going to stop this inflation is to end the reliance on oil. trying to reverse inflation with monetary policy will only make things worse (because it's not the cause, so it's not the solution).

i do not think the central bankers are confused about this - i do not think they are hiking interest rates to stop inflation. rather, i think the central bankers are hiking interest rates so that investors do not lose income relative to inflation, and that they basically don't give a fuck if it harms everybody else. this is the reality of living in a society where investors legislate their interests above the law, which is a reality that has been true here for decades and decades.

if you pay interest rates, you're going to get nailed. this is how the system is designed: they extract rent from you and live off your labour. the only way out is to not take out loans, but you'll get minimal sympathy from me; you slept with the devil, and you're about to get fucked. that's what you get for buying into the system.

for those of us in the working class that don't pay interest rates, the best thing you can do as an individual is to reduce your reliance on oil. this isn't short term, and you've been warned about this for many years. the fake left, by calling for subsidies, is not helping; there needs to be a serious push on the ground, here, to change how people consume. this is an opportunity. let's use it.

23:23

so, what exactly happens if the turks launch a serious offensive against the syrian kurds?

in past years, the americans would just sell out the kurds, yet again. we back the kurds when we want something from them and ignore them when we don't. but, there's an interesting twist in this: the kurds are apparently on the brink of aligning with the russians, who are of course the major power in syria.

so, what happens if the kurds accept an agreement with the russians? two things:

1) the russians get an answer to  their concerns about syrian territorial integrity, which has been their major aim in syria. or, at least, they think they do.

2) the kurds get potential help in a kurdish counterattack into turkey, where there is a substantial population of kurdish separatists.

the kurds are competent fighters. if the system of alliances blows up like this, they could quickly overwhelm the turks in a major offensive. worse for the turks, the americans might step back and let it happen, as they would be happy to see erdogan disappear.

there is another possibility, which is that the americans could secretly back the kurds in an aim to dismantle the eastern part of turkey and set up a buffer state. but, i'm not convinced that the state department is cognizant of the threat of allowing the kurds into the russian alliance. losing the kurds would create a land bridge from iran to syria; kurdish advances could end with russian bases in the pontus region, which is historically more iranian than greek.

or, the kurds could show an uncharacteristic level of geopolitical strategy and actually accept both russian and american aid in finally carving out a sovereign space. they have an opportunity here to take advantage of the situation.

but, the naive information in the msm seems to suggest that turkey is about to open a second front by attacking the kurds, who are about to align with the russians and iranians. this is a major escalation - and a major mistake for the turks, who may find nato disinterested in helping them, as they focus on opening a third front in finland.

23:55

saturday, june 11, 2022

"exxon made more money than god this year" - joe biden, june 10, 2022

i heard it was easier for a camel to pass through the width of a pipeline than it is for an oil executive to enter the kingdom of heaven.

what do the president's words mean? he's like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. that's just incoherent.

my best guess is that this is some kind of odd commentary on the muslim delusion that god gave them oil because they're the chosen ones. chosen to do what, exactly? choke to death on their own filth? the minimally inhabitable regions of this forsaken peninsula will roast in the heat within the next several decades, before they are reclaimed by the ocean in the next century. i hope they thank allah for their good fortune, as their burned corpses are being subsumed beneath the waves. learn to swim, indeed - i'll see you in israel bay.

but, who lets him speak? how do these words exit the mouth of the president?

i keep comparing him to dubya, and it's not frivolous. yikes.

i'll admit i'd like to compare the vatican's profits to exxon's last year, just for fun. but, what concept of god biden is referring to, i don't know.

0:47

i just meant to sit down for a minute, really.

something that happened on the way back from the big bike ride out past belle river is that the thread connecting the left shoulder strap on my knapsack became disconnected enough to loosen the strap. in fact, i think that might have happened quit some time ago, in truth. it remains hanging by a very sturdy thread, but i had to tie it into a knot to get home - and think i might have done that at some time in the distant past. i'm not comfortable carrying on this way and need some solution.

buying new school bags every couple of years is something that inevitably happens, so the bag is constantly reincarnated. there is in truth only one bag, of which all other bags are imperfect copies. this particular bag was purchased in mid 2016, so it's actually lived a little longer than normal, although i should also point out that it's had much lighter use. past incarnations of the infinite bag actually went to school with me on a daily basis, whereas this bag incarnate has only had to go out for groceries. still. six years is quite some time.

the thing is that i rather like this particular incarnation of the bag, and that there's really nothing else wrong with it. bags will often end up with holes on the bottom, for example; that has not occurred with this bag. it would seem to me to be quite a shame to lose the bag over something this trivial.

i've been looking to purchase a sewing machine, regardless, so let me see if i can buy that, instead. if i can get a cheap sewing machine, this should be a pretty quick job, and i should be able to extend the lifespan of the bag that much further.

2:08

so, i got a mini sewing machine for $40, including shipping, that comes with a foot pedal, a 6v adapter (the cheaper ones were all battery operated) and some thread and needles and stuff. i think that's the lowest price i could find one for.

besides needing to sew this school bag back together, it's going to need to sew together a fair number of pairs of jeans that have rips in them and i do hope it's enough for that. i was able to find a video of somebody sewing jeans with this particular model, so i hope that's enough evidence. i'm not talking about hemming, i'm talking about closing up rips in the knee and other places (or maybe sewing in patches on the inside). i actually really don't like wearing jeans with holes, i find it exceedingly embarrassing because it's become this ridiculous trend and people think you're trying to be fashionable, nowadays, rather than that you're legitimately poor. it's the height of stupid poseur chic bullshit - it's truly bourgeois, in the worst possible sense. so, while it might be true that if you see me with ripped jeans then it's actually because i'm poor, nobody is going to think that, and it sort of enrages me. the idea that people would think i'm pretending to be poor in order to be fashionable is just something that makes my blood boil, so i will not be seen in torn jeans. nor will i be the token poor bitch to feed the industry's greed. fuck off.

as far as i can tell, this should work like a full size sewing machine, with the caveat that it will have problems with thicker materials. but, i might be able to upgrade the needle, if that becomes the case.

i rarely buy new clothes (and, when i do, i buy them second hand because i cannot handle buying clothes made by children, which is essentially all clothes for sale everywhere. at least if you buy the clothes second hand you're buffering the slavery. but, this is...i need clothes, especially in cold canada, and i can't make them myself. i can only mitigate by minimizing participation as much as possible. but, i'm keenly aware, and the whole thing makes me nauseous.), so i actually have a pile of about 20 pairs of pants that need sewing; i've been putting this off for quite a while. so, it should pay for itself fairly fast, presuming it actually works.

i was hoping to cut it down to closer to $20 so i could get a usb pen, too. as it is, that was as cheap as i could find, so i should wait until july (or at least late june) so that i'm 100% sure i have enough for groceries.

4:14

like, this is disgusting.

somebody punch him in his stupid rich face.

4:17

i'm going to start referring to the middle class strictly as a mythical concept. i've been dancing around this idea, and have recently stated that increasing interest rates is what the middle class deserves for buying into the system - working hard as slaves for the banks and playing by the crooked rules - rather than fighting it. they may be proletariat, but they're class traitors. let them bleed as the traitors they are - and let it be a lesson for the rest of the proletariat: this is what happens when you volunteer to be house nigger.

only a movement in the proletariat to abolish the system of finance and private property and replace it with one of common ownership and an economy driven by need, rather than want, can eliminate the greed and exploitation. if you sign up for capitalism and get bludgeoned by it, you've made your own eternal bed - and i can only suggest you lie down to sleep in it. forever.

but, this idea of the middle class being a myth has been reverberating lately, and it's about time we started calling it what it is, rather than dancing around it. when this bourgeois trust fund elitist showed up and started talking about the middle class in this calvinist, randian language, it should have been a red flag - this man was neither of the middle class, nor a champion of it. when your self-designated leader of the middle class is wearing designer shoes and drinking $30 bottles of water, it should generate some moment of pause. this was followed by large amounts of ridicule from across the spectrum, as the banker's party struggled to define what this term even means. and, now, the predictable outcome of electing a collection of trust fund kids to run the government - interest rates that might spike over 10% in the upcoming months. you might be better off getting a mortgage from money mart, soon.

and, what is the material reality of this so-called middle class? it is that it's purpose is to pay rent to the investor class, through interest rates and through increasingly poverty-like living conditions. our middle class is apparently having difficulty buying food, as the mortgage rates are so high. i don't see what's very middle about that - that's the material condition of being in the proletariat.

so, this is a myth - it's a calvinist myth, it's a randian myth, it's a liberal myth and, in some ways, it's also a myth embraced by fake-left progressives. let us drop the bullshit; let us be explicit. if you work to pay economic rent, you are proletariat - and a traitor if you don't have the class consciousness to realize it.

14:41

"i know you're hungry, sweetie, but there's only 13 months worth of payments left on the 75" tv. you can wait until next year, right?"

16:34

"you sold our daughter? what?"

well, it was either her or the 75" tv.

16:47

this is entirely backwards in the existing economy.

the idea is that rate hikes should lead people to have less money to spend on buying houses, but that's rooted in the incorrect assumption that people have money to spend on buying houses, and that people have the choice to buy houses or not buy houses.

our housing problem is driven by insufficient supply and too much immigration, not by excess money production. increasing rate hikes will not address any of the causes of the current housing inflation, and will consequently not provide any sort of solution to them. demand for housing will remain high because the alternative is homelessness. and, everybody was in debt anyways, so what difference does more debt make?

rather, what i'd expect is that the increased expenses associated with rate increases will just lead to more inflation - and that the investor class will happily profit off of it.

the bank has no power in this matter and will only make things work by interfering with the economy. to decrease inflation in housing, we need rapid increases in housing supply, not the further implementation of ponzi schemes by investors.

reference:

"housing prices in canada could fall 15 per cent by dec. 2023 after bank of canada rate hikes: report", ctv news, june 11, 2022

22:03

canada is the second biggest country in the world, after russia, and certainly looks like a behemoth on a map. we have ridiculous amounts of space, in theory.

but large amounts of the country are uninhabitable due to the climate or due to the fact that they're solid rock or shifting marshland. and, we have a lot of farms in canada, too - and should.

the actual inhabited and inhabitable portion of canada is not much bigger than the boswash corridor, and could fit comfortably in the space between maine and miami on the us eastern seaboard. when you cram people into small areas at high rates, this is what happens - people fight over housing.

this isn't a problem created by monetary policy and it's not a problem that will be solved by monetary policy. this is a problem mostly created by governments, and that mostly requires a political solution.

22:13

as a member of the working class, i'm more concerned about the cost of rent than the value of bourgeois housing investments. what effect will rate hikes have on the cost of rent?

well, i guess it depends on who owns the property you're renting.

if the owner of the property you're renting is not paying interest rates, as i suspect is true in my case ( i don't know) then it shouldn't have any meaningful effect at all. however, if the owner of the property you're renting is paying interest rates, then guess who pays the interest? that's right - the renter.

rent controls in ontario are not strong enough to prevent rentiers from boosting rents to offset the rate hikes, so i would call on the ford government - which has actually made some surprising decisions on this file - to quickly write legislation that prevents rentiers from passing on the costs of rate hikes to renters. their justification should be that it would undo the claimed intent of the central bank, which is to reduce property values, and not to increase rents.

23:18

worse, what would the consequence be of a central banking policy that leads to dramatically higher rental costs, so high that it might even make buying cheaper, in large parts of the country?

the answer is an increased demand to buy houses, to get out of paying exorbitant rent costs - or possibly even reduce total expenditures. that's what they claim they're trying to stop.

as we don't have the supply to meet demand, the result is that the housing market will face pressure to increase prices faster than inflation in rent, caused by the rate hikes. otherwise, renters will buy houses, instead, to save money, which is incoherent and can't happen.

it's very important that the bank does not overstep it's mandate, which is what it's doing here. it's trying to use monetary policy to solve a problem that was not caused by monetary policy, which is not it's mandate. rather than cave to political pressure by demagogues like pierre polievre, the bank needs to step back and say "this is not our mandate, and this is not our role".

23:24

listen - carbon taxation wasn't my ideal approach. i've called in this space to write laws that restrict emissions and put corporate executives in jail if they don't meet the targets. the bourgeois political class has chosen this path instead, and it's easy enough to understand why.

so, this wasn't really how i wanted to do this either, but it's how we're doing it, and it needs to take precedence.

nobody is really starving to death, here - or isn't that wasn't, previously. our access to food banks is pretty resilient. there's ways to eat here, if you're hungry - and i know this, from experience.

the bottom line is that a little bit of discomfort today is no match for the destruction that's coming if we don't find ways to change how we live.

again: there's an opportunity here, in the form of a collective response to these oil prices, and the inflation it's producing. it's going to require a little sacrifice, and a little discomfort, but the end gains of carbon transition are worth the short term discomfort.

fake left politicians calling for subsidies in the face of high oil prices have lost the plot and should be condemned. i am not good with people - i type on the internet, that's my strength. and, there's little more that i can do as an individual that i haven't already done. but, we should be working collectively to change distribution mechanisms and reduce dependency on oil. we can do this, and we'll be better off if we do.

23:43

if you organize and build it, i'll find you and support you.

but, i cannot suffer through the effects of social interaction at that level. my overwhelming introversion and dominant dislike for humans is too overpowering and too debilitating to allow for it.

23:50

sunday, june 12, 2022

here's an example of how to do this. 

i don't eat meat, so the increase in the price of meat has not affected me. but, if the price of meat imported from however many thousands of miles has come up, ask yourself a question: can you find local meat suppliers, instead?

while you might have to deal with some price gouging, and that's just a fact, local meat suppliers won't have to deal with increased transportation costs. further, by going to the local meat supplier, you're not paying markups in grocery stores. you should, in theory, find substantive cost savings by shopping around in this manner.

this might not necessarily be true, as the input costs are variable and complex. but, it should be a general truth.

while meat consumption is unsustainable and bad for your health, and you might consider replacing your consumption of beef with pork and chicken for that reason anyways, you can probably at least save a little money by not paying transportation costs, if you make the effort. and, that's the kind of thing that environmentalists want you to do more often.

again: this wasn't ideal, but you should increasingly find that items that use less carbon to produce also cost less to buy. look for them - even if you have to look outside the grocery store to do it.

0:04

i think i actually speak for a pretty large number of people when i say i have exactly no interest in home ownership and exactly zero aspirations to be a homeowner. that just sounds like a lot of stress and responsibility i don't want. but, if somebody dropped a lot of money on my lap tomorrow, i would certainly consider trying to find a way out of the rental market - not because i care about home ownership, but because i'd want to weigh options around avoiding paying out rent.

i don't see any functional difference between paying interest on a mortgage payment and paying rent on an apartment; my self-interest would just to be to minimize total costs relative to actual resources, one way or the other.

what i'm getting at is that ensuring the existence of sufficient rental supply at affordable rates is the best thing that government can do to reduce demand for buying houses. i'd rather rent an affordable apartment in a high-rise downtown, as it's more compatible with my lifestyle. but, it's not available. about the last thing i'd want is a house in the suburbs; the only reason i'd want to buy a house is to avoid paying overpriced rent. fuck, if i had enough money, i might even buy a house in the suburbs and rent it out to pay for the apartment downtown.

so, everybody's focusing on the bank, when what the bank does isn't really very substantive - i want rent control legislated at queen's park, and i want massive investments in giant, affordable apartment buildings, downtown, so i'm not forced to consider buying as an otherwise less preferable option, in order to evade high rent costs.

0:30

the price differential between buying and renting should be large enough that renters aren't looking to buy to save money. that doesn't make sense - that's a market failure that requires government intervention to resolve.

0:46

mortgage payments on comparable properties should never be less than rent payments - that's a market that is no longer pricing things properly. interest rate hikes will make that problem worse, not better. the right answer is rent control.

0:48

houses should be expensive. i don't really have a disagreement, there - the market is pricing that item properly, given the lack of availability and the large amount of demand.

but, rent should be affordable, and it isn't. that's where the market failure is happening, and what the focus of policy should be on.

to have the bank come in and try and push a policy that reduces the cost of expensive houses neither makes any sense nor is desirable for anybody, however disingenuous.

2:19

people wanting expensive houses to be less expensive really aren't being reasonable, and that reality ought to be explained to them.

but, people wanting affordable rent are asking for something that ought to be a human right and that is actually a social problem that the state should be focusing on addressing.

2:23

so, i bought the usb pen, anyways.

i went over this a few weeks ago. i'd really like to get a dedicated handheld tablet, and maybe i will one day, but the prices don't make sense to me, given the limited functionality and the awkwardly too-large size. something i decided a few weeks ago was that the tablets were too big, and for that reason didn't make sense as a pocket device, which is what i actually want.

i didn't get the model in this video, i got a slightly different model that's much smaller. i could not tell the difference between the different lines by xp-pen, besides trivial appearance issues, with two exceptions:

1) some of the models do not have charging ports and are rather necessarily physically connected to the computer, which seems like an unnecessary limitation, even if i'll usually keep it plugged in.

2) the size of the devices is variable, and the price depends on the size.

the one i bought was $35 and is only 4"x3", but i'm only using it to draw mathematical symbols. i'll admit that i may experiment a little with drawing, specifically for cover art, but i don't draw. at all. it's for math...

i've been waiting for this for years, so i'm sort of excited about it. i'm posting this video because it demonstrates what i'll actually do with it:

10:00

this is an inexpensive peripheral, but it's also exactly what i actually want - and have wanted for years.

10:03

listening to them closely, i'm starting to pull out a kind of resentment against russia for stamping out isis amongst certain soft left commentators, and that seems to be underlying a lot of their uncharacteristic views in the discussion about ukraine. it seems to be another example of the longstanding appeasement towards islam demonstrated mostly by men on the soft left.

it will be helpful for this older generation of leftist men - those born before 1950 - to pass on. the long needed correction and refocus on the left will likely require them to disappear, first.

16:28

there's an actual war to wipe out actual nazis going on right now, and what these people are upset about is an action several years ago to root out violently oppressive religious extremists by the actor wiping out the nazis. it's beyond reactionary, it's baffling.

21:04

the russians are not some benevolent force out to save the world; they're acting in their self-interest. fine. but, we need to give our head a shake and reexamine our priorities in terms of what reasonable temporary allies are. and, we have to clue in to the fact that the russians are on the right side of history, here - in the end, the russians will be remembered as the good guys in this extended conflict by anybody with any critical thinking skills and anybody with any brains.

21:07

they've already obliterated the saudi and american funded arab supremacist, fundamentalist islamicist groups in syria, primarily. now, they're burning nazis alive in eastern ukraine. and, round three would appear to be stepping in to save rojava from a turkish genocide. how many more examples do you need?

21:08

i've pointed this out before. why are these old men upset that isis lost?

because it's far closer to the society they want than they're willing to let on. it goes back to what i've been saying about how the contemporary so-called left are in truth a bunch of reactionary conservatives. it's true that there's some overlap between leftist theory and traditional conservative culture, in the sense that traditional societies often have communistic traits in terms of things like food distribution and land ownership. but, in embracing them, you're of course jettisoning any concept of historical materialism, and you're essentially giving up on communism in the process in preference for a return to traditionalism, instead. these traditional societies are brutal and despotic, and the irony is that these leftist advocates of a return to traditionalism would be the first to go in them, but they at least know how to share. it's some combination of wanting to start over again and just wanting to give up altogether, but it seems to be fairly common amongst older men, who seem to think they've come to the conclusion that it's the only way out, and the victims of such a scheme can be sacrificed as collateral (even if those victims will always be themselves).

it's the reason foucault supported the iranian revolution, and chomsky wouldn't criticize the khmer rouge. it's longstanding.

but, it needs to stop.

isis were bad guys and it's good that they're gone. the nazis in ukraine are bad guys and it will be good when they're gone, too. we don't get to communism via backwardsness, we have to let history develop.

21:32

did foucault make it to iran before he died?

what would they have tried him for first, do you think - blasphemy or homosexuality?

21:38

the nato commanders are talking about the strategic victory of controlling the baltic by allowing finland into nato.

ok.

but, russian interests in the baltic are rather limited, are they not? they can always sail out of murmansk and around the coast.

rather, the strategic value of nato control over the baltic sea is that they can then place offensive nuclear weapons there, which is something that is not going to be popular in sweden.

22:26

if i was the russians, i'd be more interested in controlling the top of scandinavia than the bottom of it - especially with the warming climate. the better way into the north sea is via lappland.

22:35

monday, june 13, 2022

i'm a few days away from getting a handle on the ranting issue, really.

i've been meaning to finish installing components in the new i5 for a couple of days, now, and finally got to doing it this saturday night / sunday morning, but then got distracted again. i need to rewind mildly.

i got the other side of the space cleaned up and the monitor put in place on thursday night and spent some time friday morning eating and watching the monitor before chiming in on friday afternoon about the monitor actually being sufficient. i just meant to sit down with a coffee for a minute to read some news, but i ended up ranting all night, instead. i bought a sewing machine at the end of the night, but i didn't get anything substantive done before falling asleep.

i got started on ranting again on saturday night, but i caught myself and stopped. what did i get installed into this new machine before i stopped to eat and, again, sleep?

it's actually only two items, the ssd drive and ps/2 connector. i'm going to want to potentially buy a little more ram; i think that's the last remaining thing to put in the device. this device is just intended for video editing and for word processing; i have purchased a cheap, expired chromebook that i will need to put linux on, next, for the internet front-end to it (as i no longer allow my pcs on the internet).

installing the ssd initially presented me with some confusion, as some models of the machine come with a secondary hard drive compartment under the first and this one does not. so, where am i supposed to put the thing, then? i considered purchasing the compartment, but it doesn't seem to be available. then, after looking at the board, i realized it doesn't have a third power out and that it wasn't clear how to install a third drive. so, i asked the question "how have other people solved this?" and found the following video:

he certainly has a good idea, here. but, it's not what i ended up doing.

so, i have the following items:

1) two sata power outs on a board connected to a psu that runs directly through the board

2) three sata devices: an ssd, a hdd and a dvd rw

3) a sata power cord y-splitter

4) only two physical drive bays

...and i'm trying to get all three devices installed. how do i do it?

first, i decided to use the sata splitter from the dvd rather than the hard drive so that one power out goes to the hdd and the other power out goes to both the dvd rw and the ssd via the y-splitter. this is not what's done in the video, which connects both the hdd and the ssd to the same power connector. the reason i did that is that i realized that the power was going through the board rather than directly from the supply and i was worried about load balancing for that reason. this is probably a little bit paranoid, but i don't want to take chances that aren't necessary. i've never had a pc like this that doesn't connect directly to the psu, so i don't want to take chances with something i don't have experience with. if the power was coming directly from the psu, it wouldn't matter how you run the splitters, but sending the power through the board like this introduces extra fault points so i want the two lines to balance a little more equally. worse, because power connectors are sparse on this board, and it doesn't seem to operate without going through the board (maybe it might, i don't know), making sure they're not overloaded is that much more important; if one of the two power outs goes, the board largely becomes useless. that may very well be how it dies, in the end. so, putting both hard drives on the same power connector struck me as a bad idea, when i could balance the loads better by splitting the ssd (which should pull less power than the hdd) on the line with the dvd (which should see minimal use), instead. in the end, whether this makes a difference or not depends on if it's wired in series or parallel, which i don't know. even if it's wired in parallel, it could prevent too much power from coming through any specific potential fault point.

on reading through the manual, i also realized that there are instructions to install an msata in the slot under the dvd, which could also be used as a card reader bay. so, if i'm splitting the power to the ssd with the dvd, and the more correct place to install a small secondary drive is under the dvd, why not try to attach it to under the dvd instead? are there screw holes to be utilized?

there are actually screw holes to be utilized, but the geometry of the dvd bay made it impossible to actually screw them in, so i resorted to trying what was done in the video and came to the frustrating conclusion that doing so would result in being unable to plug the sata connector into the sata drive because the orthogonal connector is on the wrong side of the bay. if the drive were big enough, it might protrude out and not matter, but the smaller drive i have does not extend far enough out to allow me to plug the sata connector in if i screw it in as he does in the video. what i'd have to do is flip the drive over, but then i wouldn't be able to screw it in (or i'd have to screw it into place in the hdd bay, meaning both drives would be in the same bay). you want to watch for that.

i did not want both drives in the same bay, and i had to flip the drive around in order to connect it, so i was left with the option to find some way to connect it to the bottom of one drive bay or the other and i went with the dvd bay to salvage the idea in the manual:

it's connected strictly with red electrical tape, to the bottom of the dvd bay. you can see the splitter there, too.

is that dangerous? what i mean is - what happens if the tape gives? first, i should point out that this is a sealed pc case and it will probably hold just fine for a very long time. dust and temperature changes should be minimal to nonexistant, meaning the major stress point will probably be the heat from the ssd, itself. that is, if the ssd gets too hot, the glue keeping it together might melt. but, i actually think that won't happen because electrical tape should hold in place up to close to 100 degrees celsius and the ssd should probably not get much hotter than 70 degrees.

if the device does fall off the bottom, the right answer is probably to just leave it there. the distance down to the bottom of the chassis is only a couple of centimetres and it will be cushioned by the cords; it won't fall off because it really has nowhere to fall to. but, if i take it apart at some point in the future and notice it's no longer connected, i'll just tape it to the bottom of the chassis, instead. the only advantage of doing it like this rather than like that is that the cords are organized a little cleaner, that way.

but, i really think it will be fine.

the second item to add in was the ps/2 connector, which required me to punch out the metal plate and which connects directly to the board.

so, that gives me my ps/2 ports, which means i don't have to worry about wasting usb ports, which i'm always worried about getting intercepted, too. 

so, i then took some pictures early on sunday morning and went to start writing up this post when i realized that the data on the sd card had somehow become badly corrupted and i couldn't read the pictures i just took. all that came up was a string of weird, garbled ascii characters nobody uses. what next?

well, i've seen this before, and you have to run a scandisk on the card. if i can do that on a chromebook (in guest mode....), i don't know how. that functionality does not exist on any of my windows xp custom installs, none of which have card readers. i haven't tried the usb card reader in any of them, yet. so, i had to turn the new lenovo on to run a scandisk on the sd card before i could retake the pictures, then disassemble it again to actually retake the pictures. fuck.

it was certainly annoying, but it did work and i was ready to go by sunrise, but i had to stop to eat first. the scandisk pulled out four stranded videos - three for adventures i haven't posted yet and one video for the trip to toronto to have my orchiectomy that i thought i had lost:

i'm just biking down college, there. the original video was quite a bit longer, but that's all that survived. i haven't had access to a usable scandisk on a machine that can read (large) sd cards since early 2020 (the production machine can read small sd cards), so i haven't been able to recover fragments for years. that little fragment has been sitting there since last summer, eaten over by multiple rewrites. i'm lucky that i got anything at all from it. i shouldn't lose stuff like this, moving forwards, now that that problem has been fixed. it just indicates the nature of the technology issues i've been dealing with, as i try to piece together multiple broken computers - and i'm almost there, now. really. i can't just go buy a new computer when one breaks...

i think that little usb stick i got should prove a lifesaver if the new typing pc somehow dies, but i bought it to last and i think it will. but, i'm adapating. it will be much harder to take me down, now.

i also wanted to make sure i actually had everything i was going to put in it before i closed it back up, so i spent some time sorting through recent purchases in my bank accounts in order to make sure i didn't miss anything. it's really just the extra ram, i think. well, that and the usb pen i want for math input that i've been talking about for years.

so, i then started looking at pen inputs and did purchase the graphics tablet that i previously discussed:

i'm just not confident that i can get a really usable stylus pen & tablet combination for less than $300, and the primary software i'm going to want to connect it to is microsoft word, anyways. so, what's the point of getting a standalone tablet, if i'm just ultimately running the pen as an input into word? likewise, i'd sort of like something like a remarkable, but i'd like it to be geared towards scientists rather than business-people. like, i don't need a $500 pocket calendar, but an immersive, interactive formula-taking device that interfaces with real software would be very interesting. i'd imagine i'd actually need parallel processing for that. and, i'm just geeking out - i'm not actually a scientist and i'm not actually going to use it.

the above peripheral is what i need to get formulas input and what i've wanted for a very long time. 

i didn't buy that until pushing close to noon. i stopped to eat, got some rest and was up again early in the evening, when i ate some more, did the dishes, made some coffee and sat down to finish typing this later in the evening.

now that i'm convinced the new machine is put together for a while, i've got it closed back up. the next step is to reassemble my bedroom, clean in the space and get something to eat. 

i'm a little late on my monthly cleaning because the idea was to get everything in order first and then clean. so, that's the task for the rest of the night: put everything back together and finish the monthly cleaning, including cleaning the bathroom. i will then need to shower, and am very slightly overdue. i will then need to take a look at disassembling and installing linux to the second chromebook.

i'm making progress, but it's a little slower than i'd like. i keep clarifying that the ranting will need to be moved back to the bedroom, which will increase my productivity in the studio. but, i have a feeling that we're on the brink of a major outburst in turkey - and, turkey, specifically. i don't know if the russians are capable of creating a joint greco-armenian-kurdish force to put an end to the turkish state, but i really get the feeling that it's on the brink - that history is about to assert itself. so, i keep getting distracted by this or that in the news, but it's turkey that's what's on my mind, and it's turkey that keeps pulling me back to google.

the new typing device is the new chromebook. last step. really.

and, how much grocery store money is left? there's a new post coming. i can't tell you, exactly. it's a little more than half done.

as far as computer things are concerned, i'm just about maxxed out, and my grandmother should know that i've certainly used that $5000 up, in whatever abstraction, on a lot of things - three chromebooks, two brand new pcs, parts for two old pcs, parts for three old laptops, an ip phone & a smart phone and myriad cables and cords and drives and other things. in fact, i still might not be at $5000, believe it or not. but, i've tried to spend as much of it as i could in as responsible of a way as i can...

her concept of computer costs was tied into the fact that she's a mac user and everybody she knows is a mac user. she's also in her 80s. so, computers are strange and expensive things to her. i've no doubt made far better use of the money she gave me than she thought i would, even if she dramatically overestimated the cost of replacing what i had, at the time.

the remaining amount to spend is likely to be spent on music gear, but there may be somewhat of a lag regarding it, as i actually focus on using the gear i already have and as i try to save a little going into the fall, which i have somewhat of a bad feeling about.

2:06

i could have wasted that $5000 on an overpriced mac, but i think that would have been irresponsible. if your non-techy investment banker grandmother gives you $5000 thinking it's enough for one computer, the responsible options are to either:

1) spend half of it on a more reasonably priced machine and send the rest back or

2) buy several more reasonable machines, instead.

there was no chance she'd take the money back, so slowly buying many things was the right choice. buying something i don't need or want just to spend it would have been disrespectful, even if it's what she really expected.

2:41

actually, i'm rethinking this.

i don't want the ssd sitting on a lot of cords and heating up.

i'm going to take it back apart and tape it to the bottom, so it's not a fire hazard. that's why there's metal bays in the machine, right?

3:17

yeah.

so, the sd/msata slot would be on top of the sound panel. of course, my ssd is too small to try to connect to under the hdd and too big to fit in the msata slot, but at least the latter is manageable:

on the second picture, you can see it's protruding a little further than would be liked, but it's not so far to hit the board.

now, it's sitting on sturdy plastic. that's more stable, and i don't have to worry about a hot ssd drive (however unlikely - these devices don't get so hot) falling on a pile of power cords.

3:51

there's my new typing environment, almost ready to go:

there's the second chromebook in the corner, which i'm putting linux on this week. the record player is not connected to anything; i'm just using it to level the chromebook. i don't want to sell the record player, but i'm never going to use it. i bet a lot of people nowadays have these trophy stereo systems in their living rooms with technology that has no function anymore. i have a cassette deck, too. the device in the front is a usb hub. i've got my ps/2 keyboard, and am waiting for the ps/2 mouse. the power bar is on the table because i was concerned about moisture but those concerns are no longer real since i put the tarp down so i'll probably put it back on the floor. the lenovo is just placed with the back facing me so i have full access to all of the usb ports, and there will be some external drives  for files sitting there on top of it. my old 5-disc changer that i got for christmas in i think 1998 is under the lenovo, and will actually get some use when i do specific reviews - which is one of the things i'll be doing while typing.

there's still a few parts required. the graphics tablet will be connected to the lenovo, and i will need another usb to rj45 for that dell. but, it's almost ready to go. 

i'm going to reinstall windows 7 to the ssd to test it and because i need a live install to build the windows 11 install media.

5:26

how many operating systems do i have running down here?

- two chrome oses, one 93x and the other much older

- probably arch linux on the other chromebook

- windows 98 on p3b-f

- windows xp on the evo n800c

- windows xp on the p5b

- windows vista on the cq60

- windows 7 on the p9dws

- windows 11 on the lenovo

- i have an unused smartphone with an old version of android on it that i want to eventually customize but don't want to use at all until i do

- the cisco phone is running it's own os

and, like i say, i think i'm done for quite a while - until something badly breaks.

5:56

i'm going to throw a caveat out there regarding what i'm going to do with this dell 3120 chromebook, which has recently expired.

if you're going to invest the time and energy (and money, i suppose) into converting an expired chromebook into a linux laptop, you should do research into the specs, first. i learned that doing pre-research. some of the devices just expiring now will have 1-2 gb of ram, and processor speeds as low as 1.2 ghz.

this particular dell laptop was a bargain, and these 3120s have been known as bargains by savvy users for quite a few years, now. this device is a 2.5 ghz dual core processor with 4 gb of ram, which is perhaps nothing fancy, but is nothing to sneeze at, either. my production computer has a dual core processor at 3.6 ghz with 4 gb of ram, for comparison - and my production machine is 32-bit. you can still do a lot with a dual core processor and 4 gb of ram, just so long as you pick the right os, which in this case is definitely linux.

the only drawback to these things is that they expire. but, for $100, this will be a steal of a linux laptop. it's hard to compare it to a pinebook because the processors don't line up well, but comparable hps and acers with windows or linux, brand new, are still running over $300, and don't have comparable sound systems. it wasn't what google intended, clearly, but the expiration discount is potentially something for nerds to look forwards to.

6:21

i want to clarify a point.

i have demonstrated in this space through multiple methods that i do have indigenous ancestry via a linkage in the gaspe peninsula, but i would not identify as metis in any substantive manner. i don't have a metis card; i'm a rabidly atheist, staunch advocate of the enlightenment and i think indigenous religion is bullshit.

but, i want to clarify that this is not distant and that there are physically obvious indigenous traits in my family. the elizabeth huard in question died in 1842. her second husband was a charles parent that shows up in the gaspe peninsula around the year 1800 from unclear origins. there is a poorly sourced legend that he came from quebec city, and that is not consistent with itself; my ancestry.com report, and my own suspicion on the matter, suggests that he was probably english, and might have been the son of a loyalist. so, we're not talking about the days of distant pioneers here - these people were born after the american revolution and their children were alive during confederation.

like i say: i'm not trying to play this up for any sort of benefit or gain. if you read this site, it should be obvious that i have a stronger cultural affinity with northern europe, which is where most of my ancestry is from. but, the facts are what they are - i have traceable indigenous ancestry that is pretty visibly obvious. i found the genealogical records that prove it, and i've demonstrated strong affinity with clovis reports, as well. it's just what is.

7:42

clearly, somebody needs to go over there and glitter bomb the stupid homophobic dictators of uae and malaysia.

this is childish and the right reaction is to relentlessly make fun of them for being stupid, until they grow up and change.

*smooch*.

reference:

"united arab emirates bans pixar's 'lightyear' from showing", cp24, june 13, 2022

15:18

i'm in favour of mocking people, clearly. it's not just empty humour, it's an effective informal means of social control.

15:26

i'm also in support of glitter-bombing homophobic imams at every possible opportunity.

go forth...

15:30

i don't know why the media is pretending that dhimmi joe hasn't been taking orders from mbs the whole time.

biden's entire foreign policy seems to have been written in riyadh and sent to washington to get rubber stamped. america is the saudi crime family's lap dog - they send it piles of money, and in return america does whatever it's told to do. that's been the case for decades.

the counter-example was obama, who pushed back against them. looked at from a distance, obama's foreign policy in the middle east really was legitimately dfferent - not in an ideal sense, but it certainly made an attempt to shift directions.

something should be said about the extent of biden's personal control over the situation, which does not appear to be great. but, who do you think was the prime beneficiary of the defocus on central asia and the ramping up of nato special operations in ukraine, which led to russia's self defense operation? the answer is the saudis, even more so than the chinese. nobody in beijing is directing the white house, that's for sure.

as with so many other things, we need to stop using oil in order to solve this problem.

but, what the media is doing is smoke and mirrors to distract from the reality that joe biden is in fact in large part responsible for creating, shaping and propping up the existing network of american-backed dictatorships in the middle east. this idea that he's grudgingly dragging himself to riyadh is a farce, and it even plays into saudi delusions of imperial grandeur more than it saves whatever reality-free image he's apparently trying to salvage.

15:55

all of the "negotiations" between the taliban and the united states took place in the persian gulf.

there are currently four countries with embassies in taliban-occupied afghanistan: russia (which never closed it's embassy, for strategic reasons), neighbouring turkmenistan (which cannot avoid maintaining a diplomatic presence), saudia arabia and the uae.

the essentially singular complicity of the gulf dictatorships in propping up the illegitimate terrorist occupation of afghanistan isn't some wild coincidence, it's the reason the shift in power happened in the first place.

16:10

while the media has not been focusing on it, and i think that's of benefit to the fighters on the ground, there is still a resistance movement ongoing in the valleys of afghanistan to overthrow the illegitimate terrorist occupation of the country, which is being funded and directed by a joint saudi-american imperialistic policy of foreign colonization, and reassert a legitimate, democratic government that reflects the relatively liberal iranian value systems held by the people of the country, in rejection of and opposition to the arcane religious rules that were written by and are being enforced by distantly ruling imperialist arabs.

what happened to afghanistan, which was a liberal and modern country before saudi money and arab terrorists were air-dropped in to brainwash the children and fund the saudi and american military objectives, is one of the great tragedies of history. the freedom fighters in the valleys that are resisting foreign-imposed taliban rule need your support to reassert the will of the people, and take back control of their country.

confused by these words?

you've been brainwashed by saudi propaganda, and led to believe things that aren't true.

16:24

i fully support nupur sharma's right to state historical facts in whatever tone she would like, and would suggest that anybody upset about it can and should and rightly ought to fuck off. that said, her (former) employer (the bjp) also has a right to sever relations with somebody if they feel their comments will harm their positions in the next election. the only fine line here is whether her employer has the right to fire her or not; her right to free expression on the matter cannot be questioned.

further, as far as i can tell, the statements were simple historical fact: the mythical character of mohammad (may spit be derisively showered upon him), who almost certainly never actually existed, was a vicious, brutal pedophile, in addition to a war criminal. gandhi was also a pedophile. these are merely statements of fact. and, if you don't like the tone, i will say it again in the same tone ten times to your face, for every time you complain, until you fuck off.

but, i'm posting this because i'm a little concerned about the fact that i can't find the exact text. i understand that the party is doing damage control, but why is the text not available anywhere? do i not have the right to read it for myself and decide what i think, rather than be told by some self-righteous and self-appointed censor whether it's appropriate or not? is that not a personal decision for me to make, and do i not have the right to disagree with the opinions of others?

i understand that the comments were not in english, and i think i might have come across videos of nupur sharma expressing herself in whatever indian dialect she speaks; i do not know which it is, although i do know there are many. "indian", like "chinese", is not actually a language. so, i don't know if she speaks hindi or something else. if these videos are what i am looking for, i suppose access to the information is only restricted by translation, which is less of a problem than i am suggesting - and perhaps even proof of the opposite point.

nonetheless, i would call for the statements to be translated into english and published so that i can post them here for analysis. i feel slightly handicapped in my analysis by my inability to understand the exact words that were spoken, which makes it hard to be sure what i think about them; i would be able to form a better opinion, as an individual, if i were able to read the words for myself.

17:00

the media continues to misunderstand how immunity to viruses works. i've posted similar write-ups to this one a few times, but i have to repeat myself because the media either refuses to get the science right or is incapable of doing so.

can you be infected with the same virus repeatedly? the correct answer is an emphatic no - if you are infected with a virus, and your body mounts an effective immune response it, you are then immune to that virus. forever. the immune response does not "wear out". immunity does not "wane". any virus that you mount an effective immune response to will provide you with permanent, perpetual immunity for the rest of your life. there are no exceptions to this.

there's two caveats to this.

the first is that, because covid-19 is such a weak virus, you may carry the virus without getting infected by it. you have a line of defences that kicks in before infection triggers, and if that happens, if your white blood cells just sort of eat the virus before your immune response kicks in, then you won't generate antibodies, because you didn't even need them. this is a scenario where eliminating the virus is something more like clearing some inhaled dust. your body is constantly removing pathogens that find their way into your system. these are in truth really false positives, but they get categorized as asymptomatic.

the second, and this is by far the more common scenario, is that you may come into contact with multiple variants of the virus. this virus is mutating and spreading quite rapidly, so the reality of coming into contact with different strains of the virus repeatedly, and therefore having to fight off multiple different variants of the virus, is becoming the status quo. this is why you need to get a flu shot every year, and why i didn't bother and will not bother getting an rna vaccine for this virus; at this point, the vaccines are next to useless against increasingly distantly mutated strains, and the inevitably of that truth was always abundantly clear and predictable to the point that it was beyond obvious.

so, consider somebody that was infected by the initial strain in early 2020 (or in late 2019, as i think i did). that person's immune system may have identified the virus and mounted a strong immune response to it, but then been infected by the alpha strain a few months later because the alpha strain was different enough from the first strain that the immune system no longer recognized it. that person might have then mounted an immune response for the alpha strain, and then gotten vaccinated, only to run into the delta strain a few months later, which was different enough to get infected a third time. then, that person may have been infected again with the omicron strain, which was again different enough to evade detection. and, now they might be infected a fifth time with a subvariant, which is different enough from omicron to evade detection, yet again.

what is not happening is anybody getting infected with delta twice, or omicron three times. once you develop a successful immune response to a specific variant, it is neutralized and you don't need to do it again.

there's a few corollaries, here.

1) if you can mount a successful immune response to five different strains, you're likely to mount a successful immune response to five more - or fifty more. your young kids could come into contact with 100-200 different strains in their lives, and they will need to mount independent immune responses to all of them. vaccinating them isn't going to be helpful. their immune system will need to figure this out.

2) however, yearly update shots for the elderly (primarily) are something that nobody is talking about but should be being talked about

3) the person that gets infected five times is mounting a sufficient immune response, but isn't building effective antibodies. antibodies are a mathematical solution to the geometry problem that is posed by the virus, itself; a successful immune response is a brute force approach to dismantling the virus via trial and error that eventually produces a protein that, via it's own geometry, neutralizes the open electrical charges in the geometry of the virus to either unravel it or bind to it and eliminate it. it works the same way an enzyme does, or how clearing a free radical does. so, the antibody has to solve the basic geometry problem, and they're all the same up to isomorphism, but everybody's antibodies are going to be a little bit different, because they're all arrived at via the independent evolutionary process of brute force trial and error, which occurs in an isolated manner in the body of every individual that has a successful immune response. i don't know how to get better antibodies other than to give your immune system more practice, but it might not help, it might just be a consequence of genetic variation. the person that gets infected with five different variants and generates five different sets of antibodies ought to be concerned that they are generating a poor immune response that is likely predictive of a poor immune response to future viruses. that person would be less fit than others, and would be less able to adapt to more serious viruses.

4) existing vaccines have been useless for months and mandates that talk about existing vaccines no longer have any rational basis in their implementation. government policy decisions that attempt to use vaccine mandates to implement public health outcomes no longer have any discernible rational connection to the policy outcomes being desired and should be struck down as unreasonable for that reason.

so, are you going to be infected with covid over and over? the answer is that you're not.  rather, you're going to come into contact with different strains over and over, and while you won't be infected by every one if your immune system is working properly, you will likely be infected by every fourth or fifth, or something.

18:40

this is actually helpful. i didn't realize the policy had a sunset clause and was being extended.

i'l wait it out. that's fine.

reference:

"u.s. extends covid-19 vaccination requirement for those entering at land, ferry points", cbc news, april 22, 2022

18:45

i would suggest to the city of ottawa that it either give equal space for russian flags on it's front property or take down it's ukrainian flags. ottawa is a diverse city, and the people within it have diverse opinions. it is not appropriate for a municipal government to take a side in a conflict on the other side of the world in which the country it resides in is not a party to, nor has any legitimate self-interest in regards to.

should the city of ottawa continue to express a one-sided perspective on the conflict, it will be rightfully accused of taking sides, and of expressing distinctly russophobic viewpoints in the process of pushing a pro-ukrainian agenda. the embassy should examine it's legal options in the face of clear discrimination against russia and russian interests.

20:46

i would call on mr. watson to immediately resign for his russophobic comments. the city of ottawa, as an international city, is not well represented by a russophobic bigot.

20:54

i don't understand why the minister would claim (without any sort of argument, so i just don't know the argument - it's just a specious assertion, from what i can tell) that canada should not be present in such a meeting, or why it would be thought to be "unacceptable". it is not in canada's self-interest to break off diplomatic relations with russia, and i would hope that the minister's broadly incoherent statements are not to be taken particularly seriously - as i take it very little of what she says actually is.

reference:

"joly calls canadian official's attendance at russian embassy event 'unacceptable'", cbc news, june 13, 2022

22:37

tuesday, june 14, 2022

so, we're in another heat wave here in windsor. this is, what, the fifth or sixth heat wave here, already? it's not even summer, yet. the forecasts by the weather network (which called for a cool summer due to la nina and a decreased chance of extreme heat) have once again proven embarrassingly wrong, and i might call on them to finally fire their denialist meteorologist, who forecasts cold seasons every season. no, climate change is not "just el nino". this summer is going to be extreme, and some piddling current in the pacific isn't going to have much of a say in moderating it.

it's nice and humid, which means it's my kind of weather and i wish i had somewhere to go. windsor is boring as fuck, in the best of times. i really don't care about windsor and didn't move here to experience boring windsor; i moved here because ottawa was too town-like for me and i wanted to go to a bigger city with cheaper rent. the most affordable option within the ontario provincial limits was detroit. so, these border restrictions have really just completely eliminated anything resembling a social life that i at one point had, and there's simply nothing in windsor that i'm remotely interested in to replace it. if windsor is boring at the best of times, it's extra boring right now, in this booking hole created by uncertainty around show closures due to the provincial government's decision to unnecessarily interfere in the personal decisions of citizens, regarding exposure to pathogens. it's hard to blame touring bands for skipping ontario altogether. and, then there's the border annoyances on top of it.

so, i desperately want to go out somewhere and enjoy the weather, but i'm stuck in boringsville, nowhereland and there's simply nowhere to go. but, i'm going to hope that the americans lift the border restrictions relatively soon, anyways, and start to adjust for it.

i stopped monday morning and spent the day eating and cleaning. the cleaning is at least done. i need to take that shower this morning, and will be dying my hair blonde today, in preparation for better days. when that's done, i should be able to get a start on the laptop, i think.

6:06

this is long overdue, but this quote demonstrates the continued scientific illiteracy dominating the trudeau government's decisions:

the government may reinstate the vaccine requirement if there's a new variant of the virus

that makes absolutely no scientific sense whatsoever, as the reasoning behind lifting the mandates must be that the vaccine is no longer effective against existing variants. if there's a new variant, the vaccine will be even less effective against it, if that's even still possible.

so, this is a small step in the right direction, but the comments from the government indicate that they're still operating from a point of ignorance and still don't understand the policies they're legislating.

reference:

"ottawa set to announce end to vaccine mandates for domestic travel, outbound flights", cbc news, june 13, 2022

7:37

there's a law against drinking in parks?

whatever.

i wouldn't worry about stupid laws like that. just pick up your garbage when you're done.

also: the park is the technically correct and most socially acceptable place to smoke marijuana, not your porch or yard. i don't know what the laws say on the matter and don't really care.

so, there's some laws that are worth changing and others that should just be ignored. i really don't like the idea of reserving tables in a park, though. gross. that reeks of disgusting private property, in a space that is supposed to represent the commons. but, that's always backwards calgary for you...

reference:

"canadian cities are legalizing alcohol in parks. Some are celebrating, others worry it's a slippery slope", cbc news, june 12, 2022

7:53

yeah. the nato narrative is changing from "security guarantees for sweden and finland" to "security guarantees for sweden.". and, sweden is certainly a gain for nato, all other things considered - so long as they don't lose turkey over it.

the damage has likely already been done, at least in the short run. it's not clear to me that the swedish ruling coalition will withstand this, or at least not for long; i strongly suspect that an election will be held in sweden within the next 5 years that will pull it back out of the alliance. but, signing up for nato and then leaving is dangerous - that's how people get assassinated.

the finns still have time to get out, but, even if they do, the real catch here is the swedes, if nato can hold them. if the finns don't clue in, they're going to get sacrificed, as nato's intent on signing the finns up is to open another front in the war.

if the logic in sweden is that the finnish decision has eliminated a real choice in the matter, any further instability in finland just exacerbates it. but, if the finns course correct and pull out, sweden will be stuck in an arranged marriage it didn't truly consent to and with a partner that's eager to rape them.

8:55

may 16, 2020

stop.

the baltic regions were firmly in the varangian sphere of influence, before the northern crusades. they were then conquered, converted and colonized by force, before succeeding in overthrowing the crusaders. but, they never truly found their way back into the slavic confederacy.

so, are they greco-rus, or are they holdover vikings? i dunno.

i know they're not romans.

==========

so, what's the historical truth regarding putin's boastful discussion of the great northern war? see, it depends on the context.

if we're talking about the european union, with nato military backing, as a new western empire, the baltic sea is clearly outside of it's historical sphere of control. rome, either via paris or via brussels, has no claim whatsoever to the eastern baltic. but, if we're talking about an alliance between the third power in europe - the norse - and the descendant states of the rome/paris axis, the issue becomes a lot more complicated. this area is outside of the roman sphere, but it is both within the viking sphere and the russian/byzantine sphere. so, rome may gain some legitimacy on the issue, if it aligns with stockholm to do so, but only if it does so.

there are indigenous peoples in the region. we call the area baltic, but that only refers to the people in the southern half of the north-east baltic sea region. balts and slavs are very, very closely related people; there's not a clear consensus on the matter, but one theory suggests that baltic and slavic didn't split as language groups until as late as 500 ce. up until this point, the balto-slavs exist almost strictly outside of history, and they really only emerge within history as a distant tribal people living under swedish cultural dominance in what was a loosely organized viking staging ground south to the black sea. throughout prehistory, essentially without exception, balts and slavs are indistinguishable from each other as primitive forest dwelling tribes to the distant north east.

the ancient inhabitants of the northern part of the baltic were not indigenous to the region, but were rather the westernmost branch of an ethnic group that extends across northern russia, to as far as the urals. these are an entirely different people, who are connected more to asia than to europe. however, they too only emerge into history as an unorganized tribal people living in a staging ground utilized by vikings who were concerned about trade routes to the south.

the viking presence in eastern europe is in truth very, very ancient. while an east german presence in the dnieper no doubt predates this, the earliest actual archaeological evidence of vikings in what we today call russia and ukraine is not varangians moving south from holmgard but actually goths moving into the region up the vistula, around the time of julius caesar and settling into the region by the time of trajan. the goths were eventually pushed out of the region by a hunnic invasion and, along with other early viking east german tribes (burgundians, vandals, lombards and probably the suevi) played a major role in the collapse of the western roman empire. the huns actually would have then created a buffer state between greater scandinavia and rome, in their occupation of northern pannonia.

it is only after the collapse of hunnic power and the subsequent germanic migrations out of eastern europe that the balto-slavs start to emerge in the region as an organized group, in the anarchy that followed. that would become a constant throughout history: as various forces rode in from the plains to the east, the balto-slavs were just there the whole time, and only emerged into history as actors whenever the violently enforced dominance of whatever invading group collapsed. these balto-slavs were a strictly agricultural society and were almost uniquely disinterested in conquest, or even in organized governance, for the bulk of their existence, in history or out of it, as it would be. so, when i talk about the slavs being inherently anarchistic, that's something that is longstanding and stretches deep into pre-history. while they only emerge as a discernible culture in the 5th-6th century ce, and are called by the name "slave" in all western languages when they do, the balto-slavs had in truth been there in the region for millennia; as the direct descendants of the proto-indo-european yamnaya culture, they are the only true indigenous group to the region, and they are mentioned in the historical record as far back as herodotus, as subjugated and enslaved by the iranian scythians, who were a barbarian horse-mounted warrior tribe, who had doubled back into the region from the east.

so, while they were there tending to the fields the whole time, as far back as the homeric period and beyond, the balto-slavs only appear to history as the balto-slavs when the hunnic collapse and germanic migration out of eastern europe create a power vaccum in the region, leaving the indigenous balto-slavs as the only group left standing. or, at least for a while.

while the then turkic bulgars (bulgarians today speak slavic) would soon follow the hunnic migration path into the power vacuum on the boundary of the empire, the large scale return of the vikings from scandinavia only occurs in the 7th century, when they set up trading posts along the many large northern rivers, many of which eventually evolve into major russian cities. what are the names of some of these swedish trading posts that became russian cities?

- novgorod

- smolensk

- kiev

- pskov

- rostov

- ladoga

- chernigov

these viking trading posts differed from the scythian, gothic and hunnic settlements in the region in the sense that they were largely transitory. the vikings needed places to stop and rest on their long journeys, and they needed administrative centres to facilitate it, but they had little interest in actually settling in the areas we now call the baltics (including finland), ukraine or russia. there is, however, a commonality in how all these regions developed as swedish staging areas. it took some time, but the swedish influence finally brought the slavs into civilization, and a hybrid culture of slavic speaking settlements (probably primarily settled as slaves, initially) under scandinavian rule began to develop. do not be confused by this, though: viking blood runs quite deep in russia, even to this day. 

once these staging grounds began to take on the nature of slavic cities, rather than swedish trading posts, they began to expand to the north and east and also came into conflict with the viking themselves, who resented finding themselves in need of paying taxes to settlements they had largely built themselves. moscow, for example, was founded by scandinized slavs in this period as a slavic colony of a city initially built by vikings (novgorod/holmgard); novgorod, itself, was frequently at war with the danes and swedes.

it follows that russia is, itself, an inherently scandinavian-derived culture - and this is very much true. essentially all of the cities of russia were founded as swedish trading posts, even if some (like moscow) were via some level of separation. given that russia was built as a swedish outpost for the purposes of trading with the south, how does that frame the great northern war? is this actually a civil war?

i'm going to say not really, but sort of. 

you have to insert a number of events, first. it turns out that the scandinizing of the slavs, however important and foundational to slavic civilization, was but merely transitory; within a few centuries, the slavs were then thoroughly hellenized, in a way that the vikings certainly never were. it was the hellenization of the slavs that broke them apart from their viking rulers. if the intent of the vikings was to set up trading posts to interact with the south, rather than to colonize, the perhaps inevitable result was that the south did colonize, as that is what the south always does. the vikings really set that up. but, this is a profound civilizational difference that defines north against south. there's no need to dwell on that, other than to point it out: the vikings gave the greeks the way in, then the greeks took over, and that was predictable, in hindsight. when byzantine power waned, arabs and turks attempted to follow in the arabization and turkification of the region, but neither succeeded. the slavs are, to do this day, the last remaining outpost of re-hellenized eastern roman byzantine civilization.

the mongol invasion was of course absolutely devastating to the region and plunged it into one of it's many periods of recurring anarchy, the end of which defines the establishment of slavic identity, as we know it. this was less of an issue in the region we're talking about, precisely. while the mongols controlled all of contemporary russia and all of contemporary ukraine, the baltic sea region remained as transitory swedish and danish colonies on top of an unorganized indigenous population during this period, just as it had been for centuries previously. contemporary with the existential slavic struggle to expel the tatars, which took centuries, was the introduction of catholic german influence into the baltic and an ensuing struggle between north and south german peoples for control of the region, which eventually ends with lutheran swedish dominance in the northern baltic sea (and this was both consensual and historical, as the south germans were seen as the invaders and colonizers that they were while the less violent and less colonial swedes, who just wanted staging areas for their boats, were viewed more favourably by the finns and indigenous balts) and what is really the first establishment of an indigenous-run baltic state, under (pagan!) lithuanian control, in reaction to attempts by tetutonic knights to forcibly christianize them. when the dust settles, and the mongols are driven out, there are three axes of power in the broad balto-slavic area: the swedish empire in the north-west where it always had been, the baltic dominated polish-lithuanian confederacy in the south occupying the balto-slavic heartland of previously pagan tribes and slavic cities that were built by swedish vikings and hellenized by byzantine cultural hegemony brought in primarily by trade and moscow in the east, which had been built as a colony of novgorod by scandinized slavs and was attempting to unite the slavs under one nation. this is the setup for the great northern war, which ended with russian dominance over the entire region.

if putin is claiming that peter the great recovered territory in the baltic sea for russia, it is not clear what exactly he means. certainly, neither moscow nor novgorod ever had control over those areas. there is some kind of an argument that moscow might have liberated kiev for the slavs from the balts, but that has little to do with the baltic region, which was never slavic. worse, for that argument, is that the slavs had really slowly taken over the lithuanian confederacy, anyways.

so, while i was sympathetic to putin's arguments regarding pan-slavism in the geographical space that we today call ukraine, and i do think the russians have a convincing claim that the northern baltic is within their sphere of interest, the idea that peter the great was recovering territory for russia in the north baltic area has no historical basis and is difficult to make sense of.

the proper context really is in the sense of a broader viking or varangian civil war - this is one of many examples of the phenomenon of the colony overtaking the home city. you can and should place the great northern war in the context of multiple varangian successor states fighting over control of a large area that had a common origin point in the historical swedish expansion into eastern europe. but, you can't make sense of the idea of russia reclaiming territory in the baltic sea area; this is the motherland being overwhelmed, not the colony retaking what belongs to it.

all of that aside, are putin's statements a cause for serious concern? i think he's boasting, and i think it's intended for domestic consumption, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored. he's poking the swedes; he won't attack the swedes. the swedes would kick his ass. we forget this or don't know it: sweden has refrained from joining nato not out of pacifism, but because it considers itself a third power. the swedes are a capable military force. but, this is not the serious concern - the serious concern is the finns. if nato starts dropping weapons in finland, as they are clearly going to, then yes - the russians  could very well take steps to react, and putin's statements should be seen as concerning, in that context.

but, as before, he's walking right into it.

nato is trying to coerce the russians into invading finland, as it baited them into invading ukraine. what putin has broadcasted is that he's dumb enough to actually do it, and open a two or three front war that he can't win.

11:57

this is a useful map:

the argument being made by russian nationalists is that kiev is the origin point of historical russia. but, as i've pointed out previously, this is a very selective history.

the actual origin point of historical russia is the city of novgorod, in the northern part of the map. kiev and  moscow were both founded as colonies of the vikings in novgorod, at differing points of slavicization and spaced several hundred years apart. there's this idea that kiev was founded by jewish khazars floating around, but it's purely utter nonsense - the khazars were probably not actually jewish to begin with, they never ruled as far west as kiev and kiev itself wasn't founded until late in the 9th century. but, novgorod already existed before kiev did, and was the actual base of varangian expansion in the area.

as stated previously, i'm a pan-slavicist. the slavs are stronger united than divided. i would like to see a united slavia.

but, the reality is that conservatives suck at history and vladimir putin is a conservative. therefore, his history is predictably warped.

locating the centre of russia in novgorod helps put the russian expansion through the 17th century in perspective, though, and helps explain why the capital was moved to st. petersburg.

14:06

i've spent the afternoon correcting bad information about the extent of the largely mythical "khazaria" in dark age southern russia.

this entity existed, but the only things recorded about it are specious myths in the form of vague legends from overwhelmingly unreliable islamic sources. worse, it's become a magnet for hacks and hucksters.

there is no good evidence to suggest that any kind of mass conversion to judaism ever existed in the region of modern day southern russia, and the dna studies they've done on eastern european jews entirely debunk the idea that they're turkish or iranian in genetic origin. there seems to have been a fair amount of jewish migration into the region during the dark ages, which makes some sense, given that there was a lot of persecution of jews in the middle east under roman, arab and crusader rule, alike.

further, the size of "khazaria" on the map is frequently exaggerated by the necessary reliance on the poor islamic source material, which forces you to draw boundaries via trying to calculate how far an individual can travel in a given period of time. it's absurd to even bother trying to make sense of such nonsense.

this is what the archaeology says:

as mentioned on the map, the archaeological complex in the dnieper region is indigenous slavic, and specifically connected to the tribe of severians, and does not show affinity with these east central asian khazar nomads, who mostly lived south of the don. some coins or something might have floated up there, but there was simply not a city in the area of kiev until the vikings built one in the late 9th century. the indigenous slavs lived a simple farming existence.

i'm not going to stop people from posting the opposite, though, however debunked and however ridiculed the idea of khazars in kiev in the 7th century might actually be. people really want to believe this stuff, and the badly written islamic historiography is playing into the disinformation.

15:40

what we know about this entity called the khazars is so vague that we really can't locate it well on a map. we don't even know where their capital city was. we think it was somewhere on the volga river, but that's really just a guess. they disappeared, so we can't reference anything, we're stuck with borderline useless verbal descriptions from poorly regarded source material full of myths and legends.

in fact, while western sources have keyed in on the khazars as living west of the caspian and tried to connect them to eastern european jewry, the more convincing evidence from eastern sources suggests that they lived mostly to the east of the caspian and may actually be the ancestors of the ethnic hazaras in modern day afghanistan, through a relatively short migration from historical khwarazm, which is eastern iran.

17:16

wednesday, june 15, 2022

during the ongoing mandated hearing into the use of emergency powers during the legitimate convoy protests, the sitting government of canada has openly admitted that it had no valid justification for the abuse of power. in the latest demonstration that the liberal party is run by people that never really graduated from high school, the government actually had the nerve to claim it suspended civil liberties in the country because it was concerned about it's "reputation". yeah. these people are in their 50s, mostly, and still think and act like teenagers.

so, what's the next step, here? there should be consequences for this kind of behaviour.

to begin with, the law clearly has to be repealed. if there was a naive benefit of the doubt that our government would be mature enough not to act despotically on frivolous claims, that can clearly no longer be justified.

but, we can't have ministers telling parliamentary hearings that they contemptuously flouted the law with intent and then have them walk out without any consequence to them. this crop of juvenile delinquents in the pmo has the moral decency of the cast of seinfeld but lacks the good sense to know when to resign (unlike the cast of seinfeld), which is what they're supposed to do in this situation.

this is a crisis in the legitimacy of government. how do we fix this?

4:43

if there's justice in the universe, right?

5:03

if you want to get a good guess as to how kiev was founded, a good start is to look at detroit.

the french did not have any real intent to settle detroit. it was the church that came in first and started converting the indigenous groups, while the french traders really just wanted a place to sleep for the night. detroit was an important stop on the multi day maritime journey from quebec city to new orleans (via montreal, detroit and st louis) that took the st lawerence waterway most of the way and portaged into the mississippi from there. many goods were moved up and down this trade route, including goods made by the indigenous inhabitants.

but, detroit was just a fort - just a resting place, just a stop in the extensive french trading networks. the french didn't want to colonize, or at least not at first. that changed after the revolutions.

and, then what happened? well, the english moved in after capturing it and they're the ones that really built it. we have remnants of the french trading post on this side of the river in the form of road names, but the main road in the region is a paved over indigenous trail. on the american side, the roads are named after american generals and presidents, and the city was quite clearly intentionally designed to occupy the bulk of michigan. it's a very planned community, and it's very obvious. today, the cathedrals and whatnot from the initial french trading post on the american side are just small neighbourhood shrines in a giant americanized metropolis.

the swedish traders flowing up the dnieper would not have been much different than french traders transiting between montreal and st. louis and their trading posts, like the swedish trading posts in eastern europe, had mostly harmonious relations with the indigenous groups, which in eastern europe were the slavic speakers. most metis in canada and the great lakes region of the united states are of french origin on their european side. metis communities developed all around the great lakes trading networks, and many of the cities there today are a result of the fusion.

in eastern europe, the greeks then quickly swept in and took over and drastically changed the nature of the swedish integration with the slavic inhabitants. in north america, it was the british that took over. there were definite differences in the character of these events, but they have the similarity that the resulting culture in eastern europe became greek, even as the region fought for it's independence from constantinople, and the culture in america has been dominantly anglicized, even as america has separated itself from the british empire.

5:44

thursday, june 16, 2022

i've found myself humming this, for some reason.

6:34

so, the media seems to be having a panic attack over this "great replacement theory". they did a survey, and it claims 40% of people think it's probably true.

i want to clarify what i've said about this and what i haven't.

first, i think the media's hissy fit over this is rooted in the idea that it's a crazy thought that could never actually happen and people suspecting it might be true is some kind of delve into psychosis or something. in fact, population replacement is common throughout history. egyptians, persians, romans, chinese, russians, ottomans and the british are examples of large empires that have carried out population replacement. the roman expulsion of the jews is one of the most famous examples but it isn't the only one.

it is not a conspiracy theory that the elder trudeau adopted a population replacement policy to deal with the problem of quebec nationalism. further, it actually worked. it was less money and more the ethnic vote that foiled the second referendum attempt from succeeding.

when i talk about this topic - and i was talking about it many years before the pandemic - i tend to quote engels and frame it in marxist theory; it's about the ruling class trying to prevent religion from lapsing as a tool of control. while i don't consume much right-wing media and am not entirely clear about it, i take it that what the right is concerned about is the west being somehow taken away from christianity, which is more or less the exact opposite thing that i'm concerned about.

i think we see something similar with immigration in the united states, where the immigrants are presented as and perceived of as threats to their labour power, when the truth is that it's the elite that these people vote for that are taking away their jobs, for the purpose of maximizing greater extractive surplus value. there's certainly a lot of truth in the observation that immigrants steal jobs (that's why we have immigration...), but the solution is not to attack the immigrants - that plays into the divide and conquer. the solution is to build a social movement in the working class, and tear down the banks on our way to collectivizing the means of production.

so, if what characterizes this movement on the right is this christian revivalism that is afraid that other religions are going to supplant them, i would hardly have any sympathy for them - i've been fighting my whole life to get rid of christianity and would happily volunteer to cast the first stone. that's their concern, and it would appear to be more grounded in empirical fact than the media would like to let on, but it's hardly of any concern to me, at all.

what i'm concerned about is pretty much exactly what engels warned us of - that if we rightfully throw away christianity as poppycock, we may find ourselves with an aristocracy that is afraid it's going to lose control over us and may need to bring in some other religion to replace it. this is also more or less directly what standard economic leftists like richard wolff and chomsky have been saying about the attack on civil rights that began in the 70s: we had too much freedom, and it had to be taken away from us. if you look around the world, the primary model of religious control in today's world is islam. so, the domineering banker that wants to better control it's working class may look at importing the islamic model of control into his own country, and he does that by designing an immigration system to accomplish that goal.

this is not an empty theory void of evidence. in canada, it's primarily been the conservatives that have been doing this, not the liberals. the liberals have not modified the system put in place by stephen harper, but it was the last conservative stint in government that was responsible for overhauling the immigration system. globe and mail columnist (yes. one of your own, you media scum.) john ibbitson wrote a book about it in 2013 where he called it the "big shift" rather than the "great replacement", but it's essentially the same argument. the primary result of this so far has been doug ford, but he's probably a canary: we're on the brink of it. this is another point of difference - i'm blaming the problem on policies brought in by the bourgeois right (which is more consistent with engels' argument), and i'm arguing the bourgeois left just won't change it, because they're too stupid to figure out the threat it poses them. i'm not blaming this on the democrats or the liberals, although i'd urge them to figure it out and react to it. in the long run, fundamentalist muslims should be expected to vote like fundamentalist christians do, and that's what we're starting to see in canada, and what's starting to shift the balance of power.

what i'm actually concerned about is not the muslims wiping out the christians but the muslims joining forces with the christians in a joint attack on secularism. we're on the brink of finally wiping out christianity for good - it is really dying, it really might not last. - and the aristocracy is a step ahead of us: if you didn't like christianity, you'll really dislike islam.

do i have a temporary ally on the right, here? no - i can't see that working out, not even remotely, not even for five minutes.

the mainstream media is of course famous for it's dishonesty, it's poor fact checking and it's promotion of easily debunked strawmen arguments. i am not getting anywhere asking the media to be more responsible in it's fact checking. but, if you're reading this, i'd request you avoid propping up the strawmen.

there's some overlap between this point i've been making for over ten years and this idea floating around on the right, but our concerns are not symmetric and we're not on the same side of the argument.

7:15

this is not his best record. 

7:16

i actually think that the viewpoints summarized as "the great replacement theory" are probably primarily grounded in the generally inane and usually poorly written ramblings of toronto's other village idiot, jordan peterson. he's probably the best representative author of the warped concept of history on display by the people clinging to their religion in the face of globalization.

again, that's not what i'm concerned about.

what i'm concerned about is the threat to secularism posed by unchecked immigration from right-wing cultures. it is inevitable that secular society will get overwhelmed if immigration rates remain at these levels, no matter how hard we try to assimilate them.

8:01

so, i got a call from inflation today.

he was thinking about hanging around for a while just to piss everybody off, because he didn't really think the fed was serious. but, now that he knows the fed is serious, he's going to knock it off and go home.

what buffoonery.

i don't see the value that others do in central bank independence, but the justification by the fed for this hike proves that the fed is not independent - this is a strictly political act.

8:47

it would legitimately appear that the federal reserve thinks it has mastered psychohistory and is applying it to reduce interest rates.

a basis point or two won't lead us to stagflation, but they seem to be very serious about this and if they are not stopped, they just might. who will save us from these very serious people?

8:59

friday, june 17, 2022

saturday, june 18, 2022

so, i finally got my tax refund information and everything seems ok, with one caveat. i'm constantly worried about this because i have a large student loan. it's only a few hundred extra dollars a year, but it makes a difference in years where i don't get that extra couple of thousand dollars in from lawsuits.

well, my income from odsp is $14,000/yr and it pays rent and bills. i then get about another $800 from the ontario government and another $400 from gst rebates. that extra $1000+ is roughly 10% of my total income, and while i don't budget it, it makes a huge difference, most years, in terms of having a few extra dollars to buy random things. it's been different recently because i keep winning a couple of thousand dollars in lawsuits, or otherwise keep getting checks mailed to me from family. you can see why a $5000 check is actually exceedingly substantive, given my income is so low - and my expenses are so low. with the possible exception of a payout in the karen case, there's nothing this year, so the importance of that $1200 is that much more substantive.

well, except the extra $400 from the climate tax rebate, which the government appears to not want to talk about, and which is not even showing up in the "rebates" section of the cra website. but, i don't know if that's because something's gone wrong, if it's just not done yet or if it's because the government is trying to pretend it doesn't exist, in the face of high gas prices becoming a political liability.

as one example, the finance minister had a speech the other day where she outlined things the government is doing to address the "affordability" crisis, as though rich people not being able to afford to fill up their suvs any more is some kind of crisis. she drew attention to inflation being worked into the calculation for the gst rebate, which for me came to $4. for the year. she didn't mention the carbon tax, which for myself should come to close to $400 for the year and for most people will actually be, by far, the most substantive buffer, out of the various credits that have been recently introduced or edited. your sitcom nuclear family is going to get thousands of dollars from this - and the minister didn't say a word about it, in a speech intended to talk about things the government is doing to address gas prices.

my interpretation of that is actually rather concerning, as it is broadcasting something i already knew but that the government was going to great lengths to hide - the government thinks high gas prices are a bigger problem than high carbon emissions. that's an unacceptable set of priorities that should have consequences for them in the next election.

so, i don't know what's going on with this and i wish i did. further, i wish the government would actually promote this policy, which is going to help a lot of low income people, many of whom don't have cars or pay gas. if it's low income people that get hurt the most with inflation, this is a progressive tax for us, even if it's regressive for bourgeois suv owners.

past liberal governments would have realized this, but the current liberal government is run by the pampered children of the last generation's intelligentsia, and who live in this buffered reality that is entirely disconnected from the struggles of real working people. they think these suv driving, mortgage paying working stiffs are poor people, because they are relatively poor, compared to them - they're so disconnected from reality that they don't realize that this demographic they're concerned about is actually upper middle class and votes conservative anyways because they're fucking rich. these are people that would be conservatives, themselves, if not for the awkward fact that their parents were not just liberals but important players in the liberal party.

i guess i shouldn't complain, so long as it gets here.

but, a carbon tax isn't going to work if the government doesn't push it and explain it to people. the way the government is acting right now suggests that the days of the carbon tax in canada are likely numbered, and then what?

8:50

people that own cars are not poor - certainly not globally, and definitely not locally.

8:56

if we get 10% inflation this year, the gst amount might go up by around $40 next year, which would look like an extra $10, quarterly, for myself.

this is a rebate that should certainly be pegged to inflation. but, it's pretty low impact - even for myself - and especially when compared with the carbon rebate.

9:08

this is an unusual article.

there's two levels to being asexual. there are some people that just don't find themselves aroused, and chances are pretty high that they are actually really experiencing a hormone deficit. i think this is actually probably the less common scenario of the two levels.

the other level is people that are intellectually disinterested in sex, and that's certainly open to a psychological deconstruction. i take hormone suppressors, so i'm experiencing both realities, but i think that the intellectual disinterest is more representative of what i'm experiencing, and on that level it's just very much a choice to not engage with a dominant capitalist culture that i consider to be rather disgusting, in terms of how it treats casual sex.

i actually would like sex to have some kind of meaning or value attached to it, without going into the realm of pseudoscience or spirituality or religious rules, and that's considered weird in the society we live in. the society exists almost strictly on these extreme poles where sex is this regulated social activity to be dictated by the church, or it's this entirely meaningless form of exercise. we lack the right balance, culturally.

so, for myself, what i'm really doing is rejecting the way that capitalism reduces sex to this unthinking kind of instinctual behaviour, like something out of laveyan satanism. there's a continuum in my rejection of sex with my rejection of other forms of capitalist excess; i'm just choosing to disengage from a capitalist culture that i find empty and unsatisfying.

there is some possibility that i might engage in a meaningful sexual relationship some time in the future, but i'm the kind of person that's going to want to know you for months before i even consider getting physical with you, and that's unworkable in today's world. you can do what you want, i'm not going to interfere with your decisions, but i'd almost certainly consider your sexuality to just be flat out gross, wherever you are on the spectrum, and something i just don't want to participate in.

ref:

"asexuality is not a ‘symptom’: asexual canadians fight to dispel harmful misconceptions", global news, june 18, 2022

22:24

there is a valid cultural critique of the exploitative way that our capitalist society treats sex and sexuality as an animalistic urge rather than a means of emotional connection and how it treats people's bodies as objects to sell garbage to maximize profits. a choice to be asexual - or just a choice to be celibate - can exist within a critique of capitalism, and that's what is really true, in my scenario.

i've also become straight edge, recently, and don't really have any urge to undo that. you could also interpret a rejection of sexuality as being in line with living a straight-edge lifestyle.

22:27

you may not decide to be celibate, and that's your choice. but, if we're going to one day get to anarchism, we need to learn to reject capitalism's push towards greed and excess and adopt a cultural concept of restraint. this embrace of satanism pushed by the most extreme aspects of the queer community is a barrier to communism.

22:35

there will not be hedonism in communism.

sorry.

22:37

sunday, june 19, 2022

i've been exhausted this weekend and the annoying cold snap that came in after such a nice end of the week of enjoyable humidity didn't help. we should be back into nice weather again this week.

there will be writeups soon.

19:44

this is two weeks of highs over 30 degrees.

that's bizarre, here, where a single 30 degree day is considered an event and some years only have a few 30 degree days, total.

19:49

monday, june 20, 2022

this article is hilariously stupid.

ok. so, maybe, if you average out the entire landmass of the entire country of canada, the temperature was a little bit below average - probably due more to the ssw than the piddling ocean current on the other side of the world.

but, this is a screenshot of a part of the map that focuses in on the great lakes area:

so, in southern ontario, where 75% of the population lives, and yes including in toronto, the first half of the year was decidedly warmer than average.

so, why is the media pushing this scientifically bankrupt idea that we're experiencing cold weather, as a consequence of an ocean current off of south america, when it's obvious to everybody that we're experiencing extreme heat due to rapidly warming oceans in the north atlantic?

the reason is that the government of canada (which is a petro state, under the dictatorial control of the investor class) is on the brink of shifting into full-denialist mode, and it's trying to confuse you by throwing bad data and worse science at you. don't let them do it.

so, yeah, maybe it's been cold in alberta, or something, but nobody cares about alberta. in the inhabitable region of canada that people actually live in, the data is in and it confirms what everybody should have felt was obvious, despite what the media is trying to push - that the season was warmer than average.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/climate/impacts/canada-is-the-coldest-in-years-so-far-in-2022-thanks-to-a-stubborn-la-nina

7:35

it's been really cold in winnipeg, apparently.

nobody gives a fuck about winnipeg.

7:41

so, what day is it?

that was a large amount of recovery required for a long ride on wednesday and thursday, and while i'd like to go out for another round of it, i may have to skip the first few days of this extended upcoming heat event.

i left off some time last week, so let me try to catch up.

12:22

i don't oppose funding for norad, or for the coast guard, either. given canada's position on the globe, those are truly defensive operations.

i'd rather talk to the russians about a free trade agreement around the arctic then get bogged down in another pointless and expensive conflict with them, though. i don't see any reason why we can't get along with them, although we need to be mindful of their concerns about offensive weapons placements.

these are really just about the only types of military spending that i can imagine not opposing. well, maybe we might want to look into drones to replace increasingly obsolete fighter jets. if that's the extent of it, i have little dissent.

i doubt that's the last we'll hear of it, though.

reference:

"canada investing $4.9 billion to modernize north american defences", ctv news, june 20, 2022

12:29

*sigh*.

well, if "modernization" is code for converting norad into an offensive weapons deployment in "northcom" (the pentagon has these orwellian names for how it's split the world up, and the north pole is NORTHCOM, which should be read as NORTHCOM!!!1!!), i guess i'll have to start opposing modernizing norad, too.

at it's core, norad is just a radar system, and we should have a joint radar system with the yankees. that makes sense.

but, if we start playing around with missile systems, we're just going to end up as a warzone - like ukraine has, or like finland is going to.

when the united states released the plans for missile defence back in the early 00s, they made a major blunder without realizing it: the documents they released demonstrating where fiery nuclear wreckage would fall in the case of an interception were pretty much a direct hit on the city of edmonton, which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere but is also our fifth most populous city - and more populous than our capital city, ottawa. you might imagine america would get a little squeamish if the mexicans released a joint defense strategy that had phoenix burning in the background, even if it was mostly out of base ignorance of american geography. the point remains relevant: the systems are only really designed to protect the continental united states and if the warheads fall on edmonton or vancouver or toronto, that's just tough luck for canada. 

so, we'll see where this goes. but, we don't want missiles in canada - we didn't in 1963, we didn't in 2004 and we don't now.

https://ras-nsa.ca/thinking-the-modernization-of-norad/

13:00

the russians have these fancy new weapons, though, which is what is really the shift in power underlying the current conflict.

norad will need to adapt to that.

13:05

take it from a bicyclist: mr. biden didn't fall off his bike, he had a neurological event that caused him to collapse.

this is not the first event of this sort. i would suggest mr. biden likely has a brain tumour.

13:34

Kurdish units and Iranian-affiliated factions in Syria have formed a joint operations room under Russian supervision to counter a possible Turkish military operation in northern Syria.

even a few months ago, that would have been thought impossible. but, we're on the brink of this...

the next step is for an israeli or potentially a joint israeli-saudi force to step in on the side of the turks, and then we're not just opening another front to bleed the russians but potentially creating a major war in the middle east.

then, the armenian-azeri thing gets pulled into it, almost immediately. and, it's up to the greeks to analyze the situation from there...

13:42

the turkish occupation of western anatolia - at the least - is a tragedy of history, and i would stand in absolute solidarity with the greeks, as they liberate the ionian coast.

13:47

if there is a consensus that mr. trudeau will not lead the liberals into the next election, as i believe there is, i would call on mr. trudeau to resign as soon as possible, so as to allow for a proper leadership race.

an anointment of the clearly just as incompetent (but far less aware of it) chrystia freeland would be terrible for the country.

14:09

all evidence seems to suggest that mr. trudeau actually knows he's not smart enough to run a country but rather that he's decided he's a capable enough actor to bullshit his way through it. he knows his place.

freeland, on the other hand, is a perfect example of the dunning-kruger effect in motion. as a journalist, she's qualified to teach grammar to children, and not qualified to do much else. yet, she seems to think she's some kind of genius.

if trudeau is a threat to the country's institutions and removing him from power is a race against time, replacing him with freeland doesn't accomplish much. worse, she won't hold the conservative-leaning demographics that trudeau does (they won't vote for a woman.), and is just handing the pmo to the conservatives.

the liberals keep making this mistake and not learning from it: there needs needs to be a leadership race, not a coronation. canadians won't rubber stamp a decision made in the backrooms of the liberal party executive.

14:17

would iran pose a serious threat to turkey?

you can't attack turkey, because nato. and, as far as i can tell, the article applies just as well to defensive operations in opposition to an offensive move by a nato member. that is, if the iranians move to protect the kurds, and counterattack into turkey, that's still article 5 - at least in theory.

the iranians are unlikely to test the point.

but, they can put proxies on the ground and use them, instead. so, this is where a group like hezbollah or the ypg (as baffling as it is) becomes of immense use to a joint iranian-russian operation in syria, because they can use these groups as proxies to push into turkey.

in absolute terms, the question is yes - in an imaginary one on one putin v erdogan wrestling match type conflict, the iranians would give the turks a lot of problems. but, the nature of nato is that it forces everybody to use excessive restraint, and skews the question rather dramatically.

with serious air support, the kurds would likely win rather easily. i mean, that's what we've seen repeatedly - that with american air support, the kurds are an elite force on the ground. but, any sort of air support against the turks risks the triggering of article 5.

what the russians seem to be saying is "if you go in, we're doing it" - and then the issue opens up. the turks would have a hard enough time fighting just the iranians off. a joint russian-lebanese-syrian-iranian-kurdish-armenian force is likely to succeed in occupying eastern turkey.

this is serious.

but, it seems to be up to the turks to make the choice - or it seemed to be. the bigger the force on the ground gets, and the more likely a direct confrontation in europe becomes, the more likely that the russians move in. 

in the long run, a direct corridor between iran and russia through the black sea will be of immense strategic value to the russians in a broader war for eastern europe.

14:42

i just find it baffling that people are so naive about banks. we don't seem to have this naivete about the corporate sector in general any more, so why are we so gullible about banks, specifically?

does it help to point out that banks are corporations with shareholders, and are tasked with mandates to maximize profits, like corporations are? if so, why is it necessary to point out that banks are just as bad as corporations, when the fact is that the major shareholders in major corporations are usually banks? banks are above corporations in the financial hierarchy, and are therefore the more corrupt entity. have they got you with cutesy advertising, is that it? or, are you just deceiving yourself, because you're locked in?

there is a flip side to this, i suppose: it seems to suggest a societal longing for public banks. what i'm getting at is that our collective social naivete about the mandate of private banks seems to suggest that what we really want is more public banks.

but, for fuck's sake, people, wake up: a bank is a private corporation and it's purpose is strictly to maximize profit for shareholders. they have no mandate for altruism, and decisions made by banks and bankers are not in the public good.

if you had to be told.

fuck.

17:07

the health authorities are telling you to get a useless covid vaccine, while trying to convince you that smallpox isn't much of a threat to you.

i have no immunity to smallpox, nor do most people under the age of 50. we've been through this once before, and it probably killed close to 100 million people in the americas.

i don't think that routine vaccination for smallpox should have stopped. if i can get access to a smallpox vaccine, i'll gladly take it.

so, i'm going to ask the authorities to open this up a little. the statements we're hearing from health authorities regarding the covid vaccine suggest that they've been captured by industry. it's inevitable; it's how our government works. fine. go get captured by smallpox vaccine manufacturers, then.

17:17

 a round of mass vaccination against smallpox would be in the public good.

17:20

a smallpox epidemic in canada today, where nobody under 50 has any immunity, would be catastrophic.

it would kill 30-50% of the under-50 population.

17:29

so, i mean, yeah, i get it - monkeypox is basically an std. it's gross, but just use a condom, and don't fuck strangers. fine.

....except that viruses mutate, and this one comes from a family of viruses that has a history of wiping out entire populations.

covid is harmless, and we shut society down to stop it; monkeypox is exceedingly dangerous, and we're ignoring it. what else would be expected?

17:32

this is quite concerning.

https://www.statnews.com/2022/06/02/mutations-in-monkeypox-virus-explainer/

17:48

i think this is far too restrictive. i started hormones in my early 20s and....i don't really know if i actually went through puberty or not. looking up the definition of tanner stages, i think it's ambiguous whether i went through stage II or not.

regardless, i have had no discernible testosterone for over twenty years and i assure you i would not be able to compete against female athletes in much of anything, despite having very good cardio health. while i have very good endurance on a bicycle at the speed level i'm comfortable with, i would not be remotely competitive against women - even of my age and weight category - in any sort of racing event. 

i'm not even sure that the premise - that men are better athletes than women - is well-grounded. do men really swim faster than women?

this article suggests that height, rather than gender, is the factor:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1324101/#:~:text=On%20an%20average%2C%20the%20men,stroke%20length%20and%20greater%20height

this article suggests the women outperformed the men:

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/10/3651/pdf

so, is gendering sports categories really a meaningful distinction to make, in the first place? would an unusually tall woman not have an unfair advantage? in fighting sports, they have weight categories. in a post-gender world, categorizing people by weight and height rather than by the arbitrary label of gender is going to be a more meaningful way to pool people and allow them to compete against people their own size and strength, rather than merely against people born with the same sex apparatus as them.

i don't really care much for competitive sports, but these decisions have some cultural importance and for that reason they should be based on the science and not on cultural expectations or conservative idealizations of burkean identity politics attached to cultural norms. ages of transition and tanner levels of puberty are really strictly arbitrary considerations; it's objectively measurable physical characteristics like weight and height that are actually relevant metrics.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/19/us/fina-vote-transgender-athletes/index.html

18:22

if they based it on height and weight, then yes - chances are that a post-pubescent male to female that lived and trained as a male will be in a category that mostly includes men. but, a shorter or less muscular mtf (like myself.) would then potentially be in a category with mostly women, which would be more correct. conversely, the tallest and strongest women would be pulled up into a male category.

18:24

i think we've found the source of russia's debt.

vlad, do you really need a 75" tv?

18:49

no, listen - the way we design competitive sports based on the arbitrary characteristic of gender is one of the last vestiges of heteropatriarchy in our society left to tear down and do away with. in almost every other aspect of society today, men and women are expected to compete with each other. why do we continue to erect these barriers in competitive sport?

as mentioned, i don't care much for sports, but you'd expect that doing away with the sexism that underlies the segregation in competitive sports would help in finishing off broader, lingering, remnant sexist attitudes about women being unable to compete with men. there's no science underlying this assumption - it's just base sexist bullshit.

i can grasp the point - there's been some examples of transgendered athletes winning competitions, and there's been some open questions about whether they're competing in the right pool. but, it's not their gender that's the concern, it's their bmi or their height or some other physical characteristic. for every transgendered female winning competitions that are segregated as female only, there's ten women dying to compete with men, because they're bored with women.

it's really long past time that the barrier is done away with and that competition levels are determined by objectively measurable characteristics, not by vaguely defined qualities of arbitrary concern.

23:57

tuesday, june 21, 2022

there's actually nothing surprising about an extremely catholic, and extremely observantly catholic, demographic ultimately finding it's own voice and swinging to the right, where it ideologically resides.

what's weird isn't this ongoing, longterm swing to the republicans by latinos. what's weird is that they ever voted for the democrats in the first place, and it seems to be largely that they got led along by their noses by them.

it's hard for me to understand why liberals think they can hold hindus or muslims, in the long run. secular indians and chinese are a different issue, and the bourgeois left might find itself really reliant on non-religious indian voters, specifically, in the relative short term. but, this idea that they're going to hold muslims is daft, and it's baffling that they don't get it.

conservatives get it.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/19/mayra-flores-texas-special-election-00040723

0:43

i'm certain that some posts that made a specific argument have been removed from this space and i'm trying to analyze them in order to determine if i can find a pattern as to what is driving the censorship in order to try to figure out who it is that is doing it. i don't think that google is the culprit, but the only other entity that could succeed in this sort of thing is a government, and i just don't understand what the purpose of it is. but, it's this subtle and consistent manipulation that seems to follow me as i post - as though i'm under constant, perpetual surveillance, in an attempt to modify what i type. is somebody trying to frame me for something? are they trying to pretend i didn't say certain things? why? i don't understand.

one example of the subtle manipulation is that i'm 100% certain that i posted the following:

the reason we have a central bank is to stop pieces of shit like george soros from defrauding taxpayers by fucking with exchange rates. it has nothing to do with inflation.

that was changed to:

the reason we have a central bank is to stop pieces of shit like george soros from making fortunes by fucking with exchange rates. it has nothing to do with inflation.

the difference in language is fairly profound: in the first post, i'm condemning george soros as a crook and explaining that we need central banks to stop crooks like george soros from stealing money from the public good. in the second, i'm just angry that he's rich, or something specious like that.

george soros did not "make a fortune" in a legitimate manner, he stole money from the uk government and should be in jail for it. and, i'll defend that accusation in court, if forced to.

but, the specific argument that was deleted entirely - without a trace - had to do with an argument that increasing interest rates in the presence of inflation will lead to stagflation. i'm sure i wrote it out in a more coherent manner, but the argument was something like:

1) the inflation we're experiencing is largely being caused by high oil prices, which existed before the russian operation in ukraine. 

2) increasing interest rates will have no effect on inflarion.

3) however, increasing interest rates will lead to less borrowing, which will lead to less economic activity and a decrease in gdp

together, that decrease in gdp along with continued high interest rates will come together to create a phenomenon called stagflation.

now, i wouldn't imagine this was deleted because the reasoning is poor, or because it's incorrect. but, i don't understand why a government agency (and it could be nobody else, not at this level of persistence and sophistication) would come to my personal blog and delete my individual analysis regarding the effects of raising interest rates. if this analysis is correct, what is so dangerous about it so as to require a secret service operation to come over here and delete it?

6:57

at the end of the day, i want  an accurate record of my writing, but i don't think i'm reinventing the wheel, here. i'm more ordering my own thoughts for my own use than anything else.

but, trying to understand what types of posts are getting deleted (again, it's not google - i seem to be getting hacked repeatedly, and it's the entity hacking me that's deleting the posts) and why is of some interest, to get my head around what the intent of the surveillance state is.

i've pointed this out before, too: when these posts get deleted, all external evidence of them ceases to exist. i keep backups in two different email archives. whatever entity is deleting these posts is sophisticated enough (and persistent enough) to delete the individual posts from both archives, as well. i'm left with no evidence the post ever existed, despite going out of my way to ensure data redundancy. i just have to remember typing them up, and then baffle myself by demonstrating the posts i remember typing up not existing at all, when i go looking for them.

7:04

the posts that disappear are posts that either:

1) are critical of the trudeau government or, increasingly

2) criticize the investor class that he represents, or act as educational material in understanding how decisions by this bourgeois layer of government are made.

so, let me repeat myself - why are interest rates being raised? the answer is so that investors can keep up with inflation, and, broadly, so that the banks can increase their profit margins. interest rates do not reduce inflation - that is a bullshit lie told to you by dishonest bankers. what interest rate hikes do is ensure that the investor class does not lose money on it's investments (relative to inflation) when inflation does occur.

7:25

hey, georgie....

i'll tell you what.

for a moderate seven to eightish figure fee, i promise i'll never say your name ever again.

there's a donate tab on the side.

7:38

as before, i don't want to rewrite these posts. i could approximate them, but this blog is largely stream of consciousness, and i'd lose the context.

but, people that want to control the flow of information like this are acting with the mentality of young children, and they will lose in the end. it's not like the ideas disappeared when you deleted the blog post - i'll repost them over time in different forms. what's lost is the enjoyment of reading the writing, and trying to deprive the universe of that for some unclear selfish goal is just juvenile.

as before, i need to call for the posts to be fully restored - and for whoever is doing this to fuck off. it's a waste of everybody's time, and the only end result is that you're distorting my diction in a way that damages the enjoyability of experiencing the art. you're not erasing ideas from history, and you can't, and you're stupid to think you can.

8:21

as i expect that this inflationary event will carry on for several years (raising interest rates does not reverse inflation, and we're simply not ready to transition away from carbon any time soon), the ideas that were childishly deleted will no doubt appear again, in different contexts.

i may not remember exactly what i typed, but i didn't forget it, either. and, i repeat myself, by design.

8:23

people don't listen.

i posted the geographic maps of archaeological cultures in the dnieper basin, and explained that the unreliable islamic sources trying to describe the extent of turkic empires in the steppe region are impossibly vague, to the point that they cannot be taken seriously. that should be enough to make the point clear: the forest-dwelling indigenous slavic people near the region of modern day kiev may have sent a few chickens to some self-appointed arrogant despots south of the don a few times, but there was no city there until the vikings built one. all of the settlement levels in the region are simple slavic farming levels.

but, if you don't find that convincing, this map should get the point across:

kiev is located in an old forest, and it's important to note that this is what the slavs and balts (and finns) really were: they were forest dwelling tribes, not that dissimilar to indigenous peoples of the americas. the turks (khazars, bulgars, huns, avars), on the other hand, were horse-mounted barbarian steppe warriors that could not operate in forested zones.

if the archaeology does not convince you, this map should: the khazars could not have ruled that far up the dnieper because they wouldn't have been able to project power into the forest. the turkic horse-mounted barbarian steppe warriors repeatedly transited towards constantinople through the southern regions on the map (the turks that conquered constantinople came from the other direction), but their horses were of no utility in the swamps of the slavic forests. they had no reason to venture in that direction, as they were always headed the other way.

the vikings came in ships from the north in such a way that kiev was on the way to constantinople, and were more suited to the land, as it was more similar to the land they came from.

12:21

wednesday, june 22, 2022

this is retarded - are we to defend these buffoons, if their decision to block russian rail imports results in an occupation?

i do not stand in solidarity with lithuania on this matter, and would call on them to stop acting like retards, before their stupidity starts a third world war that i will have nothing to do with. i will not support my country, if my political leaders choose to involve themselves in defending such stupid belligerence.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61878929

8:11

the lithuanians will deserve what they get, if they continue to block the flow of trade in this manner.

nato should censure them for their conduct, immediately, and demand they cease interfering in the flow of goods.

8:14

if the lithuanians continue to behave in this manner, they should be rudely thrown out of nato for it. i am not sending a single canary to die over such idiocy.

this isn't a stupid border conflict on the distant, irrelevant baltic sea, this has the potential to start a very serious conflict that could kill millions of people. we cannot allow a war of this sort to develop out of this kind of irresponsible stupidity.

nato must condemn the lithuanians in the strongest possible terms for their behaviour, and demand they cease interfering, immediately.

8:18

what the hell are the retards thinking?

8:20

when somebody stands in your way, you push them down - and if they fall and hurt themselves, it's their fault for standing in the way, not your fault for pushing them down. the lithuanians have no grounds whatsoever in blocking the flow of any goods at all through their territory.

8:24

property is not a right - it is a form of theft that only exists via state decree, and is only enforced through the violence of the police. if the state ceases to exist, property ceases to exist along with it. if the state or the police are less powerful than other actors, if the state no longer has a monopoly on force, then they can no longer protect the fantasy of property rights that they've enforced via their use of violence.

this is a good example of this -  the fantasy that the lithuanians have property rights can only be defended by the use of force. i, for one, will never support them in this.

8:32

any entity that stands before me and asserts a "right to property" had better be prepared to fight for that, because i will demonstrate no respect for that claim, whatsoever - and will simply push you out of the way and ignore you, if i can. you may not steal my natural rights without the use of (implied) violence.

8:37

it does follow that the russians would be justified in pushing the lithuanians out of the way if they will not move out of the way themselves, and nato should stand down on the matter.

8:40

if i was putin, what would i do about this?

well, despite everything i just said, that doesn't mean invading lithuania is the best idea. rather, what the russians need to do - not just in lithuania but elsewhere - is find ways to take control of the government from the inside. it's like disassembling a bomb: you could step on it, but you're better off dismantling it.

lithuania actually has a pretty large russian speaking and russian sympathizing population, enough that it would not be difficult to find an opposition party to install in a coup.

immediately after a coup - like, the day after - they'd need to pull out of nato and invite russian troops in, instead.

now, you could claim this is naive and it'll just create a war anyways, and that's fine, but it negates article 5, or at the least gives other countries in nato the opportunity to pull back. article 5 is an albatross on the neck of the west - we don't want this, but we're stuck with it. we'll take any way out.

so, the russians likely can't avoid a fight in lithuania, but they can avoid triggering a world war by doing it via a coup, and that's likely a strategy they want to use in several countries.

10:32

ugh.

kiev is not a turkish word. it's generally derived from a proto-slavic word meaning "stick, club" and appears to share a common root with the slavic god of smithery.

it seems as though it was probably a place where swords were made or metal working was done, at some time - something like "smithing place".

13:43

the slavs did not enter the iron age. like, at all. i believe that the earliest evidence of iron working in the slavic archaeological zone would be tied to viking settlement, or perhaps to germanic or celtic trading networks. don't forget this: the celts existed throughout central europe, and in many places currently inhabited by slavs were really the direct precursors to them, as the german tribes really didn't wander very far east for very long. so, for example, bohemia is named after the celtic boii. 

the celts and vikings could certainly both iron work.

but, that's perhaps the point. if vikings showed up there in the 7th-9th centuries and started metal working on a large scale, "smithing place" is a rational name for the indigenous slavs to attach to the place.

i'm filling in details, but just look it up in a dictionary - kiev is proto-slavic, and the root is for hammer, stick, club, sword. it's not turkic.

14:13

the iranians that lived in the pontic steppes - sarmatians, scythians - were an iron age people, as well.

but, there's almost no iron in the area of europe inhabited by slavs, balts and finns until something like the 10th century of the common era.

14:17

the slavs were very primitive. they didn't enter the iron age....

that's not just my marxist bias speaking, it's very true.

14:20

again: i'm staunchly opposed to any rebates designed to make the price of carbon less expensive and i hope congress tells the president to fuck off.

these taxes should be used to help the country transition off of carbon. and, if you find it too expensive to pollute, then pollute less.

reference:

"biden asks congress for 3-month suspension of gas, diesel taxes", global news, june 22, 2022

14:59

america's ability to collect and spend taxes should not be dismantled in order to save the presidency of the useless narcissist currently occupying the oval office.

i would encourage a democrat to primary him on this specific basis.

15:02

this is one of the most self-absorbed and irresponsible proposals, if not the most irresponsible proposal, that the country has seen since george w. bush.

15:03

if mr. biden is concerned that high gas prices will hurt his re-election chances, my response is "good riddance".

15:07

a lot of the bickering around the origin of kiev has to do with the etymology of the term rus, which has no clear specific answer. we know that rus was a label applied to people that lived in a broad area north of the pontic steppes. what's happened in the centuries since is that scholars have made the mistake of trying to be specific about something that was rather clearly always very vague.

the roman sources frequently refer to barbarian tribes in ways that are descriptive in character rather than in ways intended to refer to particular ethnic groupings. specific scholars like tacitus made attempts to classify the various barbarians, and you can take these seriously up to a point, but random references to celts, germans, goths, huns or whatever else by random authors are not as specific as later writers would hope they are. a goth might be a hun, and a celt might be a german; the romans used these terms as insulting epithets, or even ways to describe lifestyles, more often than as technical ethnic or linguistic terms, which they often didn't have precise information about, if that precise information would have even mattered much to them, in the ways the terms were used.

there's a story about a rus emissary in a carolingian court that claims he paid taxes to a khagan, and i see no reason to doubt that, but it doesn't imply much of anything. steppe warriors were known to exact tribute on anybody they could; the existence of a payment doesn't mean anything more than the existence of the payment. it certainly doesn't imply that the khagan had settlements in the area he was extracting tribute from. so, this khagan might have been an avar, a bulgar or a khazar, but the existence of this particular piece of literary evidence cannot be extrapolated into the realm of actual evidence, which would rely on the archaeology. it simply says what it says, and nothing more. whether it implies the existence of a turkish settlement in the region then becomes an empirical question to be determined by archaeology, and that has already been settled: there were no turks in the upper dnieper, pretty much ever, and certainly no turkish settlements, there. the archaeological record strictly shows continuity with indigenous slavic farmers, going back millennia. 

this label of rus appears to be placed on the people that lived around the dnieper some time around or somewhat before the first viking trading posts appear in the region, and which would be later called ruthenians. if the term rus is applied to the region 100 years before there were vikings, or before we think there were vikings there, it is not applied 200 years before the event. so, wherever it came from, it seems to be either contemporary to the viking movement or very slightly predates it. whatever the origin, the viking in the region at the least adopt the label, and it becomes a term associated with the viking forts, and the slavic populations living in them.

so, i don't think we can really resolve it, but i think it's a lot less important in a broader historical sense, if you extricate the debate from kind of stupid arguments about ukranian nationalism (specifically.). the east slavic tribes will bicker about this term, which history actually attaches to neither of them, but to the vikings - and which they only adopt much later. maybe it predates the vikings and maybe it doesn't, but all of the sources attach it to the vikings, whether they brought it south or whether it had already been there a few years before they got there.

so, to recap:

1) the term rus predates the vikings by, at most, a few decades - or it was brought south by the vikings.

2) all of the sources associate the term rus with the vikings, specifically

3) so, we're left to determine if the rus was what the vikings were called when they got there, or whether it was what the people in the area the vikings moved to had called themselves right before the vikings got there

of course, every history nerd wants as precise an answer as is possible, but such a distinction could only only be of much concern to a politician. in truth, this is trivial - the rus were, in all useful distinctions, merely the vikings that lived in eastern europe.

fwiw, my vote is to derive the word from finnish ruotsi, for the reason that the actual ethnic group in the region that the vikings actually first settled (holmgard/novgorod) was finnic speaking, at the time. ruotsi is what the finns called all swedes, and what it means in finnish is rower. the finns, balts and slavs would have had longstanding communication and would have seen these invading german vikings, who travelled through their lands on boats, as outsiders, so word of who they are would have likely spread south from the finns to the slavs: the rowers were coming, and the rowers were setting up forts. the slavs would have then adopted their identity, and called themselves by the name they called the foreigners, as they integrated into their settlements. 

the open question is: why didn't the vikings call themselves by their own name for themselves, rather than adopt the finnic name? the somewhat surprising answer is that the vikings didn't seem to have a name for themselves, and that they in fact adopted the names used by other people, wherever they went. they are simply called "northmen" in most of the west, and "varangians" in much of the east. the country of norway is just named after being north of sweden (norway was a colony of sweden), and even denmark seems to have been named after a people that existed in the region before the norse - the swedes called it the danish march, apparently adopted from the latin word for the region.

i guess we can speculate about this. we know the norse, for all their raiding, were bizarrely democratic and borderline communistic. they seem to have seen the world in us v them terms. was ethnicity just beyond them, or was identifying as men of the north just good enough for them? again: it's not really clear.

but, it should be pointed out that allowing the finns to name them rowers is not much different than allowing the franks to name them normans.

so, that's my best guess - that this is a finnish loan word for swede into slavic and that the slavs slowly adopted the identity of the rowers, who started moving into the region some time in the 7th or early 8th centuries, from bases further north, and that they didn't start building cities until after an ethnic consolidation of finns, swedes and slavs started to develop. it then may have been true that some early rus might have paid tribute to some distant khagan somewhere (where is not specified), but the importance of that point has been overstated.

17:18

the photos of erdogan meeting mbs look like something out of the godfather.

biden seems to have green-lighted something. we'll have to wait to see what happens.

in recent decades, the saudis have tended to fund mercenary groups to carry out their aims, although the war in yemen has been a different tactic, and the amount of military hardware they've purchased as of late should be concerning.

18:50

erdogan is not happy about this.

18:52

so, i was supposed to be setting up the new chromebook, and i actually haven't even looked at it, yet. what have i actually done since my last update on the morning of june 13th?

the answer is almost nothing, because i was overwhelmingly exhausted over the weekend and i've been frequently distracted for the first part of the week.

what i wanted to do on monday (the 13th) and then tuesday (the 14th) was briefly run through the posts over the few days preceding it and check for typos before i sat down to look at the chromebook, but i got stuck in circles, and couldn't finish the ranting. every time i got actually started on something, my coffee ran out and it was time to eat, again. i did manage to finish the monthly cleaning and to get some file transfers moving on the new i5, but i've left that stranded, since. i was just getting back around to what i was doing when i started typing this up on the morning of the 20th.

so, as mentioned, the 13th was mostly spent cleaning and the 14th was spent fixing mistakes about the founding of kiev on the wikipedia site (kiev was founded by vikings at the end of the 9th century, not by khazars in the 5th century. there was not a previous khazar settlement in the region. there is no evidence of an older slavic settlement in the region, either. it was found by vikings as a trading post and had no existence whatsoever before that time.), but the day was mostly lost ranting. i did not get the chance to die my hair before i went out on wednesday morning, unfortunately.

in fact, wednesday was sort of a bust. my first trip, late in the morning, was to the shoppers to get my package of four ps/2 mice, and i can happily report that the two i got out of the box work; the other two are put away as backups, as ps/2 mice may be hard to find, in the upcoming years. i can get at least 10 years out of a mouse, so if these last me 20 years...i might not last another 20 years. if i do, will the computers? it's helpful to get the usb mouse back on the typing machine in the studio, even if the intent is for sporadic use. i'm immediately noticing that the ps/2 mouse is far more stable on the production machine (through the kvm), that it integrates seamlessly into windows 98 and that it works on the new i5, too. great.

the next thing i did was a grocery run, at the highest point of the heat for the day - it was pushing 35 degrees when i went out, although it didn't exactly feel like it because there was an annoying breeze. my goal was to take an initial grocery run by foot, come home, make some quinoa (and take my pills), then go out for more groceries and various errands in the afternoon. unfortunately, i ended up dropping a little quinoa on my shirt, and took it off to clean it....and then fell asleep until after 20:00. oops. 

the first grocery run in the morning actually got almost everything i needed, so i only needed to take a quick run out to the other store to get a handful of things, which was relatively successful. at that point, after drying out and putting away the kale, it was after 22:00 and i didn't have a lot of choices about where to go to finish the groceries, so i decided to take a ride out to the soy milk store to see if they had any of my brand yet, as i'm running a little low after making that huge purchase back in december, after realizing they were reformulating. they decided they didn't want to let me in with a school bag , and i decided i didn't want to leave it at the desk, so i just got on my bike and kept going. that turned out to be an important decision, because it meant i didn't spend the limited funds i had in my account.

the overnight low on this night was on the order of 25 degrees, and it was still 30 degrees - not including humidity - at 23:00 at night. i missed most of the hottest part of the day, and i wanted to get some exercise, so i just got to night bicycling, and didn't get home until close to 2:00.

my plan when i got home was to make a salad, take a shower and then get out super early for a nice long morning ride - i was thinking about taking the far ride, even. unfortunately, when i got my scale out to make the salad, i came face to face with the annoying reality that it looked like somebody had stepped on it. 

you'll recall that i was previously concerned that somebody had dropped my chromebook, or otherwise smashed it. when i opened it up, pieces of broken plastic literally fell out of it. now, it looks like somebody has smashed my scale, perhaps accidentally, and it's not clear what the fixation on it is. in fact, i think this is the second scale that's been damaged while i've been out. is the presence of a kitchen scale in a kitchen somehow suspicious to retarded cops? was the kale drying on the counter confusing? you know, growing and drying marijuana is not even against the law here, anymore, but i'm rather obviously not growing it and just as obviously not smoking it - and kale is even more obviously not marijuana. kale does not have buds, for example. i don't know what kind of a buffoon might mistake leafy kale for sticky marijuana, but i know i left with a working kitchen scale and came home to a broken one. again: it looked like somebody dropped it or stepped on it. did some idiot even decide to weigh themselves on a kitchen scale? no level of idiocy is too retarded for the police....don't put anything beneath them...

so, what next? how do i make a salad without a scale? 

well, first i tried to fix it by taking it apart to look at it. it was coming up as 8888888 and wasn't displaying the weight information correctly, which i've decided means either the sensor was broken or it was dirty, but the fact that the glass was also broken strongly suggested somebody stepped on it or something otherwise fell on it. so, i opened it up to clean it and reseat it as a first troubleshooting step. i'm not sure exactly what the problem was, but the lcd wouldn't even come back on at all after that, and then i accidentally disassembled the solder in the process of trying to figure out why. so, it's done.

why am i forced to deal with this kind of stupidity? no, the scale didn't break on it's own. but, what do i do? call the cops? it's the fucking cops that broke it.

in fact, given that they've broken two kitchen scales on me now, i can gather a slight clue as to what they're looking for. i know the cops are spying on me; i don't really know why. they don't like my politics, but that only seems to be half of it. do the retards think i'm a drug dealer, because i have a kitchen scale to weight out ingredients to make salads? really?

as i could not weigh the ingredients for the salad, i decided to make eggs instead.

i then had to spend a good part of the morning researching places i might find a kitchen scale, given the following restrictions:

1) i needed it immediately

2) i had roughly $18 in the bank (until the 30th) and about $5 in my pocket. or so i thought. it's a good thing that i didn't spend it on soy, or i wouldn't be able to make anything except eggs until the start of july.

3) i didn't want a chrome battery, as they're wasteful

4) but, i have a secret trick i can use at the sobeys and the freshco, if i can find a scale at one of them, specifically.

extensive googling gave me two choices in town for aaa battery scales, at that price range: a $15 used scale from a seller on kijiji and a $19.99 option at factory direct that i only barely had the cash for. the only sobeys in town is at the edge of town, albeit on my normal bike route, and they don't advertise items online. so, my best option was to get to the sobeys, try to find a scale there and then look around at other stores if it wasn't possible.

this diversion ruined the morning, but it worked out because there was an unexpected rain storm that came in very early in the day, anyways. so, if i had left at 5:00ish like i wanted, i would have just gotten caught in the thunderstorm; i actually had to wait until close to 9:00 for it to really pass, and the day didn't really start to warm up until close to noon, although we did get another very hot day, in the end. first things first, i went on a bike ride out to the edge of town (for the second time that waking day), and hit the sobey's on the way back. they did not have a scale, but they had tomatoes and limes and beets and margarine, which i then hauled around to several locations: the zehr's had what i wanted but for more than $30, the food basics did not have what i wanted, the metro was no use, the goodwill store was no use, the other zehr's had the item on sale for $23 + tax (still too much) and the value village had a pile of bathroom scales for $5.00 each and nothing i could use in a kitchen at a reasonable delta. realizing i was probably stuck with the kijiji ad, i decided to stop at the bank to see if i could find a way to get $15 out, with less than $20 in the account.

...and, it turns out i had miscalculated: i had $20.77 in my account. 

out of all the options, that immediately made the factory direct scale, at $19.99, the most workable. with the $5 in my pocket, i just had enough.

so, i went all the way home, found my sewing machine and my headset waiting for me on the front porch, finally put my food away, got my calcium up with a bowl of yogurt and got out to the factory direct where i picked up the scale and was ready to get back home, after making a second quick stop at the grocery store, for a couple of items i had missed the first time around.

at that point, it was still relatively early, but i had a few extra trips to make. first, i had to get to my doctor's office to pick up my signed name and gender change forms. next, i needed to find some avocados and some flax seed bread, and then i could go home. but, now, i have to buy these items at the freshco or the sobey's because my account is empty, and guess who didn't have any flax bread? at all?

it was still beautiful out, so i went all the way to the sobey's (for the third time) to look for flax bread and did not find it there. i checked a few stores on the way back and did not find it there, either. it was after 22:00 before i made it back and had little choice but to shower and sleep when i did, after spending most of the previous 36 hours walking or bicycling.

and, sleep i did.

19:28

the last couple of days are actually a little blurry due to all of the sleeping, but what i remember doing is trying to get something to eat after i got out of the shower on thursday night (including making a salad with the new scale) and needing a few tries at it before waking up with intent on saturday morning. there was couch sleeping, documentary watching and potato chip eating, as i had to try out the new flavours of cheese/ketchup (which tasted exactly like ketchup) and smart food/dill pickle (which tasted exactly like dill pickle). i dunno; maybe i got some factory defects. some cleaning and some laundry was done on friday, and i must have taken some iron in the afternoon, but it was mostly spent eating and sleeping.

i tried to get up very early on saturday morning and did manage to get some things in order, including cleaning up the mess from the broken scale, vacuuming, tidying up various things i had sitting around (including the inverter tester i can't power up and some excess ram), renewing my oesp, checking my cra information for tax rebate updates and then plugging in my new headset on the 90s laptop, where i found myself face to face with something that left me depressed and bedridden for days.

the initial symptom was that i couldn't get anything to play back through foobar, which was throwing a weird error at me when i tried to choose the output device. so, i couldn't test the headphones because i couldn't get foobar to work. i decided to try to reinstall the drivers, and got a group policy error on reboot that i've seen on several of my computers recently and have come to take as evidence of tampering, for the reason that i have completely disabled group policy in the images. that is, i should get a group policy error if somebody tries to install a group policy because there is no way for group policy to function. i explained this previously; anybody trying to hack my xp installs should get a lot of error messages, which i should see relics of when i use the machine, and this is sort of the classic sign i've been bumping into, recently.

so, i decided to just reinstall, hoping it would fix the driver problem. the result of this was that the reinstall came up with an ntldr missing error.

now, this install media was certainly aging - i believe it was burned in 2010 - but the fact is that i had reinstalled with this media not more than two weeks previously. why was it broken, all of a sudden? on observing the disc, i was able to observe a scratch on it.

so, first i get a group policy error that indicates tampering, and now my install media is scratched, so i can't reinstall. what are these fucking idiot cops up to, now?

the answer was simple enough: i burned another install media, and it worked just fine. that also gave me another opportunity to double check the scripting in the install process. after the install, i loaded foobar and it came up with the same error. what the fuck?

i had to google the memory dump, but it turns out that i had dismantled direct x (on purpose) and that foobar 0.9 or later requires direct x to launch, even if it doesn't use it to play back files. oops. the solution was to downgrade to foobar 0.8. so, then i was able to test the headset, and what i noticed was that it sounded quiet and distant.

at first, i thought maybe it was the headset that wasn't working, so i tested it by plugging it in to the chromebook, and it did work. so, i plugged my beat up backup sennheisers into the 90s laptop, which were working properly in that jack no less than two weeks ago, and i picked up a similar short in the jack. specifically, the jack was not aligned properly on the board, all of a sudden.

i then picked the laptop up and noticed the tell-tale sign of physical tampering: a crack on the chassis underneath the audio jacks. the fucking idiot cops disassembled my 20 year-old laptop and predictably broke it. fuck.

so, i went back to my new headphones and tried to jiggle them around a little bit. the 1/8th jack on these headphones is smaller than my beat up sennheisers, so it doesn't fit in as snugly, and that's decisive on the damaged jack, which requires a larger contact to compensate. the microphones does work, as well, but there's a distinct ground loop coming out of the microphone jack on the board that makes it very noisy during use.

a ground loop only exists when two competing power sources are present on the same audio circuit. i'm a sound nerd, remember. that means there's an external power source in the board. that is, the cops installed a battery powered listening device on the microphone jack and it's creating all kinds of noise on the line.

yes - the idiot cops took apart my 90s laptop, installed a listening device and made it abundantly obvious by (1) breaking the jack and (2) introducing a ground loop on the microphone input. worse, my ip phone is sitting right beside the computer, making it obvious that i'm not using the microphone on it except (potentially) as an emergency backup. fuck...

my position on this catastrophe is as follows: breaches of privacy aside, i'm baffled by the incompetence. i've explained this a few times - if there was any justification for spying on me, i'd have already killed the spies, by now. it's far too obvious. that they're able to get away with such ham-fistedly botched operations, and repeatedly, clearly indicates that i'm not very dangerous. anybody involved in any sort of organized crime wouldn't tolerate this kind of bullshit. not only have they broken multiple computers, but i can frequently hear them in the background via echoes and relics on the headphones. now, they've introduced a ground loop on the microphone jack in what is otherwise a very clean circuit, with no other potential sources of noise.

but, that's not what depressed me; what depressed me was that my 20 year old, museum piece, antique laptop just took some damage, and that i don't know how much damage the device can handle before it dies. i'll be very sad if i lose this device over the depraved behaviour of idiot cops breaking into my house, and almost certainly without a valid warrant.

i do not want them to come back and "fix" the device. so, it has a dirty listening device on the mic jack; whatever, i won't use the mic jack, then. just leave it there, please. if it has a battery, as must be the case due to the ground loop, it will die out in time. for now, i'd rather just not touch the jack. that's fine.

as for the short in the headphone jack, i can jimmy it in place, but it's not sustainable. sadly, that will never work properly again.

so, i found myself back in bed on saturday afternoon, upset about this perpetual harassment by utterly incompetent idiot cops that i appear to have no ability to stop, and that just gets worse as more and more evidence that there's no reason for it builds up, on their side.

19:29

i was awake again on saturday night, but it wasn't for long; i don't know if i was still exhausted, suffering from the caffeine withdrawal that sets in when i've gotten into these eat-sleep loops recently or just utterly depressed due to this bullshit that won't end, but i just got something to eat and went back to sleep. this pattern repeated itself several times on sunday, but i was able to finally get up to get a coffee on monday morning, when i started back up where i had left off last week by reading over posts going back to early june to check for typos and other things i don't like. you can read through my posts on monday the 20th to see the ways i was distracted, but i was finally able to get through most of the posts before stopping to eat breakfast and then going to sleep. i picked up where i left off on tuesday afternoon, but didn't quite finish; i stopped to shower after my graphics tablet came in about midday, then stopped to eat a salad and found myself back in bed once again. and, here i am at the end of another ranty day on wednesday and about to stop to eat....

i wanted to spend this week doing minimal legal stuff and making a handful of calls to various places. i'll have to do that tomorrow, now.

once i get through that, i can finally take a look at the chromebook.

now that the tablet is in, i should be able to get back to the quantum physics stuff, although i'll need to build a new windows image, first. i've thought about what to do about the microphone on the 90s laptop, and while i'm pissed off about the situation, i'm deciding i want to just leave it alone - i don't want to try to get around it with a usb soundcard, for example, partly because i don't want them to open the machine, again. i really don't want to touch that device, at all, as i don't want to give any idiot cops any more excuses to break it. this is not something that any human should ever have to deal with, but here i am.

so, wasted week aside, i think i'm ready to go in the eating room and i think i've got minimal work to do in the bedroom, to get it running again as a typing space.

19:47

thursday, june 23, 2022

wikipedia is a good idea, in theory, but it suffers from over policing, by a self-appointed collection of failures and losers that are unusually prone to accepting bad theories. who is going to volunteer to police wikipedia? the answer is the people least qualified to do so. so, again, we have the dunning-kruger effect at work, and there's likely little way out of it besides hiring qualified editors, which undoes the nature of the site.

or, at least, that's the naive interpretation.

i'm actually rather convinced - and i've pointed this out before - that there are governments working these pages, trying to control knowledge for their own purposes and to advance political agendas. so, the idea that kiev was founded by khazars may be incredibly stupid, void of evidence and thoroughly ridiculed by academia as a racist fringe hypothesis, but the standard normanist hypothesis does not align with the cia's strategic initiatives in the region, so they go to the wikipedia site to revise history to better suit their needs. further, tactically important pages are watched over by operatives like hawks, so that any attempt to correct the revisionism gets immediately deleted. you can post the best sources in the world, and they'll just delete it anyways and tell you your sources are unreliable - and then push garbage sources that experts thoroughly reject, as replacements.

what it means is that you really do have to do your own research. what i've argued in the past is that wikipedia is a good example of crowd sourcing, that it actually has a very strong level of peer review and that it's primary usefulness, like any compendium of knowledge, is to provide external sources. so, wikipedia is a good start, and usually good enough; if it's not good enough, it can get you started along the way. recently, due to this self-appointed police force suffering from dunning-kruger, or due to the influence of governmental bodies watching over it, you can't even rely on it as a body of decent references, anymore. good references get deleted if they challenge the politicized narrative. there's not a way out, other than to professionalize it.

the khazars in kiev thing is just an extreme example - the idea is laughable. it's beyond debunked, it's a joke. but, you can't fix it - the site won't let you.

3:37

this lithuanian claim that it's not their fault because the eu made them do it is not an acceptable argument.

lithuania is a sovereign country and it needs to take responsibility for it's behaviour, not blame it on the eu.

10:04

so, i'm updating this to include the iron numbers and the calcitonin results.

	2021										2022
	m	a	m	j	j	a	s	o	n	d	j	f	m	a	m	j	j	a	s	o	n	d
cholesterol	3.93	-	-	-	3.99	3.8	4.15	4.01/3.83	4.14/4.02	4.14/3.67	3.54/3.8	3.78/3.68			3.42
triglycerides	.87	-	-	-	.95	.89	1.41	1.05/0.94	1.09/1.32	1.86/0.73	2.26/0.75	0.69/1.02			0.42
hdl	1.69	-	-	-	1.84	1.59	1.73	1.42/1.55	1.37/1.42	1.51/1.74	1.75/1.72	1.74/1.69			1.55
ldl	1.85	-	-	-	1.72	1.81	1.78	2.11/1.85	2.28/2.00	1.79/1.6	<0.8/1.75	1.73/1.52			1.68
non-hdl	2.24	-	-	-	2.15	2.21	2.42	2.59/2.28	2.77/2.60	2.63/1.93	1.79/2.09	2.04/1.99			1.87
wbc	8.7/8.4	9.9/9.0	-	-	?	7.0	7.6	6.9/6.9	7.8	11.3/8.2	6.7/6.4	7.4/7.1		5.3	6.4
rbc 4: yellow 4.2: normal	3.97/4.25	4.11/4.38	-	-	4.17	4.12	4.33	4.47/4.2	4.28	4.55/4.19	4.3/4.22	4.42/4.26		4.4	4.13
hemoglobin 120: normal	132/140	133/142	-	-	139	136	141	138/138	139	144/131	141/133	140/136		145	132
hematocrit normal: 0.36	.382/.404	.394/.424	-	-	.405	.398	.418	.417/.402	.405	0.431/0.393	.409/.396	.417/.404		.412	0.392
mcv normal: 100	96.1/95.1	95.8/97.0	-	-	97	96.8	96.6	93/95.7	94.6	94.7/94	95/94	94/95		93.7	95
mch	33.1/32.9	32.4/32.5	-	-	33.3	33.2	32.7	30.9/32.8	32.5	31.8/31.3	32.7/31.5	31.7/32		32.9	32.0
mchc	345/346	338/335	-	-	?	343	338	331/343	344	335/333	344/336	336/337		352	337
rdw	13.3/13.5	13.0/13.1	-	-	?	13	12.3	11.7/12.9	12.6	13.4/12.0	13.2/11.7	11.7/13		12.8	11.9
platelet	199/187	171/171	-	-	?	175	167	168/150	155	188/185	159/184	187/175		166	181
reticulocytes	-	-/42	-	-	53	56	46	35	33	33	39	41		43	49
vitamin d	87	-	-	-	109	72	64	72/83	78	64/71	61/74	74/80		102	77
estradiol	363/388	-	-	-	-	563	443	432	777	343	578	416		307	691
testosterone	0.9	-	-	-	-	-	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4	<0.4		1.4	<0.4
progesterone	1.9	-	-	-	-	-	<0.5	0.7	0.5	0.9	<0.5	3.7		62.5	21
fsh	<0.2	-	-	-	-	-	0.2	0.1	<0.1	-	<0.1	0.1		0.5	0.2
lh	<0.2	-	-	-	-	-	0.1	0.1	0.1	-	0.1	<0.1		<0.2	0.1
ferritin	12/9	6/17	21	-	29	43	28	40	42	59	33	28		59	64
tibc	-	69.5	-	-	65.7	62.9	64.7	58.9	58.2	63.2	57.4	58.7		57.9	53.2
iron	-	9.6	-	-	22.7	37.3	19.3	28.3	37.3	32.5	13.1	14.8		28.2	17.2
iron sat	-	0.14	-	-	0.35	0.59	0.3	.48	0.64	0.51	0.23	0.25		0.49	0.32
transferrin	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.59	2.29	2.38	2.49	2.31	2.39		2.42	?
pth	-	-	-	5.5	-	6.2	5.9	6.2	5.5	8.0	6.3	5.7		6.9	6.4
tsh	0.92	-	-	-	-	0.94	1.22	1.67	1.48	1.07	1.39	0.97		1.26	0.92
calcitonin	-	-	-	<0.6	-	-	-	-	0.6	-	0.8	-		0.7	0.6
alp	61	-	-	63	59	50	60	59 /55	47	50	60	58		55	67

the fact that the tibc is coming down as the ferritin goes up is a good sign, and i should probably interpret the other two as somewhat random, with the caveat that i took this test after a bike ride in the heat, a few weeks ago. i had taken an iron pill not more than a few hours previously. on previous tests, my circulating iron tended to come in very high directly after taking the iron. so, is the fact that the iron was a little lower after the bike ride supportive of the sports anemia hypothesis, or does it suggest that the hemolysis is actually getting worse?

the transferrin test was apparently skipped. oops.

i'm going to make it a point to get the iron tested next time immediately after a dosage and without intervening exercise.

11:17

you know why they call it estonia, right?

that's right - it's east of sweden.

the estonians appear to have called themselves a variant of mari, which is a finnic group in modern central asia.

11:41

so, that finally catches me up and i need to stop wasting days at a time narrating the last several days. again, i think i get over this hump when i fix the typing problem. i'm so close....

i need to set a goal: no more typing until the typing environment is set up. the pieces are essentially all there, now. i keep thinking it'll take a few minutes, and it never does. but, i know i'm also suffering from low drive, at the moment. i think that will resolve itself when i get back to it.

i have to get a usb sound card for the 90s laptop, which means i should get a hub for it, as well. as is the case with the headset, these are utility devices that i can use for years into the future, even if the 90s laptop ends up no longer being functional for this use. together, it should cost something like $20.

i just need a headphone out on the device, one way or the other, and the only reasonable way to do it is via a $10 usb out. they're simple devices that just have 1/8" in and outs that just plug into a usb port and replace the standard jacks on a soundcard. then, i need to get a hub so i don't lose usb functionality, which is the reason i bought a headset with the 1/8" jacks rather than a usb headset in the first place. it's fucking annoying, but so be it.

i'm extremely upset about this, but there's no use in dwelling on it. i have to just fix it and move on.

but, i really, really need to plead with these fucking idiot cops: stop breaking my laptops.

i don't use a phone because i don't want one. it's not complicated; i use the internet to type, and i don't have much interest in humans, so phones are not of much interest to me. phones just don't have the functionality i desire in a computing device. there's a cell phone in my apartment on the side - it has no service, and i never even turn it on. i just set up a cisco voip phone for outgoing calls, and i only turn it on when i'm using it. this is what i want from a phone: something physical, something wired, something that sits in one place and can be approached to make a call when required, and then left there in that stationary, physical place when it's not being used. i use a voice mail service for incoming calls, which allows me to screen them. i was never a phone person, and i never liked receiving incoming calls - i like the screening process inherent in forcing people to leave a message. that's how i choose to communicate with humans, when i have to do so. there's nothing confusing or complicated about this.

if you want to listen to my calls, i don't even care. i call doctors, mostly. so, go get a fucking warrant and listen to the calls at the server level. i log in to voip.ms to make calls. it's a perfectly legal commercial service and they should respond to warrants. there's no reason to put a physical listening device in my laptop, that's fucking retarded.

i need to send the rcmp some documents about the karen case and that's what i'll be doing for the rest of the day.

13:55

if the fascist pope dare set foot in canada, he should be arrested and charged with crimes against humanity.

the pope is not welcome here.

19:27

friday, june 24, 2022

"we need to elect officials who will do that (restore roe v wade)" - joe biden reacting to today's ridiculous court ruling, which is potentially going to start a civil war in the united states.

well, i guess that's settled, then - the only person who can undo this, and who was elected, says we need to elect people who can undo this. 

again: i don't understand how this person computes information presented to him.

22:27

if mr. biden thinks we need to elect somebody else president, i think i agree with him.

22:38

that was a long day.

i was hoping to get a celiac test result (i'm not celiac.), but what they did was a total lga, which came in normal. so, they'll need to do a celiac test, after that. i don't know if they'll call me, or what.

22:48

the other results were the same as i've been getting for a while: hemoglobin and rbcs are a tad below normal (which i'm willing to accept as a consequence of low testosterone. they're in normal female ranges. the issue of concern is ferritin not stabilizing, not low hemoglobin), b12 is relatively high after adjusting my diet for it, they did alt and it remains low (i'm doing monthlies for alp) and reticulocytes just won't come up to levels that suggest recovery from anemia. the irf is at the same level as the previous result, but the range is dramatically different; the previous lab suggested 11% was high, whereas this one suggests it's normal. ferritin was not tested.

as far as i could tell, the only tests that was not picked up was copper (which should be high due to estrogen).

i should also get ultrasound results in next week that will test for an enlarged spleen and kidneys.

i think that my next ferritin results should be very important. the last ferritin was the highest it's been yet, but it was only 64. that's more than enough to keep me alive, but i'm now getting to the point where this needs to start normalizing, or i need to start asking why it isn't.

if everything else is normal and the ferritin won't jump into normal values, the really narrow focus needs to be on why; if the ferritin does finally jump into the 90s or over 100, i need to just accept that my iron stores were really dangerously low and really pay very close attention to maintaining them.

23:01

saturday, june 25, 2022

i would certainly hope that the states in the south that are going to pass laws restricting access to abortion (or already have) also immediately increase funding for social services (adoption, welfare, subsidized housing, access to education) so that they have some way to react to the oncoming influx of unwanted children by desperately poor brown people, other than let them descend into poverty, malnutrition and crime. without massive state spending, those pictures from ethiopia of starving black children are going to be what downtown new orleans looks like in five years. i also hope it intends to increase policing resources to deal with the rise in crime created by unwanted children being discarded by disinterested parents, and to otherwise enforce the law on desperate black women seeking to evade a life of slavery serving a child that they don't want. on top of that will be ensuing issues of migration (blacks moving north, when they can), as well as continuing problems with white flight; one of the less predictable outcomes of such a law may be white flight out of regions overtaken by a population boom of black children, brought on by desperately poor black women that are no longer able to control their populations by access to abortions.

when i talk about a civil war resulting from this, i'm not exaggerating.

they got what they wanted. now, they have to pay for it - or suffer the consequences of it.

so, what exactly will the white population of kentucky do when it realizes that the result of it's abortion ban is that the blacks are now outbreeding them at a rate of 5 to 1, and they're turning to unrest because they don't have access to sufficient welfare or child placement services?

6:23

the longterm result of eliminating access to abortion could very well be the end of white dominance in america, and the lingering white supremacist republican minority getting overwhelmingly outbred by blacks, south asians and mexicans.

6:25

the reality is that eliminating access to abortion - particularly in the south - isn't going to make middle class white people more likely to have more than 1 or 2 children. that idea is moronic. i don't know why clarence thomas would go out of his way to save white america from ensuing collapse. sure, he can be an honoury white if he'd like. but, that idea doesn't make any sense.

it's the poor blacks and mexicans that are going to end up breeding at higher rates, and that will just make it harder to maintain minority white rule.

hey, they got what they wanted.

now, they'll have to suffer the consequences of it.

6:28

thank you, your honour *cough*arywhite*cough*

6:29

if i was an upper class white republican in kentucky, i would consider few things to be more in my self-interest than ensuring that black women have sufficient access to abortion.

6:41

and, what is the most predictable way that a poor black woman will feed her unwanted children in a society without access to sufficient social services?

prostitution.

they appear to want to restrict access to contraceptives as well, which is baffling,

the white christian moral majority will have to deal with the consequences of it's incomprehensible stupidity.

8:06

now, am i to conclude that our honorary white clarence thomas is in fact the mastermind of a nefarious plot to fund the school to prison pipeline, to maximize the amount of prison slave labourers available to the prison-industrial complex?

it seems a little far-fetched, even if it's what the white minority tries to do to adjust.

there's a lot of angles to this, and the underlying logic may be sound in abstraction, and it may lead us to the entities that actually profit, but we have to face the facts: this is a decision written primarily by an old black man that is being driven strictly by religious conviction. white supremacist capitalism may be the winner here, and may profit from the outcome, if it gets to work in containing the fallout immediately (and if it can do so without losing the support of white voters, which is exceedingly tentative), but the root cause of the problem is the zealousness of religion run amok, without boundaries to restrict it's influence on secular society.

that is what the rest of the world need take note of: the prison-industrial complex may take advantage of this, and may succeed despite the odds, but this is what happens when you allow deference to religion in society, rather than put it in it's proper place as barbarism and backwardsness. religion is not a harmless personal choice to be left to one's own devices, it's a dangerous ticking time bomb that is inherently political in nature and that hangs over our advanced society, as the cliched sword of damocles, as a constant threat to turn the clocks back.

8:14

ukraine will never be admitted to the eu.

9:15

the conservative leadership process in alberta is demonstrating pretty clearly that the political class in alberta is entirely out of touch with reality. this appears to be a coup by the ucp leadership, which has been repeatedly demonstrated to not be in line with alberta public opinion, in aggregate. the party is run by rural people, and they may be popular out in the farms and the sticks, but they don't represent the majority opinion of albertans.

it looks like what's going to happen is that they're going to push all of the moderates out of the party in an attempt to capture a kind of pure conservatism. it's predictable, because this is how conservatives think; it's this us v them, barricade mentality and you need to constantly prove you're in the elect by these arcane purity tests. they're seeking the source of the nile, and are going to drown in the lake when they find it.

so, i'm going to make a prediction: this process is going to produce an extreme zealot that will be beloved by the ucp membership, and despised by albertans, who will elect an ndp majority in disgust.

and, i would keep a close eye on the potential of jason kenney to a return to federal politics, because he's one of a small handful of people in this country that poses justin trudeau a serious threat. the ucp membership is so right-wing that they don't even reflect the views of conservative voters. this is not a death knell for jason kenney, it's a moment of reckoning for the ucp.

you can't kill kenney, you bastards.

9:29

so, our dear dauphin, mr. trudeau, is in africa, positioning himself as the leader of the commonwealth, and trying to protect the colonies from being disrupted by subversive influences from russia, who are spreading lies about the effects of western capitalism in the region.

it really is just like old times.

perhaps he shouldn't have gone to such great lengths to undo the effects of his father's more enlightened policies and replace them with bankrupt white supremacist thatcherian christian charity work, if he sought to generate influence and actual respect in africa, even if it's just for the benefit of canadian capital. it's too bad the castros are gone.

gone are the days when canadians went to africa to help africans help themselves; today, we are a neo-liberal country that simply donates money to imperialist religious institutions like the red cross that then carry out charity work in the same old tradition of white supremacism that all charity work exists within, and merely to advance the interests of western capital. our pmo doesn't even understand the difference between development aid and charity, at this point; in the embrace of thatcherism amongst it's liberal bourgeois class, canada has forgotten what development even is. to these pampered children of past generations of the ruling class, it was just charity, all along - just noblesse oblige, just "giving back".

so, africa would be wise to avoid the influence of this incarnation of canada's government, as it has entirely abandoned the more enlightened policies of our country's past. these days, our government acts strictly as a layer of industry, and is merely trying to compete against the capital of other countries, as it secures access to resources. we have no interest in the development of africa, or in helping africa build itself, and that is a large change in how we used to think. we're just there as america's brown-nosing, cock-sucking lap dog to arouse anti-russian and anti-chinese sentiment to make way for western capital. africa should know better than to trust the old face of british imperialism, or it's new canadian presentation of what are the same old toryist british ideas in the form of today's neo-imperialist commonwealth.

the chinese are certainly not a panacea, and they offer little alternative to capitalist exploitation in the short run, but they are at the least going to leave development on the ground as collateral to their investments in the region - they're not merely handing out charity to the poor, inferior and wretched, sunburned africans, to attempt to win votes in the racist white middle class back home.

23:28

sunday, june 26, 2022

i've noticed this a few times, looking at pictures of the saudi dictator, mbs - i think he's autistic. it's just based on looking at him, granted. but, he seems to really look as retarded as he behaves.

i've been concerned for a long time about the saudis starting a world war. i am convinced that the function of the next world war will be to dismantle the dictatorship in saudi arabia and remove the illegitimate ruling family from power. i mean, it's not a country, it's a dictatorship run by a crime family - they have no legitimacy as rulers in the modern world, whatsoever.

this realization - even if it's just based on pictures - that mbs is plausibly autistic (that is, literally retarded) should be taken rather seriously, in terms of how the dictatorship in the country is approached, moving forwards.

0:26

i'm just finishing the fall of civilizations rewatch up (these videos have been edited, but they're works of art, and the creator has the right to do that. i'm disappointed in the direction taken, but i don't have grounds to criticize that the way i have grounds to criticize bad information at a site like wikipedia, which is supposed to be objective. i can just point it out and tune out. and, i might, soon.) and i'm asking the question: has anybody put together a link between samaria and sumeria?

i'm just curious. really.

i've pointed out before that jerusalem seems to have actually been a sumerian colony - that the story of settlement from the east is actually probably right. the archaeology rejects anything in the bible before the return as having any historical value; it is not even clear that the captivity even happened at all, and it rather seems that the people that moved into israel during the return were a different people than the ones removed by the assyrians. whatever happened, the process ended with the establishment of an iranian sky-god religion in the semitic-speaking region of the levant. the jews are essentially an iranian culture and race, rather than a semitic one. they just speak a semitic language. what i'm getting at is that if the story of abraham wandering in from the east has any remote relevance to history, it has to do with an understanding of the ancient settling of the region by sumerians, and probably has no relevance on the people we today call the jews. but, it does seem to have something to it, regardless.

the ancient references - and i mean very ancient - to jerusalem call the city by a name that is something like ursalem, the jew seems to have been a verbal slur (not an insult, a linguistic slur) added afterwards, by people that spoke languages different than the original inhabitants. so, we have this root word of "ur" at the start that seems to be inherently sumerian and is found in many of the sumerian cities. remember: i connect the sumerians to the caucasus mountains of the north and think they are not a linguistic isolate but actually have a linguistic relative in the language of hurrian, and that we'd be able to see that clearly if we could reconstruct both languages well enough. while the semites moved south in the historical period, the semitic homeland is likely in ethiopia, and they would have moved northwards from egypt and around the desert before coming into contact with sumerians, from their north and west. so, the semites were really from the south - and that is an established academic position. the sumerians, on the other hand, would have initially formed a part of an archaeological complex connected to the proto-caucasian tribes in the north that included sites like catal huyuk and gobekli tepe. so, these ancient sites in turkey and the levant would be sumerian/caucasian, but they would not be semitic, as the semites did not enter the region for millennia, afterwards - they lived in the desert, while civilization was being developed by caucasians, and only migrated in with their herds, afterwards. this argument is actually backed up by the genetic work done in the area, which demonstrates a caucasian substratum associated with the spread of farming that is decidedly not semitic in nature. this caucasian substratum traces from the caucasus mountains and into turkey, and then spreads both into europe and south into the middle east. when history sets in, we have these caucasian sumerians from the north as agriculturalists in the south and these sheep-herding/nomadic barbarian semites from the south in the north, and they are constantly fighting against each other, until the semites eventually win via outbreeding the caucasians and then taking over with force. it would follow that caucasians, including armenians, are the real indigenous group to the area, and semites are invaders from north and east africa that enforced their language and culture on the region through the use of violence.

as per usual, the internet is essentially useless when trying to do academic research on levantine archaeology. try googling some search terms. you're not going to find much besides christian ignorance and biblical origin myths. it's depressing what has become of this tool that was, at one point, actually so useful.

i was able to find this, though, and i think it summarizes the actual academic consensus on the matter of north levantine orgins:

i've embedded that at my own drive share because i've noticed that documents seem to disappear from the internet entirely when i link to them. apologies to the authors.

that is, israel did not exist - at all - until after the assyrian invasions. the northern part of the region was a phoenician (canaanite) colony, and the southern part wasn't occupied at all. remember: the romans carried out a comprehensive genocide of carthage and phoenicia (canaan) several centuries later, to the point that they destroyed any writing that referenced them, in any context. they were purposefully and systematically removed from history, along with all context to place them in. the romans seem to have spared the jewish scriptures, probably because they decided they were of so little value as a historical source that nobody would bother taking them seriously, anyways. oops. but, you can't disentangle later roman persecution of jews from the cathaginian genocide, either. even the idea that jews eat babies is based on a memory of carthaginian child sacrifice, which the archaeology demonstrates did actually happe, lthough it should be noted that pagan child sacrifices to roman gods during periods of famine or war continued in italy until as late as the 10th century ce, so the romans were actually being ridiculous hypocrites on the matter. specifically, the italians seem to have reacted to the broadly liberating germanic invasions by returning to the old ways, at least at first. they also seem to have sacrificed their children during malaria epidemics.

so, samaria was a phoenician city at the time of the assyrian invasion and israel did not exist, at all, until it was invented as a myth by a people with an unclear connection to the land, and which moved in after the persians conquered the assyrians (i guess there was a brief period of babylonian hegemony, first). the assyrian period was marked by wide scale ethnic cleansing, population replacement and forced migration; the persians continued the process, but they were kind to the jews, for whatever reason. but, when was it founded, and by whom?

samaria is apparently a latin transliteration of a hellenization of a hebrew word, shimron, which they claim had to do with a hilltop. i never take these ideas of naming cities after geographical areas seriously, especially not if they've already been inhabited, which turns out to be the case - if you google the more useful term of "tel shimron", you can get some actual science on the topic, and they claim the area was inhabited going back to the bronze age, which is roughly contemporaneous with the late sumerians in southern mesopotamia, but by a wave of unrelated semites moving in from the south. it wouldn't be possible to try to figure out if the semites named the region after sumerians, nor is it clear how similar shimron really is to the again transliterated sumeru, which was probably pronounced more like shimeru.

i think it's an interesting question worth throwing out there, anyways. acknowledging that the region seems to have been settled by invading semites during the bronze age, and that there is little evidence of settlement in the region before hand, how much evidence is there of sumerian migration into the northern levant or of a remnant population centre of proto-sumerians or hurrians existing in the northern levant or in turkey into the bronze age, and how much of a connection between sumeria and samaria is actually evidence-based, rather than false cognate?

i'm going to tentatively deduce false cognate on the surface, with the potentiality of a deeper connection, if further research is done. we've seen this kind of thing before - what seems like false cognate becomes upheld upon further investigation.

i strongly suspect that the late semitic expansion into the region has been misinterpreted by western scholars due to a bias towards biblical sources, and then upheld by islamicists pushing concepts of arab supremacy, and that there is likely a broad caucasian/sumerian substratum throughout much of the middle east that derives directly from the early farmers and has not been properly understood. i wonder if the ethnonym of "samaria" might be properly placed within that deep underlying substratum.

8:17

my kurdish origin hypothesis is that they were actually iranian refugees resulting from the arab colonization of iraq, after the genocidal expansions of the early arabic conquests. the areas that today make up iraq would have been a part of the iranian heartland going back to the time of cyrus; the people would have existed in a hellenized kind of iranian culture and would have spoken their own iranian dialect. we don't have written references, as the iranians didn't write much. the kurdish language doesn't seem to have existed until after the arabic onslaught, and the word of kurd basically translates as "refugee". i'm just applying occam's razor, here - the easiest solution is that they were called iranian refugees because they were actually iranian refugees.

it is possible that the hurrians themselves were partly composed of sumerian refugees that fled mesopotamia, on the invasions of the semitic akkadians, in a very similar manner. history does repeat in this manner - invasions and upheavals happen in the same ways, and refugees follow in the same paths. this basic conflict between invading semites and indigenous caucasians continued for centuries, into the historical period; the assyrians were still fighting the agglutinative-speakers, when they were carrying out their wars against the urartians, who were probably the last of the sumerians.

it does pose the question: why would the sumerians have escaped to the north and not in another direction? could it be that they knew where they came from, and retreated?

this is all speculative, but i think that it's correct. it would require excavations by teams of atheists and secularists to actually come to correct conclusions - you can't allow religionists authority over these things, as they'll fuck everything up.

9:05

and, i've pointed this out a few times before - the roman sources from the 7th and 8th centuries are not ambiguous on the point: the muslim armies were not made of men of tanned or olive skin complexion, the armies that defeated the romans and persians were black - as black as the night. ethiopian, somalian, nigerian black. 

it's easy to again imagine a model of black-skinned semitic speakers moving north into caucasian-inhabited areas and both blending into the population and adapting to different levels of sun exposure, while leaving their language on people that had much lighter-skin than they did. but, to accept such a thing, you must undo your christian programming, undo your white supremacist programming and, now, also undo your assumptions of white hierarchy tied into critical race theory.

the semitic languages developed in africa and the migrant speakers that brought the language into the middle east were black.

10:14

there is a big problem with arab supremacists and muslim nationalists not wanting to accept this. but, the facts are actually pretty clear and the issue is really not that ambiguous.

while it is true that a dialect called amharic was back-introduced into ethiopia, the language we think is closest to proto-semitic is actually an earlier ethiopian dialect called ge'ez. ge'ez is not just older than arabic, it's older than hebrew, older than phoenician and roughly as old as assyrian and babylonian. so, we have a semitic language in ethiopia that is much older than any known migrations there. it very strongly suggests that a proto-semitic was spoken in ethiopia or perhaps in sudan.

further, the dating placing semites in the middle east in the 4th or 5th millennia bce is entirely void of any sort of evidence. there's no reference to akkadian in the sumerian records before about 2500 bce, and it is exceedingly unlikely that there were semites in the persian gulf before 3000 bce. the archaeology to support semites in the region at remote dates just doesn't exist, it's based on biblical creationist assumptions and islamic nationalism. the science says they were late arriving sheep-herding migrants from the south.

more likely is that the earliest semitic movements into the middle east only came from africa in the early 3rd millenium bce (3000-2500 bce), and that the earliest history of the semites is tied to what the egyptians called the kushites, and not to the farming complexes in the middle east.

10:43

the hebrew origin story of a movement of peoples from egypt, while obviously a myth, may actually not be a bad allegory for the general movement of semitic speakers into the region, c. 3000 bce.

10:58

this is the result of the ssw, which saw the polar vortex breakup and cold air scattering outwards, and not due to some piddling ocean current off the coast of ecuador.

and, i told you this would happen - the arctic air has disappeared. it completely imploded. now, the area is just getting nailed by the sun, on a weird angle, due to the earth's tilt.

historically, what has happened is that the sunlight eventually ceases, and the coldness comes back due to the near total absence of solar radiation for several months around the winter solstice. the polar vortex will rise again.

but, for now, this solar effect has eliminated the concept of the arctic, and this is the result of it.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/records-may-fall-as-impressive-heat-wave-roasts-the-arctic-circle

19:07

does that mean it's not climate change, it's just the sun?

no.

but, right now, it's mostly the sun. in a pre-warming climate, the extremes would be a little bit muted, but the same basic event would have happened.

19:10

it's a little crude, but there's a lot of truth in it; it broadly reflects reality. it's legitimate satire.

i really wish people would stop getting offended (which is really not a valid intellectual response to anything) and start reflecting on the points being made.

this individual is clearly calling out the hypocrisy of the contemporary liberal party, and in doing so he's making a valid point.

19:22

see, this was obvious.

there's no way the ukrainians could have fought off the russians simply with these nazi infantry groups, as long as they did. it seems like the situation is turning over a little, which should hopefully speed it up. the faster this operation completes, the less people will end up dying from it.

the message from the g7 is "well, we're willing to pay lip service to what america labels 'democracy' (and which does not exist in ukraine and never did), but we don't want to pay for it.". the strategic purpose of the provocation by nato was to drag this out as long as possible to bleed the russians dry. so, the americans may find themselves fighting this on their own, soon - which is what happened in vietnam, you'll recall. the french left, leaving the americans to fight their war for them. this is different - this is america's war, it's not europe's war. but, the inevitability is escalation, and more and more nato (or just american) troops sent to ukraine, just like what happened in vietnam. a secret american bombing campaign in belarus is probably also inevitable.

for now, this is confirmation that my deduction was correct: yes, there actually are nato bases on the ground in ukraine, and this is more than a proxy war, but actually a direct conflict. in my mind, that further justifies the russian response. 

nato did not put commandos and bases in ukraine as a defensive act.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/25/us/politics/commandos-russia-ukraine.html

19:41

it's pretty clear at this point that the americans (and canada.) were planning an offensive war against russia, to launch from ukraine, and in a better world would be prosecuted as war criminals for it.

19:45

the setup and potential length of this war is potentially so senseless and so destructive, that one wonders if the proper historical parallel is not even vietnam, but the conclusion of the thousand plus year greco-roman/persian conflict, which ended in the destruction of both empires, and the wholesale conquest of persia by rampaging, genocidal arabs. they bled each other dry, to the point that neither were able to defend themselves against primitive barbarians.

my initial analysis was that the chinese would be smart to take advantage of the situation by seizing strategic regions under russian control. i still expect that this will be the long term result of putin's strategic mistake. but, if this goes on long enough, one wonders if china might be able to just sail into san francisco and walk in.

19:59

in the short term, trying to bleed the russians makes some sense for the americans, strategically.

in the long run, america may find such a tactic to be rather pyrrhic, as it finds itself bled dry, as well.

20:01

this might be easier than anybody thinks, if the democrats can hold the presidency for another term or two, which is possible.

thomas and alito are in their 70s.

they could very well both die soon.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/25/supreme-court-justice-clarence-thomas-released-from-hospital-court-says-00020468

20:22

while the views of ignace kelb are considered legacy nowadays (semites were not in kish at the "dawn of history", but were late invaders into the region from the west, and ultimately came from the southwest), is it a coincidence that the first semitic influence in the region is in the city of kish, when it seems like their origin point was the south of egypt - the land of kush?

the story of the exodus takes place in the early iron age, according to most attempts to reconstruct it, but it is also void of any archaeological backing when tried to place into that time frame. so, the scholarly consensus is that it's just a complete fairy tale - an absolute myth. while the stories of david and solomon appear to be absolute fiction, complete fairy tale, i have to wonder if some archaeological basis to the exodus story may be salvaged by correcting for the chronology to the early bronze age and tying the exodus to the general expansion of semitic speaking peoples from northern africa in the early bronze age.

the existence of egypt standing at the mouth of the nile obviously presents a barrier for semitic people moving northwards, but i need to interject that the egyptians were known to enslave the people to their south and that the language spoken by the kushite people is sort of blurry, other than being generally understood to be afro-asiatic.

it is an entirely plausible hypothesis that the semites may have been enslaved by the egyptians at some distant point in history and released into the desert (either as an act of escape or due to some concept of tolerance, or even out of concerns due to population control) around they year 3000 bce, where they proceeded to conquer sumerian cities like (j)ur-icho and (j)ur-salem on their way to carving out their own space in the region, and then moving south into the arabian desert, and eventually back-migrating into africa.

it explains how they may have gotten through the barrier of egypt at so late a date, at the least.

20:49

egypt was a multicultural and multiethnic society, which was ruled by people of east african, libyan, west asian and even european descent at various points in it's history and which took slaves from any and all directions at it's different points in time.

very early egypt - certainly around 3000 bce - was an almost strictly black society. that would not have stopped them from enslaving the semites to their south, and there's little question that that is something they actually did.

20:53

but, you thought that neolithic farmers moved into egypt from the levant!

basically: no. that's the creation myth in the bible, it's not what the science says.

the science actually suggests that the area known as the levant was occupied by predynastic egyptians, and the cultural interchange between proto-egyptians and proto-sumerians (for, there were no semites in the region, at the time) likely took place in syria. certainly, ideas from turkey found their way to egypt, through this region of cultural interchange. however, there is neither any evidence of a mass migration from africa to turkey, nor any evidence of a back migration from turkey to africa. really, the idea is pretty obtuse on it's face and should have never been taken seriously, to begin with.

the pre-dynastic egyptians have a very clear local derivation from beyond the lower nile. settlements began close to lake victoria and slowly moved north before reaching the nile in a process that mirrored the slow proto-sumerian migration from the anatolian highlands south to the persian gulf. this initial development of egyptian civilization may have taken in ideas from caucasians in west asia, and there was no doubt a flow of ideas in the other direction as well, but the culture is inherently and strictly african in derivation. the main problem in the confused narrative of west asian derivation is actually the fact that everything has to go through a filter of islamic dictatorship that wants egypt to have semitic foundations (and is based on the myth of an early semitic presence in the region, in the first place). the science itself is not ambiguous: the very early egyptians were a black african people that came from the source of the nile.

now, when the egyptians did come into contact with west asians, they got conquered, and more than twice. so, there were west asian - and perhaps even early indo-european - dynasties in early historical egypt. and, yes, cleopatra was 100% pasty white greek. but, these are observations of minimal relevance in understanding semitic origins.

slaves taken in predynastic egypt, which was a black society, would have been taken from the south.

21:16

monday, june 27, 2022

listen, you can't have it both ways - either ukraine's backwards, corrupt system is democratic and russia's therefore is, too or ukraine's "democracy" is a farce, just like russia's is. the systems are fundamentally identical. you take them both as what they are, or you throw them both away.

anybody trying to argue that ukraine is a democracy and russia is not is full of shit and not worth your time to listen to.

1:17

yeah.

i don't think laws against drinking in parks are justified, but i would support introducing heavy fines for littering.

we shouldn't let a few idiots ruin it for everybody else. get somebody patrolling the beach, and explain to them that fines for littering will be enforced.

reference:

"volunteers clean up after vancouver beaches left littered with trash", cbc news, june 26, 2022

1:27

the fine in ontario toronto for such behaviour is $500, and i'd argue that's actually too low.

$5000 is more appropriate.

1:29

i have some typing to do tonight, so i built a playlist. 

why not.

i'd imagine most of the newer music i'd want to listen to nowadays is going to be mostly instrumental music, because young people don't have good politics, anymore, and i don't care about their sex lives. that's what i tend to find - when i go looking for things today, i'm interested in derivative forms of instrumental post-rock, and producery techno built on top of abstract classical forms. and, it's not exactly easy to find, either.

so, here's some (mostly) old songs about the end of the world.

hey, go write me some newer music about the end of the world, then. make it quirky, and give it a bit of a sense of humour, but don't make it bourgeois and sterile and academic and boring, because i won't listen to it. 

but, i think i get that the kids aren't interested in such things, anymore, that the idea of music as a means of political exchange has largely passed, with the shift in technology. what's left is escapism, mostly. it's not exactly that i'm opposed to escapist music - i'd have to label a lot of what i write that way - so much as that i'm mostly looking to escape into different realms than young people are. that's fine, we all age, eventually. i'm not upset about that, i've been aware of a generation gap for a long time, now. that's ok. if i can find some things i like, i can look at that, too - but i know that this style of music in this list with these vocal themes largely simply doesn't exist, anymore, and largely doesn't have an audience, at this point. and, that's why the tunes are all mostly a little older.

i do think we're due for some good apocalyptic music that isn't stupid, though. like, don't tell me to go listen to death metal, or something.

18:42

so, i'm at the end part of filling out my name change forms and realizing that i cannot identify a guarantor.

i would not be able to identify a person that has known me for more than two years at all, with the exception of my doctor (who i don't believe i can use, because he wrote the letter) and my landlord (who meets no professional designation). i'm ridiculously introverted. if these computers or instruments could talk, but alas...

i'm going to have to call them tomorrow and ask how somebody does this when they don't have a guarantor.

22:07

i'm not understating the point.

the only people in the world that are not family and that have known me for two years are my landlord and my doctor. and, i haven't seen any family face to face in almost ten years.

i don't find this bothersome - i don't like humans much and would broadly rather avoid them. but, i'm sick of having an M on my health card, specifically.

22:13

i'm not in the category that hates humans or wants to destroy them. well...maybe i'd relish a destruction event; perhaps i wouldn't brake, if i saw humanity crossing the street ahead of me. maybe i'd let humanity drown, maybe i'd let it starve. but, the disdain is passive.

i'm really more the type that is just exasperated and fed up with humans and wants to escape and hide from them.

i'm more afraid of you than you are of me.

22:19

tuesday, june 28, 2022

ugh. the last thing i wanted last night was a stomach wrench. there was a cold front in - again, it very well might have to do with the anemia, but i've been dealing with this for as long as i can remember and it isn't something new or something life threatening. i had to sleep all night.

i'm working on loose legal stuff and it shouldn't have taken more than a few hours, but whatever. i lost the night and will have to do it today, instead.

6:27

it's an utterly outrageous step into direct fascism and, in fact, the kind of corruption that defines the fake "democracy" that exists in ukraine. we put a primitive barbaric ukrainian that doesn't understand democracy in charge, and she's acting like the representative of a backwards culture that she is.

this just doesn't happen in a democracy.

as it is, i'd call for other countries to retaliate by seizing canadian assets and nationalizing them. i'd love to see some mining assets in south america or africa nationalized by their respective governments and the canadian war criminal investors involved thrown out of the country.

reference:

"canada can now seize, sell off russian assets. what's next?", cbc news, june 27, 2022

6:40

i repeat: the russians (and chinese) have an opportunity to seize some canadian mining assets, here, and they should take advantage of it.

6:42

obviously, it is not canada's responsibility to rebuild ukraine.

if the ukrainians would like to borrow money from canada, they should be doing so at appropriate debt-bearing interest rates. we don't owe them a dime, and should not be sending them anything.

6:45

the conflict of interest on display is profound, and if this woman does not have the self-respect and self-decency to resign, she should be forcibly removed by the party.

6:47

are we to seize american assets to rebuild afghanistan or saudi assets to rebuild syria, or do such dictatorial powers assumed by the minister only apply to conflicts in which she acts as a foreign state agent for a government that is a party to the conflict?

7:36

this is not a law that was passed, it is an absence of law - a breakdown in the rule of law by a corrupt party that has legislated itself above the law, apparently driven by an ideology of extreme russophobia.

7:38

i really, honestly haven't seen much inflation in the cost of food here in windsor. maybe it's the items i'm buying, but i'm actually noticing that fruits and vegetables have been on sale this month. there's been good deals on blueberries, strawberries, blackberries and even red peppers in the stores i've been in, recently. after an initial spike due to a legislated price increase, dairy has also come back down to the prices it was at, previously. clearly, they weren't able to move the dairy products at the increased prices and had to reduce the price to prevent it from rotting on the shelf.

it's really pretty obvious to me that what i'm seeing is grocers reducing prices to move items that were sitting on shelves at higher prices and that people weren't buying because they were too expensive. this suggests that there isn't much of a supply issue on most goods, even if some items like certain brands of cereal are still empty on the shelves; grocers are trying to get the items out before they rot, and so they can replace them with new stock. that opens up a question: given that grocers are willing to put items on sale to move them because people wouldn't buy them at inflated costs, does that mean that the grocers were inflating the costs and are retreating or that they're being forced to absorb transportation costs, because the market won't tolerate the increase in prices?

whatever it is, i'm not experiencing much inflation in the price of food. i mean, things go up and down, but i haven't seen my staples go up and stay up. what i'm seeing is that most of the items i buy regularly are actually on sale, because the stores are overstocked.

7:55

if the market is functioning here to keep prices low, what it means is that producers will need to find ways to reduce costs by using less carbon if they want to continue to move products at the same profit margin. that part seems to be working. the question is whether they can figure that out, or whether we'll start seeing products discontinued because they cannot be manufactured and sold at a price that the market will accept.

at least in windsor, the price increases have just led to food rotting on the shelves - and i must ask consumers to keep it up. if we stand together on this, and make grocers take the loss, prices will continue to stay low.

7:59

the grocers won't let the food rot and take absolute losses.

we have them beat on this - we are at an advantage. we will win, if we stand together.

8:00

i could imagine that frozen foods - and especially meat - might see a continued or accelerated price increase, and that tactics to keep fresh fruit inexpensive may actually increase inflation in the price of meat, as grocers seek to make up losses in fresh produce by inflating the price of frozen foods that don't rot.

that's the concern of meat eaters and of people that buy frozen foods, and i have little sympathy for them.

eat less meat and less processed foods, then.

8:02

so, while it's just an anecdote, i strongly suspect that any serious research into it will conclude that it's actually only processed foods that are really experiencing inflation, and that should be of minimal concern to policy makers, who should be discouraging consumption of these items, anyways. healthy foods that have expiry dates need to move, and exorbitant price increases are never going to be sustainable - the food will just rot, and the prices will need to come back down. we will win this game of chicken every time if we stand in solidarity against the producers.

8:06

if canada insists on prosecuting this harmless woman as a prisoner of conscience for exercising her inalienable right to express herself, it will and must face the consequences of it's embrace of fascism.

she had better get a hearing in the next 24 hours.

reference:

"‘freedom convoy’ organizer tamara lich to appear in ottawa court wednesday after arrest in alberta", toronto star, june 28, 2022

15:17

canada has two official languages, and anybody seeking to lead a party in parliament should be able to fluently communicate in both languages. that's not something that's new, that's been the status quo for 50 years - the entire lifetime of most people considering running.

nobody that is serious about politics is going to avoid learning french - it's an absurd position. if you can't speak french, and you want to be a politician in canada, it's time to get to learning how to do it.

and, if you can't figure out french, i don't have much faith in your competence, either. sorry.

ref:

"green leadership rules so restrictive, elizabeth may would struggle, says sask. green leader", cbc news, june 28, 2022

21:12

wednesday, june 29, 2022

i have updated this, so that it is sufficiently ridiculous.

0:55

yup.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/06/28/opinion/message-ukraine-dont-be-fooled-push-new-lng-export-facilities

2:07

building abortion clinics on federal lands - or opening abortion clinics in emergency rooms - is a tangible solution with minimal cost overhead and "progressives" in the united states are right to question mr. biden's lack of action on the matter, given that he is a catholic.

if you continue to vote democratic and continue to get a republican - and that is what has happened. again. across the board. - you need to ask yourself why you're continuing to do it and start to question the tactics you're using.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-unlikely-meet-bold-democrat-demands-after-abortion-ruling-sources-2022-06-29/

12:51

i believe there's a law in ukraine that says you have to be born in ukraine to work for the civil service. it's not just the extremist nazis fighting on the ground, they're an outrageously racist and absurdly xenophobic society. homosexuality is not tolerated in the region, either.

the russians are not much better, but they're not any worse, and it's important that knowledgeable observers pay attention to the hypocrisy on the matter.

were the tables turned, ukraine would block any flow of refugees at their border, if they didn't just shoot them on contact. the country absorbing the bulk of them seems to be poland, which is already about as quasi-fascist a society as is imaginable, but absorbing all of these racist ukrainians is just going to make the issue that much worse.

lithuania and latvia also continue to have yearly national marches honouring nazi war criminals, as ukraine does. this is who we're protecting, and who we decide to call our allies? 

https://www.euronews.com/2022/06/27/lithuania-detained-migrants-subjected-to-beatings-abuse-and-racism-claims-amnesty

13:10

via rail is a crown corporation. it should be driven by the public good, and not by profit margins. it should be operating at a loss in order to service people.

that's the point of making it a crown corporation.

likewise, we should have reliable bus transportation in southern ontario operated by the state at a loss, if necessary, and not be forced to rely on private corporations, who may decide to pull services because they're no longer profitable.

reference:

"cobourg, ont. area residents call for return of early morning via rail train to toronto", cbc news, june 29, 2022

16:47

via rail is not a business, it's a service. if it's starting to act like a business, there needs to be an oversight body put in place to prevent it from doing so.

16:51

i'm incredibly irritated by this "guarantor" bullshit. i have to find somebody who has known me for more than five years to fill out a half a dozen different forms, and the only person that exists is my doctor. there is no other person on the planet that can fill this out.

worse, this is incredibly foolish, from the state's perspective.

if i were an illegal immigrant, i could easily pay a lawyer to lie about this and get all kinds of documents fraudulently mailed to me; if the only thing i need is somebody to vouch for me, that's the easiest possible thing to falsify. all i need is to find somebody to pay to lie - that's easy. so, is it designed to make it easy to cheat, or what?

conversely, i can actually prove that i've lived in ontario my whole life via a dozen different documents. i could send you a year's worth of hydro bills, for example, and that would be infinitely more convincing than getting somebody to vouch for me, which should be the least convincing form of so-called proof. it's not actually a proof at all, really. frankly, if i were a judge, i wouldn't accept a sworn affidavit as evidence unless it came with something objective, like proof of a mailing address. anybody can lie in court, and the chances they're going to get caught for it are pretty slim.

so, i'm annoyed by this because it's retarded. i understand why proof of residency is required, but asking for a guarantor doesn't actually prove anything at all, and it happens to be a very difficult requirement for me to fill, as an individual. why can't i just send you some pay stubs or an old health card or something else that is actually objective and convincing? or, is that the point, that it's intended to be easy to falsify?

17:46

well, my inverter came in, but it's damaged, and i think there's a little bit of hidden good news in it: the screen doesn't display as well through the new inverter as it did through the old one. that suggests that the problem probably is the inverter.

the ad very clearly indicated that they were selling a brand new item by hp with a specific oem branding and specific serial number on it. there was a picture with markings that was identical to the item i already had. the item that arrived had no brand name on it at all (there's some numbers on it that are not the same as the one in the picture), but that wouldn't matter to me if it worked. unfortunately, it shipped surrounded in tape that had to be taken off, and it is clear from looking at it that the tape was intended to hide the fact that the coil is damaged. so, the display is fainter through this inverter, which would appear to be because it's more damaged than the one i had to begin with.

i've requested a new item from the seller, and will open a dispute if it doesn't go through. but, i have enough evidence in front of me to justify trying a third time, once the refund completes.

20:40

this is ancient technology. i can't walk into a store and buy this, i need to find a reseller.

i just wish people would be honest - if they didn't have the item, they should have contacted me about it.

20:41

it's a $10 purchase.

it seems bizarre to me to rip off somebody on the other side of the world for $10.

20:43

this is the week that never got started.

i need july to be more productive.

21:07

ms. lich was supposed to appear in court, today.

where is the information regarding the outcome of that hearing?

21:16

thursday, june 30, 2022

i suspect the police that continue to spy on me for a reason i don't understand are interested in the answer to this question, so i'm going to post it here.

i'm an anarchist in the historical sense of the word, not in this fake american sense. anarchists reject nationalism and ethnicity as the evolution of feudalism and don't believe in a world that is organized into countries. as such, we have little interest in stupid holidays like july 1st in canada or july 4th in the united states. we don't feel we are independent of capitalism or imperialism or indeed of nationalism, and we await the day when we can declare as much, and define our own holidays. we may be willing to celebrate may 1st as an international holiday, but these days at the start of july are not of any meaning to us.

in past years, i may have seen a concert worth attending on these days, but i would not have celebrated them for the sake of doing so. in recent years, that option has not been available to me.

while i will need to get groceries and do errands, i otherwise expect to spend the weekend indoors by myself.

while i am opposed to vaccine mandates and expect ms. lich will be immediately released (again) when she is put in front of a judge (indeed that the charges against her have no serious chance of success), my utter rejection of nationalism is one of the many differences between myself and the "freedom protesters" and one of the many reasons why i have not and why i could not participate in their movement, or even call myself a temporary ally to them.

there's one thing i can agree with these people on, and it just happens to be the thing of prime importance to both myself and them at the moment.

so, free tamara lich.

but fuck canada day and fuck canada and fuck people trying to use ethnic nationalism for political gain by organizing protests on days created by the state to inflict the deadly symptoms of jingoism and nationalism on innocent people.

5:28

i would rather imagine there aren't any countries than spend a day waving flags to uphold the bourgeois rule of any class in any specific one of them.

5:30

it's baffling that extreme right-wing dictators - which is what justin trudeau is - never learn their lesson, regarding martyring the democracy movements that form in opposition to them. i want you to understand the words i'm using, and realize that all right-wing dictatorships pose their opponents as threats to the democratic orders that do not exist under their control. and, there is currently an absence of democracy in canada, which is becoming systemic and getting worse.

ms. lich has not meaningfully breached any sort of bail condition, if those conditions had any validity in the first place (they did not). rather, ms. lich is simply being held over the weekend to send a message to her supporters: canada is no longer a democracy.

what that demonstrates is that she's right, and because she is right, it will lead to greater support for her and her cause. people like myself that broadly don't like her politics will find themselves coming together to argue for something greater than her, which is the right to speak out of turn.

there was probably not going to be a serious movement in ottawa tomorrow, before they put it's spiritual leader in custody for no discernible reason. but, there is likely to be now, and it is likely to resonate much louder than it ever would have, before.

this is why fascism always loses - it never knows when to quit.

22:28

i would hope that ms. lich and her lawyers are preparing a constitutional challenge, on grounds of arbitrary detention.

22:33

anybody and everybody should clearly see that what the government has done here is both morally wrong and outrageously illegal on it's face.

22:36

this heavy-handed display of brute-forced intimidation is unacceptable and unwelcome in canada, and the crown attorney must be personally held responsible for this kind of barbarism. this kind of authoritarianism has no place here.

22:38

canadians do not accept governments, or government employees, that treat their citizens with such cruelty and contempt.

the justice will rule as much, and perhaps in those terms.

the problem here is the individual perspectives of the barbarian prosecutor.

22:41

this prosecutor is going to walk out of that court room next week in need of medical attention, because he's going to be missing a section in his digestive tract, where the justice ripped a hole out of his ass.

it's going to be vicious.

this is outrageous.

22:57

can ms. lich have a restraining order placed on this prosecutor, moving forwards?

that would be a novel argument, but it would have some merit.

23:01

 "i disapprove of what you say, but i will defend to the death your right to say it"

the author of the statement doesn't matter. 

that is a view synonymous with western culture, and one that neither our people nor our legal system will step away from without a serious, centuries-long conflict.

if you're going to try to reverse that position within the status quo of canadian culture, you should schedule your victory party for the 25th century.

23:10

i don't think it's going to be necessary to take things into our own hands, here.

the system is not perfect, but it is error-correcting. i expect the justice will fix this, and it will be up to ms. lich's prerogative to seek damages for the deprivation of her rights as a result of a barbarian prosecutor stepping very far out of line.

23:14